Should Lootscaling be removed after the new Rtm policy?

I wonder whether this has nothing to do with LS and everything to do with a full year of GW economics (with high-end items becoming less "elite" or "rare stuff" with the coming of new stuff from Z-chest, DAW, etc.) I'm not convinced either that a post-LS economy where LS would be removed would be as a pre-LS economy, there's been many interesting points on the thread on possible changes, including the impact of (we all hope) the removal of bots and gold-farmers (in Gaile's original quote, I understand they are the "farmers than make money ridiculously faster than everyone").

On the other hand, what you mention is totally right, things that are "usefull" for killing monsters and playing missions/quests are more affordable. But I wonder whether GWG's Ventari and auction website may have had a significant influence too. May be the establishment of the "high-end market" of the GW economy means that a lot of stuff is affordable because it's not "high-end" (i.e. fashionable to the "very few", e.g. Polar Bear/Panda mini and DAW weapons)? I really think you need to go beyond LS to understand the impact of removing it, but I don't have this knowledge.

I stand in the middle, between the /signed and /notsigned (which in essence means not supporting it because this thread needs /signed ... and funnily we're still in Riverside and not Sardelac ).

Again, LS caused prices to go up. The reason why most prices are low these days is cause of the Exemption List, which everyone seems to forget.

Most other farms out there require an equipment that is WAY to expensive for any casual player to afford. Also, most of the time, farming is needed to buy the equipment needed to complete the game (Hero weapons and Skills for example), so farming spots after having the game beaten is out of the question for alot of people.

Um well I don't think it's true and I'll tell you why.

Back before LS, back in 06. I would Troll farm (using as an example). If I killed 12 trolls at once I would ALWAYS get 8-12 drops. If I tried to kill that many enemies now (and I have) I get 3-5. So something is not right.

Farming builds now cost FAR less than a 55 setup pre-LS (remember the 10k sup monk runes? )

-make your good 'ol 55 into a 600
-make a smite hero
-farm away

A casual player doesnt really care if his sword has an unique or expensive skin.
And because things are getting more expensive, that means that casual players can earn more money by trading. Not for high end weapon skins, but for simple things like skills, which have a fixed price. I find it increasingly hard to purchase skills for my pve toons, its very limiting, i find that i just cannot afford to experiment with builds as i did before.

Hey guys (all of you), do not forget that this thread attempts to analyse the removal of LS but after the anti-RMT features. It's not simply about removing LS, but also once (hopefully) the "mega-hardcore" farmers and their mega-rich buyers can no longer "reroute" a huge amount of money (owned by Anet btw).

You mean deflation, right? GW has massive deflation, or the value of money has skyrocketed. But this is a problem for only one reason: Armor, the most expensive thing you can buy from an NPC in this game, stays fixed, unlike everything else. Should armor also scale like the price of dye (be based on supply/demand)? Should armor not be customized? I don't think I can answer that....
However, that doesn't apply to high-end items. There is some bad inflation is some cases (mini polar bear, everlasting transmorgifer tonic, etc.) that I think is mainly brought on by power trading and dupers.

Come over to the Dark Side, Fril.

You (and others) make a reasonable point that there are other factors that affect the price of player-traded items. For instance, rune prices shot thru the roof when Heroes were introduced, and then later came back to earth once most players had their heroes reasonable outfitted. Obviously that had nothing to do with LS, and was a simple situation of demand outstripping supply and the market adjusting.

Because of so many changes that have occurred, we can't say with absolute certainty that X led to Y. However, it stands to reason that if you insert massive amounts of gold into an economy, you get inflation for player traded items. That is Econ 101. Look what happened when Germany started printing money to fund a war decades ago. People literally transported cash in wheel barrows. And I mean literally.

It will become unquestionably harder for non-farmers to acquire the things they need to enjoy the game if we remove LS.

The other side of this argument does have their points. Farmers would be able to buy fixed-price items like skills, more easily without LS. However, the market has almost already corrected for that by tomes selling for 3-500g. If we get rid of LS and replace it with AFC, tomes will become rare drops because you won't be able to farm them any longer. The non-farmer will see the average price of skills increase, since tomes will increase in price to closer to 1k.

