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