Should Lootscaling be removed after the new Rtm policy?

Right, that's what I thought. So what exactly is the problem? You keep playing the game, you get your vanity items.

Isn't that just an illusion people see with loot allocation? Aren't we talking about loot scaling here? Why are these arguments about loot allocation kept coming up?

Because some muppets (probably high on something too) are disillusioned into thinking LS is A-net's way of denying them opportunities to obtaining "e-peen bling".

IDS is a part of the LS system. Ever killed 4 groups of foes and only got 1 drop?
LS in effect you should get about: (16 foes / 8 = 2. Ls scales according to party size and has an exeem list. So it should be about 3 to 4 drops). That's IDS.

If you want to play with 1K and collectors armors that 's fine with me. Don't complain if people want to fit their chars with 15K armors.

Anyways this is way offtopic, if you should or shouldn't have elite armors. How long have you been playing this game anyways?

"With loot scaling, players receive an amount of normal drops (common and uncommon rarity items, collectable drops, gold, common crafting materials) proportionate to the size of their party as compared to a full party. For example, a solo farmer will on average get the same number of blue weapons as a player in an eight person party."

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Loot

Loots are scaled according to the size of the party of the players, not the size of the party of the foes you are facing. Now who misled you?

You want 15k armor, which is "e-peen bling" then don't QQ like a little girl (boohoohoo LS stole my phat lootz) when it takes more effort. Mmmkay?

I shall be expecting my third minipets in 2 months.

Playing the game, and knowing through experiencing it that LS doesn't work how they say it should work. I'm fine with LS if the IDS would not exist.
IDS is not documented, but a proven fact. Kill 1 by 1 you get more drops then 1 vs many.

I'm not complaining that LS is stealing my phat lootz + make more constructive post you are failing.

LS has put a limiter on what EVERYBODY can earn in the game. If RMT proves to work, why should we earn less, and spend more time acquiring things in the game? Sense it makes none.
LS can either be removed, or be re evaluated and be in the game in a diminished form.

So how was this so-called fact proved to be true, or even to exist for that matter?

There is still a lot of confusion about how LS actually works, so here's a rough description of the mechanism:

Every monster has one or more associated pieces of loot that may or may not drop when the monster is killed. If an item is on the LS exempt list, it will always drop. If it isn't there's a random chance of it getting withheld instead of dropping. The probability of that happening is the waste percentage. If the waste percentage of your team is 50% half of your potential LS relevant drops will never materialize.

However, there is an additional factor in play since the waste percentage is not fixed. It has a self-adjusting control mechanism that is designed to make sure that your rate of income (i.e., gold per hour) doesn't exceed a certain limit. The way that feedback loop works is the following: when a drop is pending, the program calculates the ratio between the monetary value of the previous drop that was granted and the time that has elapsed since then, and compares that to certain reference values which are determined by the number of party members and the maximal party size. If the ratio is below the lower threshold, you are earning too little and your waste percentage will be decreased by a fixed fraction. If the ratio is above the upper threshold, you are earning too much, and the waste percentage is increased by a fixed fraction. After the waste percentage has been modified, the program then throws a dice to see whether you get that drop or not. If it passes LS and gets assigned, its monetary value and assignment time are written down for the next call of the algorithm.

How does this then affect the actual game? If you kill several monsters at the same time with some AoE spell, the drops are not processed in parallel but sequentially. For the first drop the reference drop has happened some time before and everything works as described. If the drop passes LS something nasty happens. Its value and drop time become the reference values when the next drop in the queue is processed. Now, however, the effective time elapsed since the last drop is zero, and when you divide any finite value by zero you get infinite (in reality, there is a safeguard in the code to give a finite but big number instead to avoid an exception). Since the result is always above the upper threshold, waste is adjusted one notch up. This then happens with every subsequent drop until waste hits a hard cap of 100% and all the rest drops of that mob will be withheld. In practice 3 drops seem to get through regardless of mob size. This is known as the IDS bug but it isn't an actual bug, just a consequence of the way LS is implemented.

