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.