Loot scaling... Helping casual players...?

You forget, skills were a heck of a lot cheaper in those days. I can't remember the exact pricing scheme, but they were practically free. I distinctly remember being very unhappy with the current system when it was first introduced.

wrong again as i remember it vividly

YOU might have been unhappy but everyone else was neutral to overjoyed as they had a 1 K CAP on the cost of a skill and they had been paying way over 1 K/skill with a 10 gold increase each time you bought an additional skill

their cost per skill dropped up to 50 per cent with that new cap

Yeah it dropped for a minority of people who had a lot of bought skills even though many were available free from quests.

It really screwed new players to the game who's skills skyrocketed in cost.

Sure it may have helped you by reducing the cost, but I assure you that you are a minority.

Not to mention that in Cantha and Elona there were no skill quests to for people to avoid the cost of skills.

Correct, but your attempt to talk about anything but loot scaling is not working on me. The casual player has no hope of ideal skill bars. Like, totally rad dood.

There are over eleven hundred (1100) skills in this game.

Subtracting out the quest rewards, hero skills, and starters, that still leaves close to 600 skills, by my count.

Oh yeah, a bunch of them are pretty much mandatory to progress in the game, or you get stopped at gateway missions like THK or Gate of Pain.

However, you would be better served to say that the casual player goes to wikis and gets the skills they need to win missions there - and says to themselves "oh geez another plat or 3" for the skills they need for the newest mission.

That adds up.

Oh hey, side discussion over, wanna talk about loot scaling?

If you want to talk to me, then stick to the points - that

1) the pro-lootscaler arguments are totally focused on the elastic parts of the GW economy
2) Loot scaling *helps* elastic pricing, and *hurts* static pricing
3) The static pricing economy is/are where casual players are effected

Done.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

Orly?

The "hardcore" players are affected by it too. And the casual players are [a]ffected by the elastic pricing.

Are you actually referring to another time I was wrong, or are you just being annoyingly patronizing for the hell of it?

You must've been playing with the most hardcore of the hardcore. Who on earth needed more than 184 skills on a single character back in those days, when there were only 75 skills per profession and half of those free as a quest reward?

I unlocked 4 classes completely back in those days, and the other two almost, without ever getting anywhere near the 1 platinum cost. And that included a very generous helping of secondary profession skills.

If you do the math, the old way of buying skill is cheaper up until when you buy your 184th skill. At 185 and further on, the new way becomes cheaper. Do the math yourself if you don't trust mine. In any case, I paid far, far, far less on average per skill on my characters than late starters.

Rly.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I think arcanemacabre's post shows how good game knowledge works. Casual players may or may not have a good enough grasp of the game to do the same though, newbies certainly won't.

I still remember my first two characters had to borrow materials for armor crafting though before loot scale. I agree you don't need everything at once but it was slow going before and it may be worse now.

Sometimes I forget there're three campaigns players can work through so eventually you will have enough. With time you'll eventally get it anyway but loot scaling didn't shorten that time so not helpful is still my stance.

Seriously though, '1) the pro-lootscaler arguments are totally focused on the elastic parts of the GW economy.'

Well, here's what it boils down to. A friend of mine recently got Prophecies, first time into GW (and never heard of loot-scaling). So, he's effectively starting from scratch. Actually, he's still in Ascalon, so not a good example.

However... he'll be able to gather gold etc. along the way at the same rate as everyone before him... after all scaling doesn't affect full parties. However, things are less costly now, so the gold he's acquiring at the same rate as pre-scaling now has greater value to purchase what he wants/needs.

So yes, loot-scaling helps not only the casual gamer, but the new ones too.

I think you're confusing casual with simpleton. Casual is a factor of time available to play, not competence.

no you are flat out wrong on that.

the time you play a week is not a factor in being casual or not.

casual is not taking the game overly seriously and simply playing for fun not i have to get this title/rank/goal/etc

someone may be a truly dedicated GW fanatic but real life limits him/her to maybe 10 hours a week. if real life permitted that person would happily spend 12 hours a day .

this person is time limited but certainly not casual toward the game

casual is a state of mind not someting you can punch in with a time clock and go DING this person is one hour into hardcore

I'm going to chop your post up to address the two points individually. Hope you don't mind.

If someone is hardcore, they make the time to play. I'd give you that if someone did infact fall into that category they would indeed be hardcore, however I think they'd be an extremely small minority of players. When someone has a small amount of playtime a week, its typically because they give other things a higher priority and stop playing when they're not having fun - that is casual.