There is another little known effect caused by this method of self-adjustment. Since the algorithm needs to know the value and drop time of the previously assigned drop, it must initialize these variables at the creation of the instance. Thus, there is a 'dummy drop' recorded when you enter an explorable. Now, since the waste percentage is modified according to your rate of earning and this dummy value gives you a fake earning rate, your waste percentage will be very high just after entering an explorable, and get progressively better as time passes and you're not earning over the limit. A monster killed about 20 seconds after entering an explorable has a nearly zero probability of dropping LS affected loot but if you wait 2 minutes before killing the first monster the chance of a drop goes up to almost 100% (I actually have data to back this up).

This description is necessarily very simplified but should give you a basic idea of what is happening to your loot and why.

LS is not limiting anything from me or anyone like me who don't solo farm. I am not earning less and it isn't me alone.

And, RMT only addressed one of the agenda of LS.

So, speak for yourself.

Edit: On second thought that was a tad harsh.

I thought that was named RoK-Bug (Rate of Killing) ?

See a couple of posts up for an explanation for why IDS/RoK happens.

But quite frankly, I'm responsible for a large percentage of actual analysis of the issue in this thread but it gets inundated with a flood of flames from people who don't even read what other people are saying because it's so much more fun to troll. Welcome to teh intarwebz, eh?

I think that I'm done with this thread, especially as it doesn't affect my game play either way.

That's what they call it over at GWO I believe.

I concur, and you make valid points to the cause. But flaming for people in riverside seems more rule then exception

What little credibility you may have had, just ended when you had to resort to insults and name calling, basically you are shouting your mouth off on a subject that you, by your own admission, have had no actual experience.

Your myopic stance on this and your general childish attitude, beggar belief, LOL.
I am done here.

I'm too lazy to look it up nor do I recall if it was here, the wiki, or someplace else there has been a fairly large amount of samples taken (and, while not perfect, done fairly well and was a large enough sample to be significant) that show such. Also it works nearly 100% for anyone testing it.

That being said, read http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10225077 which pretty much says the above is bunk. There is enough independent conformation from people who would be trusted that this is also true.

As of right now we have quite a bit of evidence saying *both* are true and the reality is that both can not be true. While I used to be fairly heavy on the side of kill rates and strongly believed that loot scaling limited you to a specific gold/per hour I no longer think so. I think it is more complex than that as that is the only way both sides can be true. As such I can't give much of a guess.

Were I to be forced, I would guess that tables are set at the instance creation and then drops are pulled from said list as you kill. That would allow drops to be the same in those instances yet have the kill rate data be true. The other option is that we were *really* unlucky (or some bias we have not noticed) is in the kill rate samples. However I would put anything outside of what Anet tells us at a very low likelihood of being mostly accurate including what I've wrote.

Drop rates are interesting and many arguing do not have the background to comment. There is A LOT of ideas that are not supported by the data given and are fully covered by random (and there is a large amount of incorrect ideas about how computer generated random like numbers function). That's not to say they are incorrect either - just that they are inconclusive. As of right now we have decent evidence that kill rate affects drops and that drops are set at an instance creation.

Actually, no, I claimed more than a decade of experience playing in games involving player based economies with loot scaling in effect. How exactly is GW magically exempt from the same contextual factors that have made it both a necessity and a boon in every other single game that has implemented it? You discount my take out of hand (if I didn't play GW without it then the fact that I'm doing fine with it, heck, according to reetkeever I'm positively rich under it, means I'm not capable of giving an informed opinion) and you call me childish?

The fact is that whether you ever played GW without it has very little bearing on your ability to give an informed opinion on it because it is not special to GW, it's just a common game mechanic. Further, given the subjectivity of the human mind to remember the hits and forget the misses, I call into question the inherent bias of testimonies of pre-LS awesomeness given the existence of hard caps like the AFC.

I have to admit this sounds very plausible - unlike many, many other theories I have read.

If you have already made a thread with your findings, could you link to it? If you haven't done so, could you start a new thread in Riverside or the Farming subform with the details?

One concern I have is that your explanation is very specific. This implies either a great amount of careful data collection, insider information, or a habit of stating informed conjecture as fact. To help us judge your claims, some greater detail (or an admission it is conjecture) would help.

