Guild Wars 2

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

In the same way that DR isn’t really a thing?

Buttercup.5871:

They are not outliers. Almost everyone I know, including myself, experienced this after a break of two weeks or more.

That’s roughly the equivalent of winning the lottery and attributing it to a specific shirt you wore when you chose your numbers.

Drop rates and how long since you last played have no correlation or connection.

Essence Snow.3194:

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

In the same way that DR isn’t really a thing?

I stopped playing for a week because I went out of town for Thanksgiving, and the first night I logged back in I got Zojja’s Weapon Chest during guild missions. Obviously the RNG is broken. Or is it?

John, I don’t know if it specifically falls under your department, but many people including myself wonder exactly how magic find effects drop rate/RNG. Anet has not given us any specifics about it, to the best of my knowledge. You commented closer to the beginning of this thread that it helps immensely, but provide no more details about it.

I was trying to get shoe boxes in silverwastes. Opened like 150 boxes. 1 shoe box, no ascended recipes. Meanwhile, my guildmate opened 30 or so boxes with me. Got 3 shoe boxes, and 1 recipe. I know I could just grind out 1k crests, and I already had, but it still seems vaguely unstatisfying.

To tevoro: They have, problem is the way its explained it’s a bit fuzzy.
The way they explained it, as far as I remember, if you have 1 in 10 chance to get something as a drop the game rolls a dice(sort of) with 10 sides(sort of again) and you have 10% change. Let’s say you have 300MF – this should make it 30 ( or 40 this is the fuzzy part) – e.g. 3 sides of that 10 sided dice will give you the drop. And this should go to every single drop there is. Correct my memory if it faulted.
After this (assuming I have not missed something), how is this implemented?
1. Does my game client do the roll, or the roll is on server.. (in a galaxy far far away)
2. If a given monster have 50 items associated with it then what? You roll for each? But then as far as my 2 years in game I see 2 sometimes 3 drops from mob, so there is a cap, or u roll for certain columns (e.g. will you and what junk, will you and what armor/weapon.. etc.)
3. How can You (A-net) explain the controversy – players claim there are “hidden things” that affect the drops like being away from game and stuff and Your statement. What do I mean (I presume You give us the right information and we make some mistakes, but still applying the observations from playing): There are a certain number of players out there (enough to be of statistical value in my mind) that get insane amount of “good” drops (good is quite subjective I know, but in general), and probably the same (or may be a bit more) that haven’t got anything of use. (yes there is a medium there, but the interesting part here is the edges and why are they so distinct).
4. As far as the information I managed to find about MF a while ago, the RNG You actually use has no securities in place – what do I mean: Every RNG should have a anti-loop mechanism – if a certain result is coming way too often, code must be forced to change the outcome.
5. There was a rumor back in the days where if you want Mystic Forge precursor and you have given number of rares/exotics, and there is a given number of % chance to get a drop you must do them all at once without leaving them map otherwise RNG will reset. E.g. is there something like RNG reset (not just for Forge but in general)
6. Given the fact you haven’t , and you probably never will reveal true drop rates, information like “The drop rate for X was increased…” is practically useless since from 0,001 You could have simple change it to 0,002% – which in terms is double, but in real live …
7. Why in the world is there magic find when:
a. There are about 20-30% of the mobs that have no drop what so ever (mostly to reduce exploits but still…)
b. After all the changes almost no loot is actually given by drops ( champ boxes, daily dungeon chests and other chests)
c. I am pretty sure MF does not affects even rewards from PvP tracks even though I have a vague memory about this in a livestream or something.
d. What use is there for MF??? Make game wide or just get rid of it and do something that will make more sence… ( keep in mind how much is invested by ppl to increase it already)

p.s. Forum does not accept word formatting I tried so hard to arrange it all…

tevoro.1587:

John, I don’t know if it specifically falls under your department, but many people including myself wonder exactly how magic find effects drop rate/RNG. Anet has not given us any specifics about it, to the best of my knowledge. You commented closer to the beginning of this thread that it helps immensely, but provide no more details about it.

They have said how magic find works.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find
Look at the Notes and References links.
“Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”

And magic find works fine for the majority of things that drop. The problem of distribution happen only on the very low to extremely improbable items. e.g. precursors and rare drops that only come from a single limited source.

That’s why I don’t think suggestions that involve increasing the chance for x, or increasing magic find for x are going to do anything for how it feels when you’re unlucky. If buying 10 or 100 lottery tickets actually worked, there’d be a lot more millionaires in the world. It doesn’t.

Lowering the outlier rate? Will turning the unluckiest fraction to simply very unlucky make them feel better? I don’t think it will.

