pathetic Wintersday in July drop rates

Dude, you're the PvE version of Reverend Dr...

Scary....

I'm all for increased rewards on VQ and missions, in addition to higher rewards for quests. But that said, there's really not much you can do about drop rates.

IMO, if you sit on your duff for 10 hours and kill raptors, you deserve some cookies. To most people, that sounds as entertaining as watching cheese mold. I let those types have their rewards for sinking nearly half an earth day.

Don't get me started on ecto, though.

Well , i totally agree with Coraline Jones , GW used to be a great game , but in my opinion , for PvP part , almost every update made it worse .

Allowing heroes parties at a time when there were many people playing ( and now it's completly dead and you are restricted to 2.. ) , constant skills updates more or less correct which made people quit ; not having any single update in some places ( which finally get deleted coz " it's too hard to fix " after 2 years of hard try ... ) , adding a new area dead from the beginning , and without anything done on it , pathetic hench contest , etc..
All this leads to actual pvp , RA which is not fun for 3/4 of players , HA and GvG which are completly dead except on zquest day , and Codex which has at max 10 people playing.

For pve , as he said it , everything turned into a massive farm , sc areas , etc.. , thus you can see now items worth over 5000ectos , every outpost except temple of ages empty.

Anyway , back to the topic , i would not say pathetic wintersday in july drop rates , but only pathetic wintersday... One we had in december was already a copy of the one we had last year , and this one was aswell.

I agree with Coraline Jones myself as I remember how it was in beta and when prophecies started...and then the nerfs started raining down like gwen's fire

I feel anet did a few things right as people started to leave the game with the heroes but the rest has really gone overboard on the "gotta grind it all", which is so far from the original game concept it's not funny.

Drop rates in general in the game suck, excessive amounts of materials needed for items just inflates costs and it's not taking money out of the economy it's just passing it between players. Once you've got your fancy toys there's nothing else to spend plat on and there are many things they could add to the game to spend plat on.

As to this whole wintersday in july. It sucks. The good stuff from wintersday isn't even part of the july thing. No cc shard drops from foes, terrible drops in general, people spending 10 hours fast farming mobs in an attempt to get a stack or three of items, none of the great quests for the pets or things. All these add up to make this event pretty bad, sadly.

Guild Wars has become Grind Wars....I wonder how long it'll take GW2 to become the same.

I agree with who says you shouldn't be rewarded for playing solo. Drops shouldn't be scaled between party members but be the same as if you go solo. This way solo farming wouldn't have sense anymore. True, there would still be the advantage of farming a certain group over and and over with some gimmick build instead of doing missions/vanq (which should really really be more rewarding, actually you do them for fun but get no income).
Last day I was talking with a friend, I said I was going around killing foes (with a full party) and he said you should really start farming, this way you'll never get anything. True, I got very few event drops, my cons titles, while I'm doing them (I know, it's economically useless, but I like using everything I get instead of stading in spamadan waiting to sell, and I like seeing the progress bar grow), will never ever be maxed for how I'm playing, I can only get an elite armour once every 3 months, but I like playing to have fun. If I wanted to kill the same foe over and over again, and even solo, I would have kept all my chars in pre-searing, methinks.
I thought this game didn't involve any farm when I bought it, but surely I was so wrong. Good news is, if you don't farm/grind you will never be rich etc but you'll always be able to play the game as much as rich people do. Unlike most of the mmorp games out there.

Monsters drop items
The more you kill the more items you get
If you kill faster you can kill more
Items get divided over party members
Less party members more drops.

Thats just how it is.

Well that's quite normal is it not?

The white drops for the event have to compete with the other white drops, purples and golds that drop from enemies in normal hench pve play. So it's normal that drop rates will be low due to competing white item drops.

AFAIK. Event drops drop extra, next to any loot a creature might allready drop.

