Guild Wars 2

John Smith.4610:

1. Use a specifically non-random NG.

I like the idea behind NRNG, especially Wildstar’s. However, it seems that there are still quite a few issues with it.

As has been pointed out, not all gear of the same level is the same. A Ventari Ascended Longbow, for instance, is (mostly) worthless in comparison to a Zojja’s Ascended Longbow.

Likewise, I’m sure you’re very aware of the disparity in pricing amongst various precursors. A Dusk is much more greatly valued than the underwater weapons.

John Smith.4610:

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

This, in my mind, is similar to Mawdrey and Silky Sand.

Silky sand, as a drop, infuriates me… More often than not, you get nothing from it (or a single Geode). It’s wasted time and energy to click on an RNG box.

Mawdrey is a nice Bloodstone Dust sink… but it doesn’t really encourage me to go farming Bloodstone Dust for loot.

John Smith.4610:

2.5: “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.”

I very much like 2.5.

Have the tokens (and maybe also a Karma cost to give Karma a new use) grant you account-bound versions of drops. (i.e. Tequatl could drop Teq tokens that could be used to get account-bound loot from his loot table… Like the mini, Runes of the Sunless, aqua breathers, a Weapon of the Sunless, or even an account-bound Precursor if you get enough tokens and karma.)

I think everyone, generally, likes how dungeon tokens work. If the rest of the game worked similarly, I think it’d be better.

Edit: To clarify why I suggest account-bound for 2.5: This would allow the token system and existing RNG to better coexist as people couldn’t exchange tokens for valuable items to resell. Keeping the token & karma cost of items like Precursors high would, as a result, keep the value of Precursors high.

as a suggestion related to possible implementation of 2.5, perhaps offer a number of tokens relative to the drop chance of an item hat can be taken when an item drops instead of the item itself and used to buy other items, for example if a pre-cursor drops 1/10,000 then it would be purchasable for 10,000 tokens, where as a blue that drops 50% of the time or 1/2 would be worth 2 tokens, these numbers are obviously made up because i don’t have access to the drop rates but giving up smaller short term rewards in favour of a bigger long term reward seems a positive choice, and could also lead to lower supply of green and blue items which may make it possible to sell them on the tp for more than the vendor price.

EDIT: also side note, please take RNG out of the cash shop period, it’s pretty disgusting.

NRNG and 2.5 solve different problems and I see no reason why both can’t be used.

NRNG follows the game design model that games are intended to be fun, and true randomness will always result in some people having their experienced ruined from bad luck. Using NRNG to adjust for this helps those people, while the general perception of RNG still remains. Famous practitioners of NRNG is computerized slot matchines which do it in order to garantie that the payout is as stated on the machine for a given time frame, and the game series Civilization uses it for the reason given above.

2.5 solves the problem of RNG and collections. The closer to completion a player get in a given collection, the lower the chanse will be to get one of the missing items. Fractal is suffering significant from this, where players who is missing 2-3 skins have very small reward incentive to continue playing. The chance that they will get a drop that they can use is so insignificant small, it can go several months or year/s for even the smallest progress.

I like #2.5 and (#2 to a lesser extent). Systems that players can see their progress towards a goal are better than systems that operate in the background I think.

Dry Top is an example of where that concept/idea (#2.5) was (partially) implemented. You have the “geode” drops melded with the concept of “map favor” for increasing access to rewards that you can also get through RNG drops. Unfortunately, the idea was only partially implemented – the missing piece is a way to get the amber fossils through some method other than RNG. Anet could/should have implemented a way to get say “amber fossil fragments.” For example an “amber fossil fragment” could have been given: 1) one from each Dry Top open world chest (including the JP chest), 2) one as part of every Dry Top Champion’s loot, and 3) and as a rare drop from Veteran and Elite Mobs. Players collect says 20-50 amber fossil fragments turn them into the vender who mixes and matches them with other fragments he’s collected and hands the player back a completed fossil of their choice. A system like that would save’s players the annoyance/frustration of grinding enough geodes to open a hundred chests and getting no Amber Fossil.

In all honesty I’ve no interest in Legendary weapons and have refused chase them at all. I find the economy working well enough for me as a result since I avoid that ridiculous time/material/gold sink. However, I suspect that GW2 has lost a lot of players over the frustration of chasing precursors through RNG and their inability/unwillingness to grind for hundreds/thousands of gold to buy one off the TP.
Carrying the thought on to precursors an example of a #2.5 system for them could be something like:

1) Add precursor components to each of the Dungeon vendors – crafting each precursor would involve gathering 4 different components from four different Dungeons vendors that would be placed in the Mystic Forge to generate the precursor;
2) Price the components in dungeon tokens fairly high but not astronomically high (say at the equivalent of 50 dungeon runs for each piece – about 3000 tokens?); and
3) Expand dungeon tokens as drop to appropriate open world areas near the dungeons – again dropping a token as part of each champion’s loot, open world chests, jumping puzzle chests, and as a rare drop from veterans and elites.

As a “sop” to the lore fiends and role players you could conceivably work some lore into the process by adding a related quest in each dungeon and/or open world area that would explain some history behind the legendary the player’s attempting to craft with a one-time reward of say a 100 tokens.

The fastest path to the precursor would be dungeon runs, but the system would also work for those who do open world. Not sure how it would work with the PvP crowd since I’m not familiar with the PvP reward tracks.

The important part for the players would be to see the progress first through token accumulation then through buying the separate components.

If you go with point 2.5 and add new tokens for every new content please use the Account Wallet. For example the Geodes from last patch is a really good candidate to store there. I don’t think you did anything with Account Wallet since it was introduced.

If we think about the dungeons currently in the game the reward system was in a good place. You can get random drops and currencies to get armor unique to that dungeon. This is a good system while people want the tokens for armor and weapons. But after everyone get what they wanted out of the dungeon it’s just mindless farming for gold, with bad droprates. This means that this reward system is working great for e.g.: 3 months and then fails horribly. If ArenaNet released a new dungeon every 3 months with new tokens, armor and weapon set, I don’t think we have a problem. But we have the same dungeons for 2 years now. In case of dungeons the problem is not the reward system but the lack of content.

I don’t think there is any reward system that feels rewarding for two years.

RNG in GW2 on a whole is really not so bad. Pretty much everything fully RNG based is on the trading post, and with the whole population getting drops and selling them it simply makes most things a matter of saving up a bit of gold to buy what you need or want. Considering just how many different types of content there are in the game, there aren’t many places RNG is actually a problem. As long as there are alternate methods of acquiring items, there’s always a cap for how much work or how many loot rolls are involved. Where problems do arise is when there are either no alternate methods of acquisition, or those alternate methods don’t feel like options. Such as:

•Precursors, which are available but at a cost that doesn’t seem attainable to most players

•Black lion chest items (dyes/weapons), which dropped at a rate that many players felt was no where near the value of a key

•Fractal rewards, which are completely account bound and 100% dependent on RNG

I’ll start with precursors, but I’ll try to be brief because I know other people have put a lot more thought than I into solutions. Personally, I would take the RNG completely out of legendaries. Mawdrey could be the template for a new way of doing them: a trans-Tyrian scavenger hunt with a combination of account bound, story related items and time-gated tradeable items working together to make something rare, rewarding, time consuming but ultimately attainable. RNG has no place here, a legendary weapon should not be a matter of luck. I’m hoping Mawdrey was a sort of beta legendary process. It’s not perfect of course but it’s on the right track.

Black lion rewards you’ve already seen to by upping the drops and I think there have been fewer complaints lately. Adding the gem store dye packs to the chest rewards was also a great idea because it devalues them a little and takes some of the sting out of getting commons from them. I wouldn’t say it’s been tweaked to perfection but it’s probably been helping, which leads me to what I see as the worst offender.