On the other hand to be strictly on topic:
1. Use a specifically non-random NG. The NRNG functions similarly to a RNG, but has characteristics that either squish the distribution so that outliers exist much less or specifically manipulate a player’s experience for loot in a more complicated way that makes it feel rewarding. – Is it me or this is the most complicated option out there to be implemented? Also I think You, as a company or developers, have a slightly different understanding about what the meaning of what feels “rewarding”. The community in general, in my mind, does not consider something of no value (e.g. if something costs less then 1 dungeon run (1-3 gold). The really rare stuff are what matters, and by using this method what you will do is (the way I imagine it) people will start getting more drops that already have low value (lets pick the obvious example – a random exotic with distinct skin), which will decrease the value even more. And given the addition of collections, you want to keep value is those items to some extent.
2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops. – This will only affect low-end behavior, and every RNG system needs a High-end behavior defense as well – e.g. If a player has received a multiple rare drops in X window of time, send him Y tickets for missdrops (e.g. no drops/bad drops or whatever You may call them). Then this may be the easiest and least harmful to the game way to change things around, but how will those tickets work? If all that will be affected remains to be monster drops (e.g. excluding champ boxes, event chests, daily chests etc.), then it will be just dust in players eyes. After all the changes, mob drops are the smallest of impact (best example – Entire map full with mobs and events, and 95% if them have little to no drop – Silverwastes). Now I understand that a lot of that is made to battle exploits, but in that regard this system will chance little to nothing…
3. “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.” – This in my mind is the best of all in terms of fairness. Problem is it will make some stuffs grindish, others less rare, and lots of long term, high-hour invested players unhappy. On the other hand (real life example) – One of my current guild leaders (guild dedicated to bosses like Teq and Great worm) has probably the most amount of Teq kills in-between all 500 of us, yet she has 1 (if I am not wrong) Teq skin box, and there are players that come 6 times and got 2 boxes… Also token based system can be implemented everywhere – champ boxes, chests, etc., but how will you value the items and their costs is misty as Rytlock’s fate. After all exotic with bloodlust sigil and ordinary skin worth way more then something like Entropy (and it should be the other way around right?).

TheFallenAngel.1320:

d. What use is there for MF??? Make game wide or just get rid of it and do something that will make more sence… ( keep in mind how much is invested by ppl to increase it already)

That about covers what I was going for, that it only effects a very small percentage of drops as it is and it seems to be missing its purpose. I wanted to see if John would comment about this, even if its just the simple “no its totally not true, but anet policy says I can’t say anything” Thank you both for your descriptions though, its something that I can direct other players to.

Still do not understand why magic find doesn’t effect chest / bags (excluding PvP rewards)….Some insight would be nice as to why you chose this route.

It’s probably so that the rich people didn’t just buy their way to 300% MF early, and then use that early time advantage to earn even more money from their activities. The rich get richer, and the poor get left behind even more.

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

But your customers (See how I use the term customers instaed of players? That’s how far we’ve come, ANet! That far!) feel like it, therefore it’s your problem. RNG is bad because it’s highly subjective. It’s a two-edged sword and you’re now experiencing the reverse side. Now you can deal with it or, even better, do something about it.

How can a RNG with an even distribution of its numbers be highly subjective? From a mathematical point of view it is absolutely fair, because every member has the same chance of getting a success on each roll. Each roll, over the complete lifetime of the game.

Unfortunately, if you distribute items this way, there are always people who are left out, although the chances are equal. Statistics tell us, that people definitely exist who will not get an item, because their play time is less than the time it is required to get a hit. It’s this “definitely” that makes this method unfair again, although it seemed fair in the first place.

By chance, I made a diagram of the probability to get all 19 fractal skins after x runs a few days ago. You see that the majority of players (66 percent) will get their skins after about 630 runs. But 5 percent of the players will not get the skins even after about 950 runs. And 1 percent still not after 1230 runs.
If there are 100 people reading this thread, 66 of them will have the skins after 630 runs. 90 people after 950 runs. But one individual will not have all the skins even after 1230 runs. It is he, who then will post his complaint here.

If the ordinary player quits playing after 500 fractal full runs, only 39 percent (or 39 people from the above crowd) will get all fractal skins – 61 percent will not get them. That’s somewat unfair, in my opinion, because I cannot influence if I will be within the 39% or the 61%.

If you are curious how to get the data for the graph: The probability of 11.7% is from the research sheet from [KING]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IHVJao5j85KOp6lBTOgO8qs4VYD3Xty-jKPZo8o-Q4/pubhtml
And the data is from a little simulation program I wrote. It simulates the outcome of the roll if a fractal skin drops and the second roll which skin actually drops for 2500*1000000 runs. There is of course an exact mathematical formula to compute this distribution as well, but my knowledge in this field from my university studies unfortunately has vanished, so I had to resort to this “brute force” method. It is still as valid as the exact formula because of the strong law of large numbers.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings;
use strict;

my $p_skin = 0.117; # probability for skin drop per run
#my $p_skin = 0.07375; # probability for skin drop per run
my $num_skins = 19; # number of skins

my $num_tries = 1000000;
my $num_runs = 2500;

my @runs; # count tries with equal number of runs
my @skins; # list of skins 0..18

srand;

$runs[$_] = 0 for 0..int($num_runs/10)-1;

for (my $try = 0; $try < $num_tries; $try++) {

  $skins[$_] = 0 for 0..$num_skins-1;
  my $different_skins = 0;
  for (my $run = 0; $run < $num_runs; $run++) {

    if (rand() <= $p_skin) {
      my $skin = int(rand($num_skins));
      $skins[$skin]++;
      if ($skins[$skin] == 1) {
        $different_skins++;
        if ($different_skins == $num_skins) {
          $runs[int($run/10)]++;
          last;
        }
      }
    }