Exactly - Its about having fun. I'm sure some people are fine experiencing the same game content over and over and over, others need to be able to experience a decent amount of game content to keep themselves interested. Enjoying varied content does not make someone casual or hardcore. Lootscaling + Fixed price items (skills in particular) means that suddenly casual players do not have the same access to game content that hardcore players do, and have to grind in order to get it.

I'm going to use myself as a personal example here. I play guildwars for about 7 hours per week. Prior to lootscaling I used to spend 5 minutes at the start of a night killing vermin or minos or spiders or whatever in order to buy the skills needed to have fun for the night. Post lootscaling, that 5 minutes has turned into 30-40 minutes, and suddenly I'm having to grind for one night in order to play on the subsequent night. This shows that lootscaling is not only not friendly to casual players, by your definition, it is infact forcing casual players to become hardcore in order to keep up!

Wrong argument. The problem was that casual players were cut off from the elastic parts of the economy as they were unable to afford anything that did not have a fixed price due to the overinflated prices from solo farming.
So, loot scaling helps the casual player because it allows the casual player to participate in the elastic pricing market.

I clipped quite a bit of your post - while somewhat relevant no real need to waste bandwidth and this is the most important and is a general summary of what came before.

Anyway, a lot of this argument comes down to what is casual? I have a little over 200k in the bank along with trade materials and trade items (I would estimate somewhere in the 400k area if I liquidated everything a trader would purchase, another 100k if I wanted to bother with the non-customized items and items which no trader trades such as Icy Bladed Axes and other golds). Am I casual, poor, rich, middle class? All of those answers affect your idea of what loot scaling has done.

Anet has said that the "average" (though I rather suspect that they mean the median) player has 20k in the bank - reality is I am one of the utlra-rich. However, many, if not all, of the players complaining before me consider me to be small time and not even worth looking at - yet I am still probably within the top 1% of GW players.

For me, loot scaling has been OK - without the introduction of HM it would have been a small loss but not too much. With HM I have found a general increase in GPH. For those below me the field looks even better - the more below me the better. I generally consider myself borderline - I play about .5-2 hours a day yet use some of the more "hardcore" builds. If I were married to my old farming runs then, yes, I would be poor. However as I have said many times Vermin weren't farmed because they were fun, they were farmed because they were profitable. Once that no longer was true I moved to other spots. I fail to see why vermin (or whatever run) no longer being good has any relevance on the state of profitability in farming on GW. Same thing with a build - there are quite a few HIGHLY profitable non-hardcore builds/runs in the farming section, some guides even WAY more detailed than I would ever bother with. Any casual player could *easily* follow them, many are even very low in price for speccing out the build no matter what skills/items you have.

If you consider that 50% of the players have less than 20k in the bank (and, therefore, play in full parties for their money) then loot scaling is the greatest increase in their purchasing ability ever done. Income is the same (or somewhat greater if they are goofing off in HM), fixed costs are the same, variable costs are *significantly* less. Since that is obviously over 50% of the game's population that is a Good Thing for Anet. Heck, even if you want to argue that HM is the sole reason - well so what? Their purchasing power is greatly increased,

Personally I doubt those that claim the 1k/hour or less claim - and if they are telling the truth then they are truly idiots. I can take my 130hp Dervish - which is about the slowest solo farmer on the planet (though, since she is my main title hunter one I use quite often anyway) and make 3-5k/hour in any random place. It took all of 15 minutes in our farming forum to find places that average around 10k/hour with her, on my 55 monk more than that (and still none of them "hardcore" farming which would make better). I average 2-4k/hour just playing with hench in Normal Mode and have done so since I hit the Southern Shiverpeaks - at one time when people complained about money here they were told to just wait, after that point gold is irrelevant. If anything drops have improved on the old statement for the casual player.

Heck, I started Nightfall with 40k in the bank. I finished Nightfall two or three weeks later with a set of Vabbian for my Dervish, all heroes rune'ed out (except vigors, the five I played with all the time had majors the rest none), and...50k in the bank. So yea, you can make gold in the game as a casual player and afford all but the very very high end. Heck, you can afford the middle to lower high end stuff. You will find that most of the complaints come from the higher end (with respect to gold) players and simply re-enforces A-nets decision.

