Guild Wars 2

Hello Community,

I do understand that diminishing returns is meant to keep the casual player at least somewhere nearer to the hard core farmer when it comes to money and to allow the casual who can only play once or twice a week (like me) to still be able to buy at least the cheaper shineys.
But when it comes to some special dungeon loot like Fractal skins and armor, Atherpath weapon skins, Precursors and others, there is simply no other way of obtaining it but bad RNG or having lot’s of money. In general RNG is a good way for a publisher to make sure a certain item is existing exactly as often as he wants to and can control the rarity and price this way.

Reality is very different, as RNG is for the individual player itself a very bad mechanic. Some people get two or three of these very rare items in short time while others do not get anything. On a sample size of 10000 players this makes no difference for the developer as there are exactly the amount of items in the markets as he imagined and calculated, but for the individuals this is simply unacceptable. True enough that over a long enough sample size this will normalize, but let’s be honest: Who is going to make 100.000 times Fractals in his lifetime to normalize the statistics and afterwards says “Yeah, RNG is great as I was sure to get this item someday!”.

Therefore I would like to see a Increasing Returns system.
When I run Fractals, I want to have the same drop rate for weapons as now. But after running the same Fractal over and over again without getting something, I would like to see my chances to get a skin or another item to double or triple or tenfold. Reduce the base chance by halve, but increase the basic chance of a gaining a Fractal weapon each time I run the Fractal without getting a weapon.

This is fairer as the system still utilizes RNG and you are still able to calculate the comeplete existing amount of rares per 1000 players, but the items will actually be in the hands of the people who worked for it and less so in the hands of the people who simply got lucky.

What you (ANET monetization guys) have to realize is following:
People do not play as long as would be required to get near to a normalized sample size. The reason is simple: You loot a precursor or two and finish your legendary early. The player looses his incentive as he got used to nice drops but does not get any more drops (rare drops normalize for him) and looses incentive to play. lost player.
The other player never get’s anything, sees all the other player running around in unbelievable expensive stuff and get’s frustrated and looses his incentive to play before his curve of good loot get’s normalized by a streak. Lost player.

Your metrics tell you that in general every player get’s a good item once a month, so why should anybody loose his/her incentive to play. Everything works as intended and you can just not understand what everybody is moarning about. Also, you cannot understand why people leave your game and your income grows thin, because loot seems fine by your calculations but people tell you loot sucks!

I hope you see the error in judgement here.

It’s always been my thought that, if you must gate special loot behind RNG, that there be an additional counter that climbs with the times the special loot didn’t drop and resets when the loot is attained.

Say, for infamous example, precursors. As an assumption
For every exotic rolled on a drop, it has a n/1000 (n=1) chance to be a precursor. Any time that an exotic drops (already a rare chance) and a precursor doesn’t drop, n=n+1. Which would mean every thousandth exotic for a given player is a precursor! Yay.

I think increasing returns need to be in the game. In Diablo, the legendary drop system increases your chances the longer you do not get one. Once you do, it resets.

They could do the same here with fractals.

For example, for every fractal you do, you have an increase of 5% to the base fractal weapon drop rate. Once you acquire it, it will reset.

This penalizes the casual players. If they run content at the same time as hardcore players then they should have the same chance of drops, no matter how many times any of them have run this content before. I know that a lot of people want to be rewarded with virtual rewards for sinking more and more time into a computer game but … just step back and think about it first.

The luck system does already give a loot advantage to experienced players.

Stooperdale.3560:

The luck system does already give a loot advantage to experienced players.

As it rightly should. But right now, it 99.9% completely hedges out people who don’t play 8-hour days on champ trains and dungeon speed runs. A system that scales generic rewards upward gives more casual players a significantly better chance.

Rauderi.8706:

As it rightly should. But right now, it 99.9% completely hedges out people who don’t play 8-hour days on champ trains and dungeon speed runs. A system that scales generic rewards upward gives more casual players a significantly better chance.

Actually, no. The chance increase is across the board, and would apply equally to casuals and hardcores, thus preserving the relative loot gain differences between those groups.

So…Gimme, Gimme, Gimme is a perfectly acceptable request now?

Stooperdale.3560:

This penalizes the casual players. If they run content at the same time as hardcore players then they should have the same chance of drops, no matter how many times any of them have run this content before. I know that a lot of people want to be rewarded with virtual rewards for sinking more and more time into a computer game but … just step back and think about it first.

The luck system does already give a loot advantage to experienced players.

I agree that this system will penalize casual players to a degree. But not more than currently and only if current drop rate would not be changed!
The Diminishing Returns and especially the higher rate of rares you get after having not played for 7 days (numbers are unknown to me, but the system exists) already gives casuals an increase in quantitive rare drops to time played.

