Loot Scaling

I have no intension of turning this into a A-net bashing session. As a sys admin my self I really appreciate all the time, services, events and development that they put into the game, turning it into one of the greatest games that so many ppl enjoy playing right around the world.

With the recent release of Gwen I found that the loot scaling system Gw uses is struggling to keep up with the amount of ppl taking up gw again. I've spent about 23 hours of game time in gw this weekend(doing night fall missions, vabbi and realm of tourment mainly). And so far I've only picked up about 3 purple's no golds except for the burried treasure pickups(I dont believe they really count as drops). Does anybody know if Anet is doing anything to address this problem?

no as far as i know loot scaling as it is will not be changed. Its actually sad that i can hop on a secondary toon and go to the same place that i was playing with my main character and get way better drops.

GW's HoM has forced us to concentrate on playing one character as a primary...but yet loot scaling has forced us into playing mulitple characters for decent drops/money. I have a whole inventory feeled with nice req 10-11 warrior weapons and shields...and numberous req 9-10 staves/wands/staffs/off hands and I can't ever sale them for 1k each. 500g less thant he price of the key that it cost me to get the damned things. Really disheartining in my opinion...but it is the way it is...and i like gw so will continue to play etc....

You have my sympathy. It's certainly not very consistant. As a Ranger, barraging, I feel it's like someone has tipped up GW and all the nice things have rolled of the edge.

But as a Warrior I can nearly always fill my bags.

I'm trying to kill things slowly (lol) and see if that helps.

Also; I play wherever it pleases me in normal mode and I've seen golds and jewels in the oddest of places. Maybe it's that the obvious high level places have been over farmed.

So maybe it's not a problem as such , more a GW weird economy thing.

It is a problem, a-net just will not admit it or do anything about it. People say "open NF free chests" well for one not everyone has NF, secondly the chests went from giving golds and 1-4 plat to grapes and 400-600 gp so those are not worth it anymore. Then they say "well with hm you get more golds and can sell them to make money" that too is BS, for one not everyone in the game is good enough to play HM (not me, I am fine with it but I been with some ppl that simply cannot do it) and secondly who are you going to sell it to?? Nobody is buying anything other than the 1/133700000000 drops like elemental swords and things that are more rare than that. Problem is if you don't have all 4 chapters, several level 20 toons to farm different areas, most skills unlocked, all areas unlocked and tons of time on your hands you cannot make money in this game anymore. And even if you do have all of the above it is still painfully slow going.

I can make alot of money in a short period of time in the GW:EN areas. Just gotta know where to farm.

This statement has no sense, what has loot scaling to do with my character? Loot scaling means that I'm getting less drops solo and when in party drop rates increase so everyone can get something. That's why it's called SCALING

Ofcourse soloing is still profitable but not as much as before when you were getting 8 times as much as in full party.

Out of curiosity, though: what do you really need the money FOR?

GW has always struck me as rather well designed in that anything more than say...50k is strictly speaking completely unnecessary: everything more expensive than that is basically for prestige alone: elite/obsidian armours are no different (game mechanics-wise) to their cheaper 1k equivalents, for example.

(admittedly I'm not doing high-level elite missions, so I might be missing something..in which case: enlighten me! )

What i meant by that statement is that there is loot scaling affects you more or maybe its an anti farm thingy...not sure but it surely affects you more when you play on a single character for an extended perioed of time...and you get no decent drops...i am talking no blues/purples let alone golds...but when you play a character that is rarely played they tend to get amazing drops. Do some searching...there are numerous threads about it. Alot of people will only do FoW or UW or other elite areas with secondary toons because they get better drops than they get with thier primary toon.

As to not getting as much loot when killing in mass numbers vs killing slowly...over time you get about the same...killing slowly you get more drops in that instance but takes you 5 times as long to do it....do 5 instances of fast aoe killing and you get about the same amount of items as you did in that one slow instance.