Fractal rewards. How many patches have gotten our hopes up with a little note that says “adjusted fractal rewards”? And yet, I’ve been doing level 49’s daily for several months now, sometimes with a level 37 on the same day, and I have very little to show for it except two bank tabs full of rings. I think it was KING that did the math and found that if you wanted to get a Fractal Tonic, you would need to play four years in order to be likely to get one. To get a full set of different fractal weapons, you’d be looking at possibly two years. Your solution “2.5” is the absolute perfect fix here, though. If I had a wish for Zommoros to fill it would be that I could exchange pristine relics for weapons or a fractal tonic. As it is now, I’m ready to give up on my daily fractals because I’ve had a two week dry spell of getting nothing. I’ve been feeling more and more bitter with every Lucce Seal or empty daily chest I get.

I used to think that having something be account bound and RNG at the same time was simply cruel, and I do still think that about items like the Tequatl weapons and armor set. If someone wants those, they have an incredibly unpleasant experience ahead of them. However, I think the Ambrite weapons are a great example of an item that’s account bound with an element of RNG. The fossilized bugs are universal for all of the weapons, and rare but not too rare. The way the drop rate is now, while working on getting the recipes you will get enough bugs to craft the weapons you want, making it a grind based prestige weapon set that’s got a fair amount of work involved. The RNG is a much smaller part of the whole, so it feels negligible. It’s well balanced so that you’re always making progress as long as you’re being active in the area. It’s another promising template for a better relationship with RNG, and I’d like to see it extend to other new zones or even Orr.

John Smith.4610:

This is a spinoff of the economy thread to talk about RNG tactics in games in a general form.
Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate. On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

We do need to be very careful about ideas that flatten the experience entirely as that quickly becomes not fun at all.

There are two concepts that have been discussed in the other thread that I’ll briefly summarize.

1. Use a specifically non-random NG. The NRNG functions similarly to a RNG, but has characteristics that either squish the distribution so that outliers exist much less or specifically manipulate a player’s experience for loot in a more complicated way that makes it feel rewarding.

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

2.5: “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.”

Obviously these are hyper-simplified descriptions, but I don’t want this to get too long.

edit: added 2.5

The better way of rewarding system is to use something similar to sPvP tracks.

1. First i want to say that token system won’t solve RNG-problem as i see it.
Main flaw of pure random reward are people on both sides of the bell curve (as was said above). With tokens u will give all participants an option to get item they want but system with random reward is still there. In the extreme variant we will get this:

• people from left side of curve get 1 <item>;
• people from centre of curve get 1-2 <item>;
• people from right side of curve get 2 <item>;

Nothing changed from what we have now, except that people from left side can get at least 1 <item>, but they still feel really unlucky when they look on drops of other ppl.
That said, i think option 2.5 is not good if implemented in line with random – it won’t fix anything.

2. Option 2 is what i think will be good decision. As i see it “…Y tickets for random drops…” means that next try will have better chances to give better reward and have nothing to do with tokens. We just need 1 variable for each account/character that will affect the quality of drop. And then each rarity family have its weight that has affect on this variable. As example:

*white item: +W;
*blue item: +B;
*green item: +G;
*yellow item: +Y;
*orange item: +E;
*pink item: +A;

W,B,G are always positive numbers that meet sequence W<B<G;
Y,E,A are always negative numbers that meet sequance A<E<Y;

Possible flaws:
1. Most tonics have yellow or orange rarity and will decrease chances of getting better rewards.
2. Orange and some yellow items have big price spread. As it is now most rare items are most expensive and it should be like that. This system won’t change rates of getting expensive item if we are looking at situation when player already rolled a dice for orange item but still need to roll for specific name.

Possible solutions:
1. Implement this system with 2 or more veriables and each of them will affect own family of items: weapon,armor,tonic, etc.

2. It may be a problem from the player point of view but in the long run we can’t predict which item will be expensive after next update (even devs can’t cause goals always shift). Perhaps precursors can be moved to unique family (they are in unique category already with that line in tool-tip of item).

At the end we will have system in which with every fail u get closer to bigger reward (at least i see it like that ).

I’ve been here 22 months, with 20 playing level 80 characters. Want to know how many exotic weapons I’ve gotten from drops during that time? Probably less than 5, no more than 10 and I think I got a dup once. Out of 1170. Drop rate requires a microscope.

That is a fantastically low drop rate. I mean I considered myself unlucky, but even I’ve passed through a few dozen exotic weapons in my time (I already had about half the exotic weapons collection completed when it unlocked). I think most of them came from champ bags and world bosses.

And that’s part of the problem with RNG. Table of drops are too large and most are “junk” to a level 80 character. If they aren’t junk then there’s a fair chance that they aren’t usable by the character or the character already has better gear. It may not be junk, just a helm shaped bag of coins from selling it on the TP.

Blues and greens at high levels are junk, and if ANet is not aware of that then I lose a great deal of respect for them. I think that’s just working as intended though, they are never meant to be used (which is a little sad, I suppose), they are intended to be vendored, salvaged for mats and luck, MFed, etc. They are basically cash drops, only a bit more interesting and require more inventory management. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how they work, and removing them from the loot table doesn’t mean you’re any more likely to get an exotic, it would just mean that instead of getting BBGBBGGBGBBGY out of ten enemies (those are the colors), you would get —-———-Y. Mostly nothing at all.

Can you elaborate more on how you would like to see guaranteed drops included? Would it be a system where, for example, killing centaurs will always drop centaur-skinned weapons (which still has some RNG), or that certain Exotics will only drop from a particular boss (and thus opening up the route of intensive farming, but is still partially reliant on RNG), or an even more definitive system of “If you want X, go kill Boss Y. He drops it 100%”? I’m pretty certain the last would never occur since it means supply would quickly outstrip demand and the majority of Exotics would quickly become worthless once players unlocked the skin.

It should be noted that most exotics are not entirely random. Most of them ONLY rop from certain mobs or varieties of champ bags. Final Rest, for example, only drops from the Shadow Behemoth WB, and Bonetti’s Rapier can only be found in Embroidered Pouches, which drop from bandit/pirate types. It’s just that these things are fairly low drop rate, so you only get one every few dozen attempts. I’ve found three Final Rests myself, and two Rapiers (still not a single Precursor though).

Silky sand, as a drop, infuriates me… More often than not, you get nothing from it (or a single Geode). It’s wasted time and energy to click on an RNG box.

I honestly don’t mind sand. Yeah, you only rarely get anything, and even then it’s often not spectacular, but it gives me something to do. At least it’s ten at a time rather than one at a time, so clearing a stack of 250 in 25 clicks is a lot better than if it took 250 clicks.

Like the mini, Runes of the Sunless, aqua breathers, a Weapon of the Sunless, or even an account-bound Precursor if you get enough tokens and karma.)

Yes, except for the Precursor, which would need to be a bit more flexible than that. I mean, if they did have Precursors for Teq tokens, it would probably have to be something like 300+ daily Teq kills to afford it, which is a bit much. To get a Precursor using tokens you should be able to combine efforts from many different activities (but not require you to do so), so that players can play how they want and add up to what they want.

So if it takes like 500 tokens in total, you would be able to spend 100 Teq tokens, 100 Claw tokens, 150 assorted dungeon tokens, 50 Fractal tokens, and 100 WvW tokens to buy it. I imagine there would be some sort of weighting involved to make some activities’ tokens worth more than others in this pursuit.