I have often thought there might be something like this going on. After all, it is pretty much the exact same logic Anet uses to control how frequently soul reaping triggers. You only get so many triggers of soul reaping over a particular amount of time regardless of how many bodies fall. It is easy to imagine a variation on that theme for loot drops that uses adjusted probabilities instead of fixed triggers.

However, I should also state that I'm not convinced this exists at all. I have personally never seen anything occur so regularly it couldn't be explained by normal variation. I ran the math on the expected distribution of drops in the raptor cave, and no matter how fast I killed, I got results consistent with what the formula predicted.

That said, I am open to be convinced, and you seem to know your stuff. Let's see some data.

I checked a lot of the posts and the people who wanne keep LS say 'it's fine' most of the time. Shouldn't it be 'LS is the best or I'm having a blast with LS'? No it's fine lol.

I've read the quote from one of the devs some 20 pages ago or so and I understand LS better now. I'm leaning a bit more to 'keep LS' because of that, but I can't say I'm excited about LS myself either, it's indeed fine and nothing more.

About the poll: I don't think most people know how LS exactly works so I'm not surprised the majority wants it removed because the fun factor is the main concern. It's also the reason LS is just fine. It will never be super fantastic, because there was or is a price to pay when it comes to fun.

Cake is indeed delicious, like it too and I know it's to represent the players who don't care, so they have something funny to vote on. Yet it would be more interesting if people had to vote on just the first three possibilities in the poll, because now their cake vote represents nothing that matters. It's troll food.

What a load of BS. This "theory", atleast in part, does not concur with my empiric results. If I get bad drops I continue to recieve bad drops for the entire session (as long as I stay in the map/mission), there's no magical algorithm that gives me better drops or vice versa. It's a nice theory but it simply does not concur with empiric results nor does it have any solid evidence (i.e. data) to support it.

It was a side project that I started around September 2007 to find out the optimal method to farm collectables for Wintersday, and after that it kind of tanked because I got my max title and became interested in other things. I didn't write a detailed report on the findings because there were still some open questions that would have needed more data, including

• are exempt items counted towards earnings (would think not but very hard to measure)?
• exactly how many past drops are taken into account (the IDS result suggests 3, might be something else)?
• how fine or coarse is the waste rate adjustment?
• what are the actual values for adjustment thresholds and initial dummy drops as functions of party size?

Since I'm not an ANet dev, I can't say that this is the definite answer. It is a working hypothesis, and the simplest one of those that I'm aware of and which are consistent with the various observations. I won't be able to convince anybody right now, and the earliest time I'll be able to continue the project is towards the end of June this year. Of course, as a scientist I'd be perfectly happy to be disproved as well

Thanks tmakinen for a lesson in a reverse engineering of a new kind

To really be accurate and conclusive, the study should have been done on totally unrelated accounts, because I guess there's a random factor that can shape things very differently. Who knows even if the various functions used in the algorithms are not randomised, thus preventing function profiling as you're trying to do?

I'd love to hear what Anet devs think of your post .

I SERIOUSLY doubt Anet will comment this post. They won't take our opinions to heart. Unless they will reply within 3 days. After that period I declare that Anet doesn't give a damn thing about it. The clock's ticking...

The thing is that there's nothing else they could say that hasn't been said already.

This sounds very plausible, but how do you account for the well-recorded empirical observations in this thread?

MMMM, i have some cake, im going to eat it too

Lootscaling sucks tho, now my only monies comes from the HoH chest

Nothing about that jives with my experience playing... I mean the norm is more likely someone in a group gets way more good loot than others, some people get nothing, and a few get in the middle... so if they're trying to balance drops the system is so poor it's unnoticeable imo.

It's all look. When you play with other players, unless you have any kind of consensus to share loot, it's like playing with H/H. What others get you never see.

Since playing with others (many times) is easier than playing solo, and usually faster, you get more drops by killing faster in teams.
Since it's a multiplayer game, it's just logical to encourage multiplaying in many ways like that. While still allowing solo playing... just without encouraging solo.

