Loot Scaling - I've just never understood it.

No one knows how loot scaling exactly works.

There are couple of great threads about connection between loot scale and aoe dmg , single dmg, party size , speed of killing; also theory about farming code per account, overfarm of the area, and cycle area farming. Also there was one good thread that proved that 2 persons entering the same area at same time and killing solo will get the same amount of drops.
But i'm too lazy to search for those threads.

Maybe when gw1 is finally buried anet might reveal the mechanics in loot scale.

Don't feel bad. I've been playing for 5 years and ever since they changed it...I don't get it.

Most of the confusion is due to anet saying "in an 8 party area you only get 1/8 of the drops, except if you are solo you get more. Oh, and there's a bunch of exempt stuff too". I can't remember how much more a soloer gets. But anet has never, afaik, discussed the kill-speed affecting the drops, even though several people have tried to study the affects of it.

Anymore I just play the game and what drops...er...drops.

ive reacently been 4 man hm farming in the jade sea the area that i farm is an 8 man area, 1/2 the time i take my heros with me the other 1/2 i dont. after 200+ runs ive determined that when i pin my heros where they grey out almost all the foes drop something white, collectable,or mat and i get grapes or a gold in 1 out of 3 mods with my heros drops are very few if hope that helps ill update with stats of runs when i can ive been keeping a log

It sounds like if you have a party of yourself and 3 heroes, and you flag your heroes out of range. It's essentially the same as having a party of just yourself.

Makes sense since if the heroes are grey out, they are obviously not participating in the fighting. So you are 'soloing' and you get all the loot.

Do you actually get more loot with heroes in party but flagged out, compared to just being in a party by yourself?

I think the amount of effort put into the battle by the player affects the drops. If I run with sins and I'm on my elementalist I tend to get fewer drops than the sins do. I know the sins use their skills faster and more often than I do as an elementalist. I've never done an exact calculation or anything, but I have discussed drops after a vanquish a few times and they did have a good deal more drops than me.

This is the only way to break it down for me.

Years ago i abused the trolls outside Droks in almost a obsessive way. Id farm those bad boys til the cows came home. It was not unusual to fill my inventory in 2 runs. That blues purples golds and on and on.

NOW i do it (rarely for nostalgic reasons) and i get maybe 2 drops per run. few tusks or other items. you used to get tusks by the hundred in a 3 hour power farm. Now its just a joke to do it.

Whats the rhyme or reason???? NO CLUE. i just know that its there and VERY VERY noticeable. Some areas seem to have been locked down more than others.


Cronk

I used to do DTSC with some guildies all the time. Over the course of a few weeks what once was a glorious array of drops shrank to almost nothing. Now that I only run DTSC on faction weekends I tend to get more drops then when we were farming nearly every day.

That could be just luck. How often did this happen?

Some classes will simply do more actions than others. I don't see the rationale, from a game design point of view, to favour one class or playstyle when it comes to loot drops.

My primary character is an elementalist. I have always had fewer drops than those of melee professions.

I guess a typical abuse could be:
Enter an area with 8 accounts simultaneously, 8 instances, and check in beginning that the instances seem to drop same. Clear beginning and hope for a black dye. Now it's rare of course, but once you find a black dye drop, you know chance is you could find up to 7 more. If not just redo without bothering farming with the other accounts.

Not the same "amount", but exactly the same objects, of the same rarity, and with the same mods iirc

Does anyone have the link to the thread? IIRC, that observation was made when two people entered an area at the same time and cleared it, then compared loot at the end. I believe the author drew some conclusions about loot drops and speed of kills.

So the point was more that if two people did the same thing at the same time (I think he mentioned the two were using same/similar builds also), you end up with the same loot. Which doesn't surprise me. There are no such thing as truely 'random' rolls anyway.

What you are suggesting is taht loot rolls are determined when you enter the instance, I find that a bit hard to believe.

Exact details were never published, but I interpret what little we know in this way:

-basic situation: full party. The amount of loot dropped is maximum, distributed evenly to the party, with heroes and henchmen taking a share.

(-the way it used to be: if a player enters without a party, he got all the shares of loot, ie. 8 shares)

-if player enters without a party, they do not get a full amount of drops (ie., not 8 shares) but get more than just 1 share (say, two shares - more than full party, but not ultra fill 8). This is loot scaling - amount of loot scales to number of players.

-certain drops are exempt from loot sharing. This means that when you enter alone, you DO get maximum amount of these drops - but not the other drops.

Examples would be: enter explorable alone. Kill foes, you get maybe 2/8 shares of normal drops (whites) and full 8 shares of exempt items, like ectos. The result should be that special drops are farmable, but the whites, where most gold came from, were rarer. Of course, since the exempt items are RARE drops, this is very hard to test.

