Rewards Balance?

Not sure if this is a suggestion or just discussion, so here goes regardless...

I've done my fair share of QQing on this forum, and this idea came to me just now. GW has NM and HM, and only very occasionally do the rewards from going HM outpace those in NM, such as gold tome drops and such.

Many of the complaints I've read deal with drops in places like Dungeons, and especially end chests, such as doing Slaver's in HM for a diamond and onyx lol.

So here's my idea. Whether it be implemented in GW or GW2, makes no real difference to me as I rarely log on anymore, but it may make a difference for others.

First, increase the drops for everybody. Its time that players felt rewarded for their efforts, along with a player being able to, say get a set of FoW armor without having to farm areas, a process that would take years. This is something that could be implemented now, and I can't think of a reason why anyone would complain barring the uber-rich power traders with stacks of ectos, but no one really cares about those jerks anyways!

Second, and this is probably more of a GW2 thing, but call it split-level design for lack of a better term. Take a dungeon, designed for 4 players with an average time to complete of 1 hour. Then design an "alternate" mode that allows 8 players to play, and adjust monster difficulty so that the average time to complete is 30 minutes. Additionally, make the drops scale so that you get the same drops per time regardless of which way you play (i.e. the 4 player team would see double the drops but take twice as long as the 8 player team).

This way, even if you could only play by yourself and three heroes, you could do the dungeon, while organized guilds with lots of active players could play full 8 player teams.

But the crux of both suggestions is scaling up the rewards in both GW1 and GW2. I think many players would be happier with better drops, and perhaps drop rates based more on player level than monster level, or some balance between. I'm not advocating a change that allows every player to get 8 full sets of FoW in five minutes playtime, but it WOULD be nice to see perhaps a global but low ecto drop chance throughout the entire game for example, such that slaughtering hordes of earth elementals in HM might net you a couple of ectos over a few hours, or that playing through dead areas like the Souther Shiverpeaks and Maguuma Jungle might give you an ecto or three could revitalize dead areas of the game.

Yes, lets increase the drop rate, and therefore decrease the market value of drops, that will work. >_> The only thing that MIGHT do as you say is let anyone get obsidian, but I dont' see why everyone is ENTITLED to a purely cosmetic bonus. Might as well leave some ridiculous grinds in the game for people that want them.

I'd rather have some really unique drops in gw2 Unique armour sets, that work with unique weapons, stuff like that.

this is another one of those threads that is useless
there is nothing that a 45 ecto weapon like tormented weapons... or w/e they go for can do that a purple pos drop u get playing can't do
they are purely cosmetic stupid shit skins
if u want the really high end cosmetic shit get off ur ass and earn it or get lucky and get it to drop
period end of story

YES,this is what I can't stress enough. GW is too set in it's old fashioned loot system,it's jsut too urnewarding. Therefore the a lot of playtiem is dedicated to trying to target rewarding parts (farming etc.) so far that it becomes removed from the main game.#

It's too late into the game for peopel to go 'wuts teh point if ther's no moar 1337 stuffs!111'. Firstly it's a game with a virtual economy. Secondly it's a game, I just want to have fun and be rewarded for my time playing, whilst having fun. Thirdly, it's a game.

I also agree with upier and think titles need to be toned down,it's still too much Grind Wars.

well they would have to un-do the loot scaling update and a few updates prior to that just to inprove drops. its said that you lose out when playing H/H but in 4+ years for me, the only real difference ive noticed between H/H and full human parties is getting less gold. the drops ive seen the other party members get when playing with people have usually sucked too. ive always felt the enemy drop system needed to be improved. its stupid to be in the high end areas and seeing the enemy drop non-max weapons. when your fighting stuff thats level 22 or higher, i dont care if its a white,blue,purple or gold, the weapon should be a max damage. or fighting a warrior, assassin, ranger, paragon, or dervish and see it drop a wand or staff. or the famed 3 req weapons that have come out of FoW. its too late to make much of a difference now in GW1.

I think this should be implemented first in some weekend events etc. I have previously asked for special weekend events where you get all cash drops and do not share with your group. The problem with this one is how would you do it with an all human group? Do you assign the cash? Do you split it? Do you increase the amount of cash drops? I am not sure.

