Guild Wars 2

nirvana.8245:

Obtena.7952:

Fernling.1729:

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

I think he meant a meaningful difference. I’m sure across the board there are noticeable differences, but as a single player I don’t notice anything.
It sucks when you use magic find booster, birthday booster and food etc. to boost your magic find and not run into a single exotic.
I’ve ran down entire 24 hour birthday boosters without a single exotic drop.

That’s simply a perception issue … that only a player can change. Birthday booster didn’t guarantee exotic drops. It’s the same argument that JS referred to as this clustering phenomenon. Based on other players experiences AND the confirmation from JS, MF does work.

He only said it does makes a huge difference. But how does it make a huge difference? Most of the farming these days involves opening guaranteed chests from participation in a specific event where magic find has no bearing on what comes out of said chest. Magic find used to make a huge difference, I have no doubt about that. But I really have to disagree that it makes a huge difference these days because of the simple fact that your getting most of your loot from champion bags, dungeon chests, boss chests etc. So yeah, it still makes a difference. But I disagree that it makes “a huge difference” because of the way the game has been evolved with champion farming when thats not how the game used to work.

Well its your own choice to go champ farming and make your primary goal boxes that arent affected by mf.
Champ farming is actually not a very good way of getting lots of loot or gold. IF you opt to farm lots of mobs (or players in wvw), you will most certainly have better loot and more gold and mf is friend there.
Because so many people do champ trains, you wont get ahead of them in your earnings, either, if you also do it.
Gold rewards from dungeons might have been nice the first 6 months after they got introduced but due to inflation they lost alot of value by now.

AlienMenace.7516:

First of all John thank you for making this thread. Your communication with the community means far more than you can ever know. It is appreciated.

Yeah it is except for the fact that it is at least 18 months too late.

My preferred solution would by no. 2, I’ve got ~3,700 hours up in the game, no precursor drops, and I barely get any exotic drops at all nowadays. This game is basically the least rewarding game I have ever played.

I don’t mind a token system either but I would think in terms of the issue with farming, anything high end bought with tokens should not be able to be sold on the TP.

I don’t want to derail the thread too much, but I guess MF IS tying into RNG, so…

From my personal experience, MF DOES make a difference. I now have 175% (or thereabouts) MF, and it’s now rare that I don’t get at least 1 Rare a day just from standard play. Exotics are still few and far between, but my drops have had a noticeable improvement from the days when I used to run around with 0% MF.

The key here is this; MF only benefits certain types of playstyles. Because they do not affect chests or Champ Bags, MF will only benefit you if you kill lots and lots of trash mobs. It thus benefits farmers, and people who like to slaughter everything in their path. If you’re the kind of player who skips lots of mobs in dungeons, who do the World Boss train but only sit and wait at the boss spawn point, or just run straight from location to location when map completing and ignoring enemies along the way, you will not see much benefit from MF.

I haven’t read everything but I’ll give my two cents. I’ve benefited from RNG luck a few times. It’s nice to get a cool/expensive drop when you don’t expect it! But in the same measure I’ve tried to get items on purpose that are behind the RNG wall, and never succeeded. When that happens, I get aggravated and think, “Who designed this game anyway!” You begin to think that you’ll never get what you are working for, and you might not. It would be nice if there was some way to work for items so you could get it if you wanted it, a guaranteed drop or something like that. To keep items more unique, you could limit them to only one per account guaranteed. Rarity is nice, and RNG helps produce rarity, but feeling like all your efforts are useless makes you want to give up. Kind of why I don’t want to build a legendary, to reliant on RNG, no guarantees. I’d rather have some way of earning special items.

So, since John updated his options, I’ll change my preferred solution to 2.5, as it provides the most concrete method by which to circumvent the RNG. Looking at this discussion I guess I must be weird, since “random” and “rewarding” just don’t mix for me at all. Then again, I mostly play WvW so I pretty much gave up on being rewarded for my in game activities a long time ago =P

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I like the “reward tracks” we got with DryTop: Geodes from zone-wide events that unlock new vendor-stuff.

I also like the scheme we have with Dry Top, that rewards participation of the individual and organization of the zerg. Still, don’t know how it could be applied to world drops like precursors… That’s why I like the idea of a PvE reward track, may not help a lot with the zerg organization but at least gives the individual a sense of accomplishment.
(Also, sometimes I feel like gaining levels with a level 80 is a waste… That’s how I ended up with 8 level 80’s LOL)
A mechanic like I suggested (leveling up while 80 leading to rolls with ever-increasing luck) would give back some of the sense of achievement.

I like option #2 and #2.5. #2 would provide players with less than average luck something but most likely not what they are after 99.9% of the time. Going, say, 500 mob kills with no rare or exotic and then getting a random rare or exotic worth 40s to 10’s of gold (with a good rune or unique model) because you “earned” it through bad luck is fine, but is that really more rewarding than now? Net result is a little more gold/globs but not much more satisfaction in getting something you really want… Maybe for those with extremely bad luck…but certainly not those who have average luck (majority.)
#2.5, on the other hand, would allow players to target specific drops over a period of time and would most likely yield more positive (and noticeable) results to the player base at large. Don’t get me wrong, RNG is fun, but if a casual gambler never won anything on a slot machine would they really keep playing for significant amounts of time (and money)? No, they wouldn’t. That is why the slots are made to average out to be profitable to the casino but pay out enough to make it seem “worth it” and “fun” to the gambler. MMO players like RNG for the thrill, but most are not playing to gamble (and lose) with their time.