Would this problem be solved if regular skill tomes drop of normal mode high-end enemies and bosses? Same drop rate as purple and gold items?
I know you have to unlock the skills on the account first, so it will require some investment (gold or time in PvP), but not as much as equipping several characters with the same skills.

I'm also wondering what game content you are talking about.
I can't think of none that require more than 8K to get going and make more profit (if it does not, why invest 8K?).

I fully agree with this. I have almost 200 skill points sitting on one character and less than 10k in gold to cover all eight characters. If ANet really wants us to "play the game" as they intended it be played, then the gold rewards from missions, quests, and vanquishing needs to be increased ten fold. The side benefit to this, as mentioned by Spellsword, is that bots (who don't do missions, quests, or vanquishing) would be put out of business.

Yeah... look at Sorrow's Furnace gold rewards: 0.
Ahem... funny...

Interesting theory. It would be nice if it were to happen exactly as you say.

Were you trying to refute my statement?

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I agree to this in part... I think the reward for completing missions with masters should be around 1-1.5K... and perhaps some of the harder "Master" difficulty quests... however I don't want it to be easy for everyone to amass hundreds of platinum through just questing alone... this would create insane inflation and would make gold as useless as it was in Diablo 2... (you could have an entire storage full of gold and multiple characters full... and it would barely be worth a Stone of Jordan). If they made masters rewards for NM missions 1K and HM missions 2K... people could make a decent amount just playing through the game, but not an overwhelming amount. It would certainly give me a greater incentive to go for protector on all my characters if mission rewards were decent.

Personally I didn't mind the days where prices were high... why? Because it was easy to farm 30K an hour. Farm 1 hour a day, and you'd have 15K within a week quite easily. I'd consider 1 hour a day "casual" farming. You could even do less... 20min would cover most of what a casual player would need. Now it takes a few hours or a bit of luck with drops to make that much in the same time period. Before the only items that were out of reach for casual gamers were A) FoW armor, which was already dropping in price and B) Rare Skinned Gold weapons... which (not to sound harsh) casual players don't deserve. If you don't want to put in the time farming, you don't deserve a req7 crystalline. The only thing loot scale did for casual players was increase the relative cost of the things they actually need such as skills, ID/Salvage kits, collectors items (since collectables are included in loot scale), and also gives them fewer materials in general (casual players could obtain the materials they needed for armor by farming certain areas along with salvaging their drops... now due to fewer material drops and white/blue/purple drops this is much less plausible).

Do I consider myself a casual player? Not really. I have a set of FoW on my ele, I have a few sets of 15K (monk, mesmer, necro, ranger), and I have UAS Monk/Ele skills in PvE. However I still do feel the effect of lootscale. The main reason is that lately I've wanted things that have a fixed cost more (the monetary part of 15K armor, and more skills in general) but it's harder to obtain the plat for these. I do have a few more rare skinned (well not so much anymore) weapons such as my war's colossal scimitar/gloom shield, which I appreciate, but for me I'd rather have a nicer way to make gold for armor and skills than be able to afford the crazy rare weapon skins. To be quite honest, a casual player in the old days would've been able to afford a req13 of almost anything other than a crystalline/dwarven/serpent/sephis axe... and req13 works just fine. The only reason people pay more for low reqs is the rarity... which a casual player doesn't need.

My main gripe: this hasn't done anything for bots. In fact, it encourages botting since obtaining gold now takes an inordinate amount of time. For all the people who seem to think the problem has been solved now that online gold has doubled in price (or whatever the increase was)... you seem to be forgetting that the value of gold in game has increased... so really nothing has changed. ANET needs to find a solution to bots that doesn't involve depressing the economy, which is now completely oversaturated with rare items. Today I wasn't able to sell a req9 inscribable dead sword for 10K... any gold that's req9 and inscribable should be worth at least that.... but there's no demand anymore with the massive influx of gold items from HM farming. Since there's no demand, people can't sell their wares and merchant them for a fraction of the price, which leaves them with less platinum to buy these HM golds. It's a vicious cycle.

And while we're at it, I'd love to see protective bond unnerfed a bit so it would actually be viable to use in a build... now that the economy is in this state (and since 55's don't even need it anymore due to the advent of SoA) I think it's time to let us have some fun with this skill again.

i just stopped spsnding money been at 188k for 2 months now just gonna get gwen skills and armor and have 100k left for crap

Your view of casual players is wrong, too.