I also am frustrated by spending a bunch of time on a dungeon and getting crap drops but I think there should be some type of testing to see what the response would be and it would also be curious to see what can be made in terms of money if something like that were to occur. I also think loot scaling should be rolled back, it stunk to begin with now with the state of the game it would do nothing but improve the player base to increase the rewards. I still get blown away by the fact that when you go out a kill a boss in either a full-group or solo and they drop nothing. It is basically like a big kick in the crotch.

In GW, bosses dropping nothing or crap, nvr liked that.
In Diablo2 bosses alsways drop better stuff, and uber bosses even better.
I miss that in GW.

I really don't think end chest rewards are going to improve at all until dungeon runners are over and done with.

I wouldn't mind a greater variety of halfway decent drops so the average player has a reasonable chance of getting a good drop or two but there is a problem.

The average player will not get the top end armour or the very rare weapons etc or even incredibly rich, they just don't work at it hard enough.
If they made it easier for the average player the dedicated farming types would just get everything really quickly and get bored.

Then anet would have to create a new layer of rare items to go for and there would be a call for those drops to be made easier.

More interesting drops yes and to balance it up a little have some things only drop in hard mode, oh and get rid of consumables in hard mode after all its supposed to be hard.

This is a terrible idea. The only reason most players get obsidian armor is because it is so expensive. Sure, there are the few that genuinely like the skins more than any other armor set, but most people get it just to show off. If you made it available to anyone who played "normally" after a month then there would be no reason to get it and everyone who bought it when it cost ~1 mil will be extremely angry.

In addition, increasing drops across the board will decrease prices across the board, making everything that was once rare valueless. Now, you might say that this is good because it allows people to get the things they want but, again, this just takes away the only reason to have Guild Wars wealth: to show off. The best example I can link this to is cheat codes. For one of my favorite games, my friend and I discovered a whole bunch of cheat codes for it. We had fun at first, stomping all the hardest competition easily, but we very soon became bored. There was no accomplishment in winning because there was no challenge. We never really came back to that game after the first two days of using cheat codes. I believe that this would happen in Guild Wars; the main reason people play after beating the game is to accumulate wealth to buy the things they really want. If you take away the challenge of buying these things by drastically lowering prices, then there is no reason for them to play anymore.

The final nail in this idea's coffin is that you want to make it easier for non-farmers to become rich. The immediate thing wrong with this is that if they desired riches they would become farmers. It seems fruitless to attempt to make people rich that don't desire to be rich. In addition to this, your proposed solution would increase the riches of farmers proportionately, in essence not increasing the wealth of anybody, just decreasing the value of gold and ectos. Essentially, the economy would be unchanged because everyone's wealth devalued proportionately, but now people would have to create a mule just to store their stacks of ectos and have nothing desirable to spend them on.

So basically,you think that you should HAVE to farm to gain money? Thus if you want to make your character look good spend ~half your gaming hours on that stuff? Right...

There is no reason to further inflate the already tanking GW economy.

FoW armor is the top tier armor in the game and thus it should take hard work to obtain it. Speed Clears already made the armor easily accessible and negated the hard work others put in for the armor.

I am not QQ'ing about Speed Clears, I myself enjoy them, they serve a purpose.

However if you are suggesting that the team make what items have little value left more easily obtainable I disagree.

HM & Inscriptions have already made the economy sub-par, why screw it up even more?

With the hind-sight that we have now, I think that Anet went down the wrong track when they introduced the idea of scaling drops. Increasing the quality and quantity of drops with less players in the team, to me is atually the opposite direction that they should have taken. They should have increased drops for the more people in your group. This would have encouraged PUGing as well as guild/alliance work at the same time as helping to address the bot problem.

all of your "suggestions" would not work at all. making a 30 minute run as rewarding as a HARDER, LONGER run is completely stupid. Yes lets let 8 people do it faster for the same reward. Wait why the hell would we ever use 4 people then?

And increasing drops means decreased value. Learn to supply and demand

Short answer, yes. Please enlighten me about why that is so wrong("Right...",while an oft used debate technique, does not advance discussion or bring someone to your side. Please contribute at least one valid point this time). If "looking good" is so important to you, than why is it so upsetting to have to work for it? If looking good is your main concern, than what is your motivation to keep playing if it is just handed to you?

