Guild Wars 2

Zelu.1692:

As ezd explains: at some point the oh so small gain of luck that you will gain from salvaging that green will not likely bring you back the value you lost by not vendoring it.

Don’t salvage things you’ll lose $ on by salvaging them… like leather… leather is bad… so just don’t do it.

See the problem I have is that ezd doesn’t understand that if you are smart about the loot you choose to salvage, you DON’T lose money. He’s also not taking into account the cost difference between a low level blue/green and a higher level blue/green, so really, his assessment of the lost cost due to salvaging is biased and favours his POV. It’s a very cherry picked argument (on top of the fact that he’s denying the impact that massive increases of MF has on your chance to loot)

Obtena.7952:

See the problem I have is that ezd doesn’t understand that if you are smart about the loot you choose to salvage, you DON’T lose money.

Don’t give away too much bro, I’m still working on my MF and don’t want more competition. It seems that very few have picked up on some of the better tricks I’ve Discovered, but I’ll share them once I hit 300 Then again it might ruin the methods, but I doubt THAT many people are really reading this thread.

A tip though… the more MF you have the easier it is to get more MF. (You get more blue/green drops->more MF)

Obtena.7952:

See the problem I have is that ezd doesn’t understand that if you are smart about the loot you choose to salvage, you DON’T lose money. He’s also not taking into account the cost difference between a low level blue/green and a higher level blue/green, so really, his assessment of the lost cost due to salvaging is biased and favours his POV. It’s a very cherry picked argument (on top of the fact that he’s denying the impact that massive increases of MF has on your chance to loot)

I don’t need commentators for my posts. Speak for yourself, thanks.

ezd.6359:

Obtena.7952:

See the problem I have is that ezd doesn’t understand that if you are smart about the loot you choose to salvage, you DON’T lose money. He’s also not taking into account the cost difference between a low level blue/green and a higher level blue/green, so really, his assessment of the lost cost due to salvaging is biased and favours his POV. It’s a very cherry picked argument (on top of the fact that he’s denying the impact that massive increases of MF has on your chance to loot)

I don’t need commentators for my posts. Speak for yourself, thanks.

So… you don’t want people to discuss what you post? Why not just not post in the first place then?

I don’t want people to tell others what i can’t understand. It is uncultured. Don’t do it and will not tell you where to go

This is all I’m gonna say I never made a mf set so when the act mf came out and I lvled it up to about 100% I get a substantially larger amount of blues greens yellows and bags also I had never recieved an exotic and now I have looted over 5.

U can say rng is rng on the Exo but the blues and greens and yellows is no contest so yea it works

ezd.6359:

I don’t need commentators for my posts. Speak for yourself, thanks.

Hey, it’s an open forum. If you don’t want people to discuss your thinking and why it might be wrong or right, don’t post. I’m up for open debate and awareness. Clearly you aren’t aware yet you speak with authority, even when people point out some major deficiencies in your approach. If you think getting MF is a money losing endevour or that MF doesn’t work, even with 300%, it is because you aren’t doing something right or lacking in your analysis.

If you want to discuss my thinking, i can talk about it with you. But you want to discuss with someone else about me, it is not ok to me. If i think that your post is wrong, should i start discuss about my posts? Or should i argue with 3rd people why you are not right? It is offtopic.

I will point out my theses once again:
1) Is it working? Yes it is.
2) How strong its impact is. From zero – to low effect.
3) Should we increase it for free? Yes. (when resources from salvaging worth it for example)
4) Should we sacrifice money to raise MF level? No.

What i don’t understand exactly?

I don’t think you understand what an open forum is bro. When some one publicly posts something, the public is free to talk about it to whoever they choose.

You’re not a moderator. Please don’t act like one by telling us what we can and can not discuss with each other in here.

Btw… Zero->low effect… I highly disagree. I would watch what loot and the quaility fo that loot that you’re getting more carefully as you increase your MF. It’s also permanent… over time the effect will add up to a large $ difference. But from your other posts it sounds like you mostly go gathering and pop chests… so no you obviously wouldn’t see a large change in loot from stuff that isn’t effected by MF.

The best example of how MF works would be what happened during the southsun event when we were all given a large MF buff from a NPC. Everyone was clearly able to tell a difference in their loot from all of the mass kill events/farming stuffs.

While I don’t think a few percent alone matter, I do feel that leaps of 50, 100, 150, etc do. I have played this game for almost 4,500 hrs and have noticed better drops with 150% vs 0-30%. That said having played as much as I have and having other players who I play with a lot….there imo is definitely something amiss. Some players really do seem to have marked accounts whether it is good rng or bad rng. After playing with such players for so long the trending is undeniable. I would have to conclude that the chances of there not being something wrong are so far beyond the chances of everything working as intended that it would be rather ignorant of me to believe marking of accounts did not exist.

