Guild Wars 2

This DR system is absolutely ridiculous….

Dragons were stealth nerfed in the last patch… you want to know why people park at dragons and don’t do other things? Because of things like pre-cursors and lack of endgame content – you are punishing people for this…

@Robert Hrouda
Thanks a lot I really wanted to know the answer of this, just keep tweaking it please!

I just want to be able to get my chest for dragons.. is it really that much to ask..

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

Would it be at all possible to have some sort of visual “DR indicator” in play? It’d be nice to know if DR was in effect, as opposed to just getting randomly bad RNG pulls.

So essentially a good analogy would be:

You are doing a great job at work. So good that in January we are going to give you a 5% cut in pay.

Next year, another cut. Next year, another cut. Eventually you will work for free.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

People rarely comment when something is working properly, and usually only bring things up in a positive light if there is a discussion about it and they feel provoked to do as such.
For instance, we recently made it possible to join and reconnect in fractals. Prior to that patch there would be a new thread nearly every other day about how bad fractals were because of disconnects, and those threads would be the most popular. But since fixing it there hasn’t been a single thread about it, or any comments. It’s just the general nature of people to happily enjoy things instead of taking the time out of enjoying something to exclaim that you are enjoying something.

Robert, first off, thank you and your teammates for this amazing game. In my opinion, it’s superior to every MMO currently running.

To your point: people rarely praise things when they are working fine because they expect it to work fine in the first place, especially if it’s an Anet product.

A person pays $60K for an awesome new car. Powerful engine, rich corinthian leather inside, Ricardo Montalban sitting in the back seat.
…but the windshield wipers and AC don’t work.

New car owner takes it back to the dealer, only for the dealer to say: “Geez, you complain and complain about this broken stuff but where’s the praise?” It’s a ridiculous and insulting comment.

The unfixed, unattended-to bugs that have been in this game since beta, the lack of a groupfinder tool for dungeons, the punishing. group-destroying issues with Fractals that have only now been addressed and should have launched with Fractals…these things are maddening.

Ohoni.6057:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

Would it be at all possible to have some sort of visual “DR indicator” in play? It’d be nice to know if DR was in effect, as opposed to just getting randomly bad RNG pulls.

^This…..Having to guess/speculate whether or not one/all of my characters have DR is….well infuriating. It’s basically gambling…if I do this event will I get full reward or DR reward.

By the nature of having multiple alts, it’s basically unavoidable to not park characters. By the time I “clear” the DR from several toons due to “parking” my other toons enter DR from “parking”? Am I to understand that I need to rotate my character play evenly?

I never ran into DR at all and there also seem to be no more botters on my server. Either I’m extremely lucky or people tend to exaggerate. A lot.

Iruwen.3164:

I never ran into DR at all and there also seem to be no more botters on my server. Either I’m extremely lucky or people tend to exaggerate. A lot.

Kinda hard to exaggerate dragon chests not appearing and/or 4-8k exp reward vs 12-17k exp.

Nalora.7964:

So essentially a good analogy would be:

You are doing a great job at work. So good that in January we are going to give you a 5% cut in pay.

Next year, another cut. Next year, another cut. Eventually you will work for free.

This is EXACTLY the feeling DR gives you, and that is why it is such an extremly rubbish system, If I got a annual or even monthly pay cut, It would annoy the hell out of me, and I would sure as hell enjoy my work that much less because of it, if I did not decide to quit.

Iruwen, I would be TRUELY and UTTERLY amazed if there are no botters running around in the grawl tunnel in frostgorge on your server.

The only reason why you would notice DR is if you play a unhealthy amount like some of us, unhealthy amount of time or not, that is my time to spend, and I do not want to get punished for spending it in this game.

I have been hit with a lot of DR. Run through some dungeons, do some DEs then switch over to another char to do Teq and bam DR-nochest.

Run all over Orr. Log in the next day kill Claw, hit the Grawl tunnel…. barely anything drops. WP to Sparkfly and the same thing. Finally entered a dungeon and seemed to get better. But beyond the lack of drops, I had 11 straight white equipment drops between the two zones and that was with sparse loot at that.

I don’t even think they know quite how the DR code works, or if they do they should be a little more forthcoming.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.

So you’re saying that I’m getting 30 tokens on certain characters because they’re parked next to CoF? Because that’s not true, they’re standing in LA when I login. Though my usual routine has been: Logon character, do CoF, go to LA and deposit tokens in bank. And repeat the next day.