  }

}

my $sum = 0;
for (my $i = 0; $i < int($num_runs/10); $i++) {
  my $promille = $runs[$i] / $num_tries * 1000;
  $sum += $runs[$i];
  my $s = ($i+1)*10 . ";" . $promille . ";" . $sum / $num_tries * 1000;
  $s =~ s/\./,/g;
  print "$s\n";
}
#print "sum=$sum\n";

I bet there is a similar diagram in the fractal skin concept documentation of Arenanet

So the way it appears to work based on my observations:

When a drop happens, there’s a roll to determine whether you get an item, and then a roll to determine its quality, from grey to orange. Exotic’d be about 0.1%, rare maybe 1%. Once the quality is determined, there’s a roll for what kind of drop it is (crafting material, weapon), which tells it what table to roll on.

Magic find is multiplied to the roll to determine what quality something is. If you have 10% MF, that’s a multiplier of 1.1. 1.1 × 0.1% is only 0.11%, absolutely tiny.

Part of the problem with magic find is that green items (which appear to almost always be equipment) and blue items (which are often equipment) tend to blur together, particularly at L80 where a portion of all your loot rolls is on the one, particularly tedious “level 80 equipment” table. You don’t really notice you’re getting more green drops because who cares about green drops.

TexZero.7910:

Still do not understand why magic find doesn’t effect chest / bags (excluding PvP rewards)….Some insight would be nice as to why you chose this route.

You may be interested in joining this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Applying-Magic-Find-To-Containers/

RNG is a legitimate tool for many things, though it tends not to be particularly engaging. Overglorified slot machines don’t tend to remain invisible in their true natures for very long, to wit.

When the only relevant aspect of player engagement is essentially a convoluted ‘push the slot machine button’ action that has no possible impact on the RNG-bound outcome, there’s a real danger of the activity itself becoming a source of overall ambivalence.

Anecdotally, I have zero interest in the mystic forge for things like precursor attempts. Not in the smallest way to I find it remotely fun, interesting or engaging to just keep throwing rares/exotics into a UI and hitting a button, hoping the blind, uncaring RNG favors me this time.

To me, that sort of RNG dependency feels like a waste of time. Deterministic outcomes give a person something to plan toward, work toward and, if nothing else, be able to feel some sense of incremental attainment upon.

Throwing exotic swords into the mystic forge? Its the worst sort of thing a system in a game can be – forgettably boring.

RNG like that might efficiently solve a developer need for system A to achieve intention 401-B and enable outcomes 100-A through 999-Z, but its really boring and uninteresting.

I wouldn’t feel remiss in speculating that most people that use such systems do so strictly because there’s often nothing else they can do that isn’t even less deterministic in any fashion.

How SHOULD it be done, some would ask? Should things like precursors be guaranteed by any specific activity?

Yes, I believe they should, but that specific activity should be something like ‘Participate in 2000 spvp matches’ or ‘Participate in 200 wvwvw wins’ and so on – things that will obviously take a bit of time, even for those that play 18 hours a day and do nothing but whatever the specific activity might be.

Let there be ways to deterministically circumnavigate the slot machines. Let people do a bunch of stuff they choose to do that will absolutely, eventually, get them to a treasure box that might even let them pick something like the precursor they want as a reward.

naiasonod.9265:

Anecdotally, I have zero interest in the mystic forge for things like precursor attempts. Not in the smallest way to I find it remotely fun, interesting or engaging to just keep throwing rares/exotics into a UI and hitting a button, hoping the blind, uncaring RNG favors me this time.

I’m the same way. I refuse to use the forge for anything less than a known recipe. I also will not buy the RNG coin mall boxes/keys and I detest this new Silverwaste grind for recipe books.

It’s just one more thing that makes no sense to me. Why bring out a new and interesting set of gear stats and then hide the recipes behind an RNG grindathon? That is exactly what this game was not supposed to be, because “Anet doesn’t make grindy games”.

I don’t know, when I think of RNG, I think about the likelihood of attaining something of great value, such as a precursor, an exotic, or a rare. In fact I hate the RNG system, and I think it’s because I’ve come to realize that the system really likes to screw you over. I remember back when Magic Find back in the day was reachable to 300% without too much hassle, and all I could say is that the rewards for killing enemies was just as cruel as it was killing enemies without any magic find. Of course I did get a little more good drops than bad ones, but getting a decent drop was hard even with Magic Find. A friend of mine got me into farming an event at Penitents Waypoint in Arah which was popular for its time, and still is up to today, but he, always got much better drops for hours, despite the fact that we maintained our magic find at a consistent 300% for a good month.

