Droprate zero now?

I had a spare hour to play and was teleporting around through the whole map to see if I missed quests, collectors, etc. I was not farming but solod a bit around towns. After a while I started to realize that nothing at all had dropped. Not even gold, crafting materials or collectable items. I sacked my party of henchmen and went back to easy Ascalon maps and started killing everything on my way... Nothing, not a single drop in the next 30 minutes. This is bad. I cant believe this is just bad luck. Nerving droprate is one thing, but it should not affect the common stuff and playing for an hour without finding anything kills the spirit of adventuring

See here :

http://guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20501

First thing...there are way too many threads regarding zero drops. So please don't start new ones already.

2nd, I have actually not experienced this zero-drop phenomenon myself. Even with a full team of henchies I was able to get some decent drops. And of course I was able to get some decent loot too. unlocked some nice runes

you are having bad luck

i have just been through the piken area and the wall mission and have gotten 3 purples a bunch of blues 5 charr hides and enough junk so i had to go to a merchant 3 times to empty the inventory

one green dye and 3 out of 7 items expert salvaged to steel so i dont think drops have gone

this was solo with my elemonk and no henchies

it was close with 3 char hitting me at once but they died first

Might be a bug or something because I farm Giants, and when one dies, they ALWAYS drop something. Even doing missions with henchies or PUGs I have not noticed any monster not dropping anything.

The zero drop rate is a new symptom of switching areas quickly.

Basically the game has a counter of how many times you've entered a new mission or explorable area and killed at least one monster. After a certain number of times (around four) the game takes away the first monster drop. The next time you enter a new area, it'll take away two. Then three. Then four. There might be a cap at around nine to ten missing drops if you repeatedly enter new areas.

The counter degrades if you spend more than a set period of time within the same combat zone, or in a non-combat zone. If you go and complete a long mission after some repeated zone changing, or just go AFK for an hour or so, your counter should have completely reset.

That's really all there is to it. If you're jumping between areas quickly and not spending time in any too long, your drop rates are going to turn to crap - whether you're power pharming or just running quests. If you spend a lot of time in the same area, you shouldn't notice a significant change to the drops you're getting.

Peace,
-CxE

Ensign: are you sure about that?

Myself and my guildmates are still farming exactly like we were pre-patch, and are getting pretty much the exact same drops (although giants have been nerfed, but I find they they're dropping better than when they were the first time they were nerfed)

It seems to me more like a bug than a feature.

I dont think its bad luck. Statisticly it should be impossible to kill like 200 or more creatures without a single drop. But all the time I was playing in the neighbourhood of towns. Maybe drops are lowered there?

Elythor: I know there are other threads but when the actual situation seems to change I'll launge a new one. No need to brag around about droppings either, I'm not ascended yet and play on 'common' fields. Even though I'm level 20 I never had 15 k gold or major runes so yes, if I even stop finding 'common' stuff than that pisses me off!

Edit: Ensign, if thats true than the reason is clear. But it still should not affect common things like materials, gold and collectables. Because its obviously meant to stop farming and players mostly dont even care to pick up commons.

I'm positive that's how it works, at least for solo players. Haven't tested it with a group.

Giants might be far enough into Riverside that you can pharm them repeatedly without triggering the penalty for a fast area jump. I haven't looked into the specifics of how long you have to stay in an area to avoid triggering the pharming penalty. I just know what the penalty is exactly, and how it degrades.

Peace,
-CxE

Are people still farming the hill giants? I thought the addition of the rune trader pretty much nerfed the values of most giant drops unless you are extremely lucky to find a superior vigor or something.

Money is not the primary motivation of most farmers. It is the need to unlock runes for use in PVP--something that the rune trader does not solve.

I farm giants so I can unlock the runes for PvP. Granted, I could just buy the runes with the PvE character and toss it onto my PvP character, but I mess around a lot with my PvP character and it'd cost a lot more than I'm willing to pay every time I remake it.

Nope, still bad. I brought my party out of Augury rock and stayed afk for an hour. Than I battled my way to Destiny's Gorge, and wow, I found 1 jeweled chalice. Useually I'm a very patient player. Taking time to get somewhere, not caring much about getting rich fast. But when the best advice I get after doing something completely normal (jumping up and down the map to visit merchants, collectors and checking for quests) is to go afk for 1 hour and than it still does not drop anything... Thats pretty lame! I must say I've had it with all this nerving and balancing. Give those damn PvP-ers the skills and runes they are whining for and separate it from adventure play!

i love how people love to just spout inane theories as fact.

there is no Area penalty.

does not exist

When you say "solo", I'm assuming you brought a full henchie team then? That maybe the reason why you are not getting much drops becuz henchies stealing your loot. So its probably just bad luck that the game not assigning you drops.

Try playing a mission with real people and you can see how the game is assigning drops then.

Do you have any evidence of that? My evidence is that Ensign has been playing the game 4x longer than you.

--Ginko

I'm also with Ensign on this.

