Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. Am I the only one who has as of late come through a bad streak with salvaging ectos recently? I always salvage with Black Lion kit and have acquired dozens (of kits) in the past. 3 days ago I salvaged 4 lvl 80 rares and got one ecto. Last night I crafted 10 rare lvl 80 armor pieces and got 5 ectos. And just now I’ve salvaged 6 lvl 80 rares and gotten 2. Has the rate been reduced or have I just had really bad luck? Never have I savaged large amounts of rares and gotten less ectos than the number of items actually salvaged (much less rates from 2/5 to 1/2).

We get a topic exactly like this at least once per week. Search is your friend.

Just another bad streak bro. I got 8 from 3 rares today and only 2 from 3 a couple of days before.

I’ve salvaged 5 rares and I’ve got 3 for 1, twice in a row, one without and 1 for each of the remaining rares, so I guess either I’m really lucky or you had a bad streak.

Does Onyxia deep breathe more?
Are my J-Boots slower?
Ectos nerfed?

Eternal questions, all!

Seriously – How many more of these “did they nerf drop rates” are we going to have with such a small sample size.

If you can say – the last 100 salvages resulted in only 80 ecto’s, where as the 100 before that gave 100, then that may be worthwhile to discuss.

But a run of 5 compare to a previous run of 5 is completely random.

Sidieon, even that would mean absolutely nothing. You’d need a sample of thousands of salvages to draw anything even remotely meaningful. I’ve salvaged nearly 15,000 items since GW2 launched, and I’ve had crazy runs both ways in that time. I’ve done 10 salvages in a row with no ectos, and I’ve done 10 salvages that yielded 26 ectos. Randomness is much more random than 99% of people realise.

“Have the odds gone up that someone didn’t notice their averages until they hit a dry patch?”

“Nope. That remains a universal constant.”

The key is to craft your own rares to get ectos from and no they haven’t been nerfed.

Was there any note of it in the patch notes? Nope. So your answer is also, nope. Also, my BL salvage kits have been giving me a consistent 2-3 ectos per rare/exotic for a few days now. Haven’t gotten a 0 ecto salvage in a while. That kind of luck is not likely to be sustainable, so I’m prepared to hit that wall of 10+ salvages with no ectos :P

We badly need a sticky on the top of these forums that says something along the lines of “Please do not post speculation threads about ecto (or other materials) salvage, drop, or other acquisition rates being nerfed/buffed without a significantly large sample size of at least 200 occurrences.” Although it may be high for some solo players, this is not overly difficult to achieve if you have guild members and/or friends willing to participate in publicizing their results as a whole.

Oghier.7419:

Does Onyxia deep breathe more?
Are my J-Boots slower?
Ectos nerfed?

Eternal questions, all!

My favorite answers:
Yes, all the smoke in her lair is causing her breathing problems, so without an oxygen tank, she has to take deep breaths. In just a few patches she’ll be dead before you arive.
No, your boots aren’t slower, you’re just getting fatter.
Ecto drops rates weren’t nerfed, but the effectiveness of tinfoil hats was lowered 10%.

If you’re using a mystic salvage kit, or a masters salvage kit 25% isn’t the best chance in the world to get ecto’s. RNG is RNG.

no they actually did reduce the rates on everything there are two threads on the loot issues one in the bugs forum and one in the discussion forum.

they purposefully (as far as we can tell because it’s been over a month of posts now and no word on Chris’s investigation we were promised he’d launch during the AMA) lowered everything to force people to have to go to the gem store to get more gold. It’s gotta be that. thousands of players are having this same issue and it’s so not luck. Luck is if you are dealing with a completely random system where they cannot +- the RNG, they can and do manipulate drops so luck is so far off base for what’s happening on this scale right now.

Many of us aren’t logging into the game anymore until they fix this. You don’t work for nothing in RL you get compensated for your time, why would you spend so much time in a game for heavens gate and get nothing for your time.

in short, it’s not luck, they do/have manipulated the numbers, there’s no point in logging in until it’s fixed.

Thousands of players? Really? Are you sure you don’t mean the fifty or sixty you may have spoken to/seen post, then just extrapolated that out? People love to blow kitten out of proportion when they’re whining about something. “I salvaged 20 rares and got 9 ectos” becomes “I salvaged 30 rares and got 3 ectos! WTF?!”.

Even if if there were thousands of people complaining about lower returns, that’s the thing about randomness, there are always going to be people who run worse than expected. If there several million people playing the game and salvaging items, then over the short term there are going to be tens of thousands who get worse returns than average and tens of thousands who get better. Few people are doing sample sizes big enough to really draw any conclusions. You need hundreds, probably thousands of salvages before anything starts becoming even remotely clear.