And yes I have looked at the way Magic Find works in the game, and all I have to say is that the statement “Every time you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones,” has to be false for the majority of players. It’s just that the RNG system is flawed in some form and niether Anet nor the NCsoft programmers will tell us what it could be; and based on statistics that people have had luck attaining an exotic for a drop, it seems that people who work really hard get the worst of all items. So overall, do not bring up the concept of Magic Find into RNG when it’s pretty worthless to even consider.

No matter what, just because Anet made the game, does not mean they have to tell you everything, there is such a thing as telling the truth but keeping what should be kept secret in secret. Back a few months ago, two of my guild members decided to have a competition on who could land the most precursors, they had almost the same amount of gold to spend, which was roughly a good 1.5k, then out of nowhere, it only took 100 g worth of rares for one of them to land dawn, and he ended up landing another 5 (dusks/dawn, cant remember) while he was tossing, whereas the other one, who had a little more gold, spend enough gold tossing to leave him with just one dawn when he reached 31g; naturally they both sold it for the money. Eventually, the same guild members conducted the same experiment, and the member who landed 5 dusks/dawn landed yet another 4 dusks and dawn while the other one just barely managed to land one. They did this for 4 weeks straight, and in the end, my luckier guild member ended up landing 16 dusk/dawns, where was my other guild member was left bankrupt on his last attempt. Then I said to myself, how come that one guy has to be an outlier, and the other has to suffer? It can’t be all luck because there are people out there getting precursors easily.

I can support this statement too, another guild member of mine in particular does very little flipping to get gold, but he landed not 1, but 4 highly valued precursors in a matter of a few months. Then Naturally he got everything he wanted, and then once he got 3,000 gold he started playing the market. Then I’ve been playing for roughly the same amount of time he has, but I land my precursor 2 years time, and despite its worthlessness (35g) compared to the other pres in the market, It poses a question if the game is naturally picking people who are to get lucky when they create their account. To support this, there are a number of YouTube videos where people get more precursors forge tossing, and they all the sudden become outliers. While others who work their butts off to get a good amount of gold to consider forge tossing waste everything multiple times and get nothing. Yet nobody has ever raised the question because Anet says it’s totally random despite the evidence that proves the system is corrupt.

I don’t feel like arguing, and I’m at a point where I don’t really want anything more for my main character, I already have a legendary, and all I need is three more ascended armor pieces, then I’m done. But seriously I feel horrible for people who gave up money to increase their Magic Find to 300%, toss thousands of gold in the mystic forge to get less, play the market, and still don’t get the exotic or precursor they want despite the hard work they do. That’s just my view of RNG as a concept. The fact of the matter is that the player should know how the RNG in the game works otherwise bringing up the discussion of RNG would be subliminally meaningless. GG

I understand the concept of RNG perfectly: some will never win, and others will win numerous times. It’s all luck, and luck sucks.

Since Lady Luck and the Sisters of Fate are far more cruel than Karma in this sense, a circumvention of RNG would be a godsend. Take the mostly dead idea of a precursor scavenger hunt, for example. It was a great idea, but for some reason it does not appear to be something that will happen. I’m guessing the coding is too difficult or something.

Right now, with the Living Story and the luminescent armor pieces, people are having to farm 4000 crests to get the items they need. It’s a tedious process that can be very daunting, but at least it is possible and guaranteed. If it wasn’t for that, many would never ever get the items they need, because RNG does exactly that. 100+ chests and 0 armor pieces yielded… That is RNG, and that is why these sought after items need a guaranteed way of acquisition.

So, make every item in the game available for acquisition via in-game progress of some sort. Obviously ArenaNet will make it as tedious as possible, to maximize the amount of effort a player has to put forth to be rewarded, but as long as it’s guaranteed and RNG is completely removed from the equation (as in nothing that has a ‘rare chance to drop’ and instead be an item you can acquire by participating in the game) then it will be grand.

How about… oh I don’t know, a vendor that uses multiple forms of in-game currency? Like, for the really sought after items, a vendor that sells the items for in exchange for karma, laurels, dungeon tokens, crafting materials, mystic forge gifts, coin, guild commendations, fractal relics, badges of honor, crests or whatever other guaranteed items the game already has a lot of. All of the items listed here can be obtained through just playing the game and it’s many aspects. Nothing will get more people to spread out and play all the aspects of this game than that kind of incentive.

Is that not what you want, ArenaNet? For people to keep playing your game and buying your gems? Oh wait, nothing I mentioned has any use for the gem store. Nevermind, nothing I mentioned here will be considered for that reason.

This is why RNG exists: so that those who are hated by luck MUST buy gems to exchange for gold to get the items they need. The less fortunate are how profit is made in this case. A brilliant business strategy, but hardly an enjoyable gaming experience for many players.

Silmar Alech.4305:

How can a RNG with an even distribution of its numbers be highly subjective? From a mathematical point of view it is absolutely fair, because every member has the same chance of getting a success on each roll. Each roll, over the complete lifetime of the game.

Yes, every member has the same chances, but does not get nearly the same items/loot/results over time. So people feel unlucky on the lower end of the curve and that they are not treated fair.

GW2 is still a MMO-game and not a slot-machine, at its core.

