Guild Wars 2

The MF post is pretty much a flame war at this point, so I wanted to try to take as much of an objective tact as possible with it here in hopes to generate real support/discussion.

Regardless of your personal feelings on MF (I like it because I find it to be an interesting and flavorful choice), there is only one logical deduction to make about it in this context:

It is a selfish stat. It is important to note that this is not an attack against players that use it, rather a recognition that it has a flawed design. It is the only stat in the game that forces you to sacrifice attributes that help your whole group to get benefits that apply only to yourself. It really doesn’t matter how much of a practical issue it does or doesn’t cause in a given dungeon run or on a specific player versus other players, etc. All of that is irrelevant and not really worth discussing.

What is also important to note is that many players like it pretty much exactly the way it is, and have a lot invested in it, so simply removing it or making very dramatic changes to it in the context of gear/itemization is not an optimal solution.

With that in mind, in the other thread, I kept advocating a very simple solution – to keep MF gear/itemization exactly as it is now, except that when you’re in a party the MF of the whole group is averaged for each player, so that instead of one person having 100% and 4 people having 0%, all 5 would now have 20%.

However, some people in that thread argued that that was somewhat unfair because you’d see very little personal advantage to wearing MF over other stats in a party of people that didn’t, that you’d be making too big of a sacrifice to grant others too much of a benefit.

So what I’m proposing here is a modification of that idea – instead of calculating a simple average and granting it equally to all party members, we hybridize the approach- each player has a percentage (say 50%) of their own total MF value applied as a baseline, and then receives a party bonus (50% of the party’s average) on top of that. So in the scenario above, instead of everyone having 20%, you’d have 60% and everyone else would have 10%. The values above are arbitrary, you could go anywhere from a 20/80 split to a 80/20 split probably.

This would essentially mean that you’re sharing your MF with the group, but it isn’t totally ‘socialized’ and you still see somewhat disproportionate benefit from gearing for MF.

Thoughts?

I would say just put a buff icon on the person indicating how much MF they have when you are in a party with them, and be done with the whole thing.

Lambent.6375:

I would say just put a buff icon on the person indicating how much MF they have when you are in a party with them, and be done with the whole thing.

That doesn’t really fix anything though, it just invites more bullying and elitism.

Einlanzer.1627:

Lambent.6375:

I would say just put a buff icon on the person indicating how much MF they have when you are in a party with them, and be done with the whole thing.

That doesn’t really fix anything though, it just invites more bullying and elitism.

And opens the door to gear inspection, because “if we can see this one thing, why not xyz?” And gear inspection is bad (at least when it’s not easily, readily changeable like PvP in GW1, where PvP characters could change their gear whenever they wanted as long as they weren’t in a game).

Einlanzer.1627:

Lambent.6375:

I would say just put a buff icon on the person indicating how much MF they have when you are in a party with them, and be done with the whole thing.

That doesn’t really fix anything though, it just invites more bullying and elitism.

No matter what you do, there is always going to be elitism. If it’s not MF, it would be something else.
Your armor is dyed red, that agros more mobs.
Your name is to long/difficult to pronounce to it hinders team play.
Your toon is too large/small so it hinders the other players.
Etc, etc, etc.
If there is something to use to exclude a section of the player base, some one will find it and if it does not exist, they will make one up.

Yeah that thread is ridiculous, I had to stop reading all the trash in there.. they should just close it.

I don’t think MF has a place in the game at all, it’s an MMO… but if it must remain then your suggestion sounds ok I guess, only one person needs to hamper themselves in order to benefit the whole team but that would bring up the obvious “but I want my MF to be my MINE”.

I would personally just remove it from all gear and double/triple the amount given on runes. It would simplify things a lot and you won’t be sacrificing too much. I do run a full set in open world but I don’t enjoy doing it one bit.

Einlanzer.1627:

Lambent.6375:

I would say just put a buff icon on the person indicating how much MF they have when you are in a party with them, and be done with the whole thing.

That doesn’t really fix anything though, it just invites more bullying and elitism.