Which is quite noticeable if you farm, seeing a boss drop his green or elite tome (or even rarelly... both at once), a white/gold and an event item in 1 kill is very possible, tho not common ofcourse

IMO if you sit on your duff for 10 hours doing the same thing over and over
you need to get a life.

@Conal: that's a very constructive post you made, at adds so incredibly much to the discussion at hand.

Now, sarcasm aside, I believe Xiaquin does raise a valid point (it was on my mind last night, but being tired as I was I couldn't quite put it into words).

If people are willing to give up their time (and a slice of their sanity) for repeating the same tedious task over and over, should this effort go unrewarded?

Edit: unless there is some way for ANet to make it so that there is absolutely no drop advantage from farming when compared to PvE, there will always be people taking their time to farm and raise some extra money/items for their titles/etc.

I think the argument is that gimping the players who DON'T like farming in order to punish the farmers is the wrong tack to take. I.e. Nerfing the drop rates so that farmers can only get X drops/hour means that "normal" players can only get X/20 drops/hr (ratio completely made up for argument's sake. The point is that farmers always get more drops) and the obsession with anti-farming has hurt more non-farmers than it has farmers (since it hurts everyone, and there are more non-farmers than farmers).

OK. I'll post the opposite question: why should repeating the same tedious task over and over again, which is no fun or beneficial in any other way - be rewarded?

Let's look at farming. We have a boring, mindless, repetitive, solo (in quasi MMO), tedious, non-educational, "losing a slice of sanity" (as said in the quote above), non-creative, non-holy, non-constructive action devoid of anything positive, that bot can do better than humans (which is why people use bots).


My question is, on what ground does it make sense to anyone here that such an action should be rewarded? Please tell me, I am curious. If you say effort should be rewarded, I can tell you of bunch of criminals who put a lot of effort in planning and executing their crimes - you're not going to tell me they should be rewarded?


So my question is simple: on what grounds?

Don't also tell me that fun is subjective, because from what I've seen 99% of GW population disagrees with it, and I'm sure you disagree that core game mechanism should cater to 1% of population.

What percentage of the population are power traders? Because the hard-coded ecto-price floor caters to them.

Inflation due to ecto farmage, yes. An empty game? No. People come out for all kinds of PvE play. Nothing is dead.

The "original" content is long over. Any obligations Anet had toward that content have long since been met. If you feel there's nothing left to do, it might be time to move on. Nobody is forcing you to grind, especially when the only reason to do it is for bling.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that special event items are exempt from loot scaling. So you actually get more event items with a full party because you kill faster and get the same expected drop count. (That is, unless you kill SO fast that you trigger the loot thinning algorithm)

EDIT: This is all assuming that the wiki is correct.

I had a level 8 Ranger sitting in pre with no deaths and decided to see if I can get her to R3 survivor. I finished all the pre quests and brought her post Friday afternoon, shortly after Wintersday "went live". With no runs and only 2 missions (Dunes of Despair, Dragon's Lair) minus their bonuses, I am sitting in Droks, still with no deaths. In my inventory, 8 fruitcakes, 3 Frosty tonics, 12 Snowman Summoners, and 13 Eggnogs. Those heroes/henchmen can sure be greedy.

Raptor farming mostly done under a 60sec after zoning in the area. add 30 sec for /resign en reenter the area means 90 sec for 34 foes.

in 10 runs you already killed 340 foes wich costed 15 min.
An area to vanquish with 8 party members sized big enough for around 340 foes will not be done in 15 min. Wich comes down to this. A full party does not kill faster then Grinding raptors.

What about grinding raptors with a full party? I guess that would kill them fast enough to trigger loot thinning though.

Woah, woah! Now you jes wait there a moment son...what kind of crazy talk is this...rewardin' people fer playin' the game! We don't like you radical types in here with your crazy ideas!

All kidding aside Anet should have done something like this from the beginning to have culled/prevented farming, but they do not take proactive actions to prevent these kinds of things, they take reactive measures sadly.