And: Applying a random distribution can sometimes also be seen as unfair by itself. Example: Would a system, where your graduation or university degree is purely based on a random “rolling a dice” be a fair thing? I do not think so.

Greetings.

Lukyromero.6780:

Then I’ve been playing for roughly the same amount of time he has, but I land my precursor 2 years time, and despite its worthlessness (35g) compared to the other pres in the market, It poses a question if the game is naturally picking people who are to get lucky when they create their account. To support this, there are a number of YouTube videos where people get more precursors forge tossing, and they all the sudden become outliers.

Just to address these two points:

1. The system as it stands is (or at least really should be) agnostic of the value that players put in the item. All items of a particular status are treated equally, even if you think Venom sucks compared to Dawn.

2. Calling outliers outliers is redundant.

2.a. The vast majority who are getting failures don’t make videos for other people to see, since they have nothing to brag about. If someone posting strings of videos of successes has a run that is all failures, do you think they’re going to show that? Hell no. That run gets secreted away, and it skews what you think their success rate is.

Ultimately, lots of successes come from lots of tries. Like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. If you get lucky once or twice, that allows you to keep playing a whole lot more.

Zera Allimatti.2541:

This is why RNG RMT exists: so that those who are hated by luck MUST can buy gems to exchange for gold to get the items they need want.

FTFY. I’ve been here since launch and never once used conversion. I’m fully kitted out in exotic gear, save for some trinkets which I could make at any time on my maxxed Jeweler. Probably 70-80% of my gear is crafted. You only resort to Real Money Transactions if you haven’t got a shred of patience or intelligence. If my guildie can make X00g in a day hanging out in PvE, it stands to reason anyone can.

Zok.4956:

GW2 is still a MMO-game and not a slot-machine, at its core.

Of course not, it’s a Skinner Box. Wait, that’s pretty much the same as a slot machine…

14 pages later – what’s the point of this discussion, or more likely monologue? Players have participated and made very good suggestions on how to improve loot system in the game. Will you implement any of this? Will you make any change? Will you check the claims of code-ghosts in the RNG algorithm? Or is this just some kind of a way to let players release some steam whils doing nothing to address the issue at hand? Is it like the Trait thread, when only it will have reached an X number of replies you will swoop in and tell us “tl;dr please give summary”, tell us we have good ideas and then go back to doing nothing with it?

As far as I see it, John started the discussion out of curiosity. How players see the RNG and possible solutions, from a players’ point of view and not from a developers’ point of view. It’s purely academic.

I don’t expect anything from it to appear in GW2. If you were planning to use a RNG that has a customized distribution, you need to build this into every game mechanic that makes use of RNG, and this is probably too much for a game in production like GW2. It would be a large change, because you have to implement what currently isn’t available at all: some kind of memory of previous RNG rolls for each account or character or item. It’s nothing you slip in with a small software patch. If at all, you implement such a thing perhaps for new rare and special items planned for the next years, or for GW3, but not for something that already exists.

They can adjust the loot system with disregard to how RNG was up to that point.
There are great ideas here which could be worked into the system. Just need to see it as a new white sheet of paper. There’s RNG until that moment that will never come, and RNG after that moment.

I would love a line to be dropped to us simply stating, “We agree. It’s broken as is. We are rectifying it.”

Iason Evan.3806:

I would love a line to be dropped to us simply stating, “We agree. It’s broken as is. We are rectifying it.”

But first they would have to admit to themselves that it’s broken. In a game wide macro sense it isn’t. On a personal player level it can be.

Take it for what its worth. My wife and I spent yesterday in Silverwastes. I had a day off and it was crappy outside (decided to skip skiing for the day) and we decided why not grind out the items we need for the two new luminescent armor pieces. Literally stacks of keys used, dozens of breaches and between us, we got one – that’s right ONE – usable piece for those collections. We only stayed at it to see how long it would take for something to actually be worth a snot.

Also, between us we have several thousands of hours of play time. Neither of us has gotten a precursor drop or one from the forge.

RNG is a wall that prevents anyone from working towards a goal. We’re at the merci of other people’s luck and market demands (price) to get anything worth working for.

Lukyromero.6780:

Back a few months ago, two of my guild members decided to have a competition on who could land the most precursors, they had almost the same amount of gold to spend, which was roughly a good 1.5k, then out of nowhere, it only took 100 g worth of rares for one of them to land dawn, and he ended up landing another 5 (dusks/dawn, cant remember) while he was tossing, whereas the other one, who had a little more gold, spend enough gold tossing to leave him with just one dawn when he reached 31g; naturally they both sold it for the money. Eventually, the same guild members conducted the same experiment, and the member who landed 5 dusks/dawn landed yet another 4 dusks and dawn while the other one just barely managed to land one. They did this for 4 weeks straight, and in the end, my luckier guild member ended up landing 16 dusk/dawns, where was my other guild member was left bankrupt on his last attempt. Then I said to myself, how come that one guy has to be an outlier, and the other has to suffer? It can’t be all luck because there are people out there getting precursors easily.

<snip>Anet says it’s totally random despite the evidence that proves the system is corrupt.