In your view, causal players are:

-Mindless: they all want one thing, and that is to play the storyline.
-Will-less: They don't want anything except the storyline, they have no other goals, wishes or whatever.
-Clones: There are no exeptions, and if there are, these exeptions are without an excuse, a hardcore farmer.

Let's play Drone Wars, yay! We all do the same things, like the same things, want the same things. W00t! -.-

And the funny thing is, THESE 'CASUAL PLAYERS' AREN'T EVEN PLAYING THE WHOLE GAME. How can you 'play the game correctly' when you do nothing except the storyline?

A-Net most certainly did NOT think: 'Ohh, let's put chests in the game, but players are not supposed to use them.'

'Let's make thousands of skills, but make it impossible for players to obtain them, unless they go PvP'

[QUOTE]lets clear a little of your BS up.

the first time through the game and maybe even the second time were you playing the game by doing the missions/quests/exploring all that beautiful areas?

or were you already looking for that farming spot and getting your 15k armor the first time through?

see above about starting character not your 15 TH time through
again a first time or second through player is not needing more than a relatively small number of skills and someone on their 5/10 15 th character is not by any definiton casual

[QUOTE=Loviatar]I was playing through the game, while needing to farm cause I bought every single better armor when possible.

Furthermore, I was looking up against other players in the guild with the beautiful armors dyed black, and drooled over it, thinking that after a while, me too could wear that. Also, I was often in Droknar to look at cool weapon skins, and I often interrupted my storyline for doing stuff like killing a Bone Dragon, Sorrow's Furnace, trying builds with guildies, farming etc.

Storyline was not at all the only thing I did. I had wishes and goals, too, when I started the game.

Oh and btw, exploring is 'hardcore' in your eyes, too, since it's working on a title, and doesn't have anything to do with the storyline. It's not needed, either.

Yeah, the first time, you should do everything. You should take your time and do stuff other than the storyline. Make builds to that you can finally kill that big Boss you had trouble with. Buy other skills so you can finally get pass that mission. Farm some monsters so you can buy the new armor you wanted, and upgrade it with runes. Experiment with Dye colours, and how they mix. Exploring and walking back to the spots the missions made you skip. Finding weird spots where you died, and have to come back prepared etc... (I was like 'whoa' when I came to that place with 5 Bone Dragons... Great times...)

There's no reason why anyone should be rushing through the storyline, without thinking about, or doing all the other great stuff in the game. You gotta find fun stuff to do, be free, enjoy everything the game has to offer - find what floats your boat, and be able to do it.

That's strange, my ranger needed at LEAST 5 different builds throughout the storyline. You can't expect me to beat the game with a pet and Power Shot, do you? A Monk using Healing Breeze? Hammer Warriors? First of all, you won't be affective, second of all, other people will not accept you in the team with uneffective builds, and third of all, these days we HAVE to alter our builds, because skill effects get changed again and again.

And NEEDING isn't the same as WANTING. There are Skill Trainers at alot of spots, and when you come to that new town, you wanna check which new skills can be obtained. You're like 'WOW!' when you see this killer skill at the trainer, and want to buy it, just to find out it sucks in reality. This is called experimenting with builds.

When I was going through Guild Wars for the first time, the first 2 things I checked for in a new outpost were Armor and Skill NPC's.

Although I can imagine today's 'casual player' just copies a build off wiki instead of trying to make something theirselves, and don't even know all the other builds and skills out there.

That's funny, cause a few posts back, you clearly said:

'the time you play a week is not a factor in being casual or not.'

And:

'casual is a state of mind not someting you can punch in with a time clock and go DING this person is one hour into hardcore'

Amounts of characters through the game = time invested in the game

Or do you now say that all casual players should be playing on 1 character only, somehow be able to spend alot of time playing on this one, but can NOT do anything except the storyline?

I can tell you that the reason that I farmed vermin (and similar runs) were not because they were profitable, if profit were the sole driver then runs with more gph like titan gems or green farms would have been done. Vermin/Minos/Trolls/Spiders etc were farmed by casual players because they were casual friendly. Namingly:

• A run takes less than 10 minutes - If the run takes longer than that, you need to sacrifice a night's play to farm.
• You can use any one of thousands combinations of classes and skills to do it - there was no mindless grind because every run was different
• You could do it alone - when your friends are online, the last thing you want to do is waste time farming.
• They didnt' rely on player to player trade - Trading takes way more time than a casual player has available.