I guess this counts as being ‘parked’ too?

I have 7 alts, I don’t want to ‘play’ all 7 characters, but I do want to use all of them for getting CoF tokens. Now you’re telling me I can’t do this, because I’ll get hit by DR? If so then this new DR system is even lamer than the old one.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I don’t think it will ever go away, because there’s always the potential for something to slip past us and enter the game. Not all players will abuse things, but the potential threat to the economy and the game is too high to go back to a system where a safety net is not in place. We saw the data from when it wasn’t in place and what things were like for CoF, and we simply can’t go back to a system open to exploit like it was before.

Yet other games do not use such measures which are clearly punishing regular players for playing the way THEY want rather than the approved anet way. Perhaps you should ask WHY players park their toons at dragon events and proceed from there rather than just instantly move to nerf which has become an anet habit.

As for protecting the economy, you mean the economy with runaway inflation where stuff like abyss dye costs over 22 gold. You’ll forgive me if I take that with a grain of salt.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

Yes but there should be a system that works in conjunction with RNG to enable players with bad luck to work to get the specific loot like you guys did with the introduction of pristine fractal relics. Anet should know by now how incredibly frustrating to players RNG on its own is.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The issue with the dragon chests should only effect people who park characters at dragons and don’t play them anywhere else. Is this what you are doing?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

So long as you play the events you should be fine to park characters in a given area.

This is contradictory. A more clear answer would be appreciated. Tonight I used my ranger to run the Teq event three times. Each time I went back to Lion’s Arch and sold up and banked and then logged in my 70+ necro to run around maps and do stuff. When Teq was back up, I logged in my ranger, paid the WP costs to Sparkfly and downed Teq. Twice I got a chest the last time I didn’t. I’ve played this game ALL DAY in any number of maps with 3 different toons. The one I play the best is the one I would naturally want to do dragons with. Your safety net catches the wrong players and yes, we’ll complain about it. I don’t care that I’ve gotten all blues, or maybe a green. I don’t care I haven’t seen an exotic drop off a dragon chest in over a month. I care that I didn’t get the chance. The chest should always appear. I did the work. Please get this resolved.

Ohoni.6057:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

Would it be at all possible to have some sort of visual “DR indicator” in play? It’d be nice to know if DR was in effect, as opposed to just getting randomly bad RNG pulls.

It’s absolutely possible. This “feature” was in GW1 and I saw it myself a couple of times. I specifically remember practicing with my warrior and while killing Grand Drakes repeatedly, I had a message that popped up that basically told me that I was hitting DR. I don’t remember what it said, but it warned me that I needed to do something else for a bit.

kohldl.7586:

This is contradictory. A more clear answer would be appreciated. Tonight I used my ranger to run the Teq event three times. Each time I went back to Lion’s Arch and sold up and banked and then logged in my 70+ necro to run around maps and do stuff. When Teq was back up, I logged in my ranger, paid the WP costs to Sparkfly and downed Teq. Twice I got a chest the last time I didn’t. I’ve played this game ALL DAY in any number of maps with 3 different toons. The one I play the best is the one I would naturally want to do dragons with. Your safety net catches the wrong players and yes, we’ll complain about it. I don’t care that I’ve gotten all blues, or maybe a green. I don’t care I haven’t seen an exotic drop off a dragon chest in over a month. I care that I didn’t get the chance. The chest should always appear. I did the work. Please get this resolved.

This raises an interesting point, its triggered by the activity attached to a character but is the DR then bound to your account on all toons? It seems ridiculous that if you’ve got multiple toons at lvl 80 why you can’t park some at dragons so long as you’re doing other events on other toons. Just another way DR screws with legitimate players.

Ohoni.6057:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

Would it be at all possible to have some sort of visual “DR indicator” in play? It’d be nice to know if DR was in effect, as opposed to just getting randomly bad RNG pulls.

Please at least give us an indicator. People are angry because their time is being wasted by some opaque system and they don’t know that the time is being wasted until it is too late (i.e. after you finish the run and get the reduced rewards). It is even worse in open world since there are not metrics like reduced tokens to definitively tell. I am not a bot. Will you please let me loot something other than ice stones, globby goop, fur clumps and rags in Frostgorge?

I’ll throw out some flavor text for the little debuff icon-

Fatigued – Your recent efforts have left you mentally drained. Your chances of finding rare items is reduced.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

So… how does this affect Fractals?