2.5 because:
Fun impacts decisions. Every time you finish a dungeon you get tokens you can trade in for reward items that you want, rather than having a small chance of getting it as a drop, because it’s more fun to always get rewarded for finishing with something you want to have!
Colin Johanson

Erick Alastor.3917:

2.5 because:
Fun impacts decisions. Every time you finish a dungeon you get tokens you can trade in for reward items that you want, rather than having a small chance of getting it as a drop, because it’s more fun to always get rewarded for finishing with something you want to have!
Colin Johanson

funny how he didn’t mention fractals or precursor in that article ;D

2.5 is my pick as well if all we can do in this thread is pick an option.

Option 2.5 has my interest… though it’s extremely underspecified at the moment.

Erick Alastor.3917:

2.5 because:
Fun impacts decisions. Every time you finish a dungeon you get tokens you can trade in for reward items that you want, rather than having a small chance of getting it as a drop, because it’s more fun to always get rewarded for finishing with something you want to have!
Colin Johanson

Yup… they abandoned a lot of things like that – including what you have in your signature.

Something like option 2.5 is my preference.

A system similar to PvP reward tracks would be ideal to me, where I can choose the goal, and many in game actions would progress me towards that goal. Something where I can shift to a different goal, and not loose my progress towards my first. Most importantly, a system that is transparent in that I can see where I stand and can directly see the progress that my actions have.

I see a rewards track type of system as much more expandable and customizable than a token-based system. Precursor track – would obviously need to be quite long – just throwing out numbers, but maybe need a million points. Some dungeons could award 1000 or 2000 points. World boss event might give 50 points. Maybe completing a story chapter gives 10 or 25 points. Just killing a random mob might only give 1. Maybe there could be a few precursor tracks – obviously the underwater weapons aren’t as desired as greatswords, so maybe one set is cheaper. Other named exotics, like the ones needed for some of the collector achievements could have a track. T6 mat track, maybe that one only needs 1000 points, and at the end is a bag with your choice of 5 or 10 T6 crafting materials.

Some tracks could be repeatable, others not, to control guaranteed supply of some items to once per account if that is needed.

I haven’t had the opportunity to go through this thread and on the whole, it’s not really a huge deal for me to be honest, but…

One request I would make is not to have anything more like those piles of silky sand, where you need to collect 10 of them just to have a CHANCE of getting something? They’re basically just an inventory filler, and to be perfectly honest, we have enough of those as it is. Make it so that there’s something you can do with them even if you only have one, or just scrap them entirely and replace sand drops with chances to get lockpicks or (additional) geodes.

Brother Grimm.5176:

I’m going to get some popcorn…..

Might I add that a simple comment from John (or any Dev) that states emphatically that there is NO secret LUCK factor tied to any player / account / character anywhere in the code (or ever has been), might help to squash some of the crazyiness I envision showing up in this thread. Just a suggestion.

Any such factor, if it exists, would be a bug. There’s at least one example – I remember reading an article about it, which I can’t find nowadays – where players of a particular console were told that there was no such thing as ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’ accounts… until one of the employees took it seriously enough to go looking through the code on their own time to see if they found anything that could explain it. And they did.

Admittedly, that had to do with aggro mechanics rather than loot tables, but it demonstrates that bugs can lead to ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’ accounts. I’m not saying that’s the case here, simply that it is possible that code can lead to this sort of thing without the developer knowing that it is.

DDCarvalho.2071:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I like the “reward tracks” we got with DryTop: Geodes from zone-wide events that unlock new vendor-stuff.

I also like the scheme we have with Dry Top, that rewards participation of the individual and organization of the zerg. Still, don’t know how it could be applied to world drops like precursors…

What if you have a zone-currency like geodes in every zone. You get the zone currency for completing events in that zone. A precursor could require 6 different zone currencies, e.g. you need the clay pot from dry top, the “item xy” from another zone, etc.

This way it would feel a bit like Mawdrey II (collecting parts in various places in order to put them together to the precursor), maybe without the time gating (but making the parts non-tradeable and having some parts well hidden in a few random locations, like the scavenger hunt we had during one of the season 1 events),…

DDCarvalho.2071:

A mechanic like I suggested (leveling up while 80 leading to rolls with ever-increasing luck) would give back some of the sense of achievement.

Well it would happen wether you actively work on getting that profession or not – it would feel like the WvW-reward chests. I don’t like this fact. Imho progression should be only made when you decide to actively work on something, else everyone gets one for free for just playing long enough.

I don’t mind the general idea, but I REALLY don’t want yet more currency tokens to fill my bank with. >.>

Zaxares.5419:

I don’t mind the general idea, but I REALLY don’t want yet more currency tokens to fill my bank with. >.>

well, we have the account-wallet for that

DarcShriek.5829:

Ruggs.8420:

DarcShriek.5829:

Maybe Anet should hire a mathematician from a company that makes slot machines. They work with random numbers day in and day out.

Slot machines are designed to favor the house and to keep you playing. I rather them ignore any advice from gambling houses for a reward system. The current system is already on the edge of being too much a lottery for my taste (for certain things like fractals and precursors).

Right now the most rewarding content in the game is dungeons. Not only is there a good gold/time invested but there are also tokens that I’ve used to equip all of my alts. Even if I get bad drops (which I usually do) I feel rewarded for that content. Fractals is poor gold/time and when you’re lucky you’ll feel it is worth it, but most of the time it’s not. I stop playing them because after 10 runs without anything good being drop’d it’s not worth the time.