Ok, how about this, make it so that the vendors will sell you Precursor tokens in exchange for their own tokens. Like for example, maybe the Teq vendor would sell you one Precursor token for 10 Teq tokens. Then the CoF vendor would sell you one Pre token for like 2000 CoF tokens or something like that. The Dry Top vendors would sell you one for 1500 Geodes, perhaps. They would also drop at about the rate of an Exotic, or perhaps somewhere between that and a Rare. All sorts of places would make the tokens available, then you collect up a few hundred of them through whatever means entertain you, and you can then buy either a randomized pre, or the one of your choice (account-bound).

Yes, this means people would be able to get the expensive ones and likely ignore the cheaper ones at first, but it would only impact demand on the market, not supply since it could not be resold.

Nothing changed from what we have now, except that people from left side can get at least 1 <item>, but they still feel really unlucky when they look on drops of other ppl.
That said, i think option 2.5 is not good if implemented in line with random – it won’t fix anything.

Getting something feels better than nothing. It is impossible to perfectly balance out the curve so long as there is a random factor, but you can at least make sure that those on the poor end of the curve don’t feel it as much.

Getting something feels better than nothing. It is impossible to perfectly balance out the curve so long as there is a random factor, but you can at least make sure that those on the poor end of the curve don’t feel it as much.

Yes, it is impossible. But tokens will open road for farm and u will get tons of threads from ppl who can’t play as much as farmers do or that they dont like to do X to get tokens. The more u give info to people about progress the more complains u will get at the end. It’s better to make invisible progress ofc if u can make it working.

@Ohoni – Well if you can remember back before EoL from blues and greens, most blues didn’t even have bids for them and greens a few didn’t have bids. And NPC vendor was something at least and depending on mat prices they may not even been worth salvaging vs vending them. Of course that means getting to an NPC vendor to dump them.

If that’s the case with exotics, do you know of a cheat sheet for all of them somewhere or do we have to look each one up in the wiki? Well at least there’s a cause/effect relationship of mod type and reward, even if the chance is low. I also understand certain armor/weapon skins from certain areas upon salvage as well if you are a skin collector.

Well that’s macabre sounding.

John Smith.4610:

This is a spinoff of the economy thread to talk about RNG tactics in games in a general form.
Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate. On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

We do need to be very careful about ideas that flatten the experience entirely as that quickly becomes not fun at all.

There are two concepts that have been discussed in the other thread that I’ll briefly summarize.

1. Use a specifically non-random NG. The NRNG functions similarly to a RNG, but has characteristics that either squish the distribution so that outliers exist much less or specifically manipulate a player’s experience for loot in a more complicated way that makes it feel rewarding.

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

2.5: “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.”

Obviously these are hyper-simplified descriptions, but I don’t want this to get too long.

Option 2 would be good but more as a strikebreaker. If they reach a certain amount of drops, falling within a range of say 200-300 drops (a randomised number between the two median values), they get a roll in a secondary rng with rare/exotic as a minimum ie. no blue or green. It would still be RNG but there would be at least some guarantee that it will happen around a certain number and there will be at least a certain time either by regular or coerced RNG.

And as for Precursors; the scavenger hunt can be done (people love Mawdrey). Either issue it as a birthday present so it can only be done once-a-year or make it so the end result is an accountbound version because people will then either wield it or have to craft the resulting legendary either for themselves or for the money after significant investment in the game or TP. This means existing precursors will retain their value being fully tradeable when dropped.

Having got most crafts to 400; there is a way for players to create their own exotics.

Another token is yet another currency to work with unless it’s time-gated like dated and ascended recipes.

John Smith.4610:

Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate.

TL;DR I’m happy with a mostly random distribution, so long as it can be massaged to prevent the more egregious outliers.

For instance:
I’m on Deso since launch. Come Tequatl first arriving we were one of the earliest servers to be able to kill it regularly. It was a lot of fun whilst it was still challenging. It led directly to one of my most memorable in-game moments(1) I’ve killed it regularly ever since. I have never had a mini, Tequatl Hoard or any of the “top end” loot. I have seen, several times, someone get the hoard and announce to map or say it was their first Teq kill. A guildie got 2 minis in 2 weeks (which is how I ended up with mine).

After only getting scraps after 100+, 200+ I have no idea, attempts, I’m just going to give up on it. It appears to not like me. I’m the unlucky holder of an outlier account that is perfectly within acceptable random distribution. Even if you are using an external random number generator with guaranteed entropy on your servers, those outliers are still going to exist. It is, after all, random

I understand the maths. But it’s a game. It’s meant to be fun. For those outliers, it frequently isn’t. How far off the distribution curve you need to be to feel like you’re “doomed unlucky” will vary person to person.

So let’s have some streak-breaks. Nudge Tequatl, Fractals, Bosses or whatever such that if you’ve done 25 (some number that keeps things on the distribution curve of “random” with the ends cut off) kills and not had something nice, you do. Simple as that. 100% chance of one of the “nice things” to break your unlucky streak. Perhaps the mini when you wanted the Hoard etc, but at least you got a “good ’un”. Perhaps a variable length run so it doesn’t become simply guaranteed loot every 25 times.

Alternatively leave as-is, but add some tickets to the loot, and a vendor in LA who sells all the nice things for tickets. Those tickets give the same drop rate as the “random” loot. The lucky outliers get more lucky, but the unlucky outliers don’t get a kick in the face every single time.

NO, not with laurels as well. NO, not with 10g as well. Just the tickets. A sane amount of the tickets.

Spoons. Stop giving them to me. They appear to take up a “nice” loot slot. I don’t want to open a restaurant.

“What’s the point doing Tequatl, all you ever get is another spoon”

Another for instance:
One guildie (the same one of two teq minis in 2 weeks) has 8 legendaries. She was gifted one pre, the rest were drops/forge. I’ve never seen one, even in party. Perhaps we’re both outliers, but even if she has played 2x the hours of me shouldn’t I at least have seen one? Even a harpoon gun. That’s not the same as expecting a guaranteed Dusk at some point.

I have simply given up on the Mystic Toilet, as I now always regret not salvaging for ectos.

I’m never having a Legendary, I’ve accepted that. Grinding gold and buying off TP is NOT an acceptable means of acquisition for me. I want to have done it myself, or it doesn’t count.

Third for-instance:
Key farming. I tried this for a while, and got a reasonable amount of “stuff”. Later I found out that Black Lion tickets should drop roughly one time in xx (I forget the exact number), as well as scraps. I’d never seen a full ticket, so I logged every key farm I did since:
52 prior to Sept patch – 0 tickets.
30 since Sept patch – 0 tickets.

Attempt 31 got me a ticket. There were perhaps 100-150 key runs before I started logging loot. So I’m still way under that average on the wiki and claimed by others.

Buy zephyr pack, get 1 ticket, and markedly better loot, along with lots of scraps. OK, is drop rate significantly biased towards gem-bought keys? Or Chests opened together, rather than opened as you get the keys?

One day I’ll quit, quite possibly when my friend gets her ninth pre, simply as I feel I have a lower chance of having nice things, so it’s pointless to go on.

I really miss season 1 of the Living Story, as I got a lot of the meta rewards for reasonable challenge, fun and time. Now you give us a boring instance to re-run identically for a few AP and Dry Top random fossils to grind. Did I mention my in-game luck?

To be fair I’ve had a lot of fun in game, and still do, I’m just unlucky…

(1) In-Game Moment:
Ninja invading low-population servers as we couldn’t get enough of our own people on the Deso map to make a kill party (people were guesting to Deso in the hopes of seeing a successful kill. No doubt similar on SFR etc).
Easy, smooth kill of Tequatl resulted, and the locals were delighted and astonished. Comments along the lines of “What the hell just happened? We never got him below 90% before…” “Please come back tomorrow?” filled the map every time.

I have a question for you John, you stated that RNG isn’t tied to the users account directly, from how I read it.
So my Question is why isn’t it when it is the user that should determine the level of luck involved with the amount of work they put into farming for something ?