Part of the problem with Random Number Generation is that most people don’t understand what “random” means. Most people believe it means “chaotic” (that something completely different and unpredictable will happen). But that isn’t what it means. If you are tossing a coin it is perfectly random if you get heads 20 times in a row.

So in the above example, people feel that the system can’t be random or the same result wouldn’t keep happening. But that is not true – the same result over and over is perfectly random.

I feel I am very un-lucky in the game, especially when I hear people getting the armour boxes in the SW events, and I have yet to get anything, also opening BLC after the patch got me no special items, and I was hoping for a ticket or node.

Prolly enough evidence here to just say “fix it”. RNG has never been a good system, anyone that has played any game that depends on it, knows this. There are plenty of suggested fixes, including Johns, that would at least bring rewards in line equally for all.

John Smith.4610:

On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

This statement here is why the total levels of RNG in an MMO should be kept to a minimum.

Some players are rewarded consistently for doing minimal work, while others are never rewarded for doing copious amounts of work.

I do agree that RNG has its place in any loot table…. but RNG should not determine over 90% of a player’s wealth.

As it stands now, the only guaranteed way to make decent guaranteed money in the game is by doing one of each dungeon path once a day.

or… guild missions after a weekly reset.

(not including of course offering services to other players for a price, ie: selling dungeon paths)

While world boss events do reward players with an increased quality of the reward in the form of rare items, said items are still heavily influenced on RNG….. and unless the guaranteed rares are sold on the trading post, they are usually salvaged and put through more RNG.

Guaranteed rares for completing a mindless task has essentially just lowered the price of rares to the point where they are barely even a worthy source of player income.

There needs to be more non-RNG-based loot behind challenging and repeatable content.

This will solve many of the gripes about RNG, while simultaneously giving players the end-game content they have been asking for.

So almost everyone in this topic, on the forums and everyone I know in game thinks too much RNG is bad. When are we getting a fix for it?

I agree with many here. RNG is fine for random mobs and Vet bosses, but if you kill a Champion you should be guaranteed at least an exotic. For Legendary or World Bosses, at least an Ascended. For “end game” – I guess Zhaitan is it for now – you should get a legendary weapon: not a mat to make INTO a legendary (which would require you to grind) but a legendary outright. Make it account bound on acquire, but make it worthwhile.

I get so exasperated over the same blue and green drops AND a pile of goop and other junk items. The best I ever got was an Ascended Healing ring and Bonetti’s Rapier. Other than that, nada. Not so much fun, that.

Another sterling example of bad RNG is having MF not affect Champ Boxes in PvE. I would almost rather go to Champs having an adjusted loot table that MF affected. No wonder you implemented the Champ Boxes. It wasn’t better for players. It was better for ArenaNet to gate magic find, thus lowering our RNG for champions. The fix should have just made Veteran and Champion drops better, because man were the drops non-existent from them for a year or so.

Iason Evan.3806:

Another sterling example of bad RNG is having MF not affect Champ Boxes in PvE. I would almost rather go to Champs having an adjusted loot table that MF affected. No wonder you implemented the Champ Boxes. It wasn’t better for players. It was better for ArenaNet to gate magic find, thus lowering our RNG for champions. The fix should have just made Veteran and Champion drops better, because man were the drops non-existent from them for a year or so.

There’s the problem.

You went from nearly non-existent to GUARANTEED drops. GUARANTEED three items and some coinage. You can’t have all of those becoming exotics gamewide and expect them to have any worth. But you can expect players to pursue them to the exclusion of all else.

I remember when the entire orr farming was halted and the longer you killed mobs the worse the loot would get. I remember how the system worked before (getting consistant green loot items at all times) Vs after (getting more and more junk/nothing if you killed the same mob the second time or third time)

I still see this problem today. If i go farm skelks, i always get 1 or 2 T6 mats in the first 10 minutes. But after that it takes me around 30 minutes to even get 1 T6.

I see it at afking in LA for a long period of time after doing Silverwastes multiple days in a row versus a week not doing anything and suddenly get boots dropped in my inventory with the second bandit chest i open. While previously it took me over 500 chests to get one of these boxes.

I even see it at mining nodes with a watchwork pick, where the first few hauls of the day grant me atleast 1 or 2 but the last 10 dont grant me anything.

The entire anti farming mechanic is definatly still in the game at every event where mobs drop loot. It might be a bug in coding if Anet says its all RNG.

I don’t particularly play the game for rewards, but rewards are a nice extra. That said, I wouldn’t run out of fingers counting on two hands the number of times I’ve gotten a drop, after which I thought, “Hey, that’s a great drop.” And I get an awful lot of drops, even playing sparingly.

I can’t say I’ve been greatly fortunate with RNG in other games, either, However, I’d have to say that — for me, at least — the percentage of remarkable drops in other games has been higher.

Apologies if this has been stated earlier. It seems to me the issue isn’t so much that the RNG is bad, it’s with the nature of where the game awards drops. Almost everything can drop from almost anywhere. That has to be a honking huge table.

