Guild Wars 2

MrSmiley.1543:

Clark Skinner.4902:

I just don’t understand how it was accidentally changed.

I mean files on my computer don’t change themselves. I need to open them, delete a number, replace it with another number, close and save the document. How does a decrease in salvage rate accidentally happen to code?

game design is way more complicated then that, and changes to one thing can create changes to other, possibly even unrelated things.

When you’re dealing with 10’s of millions of lines of code across a wide range of programmers (they are human after all) I’m sure the odd thing is going to go slightly out of whack. My code is usually 5,000 – 50,000 lines per script and at even that size they can quickly snowball into oblivion due to over complexity.

I don’t think the salvage rate is in a 10,000,000 line text file. Different parts of the game are contained in different files. Good design has it organized this way, as well as organizing mechanics so changing one element doesn’t affect an unrelated element.

Even if the mistake was that someone changed x, and it mistakenly affected y… What was the change to x?

Laughs at all the people who mass bought ectos at 22silver thinking it was gonna keep rising

…Cause I almost did.

John Smith.4610:

As you guys see, we did identify and fix a bug. Thanks to everyone for your help identifying the issue and providing great data for me to start with in my research.

Cheers all,
good luck in the future.

Great job!

Rising Dusk.2408:

IT WAS REAL.

Tinfoil hats for everyone! The conspiracy was founded! Colin, we demand rewards for this debunking!

Good work guys. I followed this thread with a bit of interest. It was nice to see that most people were able to get together on this (the usual suspects didn’t disappoint either) I didn’t contribute since I don’t salvage that often and the stats posts made my head explode but I thought I’d pat everyone on the back.

OliverT.9021:

I think the credibility of these posters just dropped by -1,000 points…

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Changes to important things like salvage rates would be listed in the update notes if they have changed. If it’s not in the update notes, then no changes have been made by the development team.

Vol.5241:

Doomknight.7923:

Vol you are contributing nothing to figuring this out.
If YOU would like to do a 2000+ sample size then, by all means please try it.
Otherwise refrain from criticizing people who are constructively posting on this.
I did one of the initial 100 salvages and later made a video of me doing another 10. (admittedly the 10 was a small sample)
I will NOT be salvaging anything else as of now. MY RATES have been lowered. If you don’t believe me that that is your prerogative.

Actually I’m one of the few voices of reasons here. I’m not to keen on joining the circlejerk that just cause you have a lower ecto chance means Arenanet OBVIOUSLY kitten the rate.

Erasculio.2914:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

I did not get even one single Ecto.

Oh go ahead, nerf the game some more.

Yes, ArenaNet has just nerfed ecto drop rate.

Just like this time.

And this time.

And here, too.

And that other time.

And of course here.

People should read this. Those complaints about having nerfed the salvage rate of ectos is proof that the GW2 community is not reliable when it’s a matter of talking about drop rates.

+1. I HATE the people in this thread, on reddit and especially ingame that didn’t believe me and others when we said that there was something fishy with ectos, JUST BECAUSE they for some reason had good luck with ectos.
Thanks for the thread and all the people that provided the data necessary to back this up. Signing out!
@Regina I won’t get on your case for that one but bugs always slip in – you could not have known. Luckily the situation was resolved.

@Stego
Thank you for your original post, data and videos.

@Geotherma
Thank you for consistently keeping the issue going, , data , videos, and keeping your cool :P

@John Smith
Thanks for listening and fixing the error

Seercull.1495:

OliverT.9021:

I think the credibility of these posters just dropped by -1,000 points…

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Changes to important things like salvage rates would be listed in the update notes if they have changed. If it’s not in the update notes, then no changes have been made by the development team.

Vol.5241:

Doomknight.7923:

Vol you are contributing nothing to figuring this out.
If YOU would like to do a 2000+ sample size then, by all means please try it.
Otherwise refrain from criticizing people who are constructively posting on this.
I did one of the initial 100 salvages and later made a video of me doing another 10. (admittedly the 10 was a small sample)
I will NOT be salvaging anything else as of now. MY RATES have been lowered. If you don’t believe me that that is your prerogative.

Actually I’m one of the few voices of reasons here. I’m not to keen on joining the circlejerk that just cause you have a lower ecto chance means Arenanet OBVIOUSLY kitten the rate.

Erasculio.2914:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

I did not get even one single Ecto.

Oh go ahead, nerf the game some more.

Yes, ArenaNet has just nerfed ecto drop rate.

