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.