Add in that the items that would elicit a feeling of joy if awarded are a larger subset of the extremely rare items (Exotic or better), and the likelihood of getting something highly desirable seem infinitesimal. Most of the exotics are not unique skins, and there are so many stat combos that the likelihood of getting one you would use is even smaller. So, any time you get a roll on the loot table, the chances of getting something you really want is vanishingly small.

So, I can take all the drops that are unexciting and salvage them, then sell the mats to gain gold, with which I could buy what I want. Obtaining a desired item in tiny increments is fine, I suppose, it just isn’t very exciting.

ErazorZ.5209:

I remember when the entire orr farming was halted and the longer you killed mobs the worse the loot would get. I remember how the system worked before (getting consistant green loot items at all times) Vs after (getting more and more junk/nothing if you killed the same mob the second time or third time)

I still see this problem today. If i go farm skelks, i always get 1 or 2 T6 mats in the first 10 minutes. But after that it takes me around 30 minutes to even get 1 T6.

I see it at afking in LA for a long period of time after doing Silverwastes multiple days in a row versus a week not doing anything and suddenly get boots dropped in my inventory with the second bandit chest i open. While previously it took me over 500 chests to get one of these boxes.

I even see it at mining nodes with a watchwork pick, where the first few hauls of the day grant me atleast 1 or 2 but the last 10 dont grant me anything.

The entire anti farming mechanic is definatly still in the game at every event where mobs drop loot. It might be a bug in coding if Anet says its all RNG.

A lot of what ArenaNet has done with drops has been with how it’s presented and perceived. Something can look really enticing but when you really look at what it is it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They did a great job with the token system for dungeons, but we still should have had a chance to get the weapons and armor as drops at the end of the dungeon. That way, if you dont get one as a drop, you can save up your tokens. Instead they went with a full on token system and then gated the tokens. I still would rather have a token system because it is surety for an item. I just get tired of the one step forward, two steps back approach though.

John Smith.4610:

This is a spinoff of the economy thread to talk about RNG tactics in games in a general form.
Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate. On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

We do need to be very careful about ideas that flatten the experience entirely as that quickly becomes not fun at all.

There are two concepts that have been discussed in the other thread that I’ll briefly summarize.

1. Use a specifically non-random NG. The NRNG functions similarly to a RNG, but has characteristics that either squish the distribution so that outliers exist much less or specifically manipulate a player’s experience for loot in a more complicated way that makes it feel rewarding.

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

2.5: “Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.”

Obviously these are hyper-simplified descriptions, but I don’t want this to get too long.

edit: added 2.5

There are 4 things that made me quit and uninstall this game, all in about equal share of blame. If any 2 of them have been adressed I would have still been playing.

the 4 things are in no particular order:

1. Anets fail to capitalize and continue development in WvW, you had a cash cow on your hands that was best on the market due to many mechanics and you let it slip through your fingers by neglect.

2. Stale zerker PvE meta and stale GWEN WvW meta. leads to repetitivness and boredom.

3. lack of good guild content, nope, guild missions dont even anywhere near cut it.

4. The horrid RNG. As this thread addresses this one in particular, no matter the outcome it is too little too late. But I will state that between about 1 mil+ pve kills and almost 500k wvw kills and their respective lootbag percentages I have gotten absolute zero precursors.

In addition it made me feel powerless, I was literally surrounded by people who were utterly stupid and couldnt even do anything beyond spamming 1 if their real lives depended on it and got precursors, while those of us who did everything right, put tons and I do mean tons of work and effort and time into it came out empty handed.

Another words I have been a victim of zero reward for the effort while people who put in nearly zero effort have been rewarded for doing so.

This was the final nail in the coffin for me playing GW2. I occasionally swing by these forums when bored and check up on changes so I am posting this, but no matter what you do now, you screwed up and can’t get us back. At best, if you make appropriate changes in a reasonable amount of time and unlike LS content they will be of some actual quality, you can at least prevent more people leaving for this particular reason.

IF you actually do it.

John,

I’ve been leveling new toons for a while now. I enjoy it, but I suffer in the loot department. Virtually no exotics and rarely a rare drop. I think you should have a shot at good level 80 loot no matter what you are doing. (even if its small)

My drop luck has been pretty bad overall. I like your #1 fix. If had extrordinarilly bad drop luck in a set amount of time you’d get one by default. Diablo III implemented this.

Perhaps removing Dr would help as well? just a thought.

I really like the system where you get to choose your stats. I got an exotic drop today and was hopeful, then I noticed it was a skin I already had with trash stats for me. Boo.

Something that would help in a small way is to have all exotics allow you to choose the stats. Not only is it more useful, it might encourage people to try different stats and builds if it’s easier to aquire a new set. Probably been said before, but still worth repeating.

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

If it truly isn’t “a thing” doesn’t it speak volumes that it seems so prevalent? See, you wouldn’t be having this issue if you made things easier to acquire but actually added new content to acquire. Those could be very nice cosmetics (A major reason for the draw to legendaries) or items with fun attributes or procs. Items in this game are boring, just like every mmo and you keep defending this one set of hard to get gear. What do other people do? What do you do for fun on your way to it? How long has this game been out? Ascended gear (which goes against the original message of the game anyway) isn’t interesting. It is just more stats… and you haven’t added new content. Fractals are interesting, but not much more than the Dragon Age: Inquisition multiplayer. A few levels that you repeat over and over again to get whatever you are trying to earn… for what? There is no harder content except for the same things with more health and damage!