I was under the impression that "loot scaling" had to do with the amount of loot you got as drops not changing with the party size. You guys seem to suggest that loot scaling changes with different characters. I haven't found that to be the case. I don't get any better or worse drops with my 10millionXP Ranger than I do with my <1milXP Dervish. If you do notice a difference, it's probably just random chance, or anti-farming code.

On the other hand, I have noticed that the drops and stuff you get from chests - particularly in Normal Mode - is crap compared to what it was. But isn't that just part of a natural progression? Even back in the early days of Prophecies, you got better loot in the later stages of the game (Southern Shiverpeaks, for example) than you did in the early parts. Now Hard Mode has added a new level and the loot needed to be scaled back in the lower areas (and Normal Mode) to compensate.

There are already so many people getting so much stuff that the market is saturated with common req9 weapons and stuff. If you made it even easier to get, it would be worth even less.

I agree. There are too many people who play GW for 2 hours every second weekend who think they should be able to buy everything and anything and whine about how they "can't make any money". But, as has been pointed out many, many times - you don't need any of the fancy stuff to play the game. An elemental sword is no "better" than a common crafter sword when it comes to damage and mods - it only looks different.
And, those who have played the game over a long time and/or for a lot of time, should be able to have fancy stuff to show-off.

Time has always been a large part of making money in GW, but most don't realise how much time is involved.

Some people will claim to make 5-10K every hour, and they probably do, but they don't factor in how long it took them to lvl their char, unlock all skills needed and reach the area they are farming/runing/ect.....

Making lots of money in GW is easy, but it does take time.

Simple completing most missions on normal mode will net you 1-2K at an average mission time of 30-60min. More on hard mode.

You can lear any map in GW in about an hour with a full party and make between 1-10K depending on drops.

There are several places people pay for runs at 1-4K each.

The real trick is to not spend any money at all once you start saving up for something. It's harder to do than most think because many people are trying to save before they have fully equiped a char, then they find they need a diff rune or weapon mod to improve the performance of thier build and there goes 1-30K just like that.

Once you have a lvl 20 char that is fully equiped and has completed at least one campain it is very easy to make lots of money in a REASONABLE amount of time.

One thing I've noticed (and this is just observation, I haven't seriously tested it) is that regardless of your character, the drops are MUCH better if you play at low-traffic hours. I can give two good examples:

I've been working on my LB/SS titles for months, running out of Ruins when I'm bored and need something productive to do. In general, if I run at 6pm EST, I see maybe one gold drop for one person in the party every 2 runs (HM). If I run at 2am EST, I see 2-4 gold drops per run.

Also, I'm a professional chest runner out of GWG. I've run well over a thousand keys, of which more than half were lockpicks. In all cases, and in particular with lockpicks, if at run at some absurd hour the drops are much, much better. The difference is absolutely incredible - running at 6pm vs 2am with 10 picks the difference is likely to be 3 golds vs 10-12 golds.

This seems to hold no matter how many times I play through a specific area or how long I've been on that session, day, week, or whole character lifetime. I can actually give lots more examples (DoA trapping, UW trapping, the list goes on.) My theory is that the servers have a set drop rate for each rarity, and the less people are playing, the bigger your slice of that drop rate. Whatever the case is, party loot scaling, as people have mentioned above, and "wtf loot scaling", as the OP was referring to, are two different and very real forces in the GW universe.

And to the OP - I've been chest running for over a year, which is when I first noticed these weird drop rates. ANet has done nothing about it in that time, so my guess is no, they're not addressing this.

Something I noticed mentioned in another discussion around here is that killing with AoE (VwK Rt) gets you less drops than killing one enemy at a time (using a touch ranger, by example)

I didn't notice any difference myself, but I don't farm much. Simply playing through the game paid for all my needs. (well, except that Tormented flatbow I'm lusting for)

no good drops, like that's something new, i farmed over 1000 hours, yet nothing good dropped. if u want gold items come faster, go chest run, that's the only fastest way.

This phenomenon does exist - I have had heated "debates" with guildies about it and taken them out to "prove" it to them...