[EDIT]

My question above was answered two months ago, I just discovered… RH has replied that DR does not affect Fractals.

Below post, I’m talking about the 30 vs. 60 tokens here, not the other DR’s that apply.

I feel that if I’ve taken the time to level an alt to a point where I can run a dungeon, help me understand why I can’t run whatever dungeon or path I want with however many alts I want and receive no DR if I’ve bothered to get that character to that level? If I have 4 characters that can run a certain path, there’s no question we should be able to run that path over and over with all of our alts.

OK, so I can understand why running 1 path over and over with the same character receives DR from 60 to 20 to 10; you’re trying to encourage players to do multiple things in the game on any given day, and I’m fine with that, I don’t mind at all how non-grindy GW2 is compared to other games and I don’t mind doing other things because there’s plenty to do out there that will benefit, but if I have multiple alts that can run that same dungeon, why should I be punished for putting the time in to get those alts to that point?

There are far more real players than bots, there are certain things the majority of us shouldn’t be punished for because of the few bad eggs.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

ezd.6359:

Logic:
1) DR == anti exploit system
2) DR punish people for playing event on that character they want to
3) playing event on that character they want to == exploit
4) exploit == bannable offence

Why don’t you just ban us for not playing your game the way YOU want?

We’re working on our DR system and looking at new data all the time, and like all things there may be bugs or unexpected quirks in it. If we just outright banned people who got hit by DR, that wouldn’t be practical.
It’s entirely possible that the DR system hitting parked event characters wasn’t intended, but was a result of us fixing an exploit or other problem within the system, and it just happened to slip by us in testing.

And like I said before, DR is a safety net to prevent exploitation. That means (to me at least) that is is not the metric for us to drop the ban hammer on people – we have other data used for that. There’s different ways to possibly unintentionally hit it, and I’d think it rather unfair to ban people over it.

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

As a programmer i can say – you are doing it wrong. Ask yourself if normal player can be caught by your system. If yes – tune it untill you will get another answer or add more variables.

If you don’t want to punish people for nothing, mark their accounts and let GMs check theirs activity. At least tune your system every time it hits legit players. Don’t leave it as it is.

If you want to protect your system from exploits, you must check other variables, like killing mobs from textures etc. If we kill same ID mobs more often than “server time”, we earn more money per second than “number” etc.

Can normal player be caught by this system right now? YES.

Your server controls how often events start (problem solved already). We can not exploit it anyhow. If someone participate in same event it is not a reason to punish him. May be it is a reason to check server timers. If someone receive rewards more often than intended, ask programmers to fix server timers, but don’t punish players. Just think a little bit: your server controls it, we can not start it, problem is not exists.

Another real life situation. I have 63 lvl alt, i “parked” him (afk) at arcanist lab (near Tequatl) while doing my home work. When i see “kraits attack…” event started, i kill them to get some loot and lvl up my alt. After ~3 events i start to receive less rewards. But why? Is it against rules?

At this moment our characters live in police state. You are not only controlling ours gameplay, you are far beyond it. You try to dictate us how to play!

While player don’t break game rules – he must not be punished for anything.

Yeah, at the moment DR is an actual worry for players and not a problem for bots. If you don’t want to strip it out OK (and I think you’re very wrong), but you need to fix it so it stops catching actual players after half an hour of running around in the same area.

We don’t need a system that impacts earnings over time. Botters don’t care, they’ll get more accounts. DR doesn’t actually hit their business model except in a very small way. Players are the ones with limited time, so they are most impacted by DR. We do need a system geared more towards catching actual hacking behavior, like teleporting directly between resource nodes. I mean, you can get a list of accounts to watch even just using a list of who harvested what node when.

We’ve seen over and over again that there are problems with the loot system. The dragon chests issue, the huge threads complaining about weird patterns in loot drops, and how the new loot chests will drop with junk or nothing when they’re only supposed to drop with blues and up, etc. We don’t need DR messing up these underlying system when the systems themselves are obviously so complex that the devs aren’t keeping on top of them.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It’s entirely possible that the DR system hitting parked event characters wasn’t intended, but was a result of us fixing an exploit or other problem within the system, and it just happened to slip by us in testing.

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.