The way I have seen how things are playing out on the forums is that there are alot more players set in the unlucky cluster then there should be if RNG was working correctly, especially since the introduction of the mega server, which should have increased drop rates across the board with the increase of players within a designated server applying more hits to RNG.

I really don’t like the idea of point 2 onward , as coming from GW1 the best feeling in game was farming for the drop that you wanted and receiving it for your hard work ( although I never got my MPB lol) ,and I feel that a cop-out token to basically say here sorry the system isn’t working for you would be a giant step backward.

One other question I have is it seams that the loot table seams to not be isolated to zones when it comes down to the bottom end of the tables. You can get the same drops across multiple zones .
Q then: If these drops were removed from multiple zones and isolated to one zone only each would that increase the RNG of the higher end items of the loot tables?

I hope everyone can understand what I am trying to put across

Cheers Phabby

cpg.7140:

Can you mix approaches 1 and 2? As in, say, the longer you go without getting a drop of a certain significance (I don’t know how you classify things on your loot tables or if it’s just as simple as rarity), the more likely you are to get it the next time? Obviously starting out with very very small increases to your chances… or is that just too much to deal with, changing every individual’s chances based on time? Does the current magic find system allow something like this to be implemented (even for loot normally unaffected by magic find)?

I don’t have any objection to the token idea, nor do I to non-random methods of obtaining rewards. I’m just thinking a hybrid might make the experience feel less like a big mechanical change which could be nice.

This is the best option, if implementable, in my opinion. This would reward people for loyalty to the game, which is probably the thing developers would want to reward most, people just playing their game.

Specifically for precursors, the use of the mystic forge should not be counted as a drop event and should not affect the time, the mystic forge is gambling after all. The timer would only reset after a precursor weapon drops from anything other than a mystic forge attempt.

John Smith.4610:

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

2.5: “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.”

#2.5 Is a nice addition. Options are always welcomed and if you can reach an objective by doing two different things more players will be happy.

But really, the game needs #2 badly. After more than 6.000 hours of gameplay, the only precursors I have (2) are from Mystic Forge massive tries, which in my opinion doesn’t count to the normal way of getting a precursor “by playing”.

On the other hand, I have a friend with almost the same exact amount of hours played and 5 precursors drop.

I know that this can sound selfish, but it’s not, really. I was very lucky with ambrite fossils and I think that other players who are still struggling to get their 2nd or 3rd fossil should receive special, increased drop rate until they get what should be reasonable after X amount of chests opened.

Thanks for starting this topic.

phabby.8945:

I really don’t like the idea of point 2 onward , as coming from GW1 the best feeling in game was farming for the drop that you wanted and receiving it for your hard work ( although I never got my MPB lol) ,and I feel that a cop-out token to basically say here sorry the system isn’t working for you would be a giant step backward.

They do not need to send you a token, the devs can put it directly in your next drop and you will never know if it was just luck or “luck”.

Yes, it is impossible. But tokens will open road for farm and u will get tons of threads from ppl who can’t play as much as farmers do or that they dont like to do X to get tokens. The more u give info to people about progress the more complains u will get at the end. It’s better to make invisible progress ofc if u can make it working.

Yeah, but at the same time, people who “farm for tokens” could be farming the same content, and RNG would provide them, on average, the same high returns. Keep in mind, most things that would be deserving of tokens would not be strictly “farmable.” I mean, for world bosses that offer tokens, they would likely be restricted to daily, at the very least daily per character. For things like DT chests you still need to buy the keys, and that’s an accountbound thing anyways.

@Ohoni – Well if you can remember back before EoL from blues and greens, most blues didn’t even have bids for them and greens a few didn’t have bids. And NPC vendor was something at least and depending on mat prices they may not even been worth salvaging vs vending them. Of course that means getting to an NPC vendor to dump them.

Yeah, which is all fine. They are just an alternate form of currency that have a few options to them (vendor, TP, salvage, forge), but essentially they are money/mats tokens that give the game a bit more flavor than if they just dumped raw mats or cash into your pockets instead.

If that’s the case with exotics, do you know of a cheat sheet for all of them somewhere or do we have to look each one up in the wiki?

You mean where each drops? I think each is listed on the wiki, I found this list of named weapons, but you have to check them individually to find where they come from. You can then reference back to see what else comes from that sort of bag/chest/etc. Look under “acquisition.” http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_named_weapons

Spoons. Stop giving them to me. They appear to take up a “nice” loot slot. I don’t want to open a restaurant.

Hopefully the spoons don’t take up ANY slot, like each time you get loot, it makes a roll, “does he get a spoon or not?” If yes, you get a spoon, if no, you get no spoon, but either way you get exactly what you would have gotten otherwise, no less.

Specifically for precursors, the use of the mystic forge should not be counted as a drop event and should not affect the time, the mystic forge is gambling after all. The timer would only reset after a precursor weapon drops from anything other than a mystic forge attempt.

I had an idea for this. Yes, if there is a “streak breaker” element added for Precursors, MF attempts should not increment or spend this breaker, it should be for random drops only. This way you wouldn’t have the “I forged 4999 daggers and then the streak breaker caused a Rodgort to drop in a dungeon” curse. But, for people using the forge, how about each time you Forge 4 of the same weapon, you receive whatever you receive, but you also get an account-bound “broken [weapon type] shard.”

These stack, and once you have a stack of 250, you can substitute them in an MF recipe. What would be fair, 250 attempts? 500? 750? Would 1000? be plenty to guarantee a Precursor? Whatever the appropriate number is determined to be, you put in say three stacks of “Broken Dagger Shards” and one exotic dagger into the forge (nothing less would do anything so you couldn’t waste them), and out pops a guaranteed accountbound Spark.

Now, the downside to this is that in the process of gaining all those shards, you’d have a decent chance of one dropping, so by the end of that process you might end up with two of them, one account bound, one sellable, and if you got the sellable one halfway through, you’d have to decide whether it was worth it to you to use the dropped one, or sell it and keep chugging for the accountbound one.

I recall WoW has a system for quest items where the odds a quest item will drop depends on how many times since they last got a quest item that the player has been eligible for a quest drop and not gotten one. I can imagine something like this working for items that players are supposed to get semi-randomly as rewards for participation, like unidentified fossils in Dry Top.

But my absolute favourite drop system is in the JRPG The World Ends With You. Each enemy drops one item depending on difficulty level, with a percentage chance of either dropping the item, or rolling for an item on the next level down. (Players are shown the drop table for every enemy.) The genius is that you could increase the odds by handicapping your characters, by using very expensive high-level consumables, and by chaining battles together without healing in between (which would also up damage from attacks). So a particular currency material might drop at a 0.6% rate from a boss, but if you handicapped yourself 40 levels and launched into the fight at the end of a 16x chain, that’s a 38% drop chance. You could push further to secure even better odds, but you’d run the risk of making the fight unwinnable. Of course, that material could then be traded in for better equipment which would allow you to push your luck further. It made rare drops into progression in a really interesting way. On top of that, sometimes the item you wanted was a rare drop on a lower difficulty level, and on a higher difficulty level you had a high chance of getting something you no longer need. You had reason to dial the difficulty down and handicap your characters to ensure that rare drop happened.

I think about The World Ends With You a lot in fractals.

I’m seeing concerns with a token system, specifically related to farming:

How much is too much, or too little? Basically, how much time or how many runs should a person be expected to go through before the system pays out?

More importantly, what happens after the player gets what s/he wants? The tokens would become meaningless, unless there were secondary rewards that could also be purchased. Just about every item we receive should have multiple uses, especially if it isn’t tradeable.

There’s been some expansion on the uses for Bloodstone Dust with the toxic tools and Maudry II. Even the fossilized amber can be traded in for a loot bag. Good stuff.