The other good argument is that it is fun to get a huge amount of drops by killing a cave full of trolls. I can't really argue with this because fun is a subjective thing. I can only say that I would personally like to have a chance to get a nice green, gold, dye, ecto, tome, or lockpick when I farm. All of that would go away with the return to the old system. All of those drops would go away if you zoned into DOA 4 times in a row. People seem to forget the lousy things about the old system.

This still doesn't effect the casual player though. They're making exactly the same amount of gold. Loot scaling or not. Assuming they play in a full party a majority of the time. Their gold income is the same. Armor price is the same. Everything ELSE just got cheaper. Armor didn't get more expensive. This is why I DON'T see loot scaling being reverted anytime soon.

If you're FARMING for armor. Yes, you will have to farm more with Loot Scaling in effect to get the same set of armor than you would have before LS. From that perspective armor has gotten more expensive.

As said many times in this thread already, Loot Scaling is a tax on farming. It's not as profitable as it used to be. Anybody who's making big money in GW these days are power trading, not farming.

You cant just compare a real economy with the GW economy. There are loads of other factors playing a role within the GW community on the price settings.

You mean like skills, armor and weapons? Try again, their prices are fixed and with little to no income there is no way to buy them except by farming ones *** off for like a month cause drops are so rare. Stuff like golds and greens will ALWAYS drop in price because as time goes by, more and more of them enter the economy. Besides, if you're a non-farmer, you should not expect to get req 8 max damage Crystalline Swords, either.


Tomes are on the Exemption list and therefore have nothing to do with the Scaling. And even with the Anti-Farm Code, there would be more drops than we have now. The Anti-Farm code was not that bad at all, it just caused players to get a bit less drops. It still doesn't compare to the 1 or 2 drops per 20 Raptors we get now. Also, Tomes rather failed as it's still really hard to buy the tome you want. Buying a skill for 1K is still cheaper is you assume that time = money.

Without bots, there is no use for the Anti-Farm Code either. So you'd be able to become a Hardcore Farmer and get these nice drops you talked about with ease.

Removing Loot Scaling =/= going back to the old system. The old system was also full of anti-bot measures.

If LS went, the exemption list would go with it...meaning everything gets thrown onto one huge drops list...stuff like tomes, lockpicks, golds, and rare mats would drop less, because whites would be dropping instead...


In the end it doesn't really matter, though. Anet will not revert the changes they see as "fixed", back to something they saw as "a problem". It was their intention from the start for things to be this way. They wanted to slow down the rate of "new gold" entering the economy. They achieved that. So really, arguing about it is pointless. :/

I don't think that would be the case. A monster with 2% chance of dropping ectos will still have that 2% of dropping ectos when LS is lifted, does not matter how frequent a white item will drop.

To many people who believe price of items would skyrocket if LS is gone, I don't think so. The reason items are so cheap today not only because of the introduction of LS but also by Hard Mode, 100% salvage, inscription, Zaizhen Chest, Ursan. It may inflate but not by huge amount.

Inflation is actually good thing as long as it's reasonable because it will encourage people to trade more with other players. Right now it's completely waste of time unless you got uber-rare item.

Has anyone considered that it's easier to keep the reins on a game economy if the potential gold influx is smaller rather than when it is bigger?

Think about it: if gold is hard to come by, people will just 'work' harder for their gold. Problem solved. If gold flows freely and abundantly, the economy will drown in hyperinflation. The former (a tough game) is a lot, and I mean a lot more desirable to a company putting a game on the backburner to work on a sequel than the latter (a joke of a game) because the former needs no involvement.

So, I'm guessing that's another reason why lootscaling will never be lifted.

You must not have farmed in the pre-LS days. In the old days, if you entered a zone (roughly) 4 times in a row you triggered anti-farming code which turned all drops into poor-quality whites and collector items.

Anet has always had a strategy of constraining solo-farming to minimize the income gap between farmer and non-farmer. The old system AFC and AOE spreading was replaced by Loot Scaling. I think what people are doing is remember the ability to get many drops while forgetting the total elimination of quality drops.

If people are going to argue for the elimination of LS, they either have to accept a return to AFC or propose some as-yet undiscussed approach.

Also, I agree that Anet is extremely unlikely to get rid of LS. I got a little nervous when I saw so many people pushing for, in my view, a clearly inferior approach.

Puh-lease What a crock of crap.