Just like this time.

And this time.

And here, too.

And that other time.

And of course here.

People should read this. Those complaints about having nerfed the salvage rate of ectos is proof that the GW2 community is not reliable when it’s a matter of talking about drop rates.

+1. I HATE the people in this thread, on reddit and especially ingame that didn’t believe me and others when we said that there was something fishy with ectos, JUST BECAUSE they for some reason had good luck with ectos.
Thanks for the thread and all the people that provided the data necessary to back this up. Signing out!
@Regina I won’t get on your case for that one but bugs always slip in – you could not have known. Luckily the situation was resolved.

you’ll always get a bunch of idiots who spew out a bunch of garbage without reading a single word in the thread. Ignore and move on

Clark Skinner.4902:

I don’t think the salvage rate is in a 10,000,000 line text file. Different parts of the game are contained in different files. Good design has it organized this way, as well as organizing mechanics so changing one element doesn’t affect an unrelated element.

Even if the mistake was that someone changed x, and it mistakenly affected y… What was the change to x?

I didn’t say the salvage rate was that large, I meant their whole code base might very well be, that is my point. You never know how everything will affect certain parts of the code, especially with shared scripts with many dependent variables. To say that it is only 1 number or 1 algorithm that determines the salvage rate is in my opinion incredibly over simplifying the problem and I would guess this is why it took John Smith and his team a day to find and fix.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Changes to important things like salvage rates would be listed in the update notes if they have changed. If it’s not in the update notes, then no changes have been made by the development team.

Well Regina was right, if it was intentional there would have been a patch note. No patch note so wasn’t intentional. All she was missing the word intentional after “no” and before “changes”. She wasn’t blowing us off as much as confirming that it wasn’t by design. But some people will always misconstrue the worse.

Behellagh.1468:

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Changes to important things like salvage rates would be listed in the update notes if they have changed. If it’s not in the update notes, then no changes have been made by the development team.

Well Regina was right, if it was intentional there would have been a patch note. No patch note so wasn’t intentional. All she was missing the word intentional after “no” and before “changes”. She wasn’t blowing us off as much as confirming that it wasn’t by design. But some people will always misconstrue the worse.

Except they have made intentional changes that haven’t appeared in the patch notes before.

As for those who want compensation. Suck it up folks. I was burned too but at what point did you not notice something amiss? Even a sampling of 25 is enough to show that something was off. True it took me 75 to really accept it and I did another 10 after one patch to see if was fixed and then another 75 as documented test cases for the unbelievers out there. Still at 160 I probably lost around 10 gold overall including profit I would have had. Sure my profits are small compared to the big boys but that’s still like 15% of my current net worth.

So if you do 100s upon 100s and not notice something was amiss, too bad. Learn to monitor your production rate and when it derails STOP.

While that’s all well and good in hindsight, when literally everyone in the game is telling you to suck it up because it’s RNG, well…

Make it worst. I got silk scraps from metal scraps (6x) with Basic Salvage Kit

Why Metal Scrap returned me with silk scraps ! At lease copper ore !

Mechanics are all bugged. I didn’t even get a single metal ore or any quality.

Kimhyuna.1035:

Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.

Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.

I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.

They’re not constructive. They help no one.

If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.

Roflmao, ahh the bitter taste of iron.

Some mixed feelings for me here.

- Awesome work by John Smith, and especially on communication. Keeping people informed that you cared about what they say, and that you were taking an interest and working was the good way to proceed. For that, you deserve all of our praises.

- Anet, once again, showing that their work is sloppy, and their game is just a mess. Bugs coming out of nowhere, even when no major changes were done to the game mechanics. This is really disappointing, annoying, and really really worrisome. How long are we gonna have to put up with this ? Every time they release a patch, every doggy time, it takes them up to 3 or 4 additional patches to make it work properly. This is really not a game where I want to put any more penny.

As things are right now, let me tell you straight away, if you were to release an expansion (ie. major content for which you have to pay), that would definitely be the end of it for me.

This had to be said.

Thanks everyone for assisting in this study and I’m glad we got it resolved and thank you very much John Smith for the amazing staff support and communication. I haven’t seen interactions like yours and interest in the game to often in the MMO world.

Thanks to all of the community that was supportive!

Vayne.8563:

Kimhyuna.1035:

Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.

Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.

I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.

They’re not constructive. They help no one.

If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.