On the other end, disappointingly, Mystic Coins are bordering on trash items, because their use is so limited, even though they’re technically time gated. (Tangential gripe, I can see why time-gating helps keep the market shock out of the trading post, but.. grr.. It irritates me nonetheless. I would rather have seen Mystic Coins used as a part of the recipe, if the intent was to slow high-end crafting down.)

And I rambled again. tl;dr – Token rewards would have to include a secondary reward for those who already achieved their focused goals, especially if they are not available for sale.

Wanze.8410:

It basically has to be defined by the player itself. I think the pvp reward tracks were a step into the right direction. Maybe players should be able to choose more specifically, which reward out of a certain group of items they would like to have. For example players determine first which kind of precursor they would like to receive, if they should get a precursor drop in the future or from forging 4 random weapons.
Same goes for common, rare and fine mats, players just check a box, if they want leather or silk, vials of blood or bones, crystal or charged lodestones.

Of course, people would start out with the more expensive drops until their prices come into equilibrium with the other, cheaper items.
But once all Lodestones have more or less the same price, people wouldnt be forced to farm the same content (Temple of Dwayna and CoE for Charged Lodestones), they would be able to get the Lodestone they want everytime a Lodestone drops for them, from whatever source.

RNG would still be applied as it was before but the possibility of people getting loot they dont want, gets minimized.

For weapons with unique skins from champ bags, it could look something like this, more related to reward tracks:
Make Achievement tracks for each unique champ bag. If champ bag A drops 10 unique named weapons, let the player chose one of the weapons, after opening 10, 50, 250 and 1000 champ bags A. If the amount of new exotic weapons flooding the market would be a concern for the economy, let them just choose to unlock the skin in their wardrobe.

Thinking on this, the collectables system could be that tracking system if it were enhanced. Collecting x number of junk items gets you y reward box, but have it be a repeatable thing. I’d probably change junk items to only be sold to vendors as well. Might even be able to tie all tracks for junk to an item that gives you a one time use item that forces the forge to spit out a precursor when combined with 3 exotic weapon of a specific type. Maybe call it the skritt shiney collectable track or something.

Like i said earlier, i really don’t take issue with RNG loot tables on drops and chests/bags. Not that i get a bunch of exotic gear, but i do just expect that it’s going to be mostly junk. If we balance out RNG with guaranteed acquisition i think the game would certainly feel more rewarding.

What would be nice to have PvE and WvW reward tracks. It would work similar way than the PvP reward tracks, so you select a track and your activities progress toward that track. Leveling up with a character would progress your track with one unit. So leveling up in the new system would be more rewarding as you get a chest pop up every time, most of the time probably with greens and blues, but after 50 levels you will get something nice at the end of the track. It can be limited to level ups after level 80, so the new players are not overwhelmed rewards :P

I remember reading an article about a study regarding the psychology of rewards; specifically the intensity and duration of satisfaction upon receiving an unknown reward vs. a known reward. Long story short, people tend to be happier when they receive an unknown reward and discover what it is and that sense of accomplishment lasts longer (possibly because people who know what they will receive have already processed the emotion while performing the action for the reward).

So while I would personally like to see some sort of token system to just straight-up pay for what I want, it might be more beneficial to keep it as random as possible and just target curbing the negative outliers of the RNG.

I would suggest an escalating returns to the loot table, where each “tier” of loot (precursor, ascended, exotic, rare, etc.) has a gradually increasing chance of dropping every time the player performs an activity that drops loot; once an item of a tier is rewarded to the player, the chance for that tier (and just that tier) resets to normal, where it will begin the cycle anew. Theoretically this will cap the maximum number of times a player can try for a drop before rewarding them with something equivalent to what they desire (possibly the item itself).

This would likely cause an increase in the average and positive outliers, so a diminishing returns (that resets on a timer) to readjust them back down should also be implemented; this shouldn’t affect negative outliers since they wouldn’t be getting enough rewards to trigger the diminishing returns anyway.

Dinks.2478:

I’ve never gotten a drop worth more than say 10g? 781 days and that is my reality.

This thread reinforces my feeling that despite no precursor drop, my luck is quite average. I don’t have any complaints about the current loot system to tell the truth. I do seem to be getting better stuff lately (more exotics and t6, some of the exotics are even valuable thanks to collections), though whether that is magic find, or doing the “right” things, or a general change or just same old rng, I couldn’t say. I know I’m not rich, but I don’t feel poor either. My best two drops ever by far were this last month and they each sold for about 70g. Before collections my best drop was worth 20g at the time. I like collections very much. (3k hours played, no flipping or farming.)

It’s not RNG itself that makes it unfun really, it is the crummy drop rates. Super low chances will naturally lead to more highly lucky and highly unlucky experiences. Couple that with the fact that it is virtually impossible to find a particular exotic weapon that you want by killing stuff and the best way to get it is to buy off of TP and you’re in for the current, very stale, unrewarding state of GW2. Wardrobes and collections could have been fun, but you can’t reasonably expect to collect say, mace skins, through normal gameplay. Diablo 3 got fun when it started trying to be a game and not an economy simulator/store and they super buffed drops while adding account binding.

Concept:
1. Make all non-craftable exotics account bound and buff exo drops, to the point where you find one a day on average assuming a 1-2 hour play session. Can probably leave precursor drops as they are and keep them sellable, because people will have more forge rolls for them. You now have many more chances to either loot what you want or toss into the forge to try to get what you want. Keep getting axes and you want to try for swords? Salvage the axes for ectos and either a)craft swords yourself or b) sell the ectos to buy craftable swords to forge.

2. Craftable exotics essentially become the “token” that can be tossed into the forge for a chance at what you want. The ecto —> pearl weapon path lets you change “failed” drops (i.e. tridents and spearguns) into a chance at what you want. Tweak ecto and ori/ancient salvage rates if you must to keep things in line.

This lets the player decide what a failed drop is and lets them turn it into a chance at what they want

I don’t really like the guaranteed token systems (get tokens —> buy item from vendor), because I think it devolves into a mentality of: “ok, now I need to farm X tokens” and that feels grindy and not fun IMO. In the context of fractals – Perhaps a system where 3-4 unwanted fractal weapons can be salvaged and turned into a box containing a new fractal weapon.

I’ve not read this whole thread so forgive me if this is answered elsewhere. I want to ask a few questions.

1. Is the loot system currently set up so people who play less are more likely to get an awesome RNG drop? There have been numerous posts like, “my friend logged on after 5 months and got X, Y, Z drop while I’ve been playing every day and got nothing!” I want to know if the way it works currently is that those who play lots get decreasing loot in proportion to playtime. Why would ANET do this? To keep people chasing the carrot.

munkiman.3068:

Wanze.8410:

It basically has to be defined by the player itself. I think the pvp reward tracks were a step into the right direction. Maybe players should be able to choose more specifically, which reward out of a certain group of items they would like to have. For example players determine first which kind of precursor they would like to receive, if they should get a precursor drop in the future or from forging 4 random weapons.
Same goes for common, rare and fine mats, players just check a box, if they want leather or silk, vials of blood or bones, crystal or charged lodestones.

Of course, people would start out with the more expensive drops until their prices come into equilibrium with the other, cheaper items.
But once all Lodestones have more or less the same price, people wouldnt be forced to farm the same content (Temple of Dwayna and CoE for Charged Lodestones), they would be able to get the Lodestone they want everytime a Lodestone drops for them, from whatever source.

RNG would still be applied as it was before but the possibility of people getting loot they dont want, gets minimized.