I started back in the fall, got a bit over four months under my belt, have ten characters. Two have full sets of elite, the other four that have progressed that far along have max armor, have most heros unlocked for those six, have equipped every single hero and character with decent weapons, have full runes and insignia's on every single player character, have most runes on most heros, have made decent progress towards lucky, drunkard, sweet tooth, and party animal for my chosen characters, have purchased every single skill I ever decided I had a need for, have capped every single elite I have ever decided I had a need for, and have even purchased a desired mini from the player market. Oh yeah, I never farm for loot and I only play a few hours a day on average. Oh, it's sooo hard to make enough money in this game, BS.

The only thing it's hard to do is make enough money to every single thing right this instant without actually playing the game, which seems to be the flaw in most of the board whiners' logic sets: they don't actually enjoy the game any more having since already played through everything to the point of personal tedium so now they pretend there's a fix other than doing the obvious: go do something else. GW is a video game, not a life or economy simulator. As someone who's still got about 30 campaigns to beat just in normal mode across all my characters, I'm not having any problem making money or entertaining myself by just playing the game.

Hmm seems to me your contradicting yourself

Eliminating LS has the potential to have a very negative impact on the casual player. It would increase the amount of gold coming into the market without increasing their income. Most casual players I know do not solo farm. They play with others or with full HH parties. As a result their income is not affected by LS (as I understand it, if I am mistaken I know that I'll hear about it).

By removing LS the casual gamer's gold supply would have less buying power than it does now. I do not believe that someone who doesnt work for it should have access to prestige items but if you increase the overall supply of gold in the economic system while not increasing the casual gamer's access to that supply then almost everything other than NPC purchased gear could very well be priced out of their buying ability.

I believe that the casual gamer really is Anet's target customer and so anythingthat would harm them (and discourage them from buying GW2) is unlikely to be implemented. In addition, I believe that hardcore farmers/traders do have avenues for accumulating wealth in game as it is. Increasing their wealth at the cost of the majority of players is just a numbers game and does not actually accomplish much for the game as a whole.

I actually farmed quite frequently before LS in effect and not much if not at all since then. And that anti-farm code has nothing to do with LS.

Either remove LS or reduce its effect to reasonable level. Killing 20+ monsters just to receive 1 single white item is ridiculous, not fun at all!

There is no point to arguing. What Anet needs to do is add a poll to their website and advertise that poll through in-game methods(announcements). But arenanet seems to have gained 300 pounds from all of gailes cookies and now are too lazy to do anything but nerf.

I understand, on my side I was suspicious at the point where too many people mentioned the word "farming" .

It's not clear to me yet, but I'll have to read through the best contributions in this thread and try to clear that. Or not.

Thanks anyway.

/abstain

/signed. Anet needs to turn the nerf bat on themselves this time and get rid of LS.

Not bothered, but it might make me have more money.

Anyone can become rich by playing so much that they can accomplish everything on 8 of their characters within 4 months. I am a casual player, not a hardcore player. I only have a few hours a week to play and in that time it's hard to get cash and I have been playing for about 3 years now and don't even have 1 character complete.

It takes me about a month to beat one of the campaigns, and in most cases skills, max armour and hero equipment are needed after about the 3th mission. There is no way I can get more than 10K by doing everything till the 3th mission. Let alone the 100K I need to equip myself and heroes. And that's just the basic stuff that I need.

No mate, YOU are the one that is not playing the game if you see it like this. Stuff like skills, titles, farming, keys, dyeing armour, mini-pets are all part of the game. Unfortunately they are all out of reach without a serious Gold income. Most of the 'enjoyable' things in the game are huge moneysinks and can only be enjoyed by the rich.


Again, as soon as you turn on Guild Wars, you are playing the game. Wether I enjoy it or not is for me to decide. You might enjoy doing the same storyline 30 times, I enjoy other things like chestrunning with friends, farming, pretty-ing up my characters and working on titles.

If you ever stopped by Hot Springs International to buy unided gold or holiday items, you are basically supporting gold farming. As long as people keep on buying from the gold farmers, or even bot farmers the gold farming company will always have gold to sell. There will always be players who will purchase in game gold using real money regardless of the policy. Removal of the lootscaling would either produce more gold farmers, or it would promote players to actually farm on their own. Price of things would go up because regular players wouldn't sell their items at the price gold farmers do.

O know its hard to think back to a time before the loot nerf, but prices were gradually falling back then.