I would do some very quick runs on the first six spiders just inside the Aurora Glade mission. After four or five runs, one of the first three spiders doesn't drop; next time it is two; then three etc etc ...

I have found that turning off overnight does not help IF I simply go back to the same run. I need to go somewhere completely different with a group (PC or NPC doesn't matter) and play there until drop return to normal. Then I can go back and kill the spiders ...

Thanks Ensign. This is the best explanation I've heard yet, and would seem to make sense in my situation. I was thinking it was because I was doing multiple quests at once in the same region before turning them in for the rewards... but I do have a habit of moving between Lion's Arch and Ascalon very often and quickly, looking for good deals or to hand out lower level items to new arrivals. I'm pretty sure that in each of the instances where I experienced all drops stopping while questing, I had previously hopped all over the map in a fairly quick manner.

And people c'mon, geez... how many times does this have to be explained before someone actually reads what's going on? This is a real phenomenon that many of us have experienced. It's not about bad luck, henchmen stealing drops, poor farming technique or not playing the game normally. What happens is that after awhile all of the drops stop during normal questing if one goes out alone or with a henchmen party. We're talking about zero items and gold drops, and it can persist throughout the entire world map for a long period of time. Logging off and on again doesn't help. Once it starts happening, you can go out solo with no henchmen and still not receive a single drop for any creature.

If you haven't experienced it, then awesome... congratulations. However if one has experienced it, being told that it's in our imagination, that we don't play properly, or being called farmers and whiners all the time doesn't really help to bring the drops back. These discussions are an attempt to find the pattern which causes the problem in the first place.

My vote would have to go with Ensign as well, considering the actual intelligence present in his posts in relation to...other posts

Have any of you tried jumping to random Arena, play one round, then go back out to mission/explorable area?

It is *rumoured* to improve the drop rate. Since its random arena...you don't really need to care about winning / losing.

I did not. But the game should not need such tricks. Droprate is finally getting back to normal now for me and I think ensign was right. But omg, this is the worst nerf I ever heard of. They should really turn this back!

Well...the origin intent of the nerf is not targeted towards farming as much as botting. If you keep running areas over and over....anti-bot mechanisms kick in and nerf the drops.

However, I wouldn't be too surprised it was a bug in their "counter" code instead.

If it stops the bots, I'm all for it. The question is, will it actually stop the bots, or just make them more sophisticated? I suspect the latter.

The heavy nerf comes in just as soon as I was preparing my ranger to take on a serious farming role...

Of course not. Henchies steal drops and turn everything into ugly statistical analysis.


Pick an easy explorable area that anyone can solo with a level 20. Say, the gargoyles right outside of Nolani Academy.

Run out there solo and wipe out a couple packs. Keep track of how many gargoyles don't drop, and *which* gargoyles don't drop.

Notice that one drop is missing after the fourth run. Then two drops. Then 3 drops.

Notice that after a dozen runs, the first pack doesn't drop *anything*. Not just whites, or just gold, *nothing*. Also notice that the second pack you kill will have *every* gargoyle drop an item.

Then come back here and tell me that nothing has changed.


Which, as stated, makes it a miserable failure. A bot does not care if 10 of the 30 enemies it kills do not drop anything, it merely cuts into its take. A player most certainly *does* care if he wipes out a couple packs of Flesh Golems and doesn't get a single drop. The need to farm has not been addressed. By making farming increasingly frustrating, all they're doing is making botting increasingly attractive to people who want to get competitive within a reasonable amount of time.

I'll state it again for emphesis - there are a few dozen monsters in the game with drops that are orders of magnitude better than anything else. I would *like* to just run missions with guildies or with a PUG, or explore out in the wilds, or otherwise just play the game. But just running to the Riverside giants, or whatever the current sexy farming spot is, unlocks runes around 100x faster. As a PvP focused player, how is that a choice?

Peace,
-CxE

As Charles says while we might be unclear on the details something has certainly changed in the way that drops work (According to what I've heard and seen, something like what Charles describes is at play. It might not be completely accurate but it best fits the available evidence). Which is problematic enough in and of itself but what's more disturbing is that this was a "stealth nerf". Something has been changed and changed in a fairly drastic way but looking over the various patch notes and statements from ArenaNet, there's been no explaination. Sure, a few paragraphs saying that farming's a problem and they're looking into it but nothing beyond that and certainly not a detailed examination of the apparently new mechanics. Their documentation of things has been lacking, by and large, but for something like this it's fairly appauling. Just what else will they change without bothering to tell us about? Just as I agree that having to run through circles and hoops in order to farm is ridiculous, so is expecting players to be frequenting the various fansites (or even the official site, for that matter - instead of using that little blurb at the login screen to shill the PRIMA guide they could, I don't know, tell everyone about the latest update.) in the hopes of catching on to what amounts to critical information.