For weapons with unique skins from champ bags, it could look something like this, more related to reward tracks:
Make Achievement tracks for each unique champ bag. If champ bag A drops 10 unique named weapons, let the player chose one of the weapons, after opening 10, 50, 250 and 1000 champ bags A. If the amount of new exotic weapons flooding the market would be a concern for the economy, let them just choose to unlock the skin in their wardrobe.

Thinking on this, the collectables system could be that tracking system if it were enhanced. Collecting x number of junk items gets you y reward box, but have it be a repeatable thing. I’d probably change junk items to only be sold to vendors as well. Might even be able to tie all tracks for junk to an item that gives you a one time use item that forces the forge to spit out a precursor when combined with 3 exotic weapon of a specific type. Maybe call it the skritt shiney collectable track or something.

Like i said earlier, i really don’t take issue with RNG loot tables on drops and chests/bags. Not that i get a bunch of exotic gear, but i do just expect that it’s going to be mostly junk. If we balance out RNG with guaranteed acquisition i think the game would certainly feel more rewarding.

I dont have a problem with rng either. Most of my examples also wouldnt guarantee acquisition, apart from the achievement track for champ bags. But there I consciously proposed the numbers, that you can only get 4 out of 10 skins guaranteed, if you open certain amounts of the champ bag. And the amount of bags required rises steeply (10,50,250,1000) to put some DR behind it. Repeatable achievement or reward tracks would encourage farming, so i dont want them in the game.

I think honestly option 2 is the best option. I have literally done hundreds of fractal runs, even achieved the 500 fractals completed in the first few months of Fractal’s release. I still regularly play hoping to get the skins I want but keep walking away beyond frustrated when I get my 10th Fractal Dagger while waiting for the Greatsword.

I honestly don’t know what to do for Precursors, but I feel that if tokens or crafting where a possible route that it should be a heavy task to complete so that we don’t kill the market value on Pres and Legendary weapons

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’ve not read this whole thread so forgive me if this is answered elsewhere. I want to ask a few questions.

1. Is the loot system currently set up so people who play less are more likely to get an awesome RNG drop? There have been numerous posts like, “my friend logged on after 5 months and got X, Y, Z drop while I’ve been playing every day and got nothing!” I want to know if the way it works currently is that those who play lots get decreasing loot in proportion to playtime. Why would ANET do this? To keep people chasing the carrot.

John answered that question in a different thread, there arent any account modifiers.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/I-have-a-question-about-the-economy/page/15#post4487484

IMO, it’s not the RNG itself that is an issue. It’s that RNG has been implemented in areas it shouldn’t be. People are only complaining about Fractal drops, precursors, and Black Lion tickets. Give us fractal items for tokens, change the legendary system, and adjust the drop rate of scraps and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Wanze.8410:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’ve not read this whole thread so forgive me if this is answered elsewhere. I want to ask a few questions.

1. Is the loot system currently set up so people who play less are more likely to get an awesome RNG drop? There have been numerous posts like, “my friend logged on after 5 months and got X, Y, Z drop while I’ve been playing every day and got nothing!” I want to know if the way it works currently is that those who play lots get decreasing loot in proportion to playtime. Why would ANET do this? To keep people chasing the carrot.

John answered that question in a different thread, there arent any account modifiers.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/I-have-a-question-about-the-economy/page/15#post4487484

Thank you.

You can invent a lot of different systems, each one more complicated than the previous one, to get an “honest” playing experience. However, keeping the system simple should also be taken into account, even if it was just for the sake of doing away with all manners of wild speculation regarding the actual mechanics.

I like option 2 from the OP best: keep the overall RNG system and it’s positive side (like getting something on the first try), while doing away with the negative side (still not getting something after 100+ tries).

The chance of actually getting an item over X attempts is 1-(1-Y)^X where Y is the chance an item drops for any single attempt.

Given a drop rate of 1%, after 100 attempts, you only have a 63,5% chance of having received the item in these attempts. After 500 attempts, 7 players out of every 1000 will still be working towards that item (probably seriously frustrated by now).

Cutting off “the bottom end” here, requires the game to “remember” how many times you’ve already NOT gotten a certain item. However, doing this can result in a sort of pattern, where you get absolute crap for the first X attempts, and then get some good drops, only for the entire cycle to start again. Not too much excitement there, I’m afraid.

All in all, RNG is needed to keep it “exciting”, but at the same time has the nasty downside of making some people “very lucky” and others “very unlucky”. Doing away with the “very unlucky” part without damaging the rest of the system, is a tricky business.

Wanze.8410:

munkiman.3068:

Thinking on this, the collectables system could be that tracking system if it were enhanced. Collecting x number of junk items gets you y reward box, but have it be a repeatable thing. I’d probably change junk items to only be sold to vendors as well. Might even be able to tie all tracks for junk to an item that gives you a one time use item that forces the forge to spit out a precursor when combined with 3 exotic weapon of a specific type. Maybe call it the skritt shiney collectable track or something.

Like i said earlier, i really don’t take issue with RNG loot tables on drops and chests/bags. Not that i get a bunch of exotic gear, but i do just expect that it’s going to be mostly junk. If we balance out RNG with guaranteed acquisition i think the game would certainly feel more rewarding.

I dont have a problem with rng either. Most of my examples also wouldnt guarantee acquisition, apart from the achievement track for champ bags. But there I consciously proposed the numbers, that you can only get 4 out of 10 skins guaranteed, if you open certain amounts of the champ bag. And the amount of bags required rises steeply (10,50,250,1000) to put some DR behind it. Repeatable achievement or reward tracks would encourage farming, so i dont want them in the game.

Farming is standard fair for almost every long term goal. That’s what people do, whether in a single spot or spread out, when their goal is to attain something at a faster pace. The only way to really curb that is to just flat out give up the goods for doing certain activities (Liadri comes to mind). Even in your scenario, champ farming is the path. When players go from world event to world event, isn’t that farming world events?

I guess if you’re speaking about sitting in one spot killing centaurs for hoves, wouldn’t various events around all the centaur areas yield the best rates? I can think of plenty of events that spawn a bunch of centaurs, so doesn’t that encourage people to play those events? I actually can’t think of a single open world area that doesn’t drop junk items. At least junk items wouldn’t be tied to failing an event for champ spawns.

So I don’t know a lot about game programming, but from my understanding MMO looting is largely derived from table top gaming, you have a loot table and roll to see what you get. What I would like to see is option 2 but instead of a physical item in game that players get and spend it would be a behind the scene mechanic.

I will try and illustrate what I am thinking using the tabletop analogy.

For this game the loot table is as follows for a d6.
1-2 Lesser rewards
3-4 Normal rewards
5-6 Greater rewards

Pretty strait forward, however every time a player gets loot for a roll of 1 or a 2 they get a reroll point (capped at x amount).

If the player rolls a 1 or a 2 they get to reroll until:
1. They have rerolled the same number of times as they have reroll points
2. They have gotten a normal reward (in which case 1 reroll point is removed)
3. They have gotten a greater reward (in which case all reroll points are removed)

What I think this will do is in essence squish the left side of the reward bell curve towards the norm without having much impact on the right side of the curve (see my poorly dawn graph attached). This in essence would keep the same number of lucky loots, increase the number of normal loots, and decrease the number of unlucky loots.

Why not just make everything available through laurels? Laurels already exist as a token, it is related to length of play, but isn’t detrimental to casual versus hardcore, they can’t really be farmed, and purchases can be account-bound on acquire.

Adding new methods of obtaining laurels wouldn’t be necessary as the “cost” of the item would be related to the current valuation and method of obtaining them.

Examples:
Precursor: 400 laurels
Named Exotics: 75 laurels
Fractal weapon skin: 50 laurels

Rauderi.8706:

I’m seeing concerns with a token system, specifically related to farming:

How much is too much, or too little? Basically, how much time or how many runs should a person be expected to go through before the system pays out?