Awarding x stacked items (for events and whatnot) for vanquishing an area or finishing a dungeon level/mission would be far better then rewarding people for being forced into repetitive boring rezone kills just to obtain items in a reasonable amount of time.

Anet could also do things like reduce the ridiculous levels of the title requirements to help prevent excessive farming needed to obtain them. They could up drop rates on stupidly rare items (craftable and non) so that they were more readily available or they could reduce the stupidly high levels of rarer dropped items needed for some things (like 105e per armor set as an example). There are plenty of positive impacting things for regular game play that Anet could do to address farming to make it less desirable instead of nerfs but nerfing is all they seem to know how to do and that sucks.

a full party will scatter too many raptors making killing them with a party take longer then a solo person grouping and killing them, that's why people don't do it.

Not sure what on the wiki you are referring to but the idea that a full party can kill faster than a farmer is completely false in terms of farming. A group of 8 may be able to kill through a mission or UW faster than solo but that is typically because within a large area or mission there are different types of enemies with different skills. When it comes to farming, its usually a build to counter one type of enemy.

To me there are two types of farms, one for a specific item where your build is to kill a certain group/target/boss/dungeon as fast as possible in order to get a specific item/green/chest drop/etc. The other would be a specific build to kill a select group of enemies as fast as possible to increase your kill rate and therefore your drop rate in order to get event drops/golds/gold/items to merch/etc.

The first is what lead to the current definition of Speed Clears. Anything but the most optimal team build to reach the end objective as fast as possible is subpar.

The second will always be a part of MMO's and RPG's because phat loot, XP, leveling up, etc is part of the game. We all chose to play this type of game. Some find this part of it fun. Some want to PvP and roll other people. Some want to just follow a storyline.

Anyone can put any amount of effort into this game. But to expect that those who grind should not get any more than those that don't is just stupid. They worked harder/longer/smarter and should get more rewards.

The only way to get rid of solo farming and give more or the same rewards for group play is to have monsters drop stuff for each player near it and that would be just as bad from an inflation perspective as any nerf or game change Anet could dream up.

Edit: I feel like I may have been rambling a bit there so I may come back to tweak my thoughts...

I'm not sure what you wanted to say because it's flawed in all ways since

1. Melee mesmer is not as "rewarding" as assassin, whereas farming is 20x more rewarding than normal gameplay.

2. Melee mesmer is creative, fun (Psychic Instability is why I like melee mesmer, while other melee classes are boring to me), amusing, and more beneficial than other mesmer builds when H/Hing - and all of these qualities farming lacks, as I was saying.


So I'm not sure which point of what I said are you arguing. If you're saying that everything should be rewarded, I only asked for *qualities* of that which should be rewarded, generally speaking. I named the qualities of melee mesmer, still waiting for qualities of farming, except the "It's something different".

Here's how to fix it:

1. Fix loot scaling so that it works correctly ALL the time on ALL items, i.e. a monster drops X amount of loot divided equally among all party members, where X is the number of players in the party.

2. Increase drop rates so people who have lives get to see more than three fruitcakes from vanquishing an area.

2 things.

1) CONCEPT not Content. Reread what i said.

2) ALL There is to GW once you've done the missions is bling. GW is nothing more then a 3d dressup game with some fighting added

I'm sure I repeat what other say - but *WTF*!!!

After you posted this, I went and farmed the raptors 1 time, in HM. 2 fruitcakes, 2 eggnogs, 3 summoners - in less than *1 minute* ("my" W/N 'solo' para hero build - LOL!!!).

Same droprate as *ALWAYS*, during an event weekend. You clearly *WHINGE* way too much. *THREAD CLOSED*.

I read it correctly, this is not 2005-2008 anymore. Many are done with content and need stuff to do. You can't keep a game fun by keeping it the same.

And yes, technically, if you only traverse the missions, you get your story and game ending, but that's only a part of the experience. There's a lot of lore out there (especially in quests), exploration, new skills to master, events to attend, dungeons, elite areas, hard mode, etc. None of those involve grinding or farming. And that's just PvE, there's always PvP.