It’s a lot better than them shouting for changes to MF that will affect people that don’t even run dungeons(removing MF from gear for instance) just because some are suspicious about people running MF under their nose.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against your suggestion at all if Anet is willing to do that, my comment was more of “do whatever you want, just leave me out of it.”

Mathias.9657:

Yeah that thread is ridiculous, I had to stop reading all the trash in there.. they should just close it.

I don’t think MF has a place in the game at all, it’s an MMO… but if it must remain then your suggestion sounds ok I guess, only one person needs to hamper themselves in order to benefit the whole team but that would bring up the obvious “but I want my MF to be my MINE”.

I would personally just remove it from all gear and double/triple the amount given on runes. It would simplify things a lot and you won’t be sacrificing too much. I do run a full set in open world but I don’t enjoy doing it one bit.

The putting it on runes suggestion has been talked about a lot, but that isn’t a fundamental change from how it is now – you’d still be sacrificing stats that benefit a group for a stat that only benefits you.

The point with my suggestion would be that you are helping both yourself and your team. Keep in mind that I’m not suggesting using the highest MF (which would mean only one person’s MF would matter and everyone else’s would be as useless as it is currently),

Instead, I’m suggesting using a combination of your own MF and party average MF, so anyone wearing MF would contribute to the group’s MF but you’d also personally benefit more from your own stuff than from your party’s.

your suggestion is flawed.
1. it’s unreasonable to expect a group to hit more than one mf user while pugging. Most people don’t use mf.
2. Keeping that in mind – the person that joins the group now has a stat that’s only 20% as effective as it was, so the person is getting punished for group play, meaning that all we see here is a new kind of segregation in community.
3. People taking the person in only get 20% mf, meaning that the person doing less damage can be easily replaced by a person in berserker’s with guild magic find banner.
A system that is needed here is something that would be fair. Something that gives everyone equal opportunity to get mf without sacrificing their stats and something that doesn’t invite even more segregation and elitism.
That’s why the idea with infusion slots worked well. If magic find was infusions only and the only thing you could put in those infusions would be gold/karma/magic find boost nobody should fight anymore.
Edit: I also don’t think that more topics like this should be even created. More mf topics = more flame wars. We get a new mf topic every week or so anyway.
Double edit: shouldn’t this thread be in suggestions?

I don’t like your idea, the easiest, simplest, safest solution is to make MF worthless in dungeons, it solves everything quickly.

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t like your idea, the easiest, simplest, safest solution is to make MF worthless in dungeons, it solves everything quickly.

it leaves people that only have mf gear with only 2 stats. How does it solve anything?

Mirta.5029:

your suggestion is flawed.
1. it’s unreasonable to expect a group to hit more than one mf user while pugging. Most people don’t use mf.
2. Keeping that in mind – the person that joins the group now has a stat that’s only 20% as effective as it was, so the person is getting punished for group play, meaning that all we see here is a new kind of segregation in community.
3. People taking the person in only get 20% mf, meaning that the person doing less damage can be easily replaced by a person in berserker’s with guild magic find banner.
A system that is needed here is something that would be fair. Something that gives everyone equal opportunity to get mf without sacrificing their stats and something that doesn’t invite even more segregation and elitism.
That’s why the idea with infusion slots worked well. If magic find was infusions only and the only thing you could put in those infusions would be gold/karma/magic find boost nobody should fight anymore.
Edit: I also don’t think that more topics like this should be even created. More mf topics = more flame wars. We get a new mf topic every week or so anyway.
Double edit: shouldn’t this thread be in suggestions?

I think your understanding of both the current system and my suggestion is more flawed than the suggestion itself, but whatever.

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t like your idea, the easiest, simplest, safest solution is to make MF worthless in dungeons, it solves everything quickly.

No it doesn’t, there would still be a large number of people geared in MF in dungeons for a variety of reasons – either they’re too lazy, don’t know any better, or can’t afford anything else yet. The solution is to make MF valuable to parties in some way.

Mirta.5029:

2. Keeping that in mind – the person that joins the group now has a stat that’s only 20% as effective as it was, so the person is getting punished for group play, meaning that all we see here is a new kind of segregation in community.