Scenario:
1 mob of 6 foes
kill all six at the same time with AoE spell
maybe 3 foes drop an item/gp

1 mob of 6 foes
kill them one by one
six foes drop an item
(occasionally only 5)

This I have "proved" time and time again on numerous runs because they said it may just be "luck of the draw", one by one, to my guildies who argued that it was not so.

As to the OP - I still make enough money by "farming" to get the stuff I want, to provide npc's for our Guild Hall, get the armour I can put in HoM, give to Guildies in need, and lots left over for other things. BUT - and this is where all the QQ threads come from - you can't make "a lot" of money just by playing the game in NM - you have to be able to access HM and solo farm there to make "a lot" of money.

What ever reason someone wants money for... thats their business, but if you want to do anything more than just outfit your one char with basic armour and skills, then you will have to go out and actually "farm" the money. I am working on mapping, and the money I make by "just playing" the game through an area is laughably low - I really pity the guys starting now, who actually get forced to "farm" to get enough money to buy skills enough to be able to experiment with their skill bars.

Also, I just farm merch fodder, I don't sell to other players (now that's a game play style I have no interest in, so I don't do it). I ID the golds for the title, I salvage good runes for the rune trader, and merch the rest regardless of what it is. I do not buy keys - chests are a gold sink, so why use them to try making money?

I have the time and the inclination to mess around farming if I want money - others don't. Others have the time and inclination for trading of any description, I don't. Farming in the hope of that 1 crazy rare item? lmao

My current working hypothesis for the loot scaling algorithm consists of the following:

* when you enter a map, your party is given a 'waste' factor 0 < W < 1 depending on the maximal party size and the actual number of party members
* each drop that is not exempt from loot scaling has a probability W of going to waste
* after every Nth kill (where N appears to be close to 3) the game compares the monetary value of actually happened drops over some reference time interval, and adjusts W: if you are getting stuff at a rate greater than about 10k/hour/player, W is increased (more drops will go to waste), otherwise it's decreased (less drops go to waste)

If you solo the same low level area in NM and HM you'll notice that the initial amount of no-drops is about the same but as you progress the drop rate of NM goes up pretty fast until after maybe 20 kills you will have no loot scaling whatsoever and every monster drops loot because the monetary value is so low compared to the income cap. In contrast HM where the value of loot is much higher will suffer from loot scaling throughout the run. Also, if you happen to get a 'lucky' string of drops in HM your subsequent chances drop through the floor until you've 'earned' the excess back.

I benchmarked this with certain runs whose yield I've known since 2005 and for sufficiently long runs loot scaling doesn't exist in low end NM which is great news for everybody who's farming stuff for festivals

Biggest BS I have ever heard.

urban legends FTW lol

I totally agree Washi - I have one toon that I play almost exclusively and I still get good drops on her. If I change to another of my lesser played toons I don't notice the drop increase or get better.

I do seem to notice a few more golds when i play a character i never play with, even in a large party. But if you belive its true right? .

But the lootscaling is basilcy the Sword pommel of new player slaying. A new player can still get his 1.5K armor O.K but i cant imagine how I could have started in GW as it is now.

.....yet the title is loot scaling... odd.

KANE

That is mostly correct, you should make about double playing solo what you do in an 8-man party and some items are excluded from the scaling totally.

Humans are *really* good at finding patterns, in fact we do not handle random very well at all. We tend to handle random by interjecting some pattern into it anyway. Anet has told us over and over that, other than scaling the amount of loot you get based on party size there are no other "adjustments". None for how many other people are farming an area, none for repeatedly farming an area, none for how old a character is, there is only one community observation that they have not commented on (more on that one). The OP's post has two - loot scale is degrading his gold drops because too many people are playing: Golds are excluded and loot scale is simply your own party size and is irresepctive of how many others are playing (so I rather imagine the answer is no, they aren't going to "fix" it as that isn't how it works).