You mean to tell us that nobody at anet picked up on this and that the first time they heard of this alleged ‘bug’ was when someone posted on the forums about it?
The same forums where thousands of threads go unnoticed…

Ok, no, you’re probably correct.

I mean, obviously they don’t have the brai…, erm, manpower to keep such an important part of their fragile in-game economy incheck. Everyone is too busy making sure that nothing can be farmed (read: exploited) to care.

So yeah. Agreed. Not a conspiracy.
Just pure and utter incompetence, once again.
:-)

anyone checked to see if the rate is back to normal?

John Smith.4610:

As you guys see, we did identify and fix a bug. Thanks to everyone for your help identifying the issue and providing great data for me to start with in my research.

Cheers all,
good luck in the future.

What’s my compensation for wasting real money items?

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Vayne.8563:

Kimhyuna.1035:

Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.

Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.

I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.

They’re not constructive. They help no one.

If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.

You mean to tell us that nobody at anet picked up on this and that the first time they heard of this alleged ‘bug’ was when someone posted on the forums about it?
The same forums where thousands of threads go unnoticed…

Ok, no, you’re probably correct.

I mean, obviously they don’t have the brai…, erm, manpower to keep such an important part of their fragile in-game economy incheck. Everyone is too busy making sure that nothing can be farmed (read: exploited) to care.

So yeah. Agreed. Not a conspiracy.
Just pure and utter incompetence, once again.
:-)

You obviously know a lot about programming on a large project that changes constantly. There’s no way I could possibly contest what you’ve said (other than pointing out that I’ve yet to find ANY MMO or any large program that doesn’t have similar issues).

It’s so easy to look at other people working and say they don’t do it well. It’s quite a different matter when you’re the one trying to do it.

Lord Kuru.3685:

anyone checked to see if the rate is back to normal?

Yep, salvaged 90 and got a touch better than 0.9 ectos on average with a Master kit.

Vayne.8563:

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Vayne.8563:

Kimhyuna.1035:

Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.

Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.

I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.

They’re not constructive. They help no one.

If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.

You mean to tell us that nobody at anet picked up on this and that the first time they heard of this alleged ‘bug’ was when someone posted on the forums about it?
The same forums where thousands of threads go unnoticed…

Ok, no, you’re probably correct.

I mean, obviously they don’t have the brai…, erm, manpower to keep such an important part of their fragile in-game economy incheck. Everyone is too busy making sure that nothing can be farmed (read: exploited) to care.

So yeah. Agreed. Not a conspiracy.
Just pure and utter incompetence, once again.
:-)

You obviously know a lot about programming on a large project that changes constantly.

Actually, I do.

Not that it matters how little or how much software engineering experience I care to elaborate on in this thread, though. And I don’t know you well enough to share my linkedin profile… just yet.

;-)

Glad to see Anet learning from mistakes of the past in regards of playerbase asking for bug checks.

:p

+1

Makes a person wonder though. The code was somehow changed so was someone messing where they shouldn’t have been messing? Were they thinking of making a change on that section of code under the radar and got caught? How did that particular section of code get changed? A group of code ninjas, trying to corner the ecto market infiltrated the office in the wee hours of the morning and swapped a few numbers?

Oh but we could start some conspiracy theories now! <insert evil grin>

Maybe all the conspiracy theories in the past have been indeed true. Maybe we should apologize to the tinfoil hat wearers. Maybe we should consider that ANet is straight out lying to us.

I’m cool with them finding the fault in the game and fixing it. But there’s little to no recognition of their own failures here. A bug is a bug and may be an accident, but bad or no QA on patches are not. Then, when you have a large playerbase saying there’s something wrong with a section of the game right after a patch, it’s probably not the best idea to say everything is fine, or the game hasn’t been changed at all.

Especially when you get into the “tinfoil hat” style comments from devs, which may not directly say “You’re Crazy! Nothing’s wrong with our game. It’s perfect. PER-FECT!”…they sure do infer it.

I’ve noticed they don’t actually say “sorry”, and if they do, then it’s very few and far between. I’d actually like to see the dev team apologise more often for faults that they could have easily resolved and refused to take the issue seriously when it first arose. They’re happy saying thanks for doing all the hard work, but they won’t say sorry or admit fault. (AFAIK, they never said sorry for the tinfoil-hat comments with perceived loot drops, only “thanks for the evidence”, same goes for a lot of bugged parts in game that have concluded in many great players bundling tons of data with their own time, and effort….they deserve a little more praise here)

Broadicea.8294:

Dumb Woob.9415:

Pretty much this. Without doing the math, I’m willing to bet you could conclude there is some statistically significant difference in ecto salvage yield per item (with alpha being 0.05, for the sake of defining one) with a sample of just 20 or so. This is because we can use the fact that each salvage is an independent and identically distributed event to take advantage of one of the most powerful concepts in inferential statistics: the Central Limit Theorem.