For fractals the solution is simple, x number of fractal tokens and you can exchange them for skins. For precursors I’m not sure.

I’d also like to see WvW tokens a.k.a. badges be useful for more than just siege.

RNG is find as a supplement, but it really isn’t an intensive unless the payout is high enough. If the payout was high enough in GW2 it would ruin the economy so really a progression system like PvP or token system would be my preference (with a very, very low chance RNG element in place).

The mathematicians that make slot games struggle every day with how to make RNG more appealing to people. They use RNG to distribute awards to players in ways that are enjoyable to players. you’re comment about slot machines favor the house has no bearing in this argument and I’m not sure why you brought it up. If Anet is having problems deciding what to do with outliers in their distribution patterns, mathematicians that have to answer this question daily may be the people to ask.

A well implemented RNG distribution system may help GW2.

Interesting fact, there are some video poker machines that pay out over 100%.

No poker machine pays out 100%, it wouldn’t make any money. There are some that payout 99.999% but it still slowly removes money from you and gives to someone else.

I brought it up because the goals are different. A gambling machine is designed to make money while keeping the user hooked for that specific machine. Put money in and on average 98%-99.999% will come back. A reward system for a MMO is not built that way. A reward system in a game is designed to keep you playing and since this is free to play it isn’t design for payback in the same way. They keep you playing and hook you through the gem store.

The real balance for an MMO is to keep the amount goods being created in the game work with the amount of money spent that is removed from the game. That keeps the inflation issue at bay. There are numerous ways to handle that and guild wars does an awesome job at it.

My only issue is that the reward system is not fair and not progressive. Meaning it doesn’t reward in a way that is fair (RNG) and doesn’t allow someone to work towards some big items, like precursors and fractal skins. In addition some content is more rewarding that others (WvW vs PvE dungeons).

I think I’m not really being clear on my posts. RNG is a great add on reward, it is a horrible primary reward. Guild wars uses RNG as a primary reward.

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

This may be true, but it fails to make a difference on the drops that a lot of people want. MF is utterly useless on any chest in PvE as well as Champion loot boxes. If MF worked on those 2 items then it would be much more noticeable and people wouldn’t think it’s so useless.

EDIT: I believe it doesn’t work on the Mystic Toilet either, which would be another amazing place to get your MF bonus.

To be honest, the way this game continues to be modified to reduce the likelihood of significant rewards concerns me as well as frustrates me. I am all for protecting the economy in this game, but why not reward players for time within the game? In other words, is farming REALLY that big of a deal within reason as long as they continue to"play the game" legally (I.e. no bots for example). One good example I have of this was the first Crowned Pavilion event. If a player spent a good portion of their time in there, the drops were quite good. However, in the second Crowned Pavilion event, you cut back so much of the drops, it was not even worth most players time to engage in that activity. I have played this game since the Beta of GW1. I GET the concern on maintaining a strong economy since this was a bit of a downfall due to over farming and bots in the game. However, I have also played GW2 since Beta and yet to get a precursor drop, so I am one of those outlining players. Between the lack of precursor drops, the continual need for tightening the screw on rare drops to players, and lack of “expansion” material in this game (unlike GW1 with Factions, Nightfall, EotN, etc) you are making it vary challenging for me as a player to maintain interest in the game. My suggestion? Start letting up a bit on farming for “good and profitable drops” as well as more encouragement for your fan base and support to want to continue the need to play this game. Sometimes I feel you simply adjust things to aide you in not affecting the gem market. I get the company needs to maintain a profit, but if you lose players to the game, that also has an adverse affect. Thanks for listening and I am glad you are at least taking all feedback into consideration.

Wanze.8410:

nirvana.8245:

Obtena.7952:

Fernling.1729:

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

I think he meant a meaningful difference. I’m sure across the board there are noticeable differences, but as a single player I don’t notice anything.
It sucks when you use magic find booster, birthday booster and food etc. to boost your magic find and not run into a single exotic.
I’ve ran down entire 24 hour birthday boosters without a single exotic drop.

That’s simply a perception issue … that only a player can change. Birthday booster didn’t guarantee exotic drops. It’s the same argument that JS referred to as this clustering phenomenon. Based on other players experiences AND the confirmation from JS, MF does work.

He only said it does makes a huge difference. But how does it make a huge difference? Most of the farming these days involves opening guaranteed chests from participation in a specific event where magic find has no bearing on what comes out of said chest. Magic find used to make a huge difference, I have no doubt about that. But I really have to disagree that it makes a huge difference these days because of the simple fact that your getting most of your loot from champion bags, dungeon chests, boss chests etc. So yeah, it still makes a difference. But I disagree that it makes “a huge difference” because of the way the game has been evolved with champion farming when thats not how the game used to work.

Well its your own choice to go champ farming and make your primary goal boxes that arent affected by mf.
Champ farming is actually not a very good way of getting lots of loot or gold. IF you opt to farm lots of mobs (or players in wvw), you will most certainly have better loot and more gold and mf is friend there.
Because so many people do champ trains, you wont get ahead of them in your earnings, either, if you also do it.
Gold rewards from dungeons might have been nice the first 6 months after they got introduced but due to inflation they lost alot of value by now.

