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.