Guild Wars 2

Update/Edit: Confirmed bug in the AMA Q&A.

Bleh. I posted this question about an hour before the Lost Shores forum was closed and archived, so let me move it here. Although it uses the Lost Shores event as an example, it’s really about large events in general anyway.

Note: this thread is NOT about event chest rewards.

Something was horribly wrong with our ability to receive kill credit (both XP and a chance of receiving drops from the corpses) during the Lost Shores event. The phase 3 event with the Ancient Karka is the example I’m going to focus on.

I’ve been watching a few recorded streams of the entire event and some of these video makers were receiving kill credit for almost every mob they bothered to attack during the Lost Shores finale on the island. I watched players obtain what seemed to be nearly a level’s worth of XP on kills alone, and obtain so many item drops from corpses that they had to go sell at a vendor mid-event because their inventories were overflowing with treasure. Shells, junk-loot, blues, greens, yellows.. they got it all and they got A LOT of it.

Now, as far as kill credit + loot goes, I usually do very well on normal zone events that require killing hordes of monsters, even amongst a decent sized (a dozen or so) group of players. And I was doing comparable damage (and often better) than these people who were recording the Lost Shore finale streams, with much more consistency, and being more aggressive with my attacking. The players streaming tended to multi-task often (typing in chat, fiddle with game settings, stop to make comments for the video, etc), usually just auto-attacking at these moments and sometimes not bothering to even do that. And yet, they would receive kill credit after kill credit. I watched one streamer fire just a total of TEN attacks against a veteran Karka, almost all the strikes minor auto-attacks, and still receive credit for the kill.

I, on the other hand, walked out of the 3+ hour Lost Shores finale with a total of 6 Karka kills under my belt (verified by the Karka kill achievement counter) and no corpse loot drops . How is that even possible? I would run up to a fresh karka, big or small, and attack it from start till death and still not receive kill credit for my efforts. And I know I wasn’t alone, because there were many, many people complaining about the lack of loot drops and XP during the event.

Now, I was assuming that practically no one was receiving kill credit, and the reason for that is this: according to developer interviews, to receive credit for killing a mob (and thus be rewarded XP and a chance of a loot drop) you have to be responsible for at least 5-10% of the damage required to kill your opponent. Let’s be on the safe/generous side and say 5%. Well, once you have more than 20 players fighting a single opponent, you’re obviously in a situation where some people are guaranteed not to get kill credit no matter how hard they try.

In fact, once you have ~25 people attacking one of these event monsters with large health pools, it is theoretically possible for nobody to get credit for killing the mob if all 25 players are responsible for no more than 4% of the total damage. Throw 50 or 75 players at a champion boss in one of these events and the likelihood of no one receiving XP (or the possibility of a loot drop) increases dramatically. It would be fairly difficult for an individual to be responsible for at least 5% of the damage done to mob (with a large health pool) if you have nearly a hundred other players attacking it also.

And that made sense to me, but what doesn’t make sense are some players making out like total bandits on kill credit while others who were doing comparable damage (or better) were receiving no kill credit during the phase 3 event. Something must be breaking down somewhere in how kill credit is awarded when you have dozens and dozens of players attacking the same monster. I can’t imagine what else could be causing such a huge disparity in awards.

The only obvious difference (I could see) between myself and players receiving tons of kill credit was that they were in a party and I was not. But that shouldn’t have been a factor AT ALL, because credit for kills is not shared between party members. I know this because it is one of the big things that annoy me about grouping. I wish they did because then it would be easier for players to focus on support roles during events, but it doesn’t: if one player in a group is doing all the damage and the other group members are not, only the player doing damage receives credit for the kill. It has always worked that way in this game.

So, if it’s not a party-thing, then what’s the deal? Something is breaking down somewhere. I’m curious to hear other people’s experience on kill credit during the Lost Shores finale.

Your group’s damage is factored into the kill in addition to your contribution. So if everyone else is grouped up and you are alone, it means that your damage potential is essentially 1/5th of everyone else’s. That probably doesn’t account for everything but that would be my best guess as to what you are experiencing.