I do what I think benefits me the most. The way I see it the top farming methods are:

1. FGS champ farm 15-20g per hour
2. Dungeons 10-15g per hour
3. Node farming ~10g per hour
4. EoTM (more for the karma)
5. BLK farming pre NPE rework ~15g per hour
6. Orr Temple runs 5-10g per hour
7. Boss farming ~8g per hour
8. Drytop event farming ~10g per hour

With all these “farming method” the primary loot is not effected by magic find. With all of these “farming methods”, simply being in a party will have a larger effect on your end rewards than the 308% account bound magic find, 50% magic find from a booster, 40% magic find from food, 100% magic find from a birthday booster, magic find infusion combined with a magic find banner 15% (533% magic find). Even simply running a berserker/high damage build has a larger effect because it increases your chances of getting credit. You say its my choice to do farming methods that do not utilize magic find to its maximum potential. But is it? I certainly wouldn’t be doing these things if I didn’t think the end result was worse. Who’s choice is it really? Who really has control of what I do? Or am I missing something. Which farming methods do you think maximize the utilization of magic find to its greatest effect and can yield better results than the ones I have mentioned above?

So I want to second or third the motion for PvE reward tracks, I love the the idea of adding value to post-80 level ups, I also think a standard “achievement” based track could be fun, or add quests that make you replay stories or dungeons to “find” or acquire something from there (similar to the back piece scavenger hunt which has been way fun other than the ridiculous crafting requirements)

Along the lines of the “Feels” posts I 100% agree boss drops don’t feel epic honestly clicking an oversized chest and getting a RNG box may be simple but it doesn’t feel awesome refer to the kitten Crater of kittenitude where when you beat the boss there is a LOOTSPLOSION 500 items drop 98% of which are junk or low value but among them are good items. Now I’m not suggesting that world bosses barf a giant pile of lag inducing whites every time they die, but could we have boss drops that feel epic? Or perhaps could we make items that currently are useless useful?

Example my main is a warrior I use a great sword and dual 1h swords, I never use a war hammer and have no motivation, if an exotic war hammer drops I am 98% likely to sell it on the TP because the gold is more useful than soul binding a new weapon I may only use once. But if usable war hammers dropped more often (thus reducing the value) I would be more likely to have the cool I got a new weapon to try feeling (side note I really want the GW1 weapon customization system back rather than auto soul bind) Drops don’t feel great in GW2 because you can’t use most of them right away once you are high level. The only “new” gear you keep is ascended stuff because it auto binds on acquire. There are no “elite” armor skins to work for, any of the new cool stuff is all pay-to-win there is no earning a special armor set other than the hellfire/radiant stuff. Hehe maybe they should add 5 new armor sets to each armor class and drop them as skins from high level encounters and bosses

I almost forgot to mention that all RNG needs to be removed from the gem store it’s insulting to pay $10-20 in real money on a digital gamble the the item you want I also understand the only way this will happen is if the gem→gold and gold→gem systems are eliminated which I believe needs to be done

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

How does the magic find make a HUGE difference? How does it work?

I had understood that it increases your chance on rares drops.
So if there was drop chance of 1:1 000 for item Y (that’s 0.1%) and I had magic find 100% it would double that chance to whopping 1:500 (0.2%). With magic find of 200% you would have 1:333 (0.3%).
Is this correct assumption on how it works?

I’ve been using my birthday boosters for weeks now (with multiple characters) and have seen a increase in rare drops (I have MF 113 unbuffed), but not much of increase in exotic drops. What I mean that in the past couple weeks I have found whopping total of three exotics. I have been running dungeons, world bosses, fractals and lately some PvP. I have also done map completion from 80% to 100% with one of my chars.
I usually play about 3-5 hours per day and 4-6 days a week. On total I usually get about 20-30 hours of gametime per week.
When I popped those birthday boosters and saw my MF jump well over 200%, I really expected to see an exotic drop almost daily.

So if Magic Find really makes a HUGE difference, how come increasing it from 113% to 226% doesn’t make a huge difference?

What if you have a zone-currency like geodes in every zone. You get the zone currency for completing events in that zone. A precursor could require 6 different zone currencies, e.g. you need the clay pot from dry top, the “item xy” from another zone, etc.

A lot of people have said something like this in other threads, and I’m not a fan of it. I think geodes work for Dry Top because it’s a fairly dense and consistent zone. I think if more zones had their own currency though it would just spread the players too thinly, and most zones would not be as fun to play in for the time necessary to build up the currencies. If they want players to explore low-pop zones, they could have things like daily quests to go to a specific zone and do various content, but it can’t just be “Kill X in,” or “do 3 events in,” because a lot of zones using the current mechanics it can be hard to find active events or fun to fight mobs in a reasonable period of time. If they did this, they would need to tweak the UI so players could more easily find active events (even from across the zone).

I honestly think that, if they do implement a system to reduce loser outliers, that this system only apply to prestigious stuff that has a very small chance to drop. I don’t think the game needs to track how long it’s been since we got a rare, or even an exotic. I would like them to track how long it’s been since I got a teq horde, or an aetherpath weapon, or a black lion ticket. We don’t need to put an undue burden on the game engine, tracking everything ever. However, I do think that 2.5 is the best, where you have a chance to get the item as a drop, but if you don’t, you get a token. I also agree with people that Dry Top is a good place to start.

I do have a question for John. Suppose the game is set up so that something drops 1% of the time. And suppose 1000 people loot the chest with the item in it. And one person gets 10 of these items, and the other 999 get nothing. Is this working as intended, or is there something wrong.