Of course, there are other ways to encorage parties... like, for example, making bosses drop one item for each party member, like with reward chests.

i truly wish Ensign (mr super stat) were here to answer that.

basically he would say that is such a statistically small sample relative to the entire playerbase playing that it was worthless to base anything on

Here's a graph demonstrating the entry effect, one of the best clues to the inner workings of Loot Scaling:



The rectangles show the probability of the first killed monster dropping something as a function of time elapsed since entering the explorable. The data were collected with a 1/4 party (solo) by entering Diessa Lowlands NM from Nolani Academy. Errors are 1-sigma.

I should collect more data with higher temporal resolution to see whether there is any granularity in the probability function that would indicate some particular adjustment method. The entry effect is ideal for experiments because you start with a known and reproducible 'clean' state.

About the sync farming experiment, I've treated it extensively elsewhere. Very shortly put, matching LS exempt drops show that the two players have indeed entered two separate instances with identical seeds. However, if LS is not adjusted on the fly based on the killing rate, the rest of the drops should be identical as well. Since they are not, LS is adjusted through player actions. The small amount of difference suggest that the thresholds for adjusting LS define a rather large range of non-adjustment and are only triggered by extreme values in either direction.

It would be nice if one of the devs could comment on your findings

Devs don't comment on guru. Ask them on wiki.guildwars.com, but even there I doubt they will confirm or deny anything.

Hero faction farm.... 150 gold per min... no where else in the game can you make gold that fast (without getting a lucky item drop) Lutgardis Conservatory (factions) is where this is done from....


Breakdown is like this if your farming the Kurzick title track

10k faction is 25 runs thats 3750 gold per 10k faction... takes about 25 to 30 mins for 10k faction.

To max this title is 10 mill faction donated... that is 25thousand runs.....

that is 3 mill 750k gold farmed...

Personaly I think this farm right here is just one more set of evidence that loot scaleing seriously needs to change. When you can make more gold killing NOTHING......something is seriously wrong with the drop rate of cold hard cash.

Allow me to ad I dont find anything wrong with this hero faction farm it is a nice thing for those like me that can not stand alliance battles... But... come on I've totaly stoped killing baddies for loot because quite frankly .... this is more profitable thanks to loot scaleing...

Link, please?

Or, in other words, this feedback mechanism (if it exists as described) is so weak that you'd really have to try hard to get a non-trivial effect out of it.

Anyway, I don't think whether or not Loot Scale has a subtle feedback mechanism or not is particularly germane to the question of whether it should be retired if/when the RTM companies are driven off. It's the baseline loot reduction (what you'd call the default waste ratio for 1-man parties) that bothers people.

Divide by 2 if you are donating to your alliance. 1,875k gold in total, assuming you can handle the murderous rage the 250 odd hours of grinding the same mindless flags will put you in. And 30 minutes for 25 runs is a tad optimistic.

Also observe that your gold earning rate is 7.5k/h. Nothing to get ecstatic over. You can do better farming raptors in HM even with LS.

Understatement. Its cloud bonkers IMO, you are doing very well if you get 15 runs in

people always exagerate about their farming runs, more e-peen I guess

One of the best examples I came across for the IDS was with the Turai procession farm.

With this farm you would bascially insta death a group of about 20 - 25 poor margonites.

Before loot scaling you would have a stack of loot filling your inventory on every run. With the advent of LS this was reduced to 1-2 common drops and maybe the odd gold,dye,tome etc.

You may remember that splinter weapon( around which this farm is based) got nerfed and it was no longer possible to insta kill the margonites. The process was now a lot slower but still possible. The margonites now dropped in the region of 8-10 common drops.

This farm alone showed me the effect of IDS.

Which bright spark came up with silly name of Icy Dragon Sword for the RoK bug?

Maybe i got this wrong but does that graph mean that waiting for 60 seconds before killing anything increases the potential drop rate on the first monster.

are you saying that: If you wait, kill a monster and get a drop, the rest of the instance will benefit from higher drop rates.

Another fine example of skill>time

I think the numbers in the poll speak for themselves. The majority of the customer base (that have voted, i'm not making a generalisation) want Loot Scaling out, so as that would actually make us happy and is what we have asked Anet for, I somehow bet it doesn't happen.