EDIT: Please realize that that was not what I was arguing in my previous post. The essence of that post was that the proposed solution would not stop farming or make "normal" players as rich as farmers. It would just make everything common, leaving nothing to spend your money on(as nothing would be expensive anymore), and increasing the supply of gold(from merching items), meaning everyone would have tons of gold and nothing to do with it.

i seriously miss the non-lootscaled times.... the times where troll farming or griffon farming in the desert was bliss and FUN!

Reading comprehension is your friend. Seriously, its amazing that in a post that addresses reward and play balance, that even the mention of ectos brings out the elitist jerks crying about the economy and FoW armor being available to the serfs.

I don't care one way or the other about ectos and FoW armor, in most cases its not even the most attractive, and just serves for losers with no self-esteem to get their e-peens stroked online.

The point of my original post was to address what I perceive to be serious imbalances in the loot system, both in overall drops and balance of areas.

While I understand that most if not all of my ideas would be unable to be implemented in GW, it might serve as a baseline for GW2.

For example, it USED to be profitable to solo everywhere, until loot scaling was implemented. It was such a terrible idea, and a lazy method of balancing party composition and player builds. It makes logical sense that if a player is able to solo a monster that is designed for a full party to kill, then he/she should receive the same drops as the full party. The fact that monsters know how much cash to leave out of their wallets when a group zones in is kind of ridiculous.

The other suggestion, which Risus apparently missed entirely, was that if 4 people take 1 hour to beat an area, then a party double the size (8) should take half the time (30 minutes) to do the same. I thought it was obvious, but whatever. It has nothing to do with difficulty, I meant more of a "mode split" where the 8 man group can do double the runs of the 4 man group, but the area is still "doable" by the 4 man. Whether there would be some sort of loot scaling or not would be another issue.

Why would this be a great idea? Well given the current system, a player could take 3 heroes. Or in a big guild go with 7 other players. BUT if a player doesn't have heroes, its more likely he or she can get a group of 4 together and do the mission, rather than spamming LFG in all chat for hours waiting for 7 more players. Yes I realize there are Henchmen, but this is supposed to be an MMO right?

And besides, since most outposts these days are completely dead, except for the common high end areas and Zaishen areas, its exceedingly difficult for new players, whom ANet should be trying to court to even play the game. I can for example reliably play with a bunch of people in Diablo 2, and that game is over twice as old!

Lastly, its just not cool to do all of Slaver's Exile or UW and come up with a couple rubies, diamond and onyx. And in response to Risus' comment regarding supply and demand, I know all about market economics, having a BA in the field myself. The point is, the GW economy is NOT Wall Street, and as several have pointed out everything in the game is just cosmetic in nature. While you may say you pay for the "privilege" I contend that its just a frigging game, and that rewards should be commensurate with time invested. If some noob who has never done FoW successfully accomplishes a speedclear and gets a bunch of merch fodder, how is that an incentive to keep playing?

GW should NOT be Grind Wars, but even a couple in this short thread alone have stated that to acquire stuff you need to farm, the exact opposite stance that GW was advertised as! Again, for the ADHD crowd, I'm not advocating FoW armor for all, what I'm saying is that to incentivize players to keep playing tough areas, rewards need to be appropriate. I could piss and moan all day about not getting a Celestial Tiger despite opening close to 1000 lunar fortunes, but that's just a small example of the screwed up loot/drop system.

lets stop the flaming. and analyze the idea.
right so the op wants to make the whole game rewarding, hoever gw was brought out in an age when it was 'grind wars' korean high level grinding was in fashion along with click to move ;P however as time has moved on people were spoiled with good drops in other games and therefore wanted better drops in gw. yet they forget gw was never supposed to be grind wars it is skill based and the developers MAY have thought that skins wouldn't matter and the economy would be fine due to no huge fluctuations in price, everyone would be equal in skill this presumption may have been because most games of the time had poor graphics so it was stats, which generaally were not the same damage for each type of weapon vs. skin, but in our beloved gw people soon wanted sick skins.
Therefore an economy was based around rare skins and to some extent rare mods (duo vamp) to make loot and specifically these skins easier to obtain would cripple the economy, but tht doesn't mean its a cool idea, but like beckham in 2003, cool but stupid. too soon?
anyways as some people have pointed it out it has turned to grind wars due to stupid titles and low droprates which inturn create rare items which leads to further farming and more grinding, its like the catch 22 of gaming.
that was me talking and this is me pondering;
I agree lux/kurx/rank titles should be less grind.
That lvl 20+ should drop max weapons regardless of rarity, however the drop doesn't have to be class specific but q7/8 near max or max should keep same drop rate.
on above point I believe hm dungeon chests Can only drop max weps.
ty for reading-don't burn me for an opinion-hf and gl to yall
~Deatgs