The notion that the game designers would include an account-specific variable in the formula determining the quality of your drops is baffling, to say the least. It nicely reeks of urban myth and statistical ignorance at the same time.

What it would actually mean is that someone, at some point, consciously decided to write an extra variable in the code. For example, instead of simply rolling a die and adding your MF rating + possible rating based on the rarity/difficulty of what you killed, it also adds some secret quantity, linked to your account to determine the quality of your loot.

Why would Anet do that? They have no incentive to do so.

If something does NOT get included, it can be because someone forgot it. But if something extra is added, it means you made the effort to add it. And if it costs effort, you need to have a reason to do it.

It sounds to me like the perfect urban myth, something players on a bad luck streak tell themselves to bring some subjective rationality to their fate as a statistical outlier.

Loot in GW2 is RNG, so by laws of probabilities there will be some people who overall are lucky and get more rare drops and some others who are unlucky and get comparatively less rare drops. But most of the people will be in the middle, getting neither a lot of rare drops, not little rare drops. (and by the laws of great numbers, the more you play the more likely you are to find yourself in the middle and not as an outlier)

And because of the limited rationality of human beings and biased perceptions, we will always tend to make mountains of our bad luck and overstate the luck of others. “The grass is always greener…” So some people who actually are in the middle might think they are getting the short end of the stick and have an unlucky account.

There are not marked accounts. If you think otherwise, I suggest you start reading whale.to regularly. You will surely get a blast.

Zelu.1692:

The notion that the game designers would include an account-specific variable in the formula determining the quality of your drops is baffling, to say the least. It nicely reeks of urban myth and statistical ignorance at the same time.

What it would actually mean is that someone, at some point, consciously decided to write an extra variable in the code. For example, instead of simply rolling a die and adding your MF rating + possible rating based on the rarity/difficulty of what you killed, it also adds some secret quantity, linked to your account to determine the quality of your loot.

Why would Anet do that? They have no incentive to do so.

We’re not speaking of that implemented that way.
We’re speaking of a bug difficult to detect, and making some account having more luck than others.
There may be plenty of reasons for a bug of this kind to appear in the code (complexity of the loot implementation with multiple factors (mobs, loots, damages done, MF, …), a problem that would occur only when there are too many peoples in a event, and so on).

Something like the Wi Flag :
http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag
(a bug corrected years after the game release, affecting players all that time, and players were saying all the time “yes there’s something weird about that”)

Zelu.1692:

The notion that the game designers would include an account-specific variable in the formula determining the quality of your drops is baffling, to say the least. It nicely reeks of urban myth and statistical ignorance at the same time.

What it would actually mean is that someone, at some point, consciously decided to write an extra variable in the code. For example, instead of simply rolling a die and adding your MF rating + possible rating based on the rarity/difficulty of what you killed, it also adds some secret quantity, linked to your account to determine the quality of your loot.

Why would Anet do that? They have no incentive to do so.

If something does NOT get included, it can be because someone forgot it. But if something extra is added, it means you made the effort to add it. And if it costs effort, you need to have a reason to do it.

It sounds to me like the perfect urban myth, something players on a bad luck streak tell themselves to bring some subjective rationality to their fate as a statistical outlier.

Loot in GW2 is RNG, so by laws of probabilities there will be some people who overall are lucky and get more rare drops and some others who are unlucky and get comparatively less rare drops. But most of the people will be in the middle, getting neither a lot of rare drops, not little rare drops. (and by the laws of great numbers, the more you play the more likely you are to find yourself in the middle and not as an outlier)

And because of the limited rationality of human beings and biased perceptions, we will always tend to make mountains of our bad luck and overstate the luck of others. “The grass is always greener…” So some people who actually are in the middle might think they are getting the short end of the stick and have an unlucky account.

There are not marked accounts. If you think otherwise, I suggest you start reading whale.to regularly. You will surely get a blast.

He aims, he shoots, he misses! Your assumption was off a bit. Like the poster above noted, no one here is suggesting they did it intentionally. I’m baffled to why you’d think so.

When you think about probabilities and RNG, like you noted as time goes on the outliers move more towards the middle. The more one plays the more they will notice that some players simply don’t move towards the middle. If someone were to win the lottery time and time again, probability would tell you something is more likely amiss than working correctly.

ezd.6359:

II will point out my theses once again:
1) Is it working? Yes it is.
2) How strong its impact is. From zero – to low effect.
3) Should we increase it for free? Yes. (when resources from salvaging worth it for example)
4) Should we sacrifice money to raise MF level? No.