People think they see a pattern and have decided Anet has lied, it is fairly amusing to watch people argue over which non-existent thing is the *real* anti-farming method they use. Like you, I have found every single one of the anti-farming codes Anet denies to have never affected me (or at least never affected me for anything greater than could be accounted for as "bad luck") and every single one they say they have to affect me in exactly the way they said it would. Go figure.

The only thing I am not aware of them denying is the difference in drops by killing one-by-one vs mass death. There has also been a fairly large and decently aggregated "study" (I use that term loosely here) that shows that to be the case. However, your GPH (gold per hour) on loot scaled items stays the same due to the fact that one-by-one takes far longer to kill things. I, personally, believe loot scaling to be implemented similar to the way Soul Reaping works - it limits the GPH the game allows to drop for you. Of course, without Anet officially weighing in on the matter we do not know and it is pure speculation. I say this because looking at the table it "scaled" more based on GPH (it stayed the same) than any other factor and we know it is quite possible for them to do such a thing.

But, do whatever makes you feel good. There are many many many people who fervently believe that a rabbit's foot gives great luck regardless of how unlucky the donor rabbit was with four of them. Though this generally boils down to ignorance on how "random" works including a general belief in the Gambler's Fallacy and the Law of Averages.

The sad thing is, I can farm undead outside of Bergin with my monk, get decent drops, maybe a few golds and then go do some missions etc. When I come back to Bergin, and start farming undead, I have gotten 5 golds in ONE run. And others have reported the same thing, if it happens often enough it isn't random.
I always liked that little thing about rabbits feet being good luck, but even though I know it wasn't lucky for the rabbit I got one anyways.

Really? And why is that not part of random? Again, go look up the Gamblers Fallacy and the Law of Averages (Both are included here).

There are all types of superstitions where people truly believe something fixes their luck and they have all types of anecdotal evidence. Yet, like the anti-farming code supposedly in there now every single time anyone does a long term recording of their drops it works the way Anet says. It's not like doing missions hurts, it just doesn't do anything.

I definatly find that the more you play with one char the less the drops are. In my guild the leader and I both only have 1 char we really play with. And when ever we go to FoW/UW/Vanquishing. We littrally get currently about 1 gold drop in 2 weeks(and we play about 36 hours a week). While the other guildies that go vanquishing/FoW/UW with us get all the good drops. I'm dead sure they also limit you if you play a certain char allot. Our guildies would get about 1-6 obs shards when doing FoW while we would get 0-2 shards for the entire FoW.

it isn't random because it happens with to much regularity. try it sometime if you have a monk, the first time gets the best drops, after you do the run a few times, the drops...drop....off. Go kill stuff somewhere else, come back and here are the gold drops again.

not really, there were days where i farmed...and farmed...and farmed without doing any single thing and i saw how my gold drop ratio went from 5 the first time in a run, to 0 gold drops for several runs, and some runs later i would get 5 gold drops again.

during the period i was getting 0 gold drops normally i would go out and do missions and other stuff, then come back and get my gold drops, but after that first incident, i decided to keep farming during that lack of gold drops, and as frustrating it was to see 0 gold drops for that while, it was quite pleasant to see the gold drops coming back.

Is there a method to the loot scaling madness? I still don't agree with the fact that solo farming only gets you twice the drops as a full team of 8. The reasoning being, if a team of 8 kills 80 guys, you'll get 10 drops in a drop rate of 1/8. If you are solo and you get double the drops in comparison to a full party of 8 in the same area, you kill 80 guys solo and get 20 drops. That is a drop rate of 1/4, that is if the drop rate for an 8 man group is 1/8. Pre-loot scaling it was a drop rate of 1/1. Think about it, you have to kill four times the guys to get loot like you did before. This applies to casual players and hardcore farmers.

AoE damage reduces drops - I agree entirely.
Rarely played characters get better drops - I have experienced this (9 characters here)
Of course without anything official from Anet, we can only theorize. There is no need to flame either, your counter opinions are welcome. Thanks.