More importantly, what happens after the player gets what s/he wants? The tokens would become meaningless, unless there were secondary rewards that could also be purchased. Just about every item we receive should have multiple uses, especially if it isn’t tradeable.

tl;dr – Token rewards would have to include a secondary reward for those who already achieved their focused goals, especially if they are not available for sale.

Why would they have to include secondary reward?

We’re trying to correct a problem of outliers, which will exist in any random distribution, not introduce an additional loot system. We have far too many of those already.

There could be hundreds of people that random has “blessed” with outlier results, and so hundreds of people likely to be that bit closer to leaving than the average, because they really do get less. Much less for a tiny few.

We don’t actually know it’s truly random either, or that the pseudo RNG is bug free, so the distribution might be far from ideal.

What happens to the lucky folks who have had 2 Tequatl Hoards or two minis now? They salvage, sell or vendor depending on binding. I guess some stopped going to Tequatl now they have all they want. Give the tickets 1s or 1c vendor value and people who have all they want can either vendor them or save for a mini, skin or exotic and make a few gold, just like some already do with multiple drops.

The Sunless weapons are already worthless for many as they run zerk, so unless they want the visual it’s just very expensive vendor trash.

Personally I’d prefer if the RNG was weighted to break “unlucky” streaks so you eventually get something shiny over a selection of tickets/tokens/scraps/dragon scales to take up bank space we don’t have! That way the system quietly “fixes” any inherent accidental unfairness. I’m not seeking more loot overall – that’s a different conversation.

Finally a thread on RNG and methods of obtaining items. Been looking forward to this one.

Specific thoughts on RNG
It works perfectly for insignificant drops/rewards, but completely falls apart when you take the high-end “important” items in the game, such as precursors, into account. Assigning a purely RNG-based system to acquiring end-game items was a huge mistake. Allowing those end-game items to be sold on the open market knowing that the only other way to get them was RNG, was an extension of that mistake.

In a loot drop based game RNG is inevitable. It’s essential. It’s not going away. We’re all ok with that. If you search all the threads on this forum you’ll notice that complaints about RNG only occur with high-end items: precursors, ascended drops from fractals, Tequatl weapons, etc. Nobody complains that RNG gave them that masterwork staff they can’t use instead of the dagger they wanted. Because they can easily solve that problem with a very small amount of gold.

Solution to ending the complaints about RNG
Either completely remove RNG for important items in the game, or go with a system that says “if you haven’t got a precursor drop after X hours of play, we’ll give you one”

Option 1: RNG, but with ever-increasing odds
This would an acceptable way to do it, but you’d still have complaints that it’s taking too long, or whatever. People are impatient and get irritable when they can’t see the end clearly. Not knowing is frustrating. But this system would still be preferable to what we have now because at least I could say: “If I keep opening champ bags I’ll get the precursor eventually”

Option 2: Reward Tracks
The Reward Tracks from PvP are actually an exceptional way to allow someone to progress toward a specific goal. Something that they can choose themselves and see their exact progress toward that goal.

How amazing would it be to load into Fractals and be able to select a Fractal Reward Track in order to get one of the Fractal weapons?

How awesome would it be to go to a world event like Tequatl and select a Sunless weapon as your eventual reward for beating Teq X number of times? (this would involve implementing factors showing that you actually participated in the event, maybe saying “you progess x% for each dragon chest you get”)

And lastly, how fantastic would it be to be able to set a general account Reward Track for that specific precursor you want? The reward track could easily tell you what you needed to do to progress further in the track.

It’s a great system and fits perfectly with what we’re trying to accomplish.

I’d love to see a dev’s opinion on this

So, I could have missed this but Anet has already valued what the cost of skins are weither they are Black Lion tickets or rare drops. They did this for PvP in the form of reward tracks. So if you remove RNG then Anet has basically stated that the worth of 85% of equipment is 40,000 rank points. Secondly, they implemented a secondary currency in the form of laurels which is directly tied to achievement points.

So why would we use a “secondary” currency when Anet has already defined Achievement points as universal currency? So tie the gain of ascended items or precursors directly to Achievement points which are available to all forms of the game (PvE, WvW, PvP).

We can also do a reverse calculation. If we define that 40,000 points equals a rare skin and the PvP Mercenary title is rewarded for 48,000 points then we can define that Anet believes you should get a new skin every 100 achievement points. Further, Anet has also defined that you should be rewarded with gold/skins every 250 achievement points.

So the item for discussion should be If Anet has valued skins to be work between 100 to 250 achievement points, what is the value of a precursor? Regardless of the actual value, it is something the player has power to achieve.

So since we have a currency for skins (achievement points) why aren’t we using those as our metric for when to be rewarded (precurser, rare, ascended)? This should be in ADDITION to the RNG nature of the game such that getting “lucky” would allow you to gain an additional precursor, rare, etc but everyone at least has a baseline reward. If people want to sell their item, let them for the gold. If people want to keep their weapon or item then that’s fine too. I would say it will probably drive precursors down but I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

please go for option 2.0

playing since release, over 3.3kh , without more than 200hrs of afking, completed well over 1000 dungeons, fractalcounter doesnt count anymore since a year, a whole mule just for rings.

the only pre ive ever gotten was the torch-pre at karkaevent, which was like 8g. and 8g in these times were like 12g today. in total i didnt even have single drop over 40g.

im already at the point that i stopped playing the game itself, since i got every dungeonskin i ever wanted, and further legendarys would need such a huge grind.
nothing interesting except living story anymore.

if you want to use the 2.5 option, all players like me would have to grind another 400hours just to get the tokens, when most ppl are turning their back on gw.
gw is already dieing because of it.
im always trying to get some friends into gw2, but the biggest part of them is like : hey i want to kill some mobs to gain experience, level and get some equip.

to sum it up : i stopped playing gw and investing in gems because all new items are either gemshop stuff, and i feel im getting no reward for whatever im doing at all.

brittitude.1983:

Why not just make everything available through laurels? Laurels already exist as a token, it is related to length of play, but isn’t detrimental to casual versus hardcore, they can’t really be farmed, and purchases can be account-bound on acquire.

Adding new methods of obtaining laurels wouldn’t be necessary as the “cost” of the item would be related to the current valuation and method of obtaining them.

Examples:
Precursor: 400 laurels
Named Exotics: 75 laurels
Fractal weapon skin: 50 laurels

I like the spirit of this post with the exception of Fractal weapons for laurels. You should have to play Fractals to get a Fractal weapon. That notwithstanding, something akin to this is good especially the account bound part of the laurel purchased precursor. Having them be on a vendor and account bound ensures the market for looted or Mystic Forged precursors stays viable. It also ensures that people who actually want a legendary have a means of acquiring it and it’s not just a way for people to make money.

A non-RNG way to acquire precursors should be implemented for people trying to make a legendary. This type of system satisfies that. I think the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I like the direction.

I feel like a non-RNG method of acquiring precursors hasn’t been implemented because ArenaNet makes so much money off of people buying gems and converting them to gold and then buying the precursor. It makes sense from a business standpoint, but as a player, it’s frustrating. There has to be better common ground in this discussion. The fact that this type of discussion has been going on with players for almost two years and we are finally getting around to a constructive discourse on the topic is also maddening. I feel like we are long past the conversation phase of this topic. We should be well into the implementation of a system that is more rewarding for players.

Raina.8642:

The reason I don’t like the concept of reaching a point where your next one is guaranteed through a hidden system is the following example:

I want incinerator. Ive thrown 600 exotics in for it, and had no luck. My ‘hidden guarantee’ is at 99%, but as far as I am aware I could be months away from it.