I’ve probably salvaged 2000 rares in the last two weeks alone, and the rate has been roughly the same as it was two months ago. You get terrible patches and great patches. That’s just how it works.

The most interesting thing that I have read about the salvage rates of ectos is that people who are saying they are relatively the same and not seeing a large difference refer to RARE quality items. Over the past week I have salvaged roughly over 30 exotics with BLSK’s and gotten a grand total of 2 ectos. A better attempt at precision is I have salvaged only on three occasions in the past week.

The first I remember distinctly and is as follows:
19 exotics, 19 BLSK’s => yields 2 ectos with me receiving those 2 from 1 salvage of the 19

I bought another batch of cheap exotics to salvage and due to finals and the fact I bought them a few days ago don’t remember the exact number but it was around 15 or so. I salvaged half got nothing and stopped due to frustration. I just logged in about an hour ago and salvaged the rest and got no ecto again with every exotic salvage using a BLSK.

I never, ever had this string of luck with doing this and can only assume something changed. The first set of salvages when the drop rate went south happened for me on Dec. 7th after the login servers went offline. Before this as a reference point I got 1-3 almost every salvage (exotics, BLSK’s) with 0 not happening often and a max of only 2-3 times in a row when it did never more.

Excuse the fairly lengthy post, but this has been really annoying me as it removes any desire for me to try my chances at salvaging exotics for ecto. I can’t say anything in regard to the rares as I have not salvaged more than a handful every now and then after running dungeons. Also to note, I understand the whole “it’s just RNG” that people always throw around with this kind of thing, and typically agree since up until now the worst thing I have dealt with is a simple bad loot night in a dungeon run. However, when I am actively watching myself get no ectos in return over and over, I fail to believe that my luck went from being consistently good/decent to abysmal for no reason whatsoever.

Actually, about 200-250 of my salvages over the last two weeks have been exotics, using a BLSK. I’ve actually run well in this batch, and have probably averaged 2 ectos per salvage, possibly slightly higher. For every bad run, there’s someone doing the opposite…

All that stuff I said about small sample sizes applies to exotics too. But that said, 2 ectos from 30 seems extreme, like, extreme enough to be an exaggeration.

@Andykay
I understand where you are coming from, I work with statistical analysis every day. However, with MMO game loot drops and functionality we are not dealing with a natural system where standard principles of randomness applies.

We have no idea what tweaks Anet does with the weekly ‘maintenance’ updates, Sure, they make drop announcement for things like special events, but for the weekly updates and you can be assured anything like loot drop tweaks would not be made public.

The game is still very young, and I am sure Anet hasn’t settled on a ‘sweet spot’ yet for loot balance. This is why we get so many threads on nerfed drop rates for this and that. Put simply, Anet are in control and we never know from one week to the next how things are going to play out.

But they routinely say they’ve made no changes. If the company in charge says everything is as it was, and everyone’s results are well within the bounds of statistical probability, then there’s no reason to assume anything was altered. Could they be lying? Sure. But there’s absolutely no reason to think they are.

Every time a thread like this appears, it’s people using sample sizes of <100, which are totally insignificant. We don’t even know how ecto salvage works. Depending on how they arrive at the average of 0.9 ectos per salvage, or whatever the real figure is, the standard deviation could be anywhere from fairly small to totally enormous. You could require 200 salvages to have decent confidence in your results, or 3000.

bri.2359:

@Andykay
I understand where you are coming from, I work with statistical analysis every day. However, with MMO game loot drops and functionality we are not dealing with a natural system where standard principles of randomness applies.

We have no idea what tweaks Anet does with the weekly ‘maintenance’ updates, Sure, they make drop announcement for things like special events, but for the weekly updates and you can be assured anything like loot drop tweaks would not be made public.

The game is still very young, and I am sure Anet hasn’t settled on a ‘sweet spot’ yet for loot balance. This is why we get so many threads on nerfed drop rates for this and that. Put simply, Anet are in control and we never know from one week to the next how things are going to play out.

If you work with statistics, you know what a bell curve is, right? And that it’s pretty much guaranteed to have people with extremely bad results while also having people with extremely good results. Those who feel “cheated by the system” are also bound to come here and complain while those who are happy are less likely to bother. I get most of my ectos from my partner. On daily basis I get to watch him salvage 4 rares with a basic kit and get ~10 ectos out of it(think his lowest score was 8 ectos from 4 rares and he gets 12 more often than. But then again, he’s the luckiest gamer I’ve ever seen… if there actually is a problem, don’t you think everybody would be feeling it instead of just selected few?