Cheaper superior runes has nothing to do with LS and everything to do with HM.

Farming was alot more fun before loot scaling. Not just because of the cash value, but because having a ton of drops on the ground was quite entertaining (Anyone remember solo farming the "The battle of turai's procession" quest? Instantly filled inventory ftw.). /signed

You're simply a freakin lying crybaby. I've made well over 250K never farming, never grinding, never doing a damn thing other than playing through the games and the quests and I've not even come close to doing it more than once for each of the characters.

No, see above for lying crybaby. I dye my armor, I've got two full sets of elite, I've got what mini pets I care about, I've got all the runes I found mission critical, I work on my titles. I don't need a penny more than playing the game gives me. If you are stupid enough to think you should be able to outfit every single character you create a slot for in a fully tweaked out manner without actually playing that character, that's your own stupidity at work.

Tonight in LA, Gaile said something in the lines of the devs looking into it. This means they've noticed this thread and maybe there's some hope, just maybe.

Where of course the best would be, leave everything like it is right now.

Yeah, they can't satisfy everybody all the time ofcourse. My bet is they won't give in, but who knows. I still think it would be more fun.

Can I see this convo in a screen please? Preferably with some context?

First off, please don't attempt to make this a flame war.

Second off, ANYONE who only plays 4 months and has as much characters maxed out like you said should have over 250K. You've got more characters maxed out than me, even though I've been playing for ~3 years now.

Also, 250K in 4 months is nothing. At least 100K is needed if you want to equip a character with decent skills, armour and weapons when they leave the starter island in NF/Factions. In Prophecies you need less, but it's also way harder to make cash there.

And last, you are not in the position to call ME a lying crybaby. You have no clue what the game was like before the Loot Scaling if you've only been playing for 4 months, and thus you should not compare the game without LS to the game with LS. Please think before you make conclusions.


Well congrats to you. So just because you appearently get lucky drops or play 24/7 means that no-one else may get these items because they are not hardcore players?

I'm not even able to do that with ONE of my characters so far. The most expensive thing I bought after the Loot Scaling was 1,5K armour for Monk because the Damask was high-priced. That's all I can afford with the little Gold income I have now. Per 20 monsters I kill I get about 1 white drop or a collectible (Raptors, anyone? -.-). All the cash I collect from the Storyline goes directly to my Heroes' equipment because I only set up about half of them.

The Gaile chat is often posted here on Guru in the dev track forum if I'm not mistaken. I hope they post tonight's chat as Gaile replied she alrdy got that question earlier when I asked (I arrived later) but she answered it again anyways. It's dam stupid I didn't take a screenshot so at this point I can not give anything more than my word on it. Hope someone can proove it.

I have to /agree.

I haven't stopped playing (like others have said, GW is a unique game and nothing else is quite like it).

I am casually grinding titles, which isn't very fun.

I monk Ursan DoA runs occasionally, but it's not really my thing.

On a personal level, I do miss the old days of farming. It actually was fun for me to splatter big nasty hordes of monsters all by my lonesome. I haven't farmed regularly for about a year now. Granted, I have never been one of the uber-rich nor has it ever been my goal to have pages of ectos. I just wanted armors and skills and nice weapons.

That mods and runes are very cheap now helps out new players to purchase perfects faster than before. I remember when I was a new player and couldn't afford nice runes for a very long time. But ya know what, I still played despite not having perfect runes. And I'm still here, 32 months later.

/signed

People the reason items / mods / runes are as cheap as they are now isn't only because of LS. The game is out for almost 3 years now, and there is much more supply of everything then demand. That's why it's so cheap. Actually it's so cheap that people can't even make money out of descent drops. Everything can be merchant above req 9, because you can't sell it anyways.

Lootscaling does cause a relative scarcity of minor runes and common materials. Demand is apparently still pretty high for some given their prices.

Then they weren't decent drops, were they? Besides, most people don't care what they can sell, it's what they can afford to buy. From where I'm sitting, only the jaded old-timers are complaining in this thread.

The old-timers are already incredibly rich off of power trading and their wealth from before Loot Scaling.

Me, I just want loot scaling gone so I can get nice-looking armour for my characters.

Yeah? Ask Reetkever where he's hiding his millions. The incredibly rich old-timers aren't the ones complaining in this thread, obviously.