I do a world boss chain, and end up with 3 exotics that have crap sigils. A trident, a warhorn, and a focus. I toss them into the forge with a mystic shard, and poop out comes the rodgort precurser. My “99% guarantee” resets to zero on a once off, throw away forge giving me something worth about 100g only, instead of the realistic return I deserved of 1300g from Incinerator.

takes a drink
Realistic? Deserved? Even in hypotheticals, the entitlement is bleeding through. Maybe you need to come back to my end of the economy, where I’m more than happy to garner a single G for anything I get.

Even if you hadn’t run your luck variable to its maximum point unknowingly, you still had a chance of it granting you something, and LOOOOOONG before it reached 99% (assuming it increments reasonably instead of jumping from 10% to 99% in one go). And that one lucky hit still wipes the bonus completely. If the results really mattered that much to you, you’d quit playing the forge when you couldn’t guarantee the payoff.

Lil Puppy.5216:

Option 2 sounds more relevant to the topic than messing with an rng system in some convoluted impossible to maintain way. However, as described it reads like we’d get a token that if double clicked would give us another chance at the RNG treadmill. This is not what we’d look forward too, that would be the equivalent of just adjusting the black lion key drop rate so that everyone gets one every few mobs (2500+ hours and only got 3 blkeys as drops).

What I would personally look forward to is option 2 but something like a black lion ticket scrap type of ‘token’ that I can exchange for the ‘something’ that I would like or equivalent.

Example:
NPC trades X amount of said tokens for a chest of Y rarity. Chest goes through RNG for that rarity table for all possible items of that rarity in game. Items that fall from said chest are account bound so as to not affect the market for those items. This plays well with the wardrobe system and doesn’t affect the market tremendously when you salvage the exotic/ascended chest variants and sell off the materials that aren’t account bound – crafting needs to get cheaper anyway

Problem with your example is that I sell everything and I mean everything on trading post that can be listed. This will be bad for us that have no use for any of the majority if exotic gear which already have our gear.

It has to be sell able if this was implemented.

I don’t care how they change it, anything would be better than being stuck on the non receiving end of the ‘random’ number generator for another two years.

I think the biggest problem with very rare drops/results/etc. is not the RNG, it is the User Experience with it. If there is a very small chance (e.g. 1:100,000) the User sees no progress. You could implement a concept similar to Black Lion Ticket Scraps. Instead of a chance of e.g. 1:100,000 for a precursor you get a chance of 1:100 for a Precursor Ticket Scrap and you need 1,000 Ticket Scraps for a precursor. So when a player throws 1,000 swords in the mystic forge, he most likely gets a couple of Ticket Scraps and sees some progress on the way to his precursor.

Wanze.8410:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’ve not read this whole thread so forgive me if this is answered elsewhere. I want to ask a few questions.

1. Is the loot system currently set up so people who play less are more likely to get an awesome RNG drop? There have been numerous posts like, “my friend logged on after 5 months and got X, Y, Z drop while I’ve been playing every day and got nothing!” I want to know if the way it works currently is that those who play lots get decreasing loot in proportion to playtime. Why would ANET do this? To keep people chasing the carrot.

John answered that question in a different thread, there arent any account modifiers.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/I-have-a-question-about-the-economy/page/15#post4487484

what he is speaking of wouldnt be an account modifier, and it probably does exist, mildy. There is Diminishing returns on drops and it decays pretty slowly. You will in fact see more drops in your first few hours after not having played for awhile.

They will never tell us exactly what is happening, but your friend who plays rarely will basically have no DR for almost all of their playtime.

WGuardian.1028:

1. First i want to say that token system won’t solve RNG-problem as i see it.
Main flaw of pure random reward are people on both sides of the bell curve (as was said above). With tokens u will give all participants an option to get item they want but system with random reward is still there. In the extreme variant we will get this:

• people from left side of curve get 1 <item>;
• people from centre of curve get 1-2 <item>;
• people from right side of curve get 2 <item>;

Nothing changed from what we have now, except that people from left side can get at least 1 <item>, but they still feel really unlucky when they look on drops of other ppl.
That said, i think option 2.5 is not good if implemented in line with random – it won’t fix anything.

2. Option 2 is what i think will be good decision. As i see it “…Y tickets for random drops…” means that next try will have better chances to give better reward and have nothing to do with tokens. We just need 1 variable for each account/character that will affect the quality of drop. And then each rarity family have its weight that has affect on this variable. As example:

*white item: +W;
*blue item: +B;
*green item: +G;
*yellow item: +Y;
*orange item: +E;
*pink item: +A;

W,B,G are always positive numbers that meet sequence W<B<G;
Y,E,A are always negative numbers that meet sequance A<E<Y;

Possible flaws:
1. Most tonics have yellow or orange rarity and will decrease chances of getting better rewards.
2. Orange and some yellow items have big price spread. As it is now most rare items are most expensive and it should be like that. This system won’t change rates of getting expensive item if we are looking at situation when player already rolled a dice for orange item but still need to roll for specific name.

Possible solutions:
1. Implement this system with 2 or more veriables and each of them will affect own family of items: weapon,armor,tonic, etc.

2. It may be a problem from the player point of view but in the long run we can’t predict which item will be expensive after next update (even devs can’t cause goals always shift). Perhaps precursors can be moved to unique family (they are in unique category already with that line in tool-tip of item).

At the end we will have system in which with every fail u get closer to bigger reward (at least i see it like that ).

What color do you suppose precursors now get for rarity then?

Red? Red was a rarity for PVP only skins/weapons in GW 1. It should be a color reused for precursors instead in GW 2.

Make precursors tradeable ascended weapons.

I would prefer 2.5. It is OK, when some people feel lucky but it is not good when other people on the “lower end” feel unlucky. After all I want to feel some reward for what I achieved but I do not want to play the lottery. (I do no buy black lion chest keys and I avoid the RNG-part of the mystic forge)

So I think the RNG-influence should be decreased/corrected and there should be some ways/tracks that assure getting the “extra good” items after some efforts even without RNG.

And the loot distribution system or “loot tables” should be looked into. For example: It is OK to get some trash/junk items when slaying some unimportant mobs. But it is not good to get trash/junk items as part of the reward of finishing a living story episode.

So I think that the overall influenc of RNG for loot distribution should be reduced.

Greetings.

Megis.9264:

Make precursors tradeable ascended weapons.

No the idea is to make precursors in a font color that people can always recognize; separate and different than any other rarity.

Iason Evan.3806:

• Events that were bugged were often patched with a band-aid by removing loot from the mobs. Even after the events were fixed properly, often times the loot tables were left bare. (Halla Corpseflayer, Crusader Angaria, etc.)

• Gold bots in the early times of this game would often farm groups of mobs that had good drop rates. A lot of those enemies now don’t drop decently anymore even though bots have been destroyed mostly. Why not bring back some of the loot to those mobs?

• The First Halloween was very rewarding to players for beating the Mad King. We even got BLTC items from it. You guys have really tightened the reins on rewarding loot.

• The second Pavilion Event saw massive cuts to the type of loot players got. I liked the design of the second one better from a game play perspective because it was more challenging, but the loot was decreased across the board and even some of the “rewards” dictated that we spend gold on top of the currency you were letting us earn. There was also a gold sink involved in kicking off the event. So an event got more challenging and we were rewarded less and a gold sink was added. See the issue? That to me isn’t rewarding for players at all.

Evan, you nailed it. Loot in this game is bad. Real bad from normal mobs. There’s no point in killing trash at all anywhere anymore, unless they drop heavy moldy bags and really only 10+ at a time.. I lived in the 1st pavilion event during the entire event because loot was awesome. Same with the Scarlet Invasion. Loot was good. Those are the only two instances I can think of where loot was good enough to hold fast my attention for an extended period of time.