1 point to look into – Something I’ve noticed personally and when talking with players is that people who log in and log out in the same area get hit with DR quicker than people who log out in a different area. Example:

I started exploring Straits of Devastation. I spent about 4 days there. Day 1, I logged in in LA, traveled to the Straits and grabbed a few WP. Day 2, I logged in in LA, WP’d to Straits and started exploring. Days 3 and 4 I logged in and logged out in Straits. On those days (3 and 4) I started getting Porous Bones very frequently, where the first day I hadn’t gotten any and the 2nd I think I got 3. Drops were also less frequent, it was common for me to kill something and not get anything. I grabbed about a 3rd of the area each day on days 2, 3, and 4, and did most of the daily there too, so I was doing the same number of events and making roughly the same number of kills. So it seems obvious that I hit DR, and the only different thing I can point to is that I logged in and out of the same area.

Gilosean.3805:

Yeah, at the moment DR is an actual worry for players and not a problem for bots. If you don’t want to strip it out OK (and I think you’re very wrong), but you need to fix it so it stops catching actual players after half an hour of running around in the same area.
…….

1 point to look into – Something I’ve noticed personally and when talking with players is that people who log in and log out in the same area get hit with DR quicker than people who log out in a different area. Example:

I started exploring Straits of Devastation. I spent about 4 days there. Day 1, I logged in in LA, traveled to the Straits and grabbed a few WP. Day 2, I logged in in LA, WP’d to Straits and started exploring. Days 3 and 4 I logged in and logged out in Straits. On those days (3 and 4) I started getting Porous Bones very frequently, where the first day I hadn’t gotten any and the 2nd I think I got 3. Drops were also less frequent, it was common for me to kill something and not get anything. I grabbed about a 3rd of the area each day on days 2, 3, and 4, and did most of the daily there too, so I was doing the same number of events and making roughly the same number of kills. So it seems obvious that I hit DR, and the only different thing I can point to is that I logged in and out of the same area.

I have also been suspecting that logging in/out, changing to alts or zoning is triggering an acceleration in DR. I’ll often log out to character select screen as a “pause” button if I need to go switch the laundry/take out trash/talk to wife. Saves me from the inevitable afk death when someone trains a pack of wolves onto me as they run by. Sometimes I’ll jump to the home BL in WvW to pick up from auction house and/or dump stuff into the bank and then port back to where I was. Or maybe I jump onto an alt who is parked next to a place where I know I can get some quick revives for the daily. Say I go back to map completion on another character afterwards -doesn’t matter if I do an event, grab a vista, hit a skill point – it is painfully obvious by looking at my bags that DR has hit. There is a clear line before which the loot has a mix of junk, blues, greens and maybe a yellow and after the line it is fur clump, sword, torch, chainmail chausses, rag (all whites).

Strangely, if on another day all I do is log in —> go to southsun —> nuke barracudas and skelk for an hour straight I never seem to hit DR.

If you’re parking characters in the same zone for more than one session (i.e., hitting the login / logout button, like your avoiding-afk-death routine), then yeah, we’re describing the same thing. I find that if I start from LA, hit a bunch of zones and end in LA I don’t hit DR. I also usually cycle through WvW and do an event or JP. It’s only when I log out in a zone and then later log back into the same zone that the DR starts hitting super early. It’s really inconvenient for exploring in zones that aren’t near a big city.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

i don’t think this is working as you describe, i have several characters “parked” at farms and am getting multiple gathers from the same node repoping instantly, such as 6 strawberry off the same plant, meanwhile characters that i move around the world usually only get blue items or nothing at all from vets/champs and green from chests. this is with 121% MF on my main

In some cases exploits aren’t clearly exploits and are the result of implementation errors on your end ie snowflake jewellery thus if if players unknowingly exploit remove their gains and if they repeatedly exploit after being informed what they did is an exploit ban them.

I went away for a weekend and came back to amazing fractal drops. Maybe it’s just random luck I had, but I recommend testing out skipping three days and coming back. I got 4 exotics, 1 ascended, and a bunch of stones from only a lvl 14 after my short break.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

lekyii.9856:

Thats true, but why now? why only after patch ppl start to complain about the loot!?

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

This is insulting.

RNG is “Random”.

I don’t consider it “Random” that the rate of rare drop across my entire account has plummeted, literally, 720 fold, since the 11/15 patch. (I used to get 3 rares an hour, now I get 3 rares a month – that’s 720 fold).