How many of the 10k/hr runs that you found could fall into this casual friendly category?

It would go some of the way to solving the problem. A better solution would be an accross-the-board reduction in the price of essential fixed price items (weaponsmith items, 1k armour (or make armour salvage work like hero armour so that you don't need multiple sets), skills, tomes).

Content = things to do * ways to do them. Without forking out massive amounts of gold for skills, you're locked into a tiny fraction of the game content.

The former. There is so much wonderful content in the game that it would take thousands of hours to experience it... unfortunately it costs way more platinum that you get through playing normally.

Sorry Loviatar, but your definition of casual gets more ridiculous everyday. Now you're adding the stipulation can't be a casual player is someone who is content to mindless grind away at the same content over and over?

The vast majority of them. Minos outside of Ice caves, Undead in Bergin Hot springs, Fahranur the first city, the six jade knights in the entrance of Wajjun Bazaar, and hydra outside Augury Rock to name a few. These all range in the 8-12k range depending on which builds I use - they are all VERY doable by a 55 monk, 55 necro, and a 130hp dervish. I've seen builds, but haven't used, for things like a VwK warrior and a few ele builds. So pretty much all the standard farming classes can do them.

As of right now the 55 monk is as casual friendly as it has ever been, the price is *well* within the purchasing power of anyone out there that saves a little. However the 55 necro and 130hp Dervish are both cheap and easy to use. The above runs just need to take a a few hours - at most - to learn the builds (and once learned they go anywhere), WAY less for the 55 monk (due to the +20% enchant weapon and blessed Aura most enchants last 50% longer and he Divine Favor bonus pretty much does all the extra healing you need). The 55's difficulty is in purchasing the dang thing, though that price has dropped tremendously - one run through the unlocked treasures in Elona will *more* than pay for one.

In fact, with the 55 monk it is easier than Vermin Farming - both to learn and once you are experienced in it. In fact, the undead around Bergin Hot Springs is the *easiest* farming I have ever done in the two years I have been playing. I make right around 10k/hour there, sometimes a little more if the gold items are dropping good. I, too, thought they would be difficult. I kick myself now for never using them (I purchased my first one about two weeks before Hard Mode was released) - things like a sliver armor or mist form ele, a warrior tank, or the other so called "casual builds" were MUCH more difficult to use - they were just cheap.

I'm not terribly good at the prot spirit builds - I still either get my butt handed too me in the UW/FOW or I can't figure out how to do enough damage. It's too expensive to learn and I make enough otherwise. By far the *hardest* run I do is the old dead sword farming and it is harder to freaking get there than do the farm. I average (based on my accounts age and hours played) about 1.5 hours a day and most of that is from weekends - so I am neither a wonder player or have tons of time. I still can't totally figure out why Shielding Hands and Shield of Absorption sometimes quit working (I know it has to do with the order they are cast, but it seems that sometimes the suddenly quit working and I haven't cast anything in 4 or 5 seconds and no enchants have stopped).

In fact, the majority of the gold I have in the bank and the things I have purchased are funded from questing and the unlocked treasure chests in Elona.

I too would like to see some thing lowered in price - I have always thought that skills were too expensive, personally I would rather up the EXP needed to 20k and make them free (it would be fine to still need to purchase cap sigs) - it is irritating to have skill points and have to choose between a piece of armor or another build. The other things - Keys and such - are not required and are money sinks so they are fine there.

I have done every one of the builds you mentioned and I can tell you from personal experince that none of them will gain you more then 5-600 gold in 10 minutes - not even enough for one skill.

Until they put a weapon mod trader into the game, keys are a necessity.

Some people say the game and the economy was better before nightfall well i say: farrming in DOA foundry for titan gems ,i only caught the time when they were 50k each and i did made 4 gems in a day without a strugle, so that might be translated to 200k per day ,i wonder where could u have goten this kind of cash before,because vermin farming or trolls dont even come close to this.

Almost forgot i also atm colect al mi free treasures the ones scatered trough nightfall u can get 15 k per char ,so doing it with 10 chars would be 150k which is doable more or less every month.

Then you are doing something wrong - I actually bothered to keep a record of total time spent (including ID'ing everything, selling to the merchant, zoning for the traders - basically the *whole* thing as a run) and the least profitable place was 5k/hour. I did so for several weeks of farming.