Exactly my point. If FoW armor is easy to get, there is no point for it to exist.

I really don't understand this. You are anti-farming, but you're great idea for fixing Guild Wars is.....to repeal loot scaling? Also, you care about the lore of monsters drops changing based on party members, but you think that Charr should drop the remains of ghosts(ectos)?
Makes sense to me, but I don't think anyone was debating that.

True, but the solution to that is fixed rewards, not more rewards.
Again, you are supposedly anti-farming yet you are worried about the speed clearers?

I'm pretty(100%) sure that this is directed at me so I'm going to quote it twice. I was saying that if someone wants to accumulate stacks of ectos or to look rich(ahem, "good") than they should be farming. I don't think this is unreasonable but, again, feel free to enlighten me. As to GW being advertised as free of grind, ArenaNet has also added items with less than a 2% drop rate to hard to get to dungeon chests. Do they really expect people to obtain a BDS without farming?
If you don't want everybody to be able to get FoW armor and you don't want anybody to have to farm for it, then how is someone going to get it? Powertading? Oh wait...High end PvP? And just for the record, I am definitely not an "uber-rich power trader"(I have ~100k to my name and that is the most I have ever had at one time) and I don't really think I am an "elitist jerk complaining about FoW armor being available to the serfs" as I don't own a set myself.

This really belongs in the suggestion forum.

Anyway, I am shocked from reading some of the responses in this thread. Does anyone remember the pre-nightfall market?!? Money was readily available, but items were extremely expensive, so the average joe could easily get 15k armor sets but would have to work for the expensive items such as FoW and the IDS. Nowadays people have to farm one way or another to get any sort of revenue-playing through a game completly only nets you about 30k.

There are a couple of reasons why the market is in such a poor state right now, namely:

Age- the game is old and people have invested a lot of time in getting the items they want; hence the small market for non-high end goods.

Inscriptions- Killed the market for non-high end goods. Items were generally worth a lot more with perfect mods because they were so hard to get. As a result, Anet had the brilliant idea of dumbing down the game so that everyone could didn't have to invest any time in getting decent weapons. Weapons are now priced by their skin, not their mods.

Lootscaling- Reduced the amount of cash that people could accumulate for going out and killing monsters. Instead of properly balancing an area so people couldn't farm 30 monsters within two minutes, Anet took the lazy route and nerfed everything. Now if you want money from regular farming, it's the few locations (raptors, vaettir, nephilia, etc) that you flock too.



Back to your suggestion- I don't Anet should follow your idea for GW1, maybe for Gw2 because the economy will never become like it was a few years ago. These are the ideas that I have for GW2 to keep the economy from falling apart so quickly:

No lootscaling- It's not hard to change a monster's skillbar or the amount of monsters that spawn, just put some effort into spawn locations.

No inscriptions- Dumbing down the game always ruins the game. See WAR online's crafting system for a clear example. If you want mods to be available for people who don't want to farm hours for it, make it a customizable option requiring a sum of gold and materials.

Better rewards for completing missions- 1k for completing the a mission isn't a suitable reward for playing it again- more gold, trade-ins (such as imperial commentations), or crafting materials would be a better incentive for people to play missions instead of trying to farm areas.

Goldsinks for elite areas- I like the 1k requirement for fow+uw because it brings a high risk-high reward element to the game-keep it.


I'm leaving out SCs and dungeons from this response because I'm not sure what they're going to do in GW2.

Flame on.

In all your obscenities you failed to consider the economics of the situation. which exits if you want them to exist or not.

