Guild Wars 2

I’ve been doing fractals since they came out. Well not in the last 2-3 months, because of … life, but still. I have a lot of wonderful fractal weapon skins! Like dagger, trident, staff. Too bad I am a warrior, and I am not Saurfang to be able to equip wands. Why is that? I want a greatsword skin. Almost 1.5 years of farming fractals, and my efforts were not rewarded. Thank you!

Also, not to mention, today I worked hard in Frac 50 for my daily chest and guess what? I got a power outage when the Jade Maw was at 20%, and by the time I came back, the party already killed it, and left. My question is, why doesn’t the game allow me to collect WHAT I WORKED FOR even if I get a DC? I want the loot that ir rightfully mine. I demand it. This makes me want to abandon the whole game. Maybe I just go and chose another one that firstly rewards my efforts, and secondly, has some indulgance when it comes to situations where the player is dropped from the game for reasons out of their influence.

There is a post on the BLTC forum page about RNG in general. It was started by a dev who has not since contributed to it, nevertheless it is interesting to see where his thoughts are at in the first post.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/RNG-as-a-concept-Discuss/first#post4488821

In short, the devs know that players have an issue with this style of thing, but haven’t announced how or if they are going to fix it (presumably because they haven’t decided yet).

FWIW I think the dungeon tokens system is far preferable to the systems forthey later adopted in FotM and Aetherpath of TA.

The best solution as things stand I think would be to add a Mystic Forge recipe where you throw in 3 fractal weapons and a rare weapon of the variety of fractal weapon you want.

Silmar Alech.4305:

There are 19 different weapons. Even if you get a fractal weapon drop, which is rare by itself, the probability that you get the one skin you desire is 1/19 = 0.052. That’s 5.2 percent.

Given a probability of 9 percent of a skin drop (according to the research sheet, doing mostly 40+ and doing a lower occasionally) you have a probability of 0.052*0.09=0.0047 or 0.47 percent of a desired skin drop every fractal run.

If you do more math and compute the combined probability with multiple runs combined, you get this table:
(I computed the probability for dropping one or more desired items after n runs that in itself has a probability of 0.0047. The formula is p = 1 – (1-0.0047)^n

tries / probability with n tries
1 0,47%
5 2,35%
10 4,64%
15 6,87%
20 9,06%
25 11,19%
30 13,28%
35 15,31%
40 17,30%
45 19,24%
50 21,13%
55 22,98%
60 24,79%
65 26,55%
70 28,28%
75 29,96%
80 31,60%
85 33,21%
90 34,78%
95 36,31%
100 37,80%
105 39,26%
110 40,68%
115 42,08%
120 43,43%
125 44,76%
130 46,06%
135 47,32%
140 48,56%
145 49,77%
150 50,94%
155 52,10%
160 53,22%
165 54,32%

That means, you have to do 150 fractal runs at about level 40+ to get a fair chance of about 50:50 that you got your desired fractal skin somewhere within these 150 runs. Only 150 fractal full runs! In these 150 runs, you accumulate about 0.09*150 = 13.5 skins in total. And remember that’s only one half. Only half of all people that do 150 runs get the desired skin. At 150 is only the 50% mark, not a 100% mark, which doesn’t exist. And it tells only about the number of runs since Oct 21 2014 – with the broken probability of about 4% since the “fractured” update, your expected runs were more than doubled (about 330 for >50%)

I tried to compute the expected number of runs to get all 19 different skins with a probability of about 50%, but my school and university math is unfortunately too long ago to remember which formulas could be used for this. It’s so difficult to pick the correct one – even in school I often picked the wrong ones and forfeit the better marks.

This is confirmed. He has the theoretical data and I can tell you I did the experimental part.

That’s pretty much around what I had to do to get my longbow – although I feel it was a bit more anyway.

An interesting development of late is that we may have acknowledgement that the Fractal Weapon collection is bugged. (Gaile has it listed along with 3 other broken collections, but unlike the other 3, the Fractals collection was never announced and only discovered by accident by some people who already had unlocked Fractal skins.)

