LOOT SCALING NERF – Ruining the Fun

I really don't know why you posted. Why is 15k armor in the game? Answer that. Because some people really do want nice stuff, just because you don't means that this thread doesn't concern you.

I had less than 60k before this fiasco, so I started a 55, went hard mode farming and now I'm rolling in it. Know why? Because I WANT nice stuff!

I was perfectly content with the way drops were, but anet had to screw it up. Now they've made more farmers than ever.... and yeah, now I'm rich. Big freakin deal.

I'll keep farming and I'll get richer.

KANE

that is my point.

i dont do this to make money to buy something.

i do it a few minutes here and there when i simply want to knock a few easy things over and whatever i get simply piles up over time.

the full hour was simply a long run to make the figuring easy as well as a one shot random trip.

however it is about average

see the difference?

i would have done it anyway if nothing at all had dropped for a short bit of fun.

the money is extra not forced grind

My point is that 15k armor is just vanity armor, it's not necessary to beat the game. Too many people whining about loot scaling are talking about "forced grind" to "survive". They don't seem to get that all the essentials are cheap and easily obtained by just playing through the game.

The purpose of 15k armor, rare skins, fow armor, etc., is to give something for more dedicated players to do. If one was given EVERYTHING for free at the start of the game... what would you do once you played through it? Farming for vanity items or titles is the end game for pve players. It's not about "earning" things from "hard work"... it's just about giving a reason for players to continue to play. And for that reason, it doesn't matter if it takes you a few weeks or a few months to afford the vanity item that you want. It's not for the casual player who hasn't run out of things to do.

And of course I want nice stuff. I buy a lot of nice stuff. I've never found that high prices were unfair.

I also believe that the complaints about not making enough money are ridiculous. Yes, in nightfall you have heroes to equip. But you can do that by getting them collector's items and easily farmed greens. Most runes aren't that expensive... and they can get by just fine without vigor runes at all. If I can vanquish in hardmode with heroes without vigor runes, then surely others can play through normal mode without them.

In nightfall, you get these things called hero skill points. They let you get skills for yourself for free. More than enough skills to get through the game. There's also treasure chests which have netted me 100's of plat since they were introduced. The quests don't seem to give that much money, say 200g and an item worth 200g. But you also pick up items while doing those quests. I've had characters go through nightfall, bought them 15k armor and all their new skills, and STILL ended up with more money than I started with. Without any farming at all.

I recently made a fair amount of money as a byproduct of maxing the sunspear titles on my characters. All that required was flagging around henchies in their wurms. It seemed like I wasn't making that much money in any one run, but over time it added up.

You can make even more money if you farm for it.

It only ruins your fun if your fun is determined by drops.

OMG

for over 2 years i have been wasteing my time having fun playing a game for...............fun.

i never realized that i needed to be rich and buy things for their price to impress impressable people instead of getting cheep things i liked instead.

i used keys that dropped instead of buying them.........oh woe

i only got a skill if i could actually use instead of grabbing it simply because someone else has it..........ohh double woe

i wasted all this time in ignorant poverty having fun....oh woe is me.

i think i will play some more just for the fun of it and drown my sorrows in a few hunters ales from the bear hunters..........or maybe a few spiked eggnogs sync dancing on the monestery steps.

oh woe..........oh woe.........fun...what is this game coming to......snicker

On the other hand, now that they came out with this wonderful fix for the drops in x/x/08, I finally have FoW armor and the bestist of bestist items to show for all of the hard work (time) I put into this game. Now my life is complete. It would have sucked if I hadn't had that FoW armor. Following the actual plot of GW isn't much fun, nor is the gameplay. No, but the rush I get when opening chests and IDing the awesomezorz items I have gotten with my drops is just the best fun I could possibly wish for.

I didn't understand your post Loviator, could you rephrase or something?