If it were “random”, I’d have some good luck streaks, but I don’t. Half of my friends suffered from this, the other half did not, for some arbitrary reason. The half that did not continued, also for months unabated, to receive 3 rares an hour.

Again, “RNG” is not by nature “consistent”, this behavior has been “consistent” for months.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Essence Snow.3194:

When ya’ll did this “tweaking” ya’ll broke dragon DR.

The issue with the dragon chests should only effect people who park characters at dragons and don’t play them anywhere else. Is this what you are doing?

When someone reaches 80, they’re supposed to be rewarded for what they like.

What if what they like is slaying huge dragons?

TheLordQ.1857:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Essence Snow.3194:

^^This..I have 9 lvl 80s and had one parked at every meta event that had a chest so as to avoid WP fees.

Congrats on 9 of them. I’m working on my third now.

So long as you play the events you should be fine to park characters in a given area.

This is not working.

Example: Fire elemental chain in Metrica. My smaller character does the events leading up to the fire elemental. As soon as the elemental actually appears, I bring in a level 80 and kill the elemental. No chest.

In between events such as these, my other characters are wandering around the world killing things… I don’t JUST log into events.

I don’t know what the larger picture here is, but I do know that I made multiple 80s to park them at important places, and now I’m doing quests and getting no reward. I do not find this a fun experience. I don’t know how to ‘play the game properly’ in order to make sure I get the rewards I earn. It’s extremely frustrating.

Thanks for reading.

So you do the event on a lower level, then bring out the higher level to get the higher level loot? I think that is probably working exactly as intended. If you know the event is up then get on your higher level to begin with from the start. If not then just deal with it and take the loot on your lower level.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Alur.7510:

@Robert Hrouda

Once things are tuned down, there’s a chance the DR System is going to be taken away? It felt for me more of a time “solution”, but yea, main concern is, once everything is tuned, if it is going to stay or not, you know how it can be sometimes.

I don’t think it will ever go away, because there’s always the potential for something to slip past us and enter the game. Not all players will abuse things, but the potential threat to the economy and the game is too high to go back to a system where a safety net is not in place. We saw the data from when it wasn’t in place and what things were like for CoF, and we simply can’t go back to a system open to exploit like it was before.

Of course, I am not in charge of such things. People paid much more than me get to make those decisions

Then those “people” aren’t doing their job properly then, since this annoying issue will only drive away frustrated players and hurt the game as a whole.

Upon further reflection, I think (no need to confirm/deny on this, it’s just my supposition) the problem isn’t in the DR code itself, but the loot tables themselves—I shudder at the thought of the current state of the reward code. With all the patches and rewrites done to that part (as I suspect that it’s much easier for the programmers to just change the stored variables around at that part to “balance” things), the whole chunk is likely now nothing more than a jumbled mess of virtual spaghetti that’s two meatballs short of gaining sentience. Which is why it’s not giving credit properly right now….

You should get a raise or something since you’ve gone above and beyond what your duties and responsibilities, in any case.

I would be interested in discussing some of the gameplay activities that could impact the economy and that DR is supposed to address and whether that is still the case.

Bot farmers – DR addresses continuous farming in a specific area. And due to the playerbase reporting and Anet’s actions, the amount of bots operating in this manner has drastically been reduced.

Dungeon running – DR addressed, and after changes to a different degree addresses continuous running of the same path on the same character.

Karma farming – DR addresses repeated event farming. Although karma is account bound currency so there has always been a debate as to why this should be diminished in the first place. Newly introduced karma items however, make the case that karma = gold.

Node bots – DR does not help curtail this.

It’s the side affects of this that seem to be causing concern with players. And most likely our own misunderstanding of the mechanics makes it worse.

Dragon chests – Players parking characters at an event will hit DR even if other activities are done before and after on a different character

Long play periods – Players report receiving reduced karma, rewards, drops etc after playing for several continuous hours even if their activities change

Dungeon rewards – Players report different DR mechanics for tokens at the account level

Normal play – Players that leave characters in a zone rather than zoning out experience DR faster

Whether or not all of these are true is still up for debate. But what I’m getting at is DR really helping to prevent the major sources of economic exploit through game play working as intended?

(Note: This was quickly throw together so I’m sure there are other issues I didn’t consider. I can edit this later. And perhaps this should be it’s own thread.)