Well, that's how I read the published stuff, anyway.

Way i see it and taking into account all other types of info given by players is thus -
Zone has set number of drops regardless of amount of players - then the drops are worked out by party size .Note i said a set number of drops - when you enter zone may have say 100 drops which are then divided to player numbers.
Now ive done vanquishes - specially MQ and tbh in either a full 8 man team of humans or mixed humans and heros and the amount of drops ive had have ranged from but a few to around 20 max before.
Once again its an area thats gonna be gray - too many outside influences that can differ results - has the chr been doing the zone regular to death before gaining data - eg been doing raptors for day , is the chr a virgin farmer ( never been to zone before ).Players can easily come up with more variables that they have experianced.
Luck comes into it as well as bad luck , but no matter what we will never know exactly how drops/lot scaling etc actually works or comes into play untill the day anet says exactly how they work it ( and that will never happen ).

The search function on the forums is a great teacher

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/d...nur+Diggin gs

Note that this study was done in '07 and may not be accurate to current game mechanics.

The best advice I can give you is: Do NOT learn about loot scaling from anyone in Rata Sum. Read the forums and use your brain. Also, if you question what you read in the forums, experiment for yourself. But know this: You must have a statistically-significant sample size before making a conclusion about your experiment. Typically this means at least 30 pieces of sample data obtained in the same way.

So for example, if you are wondering whether you get more gold (rare) drops in the raptor cave solo or with 7 leachers standing by the shrine, gather 7 leachers and do 30 runs, putting all your gold drops in storage. Record your data, then do 30 runs solo, and compare.

If you trust the wisdom of the typical Rata Sum farmer, you will likely realize their beliefs are often the result of herd mentality, or the faulty reasoning of observing one or two runs where they got good drops while with leachers.

Imo this thread is useless, u cannot know how loot scale exactly works, ANET is too ''shitty'' for it. But, in my expierence, I used to farm solo UW with my Ritualist, in beginning had 2 drops per run, and then had one with nothing, then I quit, because after a few times I noticed, when there dont drop ectoes anymore u need to wait. I think it has to do something with ''over''farming an area.

theres so many theories on how it works. yes it scales based on how fast you kill. i believe its been verified by many. ball up a mob and kill them all at once yields less drops then if you kill one at a time. the more you solo farm the less drops you will get compared to farming with more in your party. Loot Scaling was one of the many failed attempts to deal with the gold sellers and their bots. as with the many past attempts to deal with them it only pissed off the community more then it stopped the bots. at this point in the game Loot Scaling is something that needs to be updated or removed. reason solo farming or farming with less then a full party yeilds more cash, is the gold drops, or what little does drop isnt split with the party and in most cases solo farming is still faster, with what drops you do get, then a full party. you can do many solo farm runs in the amount of time it takes a full party to do an area and in most cases those many solo runs have resulted in more gold and drops then the full party got in the same amount of time

Sigh.
Yes, loot scaling is very nearly fully understood. Between the synch tests, the entry effect tests, the rate-of-kill tests, some obvious mathematical truths, and a little bit of knowledge of standard programming techniques, we know enough to say with reasonable certainty how it works:

There is a cap on income, probably in terms of gold/time.

The game keeps track of the gold value of every item assigned to you since you've entered the zone, as well as the time.

When you first enter a zone a phantom "dummy drop" is assigned to you. This is to prevent you from having $0/time when you make your first kill. (If we didn't have this, bots could evade loot scale by repeat zoning.)

When a monster dies and is about to drop an item the will be assigned to you, the game does the following:
1. Is the item loot-scaling-exempt (gold, green, rare crafting material, etc.)? If so, the item will materialize. If not, then ask...
2. At this moment, is your current gold/time value over the cap? If not, the item will materialize. If so, the item will not materialize -- it's been loot scaled.

In terms of its original goal of stopping the bots that used to make huge gold/time by farming easy monsters for white items, the system is virtually perfect. It is strictly impossible to ever do better than the cap if you're farming loot-scalable items and selling them to the merchant.

Ways to beat the system include:
1. Farm specifically for loot-scale-exempt items. (Ecto, etc.)
2. Farm for loot-scalable items that have a higher value when sold to crafters/collectors/other players than their gold value. (Certain collectibles, salvagables, etc.)
3. Farm for a single high-gold-value loot-scale-exempt item very soon after entry, then rezone and repeat. (Farm raptors for junk golds.)
4. Farm festival items (which seem to be not only loot scale exempt, but entirely outside the normal drop system.)