Are you picking up all your drops and, you know, killing things? I've never been able to clear all of The Cursed Lands and not have my inventory full (normally I have at least 20 or more mobs left), I have no idea whatsoever how you made it to the TOA and still were able to pick things up. If you did it correctly that is the worst luck in the game I have ever heard of by far and you should be rewarded just for having a 1/1,000,000 run. Even in normal mode The Cursed Lands has *always* netted more than 2k and it takes around 20-30 minutes for a full run (start in Bergin, clear the way to Cursed Lands, clear Cursed Lands, ID everything, sell, repeat). In HM I usually get 5-7k per run with 2-5 golds.

Not only that, but *2 hours* to get to TOA? Even in HM trying to vanquish the areas it should take half of that time. All I do is keep prot spirit and Mystic Regen up, cast SOJ, and stand there so I know anyone else can do the same. Nothing in my run is *remotely* elite.

With that sort of time you *shouldn't* be making much money, in fact of you did then inflation would cause prices to be so high you couldn't afford much anyway (see the early days of the 105 monk). Heck, I can freaking wand the guys to death faster than that.

Another thing about loot scaling is that contrary to what some people have said, it doesn't make getting neat stuff any more challenging. I can farm several areas easily. It doesn't get more difficult by having to repeat the run x times, it only gets tedious. Its all about mindlessly repeating the same easy steps over and over again. No fun at all. I would honestly consider getting a bot program if I wasn't afraid of getting caught.

Guild Wars was supposed to be about skill and not about time spend. I can only laugh at that now.

So... in order to not be about time spent, guild wars must be achievable within two days and have no endgame? The vanity items have no effect on your gameplay. It makes no difference whether you're wearing fow or 15k or 1k armor. That's why it's about "skill". That doesn't mean that you get fow armor given to you for nothing at the start of the game. You can spend lots of time farming for vanity items or titles, but in the end how you perform in the game is down to your skill, not the time you spent farming. That motto does NOT mean there should be no farming. It means that excessive farming shouldn't give you an advantage (which is why skills based on titles are wrong, but I digress).

Furthermore, no you don't have to do the same thing over and over to get money. If you do so, then that's your choice, don't complain about it. There are many different areas to farm, many different builds. There's no reason to just do ONE of them mindlessly all the time if it bores you. Some farming is solo, some farming can be done in groups. You can also get money by activities OTHER than farming. *gasp* You may not make it as fast as farming, but if it's not boring and you're doing it to achieve some other goal anyway (eg. vanquishing), then the money is just an extra reward for having fun. And IMO that's the way it should always be, whether soloing or questing or whatever.

If you're a casual player who just doesn't want to spend that much time playing to get the vanity items - then they aren't for you. They're just pixels with no effect on your gameplay; I'm sure you can survive without them.

complte and total stupidity.

skill over time is PVP combat not armor farming

have you even wondered why they have 3 very clear tiers of armor?

1.5K ARMOR

long term goal of the truly casual one hour or so maximum play per day giving at that rate a LONG TERM GOAL

15 K ARMOR

10 times the cost plus rare materials

long term goal of the more serious player willing and able to give several hours maximum play per day giving at that rate a LONG TERM GOAL

FOW ARMOR

most expensive by far requiring dedicated long term play

long term goal of the most serious player willing and able to give very many hours maximum play per day giving at that rate a LONG TERM GOAL

each of those is supposed to be for a different level of player from casual to hardest core and protect equally

you were not guaranteed equal wealth

if you want 15k armor that fast why not FOW armor as well?

Ever since loot scaling the bots have been worse in Bergen Hot Springs or maybe since hard mode. But my experience with hard mode is it stinks just as bad and normal for drops. It has become very hard to make money, while they have added many things that are a constant money drain. Trying to get titles, skill hunter 1k a skill, chance, opens at at least 450 a key, and gold ids if you can find one. Personally I don't see whats wrong with a little soloing. 55ing it is too much for me, but I do have a few nice builds that can solo in easier areas and that has been completely ruined. So heres to making a little money, and more and better drops.

I'm pretty new to GW and have read thru these boards quite a bit lately trying to get a feel for the game in general. I was playing DAOC and I know what a bot is in that game (another account used by the same player to provide a support toon). Is that what a bot is here also or is it a different thing entirely.