Samples of a couple of thousand are often used to make estimates of things like national-level opinions, but in these cases there are a ton of variables to deal with, making a large sample necessary to minimize sampling error—ensuring that your sample is indeed a representative of the population. Here, though, each rare is exactly the same as all the others (for the purposes of salvaging ectos), meaning there aren’t any other variables to control for in the population—making relatively small samples illustrative of any change (especially if the change is a large one, like how we have observed).

Yup, exactly.

For anyone wanting to learn more about the cool stats stuff described by Dumb Womb and Geotherma, I’d suggest this as a nice starting point: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/probability

I will certainly save this information for the next time someone states blindly that “It’s RNG get over it, your argument is nul” like so often happens when we talk about loot and resources not being what they should be in this title. Thanks.

Thanks John for fixing the problem I’ll definitely be checking that out. I wonder tho if any of the other loot issues were fixed with this problem, namely the reported problems with drops being one side or the other 98% of the time with players who side by side play the same events weekly, or the ongoing battle to actually acquire T6 materials like lodestones for both crafting and legendaries or the RNG involved with the Heavy bags/Orr Box/Laurel crafting bags not dropping anything when opened.

John Smith.4610:

As you guys see, we did identify and fix a bug. Thanks to everyone for your help identifying the issue and providing great data for me to start with in my research.

Cheers all,
good luck in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to investigate and come to a quick resolution.

This was a surprise to me, my salvage returns over the last few days have been fantastic, best ever. lots of 2s and 3s. Hope this doesn’t affect my luck

An Anet official still hasn’t reply, so I would like to kindly ask again: Can people expect a compensation of any sort?

With my limited knowledge of game code and logs and the such, I understand salvaging items is probably a pretty complicated process (Item ID’s get removed and created I gues), but perhaps there are logs of some sort, I don’t know. I know there are TP logs which could indicate how much rares an individual bought, I just don’t know how far back they go in your database.

As I said in my previous post, I’ve lost a substantial amount of money which would take me several weeks to get back. (I’m not good at flipping or other TP tricks which scale with the amount of gold you have) Converted to gems/real world money, I lost about 30 dollars which is like 3 quarters of the price of a new game…

Would be cool to hear an official reply regarding this.

Not sure about that. Last night, I converted and salvaged 11 CoE rare helms, and 2 of them I received 2 Ecto from. I know they changed ecto salvaging, but that was quite awhile ago, if I remember correctly.

Now I can clear my bag of rares

Thanks Mr. Smith

Rendier.8490:

An Anet official still hasn’t reply, so I would like to kindly ask again: Can people expect a compensation of any sort?

With my limited knowledge of game code and logs and the such, I understand salvaging items is probably a pretty complicated process (Item ID’s get removed and created I gues), but perhaps there are logs of some sort, I don’t know. I know there are TP logs which could indicate how much rares an individual bought, I just don’t know how far back they go in your database.

As I said in my previous post, I’ve lost a substantial amount of money which would take me several weeks to get back. (I’m not good at flipping or other TP tricks which scale with the amount of gold you have) Converted to gems/real world money, I lost about 30 dollars which is like 3 quarters of the price of a new game…

Would be cool to hear an official reply regarding this.

They might do some overall thing like they did with Halloween and chests, but i can almost guarantee they won’t be going through logs figuring out who gets what. That would be a ridiculous amount of manpower and i can think of at least 20 different things i’d rather see them address. I dumped a bunch just testing salvages with BLSK’s, i really don’t expect compensation.

Is it fixed though? I just salvaged a bunch of rare armours and got just 1 ecto. From a weapon I just salvaged, I got 3. Is it fixed for weapons but not armour, or did I just get yet a-(!&$!*@-nother run of bad luck?

Well, I for one, am terribly impressed.

I am impressed with the economist’s continual communication and efforts to resolve the problem. Kudos.

I’m impressed that it was “fixed” (or reverted).

I’m impressed that the community identified the issue and took efforts to get it resolved.

I’m impressed that the company that routinely tells us that bugs are hard to find and fix (and that said fixes take extensive testing) was so quickly able to identify this specific bug and fix it (almost as fast as if they knew exactly what it was).