Seems like Diminished Returns works on Fractal daily chests too. I run Fractals dailies everyday. I run b/c of the Fractal Weapon skins and what do I get in exchange for weeks and months slaving away in FOTM? Just a rifle, that’s it. FYI, I got the rifle after not doing fractals for 2 days. Isn’t that what a Diminished Return is? If so, I guess I gotta run other crap instead of Fractals or just quit the game all together =/. I’ve done all the dungeons, Fractals Of The Mist is my favorite. PLEASE increase the chances of a Fractal Weapon. It’s getting very dull running one of the more difficult dungeons in this game and not getting anything out of it. My time apparently amounts to night anymore.

This is for Robert

I have to farm the lodestones for twlight or sunrise since i aint the richest player in the world and my RNG luck is below average ( current ecto to mystic clover success rate proves that ). How fast will DR kick in if i just straight farm onyx or charged lodestones for example, or would it be better on the drop rates if i did onyx a few hrs then charged a few hrs.

Since the last patch I get 1/4 to 1/4 junki/nothing regardless of where I am. I move between zones constantly but for some reason my loot is much worse than before.

Please Explain?!

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I can’t go into specifics to how DR works since it is a safety net system.

That’s unfortunate, because constantly having to try and figure out whether you’ve hit DR or are just experiencing the capriciousness of RNG is one of this game’s more crazy-making, anti-fun frustrations. Two bad systems, RNG and DR, combine to make the game a lot less fun than it would be without them.

Surely some guidelines as to how to avoid it are in order.

For example, does DR persist after you log out overnight in an area in which it has occurred, or do you have to leave that zone and do something else to make it go away? I don’t think the answer to this question is giving away any major secrets and having to stress about whether you are wasting your time or not due to DR is clearly anti-fun.

So, if I do the same 3 dungeon paths two or three times a day, will I get hit by the DR? I’m not sure if I’m understanding this correctly.

The easiest way to control the hyperinflation in this game is with price caps. There is no need for instituting mechanics that clearly do now work to control inflation and which only cause players frustration.

There is currently a price floor on items, in that you cannot sell items on the TP for less than a vendor will pay for them ( though you can still take a loss over selling to a vendor due to the exorbitant TP fees). You can create a similar system for most items where they cannot sell for more than 5 times the vendor price, or just set a fixed maximum price for the item, and leave sellers to compete in the gap between minimum and maximum prices.

With inflation thus controlled, you can then proceed to eliminate wp costs, repair blls, DR and the other anti-player mechanisms and taxes this game is bogged down.

Oreoz.2573:

The loot is crap. Utter crap.

I should NOT be getting blues from The Claw of Jormag.

Hardly ANY of your content is worth the reward anymore.

I understand the need for patience and hard work but the fact is the drop rate on rares and exotics is barely enough to even give people hope. Even masterwork gear in some cases……

You do not have a good balance of risk vs reward.

It is ALL crap nearly ALL the time.

Um it’s the Claw of Jorlag since the guesting patch.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

lekyii.9856:

Thats true, but why now? why only after patch ppl start to complain about the loot!?

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

I used to get good loot from fractals till that first nerf, now I run 40+ fracs and usually walk out with 1-3 rares, I have on occasion walked out with a few more and sometimes an exotic but rarely, if it is RNG then shouldn’t RNG be tweaked and DR be left alone since it seems to be working and RNG seems to be what everyone is complaining about?
Another thing, I don’t think it’s right to buff the mob’s in a dungeon and nerf the drops, if you’re gonna make the dungeon harder, drops and chests should give better rewards. Just my opinion though.

I do a lot of Orr farming at penitent/shelter, all of my characters seem to have developed DR after just 2 or 3 days of farming there, in order to try and shake off the DR, I take my characters other places, I do dungeons occasionally, fractals, dragons etc. with all my characters, but the DR does not seem to ever go away. I use over 100% MF all the time. Is it possible that MF is not working as intended?

Because of the above, I am grateful for the change to chests loot.

Could someone from ANet PLEASE tell us what we are SUPPOSED to be doing to get the maximum or NOT NERFED rewards for our time???

All I see is a long list of doing to much of something means you are wasting your time.

This DR system was built to prevent ‘exploiters’, but has really just made playing the game a huge waste of time for all the rest of us who really have nothing else to do for end game content other than farm SOMETHING to get closer to attaining a legendary weapon.

I park characters in Orr to farm the T6 nodes every day and save on portal costs, but apparently that is exploiting as sparks have seemed to stop dropping lodestones since I started doing this. I do my dailies every day with another character, but that does not seem to reset DR.