What I intended with this system is following:

The current system of RNG is inequal to all players and therefore fair. But the low chance of getting a rare drop (exotic, ascended, some weapon skins) simply requires a large sample size to become a normalized drop. The current system rquires a too big sample size for most players in their available play time and leads to peaks in drops for some players while other players do not get anything as they have been unlucky and been on the other side of the curve.

The IR system should decrease drop peaks and also decrease non drop peaks and by that lead to an earlier normalized sample size than currently, while still keeping the same drop chance for everyone in the long run. This can be assured by an overall smaller drop chance (in relation to the IR) to decrease the quantity of drops/hour. But the increase in drop chance per run will lead to a situation where you are guaranteed to get a drop at some point. Player who play more often will have more drops while players who play less will have less drops, while the drops/hour played stay the same for everyone. The reset of the drop chance will lead to a situation where RNG again will put players with more luck in a better state and these players will loot earlier, reset earlier and get earlier a second item. But these again are normalized with time.

The current system is fairer the longer you play the game in hours, as the chances of loot are so small that casual players may get trapped in a bad luck streak or a good luck streak for as long as they play. This system will lead to more continous drops for everyone and reduce luck or bad luck streaks and is thereore especially good for casual players!

I dont want to sound pessimist, but besides a very small team I don’t think Anet is even working on GW2 anymore, all the modifications they’ve made to he game have been cosmetic. They are probably going to release the LS2 content they made 1-2 years ago while they are developing a new game.

Thus the mega server, to make sure as the population diminishes that they do not waste server bandwidth.

Anyway, they’ve been told about the drop problems since day 1 and never fixed it.

The argument will always be that you can just buy it on the TP.

Sadly that is the reason why I would not believe that something with an impact will ever be done here. If ever I read patch notes about some increased drop chances – all I do is maybe raise my eye brow and think “oh yeah? we’ll see”.

Dye’s from my point of view were the perfect drops. Not too often not too rare and chances were always that one of my characters could use it. Changes made to dyes where good, but in order not to devalue them they are not dropping anymore.

If there was to be a “better” dropchance in general for every player – boy would that devalue many things. I would like it, basically because for my personal taste it would feel better than to buy it (“would you like fries with that?”).

Brother Grimm.5176:

So…Gimme, Gimme, Gimme is a perfectly acceptable request now?

My favorite response! “You’re dissatisfied so clearly you’re a whiny kitten who deserves nothing!”

Fact is that drop rates for these items are so extraordinarily low that you could spend your entire play time in a day trying to get one to no avail; literally zero progress toward the goal. It’s not like you got some tokens, and it takes a lot of those tokens to get the item, so eventually you will get enough tokens. You made no progress toward the goal, and theoretically, this could happen every time you play.

God forbid somebody expect to get tangible results from sinking hours of their time into something they don’t even have to be doing! I mean it’s not like Anet has a vested interested in people continuing to play the game.

Andred.1087:

Brother Grimm.5176:

So…Gimme, Gimme, Gimme is a perfectly acceptable request now?

My favorite response! “You’re dissatisfied so clearly you’re a whiny kitten who deserves nothing!”

Fact is that drop rates for these items are so extraordinarily low that you could spend your entire play time in a day trying to get one to no avail; literally zero progress toward the goal. It’s not like you got some tokens, and it takes a lot of those tokens to get the item, so eventually you will get enough tokens. You made no progress toward the goal, and theoretically, this could happen every time you play.

God forbid somebody expect to get tangible results from sinking hours of their time into something they don’t even have to be doing! I mean it’s not like Anet has a vested interested in people continuing to play the game.

+1
I nearly got my Fractal Frequenter achievement done, which is equal to around 120 runs. Atleast 100 of them where higher than lvl10. The one and only weapon I ever got was the fractal rifle.

Stooperdale.3560:

This penalizes the casual players. If they run content at the same time as hardcore players then they should have the same chance of drops, no matter how many times any of them have run this content before. I know that a lot of people want to be rewarded with virtual rewards for sinking more and more time into a computer game but … just step back and think about it first.

The luck system does already give a loot advantage to experienced players.

The type of increasing returns systems they are talking about help casuals just as much, because they too get increasing returns the more they play.

Another method of increasing returns would be increasing drop rates the higher you get, Even though this is supposed to be in place, mathematically it is not true. Based on data, and time to complete higher level fractals you generally spend less time getting more results by playing lower levels.

Xillllix.3485:

I dont want to sound pessimist, but besides a very small team I don’t think Anet is even working on GW2 anymore, all the modifications they’ve made to he game have been cosmetic. They are probably going to release the LS2 content they made 1-2 years ago while they are developing a new game.

Thus the mega server, to make sure as the population diminishes that they do not waste server bandwidth.