Yes, truly impressed.

What I’m curious about. What behind the scene changes to the “player driven” economy were being attempted that resulted in this bug? Where were those patch notes? Yes, it makes me wonder.

Rendier.8490:

An Anet official still hasn’t reply, so I would like to kindly ask again: Can people expect a compensation of any sort?

I contacted support, their first reply so far was that they won’t even refund the 300 gems I spent on the last stack of BLKs. That was a really minor thing to ask for that should be a given considering I paid real money for it. I’m really not impressed by that attitude towards customers. If something’s free and bugged, well bad luck. But that was a real money transaction.

How did it get “BUGGED” in the first place?..makes you wonder.

Ghettoblade.7962:

How did it get “BUGGED” in the first place?..makes you wonder.

Don’t even.

Remember that at the end of that day, this video game is still a program run by script and code. Anything implemented can have unintended effects towards other areas of the game and it’s very easy for something like this to happen without it being noticed.
All it takes is for one tiny detail in script to trickle down to other areas, IE; A 0 where a 1 should be for example can cause the script to run in a very peculiar manner. Everything can seem fine and look fine, yet something may be amiss.

Iruwen.3164:

Rendier.8490:

An Anet official still hasn’t reply, so I would like to kindly ask again: Can people expect a compensation of any sort?

I contacted support, their first reply so far was that they won’t even refund the 300 gems I spent on the last stack of BLKs. That was a really minor thing to ask for that should be a given considering I paid real money for it. I’m really not impressed by that attitude towards customers. If something’s free and bugged, well bad luck. But that was a real money transaction.

+1 IF what you say is true, why they would reimburse 1 and not all who SUBSTANTIALLY CONTRIBUTED, very easy for ANET to confirm whether you did or not. Hope they reconsider if so.

@Iruwen

The BL kits are still good and do return more ectos than the master. If you knew the problem was being investigated then why buy BL kits or use the ones you were saving? Couldn’t go a day or two without breaking down your supply of rares?

Behellagh.1468:

@Iruwen

The BL kits are still good and do return more ectos than the master. If you knew the problem was being investigated then why buy BL kits or use the ones you were saving? Couldn’t go a day or two without breaking down your supply of rares?

He was running tests to help determine if they were also affecting the Black Lion Salvage Kits. Please read more than one post by that poster to determine this.

I just received a message that they refund used black lion salvage kit for when the bug was active. I guess everyone gets it, since I didnt report for just 1 black lion salvage kit. Even when you received it from a daily achievement, since I received it from a daily. Tnx very much, was not needed, bugs can happen.

Just got an email with a Black Lion Salvage Kit to replace the one I used up while this bug was active. I don’t salvage many rares because I’m way down the curve on ectos salvaged, but I did try salvaging a few when this thread kicked off and I didn’t really notice any difference, so it was nice to receive this.

Anet are now sending out mails (with glitched characters, but that’s besides the point :P) containing BL kits to those people who used them during the glitch. I, myself, got 1 kit back as I assume I used one kit during the glitch.

The problem isn’t the kit however, Anet, it’s the 65-80 gold in ectos I lost. The gesture is nice, and very much appreciated, but does the fact you can trace who used what salvage kit indicate you can also see who salvaged what within a certain time-frame?

An official reply would be appreciated,

Kind regards.

And again thanks for the BL kit, it’s already a nice gesture, though not exactly what I was hoping for…

Wow, definitely wasn’t expecting replacement kits. Thank you very much ANet.

Wonder if I’ll get one. I used a kit, but not enough to run it out of uses.

Sligher.6043:

I just received a message that they refund used black lion salvage kit for when the bug was active. I guess everyone gets it, since I didnt report for just 1 black lion salvage kit. Even when you received it from a daily achievement, since I received it from a daily. Tnx very much, was not needed, bugs can happen.

Made a thread at like the exact same time as this post :P Wish I’d have waited, I would have just posted here.

Rendier.8490:

The problem isn’t the kit however, Anet, it’s the 65-80 gold in ectos I lost. The gesture is nice, and very much appreciated, but does the fact you can trace who used what salvage kit indicate you can also see who salvaged what within a certain time-frame?

I think what they now did is enough. They replaced real money stuff if this was the cause. That you lost 65-80gold is your own mistake. After -5 gold lost(50 items) you could notice strange salvage values. So why salvage more instead of waiting like most people did.