A BOT is a Computer Third party Program that controls a players character automatically. Bots normally go outside town, kill Stuff, Picks up drops and Gold, Goes back to town and merchants the Items. Rinse and Repeat. They are most often run by a Chinese Gold Selling Company's that sell Guild Wars Gold for Real world Cash.

So a Farming company will set up hundreds of computers and have them all running Bot Programs. Go to Bergen Hot Springs or the Granite Citadel , those towns ARE FULL of bots on a daily basis.

And Yes The Loot Nerf has only made Bots more prevalent in the game. You notice them now more than ever. The Gold Farming Company's now have to run more bots to keep the same flow of gold coming in. I think ANET can really do nothing to fix the situation and it is out of there hands. They Can't do anything cause they are going to have to ban ALLOT more than 4,000 a month. I think the more aggressive they get the more likely it will be that they will start to ban more real players by mistake.

Anyways as far as the OP is concerned...

1).... Loot Nerf does suck... I agree.

2) It has done nothing to decrease the Bots in the game... I think the Gold Farming Company's are making more money than they ever have in the past.

But that is just my opinion.

Where did this drop? been looking for this info for awhile now.

This is what I don't understand. People like to do different things. Why should one thing be more rewarding than one thing if done for fun.

Player A enjoys playing with 8 person teams, so he does.
Player B enjoys killing things by himself, so he does.

It is not like killing things by yourself is any more challenging, if anything its easier. So my question.....Why should Player B get atleast 8x as much gold as Player A for doing something he enjoys? They both enjoy what they do, but one is so rich he can't spend it all, and the other can barely afford armor and skills.

The loot scaling helps make it equal for both of these players. What now needs to be done is just a global increase of drops. Such as increase both 8 person drops and 1 person drops to 200% of what they are now. This makes playing the game profitable, while also keeping play styles equal.

This would cause some of the items to over inflate again, such as some runes, but everyone would have more gold, even the people who enjoy playing with teams of 8. The people who didn't like solo farming as such, but do it for more gold, should be happy about this because there would be no reason to solo farm anymore. People who play in teams of 8 will enjoy more drops. People who enjoy solo farming can still solo farm, and still make as much gold as other people.

Everyone wins, everyone gets equal gold, and everyone gets more gold.

Probably doesn't make sense, I'm tired.

Usually elemental swords drop from graven monoliths - I found one while farming lightbringer points with the Show of Strength quest - req 9 - third run

The loot nerf is out of control.

Example.

I finished tanahki temple and was running through the mission as per normal....from the corridor to pongmei valley and maatu keep.

I picked up ONE hammer....and a blue longbow......that is it! two things when I had to kill over 30 enemies.

the idea that with holding looting from the first 15 creatures is absurd. ANET wake up to this serious oversight.

getting to arbourstone mission was mildly better...i had to kill 8 wardens over the 15 kill before loot drops again....i got some tanned hide squares....a warden armguard and amber staff.....SWEET.

we play the game to get loot and make money in game....not do missions JUST to advance a story......the more I see of this the more I think ANET really dosnt understand the changes they make and how it affects the normal gamer.

ONCE AGAIN I STATE.....THIS ONLY HURTS AN HONEST PLAYER. Fix it please.

M belief is that Though eight member parties get x8 the drops, those drops are distributed per the team so everybody gets only 1/8 of the drop. This means the drop rates for that one person is the SAME as the one soloing.

Before the soloer would get drops equivalllent to an entire teams worth. So in this case your entire argument comes back to bite you in the ass unfortunately. Now the two are equal and the soler is en par with the eight party guy. Now the two can enjoy the game as they like without being jealous of the other.

This is no longer true - the loot nerf is no longer based on party size (at least in normal mode - in hard mode party size still seems to be the determining factor).

Now all creatures drop something after the first 5 kills in an area as long as they are killed one at a time. As long as those conditions are satisfied a solo player will get all the drops - which is about 8 times the amount the person in a full party will get.

I think this is as it should be. If you kill more by yourself, you should get more loot.

