Dye drops nerfed o_O ???

Does anyone else get the feeling that they have gotten unlucky since the last economy update ? I've started a character after they "fixed" the prices, I'm currently in Yak's bend and I have gotten ONE DYE DROP so far (green in pre-searing).
I may just have a really long stroke of bad luck, but reducing dye drops seems to be quite probable, actually:

When Arena has increased the amount of gold you get when selling dye to a trader, they encouraged many players to sell dye to an NPC rather than trading it to other players. And here Anet's beloved supply & demand comes into play: INCREASED SUPPLY REDUCES PRICES (real life economy 4TW)

So, the developers may be trying to keep the games broken economy from collapsing once again, in an opposite direction this time- they are trying to prevent the dye prices from collapsing to a "200 gold for black" level.

Actually, my drops seemed to improve slightly...I say slightly because it doesn't seem noticable enough since the update, but if it continues I'd say things have gotten better. I picked up a dye last night, a purple and a few blues...that's the best I've gotten in a long time and I didn't even play that long.

mine are about the usual for the last 3 days

maybe 5-6 dyes including silver red and blue

I get a dye once every blue moon, that hasn't changed for quite some time, so I would say it's just luck of the draw.

I have not noticed an overall trend going one way or the other. Some days I get a span of none, while other days make up for it. All in all, about the same.

belive it or not i have recive 1 black many blues/red /greens/ and a few silivers/and 1 or 2 yellows /3 oranges

From rarely getting a dye once in a blue moon, in the past few days I've gotten at least one dye each night if not more than one (as well as my random PUG traveling companions). I had to put away 2 green, 1 red, and 1 silver last night after using one red on a piece of armor.

Not true, I get several dyes per day.

i just checked my storage and got a rough count

from day 1 i have just over 130 dyes including 10 black and 16 silver

the most i have are the worthless orange ones 37

Maybe the drops are increasing later in the game, but this is really strange because before, I usually got around 3 dyes in pre-searing alone.

A fact about randomness is that a truly random set of events/numbers will have clumps in it. For instance, when flipping a coin you have a 50% chance for heads, 50% chance for tails. But if you flip a coin a 1000 times and track the results, you won't see a series like this:

H T H T H T H T H T...

But instead more like this:

H H T T T H T H H T...

Since dye drops are random and rare, any given drop is unlikely to be a dye. What this means is that is you track drops you'll see clumping like what I listed above, but that clumps of dye drops will be quite rare, and clumps of no dye drops will mean going a -long- time between seeing a dye drop.

When you make a post like this on the forum, you're likely to attract two kinds of replies: one from people currently experiencing their own drought (supporting the idea that drops have been nerfed), and one from people currently experiencing a clump of dye drops (making it look like the opposite has in fact occurred).

Dye drops are so rare that the only way to -really- tell if their level has been altered is to track every drop you get for thousands and thousands of drops and then do a statistical analysis to determine if there is in fact a change over time. With something as rare as dye drops you simply can't use your subjective feeling about it as a guide, because people are biologically hardwired to notice clumps and thus to over-emphasize them (positively or negatively).

What are you farming my friend ? I gotta try...

I have found about 200 Dyes till the release or something. I think most of them found in Pre-Searing, since even after all the nerfing, they still drop every run I've done. Found 10 Black Dyes in Pre-Searing the lost 2 weeks, mwuhahaah!

Thankfully the wife and I share on our two accounts and she gets dye drops all the time. She must get at least 4 per day. I on the other hand am lucky to get 1. Luck of the draw I say. And some people just aint lucky.

I have varied luck in dyes... some trips I may find 2-3 dyes ranging from green, yellow and silver. Rarely do I get black, blue or red. I think I have only gotten 3 black dye drops in the total 200+ hours I have played. One trip I got 3 dye, two purple and 1 green. Next trip... nothing at all. Its all in that randomness...

Actually speaking of the market, I got it to flux for me. I had a pile of cloth to sell and they were going for 90g a bolt of 10. I sold about 5 that way and then the price went to 80g for 10 and the selling price asked by the merchant went down to 180g for 10 instead of 190g. I had a laugh, I had directly seen the effect in the market.

Regualr dye drops are the same for me. But I used to get a LOT of purple...now don't see them as much.

But I have yet to see a black dye drop (for me or for anyone in my party) ever since WPE back in Oct last year.

Bad luck? I think so too.

I have not noticed a huge drop in dye's i got 1 black and 1 silver in 1 mission at the ring of fire last night. But I also mainly only play on the weekend (between work and tech school no time to play during the week)

I think ANet nerfed the drop rates on my account. I haven't gottan a single black dye, or shard in the 2 months of playing...

Dye drops are normal for me...