WHY DO I HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT DR???

I play a few hours a day and have never had a total of 20 gold in my account, yet I am being punished. Why? Doesn’t this seem BROKEN?

Someone explain this to me, cause I’m getting pretty sick of it.

I have 8 alts, only play 1. Haven’t played the other 7 in a week. Last thing I did on every alt was run cof p1, went to LA, sold all the stuff and put tokens in the bank. I logon a week later, now ALL my alts get 30 tokens for running cof p1 again.

On 1 alt I even ran around queensdale to complete daily. Did some events, mined some copper ore, etc, etc. And I still get 30 tokens!

What’s up with this new DR system?! At least the old system reset after 2 hours. Can someone please explain why I keep getting 30 end reward tokens? It’s obviously DR.

Cuchullain.3104:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I can’t go into specifics to how DR works since it is a safety net system.

That’s unfortunate, because constantly having to try and figure out whether you’ve hit DR or are just experiencing the capriciousness of RNG is one of this game’s more crazy-making, anti-fun frustrations. Two bad systems, RNG and DR, combine to make the game a lot less fun than it would be without them.

Surely some guidelines as to how to avoid it are in order.

For example, does DR persist after you log out overnight in an area in which it has occurred, or do you have to leave that zone and do something else to make it go away? I don’t think the answer to this question is giving away any major secrets and having to stress about whether you are wasting your time or not due to DR is clearly anti-fun.

I agree, once you have hit 80 with 3 or more alts and equipped them in all-exotic/ascended gear, and have played all the dungeons (~ 3-4 months in), there is nothing left to do end-game wise, other than collecting enough resource for “luxury” items such as Volcanus, Vision of the Mists, Legendary Weapons.

Unfortunately, this is not how the game designers of GW2 want us to play the game though.

- Mind-boggling mechanics aimed at discouraging bots hurt legit players.

- A particularly fickly “RNG”

- A ton of hello kitty rewards for hours spent in hard dungeons (yay! 2 blues, 2 greens after 3 hours in Fotm 42 – that’s time well spent! Totally want to do it again, right away!)

- A Diminished Returns system that relies on specifics to be kept secret, rather than a solid design and implementation. (If the DR system was safe for legit players and would certainly hit bots, then there should be no problem in giving all the details, as we won’t be able to cheat or game the system anyways. But alas, it appears that there are huge gaps that can and will be exploited and thus everything is secret.)

So I ask you, if I have achieved everything I want less than half a year into the game, and can not achieve what I do want next, why would I keep on playing the game? Yeah, right, and that’s exactly why I’ve moved on to other games (look at my login logs you will see I’ve gone from playing GW2 for 2+ hours every single night, to playing 45 minutes once a week …)

Hope you guys (devs/designers) get the wakeup call soon.

I went to Cursed Shore today for first time on week, completed only one event, Temple of Grenth, and receive only 378 Karma. Is it normal? Question for developers

The biggest thing ruining GW for me is this DR mechanic, it punishes everyone including the bots.

With DR, the game feels like a build your city type game, where you start an action which will complete in a day etc. and inbetween those times there is not much point in playing as it is not worth your time.
In GW2, you login do 1 hours play then it feels like im wasting my time playing any longer, like it is forcing me to go away and come back later because im not playing the anet approved way – 1 fotm, dailies then logoff, come back next day.
This makes the game very depressing imo and legendaries etc. obviously take much much longer, made all the worse due to the fact that they are the clear goal of most of the people in the game from the start.

Also, surely DR encourages botting, if it affects everyone, why is it a deterrent for bots? Surely more people would want to bot because you have just made everything so much slower and more of a grind?

Also, are there no better altenatives? It seems heavy handed to say the least.
I have read loads of stories of botters (on their sites) that applying for a ticket and playing dumb worked to unban their account, and I even saw someone who had set up a service which would send anet the letters for the botter to unban their account.

Aswell as this, a system which relies entirely on player reports seems a little meagre for the problem, and it is insulting that anet decided to implement DR instead of a proper antibot system, like that of other games.

Because of this, botters dont need to worry about bans, which is why some still do it blatantly – groupbotting, teleporting, playing for 40 hours…

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Syeria.4812:

Anecdotes are worse than useless for trying to track alleged changes in RNG as people will only ever comment when things are going poorly. Of course all your anecdotal evidence is from people having poor luck, they wouldn’t ever bother to comment otherwise. It’s like interviewing people leaving a bar and freaking out that almost everyone you talked to had been drinking.