To some extent you are correct - it wasn't constant so a ten minute figure would usually not get 5-600 gold. But then, we are talking what you average over time so your metric matter litte. It would be *very* profitable if you had a 95% chance every 30 minutes of making 100k but all other runs make 0k - yet it would look horrid based on what your metric.

Over time, I had one really bad place (Hulking Stone, between 4-5k/hour) and one really good (Dead Sword - between 12-13k/hour) and the rest solidly in the 8-10k category. And, yes, I even bothered to move chest drops in a position that they didn't factor in and it was all merch food (I kept a few gold weapons, but not enough to skew anything).

For instance, Fahranur take somewhere between 28-35 minutes for a full run and I get anywhere from 2k up to about 6k. It, once again, averages out to a around 8k an hour - it is unusual to get less than 3.5k or over 4.5k a run yet it happens (runes sometimes get a nice large spike in there). Sometimes I also get bad strings where I get 2k/run for a fairly long while.

I had an occasional build that *really* sucked in one area (my 130hp Dervish made abysmal money farming Frost Minotaurs, I do not recall the amount) but another profession fixed that right up (55 necro in that area did in the lower 8k/hour range). All of them had a few areas that were in the 8-10k range.

As to why you do not - dunno. This is over quite a number of hours, enough so that I would have to be *really* lucky and am continuing to do so across multiple professions and locations. If you aren't making at least 4k/hour in HM you really need to be looking at your builds and your ability to run them, if you just can't quite get to the 8k/hour range then read the farming forums and try out different runs - all of mine I either got from there or someone else has already posted it.

Anet has server logs so they do not need to go by forum posts - they know if their target audience is making what they want and know if people are out there making more. There are MANY people making in the 8-10k/hour range farming and that has seemed to always be their target based on what gets nerfed and what doesn't. Therefore I have little confidence that "I can't make that much" will be "listened too" (or, more accurately, do what you want - a "no" is still listened too). There are too many of us who *have* bothered to keep some record of what we make per hour that make in that range for it to just be some type of grand ability or pure luck - I know that if I can do it others can too, I do not have any special skill that I can do in this game, in fact I normally tend towards the bottom of the field.

Of course, if you *can* get Anet to increase drops then I'm all for it - I always like making more gold. Read the above as helpful - you can make that gph rate also (and it still isn't that great compared to others).

I'm glad you were counting the merching, zoning and enchanting times. I'd assumed you were not and that was why your statistics were radically different to mine. I think you are discounting the importance of the per 10min statistic though.

Using myself as an example again. I'll log in knowing that I have an hour to play. Given that it takes 45-50 minutes to do most things I know that I have to make 1-2k in 10 minutes or I won't be able to afford the skill(s) to play with for that night. In a pre-lootscaling world, 1-2 runs of pretty much anything could have been done and you would have the gold to buy skills. HM farming doesn't guarntee this, it gives you a bigger opportunity for things like sup vigours, but it may very well leave you with 3 decayed orr emblems and 60gold. Even if you end up with a gold weapon or two, they only sell for 2-300 and theyre replacing 1k worth of pre-lootscaling whites.

Partly agree on weaponsmith items, there are some greens that are better and are cheaper on the player market, making getting a good weapon for reasonable price not that hard. There are collectors weapons that should be enough to get through the game.
Agree on the armor salvage, though I only switch headsets, except on my monk (one +e armor and one +armor armor) and necro (55 set for orders/BiP builds).
Skills are expensive, however:

That would mean running every possible skillbar with every possible team setup. Not even considering multiple characters this would take ages.
When this is the sole reason for having all skills, that would indeed be a problem. However, since this would take ages, income would also be high, unless you want to test quick or with solo character.
When this is the case, pre-determining if a skill is worth is by looking at wiki description should seperate the good from the medicore skills.


One thing on income side in HM (full team).
I vanquished Snakes -> Lornar's with guild team yesterday.
Income of most of us was in 5-6K range, excluding some gold items that could be sold on player market. Most gold drops (also from chests) were pure merchant stuff.
We left tons of white items on the ground, even while most of us started with clear inventory. Take more salvage kits next time ....
However, income/hour was BAD, since we had a sub-optimal team build.
Even when we would have good builds, the hour/income would be not that good. Farming nets a lot more.
On the other hand, we had a lot of fun, so it was not that bad

Just to clear this up, you can make it through the game without the extra 30 health and 33% longer bleeding. Trust me, all my heroes have finished the game with the first max damage weapon I found.

This is about the casual players.