[QUOTE]exactly what they stated it would be

official wors from the developers here
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10146006

note this

not just 8X but up to 30 X

Well the loot scaling stinks, but i really isn't going to be changing any time soon... For easy ways to gaining money use the golds and money from treasures to start buying and selling. Sell those gold weapons too! Get enough to get a nice stash of lockpicks and go to the free services forum to get someone to run ur lockpicks in HM or NM. You can get a few nice golds that way. Then sell the golds and rinse and repeat.

Granted you might not be lucky, but chests are really the only way to get good stuff.

Yea i've noticed...but in any case i can always fill my bags with GOLDS every run, everytime. (If you know where to go) >=) There's more to farming then just tryin to mutilate monsters. Know which *quests!* to farm with and try to farm the impossible, unfarmable areas. Once you've got that under wraps. Do it HM. Reap the benefits! >=)

I'm dead sure they don't. Not only do they say they do not but there are many many many people experience who says otherwise.

Over 90% of time in game is on two characters, of that well over 80% is on just one. I farm, play the game, and do mostly everything on that one. Over a week long period I still get the same old Gold/Hour (both in terms of money *and* golds) that she has gotten since I first made her. She gets the same as the second most played character, and both of them get the same as any of the other characters when I try a farming build I happened to want to try. And, in fact, every single time I know of someone actually bothering to record drops they find the same thing (and by that I mean more than just noticing but actually recording them *all* the time, for both the good, the bad, and the normal with no breaks in keeping records because you didn't feel like it).

Now, back in the old Anti-farming system that was not the case. It degraded on every single character at around the same rate, quality (in both terms of money per hour and rare per hour) dropped eventually to nothing (and the game informed you of this also). It did it every single time on every single character and for every single person that kept track of their drops.

For what you say to be true those crafty programmers would need have only picked out a few random people to do this too and generally know when people are trying to take longer term counts so they can fool all of us. I don't buy that - if it were an actual anti-farming code it would be applied all the time, not just from time to time. I find it MUCH more likely you are doing what millions of other people do when faced with a random situation - find patterns that aren't there by selective observation. It is the same thing that makes so many gamblers have a "lucky charm" and many of those being the same thing across many different people all come up with independently. Humans do not handle "random" very well.

Strcpy: I'm one of those guys as you can see from my post. If you like. I'm willing to meet you in GW, do any run and show you how much your/other ppl drops will differ from what I get with my Character. Maybe we should make it a bit of an event :P. Get all the guys that say they get bad drops and then get the guys that say they get the 1 gold/hour and record everything. Maybe settle this debate that way .

I would agree if you if it wasn't the case all the time. I think my heroes get better drop rates than me :P.

Loviatar thanks for that link, here are some things I noticed.

"People who periodically enjoy farming solo (with no heroes or henchmen) but are casual about it are also likely to see an improvement."

This is absolutely wrong. If I farm an hour, out of the week, I still get 1/4th the drops I used to. Improvement=better than before, which is incorrect. The developers say it is not effecting anyone but "People who were advanced solo farmers", lets be honest, it effects anyone who farms, which is everyone eventually.

"the most advanced farmers should differentiate themselves from the crowd not through the amount of gold and common loot that they farm directly from monsters, but instead through the amount of gold that they can get from selling rare items"
"Here's how we've provided a new way for advanced players to make as much money as they did before: by introducing new items which will have a high demand from other players and thus high trade value"

So now you can just farm voltaic spears in slavers! Yes! Or you can clear underworld and get your eternal blade! Oh, there is no guarantee that you get these items after 3+ hours, but if you are an advanced player, the option is there. (I love options, but is this really a viable one for the majority of players, no.)

"The bottom line is that ArenaNet's goal is to make it easier for normal players to make money while redirecting the efforts of the expert farmers to a way to continue to reap rich rewards without having a harmful effect on the overall game economy."