However, the nerf which makes loot drop less if mobs are killed several at once is a huge mistake - I can only imagine how discouraging it must be to run through an entire area and get only about 1 drop in 20, or less, which is what seems to happen if you are running an AoE caster build in a H&H party of 8. While it does not affect me directly, this situation will certainly cause a lot of casters to eventually leave the game if it is not resolved.

Uh, I think you missed his entire point. So, let me try and interpret for you.

Before:

Farming Players had too much money (all agree)
Non-farming players had too little money (all agree)

After:

Farming players have too little income but can still afford everything because they already have it (edit here)
Non-farming players have too little income (this is my edit, to account for previous wealth)

So you want the farming players to get as little money as the non-farming players? That is not helpful. Farming as a directed activity should net more money than non-farming. I'm the guy who lives on 1.5K or collectors armor, but I do not begrudge a farmer his extra cash. If he wants to put his or her time into this game, which does nothing to benefit society as a whole, then fine by me let them have a reward above and beyond what I do.

What I and he object to, is enforced farming to experience the game. You must farm to get all the skills. There are over 1,100 skills in this game, and even if you only buy the skills for the characters that can use them you're still spending 600 plat - that is 600 plat, repeat 600 plat cause the costs ramp up. That is 1,100 - (prophecies quest rewards) - (starter skills) - (NF hero skills).

The tomes are nice but are at their core farmed drops. Nuff said.

600 plat. Yeah, that's farming. That does not count outfitting heroes, equipping your characters, bling if you chose to get it, etc. That is a lot of cash.

His proposed solution:

Farming players get 2x the current money
Non-farming players get 2x the current money

How is this going to harm your gaming experience?

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I've read all 7 pages of this thread so far and this is the most accurate statement for me.

The bottleneck has badly shifted to converting gold/green items to actual gold which is required for many things.

WE HAVE NO GOOD SYSTEM TO DO THIS!!!!

Many players hate hate HATE selling since it's spam SPAM SPAM!!!
As a result it doesn't matter if you play in normal or HM, you get gold/green drops which you'd like to convert to cash.

I personally am in this boat - my toons are laden down with gold items and I can't muster up the will to spend hours of WTS in various towns...

In the "old days" you might have grit your teeth and sell one or two gold items and you'd have enough money for whatever you need - skills, armor etc things you need plat for.

Today all golds/greens have devalued so bad that you need to sell a hell of a lot more to get to the same value of plat.

This has definitely turned me off the game more....

Interestingly I played a little bit of Archlord for a laugh over the weekend (got the game REALLY cheap), what a grind fest that is but it has a fully functional auction house - it was such a relief to drop stuff off there and just move on.

You seem to be confused as to what I meant...

First of all, there was no argument, so it makes it hard to bite me in the ass.

Secondly, I am aware that the solo'ers get the same amount of drops as each person in an 8 man party, in theory that is. Which, of course, makes it fair for everyone. I thought it was obvious that I knew that. I'm not trying to suggest loot scaling. I am pointing out that it is in fact FAIR.

Last but not least, I was saying that loot scaling was a step in the right direction. To further make the loot more efficient, I proposed that we double drops across the board, regardless of team size. Which counters the complaint of "but I can't afford skills anymore" and it doesn't hose over the solo'er.

why not just make it so loads of cash drops? instead of stupid 75 gold drops that you share with your party? i mean, why not 50k for finishing sorrows? just an example

While I haven't read through this entire thread, I do have an opinion on loot scaling: I completely hate it. Nothing is more discouraging than spending 20-30 minutes farming and ending up with 2k-4k. The whole loot scaling thing never made sense to me; the previous system made much more sense to me. I always thought of it like this before: go with a full party u do 1/8 the work and thus get 1/8 of the drops (roughly). Thats fair. And if you go by yourself, your doing the work of 8 people and thus should get all the rewards. Now, if you go with a full group you do 1/8 the work and get 1/8 the reward. However, you go solo and do the work of 8 people and still get 1/8 the reward; perhaps the rewards are better than this, but they are not nearly as good as before. Basically what this loot scaling has done is make it so that honest players do the same amount of work as before and get much less rewards. That is why I hate loot scaling and I do not understand why A-net implemented it. Is it to stop bot farmers? But bot farmers can constantly farm, while actual players cannot. So who gets hurt? The honest player. Sure, the bots may be making less money, but what will they do then? They'll drive up their prices for gold. In my opinion, what A-net is doing through loot scaling is punishing honest players for the actions of a few illegal bots.