Anyway, they’ve been told about the drop problems since day 1 and never fixed it.

actually, i didnt really think this was likely, but it makes a lot of sense.
they have a lot of employees, but honestly most of the stuff that was released, wasnt worked on by many people.

They are always talking about priorities, and resources, but There is no way that they are using much UI, animator, modeller, charachter design, etc resources on what we have gotten to this date.

There are a few key developers who have disappeared, but are still as far as anyone knows still working for arenanet.

So yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense that a decent amount of arenanet resources are being spent on a new game. This would explain a lot. Still, they still have to keep this game making money/being interesting so maybe they need to hire more people if this is the case.

Well, this is the kind of problem the dungeon tokens were created to solve(ish), running content a bunch of times and never getting a decent drop. So you get tokens every time which eventually add up over numerous runs to a guaranteed “drop” (purchase).

Maybe for fractals the amount of tokens you get could be more random?

The problem I see with the initial suggestion is that it doesn’t really change the dynamic between casual and hardcore players. For example if you add a system that increases your chances of a drop every time you do it, so that say after 10 runs its a 100% chance (just as an example), and the casual does 10 runs over a week and gets one drop and the hardcore does 5 runs a day over the same week and gets 3/4 drops, simply because he’s boosted it up several times over.
The hardcore players will still get more drops, unless you add something like it only increases once a day? Either way, what you have right now is a system where each person gets the same odds (theoretically) at the drop and the hardcore player is simply taking more rolls on the rng dice, thus he gets more drops (well, more chances for drops, which statistically kinda/sorta means more drops)

But even with a token system people who put in more effort get more reward (although that is capped right now at one run per path per….account? per day).
I think one problem is that casuals want to have their total rewards equal that of people who put in 10x or 100x more effort, and that’s not really fair.
Especially because if there were a way to get all that stuff for a tenth of the effort that’s the way everyone would do it, and since they’re doing 10x more than you you still end up with less, unless we cap the rewards so they can’t earn more than you?
Then what’s their incentive to play? Log in, do their daily this and daily that and log off because you can’t make any progress no matter how much effort they put in?

The one thing I can think of that would boost casuals without boosting everyone in general would be like a MF boost that builds up while you’re offline (I’ve actually seen a game use this mechanic, except theirs was also an xp buff, and they eventually changed it so that you had to be logged in but not killing anything to build it up, was kind of counter to the whole idea though)
So if they added something like that, where it builds up while you’re offline and is used up while online.
Not that it comes without issues, I mean its a system that encourages not logging in :P
(Or in the case of the other game to log in and afk for long periods)

It’s a complicated problem, and how do you define “fair” anyway?
Because different people will give you different definitions.
I.E. the difference between everyone getting the same thing and everyone getting the same opportunity at the same thing.

To counter the argument that an increasing-returns system would benefit hardcore players more:

Good. They deserve it. They get rewarded for their time.

More casual players do not get the same reward.

If there’s concern about hardcore players getting more loot, it’s possible to include decreasing and increasing returns at the same time.

For example, the rate of earning specific rare rewards by loot drops could be:
(1c) / 1,000*(1+.05n)
where c is the number of “missed” chances at said loot drop (resetting when that loot is gained),
and n is the number of times that reward or level of reward has dropped (adjusted downward per time iteration/diem/month/annum).

So, say out of 100 loot shots, I get fairly lucky and have 2 exotics drop out of the set, and it’s been 15 boss drops since my last good drop, including the current drop. My odds would be adjusted by:
15/1100, or 1.3%
Similarly, my unlucky friend has gone the entire time without a good drop for an adjustment of:
100/1000 or 10%

Basically, every time a player doesn’t get a drop, he gets a better chance at it the next time the drop applies. If he gets good/specific loot frequently, either by extraordinary luck or lots of logged time gaining loot, it becomes harder, until a specific time frame has passed.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how well the idea would fit with the usual structure of a loot table, but it could very well apply as an additional, hidden Magic Find boost.

Which is also an idea I like….

Piggybacking off my previous post, I wonder if there could be a normalizing system in place that boosts Magic Find for all loot tables (not just non-chest drops).

Similar to the above, with qualifiers explained below:
(b+r) / (r+g)
b: A modifier based on “bad” drops: greys, whites, and blues. For arbitrary values: 4, 2, and 1, respectively.
r: A base rate to blunt the curve. For arbitrary value: 100
g: A modifier based on “good” drops: greens, yellows, exotics, and precursors. For arbitrary values: 1, 10, 100, 1000. (Don’t hate the random numbers, they’re just for examples.)

