Elite mission chests already nerfed....:(

Hello! I am sure i'm gonna get a crapload of flame for this but here i go anyways. I love this game, pvp, pve, gvg everything, i always have and i always will. This is just a stupid rant about stuff. I am in xoo ladder and have been doig the elite missions lately. Now normally i wouldnt care about chests dropping purples in normal areas, but this is the elite area. I have done 3 runs since it opened, the first run 5 chests, 5 golds. nice! the 2nd run 3 chests 2 gold, ok fine. this last run i went on there were 5 chests, 4 of which were purple chests. This is insane. 1.5k per key and you cant even get a lousy gold outta the chest. i could understand 1 or 2 purples, but 4?? come on. How can a chest that appears only a couple times a day be nerfed already? Think about it. There are maybe 10-15 groups that go off a day when we hold the town. so thats only 50-75 chests a day. compare that to say a kurzick chest which prolly spawns a million times a day. argh.

on another note, the elite missions are NOT worth all the attention they are getting. it takes 4 hours to get to the last guy, and during that time the monsters drop no max dmg or gold items. the only good things come from chests, which were obviously nerfed. ok then, let the flames begin! /endrant

No flames from me, I just have to take your word for it, as I haven't had the chance to check them out for myself.

If they're not worth all the attention, it's even more silly to exclude it from possibly over a million players.

wow haven't tired these missons yet but that sucks to know. i get better drops in doing duel house farming (from what your post says).

oh well it must be fun to "play" the misson the first few times then get old.

One run where you got a bunch of purple items, so you conclude that the chests are nerfed. Please. If that's the only thing is this game you have to whine about, you should be pretty happy.

I can't believe you are surprised by this. You do know that a certain group of guilds is core farming that area 24/-7 right? Just because we can't see them when we hold, doesn't mean they're not there.

Just like everywhere else at first, even the chests around KC were nice, with some awesome drops. Now they are all purple junk and non max golds at best. Farmers and chest runners move in, and all the good goes away. It happens everywhere and the EM, which was always treated as a gold mine, instead of an actual challenge of skill by most anyhow.. is not an exception. Quite frankly, I'm sick of seeing "ZOMG WTS ZODIAC EVERYTHING" every second, if not every post in high end anyhow.

Only a very small portion of us can ever actually get access to the elite missions. Just sucks to be those who have the elite missions. All their dredging for nothing. XD

The thing is, when we lost house before, i stayed in urgoz warren with one of my chars. i joined and just watched every couple hours or so. there was barely anyone in there ever. with xoo, no matter what time you go, there are normally 2 groups going. i just dont see other alliances doing it thats all. im sure there are people just farming the crap out of it, but thats one or 2 groups. i dont konw, i think the elite mission should be open for everyone, because it is honestly a waste of time.

no problem man, im just telling it like it is. people need to stop complaining about this waste of time mission. go do something more worth your time, like hoh. i can say im done with the missions. and the 3 missions i did were all about a week apart. its not like i did one then another then another. oh and thanks letting me know im not a "real player" i must be a henchie OH another thing. I did NOT do all 3 runs with the same character, i did it with 3 different ones. thx

[Edit: Reference to deleted quote removed
-Mercury Angel]

Well I've noticed this myself in other areas of the game. The more times I visit an area for its chests the lower the drop quality becomes from those chests. When I did dragon misison (Waking Waters?) with henchies and then 2 more times with groups the drops from chests were all gold with great mods. I got 15^50 plagueborn daggers and some other nice golds. Thinking this was a good place to do chest runs I went back a lot. Now the only thing that drops for me are purples. I really do think there's some anti-chest farming code at play here. However, as with all other players I don't have a great statistical sampling here.

It may be that I'm just on the wrong side of the random number generator. I have a feeling that's not the case. I'm guessing that the randomness is weighted by how many times you enter an area and open the chests there.

Oh my god. Are you serious? So when they are hyped, people say they should get in because they want access to great areas, then when they aren't they say they should get in because it's not good enough to be "elite". What kind of crap is that?

