Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has lots of mechanics designed to encourage cooperation between players. ANET has gone to a lot of effort to try and make the selfish option and the option friendly players would prefer you take to be the same one. Compared to all that effort, Magic Find is a very selfish mechanic that harms nearby friendly players in exchange for personal reward.

When you equip it you are weakening yourself, thus making things harder for your teammates on a dungeon run. In exchange you, and only you, get greater rewards.

When players are taking part an open world dynamic event the players with MF are less useful than an equally skilled player without MF gear. So they contribute less to the event, while getting greater rewards from drops.

Such a selfish mechanic doesn’t fit with the philosophy of cooperation ANET has tried to build into both the mechanics and lore of GW2.

So something needs to change. I’ve seen two possibilities:
1 – Magic Find gear boosts the MF of all players in the same dungeon, and all players within a specific radius in open world content. Probably with some heavy diminishing returns for MF stacking in open world events. At the same time, the MF each player gets from their gear should be clearly visible to everyone else. That way other players can decide if they want to party with the high MF player or not.
2 – Get rid of MF. But then the players who currently own it would need some compensation, and I have no idea how to do that fairly.

Agreed…this has made many of my dungeon experiences horrible. Its not worth doing PUGs anymore on explorer modes cause most people are decked out in MF gearthus making them essentially useless for many areas and then they get mad when you dont rez them after the 500th time…

Defeats the purpose of working together and all that blah blah Anet talks about…. sorry its late thats why Im using the words blah blah..

For dungeons i agree that using MF is wrong unless the whole group agrees , or does not care about it. On PUGs for an example party members should be using not MF gear , even if their best set is full greens.

But really open world got nothing to do it , and using MF is perfectly fine.

Actually, I’ve thought of a way to compensate people who own MF gear while removing it:
– For consumables, just kill the recipe to produce them. Players will still have the consumables, till they consume them.

For other items, ANET just needs to look at the price the MF items are going for on the TP. Then give the players that much gold. If it’s a dungeon item, give them the tokens back. Don’t remove the items, just kill the MF stat on them.
This infusion of coin will give a brief inflation burst. But the TP tax will counteract that over time as it returns prices to the equilibrium of the tax taking about as much each day as players earn.

For reference, I’m not someone who has an MF gear.

One thing I do know is: “I am not going to sacrafise an important stat slot just so I can get better loot drops from mobs.” I think the MF gear is a piss poor game design, period.

Sure I will stick around until the next big game comes out, and you can bet your ars I will be there. Why play a huge treasure hunting game like Gw2, that the only way one can get half decent loot is to have MF bonus’s on their gear?