Increasing drop rates or rewards at all will drop the price so the value in gold of your increased drops/rewards will remain the same as the "lesser" rewards given now. By increasing supply more demand will be fed... when demand lowers price will decrease because there will be more competition to sell your drop/reward. The only reason items are worth what they are is due to the degree of difficulty they are to obtain. Which keeps this game alive (kinda) because it spurs competitiveness.

Whats proposed here is almost to give people everything they want, which would make everything nearly valueless... making gold worthless... destroying the economy... and when most players have everything no competitiveness will exist... so whats the point?

So maintaining a good game economy is not "elitist" its common since.

Get educated not emo.

lots of good points.

yes the economy will never be back to what it was before nightfall. Anet killed the market on alot of skins for high end non-inscriptable weapons when Anet made inscriptable versions of them.

but thinking back to many changes and updates, we have gotten what we have asked for mostly while anet has ignored alot of ideas to fix some poorly done changes.

-heros came due to everyone complaining how useless henchies were and how bad their skill bars were. finally last year they changed the henchie bars.
-inscription system came due to people wanting to change the base mods on their weapons
-loot scaling came as one of many attempts to deal with bots and also get people to team up again with real people after heros started turning the came into a single player game while people complained they couldnt find groups to play with

we got stuff last year that for a long time Anet said there was no way it would ever happen. name changes, more storage, sex changes, makeovers and equipment packs. if those things were possible after years of saying they werent, wheres our 7 heros? which next to an auction house, is probably the most wanted update.

Only until you realize that the common definitions of "economy" do not apply in a world with infinite supply and a godlike organization that can and does reorganize the market by fiat. Regardless of stupidly-miniscule drop rates, the underworld will never "run out" of ectos, CoF will always have one more chalice, Kepkhet has an army of gnomes to constantly churn out new foci, etc...

The anti-farming code and loot scaling can only reasonably be viewed as poor solutions to the botting problem, because the existence of FoW armor is one of the oldest example of a pro-farming attitude (to say nothing of more recent additions like Nick, stupidly-low drop rates on eotn trophies (chalices/relics particularly)). It bit us all in the ass in that it messed with the human farmers, giving the botters less drops over time as well, but increasing the demand and thus the price.

On one point, I agree with those who say that ArenaNet has damaged the in-game "economy." There is an undeniable element of favoritism in Anet's interference with the "economy" of the game, and there is no way the game can have anything resembling a healthy economy in the face of it. Price resets and hard-coded price floors at the "volatile" traders were added to quiet the wails of the vocal minority for whom the game currently exists only as "Kamadan and the various areas that don't matter" to play "Menagerie Tycoon", and to the detriment of the majority of the non-powertrading players.

So yes, the "economy" in GW is not good, but changing to the way that the "good economy" crowd generally suggests would not be any better. Inscriptions addressed a flaw (partially) that had been overlooked/ignored: part of the logic of the max weapon/armor system was to prevent the game from being gear-based. It worked against the marketeers but was a net gain for the playerbase as a whole. The results will be similar to any of the "good economy" claims.

Guild Wars is beyond redemption at this point. ANet (the organization, not necessarily the individuals) doesn't care about the game and the merchant princes are used to getting their own way.

For GW2, assuming it ever sees the light of day, ANet will need to decide if they want to retry their doomed mercantile simulator approach, or address the issues and learn to let the whiners whine.

Indeed.

Come now, are you trying to tell us that a non-dyeable blindfold isn't worth anywhere up to 150k? Nawwwwww...

I wasn't thinking about the gold value. I was thinking that it's not worth anywhere near clearing CoF 150 times or more(If I'm lucky, I get 1 chalice every 3 runs or so)

That too, lol... TBH, post nerf, dunno about you, but the 3 or 4 thousand(At least) times that I've done CoF the fast way, is almost a dead sure guarantee that I will NEVER go anywhere near that dungeon. Ever ever ever ever again..

Wonder how many others feel that way, and about how many dungeons..

It's heart-breaking to feel that way about a game you love, but that's just the way that aNet want it, so no use griping. Boredom is certainly the order of the day..

Agreed. After I got my LMotN, The only dungeon I'd ever set foot in again is Fronis. And that's a maybe. EotN isn't as "replayable" as they'd like.