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. What I mean is that elite missions better be the best thing since sliced bread if they expect it to be the highest reward for collective grinding ever. If it's not, it just totally destroys the point of alliance points in the first place. Just the fireworks or the discount at shops isn't good enough motivation. It was a bad thing to exclude it in the first place, but if they really are set on making it exclusive to the non-casual players (going against everything GW stands for, I can't stress that enough), then it should only be fitting that it's worth the trouble.

And you probably never will.

I think only Arena Net could have topped the high-end PvE area restrictions they created in Prophecies.

There isn't a such thing as a "good enough" motivation. If fewer people are interested, fewer people will grind faction, the cost to control a town will be dramatically lower, and some alliance will still get it and enjoy it.

People on both sides keep forgetting: this isn't about how hard players collective work for it. It's how hard the best alliance needs to work in comparison with other players. Everyone trying hard desperately to get in just means more grind for the top dogs, most people not caring simply means less.

This elite map is just what it says, an elite map.

You have to be somewhat elite to finish it (read: not stupid). The end reward is a stinky bow. It's more of a throphy than a bow.

"Check it out, I beat the leet mission, I'm leet *show bow*"
The monsters are ugly, boring and too numerous. The place is dark and smelly.
Of all the people that have been brought into that mission, maybe 0.01% stayed in there to "exploit the huge rewards"

I'm selling perfect zodiac staves that should have been worth 100k+ for as low as 10k now X.x

This thing is just another THK with 100* more monsters at lvl 28 without bosses.

OK the game has several aspects and the things that bother me are only: relating the ingame items/titles to real money (buying or selling), botting, scamming,mistreating other players. Other than that, everyone is free to play the game as they want, they can farm the same area 100000 times, do trade only, do pvp only, do chest runs only.
Are you sure the chests drops have indeed diminished? 3 chests don't exactly make a statistic, we would need a much larger sample. Even 100 chests don't make a good statistic, but I think judging just by 3 you're rushing into conclusions. The word "nerf" is being used too often, and apart from that, the impact to the economy would anyway be the same: If every chest in the elites was dropping a perfect rare, soon prices would go down (they wouldn't go for 5k each, but still eventually...). Look what happens to Tombs greens: You have the best sword in game dropping there that ended up costing 8k because there's simply too many of them around.
I understand your frustration but I would wait a bit to see if it is so.

It's funny to me when I read this. I wanted to go on elite misisons, but can't because I don't feel like farming faction for days on end. The whole faction farming thing pisses me off.

Now I hear from people that have been in the mission that it isn't all that great and the drops are getting progressively lousy.

Then there's the crowd of PvP players that is none too happy with the whole PvE focus of Factions.

I'm starting to suspect that for the hard-core players (PvE/PvP) that Factions misses the mark in quite a few areas. Hopefully the casual/non-hard-core don't feel the same or the Guild Wars franchise is in trouble.

I've noticed this meself. when XoO first took over HzH we went on a test run and out of 7 chests we had 6 were gold. the next day there was an update and not only did anet REDUCE the number of chests (we went the same way and only had 3 chests), but the chests themselves sucked. out of 3 chests, 2 were purple. all that makes chests' presence in Urgoz kinda useless considering the price you have to pay for them keys

edit: I also have to say that the reduction fo gold chests doesn't do anyone any good. first of all, this will lead to the loss of interest in elite missions since good stuff drops so unbelievably rarely, and the time it takes to get to Urgoz for them bows is too much for your usual pve'er. second, the price of them zodiac items will increase, which is only good for those very very few that actually get a good drop down there.

Ignis, please remember that not just the contents of the chest is random, but the appearance of and placement of is aswell. Having 7 chests 1 day and 3 the next is pure coincidence.

What pisses me off is the fact that after slogging through ridiculously insane amounts of monsters, the chests (keys for which cost 1.5k) dropped purple crap that's neither usable or sellable. I spent four effing hours down there. If it's supposed to be elite, then you should come out of it with an elite reward.