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

My opinion is that the 2.5 system is the best one. A token system allows players to track their own progress thus creating incentive to keep going. Even if it’s slow and hard to get to it’s still better than just waiting with nothing going for you.

System 2.0 works fine – the more chances to get it the more times you fail to get it but the problem is it works in the background and players never really know how close they are to getting that item.

Keep things in plain view, keep players informed of their progress. Make system transparent and easy to read.

That’s how it should be in my opinion.

John Smith.4610:

phys.7689:

Wanze.8410:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’ve not read this whole thread so forgive me if this is answered elsewhere. I want to ask a few questions.

1. Is the loot system currently set up so people who play less are more likely to get an awesome RNG drop? There have been numerous posts like, “my friend logged on after 5 months and got X, Y, Z drop while I’ve been playing every day and got nothing!” I want to know if the way it works currently is that those who play lots get decreasing loot in proportion to playtime. Why would ANET do this? To keep people chasing the carrot.

John answered that question in a different thread, there arent any account modifiers.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/I-have-a-question-about-the-economy/page/15#post4487484

what he is speaking of wouldnt be an account modifier, and it probably does exist, mildy. There is Diminishing returns on drops and it decays pretty slowly. You will in fact see more drops in your first few hours after not having played for awhile.

They will never tell us exactly what is happening, but your friend who plays rarely will basically have no DR for almost all of their playtime.

Still catching up, but I wanted to stop to be clear. No to this. This doesn’t happen, it’s a cognitive bias. There’s virtually no DR active on any given day.

Hi John, I just want to add to this if I may. I have 2 accounts, my main acc I play pretty much exclusively and v rarely on my alt.
On my main account, i can spend 5 hrs plus+ pretty much every evening playing every different aspect of the game throughout an evening yet I rarely see an exotic drop more than once in a 3 week period. I can spend a full 3 hours in EotM match playing and see maybe 1 or 2 rares on a good run drop wise.
Last night, for a change, I took one of my L80 alt account characters into EotM , within 2 hours of play I had 13/14 rares drop.
Something here is certainly not adding up. My main account has a LOT more base MF and I use MF food/boosters and birthday boosters too with the same poor drop rate, yet on my alt account i had just a b-day booster active and saw this HUGE difference in drop quality.
It seriously makes me think either A) Some accounts are just luckier than others from a non-user influenced factor, or B ) The longer time an account is not used it has some kind of hidden buff/boost to drop rates.
I have tried this a few times with my two accounts, and nearly always see the same difference. Something certainly isn’t quite right here.

Ive had two precursor drops. The first one (QUIP in WvW) was the same day I transferred to SFR on EU from BG on NA. The second one (DUSK from MF) was right after I had come back from a 6 month break from the game. I also notice a regular increase in rares and exotics if I take a break from the game for a few days. I believe Johns belief is just a belief and there is something working here in the background that he is not aware of. Either way, we will never know, because Anet would never release that information.

I would like to see RNG still play a huge part in this game. I would suggest changing RNG to more of a diminishing RNG. This would work off of tiers of loot with maybe the only exception being Crafting materials and Precursers. So for example, lets say you have a 1 in 3000 chance at an exotic currently(seems to be my current rate)…. Change this number to a 1:4,000 add in Magic find that could be a 1:1 ratio or something like that. So I have a 1 in 4,000 chance at an exotic, minus my magic find, then turns it to 1 in 3,700 but heres the catch, for each drop I get without an exotic the chance gets greater….. 1:3,699 1:3,698 and so on. given this method I am guaranteed an exotic somewhere within the number I started with, when one drops that number resets to original number minus magic find. Take into account level of mobs if you would like, it could change the number, but the math behind it is basic.

Mystic Forge can work much the same way, but with different starting numbers and not taking into account magic find.

nirvana.8245:

Wanze.8410:

nirvana.8245:

Obtena.7952:

Fernling.1729:

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

I think he meant a meaningful difference. I’m sure across the board there are noticeable differences, but as a single player I don’t notice anything.
It sucks when you use magic find booster, birthday booster and food etc. to boost your magic find and not run into a single exotic.
I’ve ran down entire 24 hour birthday boosters without a single exotic drop.

That’s simply a perception issue … that only a player can change. Birthday booster didn’t guarantee exotic drops. It’s the same argument that JS referred to as this clustering phenomenon. Based on other players experiences AND the confirmation from JS, MF does work.

He only said it does makes a huge difference. But how does it make a huge difference? Most of the farming these days involves opening guaranteed chests from participation in a specific event where magic find has no bearing on what comes out of said chest. Magic find used to make a huge difference, I have no doubt about that. But I really have to disagree that it makes a huge difference these days because of the simple fact that your getting most of your loot from champion bags, dungeon chests, boss chests etc. So yeah, it still makes a difference. But I disagree that it makes “a huge difference” because of the way the game has been evolved with champion farming when thats not how the game used to work.

Well its your own choice to go champ farming and make your primary goal boxes that arent affected by mf.
Champ farming is actually not a very good way of getting lots of loot or gold. IF you opt to farm lots of mobs (or players in wvw), you will most certainly have better loot and more gold and mf is friend there.
Because so many people do champ trains, you wont get ahead of them in your earnings, either, if you also do it.
Gold rewards from dungeons might have been nice the first 6 months after they got introduced but due to inflation they lost alot of value by now.