Why do people act like soloing takes 8 times the work? Making a bot that can solo is easy. Make a bot that effectively play in an 8 man party and I will give you a cookie.

Soloing consists of casting 4 enchantments before battle, then in battle you spam 3-4 skills on recharge.

Noooo! I thought this thread was finally gone. All you see are the same 4 people going at it on why they are right about it. But since I know I'm right about this one I'll just explain it again .

Loot scaling= adding value to the gold which means the less gold you have the more it is worth now. Less=More. Deflation in the price is good and inflation in the value of gold is good.

You all seem to be under the impression that items are/were meant to be 100k+.

In todays economy you can farm plenty of cash for anything you need. Less available cash means prices drop on high end items, it just takes a while for the stubborn rich sellers to realize this. Once it stabilizes for example:

previously worth 100k +10ecto
now worth 20k

easily obtainable in todays state of economy.

@Omniclasm
The level of the flaming is getting high so I might have thought of it as a Negative post at the time.

Apologies for the confusion.

Do note... That the main reason there are more golds are to bring their value down. They want to bring down the value of all these golds so Average John Goodwill (I refuse to use the name Joe) can afford the gold. Personally Arena Net Should look at Etiher The xunlai Trade Center, The Center island idea, Or an Online Auction house. Guru's is too slow/Buggy for me

It's called Vanquishing. LoL!

I have said it about 7 or 8 times, I don't think it will ever get through to them at this point. I'm about to give up explaining it to tbh lol.

a simple semi-solution that has been mentioned before would be to add npcs that buy/sell perfect mods and tomes. that would decrease some spam and would also put a decent, depending on npc prices, amount of gold in the coffers of casual farmers.

The reward for vanquishing is a joke....

Something like 800 xp and 200 gold. I try not to spend it all in one place, but it's hard not to. Granted, I usually get 2-3 golds, all of which sell for about 250-300 gold. So vanquishing one place will get me about 1.5k gold, give or take 500. Now, if I was flat broke, and I wanted to try a new build, I would need to vanquish 4-5 maybe even 6 areas. This is an all day job at least, not to mention impossible for many other people, casuals especially.

<edit below this point>

However, as has been said in other places, the prices of skills and armor are still the same.

Feel more discouraging than pre-loot scaled... Always feel like go back to outpost emptied-handed... -_-

That's very true. But it just means you need to wait and save up for a little longer.

drago, I'm not arguing that loot scaling is bad. I am 100% behind loot scaling, was one of the best things they did in my opinion. However, slightly increased drops would hurt nobody. Slightly increased globally, not based on party size. That would make acquiring the static price things, such as skills and armor, more feasible for everyone. The price of items would go back up slightly yes, but EVERYONE who plays the game would have more gold, not just a select group of people that solo farm.

Is it just me who wants to shout "ARGGGH Its all in your mind!! Its the same as before!" But people have been telling you there are not many golds dropping now (lie - its unchanged for normal parties) so instead of noticing the Golds before (Wow Im so Lucky I got a gold this hour) You now notice the gaps! (Gaw! Havnt had a Gold for an Hour) Freudian Reaction!

Whimpers...Sorry...I think the whining asura broke me ....

Yeah, that makes sense. I totally agree, I wasn't saying you were arguing it. I was just commenting on it what you said.

guildwars just knows how to screw a players trust and ruin a good game.

each new major update they continually ruined the game.
at this rate of losing player trust they're gonna lose quite a lot of their player base before GW2 even comes out. all it takes is for someone to mention loot scaling in GW2 for me to forget about it.

in anycase, what with the direction guildwars seems to be going these days, EoTN is probably going to be it's worst sold product, and GW2 wont even have half as much players as GW1.

Can I have your gold before you go? Sheesh atleast say why its going bad.

why would you want my gold? the amazing wonderful loot scaling will provide u with all the gold u'll ever need.