Really, we might be wrong about the specifics here but the results are what matter and those results are clear. In an effort to hamper botters the developers have made farming next to impossible without resorting to botting. So, whatever they were trying to do and whatever the actual machinery is working behind the scenes, it's been yet another horrific misstep. Farming is, for many of us, synonymous with grind and I, for one, would be happy to just play the game and have fun and to have any need for farming taken care of there but that's not the case at the moment. Farming remains a necessary evil at the moment because of a few factors at play:

1) Players need a way to acquire massive amounts of resources in order to reamin "competitive". Unlocking runes and skills takes a lot of money, experience, and time invested to gain them directly - by finding and unlocking them yourself - or indirectly - by paying others a premium for doing that for you. In other words, to play at the highest levels of PvP without putting yourself at a disadvantage from a start you need the skills, equipment, and money to compete. So there's a built-in need for the sorts of things that actively farming can deliver. Even those who don't play at the highest levels of PvP and, indeed, might never want to still require extremely high levels of resources to get the things they need and want. Fortunately, they don't operate in an environment where they need to keep pace with anyone else so they can take their sweet time. Say, for example, though that you wanted to unlock as many skills as you could. I estimate that unlocking every skill with a single character will take roughly 300 skill points (It takes about 80 for your first two chosen professions thanks to all the freebies around, then you can switch and pick up around 15~20 free skills for each new profession but after that you're paying cold, hard skill points) and unlocking them with a series of characters will take around 180~240 (You'll pick up more freebies but you'll be duplicating your work by repeating quests and missions you've already done). Putting aside the skills that you won't really want to pick up, that's still a lot, and each skill point gets progressively harder than the last to get. Once you finish with the rewards for completing missions then those skill points become a matter of finding a way to get 20, 30, 40,000 and even more XP (By way of comparison, about 500,000 total XP is where I'm at and that's around 60 skills points. I know several people around 1,000,000 and they've gotten perhaps 90 skill points).

2) Drop tables for monsters are horrendously imbalanced. Giants have been made mentioned of and, it's true, they're good to farm. For runes, anyway, because they drop a lot of armor and runes are found in that armor. If you're hunting for weapons with perfect stats and good modifiers, you'll be farming elsewhere (actually, you'll be looking at a collector list and finding the monsters that drop the necessary item). Different monsters are best to farm for certain things. Even if they "fixed" the issue with runes, there'd still be farming taking place because certain monsters would be comparitavely easy for their level and people would grind them out for the XP for the skill points to get new skills. Remember Flesh Golems?

3) ArenaNet believes it's #2 that's the problem and not #1.

What should be addressed here is the "grind". The need, the desire, and the demand for people to farm. It's the underlying, systemic cause for people who want to go out and whack away at Gargoyles then teleport back and do it again and again until they get tired for the night. Or Hill Giants, or Flesh Golems, or Jade Scarabs, or whatever else they might want to farm. They do so because that's the easiest and best way to get what they want in a hurry. Farming is best done alone and in bulk. Playing with henchmen or other players saps your resources away. There are areas that, with a full and proper team, lead to good results but at the same time there are areas where a single character properly prepared can take out the various imbalanced monsters to achieve as good if not better a result. Whether you're hunting for runes or for weapons or even just XP for skill points the more people you have with you the longer it takes, especially when to play with others you need to coordinate your activities and play times - not everyone has a guild or a set team to go run the WaW content or the later missions at the drop of a hat - so when you have nothing better to do when you're by yourself, you go out and farm. Now, that leads to behavior a lot like what a farming bot might engage in, of course and while there certainly should be measures in place to deal with them there also needs to be something for actual players to do to get the things they need.

What ANet has done with this change is to take away the supply without doing anything about the demand. Runes still need to be unlocked, collector items still need to be gathered, gold still needs to be piled up to pay for runes and sigils and anything else in our broken economy, and the more skills you want the more laborious your play experience becomes. But, now, going out and trying to find the most effiicient way possible of getting those things is apparently something the developers are eager to stamp out. Players farm not because it's enjoyable but because it's what they'll do to grit their teeth and get to the parts of the game they enjoy. Were there an alternative most of them would happily take advantage of it (There are some people who enjoy farming I'm sure. I'm also pretty sure that Guild Wars is not the game for them and nor was it intended it be.) but in the absence of that alternative then making it more difficult to farm is not easing the actual problem, it's only making it worse. As long as the developers are going to shy away from tackling the structural issues then farmin should be made *easier* not more difficult because by fixing the specific imbalances in the system but not addressing the desire that leads to people abusing them all they've done is to create frustration and disappointment in the way things are working.

I think what Ensign has stated is most likely correct and makes the most sense. I'll leave it up to everyone else to test it out, though...I don't have the patience. I went through one run outside of Ascalon until my inventory was full. Came away with 38 whites, 8 blues, and 1 dye. Every single creature I killed dropped either an item or gold, as they have always done for me. However, I don't repeat the same runs over and over. I don't farm. So good job Ensign on the most probable and correct explanation of the farming 'problem', I'm off to do stuff that's much more fun, for me, anyway. I'm done with the topic for all eternity.

Wow. So by teleporting around to give away items to guildies, my drops afterwards will be diminished?

And the same if you were elite skill capping, and the boss you need doesn't spawn, hence the need to re-zone?

*sigh*