Normal players have a much more difficult time making money, normal players don't farm elite areas, normal players do quests, story line progression, etc. On a positive side, Eotn provided dungeons are excellent sources of loot, and work in with progression. But people without Eotn, or when you are playing another campaign, your loot is awful. Play through nightfall from the start, brand new, without using existing storage, without farming, and be thirfty with your gold and when you reach the end of the game, buy one elite set of armor...(100k+ with material pricing so high)...You think it is possible? I don't.

These are my opinions and viewpoints, feel free to disagree with them, and make a counter point. I think this is one of the biggest issues in guild wars currently, and would like to discuss it.

Excuse me, but NORMAL people come into these forums now and ask how us rich people got so much money.

KANE

I believe the issue is not that humans make patterns out of the random, but instead that a computer cannot create a "random" no matter how much we try to do so. There is eventually a pattern. And just like you said, humans are extremely skilled at finding patterns. We see that pattern and think it is something that has been programmed when in reality it is actually the limitations of computers.

I would have to agree that I think loot drops are pretty random and any patterns that we see are of our own making.

Lately, I've been getting much better drops playing with a full party. Make of that what you will, but I think it's just random.

The other interesting factor for me in this discussion, is the idea that you somehow NEED to accumilate wealth in this game. I've never really understood that. Gold is for spending. I only farm if there is something I WANT. Elite armor, rare skin weapon etc... But I don't NEED any of it.

The only things you NEED in this game are max armor (skin doesn't matter) max weapons (skin doesn't matter) and skills.

Everything else is just a WANT.

My $0.02

-SS

My observation is that soloing Hard Mode now gives the same reward as soloing did before there was Hard Mode/ loot scaling. When I go out and pillage Hard Mode Old Ascalon, I usually rack up about 150-200 kills before I call it quits. The amount of cash and golds/purps/blues seems to me to be about on par with what I used to get farming Skyward Reach Hydras before Hard Mode came around. Again, I would kill dozens of enemies per run, and not just wipe a out a mob or two and repeat.

The same goes for my monk 55'ing Titans in North Kryta. I'd say the drops from clearing the zone in Hard Mode are equal to or just slightly better than clearing it pre-Hard Mode. The addition of lockpicks makes it more rewarding, because whenever one of those drops, I know it's a guaranteed 1k sale (I sell em for 1k, since it's 100% profit anyway).

If you really want money, the best way to do it is to make a dedicated farming character, rush that character to get the skills and equipment you need, and then farm that toon to death to pay for stuff you'd like to have for other characters. Realistically you can make over 10k an hour if you farm the right spots. Unlike other people, when I say 10k an hour, I don't factor in the headache of selling stuff to other people. I mean from piles of gold and selling stuff to the merchant. People who say "I make 100k an hour in my super secret spot that I'm never telling anyone about" are either a) full of BS, or b) assuming that they can / will sell whatever items they find to other players. Since I really hate selling, I just farm all my loot. And when I want to buy something, I just go to LA/Kamadan/Kaineng and WTB.

This is a discussion on loot scaling, this would be better posted in another thread in which people are in need of money. Feel free to start one, I'll be glad to tell you how I make money. Thanks.

In response to Shadow Spirit,
Yes it is true you don't need to acquire wealth in a game, but progression and advancement through gains (material, statistical, or otherwise) is what a role playing game is build upon. RPG's have a recurring theme, this is one of them, role playing essentially is something we all enjoy doing, and no one wants their role playing character to "suck". Well...you never know. There might be someone out there striving to be the worst.

There is no discussion on loot scaling. Overall consensus is that it sucks and should never have been instituted in the first place

As to your comment about making money, notice I said "us" rich people. I included myself because I sure as hell don't need you to tell me how to make it. lol

KANE

I got 5 elemental swords all q9 inscribeable with +30 hp and 15^50 mods, 26 crystalline same stats, and for some reason bosses were dropping mini ghostly's and stacks of armbrace's so I got 20 stacks and 45 ghostlys..you just have to know where to farm.... You see if I told everyone where to do this then I would be proven wrong so I am not going to tell you just like you are doing in your post