Is this game meant to be a solo game ????

I's true.. with this kind of events being with a group the drop rate is shamefully low

Yeah, this event sucked!

Enemies shoulda had like a 60% chance to drop a mini polar bear or at least a mini of the OP crying.

Lame.

So you are saying that if everyone gets everything prices will go up? Who is going to buy stuff?

Anet is like real life governments - they don't understand economics and look at the wrong indicators.

Prices drop with availability.

Anet artificially keeps prices up by trying to preserve the value of stuff (by changing drop rates/nerfs to skills/making content harder), I don't know for what reason, and introducing exclusive items (mostly mini pets) that players can't get by playing the game or ones with such low odds of dropping that are like it.

Really, I don't understand governments/Anet - lower prices is better overall. It is like if TV makers kept slashing LCD/Plasma screens prices by producing more and more, but Anet/government came and slapped them in the wrists and passed regulation to prevent them from selling plasmas at $10 instead of $10000.

Raptor farming with 8 people getting more drop is srs the biggest crap I have seen. I have done it both and both got runs with no drops and runs with 14 event items and runs with 5 gold unid. And thats not based on 10 runs or so but on thousand runs over the last years.

The only thing it does is giving leecher the change to max there title.

I didn't claim that a full party gets more drops per run, but rather more event items per unit of time. Big difference between the two. But Imaginos and Jk Arrow already set me straight and showed the flaws in my claim, so I'm still wrong .

"OMG I CAN'T COMPLETE EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME GW2 WILL SUUUUUCK!"

Please. Newsflash: there will always be someone with more time on their hands than you, so there will always be someone with more time to pour into the game than you. If there are no upper level goals, many people will simply stop playing the game. The salient point here is that, as long as those goals are completely useless and aesthetic stuff like Drunkard, there is no harm to your game done by letting some people grind their little fannies off.

If you suddenly started getting alcohol for every other kill, would you pursue Drunkard then? Would any casual player? Remove the time grind; would any casual player go for Sweet Tooth if he could, instead, sell his sweets and buy some cool armor or weapon? Probably not, because the goal is simply unattractive in and of itself. There's literally no reason to go for it except that it's there. If you're just playing for fun, why would you do such things, no matter how much they reduce the grind? I submit that a casual player wouldn't. Therefore, there is no harm done by these titles.

Further, and this has been said plenty of times but it bears repeating, you can get these titles without farming your ass off. I've basically never farmed anything for very long; I'll try out a build here and there basically to see if I can do it, and to see the pretty yellow numbers, but that's very occasionally and only for an hour or so at most. And yet, over the course of five years, I've managed to accrue more gold than I anyone could ever possibly need. I've gotten the rare weapons, something like 20 elite armor sets including FoW, all the runes and such that I need...what's left? Pouring it into money titles, because f*** it, why not?


I think of it like this: there are a hell of a lot of grindy trophies getting put into basically all single-player console games these days. I don't know who exactly cares about getting a trophy that says you slaughtered 10000 zombies, but apparently someone does. Good for them, but the existence of that trophy doesn't make me want to play a game longer than I would want to play it. You should try that sometime.

You can't increase drop rates without flooding the market. Rare skins should be rare. Event items shouldn't be acquired in masses just from normal play. Most people just accept these facts and don't complain. If you really want to change it, you don't mess with the drop rate, that should never happen. I'd rather the events stop random drops and switch to quest rewards than see people throwing stacks of loot around like spare change.

I said it last year and I'll say it this year.

This event's point was not to farm drops. It was to allow people to play snowball arena. That's it.

My original post referenced politics and real world economics but I smartly deleted those lines. I'd rather not get into that argument here.

The problem with upping the drop rate on things is that there will just be more of them around. The farmers will still have more than the non-farmers. If a fruitcake dropped for every kill, sure the casual player could easily get enough for the silly title but the farmer would still get 250x as many as the casual player. That solution doesn't help anyone.