I do what I think benefits me the most. The way I see it the top farming methods are:

1. FGS champ farm 15-20g per hour
2. Dungeons 10-15g per hour
3. Node farming ~10g per hour
4. EoTM (more for the karma)
5. BLK farming pre NPE rework ~15g per hour
6. Orr Temple runs 5-10g per hour
7. Boss farming ~8g per hour
8. Drytop event farming ~10g per hour

With all these “farming method” the primary loot is not effected by magic find. With all of these “farming methods”, simply being in a party will have a larger effect on your end rewards than the 308% account bound magic find, 50% magic find from a booster, 40% magic find from food, 100% magic find from a birthday booster, magic find infusion combined with a magic find banner 15% (533% magic find). Even simply running a berserker/high damage build has a larger effect because it increases your chances of getting credit. You say its my choice to do farming methods that do not utilize magic find to its maximum potential. But is it? I certainly wouldn’t be doing these things if I didn’t think the end result was worse. Who’s choice is it really? Who really has control of what I do? Or am I missing something. Which farming methods do you think maximize the utilization of magic find to its greatest effect and can yield better results than the ones I have mentioned above?

Just get a farming party of 5 people together and go for DE´s that spawn alot of mobs, so your kill count per hour is high. And i dont neccesarily mean lvl 80 zones that yield t5-6 mats only. Lots of lower level mobs drop relatively valuable items at a decent rate.
In this method, gold find becomes interesting as well, once you stack enough to get more than 1s per loot drop.
If I had the choice of farming 1 champ bag in a minute or 5 regular lootbags in a minute, I would always go for the latter.

Wheatty.1892:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxfkWZPAUg4

This is a great video that every developer should see. It describes also the feeling I have about dragonite ore and all the salvageable items in the game you get 99% of the time something drops.

Just because it might be better for us players it doesn’t have to feel better for us. Getting the epic sword feels just much better than getting some crafting mats over time to craft the epic sword.

On the other hand it contraticts the common voice here which wants tokens in order to craft the precursor with those after a while. I’m not so sure anymore if this would be a good thing. Personally I’d prefer a fleshed out scavenger hunt which let’s you have various such “I got a great reward” moments.

Kamikae.9536:

if the gem->gold and gold->gem systems are eliminated which I believe needs to be done

The trading post’s items are generated with the idea in mind that people turn their gold into gems. Imagine the outcry if every armorset in the gemstore can only be bought for real money. Horrific.

John Smith.4610:

or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

This is me…NOT REWARDED AT ALL

Its one of the reasons I do not play GW2 much any more…my steam catalogue of games plus Diablo 3 are FAR, FAR MORE REWARDING. I feel any time I spend playing GW2 to be a utter and complete waste, with zero forward progression for anyone of my characters. The only exceptions are fractals, where you go up ranks and WvW ranks, where you can build your ranks and get a regular chest reward too.

I have played 1,500-2,000 hrs of GW2, NEVER HAD A PRECURSOR DROP, you should be ashamed of yourself John Smith for such a crap reward system.

John Smith.4610:

2Add 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 the reward system I most like…just set a price on something and I will collect the tokens and pick my own reward. Don’t make it a secondary reward system, scrap RNG completely and just have all rewards token based.

Ocassionally, often during festivals you have the tokens, collect reward from the vendor, that’s when I personally play GW2 the most, because I actually have a reason to play the game, a goal…

Ohoni.6057:

I think if more zones had their own currency though it would just spread the players too thinly, and most zones would not be as fun to play in for the time necessary to build up the currencies.

I don’t think this would happen with Megaservers. Quite the contrary I believe: instead of having 6 or 7 versions/Megaserver-maps of Orr, where everyone farms the best stuff, people would go from Orr to the other zones which would get more crowded and Orr would still have enough players for 1-2 full maps.

Harper.4173:

My opinion is that the 2.5 system is the best one. A token system allows players to track their own progress thus creating incentive to keep going. Even if it’s slow and hard to get to it’s still better than just waiting with nothing going for you.

After I saw the “Extra Credits” clip linked above I’m not so sure anymore. Token drops would feel really underwhelming and the progress would just feel like a huge grind.

I’m have no idea about a good alternative, but this one seems to be one which doesn’t feel very rewarding.

We have to ask ourselves: Whad does feel rewarding? Well, if you accomplish something that you can’t do easily, then you feel rewarded for living up to the challenge. Does this mean that we should only fight champions to get the good loot-drops? I don’t think so. What if the medal system (for events) would have more shades and would recognize “good play”? What if a better medal would reward you with drops at a higher temporary magic find value? How could we measure good play?

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

No it doesn’t…it makes virtually zero difference…that’ my experience anyway.

It did when the current luck system 1st got implemented but after a month or so it either got broken (bugged) or someone at Anet nerfed it.

Meglobob.8620:

I have played 1,500-2,000 hrs of GW2, NEVER HAD A PRECURSOR DROP, you should be ashamed of yourself John Smith for such a crap reward system.

Talking like this to a dev who takes the time to discuss with us a concept is NOT OK. They have far more variables to consider than we would know, so keep your respect and talk like a grown up.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

What if you have a zone-currency like geodes in every zone. You get the zone currency for completing events in that zone. A precursor could require 6 different zone currencies, e.g. you need the clay pot from dry top, the “item xy” from another zone, etc.