Animus.6073:

Your group’s damage is factored into the kill in addition to your contribution. So if everyone else is grouped up and you are alone, it means that your damage potential is essentially 1/5th of everyone else’s. That probably doesn’t account for everything but that would be my best guess as to what you are experiencing.

Do you have any proof of this? Guesses are fine, it’s just it would be nice to see something official backing this up.

You can join a group with a friend, have him kill something while you stand there (even if you’re healing/buffing him), and you won’t get kill credit.

In fact, I often do my dailies with a friend and they will not get credit for a kill if they don’t do enough damage to the mob (which happens often if I do most of the damage before the get in range and hit it). In such a scenario they ARE doing damage to the mob that their party member is kiling, yet still not receiving credit because they aren’t doing enough. This often leads to me completing the kill task portion of the daily well before them, despite the fact that we are hunting together.

well i got zero of exp or drops during the entire 3 day event and i participated in all of them. the first 2 events i did on my mesmer and the last one i did on my ranger. it made no difference, there was no loot. even when i was solo exploring the island and solo killing kraka and other critters there. i only got an odd junk loot and a couple of powerful blood after killing tons of them . On the final event, I was even in a party of 5 all the way till we fought ancient kraka and i got kicked off the server, but no exp or loot during the entire event.

For what it’s worth, while I didn’t do the whole sunday event (I left after a bit over an hour), practically every single bit of the weekend event (including the initial assault on LA) I did while grouped with my gf. And over the whole weekend and the course of every event I participated in, I probably got kill credit and xp less than 10 times in total. About the same for my gf.

With the way GW2 does NOT encourage grouping for DEs, I can’t imagine there were a lot of full groups running around, so even if Animus’ theory is correct (which personally I doubt, my experience towards kill credit while grouped is more in a line with Edge’s), we should have seen a lot more xp. And also, it seems very counter-intuitive to me to assume that just because you’re in a group of 5, each single member should get credit for all the damage their whole group did. That would basically multiply everyone’s kill credit by the number of group members.

But then, I’m just speculating here too. All I can say for sure is that I barely got any xp during any of the weekend DEs, apart from the completion rewards.

Tiger Ashante.1792:

On the final event, I was even in a party of 5 all the way till we fought ancient kraka and i got kicked off the server, but no exp or loot during the entire event.

Well, there we go. We can dismiss the party being a factor theory, I guess.

If any one is interested, here’s a stream that shows a good example of heavy kill credit during the event:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/11/19/flameseeker-chronicles-guild-wars-2s-lost-shores-recap/#

During the video (~1:05:00) the column owner/streamer is discussing the loot complaints that are happening in chat and counters that by showing all the drops in her inventory which she’s picked up during the event. She suggest that if people aren’t getting any drops it’s because “they’re not contributing” to the battle. That was pretty annoying hypothesis to hear, honestly, since I worked my tail off during that event and received next to no kill credit during the many hours I was there.

Something is breaking in this area during these massive events and I would like to see it fixed.

Edge.4180:

Animus.6073:

Your group’s damage is factored into the kill in addition to your contribution. So if everyone else is grouped up and you are alone, it means that your damage potential is essentially 1/5th of everyone else’s. That probably doesn’t account for everything but that would be my best guess as to what you are experiencing.

Do you have any proof of this? Guesses are fine, it’s just it would be nice to see something official backing this up.

You can join a group with a friend, have him kill something while you stand there (even if you’re healing/buffing him), and you won’t get kill credit.

In fact, I often do my dailies with a friend and they will not get credit for a kill if they don’t do enough damage to the mob (which happens often if I do most of the damage before the get in range and hit it). In such a scenario they ARE doing damage to the mob that their party member is kiling, yet still not receiving credit because they aren’t doing enough. This often leads to me completing the kill task portion of the daily well before them, despite the fact that we are hunting together.

I don’t have any hard evidence, just some anecdotal evidence. I know it doesn’t matter whether or not you are grouped if you stand there doing nothing and your party does all the work; you will not receive loot in that fashion. However, the threshold of damage you need to output decreases based on your party status (and may be impacted by the number of people in your party). I have no numbers or percentages I can give you but this is what I have noticed.

I noticed I got no kill credit even when i took maybe half a mobs health of before anyone else joined in I assumed they were unlootable no xp mobs, so for the second reinforcements part just auto attacked from the back and stopped caring.