For hardcore farmers, the income is the same, if not better, than before. They can farm Titan Gems, ecto's, shards, gold weapons with huge prices etc, and don't see a difference cause of the exemption list. But the thing is: WITHOUT loot scaling, it wouldn't mean anything to you. The players who are having it good, get it better without loot scaling, and the players who are having it worse... also get it better without loot scaling.

However, casual players do not farm these things. It costs alot of time, preperation and it is fairly hard. (Sure, for you, it's easy, but to make the build yourself, test it out etc... it takes a long time).

While casual players don't LIKE to farm, but HAVE to. They HAVE to farm trolls, vermins or griffons, or else they have little to no cash, and can't do the stuff they want.

Ohh, and after opening the treasures about 3 times, they don't seem to reset at all... And if they do, they drop little to no gold coins, and a purple item worth 100 gold.

Trust me, some people cannot. Some builds require certain mods, say, to keep that bleeding or poison up. For others, the 20% longer enchantment is needed. Health + 30 might not seem much when you are at full health, but if you are going against alot of Life Degeneration, you can use all the extra health you can get.

Also, where do you find max dmg weapons? Even in the final missions in Hard Mode, the monsters drop un-maxed weapons. Only purples and golds seem to be max damage, and these nearly don't drop. Ohh wait, if we can buy keys and open chests, that problem is solved, too! But only the hardcore farmer can get those...

Few builds require a certain mod. Shock Warriors, and certain farming builds require special mods. Making bleeding or poison last 30 seconds isn't required when that foe will die in about 5-10 seconds. And that max 30 health mod won't keep you alive a whole lot longer than a 15 health mod that you found from a blue item. Under 10 degen like your argument, it will keep you alive for an extra 3/4 of a second.

And yes, you can find max, or near max weapons in any level 20 area. Granted, it might be req 12, but it will still be max. If you say that you cannot, you are again exaggerating to fit your argument. Not all weapons are max, you are right, but some are. Please don't use the "Well I'm unlucky and never find max weapons ". A sword with 20 damage will do just as well as a sword with max damage and 15>50. You might lose out on 5-6 damage, oh no.

As with loot scaling effecting casual players. Casual players play in full groups most of the time, so loot scaling doesn't effect their drops. Static priced items are the same, and their drops are the same. So saying that static cost items are harder to get is nonsense. It has made the fluctuating priced items become cheaper so that they are somewhat affordable.

How could of this not helped casuals? They get the same amount of gold, the static items are the same, the elastic items are cheaper. If anything, that helped them. Just because people can't farm for a set of 15k armor in 2 hours does not mean that casual players are screwed.

New players to the game, they will still think that solo farming is great. Solo farming gets more gold than playing in a team, so any new player will find it great.

Casual players can still play through the game, casual players can still get gold. Playing through the game with a full group still gives ya just as much gold as it always has. My first character, my Necromancer, managed to play through Prophecies, go to several UW trips with my guild, buy 15k armor, and have several builds to play. No solo farming at all. So playing in a full team gets you no gold? Come on.

I would like to make a point concerning the term 'casual' player and 'hardcore' player being thrown around here. I did a game design unit in university last semester so I believe I have a resonable idea on how the mechanics behind game work (not saying I'm an expert).

A casual player is defined as someone who plays games to pass time. Someone who is bored and wants to kill some hours.

A hardcore player is someone who wants to complete the game as much as possible.

In the case of Guild Wars, a hardcore player is someone that tries to get all the titles, rare golds and FoW armour etc. In your case if you want the 15k armour then that means you've just stopped being a casual player, you're playing the game to achieve something, not to kill time.

Yeah.

Let it be reiterated for the final time. Because, obviously the fine technical points are alluding those arguing against loot scaling.

Loot scaling does not affect full parties in a derogatory way whatsoever.
HARDCORE players [farmers] are affected in the same way casual players are because they get less loot. They just play more. They have to play a lot more to keep their wealth up.



Uh-huh. They do drop un-max weapons. They also drop max weapons. They drop both. And if you've played ANY Hardmode at all, you know that golds and purples drop with ease. It's the reason they aren't worth anything.

Complete BS. Show me a chest that offers you less than 1 plat. Maybe that one on Istan. I've opened the Kournan chests 5 times now. 1.3 at least each, with a reasonably nice gold item each time. Show me a screenie to prove your fallicious claim.

