Hey
The name is Tahantos and have been playing now for almost 2 months. As you might guess I’ve already got 2 characters at lvl 80 and started to think of ways to acquire a legendary weapon. As such I first started to investigate the mystic forge, drop system, anything related into obtaining materials and a precursor. Thus I stumbled upon diminishing returns, a feature which I’ve noticed myself every time I farm for extended periods of time.
One forum post by a dev (can’t remember the name) said that normal players should not be experiencing diminishing returns and that it was created as an anti-botting measure. I understand the importance of such a system but being a normal player I’m unnecessarily experiencing this. As an example, after 30 minutes of farming in a single place will greatly decrease the droprate of even the “masterwork” items. Another example is dragon bosses and other events that give those big shiny chests; I get 1-2 rares every time I open a chest first time in a day, but after that the drops become not worth the effort of the event. This can be very frustrating when trying to make profit in guild wars 2 and, in my opinion, makes the economy a bit crooked (everything is pretty expensive at the moment).
My suggestion to this issue is that the diminishing returns mechanic would not affect all players. Those players that have been reported x amount of times as botters would experience this. Where x is a certain threshold that Anet finds satisfactory. Now what I suggest Anet would do is take all that data from botting reports, see the avarage amount of reports a botter gets, what is the percentual chance of someone reporting a player that is not botting and vice versa. Use that data to determine an appropriate threshold.
I understand there might be a few issues to this suggestion, one being false reports in order to make normal players get diminishing returns. You must remember though that there is a threshold that requires a certain amount of reports from different players. So the scenario would more be like a guild doing the reports etc. Then again I’m quite sure those who are botters and get reported as botting get hundreds if not thousands of reports from different players. Thus the threshold would deny this possibility most likely. Another problem is some botters getting away with botting, not getting reported much etc. I think the amount will be so little that it’s more worth it to not make normal player farming that much harder.
I’ve seen quite alot of reporting requests in map-chat and normal players working together in getting these bots out of the game, that I’m certain this suggestion would work and diminishing returns would do it’s job as it should.
Another aspect to this is dungeons. I’ve personally never heard of botting dungeons but in a possibility that such a thing exists, the devs should make dungeons anti-bottable and require a need to use your brains in the first place. Some dungeons are really hard, so I’m quite sure that botting those is almost impossible.
Please give me your ideas and feedback. This might not be the final solution to this problem, but I’m sure this is a good start to at least brainstorm this idea. Also if you can come up with more worst case scenarios, please let us know!
TL;DR: Diminishing returns will affect only those who are reported as botters