The more fundamental problem is that GW doesn't have compelling loot to drop. There is hardly any progression beyond level 20 in terms of item upgrades, the only thing anyone cares about is rare skins, which by definition you can't get very often or they cease being rare. Any rare skins that drop with inferior mods will be merched compared to your current easily obtained but drab perfect gear, so there's no gradual progression up to the "best", rather a sudden leap when you get lucky or save up a ton of cash; even more so with inscriptions now because there's a much stricter cutoff between useable (max stats with insc) and not. Armor works the same way with most people farming a complete ecto set and then buying their obsidian at once so everything matches. If you just give people this stuff fast/easy, that's just all the sooner they quit the game because they will soon have "best" everything; but give it to them slower then that, and they have very little feedback about their progress and long droughts with no exciting items to upgrade.

Making items drop more or less doesn't fix this fundamental issue. It's just one of the tradeoffs of GW1's "skill>time" model, which I predict they will diverge from in GW2.

Ur right you cant apply real world definitions of economy to this game.... but they are still related none the less... Supply doesn't equal the amount of an item in existence in a MMORPG. Since there is no way to tell how much items are in existence true supply is unknown. The only gauge we have to tell what the rate of creation is doing is the rare material trader quotes going up or down (IE ectos). With this gauge it offers seller and buyers a immediate transaction price and with that leverage to buy/sell around that price... If a seller or buyer can't the price they want they use the trader. For items without this gauge price would be totally dependent on the amount of competition there is to buy or sell an item.... which is also related to the properties of supply and demand (IE armbraces). Therefore (Supply = the rate of creation - the rate of consumption)(IE items destroyed by creating armor, ect). Demand still applies in its real world definition because were all still people.

This is why we saw such a sharp drop in price of shards and armbraces post-dhumm. Speedclearers moved to Fow and DoA thus drastically increasing the rate of creation (supply) of their respected items.

We saw ectos skyrocket because of this nurf lowered the rate of creation (supply) and demand was highly increased by high anticipation of ectos being harder to farm post Feb 25th update...

After the update this anticipation dissolved lowering demand along with price.

So in conclusion, the value of reward/drops of playing elite areas are determined not by people or ArenaNet. ArenaNet can only control the supply ceiling (the highest point something can be produced). Us the players as a whole control demand and the supply rate itself by farming. Together this determines value (price)....

If you want your drops to be worth more... stop farming them, stop speed clears... you cant make items easier to get and retain a rare value... sorry you can't escape economics when there are people involved.

BBA in Accounting ftw. stay in school kids

Before loot scaling:
-some solo farmers got stupidly rich.
-Power traders got stupidly rich.
-Gold sellers had it easy, since it was easy to amass plenty of gold using solo-farming bots.

Did I feel like the game had problems at that time? No.

I didn't farm at that time, I've never been a power trader, and I've never bought gold. Drops were fine for me, I made plenty of money for my purposes as a casual player. If I wanted to work for something expensive, it took time, but wasn't a big deal.

After loot scaling:
-Solo farmers got hit.
-Power traders were unaffected, business as usual.
-Gold sellers got hit.

What was the purpose of loot scaling? Wasn't it really just to hit gold sellers and bots? Which it did... but it also meant that the best way to get rich, became power trading. ie. by standing in town spamming, and not "playing the game"

What if they did remove loot scaling? The game and its economy would be back to what it was before... big deal, we'd simply go back to a time when I (personally) didn't see any problem. Would it be so bad? The numbers would change, but I figure the relative values and time needed would stay pretty much the same. BUT people could get rich by farming again ("playing the game"), as well as power trading.

The problem is, A-Net would have to come up with a real solution to bot farmers. Onoes.

I also note that account theft probably wasn't so attractive to gold sellers before loot scaling and anti-farming nerfs...

Anet really is the not so bright and not so creative student of the class when it comes to creating exciting loot and mechanisms.

GW deteriorated on that part over the years. Some good efforts were made the first years like the weapon skin contests, and afterwards the addition of the deldrimor weapons sets etc but overall this game has a real problem concerning loot and rewards. The fighting of bots resulted in a very unrewarding game.