Disappointing that some people had amazing weekends of loot and others get nothing.

This..

Animus.6073:

I don’t have any hard evidence, just some anecdotal evidence. I know it doesn’t matter whether or not you are grouped if you stand there doing nothing and your party does all the work; you will not receive loot in that fashion. However, the threshold of damage you need to output decreases based on your party status (and may be impacted by the number of people in your party). I have no numbers or percentages I can give you but this is what I have noticed.

..is not meshing well with this..

Tiger Ashante.1792:

On the final event, I was even in a party of 5 all the way till we fought ancient kraka and i got kicked off the server, but no exp or loot during the entire event.

..or my own experiences with grouping, frankly. I think we’re barking up the wrong tree with the party excuse/theory.

Like I said, I have no hard evidence to support the theory, but neither does the person you are quoting. How do you know his or her group was playing properly? Was he or she playing properly? Was the event bugged? All I can attest to is that while event farming in Orr, I have seen a noticeable difference in “tagging” ability based on whether or not I was part of a group, with no change to my play.

I believe that each group is treated as an entity, like each individual player who is not grouped, when being evaluated for loot/xp credibility. However, if players in a group do not contribute, they do not get included in the group’s credibility. I know that I am not incorrect in stating that group play increases your chances of “tagging” mobs, that much is confirmed in my mind. Anything beyond that is speculation, unless someone has a definitive answer.

Animus.6073:

Like I said, I have no hard evidence to support the theory, but neither does the person you are quoting. How do you know his or her group was playing properly? Was he or she playing properly? Was the event bugged? All I can attest to is that while event farming in Orr, I have seen a noticeable difference in “tagging” ability based on whether or not I was part of a group, with no change to my play.

I believe that each group is treated as an entity, like each individual player who is not grouped, when being evaluated for loot/xp credibility. However, if players in a group do not contribute, they do not get included in the group’s credibility. I know that I am not incorrect in stating that group play increases your chances of “tagging” mobs, that much is confirmed in my mind. Anything beyond that is speculation, unless someone has a definitive answer.

First, my personal daily observations with grouping mechanics matches his results, where as they don’t match your hypothesis at all. I complained on the forums about the lack of proper group credit in parties during beta more times than I care to count.

Second, if you watch the video I linked above, at one point the streamer ends up reconnecting and lands in a different overflow instance than her party members, and yet even without their presence still continues to receive kill credit fairly effortlessly on her own – while pausing to heal other players, revive other players, mess with UI settings, communicate to people in chat, and continue commentary with her audience.

You’re suggesting people were playing improperly. I have to wonder what you mean by that, because getting credit in GW2 for kills has always been easy to the point of being overly generous. As long as you attacking mobs, it’s fairly simple to obtain credit for their defeat.

It’s really pretty simple. If you must contribute at least 5% of the damage done to a monster to receive credit, it is mathematically impossible for 21 or more players to all obtain credit for the same kill no matter how evenly everyone tries to spread the damage. Above 20 players and someone is guaranteed to be losing out. The fact that some players were managing to get credit without really trying while others were trying as hard as possible and not receiving credit suggests that something is not working right with the mechanics in crowded events like this one. And I can’t just chalk it up to one person doing superior damage over the other because my damage output was easily comparable, if not better, to what is being shown in that video, and certainly much more consistent.

The streamer of that video suggested during the event that people who weren’t getting any drops weren’t likely "contributing” to the battle. As someone who was trying very hard (and getting nothing) it’s difficult not to take offense to that, but at the same time I can understand her making that comment because she was spending more time not attacking than attacking, and yet obtaining credit very easily. So what other conclusion can she be expected to come to (if one is not willing to accept the possibility of a bug)? She was obtaining excellent results with minimal offensive effort, so of course everyone else must just be twiddling their thumbs. :/

More importantly, there is a huge disincentive to play a support role during such zergfests. Why bother bringing Guardian shouts if it lowers the chance of receiving credit? Why bother reviving people if it might cut into your damage %? Better to keep auto-attacking than try to revive all the people steamrolled by the Veteran Karkas to prevent a wipe.

