Guild Wars 2

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Perhaps Anet didn’t intend for some accounts to be flagged with a higher reward rate, but it does seem suspicious how certain accounts have win streaks that push the boundary of credibility.

If you know of a specific account which — going forward — continues to get good drops at unexpectedly high rates, that is solid evidence that there is a problem.

If you know of a specific account which — looking backwards — had an incredible string of luck, that’s solid evidence that RNG is implemented correctly. Random results included surprisingly long strings of good and bad luck.

I also think it’s possible that there’s some bonus in loot tables for accounts without recent activity — but I have not found any solid evidence for this. I tried to test it out with some of my storage accounts, but did not see (looking forward) unexpected strings of good rolls continuing. This also doesn’t disprove it (perhaps I didn’t wait long enough), but it certainly doesn’t support it.

I have had good rolls after going away for a while and coming back, which is why I wanted to test it; and what I hear from people new accounts makes me suspect the same (e.g. 50 blk → 3 nodes, a perm merchant, and 10 black lion tickets) -- but that’s just what was said in chat, and all the data I have is within what you’d expect from a correctly implemented RNG.

I have talked with someone who claimed to have ~7 drops of The Legend (low AP, and after I explained that my staff was Bifrost, the next time I saw him he had that). The streak of luck he described would exceed what I think is plausible from properly implemented RNG, but I only have his word, and for various reasons I’m not sure if he was saying that just to get attention.

I’ve also talked with someone who forges a lot of precursors, and they seems to think that their account is blessed with good luck … but again, I don’t have sufficient data to actually support any assertions based on this.

Yes, they are actively altering individual player coding to impact droprates while favoring new players.
OR.. Maybe its just RNG? Like all other games that have any form of Random Number Generator (Rolls, drops etc…)
Of course, conspiracy theories are much more fun!

Maybe your karma sucks in real life and you’re being punished for it? Better grind some karma!

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Had to hunt it down but here we go.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-data-about-perceived-strange-drop-behavior-here/first

I’d have to hunt for the six or seven threads that prompted Anet to make that one, but hey after 31 pages.

“Yeah guys turns out not all our loot rules were working right.”

1st post in the thread CREATED by a dev:

We’ve seen reports from players questioning the randomness of the drop mechanisms in GW2 and in particular asking if it’s been changed recently. This is not the case and we don’t think that the randomness mechanism is misbehaving, but we’re running some data to be sure there isn’t anything unexpected going on. So far nothing shows anything suspicious but we’ll keep gathering data and analyzing it.

Bold is mine. So in the first post in the thread, they’ve said the system shouldn’t work like that, they’ve not gotten enough concrete proof to indicate that something’s off, but they’re running tests anyway. And the tests hadn’t found anything, but that they were going to continue to gather data and analyze it.

That sounds like they didn’t think there was an issue, but were looking into it anyway with their mass simulations.

It should also be noted that the post was posted 3 days before Christmas, so that meant more employees were taking holiday vacations than during a normal period. About 3 and a half weeks later, Colin posts that they’re still looking into the issue and that it’s mostly a manual process and they’re also simultaneously trying to develop an automated system.

No dev post, but based on posts in the thread, a patch was released 12 days after Colin’s post that seemed to have code to fix the problem, which means in about 1 month from when they posted for more info on the problem, they had released a possible fix.

On February 2nd, they determined that none of the patches since November had broken anything related to the loot. But that they were going to go and look at every single loot table to make sure nothing funky was going on there. And that claiming it was the November Lost Shores patch or a later patch that did it was a conspiracy.

That’s not a “there’s no problem”, that’s a “the problem is not X, we’re looking into Y now.”

16 days later, Colin posted that a patch coming out later that month would have a fix to the problem as they finally located the problem and verified that everyone who had reported issues fit the condition of the problem.

So it was more like 3-4 months, but ANet got enough data to show that there might be an issue around 1 month.

Malindor.1089:

Maybe your karma sucks in real life and you’re being punished for it? Better grind some karma!

As long as we’re in conspiracy land anyway, this is one of the better ones. I tend to get better loot when I’m being a better person as opposed to a fiendish one.

Some days are better than others.

tl;dr all ANet said was the people weren’t always getting as much loot as ANet had intended. There’s nothing at all to support the idea that some accounts are flagged for better loot.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

I honestly believe that some accounts are flagged for better drops that others upon creation.

They say they didn’t do it that way, but it also took six months of proof being posted daily before they admitted to a bug in people being flagged for loot.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Had to hunt it down but here we go.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-data-about-perceived-strange-drop-behavior-here/first

I’d have to hunt for the six or seven threads that prompted Anet to make that one, but hey after 31 pages.

“Yeah guys turns out not all our loot rules were working right.”

What they said was: sometimes people did not get any drops when they should have. ANet didn’t say that the distribution of what dropped was off.