The side affect of increasing drops also causes inflation. If more money enters the economy, there is more money to spend on stuff with basically the same demand. People will be willing to spend more on items pretty much just because they have it, and again nobody benefits. Remember, any time an item drops that can be sold to a merchant, more money is added to the economy.

I realize that event drops cannot be sold to merchants so they are somewhat outside of this. The money for these is just transferring from those that want them to those that have them. Wherever they meet on price is where the market will settle.

If it would cost 1k to get the entire Sweet Tooth title, what value would it be to have it if everyone else did? Honestly, what value does it have other than a few shiney pixels anyway?

If you are looking for a solution to farming that doesn't involve increasing drops for everyone, try random mob compositions, or better yet random skills and/or random affects. Diablo 2 had that...

Enough rambling for me...I need to learn when to shut up.

A few things on this:

1) So there are more of item x being collected. The casual player will have enough to get their titles in a reasonable amount of time, the farmers will have 250x as many and won't be able to sell them for the prices they get now for these items as there are so many on the market, making it easier for people to obtain these griderific titles. This is a decreased grind.

2) Partially Incorrect. Inflation will not increase if the items dropped do not sell to merchants for any gold as players selling to players only circulates money and doesn't create money. Fruitcakes and event items sell for 0 to merchants, thus no inflation. If ectos dropped at 10x the rate they do now, more people would remove currency from the game instead of creating it by using those now easier to get ectos on armor and paying the armor crafting prices. This too can be controlled by lowering what the trader will buy ectos from to decrease potential gold incoming by people just selling to the trader instead of using the ectos for armor.

3) Yes

4) Currently titles are only e-peen value and grindy time wasting ones at that. What would it matter if the title were obtained for 1k? The only time it's going to have any sort of ingame impact will be once GW2 comes out and it does "something" in your HoM. Why should someone have to pay out 1000k for a title? Why aren't these titles obtained via quests+drops instead of the mind numbingly boring grind that anet seems to be orgasmic over?

5) That's pretty typical anet thinking right there. More nerfage. Why so negative/punitive? Why not a positive fix instead. Lower whats needed for titles/armors/whatever to reasonable levels instead of increasing drop rates. Add quest chains that once complete get you said item/title/whatever instead of increasing drop rates. There are many things that can be done that are positive and not negative/nerfish, yet none of them are implemented at all...why?

Example: FoW armor costs 105 ectos and 105 shards that have a terrible drop rate and a price floor-cap at the merchant so that they are always stupidly expensive. Why isn't there a quest chain as you're unlocking the armor maker that awards you with enough ectos or almost enough to do your armor? Why is it 105 ectos/shards instead of something reasonable like 35 ectos/shards?

Why does anet cream their jeans over stupid boring eye gouging grinds and nerfs? Bad designs.

6) No you don't Can't have a conversation/discussion on something without opposing views and open minds.

Thanks for disecting my post.

I won't comment too much on your rebuttles but I disagree with 5) being a nerf. I think randomness should be a welcome change to the game. Sure it's different and you don't know what would be coming in PvE but isn't that what PvP is all about?

My opinion as to what it boils down to - the haves and the have nots. People want nice things. If there is something that comes out that is nicer than what they have, people will want it. It happens all the time with cars, TV's, jewelry, clothes, etc. This game is no different.

A Greater Sage Blade will get you just as far as an Obby Edge will. Sort of like a Ford will get you from point A to point B just as a Mercedes would. People gravitate to wanting the nicer item but have to resort to what they can afford. I don't understand why everything should be free in the game or easily affordable without some additional effort.

If everything was so easy to get and the amount of time/effort for titles was so short as to earn it in a day, why bother to have them at all? Outside of a few rep titles, they do nothing for your play experience except the satisfaction of earning them. If they are just given to you or are so cheap that everyone can just get them, what is so fun about that? I don't see reducing title reqs as doing any benefit either. People would still complain that "Oh, my Kurz title still takes 1M faction to max!!!"