This pretty much sums things up. People rarely comment when something is working properly, and usually only bring things up in a positive light if there is a discussion about it and they feel provoked to do as such.
For instance, we recently made it possible to join and reconnect in fractals. Prior to that patch there would be a new thread nearly every other day about how bad fractals were because of disconnects, and those threads would be the most popular. But since fixing it there hasn’t been a single thread about it, or any comments. It’s just the general nature of people to happily enjoy things instead of taking the time out of enjoying something to exclaim that you are enjoying something.

Your team just gave us what we all expected from day 1: something working properly. Nothing to thanks about it, did you expect any?
There is still so much to fix (as expected, nothing to thanks to anyone, just core functions for a sane normal mmo) , and we blame about it daily…

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

Sorry what? Who are you talking about, Robert? Who found a precursor on Maw chest? 1 or 2 guys on this planet maybe? Never even barely heard of it. Is it happened maybe? Be serious.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Syeria.4812:

Anecdotes are worse than useless for trying to track alleged changes in RNG as people will only ever comment when things are going poorly. Of course all your anecdotal evidence is from people having poor luck, they wouldn’t ever bother to comment otherwise. It’s like interviewing people leaving a bar and freaking out that almost everyone you talked to had been drinking.

This pretty much sums things up. People rarely comment when something is working properly, and usually only bring things up in a positive light if there is a discussion about it and they feel provoked to do as such.
For instance, we recently made it possible to join and reconnect in fractals. Prior to that patch there would be a new thread nearly every other day about how bad fractals were because of disconnects, and those threads would be the most popular. But since fixing it there hasn’t been a single thread about it, or any comments. It’s just the general nature of people to happily enjoy things instead of taking the time out of enjoying something to exclaim that you are enjoying something.

I know this is old but I really gotta say this. If ppl are not complaining about something means its working fine. How hard is that comprehend. Hell this (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Update-on-Loot-Drops-Investigation/first#post1462956) would not have happened if not for the complaints. Now there seems to be alot of talk about DR and loot tables in fractals. When are u guys gonna take a proper look into it instead of just writing it off as “that’s how RNG works” again.

Running the same content for gold is part of the core essence of what an MMORPG is. It’s what a great number of us enjoy. We get that you’re trying your hardest to make GW2 something special, but if you want to trade your “serious” players for a bunch of daily-loving casual players, you’re doing a great job of it.

After all, those who can farm the gold have no reason to buy gems, right? If this is really the issue (which I’d bet my last dollar it is), just make the game pay-to-play. I’d rather get a good game that is honest about it’s business model than to have my gaming experience repeatedly crapped on so you can squeeze more money out of me.

Don’t be Blizzard.

I am sorry if im posting on an old thread or beating a horse to death but I’ve been searching up DR posts and i need to ask a couple things

1) How the heck does DR work? From all the posts I’ve seen it affects people differently. I had returned to gw2 after not playing for MONTHS. i decided to try to complete my flame legion set. I was able to run CoF path 1 about 6 times getting 60 tokens each. after that i would get 20. Next day at 8:00 EST when i was reset, i was able to do 3 before getting DR. The next day after reset i was only able to get it done ONCE before my DR hit and it hit at a harder and faster rate than before. Was it because i “parked” my character in front of CoF?

2) Why is such a thing even implemented? I understand wanting to keep botters out but has it really helped? If DR is account bound, cant such people just switch accounts? What about having the client check for files that are not supposed to be in the directory or using things like punkbuster or secure vac? All DR has been doing is punishing the actual players more than cheaters. What if i want to spend endless hours farming tokens for armor? Wouldn’t the grind make the acquisition of said items even more special? Hell the items in this game are way too expensive anyways so farming is almost a must. If you want to stop the crazy farm then give the dungeons meaningful rewards, like 100 tokens first run and go from there. to get a chest piece i would need 330 tokens, if i get 60 first run and 20 after each other run it will take 10 runs. or how bout a weapon for 500? T3 cultural is 120g and if your like me who has every bad luck when it comes to loot even with 150+ MF then dugeons are realy the only way to make gold. I would have to run about 120+ dungeons to get t3 cultural (which stat wise sucks anyways).