If this is true, and it is fixed in an upcoming patch, then I expect there to be a HUGE outcry over the insane RNG needed to acquire the specific Fractal Weapon you’re after, and we could see ANet introduce a different acquisition system, such as through trading Pristine Relics, or perhaps the introduction of the Fractal Weapon Box at higher levels.

Fingers crossed this happens. I want my Fractal Sword!

I pray for your wish to come true, Zaxares! I myself want to have my fractal dagger eventually.

You can have the two of mine iris =) they dropped in the beginning of time in the fractal cycle, i wore them proudly and many noobs were slain by it’s blades.

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

You can have the two of mine iris =) they dropped in the beginning of time in the fractal cycle, i wore them proudly and many noobs were slain by it’s blades.

Did you just pick a fight with me? Wanna be slain under my incinerator blade or get clubbed to a muddy pulp by my shiny bifrost?

Well i don’t think you stand a chance, my lvl 2 guardian will just wave of wrath you with her bifrost and you will fall over.

Phil.7903:

Hello, I am new player to this game. I run levels 50, 40, 30 everyday. I am very disappointed about droprate of fractal weapons. Everytime I got a weapon, it was either speargun(5x) or torch(3x). It would be cool if I could exchange those for other weapons I want. I think this would make me happier and also buy more gems.

I dont know if you are trolling or not but if you are new to the game , you can be lucky that you allready dropped 8 fractal weapons. People in my guild with under 500 fractal runs got more then 8 weapons and people with >500 like me got 3 – seems legit

This demonstrates why Anet’s use of simple low static fixed percentage drop rates is so old-school. In fractals it should be based upon the tier level of the fractal you run. Higher tiers have higher dropped percentages (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50) per item type (weapon, armor, ring).

In fact, the more you play the more you be rewarded. It surprises me how much the developers worry so much about economy when their approach to drops is so much like communistic based economies of equating all participants rewards as being an equaled low fix percentage. Anet should change the drop formula to be based upon player hours in game (simple example would be that every 1000 hrs in game time would double your chances). I would think they would have a more “expanded” population baseline of daily players.

curtegg.5216:

This demonstrates why Anet’s use of simple low static fixed percentage drop rates is so old-school. In fractals it should be based upon the tier level of the fractal you run. Higher tiers have higher dropped percentages (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50) per item type (weapon, armor, ring).

This is how drops work in fractals. The percentage change isn’t too great though. And as far as we know the tonic rate is less than 1 in 1k.

I ran for 2 years to get the fractal sword, I just finally got it 3 weeks ago, and I got 2 more drop in the next 5 fracs after that. unreal.

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Please nerf necros.

spoj.9672:

Please nerf necros.

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

KingJD.9687:

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

Ahahah

I wish fotm 50 – took 20-25 mins.. (It may do for organised guild runs) – but I can assure you the average pug run is still awful.

Zerk pug meta may take between 30-45 mins (good run).
PHIW – 1 to 2 hrs

And I’m not kidding – this is based on painful experience.

KingJD.9687:

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
ty

Veydar.5017:

KingJD.9687:

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
ty

So 22,5 minutes as average value?

Lendruil.9061:

Veydar.5017:

KingJD.9687:

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
ty

So 22,5 minutes as average value?

y u do dis? :[

5/10 for sarcasm though

Lendruil.9061:

Veydar.5017:

KingJD.9687:

Lendruil.9061:

I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.

Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
ty

So 22,5 minutes as average value?

bonus points for wearing nomads

If ur running 25 min 50s on a regular basis then u have a very good group. The average fractal run, not even just the average player, isn’t gonna break 35 very often.

you completely missed what they were referencing

Do people factor in rolling swamp and waiting for people to come in? That alone can take 5-10minutes from my experience.

Of course not. That would mean they cant brag. :>

EcoRI.9273:

Do people factor in rolling swamp and waiting for people to come in? That alone can take 5-10minutes from my experience.

I think most people work on that while they form the party, so I mean it’s there, but it’s not always time you’d actually have been doing a different fractal, if that makes sense.