Whoops… /rant

DaedalusDragon.3754:

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

If it truly isn’t “a thing” doesn’t it speak volumes that it seems so prevalent?

Confirmation bias, however, is a thing.

Artanis.4963:

DaedalusDragon.3754:

John Smith.4610:

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

If it truly isn’t “a thing” doesn’t it speak volumes that it seems so prevalent?

Confirmation bias, however, is a thing.

I wasn’t referring to any facts or error in the code but in playerbase perception. I understand confirmation bias, but even if it isn’t necessarily true it will seem true and that is very important to consumers.

Well, it’s nice to see an official topic on RNG. Honestly RNG has gotten out of control in games in recent years. Before gear was given out simply, you either won it or you didn’t, if you won you randomly got gear out of one group not 6 different levels of rares. These days it goes through an entire system has been heavily diluted, from just winning, to what you win to the stats on what you win.

1. RNG from to see if you won something.
2. RNG from different levels of magic find to see what group of gear you won, trash/common/uncommon/rare/exotic/ascended groups.
3. RNG to see what level of rarity of item out of the chosen group.
4. RNG to see which piece of gear out of that finalized group.
5. RNG to primary or secondary stats of that gear.
6. Add in special drops that may or may not be in those existing groups or a separate group that can make the system worse, (exotic commander spoon really?).

I don’t know how far into the system GW2 goes, but having a secondary system in place for “failing” to receive a proper reward many times, would be a welcome change, so basically category 2.

The token system does already exist in GW2 from dungeon tokens and wvw badges, eventually you get an exotic of your choice using that system, (would be nice if this was extended to ascended items as well but I know that’s not going to happen).

There is another game that had a points system, where if you gathered enough points you would be able to buy gear that was near the quality of raid gear to help gear you up in a secondary manner, since raids were only completable once a week. This would probably work well on something like Tequatl, face him 50 times and still haven’t gotten anything good? then take the points you earn from killing him to buy something from his loot table.

I would like to see a system where if you haven’t won something in say a weeks work of playtime, your chances to get a rarer drop becomes higher. In other words for the case of GW2 your magic find goes up to the maximum until you find something good such as exotic level and above. But magic find is another random system that I would like to see removed altogether, it should not be an open stat for people to improve upon it should be one flat stat for everyone.

The other problem comes up when ascended items drop and you don’t have a choice in the stats you get, making the item most times a waste of a drop especially since you can’t even sell it off to another player.

Overall the randomness of the game needs to be toned down, the system is so bad at randomly rewarding players that it mostly rewards the middle ground of potential rewards. Every day I see bags full of trash, blues, and greens, and sometimes a rare or two, and all I see is bags full of items I have to break down to get my lucky charms up, it’s not exciting and it’s not something I look forward to logging on for.

John – First, thank you for this thread. While I appreciate what has been posted here I have serious issues with this games RNG structure and its in-game behaviour. I understand what you have been told with respect to how the rng works for drops in-game for gw2 however, the possibility of ‘flaw’ still exists. The in-game observations of the player base, and the growing discord related to those observations, is speaking to the possibility that something is wrong – a question though is whether someone is listening and making an effort to evaluate these complaint/s, to examine their possible merit, or whether they are simply being dismissed outright.
A major problem in trying to analyze the rng is that a ‘prized’ drop outcome is itself an ‘outlier’ event statistically – this in turn makes a true/valid assessment of the in-game RNG and/or an individual account with respect to rng difficult – but not impossible.
I was able to look at the problem from a different angle mathematically. {Note that I am NOT going to openly post what I looked at or its math/statistics – BUT I will invite the dev here: John Smith.4610 to contact/PM me for the purpose of sharing that data with him}. I am being deliberately vague here due to possible issues related to the Guild Wars 2 EULA. I will state though that with respect to the GW2 in -game RNG – it is very easy to attribute what is seen for ‘reward drops’ as the rng factor simply being in play – BUT – if one never allows for the possibility that a flaw could exist then one will never find that flaw. ( and yes – there is a provable flaw)
Going back to the initial post in this thread (and based on the above) – option #2 – would, imho, be the best choice help to reduce/relieve ‘low-end outlier behavior inside of game design.’

John Smith.4610:

2. Implement measures that counteract low-end outlier behavior inside of game design. This would be a system that is something like: If player hasn’t received a rare drop in X time send them Y tickets for random drops.

This could probably work. Make an uncommon drop that’s exclusive with the rare+ tiers, of 1-3 (avg. ~1.5) appropriate monster chests from PvP.

John Smith.4610:

2.5: "Add secondary reward mechanisms (ie. token based system) alongside the primary RNG system; allow progress to be made even when you don’t get the result you want.

This is what I saw karma as being at launch. There’s already a thread looking at the recent influx of new, non-Wallet currencies, maybe not add any more?