There needs to be a better way of gauging contribution than simply damage %. It makes sense in a normal setting where someone who lightly wanded a Champion once during the entire encounter should not benefit from the kill, but when you spend minutes actively trying to kill something and still don’t receive credit? Very demoralizing. The event pretty much turned into Whack-a-Young-Karka for me — jumping on them before they disintegrated to the massive zerg-fire so that I’d at least receive a chance at something.

Always be in a group when doing large scale events.

I had a theory that the amount of people that could tag a mob was actually capped at a fixed amount. In addition to this, if you were partied with four other people and one of your party members hit an enemy, it would tag that enemy with all five names. At that point, as long as you did at least 1 point of damage to it, you would get exp/loot. Of course, this is untested, but it would explain why my slow attacking ranger was having trouble even getting a kill at the camp north of pentinent path before the bot bans and invulnerability removal, even when auto-attacking the veteran spawn for more than 5% of its life, but was getting kills all day at the adjacent camp because the spawns were more spread out.

I think Lord Yoshi has a point. I’m not sure though whether it’s a cap on players that can tag a mob or maybe only when no players meet the 5% that the first few players that tagged the mob get credit.

Reminds me of an old web-based game that always resolved grouped attacks in alphabetical order. If you chose a playername starting with P-Z, your allies would often kill the target before you did any damage. On the other hand, if your name started with an A, you’d be the one to get retaliation shots in your face.

I noticed this problem too during the weekend event, but also something even more odd. The sigil I had equipped on my weapon, which heals every time you kill an enemy, was registering kills by activating and healing me, but my exp and kill count for the karka achievement were not, even when I got the first hit on an enemy and took out a chunk of health before anyone else joined in.

Lord Yoshi.6738:

I had a theory that the amount of people that could tag a mob was actually capped at a fixed amount. In addition to this, if you were partied with four other people and one of your party members hit an enemy, it would tag that enemy with all five names. At that point, as long as you did at least 1 point of damage to it, you would get exp/loot. Of course, this is untested, but it would explain why my slow attacking ranger was having trouble even getting a kill at the camp north of pentinent path before the bot bans and invulnerability removal, even when auto-attacking the veteran spawn for more than 5% of its life, but was getting kills all day at the adjacent camp because the spawns were more spread out.

There may be a cap (and it would be nice if that were explained to us from an official source).

However, I can say that (real example) if you are in a party of two and one player in the party hits the mob and does 99% of the damage, and the other player in the party hits the mob and only does 1% of the damage, the latter player does not get kill credit when the mob dies.

This is a problem I have to be careful to avoid (but frequently run into) every evening when doing dailies with my friend. Many times I have to ask “did you get credit for that?” when I notice they began attacking late, at which point the response is usually “I didn’t see an XP message, let me check.. no (sigh)”. It’s easy to tell during daily achievement farming because of the two kill achievement counters that are a part of the daily.

I got 5 drops, all crafting material, while being in a full party, for 2.5 hours of killing Kraka during the event. Excluding the final chest.

I’m very disappointed in this.

Edge.4180:

it’s really about large events in general anyway.

Something was horribly wrong with our ability to receive kill credit (both XP and a chance of receiving drops from the corpses)

Thanks for your detailed post! What you describe takes most of the fun out of well populated dynamic events for me currently.

I imagine if you mostly farm events for karma it is not an issue. But the game already seems extremely reluctant to support players with a most basic gold income in PvE at max level, compared to other MMOs. It seems to me you have to go out of your way with gearing for magic find and speccing for some form of efficient AoE tagging build, in order to produce a steady income from drops in events.

Those problems are kind of cancelling out the cooperative PvE aspect the game is supposed to have, so I hope the devs can take a serious look at it soon.

EDIT: Forgot to add, I got 1-3 drops from the Ancient Karka event, apart for the chest. That event was nearly 3 hours of button mashing on my overflow, I maybe only AFKed for about 10-15 minutes max.

scabies.3246:

I got 5 drops, all crafting material, while being in a full party, for 2.5 hours of killing Kraka during the event. Excluding the final chest.

I’m very disappointed in this.

And yet, if you watch the video in the link below, you will see the host who (like you) is in a full party during the final event and received so many drops that she was forced to detour to a vendor to clear her bags for more loot partway through the event. And I would argue that she spends more time doing things other than attacking than actually attacking.