In effect, the system that was designed to give 800 drops from 1,000 kills was only giving 780 drops instead — narrow set of circumstances, not a problem affecting every drop and not affect the types of things that dropped. It was a tricky bug, so they weren’t forced to admit anything — they had to investigate to find the specific issue and make appropriate adjustments.

Wow, you got 4 percusor???

im at 16k AP and i have only obtained ONE percusor, countless run of fractal at lvl 50 and i only have obtain one stupid fractal Spear Gun skin!

Onyxia also deep breaths more on patch days.

Not using that thread as proof that drops are linked to accounts, never even claimed that it proved that.

What it does prove however is at least once in the past, when the player base has experienced something off with drops, Anet first told them they were imagining it, that everything was working as intended. It turned out upon investigation that the player bases feelings and concerns on the issue were indeed valid.

Proof that some accounts are lucky?

No, but an indicator that despite Anet saying ‘working as intended’ they could be wrong if they bother to check it.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Not using that thread as proof that drops are linked to accounts, never even claimed that it proved that.

What it does prove however is at least once in the past, when the player base has experienced something off with drops, Anet first told them they were imagining it, that everything was working as intended. It turned out upon investigation that the player bases feelings and concerns on the issue were indeed valid.

Proof that some accounts are lucky?

No, but an indicator that despite Anet saying ‘working as intended’ they could be wrong if they bother to check it.

You dont get it.

Player base claimed DR is off, Anet said no. Anet checked nonetheless and nothing was wrong with DR but while checking, they discovered A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ISSUE with loot from events.

They also made many statements in the past about DR and lucky accounts, even checking indivual accounts for wrong DR or unlucky streaks but nothing except some outliers ever surfaced.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Ayrilana.1396:

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Ayrilana.1396:

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Had to hunt it down but here we go.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-data-about-perceived-strange-drop-behavior-here/first

I’d have to hunt for the six or seven threads that prompted Anet to make that one, but hey after 31 pages.

“Yeah guys turns out not all our loot rules were working right.”

Not applicable since the issue wasn’t tied to specific accounts. Anybody could have been affected by that.

“The rules by which you qualify for credit for an event or for experience when killing a mob are different rules than those used to help determine if you qualify for loot. Some of these were set up to be unintentionally restrictive, and as such you could kill a creature with a lot of health (this was most noticeable on champions) and not qualify for loot, despite qualifying for all other credit.”

It had nothing to do with the individual accounts.

Given that I was using it as an example where Anet has told us one thing, when the truth has been different, so yeah its applicable.

Perhaps Anet didn’t intend for some accounts to be flagged with a higher reward rate, but it does seem suspicious how certain accounts have win streaks that push the boundary of credibility.

When a ‘supposedly random’ computer system starts giving the same account streaks of high rewards, then maybe its time to have a check and make sure the code is working right.

Read the actual thread rather than pick and choose what you want. The issue was that there were two different rule sets for event credit and loot credit. This has absolutely nothing to do with your claim that some accounts are flagged upon creation.

I am going to have to assume that English isn’t your first language, since you can’t grasp the idea of comparing a parties action on two related subjects, when its written quite plainly, so I will try again.

1.Anet said accounts have nothing to do with rewards, lucky accounts are just player perception.

2.Anet also said when people raised the issue that they were not getting drops, that it was just player perception.

They were wrong about 2 when they checked, so since they have never bothered to check 1, how are we supposed to believe them when they say there are no ‘lucky accounts’

Here is why this is wrong, because I feel like no one here is effectively explaining it to you.

The problem that you linked was in a game wide process not functioning as intended in a specific instance. Anyone could be affected by it if they interacted with that instance.

What you are proposing is a function that does not exist. In order for accounts to be “flagged for better loot” there would need to be a better loot flag. It’s something they would have had to make in the first place and there is no reason for them to have ever done that, let alone to suspect they might have. There is no situation in which you are guaranteed an artificially improved loot chance in the game. If there was then you could point at that process and say that’s probably what is stuck on. Without a better loot flag there is no way for anyone to have accidentally tripped it on character/account creation.

It is an absurd notion.

Cactus Brawler.7415:

Not using that thread as proof that drops are linked to accounts, never even claimed that it proved that.

What it does prove however is at least once in the past, when the player base has experienced something off with drops, Anet first told them they were imagining it, that everything was working as intended. It turned out upon investigation that the player bases feelings and concerns on the issue were indeed valid.

Proof that some accounts are lucky?

No, but an indicator that despite Anet saying ‘working as intended’ they could be wrong if they bother to check it.

You didn’t read my post did you? And I mean really read it.

Because it was clear that ANet was onto investigating the issue within 1 month of the issue starting (and one month is reasonable, takes players time to realize the problem isn’t just a case of a bad streak with RNG). And it took them 3 months after that to find the problem AND fix it. And they posted at least once per month with progress updates. So the thread you posted does not support your claim.