And sometimes griffons drop dye, but they've only given me 1 silver, and a few of every other color so far (no black )

I think it is random. I've discovered 1 or 2 places where (for some reason), dyes seem to drop more frequently than others for me. It could just be coincidence, but it could just as easily be the way that Anet have designed it.

Not that I have that much interest in dyes TBH. It's nice to get one or two, but in comparison to what you might make on farming with 3 henchies in the high Shiverpeaks for about 1/2 an hour, it's small potatoes.

Some of you need to go back and reread my post. *wink*

There are quite possibly areas in post-searing that drop more dye than others. What is more likely though is that someone had a clump of dye drops and erroneously attributed that to the area they were in when it happened.

As to black dye, because it's the rarest of them all that makes the clumps (both negative and positive) that much more noticeable. A clump of non-drops involving black dye might mean you go hundreds of hours without getting one to drop. It's nothing to do with luck, it's just statistics. Play long enough after that and you'll get a 'common' clump, playing very long and you'll have a lifetime drop average that's almost exactly average.

There are thousands and thousands of people playing GWars. That means that you'll always be able to find people who are at the extreme ends of a random series. For instance, somewhere out there there might be a person who's found 15 black dyes in 20 hours of play post-searing, and another who hasn't found a single black dye in a thousand hours of playing. These people are much more likely to post in threads like this, so you have to take that into account when reading them to make sure that you aren't taking an aberrant case as an average one.

I think the dyes drops have improved lately.

In the last 2 weeks I have got 2 black, 5 silver, and probably 20 other colors.

I played a ton of time and before those drops never saw a black, only got 1 silver and maybe 7 other color dyes.

Sorena Mascar

One time long ago when i was doing a drake run, i grouped about six of them, they all dropped either and orange or green dye, i laughed.

just luck I guess.

if I don't win the lottery this week, the win rate must be nerfed

if I win the lottery this week, the win rate has been increased

above statements true?

Vorlin - I have no disagreement with your statement, but as neither of us have any idea of the programmed algorithm that dictates dye drops, there is no way of telling. It's all just guesswork and speculation.

I'm pretty much making observations solely from my experience. I tend to travel a lot, and don't get dye drops for ages, but one particular mob in one particular place usually drops a dye for me approximately 40-50% of the time. So far though, that's out of about 5-6 times I've visited, so it's not a good accurate statistic.

(And before everyone starts asking me to spill where it is, I'm not telling, and the drops are usually yellow or orange anyway)

i have found one blue, one yellow, one purple since may..

I'm really unlucky..

Trelloskilos, I agree, there may indeed be creatures and/or areas where the dye drop is higher or lower than others. The reason I posted what I did is that it applies even in this case. The details of the average and clumping will vary, the the phenomena of what I wrote about will still apply. Say you are killing a type of creature that drops dye 50% of the time, you'll still eventually have entire runs where you don't get a single dye drop, or where you get an 85% drop due to the phenomena I detailed.

You see people attribute this to luck all the time (people have numerous times in this thread, for instance). What I'm trying to make them understand is that luck has -absolutely- nothing to do with it. It's simply a behavioural aspect you'll find in any series of events with a random component.

It's important to realize that strings of random events behave this way, because it explains a lot of things in life (as well as in computer games). For instance, occassionally you'll find someone thinking they can beat the roulette table in a gambling joint using the following method: bet X dollars on black. If you lose, bet 2*X dollars on black, if that loses bet 2*2*X dollars on black, repeat until you win. They think this is an unbeatable method. Whenever the dealer in a casino sees someone try this, they have to work hard to hide a smirk, because they understand what I've been saying about random numbers: they clump. Try the above method and you'll win for a bit (and not much, as an exercise to the reader I'll let you do the math and see how much it pays out when it works), but eventually you'll hit a string of losses that will require you to increase your bet to an amount you don't have, at which point the house cleans up by taking all your previous winnings and the money you brought with you as well.

Sorry for the mini-lecture, it's just that when people start talking about 'luck' in an area where no luck at all is involved, I just feel sort of obligated to try to educate them. It might save them some pain later in life.

To me they've definitely increased. In the last 3 days I've gotten 1 black, 3 silver, and roughly 9 other drops, all in the same farming turf.

Ive got around 250 hours playing, w/o one black dye drop. Prob about 10 silvers tho.

In the last 3 dayes of farming I got 19 dye drops, cant see how they have been nerfed... change ur farming area

Throught the whole game i had never gotten a black dye but after 2 months and 400 hours i finaly got black dye (2 of them in the same farm run )

With the update mine have increased alot,I usually get now from 1-3 maybe more dyes a day,since people are selling back to the traders,so they are in higer circulation.