As I see it, the most votes are going to a currency based system (John Smith’s option 2.5).
My point is that reward tracks are a currency based system, just a more elegant one.
Analysing each one of them:

1. Wallet tokens: can accumulate without you seeing you have thousands of them, which gives not a lot of sense of achievement. At least, you got “money” without even seeing, yay!
2. Inventory tokens: they occupy inventory space, stack on 250, so many times people don’t know what they are for and destroy them, to later regret. Also, not very “sense of achievement”.
3. Reward Tracks: they are also just an accumulation of a currency (it it glory? rank points?), but they show a clear objective and milestones, so it ends up giving a sense of achievement because you chose that track, so you want those prizes.

But I agree with your idea that the design decision of the game is that people do focused content to get specific rewards (as much as World drops don’t fit the bill).
Maybe, instead of those tracks being fed by level-80 level ups, they would be content-specific (but I still want to use my level-80 level ups to something :P)
Like, you only progress on the Teq track if you kill Teq (and maybe some neighbouring events?), only get Kryta progress while completing events on Kryta, and so on.

Now, while I like the tracks, I have never completed one… Do they give a “choice” of reward on the end? Or is it RNG-based?
For example, in the AC track, in the end you get a choice of equipment, like the Ascended boxes, or a random ascalonian equipment?

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

magic find pretty much only makes a difference for items of low and medium drop frequency. I’ll pull some fictinal numbers for example with magic find 200%:
1 in 10 chance for a white or grey item → 2 : 10 chance. pretty significant increase.
1 : 1000 chance for an exotic item → 2 : 1000 chance. not much of a difference
1 : 10000 chance for an ascended box → 2 : 10000 change. neglible.

Obtena.7952:

I think my point is: we already HAD that situation with Karma. Frankly, a token situation that isn’t the ‘SWTOR’ situation is almost not even worth the effort to implement. Specialized currencies = grind in general. I think that’s what the RNG attempts to circumvent: Getting lucky = less grinding. I think the trick is to make it so that if you gamble with RNG, the payback is better than simply grinding out currency. Unfortunately, somehow, that doesn’t appear to be the way it works in GW2, unless I’m perceptively challenged on that observation.

The idea behind using RNG instead of grinding is that over a long enough timeline, both should produce a a similarly curved graph; the difference being that grind produces a smooth curve with little variation, whereas RNG produces as jagged curve with peaks and valleys.

The theory behind RNG being “better” for the player experience (when both produce the “same” result in the end) is that RNG can “feel” more exciting when you’re on the top of one of those peaks; the problem (and the one that I think is hurting GW2 right now) is that when you’re stuck in a valley, there’s no clear end in sight – some part of you knows that eventually you’ll get lucky with the RNG again and it will balance out, but it feels crappier because the gameplay is still a grind. So the player loses a sense of agency over the process and feels helpless. In a grind, the player can say to themself “well I just have to make it through X more hours of this and I’m done” whereas in an RNG the player doesn’t know how long it’s going to take, and they become fearful (possibly rightly so) that it’s taking longer than it should.

This is why GW2 needs to include stronger mechanisms for allowing players to dig out of a “valley”. That way it can alleviate the feeling of being “stuck” that players get, particularly past L80 when they are working towards some kind of goal such as completion, collection, or building desired items. It might take 20 hours to grind out a precursor or 20 hours for the RNG to drop a precursor, but without the guarantee that it will happen, the RNG seems a lot more hostile than it actually is.

Game design is about psychology – numerically something may be identical to another, but if the player doesn’t enjoy or understand this to be true, then ultimately you’ve failed to achieve what really matters, especially for a long term game like an MMO – continued player enjoyment

DDCarvalho.2071:

But I agree with your idea that the design decision of the game is that people do focused content to get specific rewards (as much as World drops don’t fit the bill).
Maybe, instead of those tracks being fed by level-80 level ups, they would be content-specific (but I still want to use my level-80 level ups to something :P)
Like, you only progress on the Teq track if you kill Teq (and maybe some neighbouring events?), only get Kryta progress while completing events on Kryta, and so on.

Now, while I like the tracks, I have never completed one… Do they give a “choice” of reward on the end? Or is it RNG-based?
For example, in the AC track, in the end you get a choice of equipment, like the Ascended boxes, or a random ascalonian equipment?

You get some champion boxes during the track (here in sPvP magic find works on these boxes but I heard some disappointed voices that it doesn’t make a huge difference) and at certain intervalls you get a weapon box from that dungeon and at the end an armor box from that dungeon. From the wiki:

“Every two tiers of a reward track, players may choose a weapon and will be given 60 dungeon tokens. Completing a reward track gives a total of 240 dungeon tokens. At the end of a reward track a player may choose a single piece of armor associated with the dungeon.”

I like the idea about reward tracks only working when you’re in the zone for that track. It would be very similar to a zone currency like the geodes in DryTop. The geodes have the advantage that you can choose what to spend your currency on, contrary to reward tracks where the rewards are a given.

That’s why I’m a supporter of zone/region currency in each zone – with specific rewards. You could also let some dungeon-tokens drop from events. This would give people access to dungeon-weapons and armors who don’t like to play with 4 other people. Now that we have reward tracks for dungeon gear in sPvP I have no problem getting them from doing open world events in the specific zones. People who get 1-2 tokens per gold-event would also feel an incentive to get the rest of the tokens by doing dungeon-runs.