Something is off here.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/11/19/flameseeker-chronicles-guild-wars-2s-lost-shores-recap/

Edge,

Where can I find the interview for this:

“Now, I was assuming that practically no one was receiving kill credit, and the reason for that is this: according to developer interviews, to receive credit for killing a mob (and thus be rewarded XP and a chance of a loot drop) you have to be responsible for at least 5-10% of the damage required to kill your opponent

I knew I had to do some damage but was unaware there was a percentage involved.

I had the same tagging problem in both of phase 1 and phase 2.

It was compounded by the number of attacks I had that were evaded (it’s a giant bug barely moving – it certainly doesn’t appear to be evading).

In addition a significant number were registering as obstructed, even though there were no visible objects, and again with Veteran/Champion mobs the things are towering overhead. In both of those phases I’d estimate I got credit for about 20% of the mobs I spent significant time attacking.

The theory in my guild was that grouping into a party would help, but I didn’t group until after we’d split away from the zerg for other events, so I can’t say whether it would have worked in the zerg.

Mala.3861:

Edge,

Where can I find the interview for this:

“Now, I was assuming that practically no one was receiving kill credit, and the reason for that is this: according to developer interviews, to receive credit for killing a mob (and thus be rewarded XP and a chance of a loot drop) you have to be responsible for at least 5-10% of the damage required to kill your opponent

I knew I had to do some damage but was unaware there was a percentage involved.

http://www.incgamers.com/2011/06/interview-designing-guild-wars-2-part-2

Thank you kindly.

Edge.4180:

Mala.3861:

Edge,

Where can I find the interview for this:

“Now, I was assuming that practically no one was receiving kill credit, and the reason for that is this: according to developer interviews, to receive credit for killing a mob (and thus be rewarded XP and a chance of a loot drop) you have to be responsible for at least 5-10% of the damage required to kill your opponent

I knew I had to do some damage but was unaware there was a percentage involved.

http://www.incgamers.com/2011/06/interview-designing-guild-wars-2-part-2

Yeah I wondered the same thing during the event – how come I was not getting any XP from killing the larger Karka? So basically what this implies is that if 25 or more people pummel the same Veteran Karka with identical DPS (<4% damage each) none of them will get XP and loot for their efforts. Seems pointless to me. I can see why that mechanism exists (to prevent XP farming/free loading) but I think the reward should decay more smoothly with damage percentage, particularly for these zerg events.

My first time through the event I received two blues and two karka shells. That’s it. It was one of the very first runs so it was PACKED with people and the zerg was massive.

Second time, it was a tad better but not much (still early in the day).

Third time, although I was only able to complete the explosives part of the chain (before even reaching the Ancient Karka) due to the server exploding, I had already collected nearly 100x the loot as my previous two runs combined. There were very few people (like two dozen) and no lag at all. Every dead body was lootable and the bags reflected that. I am so bummed that chain got cut off early… I can only imagine how much I could have made.

I remember thinking when they first removed the vendor who sold the Ancient Karta ring for 1000 shells ‘wow, that is stupid, no one could have gotten that many during just the event’, then thinking… ‘wait, I guess it was possible after all’.

That’s how much of a difference in loot there was.

Yes, it is broken.

Well, for those of us frustrated by this, this specific problem was brought up during the AMA with Chris Whitesite last night and in regards to the problem people were having obtaining kill credit/xp/drops he stated “This was a bug and was not intended. The bug will be fixed moving forward.”.

So, that’s good to finally see. Although, why not just post that information here on the forums days ago, I have no idea. It doesn’t take much time to type “it’s a bug, fixing it”. :P

Hopefully it really will be fixed before the next large event. It’d be interesting to hear the details of what exactly was breaking down where, but I doubt we’ll ever know the specifics.

I participated in the entire 3 day event as well and barely got any drops, but I wasn’t grouped. My guildies who were in groups of 5 on other overflows, got tons of loot.

If I’m farming Plix solo, I barely get any drops. If I’m in a group of 5, my bags are usually completely full after a single Plix chain.

In WvW, I got much fewer badges solo than when I’m in a group.