The only advice I can give you and Anet is to check out other games and their mechanics like the revolutionary weapon generator in Borderlands or Torchlight etc.

No hope for GW I'm afraid, they just suck at it.

supply v = ((r-s)/t * p * tf)


r = drop/creation rate
t = time unit (minute/hour/day/etc...)
p = people farming
tf = time farming per person
s = removal rate (armor/gloves. player-to-player sales do not remove items from the game. Selling to volatile traders does not apply either due to the fact that they are also not removed or created, according to explanations of how the volatile traders work)

If one defines "t" as "server lifetime", then no item in the game has r=0 (proof is trivial to the point of being vacuous). Even items that no longer drop, such as vampiric weapons in pre-searing, will have an r that approaches, but never reaches, 0. When the last vampiric weapon in pre is removed, (r-s)/t *will* equal 0 (since r=s).

Worth mentioning is that tf is O(t), since you cannot farm more than 100% of the time.

The term (r-s)/t is the change over time t in the item supply.

Using ectos as a good example (since you did):

s(ecto) is low compared to s for other items, due to the limited number of ways they are removed from the game (few players will craft multiple sets of obby armor/chaos gloves for a single character, and the only other real way to remove them are mistakes that most players will try to avoid: merching/trashing/deleting).

If one stipulates that there are more ectos in play than are being removed from play -- an assertion that is supported by their use as alternative currency, meaning that at least 1 ecto is in play and not intended to be removed from the game -- and that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (p > 0 and tf > 0) is farming then:

r > s
r - s > 0

Then we can show that

v1(p) = lim (tf->t) v = (r - s) * p

By removing t and tf from the equation by carrying them to parity, we're left with a function that tells us that v1 can be increased by increasing r or p, or decreasing s.

The first is solely under ArenaNet's control. The latter are under player control. If we posit that s remains relatively stable (no new "ecto" sinks are added to the game and no one organizes a "merch your ectos" protest to stop its use as currency), and that ArenaNet does not alter the drop rate of ectos (not necessarily a safe assumption: see my editorial below).

Since we're assuming Anet's not going to jerk us around wrt drop rates, we've an (r-s) that can be considered, for all intents and purposes, constant.

That gives us

p*(r-s) = O(p) as p->infinity

Or the upper bound of the supply is set by the number of farmers so, with an infinite number of farmers (I bet anet would love those sales numbers! But this is theoretical, not applied), there is a potentially infinite supply of ectos.


** Puts nerd cap away**

Ironically, Anet (and, by extension, the powertraders and hoarders they were catering to) actually exacerbated the "ecto farming" problem they love to piss and moan about. Remember shortly after the SF buff when ectos plummeted to around 3k? There was a huge shitstorm with much wailing and gnashing of teeth that day.

So what did Anet do? They reset the prices and applied a price floor. This made the hoarders very happy.

It also made the ecto farmers very happy because, now, overfarming would never again lead to the price dropping below profitable levels. Had the left well enough alone, the price would have dropped, the farming would have tapered off, people would buy the ectos from the trader, the price would have risen, repeat. It was self-correcting, and they removed that aspect of it.

The funniest part of the whole thing is that, with the Dhuum update and the SF and 600/smite nerfs, speed clears were crushed (and, as many predicted, quickly adapted) but many ecto farming builds were unaffected, particularly since they don't care about "clearing".

Interesting stats. Working on Skill hunter (all 3) at the moment. Of the 100 plus bosses I've killed since yesterday, the best drop was an old school blue. No greens. No golds.

If that isn't straight up pathetic BS, I don't know what is. I've been playing RPG's etc since the early 80's, and that is without doubt the absolute worst drop rates I have ever seen in any game, full stop.

Interesting indeed. By those odds, it's easier to go farm ecto than go farm greens..

As others have noted, this idea is self-defeating.

The reason that drops aren't worth anything is that they have been overfarmed. If you increase the drops, then there will be even more of those items flooding the market, making them even more worthless. In the end, all it will do is increase inventory cluttering.

/facepalm

Do you understand how the stock market works, or ANY economy for that matter? Why a $1 bill has its value, and why it can be exchanged for something?

Its because people put faith in it, and the agency running it as a means of currency, in this case the government.