So, if you’re out there farming centaurs or something and get 20 hooves, some bags, a few low quality weapons, say.. 88 on the B scale,
but somehow manage to net a few greens, then get a pair of rares on a boss run, a 22 on the G scale… About 154% modifier Magic Find.

But then, joy of joys, a precursor drop from the boss chest! That Magic Find modifier just dropped to 16%. Looking pretty grim. After a bout of really unsatisfying drops (which you ignore because YOU GOT A PRECURSOR), you rack up about 128 bad points and call it a day.

So what to do to keep these loot numbers from exploding out of control? Cut both significantly. 50-75%. Or if we needed longer reaching normalization, 30% or less.

What happens to our example, it ups to 43% (on a 75% cut). So a few more lackluster drops later, and things round themselves out.

Needs a little tweaking, but it would certainly help balance out the luck issue, though it does lump treasure qualities together a little much.

Eh, just throwing out ideas.

I completely empathize with your desire for nice things. Casual player or hardcore player, student on summer break playing 8 hours a day or working man providing for a family of four, we all want the rarest, most exclusive, most evasive, most prestigious rewards in the game. However, in a game, the value of rewards are completely relative, especially when these rewards are purely cosmetic. This means that legendary weapons and rare aetherpath weapons are valuable simply because not everyone has them.

One way to create value is with items that not everyone can or will attain. While this concept might be shocking or offensive to some, I would argue that it appeals to a population of players. At the risk of being judged as being psychologically childish, I openly confess that I derive an immense amount of satisfaction from having things in the game that few other people have. If everything in the game was made accessible such that any player can have anything they want by doing whatever they want, there would be nothing for me to set myself apart or feel a special sense of accomplishment for having. I argue that such a game structure, one that makes everything available to everyone, would “lose players” just as much as the current system, if not more. It’s just that the population that would be lost would be the players who are more committed to the game instead of casual players, and more likely to stick with the game in the long run.

That being said, what kind of items would it be ok to make so rare or difficult to attain that not everyone can have one? I think that most people would agree that power or anything that grants combat advantage would be a very BAD choice. It would be terrible if I couldn’t enjoy living story or dungeons with my “casual” friends just because they don’t/can’t invest as much time in the game. Fortunately as it is, a full set of exotic gear is not too outrageously difficult to get, nor is getting to level 80, and the vast majority of the content in the game is fairly accessible to casual and hardcore players alike. What about cosmetics, then? I would argue that making a certain look rare or exclusive would be an extremely wise decision. Those of us who want to set ourselves apart and feel special or feel accomplished have a means of doing so that does not grant us any practical advantage over another player.

The downside is, of course, there will be players (and lots of them) who will not be able to have these exclusive items. On one hand you have players who threaten to quit because they can’t have a certain look that they really want by only spending a couple hours a week in the game. On the other hand, you have players who do every single achievement every single day, farm dungeons, follow the dungeons, and invest a lot of time and effort into the game who would feel cheated if everyone were given the same items they were with little to no effort at all. I dare say that the greater injustice would be to “normalize” all rewards, robbing the second type of player from any sort of distinction.

I guess my primary concern with the “increasing returns” idea is that it would make any reward, no mater how rare, accessible to any player and ultimately decrease it’s value. It’s kind of like the old joke, “if everyone is special, then no one is.”
However, I do think that the game already has systems which implement incremental rewards based on how much you play, and it is completely additive. As you play the game, you accumulate achievement points which will eventually lead to permanent bonuses to gold, karma, experience, and magic find. Magic find increases at a rate much faster than the other rewards even, because you obtain it from salvaging blues and greens which you naturally accumulate from playing the game for any amount. And it works quite well too; the more you play, the more blues and greens you get, and the more/faster your magic find increases. But they do curve it a little, so that hardcore players aren’t leagues and miles above the casual player, because amount of luck required to increase magic find increases exponentially.

I am not sure about the whole increasing returns idea, but certainly the system needs to change. I am also one of those who played since beta and still no precursor.

Add to the discussion, that when a lucky newbie gets a precursor he tends to just salvage it… yes this really happens.

Add to the discussion the inflation of precursors. I finally made 600g to buy it, but it is now going for 1000g. This gives the player the feel of chasing rainbows, which is why many have given up.

Add that they should add new legendaries because the old ones are getting… old, and overly used. Regardless that they want to make them look nice first, sometimes just adding new ones help a lot. Honestly, I am starting to not feel special for having a legendary sunrise because… so does everyone else.

Diba.4682:

Add to the discussion, that when a lucky newbie gets a precursor he tends to just salvage it… yes this really happens.

Yeeeah, they don’t really mark those very well. I’d want big gold text that says PRECURSOR, not a text blurb I’m never bothered to read.
Didn’t salvage it, thankfully, but now I’m kinda stuck with it because I unlocked the skin. =P