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20% Might be needed for 55 farmers and some enchantment heavy elite farming areas. But where else? Oh, and by the way, if you know this game, you'd know that Defense mods are much better and cheaper than fortitude. And +29 Health will hold up the same against degen as +30 would. Invalid argument.

This has always been the case, for everyone.

You haven't actually provided a persuasive argument as of yet.

My last (4th, I think) run with my Paragon got me 11 purples, 1 sapphire and only 2 chests (The RoT ones) gave me more than 1k. I'll be sure to make screenies the next time.

Hardcore farmers (the ones who farm Ecto's, Titan Gemes) are NOT affected. Ecto's and Titan Gems, and rare weapons, still drop the same as before.

They don't have to play more to keep their wealth up, they just play the same, with the same drops (exemption list). Only difference is, some of them play in Hard Mode to actually get MORE items than before - rich stay rich, and some become richer.



Golds and Purples don't drop with ease in HM at all, and neither do max dmg whites.


I can't make screenies when all my chests have been used up, but the last times, they all gave me less than 1K, except the ones in the realm of torment, who gave me 1K and like 34 gold, or sometimes 900 gold.

Gaile Grey said herself that quality drops the more often you open chests, so it most certainly is not BS.


It's just an example, and I was talking about new players, who might NOT know what would be better - hence the experimenting. I don't know where it's needed, but there are situations.

Look beyond the standard skills and make your own builds, and you'll see what I mean. When fighting in the Shiverpeaks, against Ice Golems, the Armor + 7 (vs Physical) won't mean anything, cause Ice Golems do Elemental Damage, and vica versa, Armor vs Elemental isn't good in other spots. Builds can always be perfected, try keeping that enchantment up, instead of letting it end a bit to soon, try letting the enemy be poisoned, instead of letting the poison end too soon.

Ok, maybe Poison or Bleed were bad examples, but for Daze, 1 second can mean a difference. If you fought against Willa the Unpleasant or Mungri Magicbox, you know that if you don't keep them interrupted, they are back at full health in no time.

It USED to be the case, now, casual players CANNOT farm the trolls and vermins... Unless they do it for 2 hours, which nobody wants to do. And if you admit cash is, and always was a problem, why not improve the means of obtaining cash in this game then? Why are you so stubborn about protecting something that only decreases cash obtained?

And despite all the Farming hate, I haven't heard a good reason why to KEEP the Loot Scaling yet.

If Casual Players are unaffected as you say, why try so hard to keep it? It wouldn't matter to you. And don't give me the 'Prices dropped', cause Loot Scaling only caused weapon prices to drop, and they didn't drop alot, at all.

Without Loot Scaling, prices would stay low, anyway, because of the gigantic supply of stuff coming in the market.
I guess some people are just afraid the removal of the Loot Scaling will make their farm spot useless, or their super item wort a few ecto's less -.-

Just give up, reetkever will just lie about it. Come on, 1k gold from RoT chests? No golds in HM?

Cause I had time to kill I decided to cap 6 elite skills and accomplished it in 1.5-2hrs. I killed 13 bosses, cleared 1/2 of 2 zones since I didn't have some outposts. I used full parties each time and went to 6 different zones. No dye, key, green, gold, or purple items dropped, no runes/insignias either (odd). Gold coins obviously split amongst party members so I made diddly squat. Total made was 1,300 after merching all but 2 adventurer's scrolls and about 50 common materials. I am not factoring in my cap signet costs as capping was an excuse to go pveing. No keys used, no chests opened, no expenses.

This is a normal occurrance for me whenever I do regular pve. I'm not saying every time is like this but it's usually like this. So this what it looked like before loot scaling and it's what it looks like after. It isn't helpful for me if it stays the same, it isn't helpful if I tried it with less members.

Chests getting worse quality is a FACT, stated by Gaile Grey. And this is indeed happening. After opening chests more often on the same character, the quality will go down. Even opening chests in the same 'wave' makes the quality go down.

(Note how Gaile said it is BETTER to open the high-end chests before the low-end, because quality goes down with every opened chest.)

And Are you saying you find Golds and Purples everywhere, every minute?

Your story seems like bull to me. I never stated that golds NEVER drop, but they just don't drop alot, and most of the time they're crap, anyway (armors with useless superior runes which my heroes cannot use, or offhands or something with terrible stats.)

Some of my heroes do use the gold or purple weapons I found in battle, though, but I'm not getting nearly enough good drops to equip all of my heroes.