As others have noted in this thread and others, there is an infinite supply of items. If every player in GW spontaneously decided to do naught but farm ectos, very quickly prices would drop below 100g without a price floor.

But what you continue to fail to understand is, I don't give a care in the world to the economy. Its bland icing on a stale cake. If the economy evaporated tomorrow, the game would continue on, monsters could still be killed, quests completed, Shiro fought etc., etc. Yes, there ARE those who see the game as a means to an end, the end being e-wealth/power trading, but what makes that sad and pathetic is its solely within the confines of the game, so it makes no impact beyond that context.

It is perhaps one of the things I liked about WoW, the binding system that prevented the high end stuff from being traded, which forced players to adventure for loot, rather than barter in a marketplace. You had an economy (and Auction House) for many things, but the best stuff (the equivalent of high end weapon skins, FoW armor, etc.) could only be had by going out and killing something. This minimized the impact of an economy, and made it about the game.

To reiterate, the "economy" is one of the things wrong with GW, and I'm not talking prices and supply fluctuations, I'm talking in terms of the concept itself.

@EragonSorcerer, I'm absolutely NOT against farming in any way, I myself farm on occasion. What I am against is the direction the game has gone, and ANet's handling of the situation, which has placed a large focus on the false economy and virtual e-wealth, at the expense of the FUN of the game. If they re-balanced loot scaling and drops so that the average player had more of an incentive to do difficult missions and such, then more people would PLAY more of the game. Of course, obsessive farmers would farm and become more rich than before, but if GW has re-balanced loot as I mention, this would have less of an impact since the relative value is much lower.

Again, I understand many on this forum have strong opinions, I myself would like to see GW reinvigorated and have more hope for GW2. Its ironic that a community that hated SF and SC/farmers and clamored for changes to make farming and e-wealth less accessible to average players is adamantly against changes to the treasure system that would shake up the economy and make farming less attractive from the outset. Perhaps this community just doesn't understand basic logic?

@OPs original idea: there's barely any grind required to get obby.

please go play other MMOs before complaining about how a reward that is a purely cosmetic and is a badge for how much one has grinded takes a long time to get.

Again, this idea is not about Obsidian armor. Try reading. Also, let me know when you get your FoW armor after one run through UW and FoW, 'kay? Oh wait, you're saying you have to repeatedly do these areas to get the materials, or that you have to repeatedly do other actions to build up the cash the pay for the materials? And you're saying that's not grind?

As my point of BALANCING REWARDS seems to fly over everyone's head, I guess its futile to try and make a forum community renowned for its stubborness to see sense.

The point is NOT to make all cosmetic fluff instantly available to the player, the point is to balance rewards in all areas to make the areas attractive to play, such that the impetus to play the game is not solely restricted to Chaos Plains farming and speed clears.

If dungeons and random areas rewards were increased, say GUARANTEED green drops from end chests, rather than the more likely scenario of a couple of rare crafting mats, or adding an extremely low chance for ecto drops in the rest of Tyria/Cantha/Elona, then players would not be as inclined to repetitively hit up areas like UW, knowing that over time and with much less grind they could acquire what they wanted by playing naturally through the game.

Guild Wars was supposed to be anti-grind, but has degenerated into a grindfest more mindless than any other MMO I've ever played or seen (with the possible exception of FFOnline), and with the grind reward being cosmetic skins or useless titles (with an unknown sequel benefit) the game is even WORSE off. By spreading the wealth and making the drops and various areas more attractive, its possible to reinvigorate the playerbase and the game itself.

I'd much rather play through a mission or quest than raptor farm for example, but in terms of reward vs. time investment, the rewards of raptor farming far outstripped what I would receive in an 8-player group. The reward ratio for both should be the same, such that you would receive the same rewards (or nearly so) for doing either, making farming less attractive and the gameplay more interesting.

Pretty much this.

The whole "I SHOULD GET MORE ECTOS!" thing is just stupid. Nothing is "rewarding" in this game. Have an Obsidian Edge? Good for you, I have a collector item that does just as much, or possibly more damage since it is customized.

I'll never understand people who play the game, and do things in game, for the sole purpose of getting gold so they can buy a weapon that they could have gotten for 5 collector items aside from a usually shitty looking skin.