What i don’t understand exactly?

1. - If you do an objective test, you will see it’s impact. It’s strong or not? That doesn’t mean anything. Quantitative results are important here. When I have to empty my bags more often for a farming run, then I know MF works and it has a noticeable impact to me. Expecting to see MF impact on a dungeon run where you kill a few dozen mobs is statistically insignificant.
2. - Raise for free? I don’t agree with that. It’s obviously not intended to be free because you have to get and consume luck to raise MF. Making it free is just a nonsensical concept.
3. - You are not doing MF right if you are sacrificing money to raise MF. It’s an investment and if you invest correctly and know when to stop, you won’t loose money.

Sometimes things in MMO’s require thinking. Obtaining MF and getting the most from having MF is one of those things.

Obtena… there are ways of doing it to where it isn’t free… but profitable. They are the little ways with extra steps in them that the other players haven’t figured out yet. You need to be smart/creative with the resources you have at your disposal. I see people complain about how expensive it is in LA map chat from time to time… those are the people trying to do it in the most direct obvious ways (which everyone else is doing).

but I think most people who build on magic find, it’s not always about the profit margin (not speaking for everyone), but more about the pleasant surprise. You might have wasted 800g’s salvaging greens/blues to get to 200 and something MF, an amount that could get you lets say Dusk. But buying dusk from the TP isn’t anywhere near as exciting as you farming or WvW or running a dungeon and randomly getting a Dusk.

Aberrant.6749:

Obtena… there are ways of doing it to where it isn’t free… but profitable.

What I meant by free was that it doesn’t cost you anything to do it. I definitely it should be something you have to invest in to get. Whether that is your time, or your money or your drops. It’s good you have found a way to profit and get MF but there is still some kind of investment there. I was wondering if it was possible to get MF and make a money on it myself since I’m a massive farming type.

Personally, I don’t think of MF as something I need to profit on. This isn’t a job for me, it’s a game so spending or losing in-game gold is meaningless to me. I like seeing my bags full, or seeing how fast I can click down a stack of 250 essence.

Obtena.7952:

Aberrant.6749:

Obtena… there are ways of doing it to where it isn’t free… but profitable.

What I meant by free was that it doesn’t cost you anything to do it. I definitely it should be something you have to invest in to get. Whether that is your time, or your money or your drops. It’s good you have found a way to profit and get MF but there is still some kind of investment there. I was wondering if it was possible to get MF and make a money on it myself since I’m a massive farming type.

Personally, I don’t think of MF as something I need to profit on. This isn’t a job for me, it’s a game so spending or losing in-game gold is meaningless to me. I like seeing my bags full, or seeing how fast I can click down a stack of 250 essence.

Oh, ok… opportunity cost… yes there is some required. I could do other things which would increase my gold more, but that’s not the main thing that I’m after when I’m doing it. Personally I just don’t want my time to feel totally wasted (which I would if my total gold went down instead of up). I see MF as a long term investment which will eventually yield more Vs. doing other stuffs. The fact that my gold is going up slightly while adding to this is a nice plus.

I don’t feel this game is a job either. I have fun finding little unused niches and using them to do well. It’s as much about the thinking/finding as it is the end result (more gold/mf/whatever) for me.

The other night I decided I’d go for making the Delusion staff (since it is no longer on TP), it’s been months since I’ve used the mystic forge for anything. I bought 3 AC staves & 1 Ta staff, threw it in the MF & got The Legend on my 1st try. My Magic find is 83% so it may have a factor?

MF doesn’t help anything other than drops from kills (not chests/forge). You just got very lucky

I have two Delusions… waiting for them to give it fixed stats so I can sell the suckers lol

SRG.3607:

Something like the Wi Flag :
http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag
(a bug corrected years after the game release, affecting players all that time, and players were saying all the time “yes there’s something weird about that”)

Okay, this is quite interesting. And it makes me cautious/paranoid a bit.

That being said the likelihood of “marked accounts” being an urban myth fueled by disgruntled outliers (after all the game has not been out so long) still seems more likely.

Zelu.1692:

SRG.3607:

Something like the Wi Flag :
http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag
(a bug corrected years after the game release, affecting players all that time, and players were saying all the time “yes there’s something weird about that”)

Okay, this is quite interesting. And it makes me cautious/paranoid a bit.

That being said the likelihood of “marked accounts” being an urban myth fueled by disgruntled outliers (after all the game has not been out so long) still seems more likely.

I’ll believe it when I see it.