One thing that has always bothered me about GW is the amount of beggers out there. "Can I has 1000g for me armor plox?" It's a sad reflection on people when they would rather get free handouts than work for something.

Enough for now...

So what if the farmers got 250x times more?
They can sell them to me much cheaper than before.
If they don't, well I'm also getting more, so is everyone else, so demand will be smaller.

Look at ectos as an example.

The more they drop, the cheaper you can buy them. Sure, it sucks for people using them as money, but is much better for those that want to get an obsidian armor.

This is only true if the drops for the more rare items remains the same.

Example - Elemental Swords. Their drops increased (due to a farm) and they went down from 1 million to 5k or less. Even though, today they drop much less due to nerfs, their demand is near nil - most people wanted them for "I'm rich and can afford this status" not because they though the skin looked any good.

Again - this is simply trying to keep blowing air on a dead economy.

Look at yearly mini-pets.

When they come out they are expensive because there are few of them - even whites can be traded for 100k+.

As time go on, the supply increases and prices go down.

The same should happen with every other item that can drop - of course items that have incredible low drop rates and/or drop in hard areas will take more time to drop in price.

Every instance of increase in supply (by speedclear, farm, whatever) causes prices to drop. Farming for white drops to sell for gold has long been nerfed, and no one is advocating that that should be reverted.

And sincerely what is the value of having a title that only takes money to buy? They can as well create a title that measures your played hours...

I've never bothered with titles until the moment titles started to give game bonuses, although some would go for that for the challenge - and that is ok.

It wasn't until Anet created HoM and promised bonus for GW2 based on titles, that the title craze started. And Anet reckons that - look at how many stuff they have introduced to give you consumables and/or enabled people to get titles in much less time since.


To conclude, people getting more stuff is never a bad thing - it is called capitalism and free market.

Of course if I'm the only one that can afford a car "I'm Mr. Important that owns a car". That doesn't mean it isn't better when everyone can afford a car, even if "Mr. Important that owns a car" will be less noticeable.

Heh

Not refuting your opinion really but pointing out that anet takes a very negative approach to game modifications and adds plenty of things that go beyond fun into the realm of grind/boring/eye gouging and they attach shinies to these things or ingame benefits so people of course want them.

Games should be fun. That's a core design mantra that all game companies would do well to remember.

I agree that people always want the new shiny on the block, that's human nature or at least the human nature we're raised to believe .

Now the one thing I really want to address is this part of your post as it struck a note with me, mainly being that everything should be easy to get or why should everything be easy to get. First I don't feel they should be just handed to people and a little effort to play/obtain these items is fine. The core problem comes in that the current design for these items/things goes beyond a little effort/some effort to obtain and falls smack dab into the realm of extreme/time consuming effort to obtain, which sucks all the fun out of doing said obtaining.

Example:
I can't even count how many people I've talked to with FoW armor who's outlook was "Thank GOD that's over!" and not "It was cool to get the drops/do the quests to get the armor". They hated the extremely low drop rate and stupidly high number needed for said armors.

This is where anet fails in game design. I don't think they should just hand the things out but the current levels are far too extreme.

Example 2:
City of Heroes, another game owned/Published by NcSoft, also has grindy titles (badges) in it. Somewhat recently (last year or two) the developers re-examined the titles (badges) due to player complaints over the years and redid some calculations and lo they found that many of the titles (badges) were not maxed and a few not even obtainable without years of effort. They changed most of these excessive titles (badges) to be easier to obtain, yet still require some effort on the players part to get these titles (badges). The devs were happy, the players were happy and that's good game design.

So in a nutshell I think Anet needs to drop the nerfing everything crap they do and start looking at more proactive positive fixes, including the reduction of what is required for some of these titles/item achievements without just making them into a handout. Some effort should be required, extreme/excessive effort/time should not be.

Was this derailed or how?