We’ve already been over this a million times in the other thread. EVERY stat is diluted in a group, except Healing/Boon Duration when used in AoE. A group gets proportionally less out of a person, say, maximizing their damage than that person would get alone, because compared to the damage of the whole group, the difference is much smaller than it is compared to their own non-maximized damage.
So long as MF replaces stats that the group benefits from, averaging it makes it function the same as everything else.
And before you start on about your suggestion to move it off of combat stat replacement, I know it’s there. It’s also a significantly more difficult change than averaging, which must be taken into account.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Mirta.5029:

2. Keeping that in mind – the person that joins the group now has a stat that’s only 20% as effective as it was, so the person is getting punished for group play, meaning that all we see here is a new kind of segregation in community.

We’ve already been over this a million times in the other thread. EVERY stat is diluted in a group, except Healing/Boon Duration when used in AoE. A group gets proportionally less out of a person, say, maximizing their damage than that person would get alone, because compared to the damage of the whole group, the difference is much smaller than it is compared to their own non-maximized damage.
So long as MF replaces stats that the group benefits from, averaging it makes it function the same as everything else.
And before you start on about your suggestion to move it off of combat stat replacement, I know it’s there. It’s also a significantly more difficult change than averaging, which must be taken into account.

including an infusion slot is easier than you think. Recalculating averages of every party every certain amount of time, having in mind that equipment breaks and people switch gear sets is more taxing than you think.
The only thing that doesn’t work properly in group play in dungeons is conditions. Your health and toughness doesn’t get divided if you run with people without it and because all dungeon bosses have a lot of health every berserker can max their personal damage no problem.

Einlanzer.1627:

I think your understanding of both the current system and my suggestion is more flawed than the suggestion itself, but whatever.

oh, I thought you were only echoing your old suggestion lol. The new one is better. Though I think it would be perfectly fine if mf users could keep all of their mf and apply a buff to the party. Though one could argue that it could be a bit OP loot wise. Really this would require very careful balancing. I’m not an Anet developer though, so I can’t really say where the line would be just fine though.

Mirta.5029:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Mirta.5029:

2. Keeping that in mind – the person that joins the group now has a stat that’s only 20% as effective as it was, so the person is getting punished for group play, meaning that all we see here is a new kind of segregation in community.

We’ve already been over this a million times in the other thread. EVERY stat is diluted in a group, except Healing/Boon Duration when used in AoE. A group gets proportionally less out of a person, say, maximizing their damage than that person would get alone, because compared to the damage of the whole group, the difference is much smaller than it is compared to their own non-maximized damage.
So long as MF replaces stats that the group benefits from, averaging it makes it function the same as everything else.
And before you start on about your suggestion to move it off of combat stat replacement, I know it’s there. It’s also a significantly more difficult change than averaging, which must be taken into account.

including an infusion slot is easier than you think. Recalculating averages of every party every certain amount of time, having in mind that equipment breaks and people switch gear sets is more taxing than you think.
The only thing that doesn’t work properly in group play in dungeons is conditions. Your health and toughness doesn’t get divided if you run with people without it and because all dungeon bosses have a lot of health every berserker can max their personal damage no problem.

A berserker absolutely can maximize their personal damage no problem. However, since enemies are scaled for 5 people, and the group is five people, the difference between that berserker’s damage and his non-maxed damage is far larger than the impact his maximization has on the party.
Simple numbers example: Group of 5, all deal 50 dps. Total dps = 250. One person maximizes their dps, upping it to 60. Total dps = 260. (260-250)/250 = 1/25 = 4%. (60-50)/50 = 1/5 = 20%. This person raised their personal damage by 20%, but compared to the group as a whole it improved it by 4%. This is a fifth of the effect, because it is an AVERAGE.
Everyone’s efforts are diluted except AoE heals/buffs (and conditions, but that’s because it hits the ceiling because it is broken). Averaging MF would do the same.

Also, I’m also guilty of not quite reading the OP, I thought he was going for complete average again instead of weighting it. This is also a good idea. The most important part, however, is that it’s better than what it currently is, as would be straight averaging.

All controversial topics end up becoming a flame war. MF is a big example. There are countless threads on this argument and another one isn’t necessary. I do understand why you made the new thread though.