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.”

isn’t that exactly what you wanted to do when you made gw2? isn’t that exactly how a game as this should be? the dungeon rewards as well as f.e. the ring tokens from fractals are exactly how a reward system should look like. in order to balance things out values can always be shifted (how much you get vs. how much you need) but the fact that such a system is in place makes playing a lot more enjoyable. why not be able to buy most of the stuff with tokens? tokens for mats (different tiers), tokens for diverse gear (f.e the champ bag – weapons, why not make a token drop and choose the weapon yourself?), hell even a billion-token-precursor-vendor would be amazing even if it takes twice as long to farm the tokens than farm the gold to buy it off the tp.
make the tokens tradable or at least exchangeable with each other through an npc (f.e. 3 of token a in exchange for 1 token b) so you can either spend gold (→ gems) or play other content (but more of it, based on exchange rates) to get stuff you might want but don’t enjoy the associated content.

since release you managed to implement a lot of rng into the game. the initial idea of having a huge variety of tokens to trade them in for stuff was actually a really good one.
play content-> get a placeholder reward -> choose your reward. that’s what i think was the plan from the beginning which somehow got lost during some of the bazillion iterations you did. my suggestion? back to the roots, capitalize the system you already have, build upon it, get (mostly) rid of rng as main reward distributor and you might stand as the only company with such an amazing system of reward distribution there is.

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

It might make a difference numerically, but frankly, to me it doesn’t feel at all like it does.

My MF is something like +50% (before boosts, guild bonus, etc) at the moment and upping it is a complete slog; clicking on essences of luck has become a chore, but the real problem is how slow upping MF goes. I understand why we can’t just allow people to zoom their MF up to the max, but because it takes weeks or months to make significant progress in MF increase it stops feeling like it matters that much. By the time you get to 300% you forget what 50% felt like because it was hundreds or thousands of hours (gameplay time) ago – months and months of “real life” time.

This has 2 problems – 1) it means that by the time your MF is high enough to feel rewarding, you’ve played the game so freaking long that you probably don’t need or care about drops anymore, you’re probably bursting at the seams with money and legendaries, and 2) it stopped having any meaning long ago.

I’m not saying that MF should be converted to the “big spikes but less frequent” method that was similarly done with stats and levels, but I think that the way Essence of Luck is distributed should change. I feel like it would work better if salvaging gear should only produce “appropriate” levels of EoL; At lower levels players are happy to get Fine or Masterwork EoL, but once your account’s MF hits a high enough level, remove Fine and Masterwork from the (visible) equation and start tracking them automatically and silently and when a player hits the 100/200/500 mark, have the next item they salvage automatically pop a Rare/Exotic/Legendary EoL, that way I can at least feel like I’m contributing a big “jump” in my Luck every time I get EoL rather than it eventually turning into a horrible click grind.

Did you know that I would have to click almost half a million Fine EoL’s to get to 300% MF? That’s one million clicks of my mouse when you factor in the need to double click EoL.

That’s absurd. Clicking on Fine or Masterwork EoL is fun at lower levels, but they quickly become nothing more than wasted time/inventory space. Ditch them. In fact, you might want to just ditch them at all levels, and just make it more exciting for lowbies to get big chunks of luck. It moves so fast a lower levels anyway that I don’t think it less frequent (but larger) increases in MF would really hurt the experience; if anything it might temper the expectation for later so that when they hit “the wall” it feels a lot less pronounced.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Thiefz.3695:

Just a small follow-up on my post from last page. We have a TON of currencies. Just look at the wallet and you will see just how much we have. If you are going to do something token based please use existing currencies. Half the currencies I don’t even use.

Well, the only problem with that is that so many of those currencies are for dungeons. I mean, almost exclusively all of them are.

There might not really be a good way to adopt dungeon currencies to other areas. You could open them up and make them a “global currency” for a zone (Ascalonain Tears being the Ascalon/Charr currency, for example), but then you’ll have an issue with people NOT running dungeons for the currencies anymore (since they can buy dungeon gear from doing “regular content”), so dungeons will become almost empty and obsolete.

Though, I suppose a way around that would be to make dungeons drop significantly more tokens, but you’d also have to jack up the token prices on dungeon gear to accommodate that, which some players might not be happy about…

I think dungeons need to do 2 things: convert to a universal token shared across all of the dungeons and rework the way tokens are distributed from dungeons so that they aren’t given out in big chunks that encourage speedrunning the bosses. Tokens should be cumulative so that every enemy killed in a dungeon adds to an exponential token curve. If you kill a boss without killing any other enemies in the dungeon you should get 5 tokens. If you kill a boss after clearing all the previous enemies and trash mobs, you should get 20 tokens. If you kill a single trash mob you should get 0-1 token. If you kill every trash mob you see in the dungeon you should get 2-5 tokens per mob with token drop drop chance (on regular mobs) between 10% and up to 75%, again depending on how many mobs you’ve killed.

This would eliminate dungeon speedrunning and zerging and thus balance out the dungeon experience that is currently so hostile to new (or sub-80) players and focused on L80 Zerk Exp ONLY!™

I think there are two different types of loot that need different systems.

First you have the fairly valuable items like named exotics, giant eyes, certain lodestones etc. I would much prefer an invisible system for these, for example increased chance over time (i.e. concept 1?). The fun of these isn’t so much the value as it’s the ‘Wow! I got something good from a drop’ fun factor. Amassing tokens to exchange wouldn’t be the same imo.

Second are the hugely valuable items, mainly precursors. A drop like that will completely change most people’s economic situation in game. While it’s good for excitement that this can happen, I think it needs a different system as well. Either actually doable crafting (but we’re not talking about that now) or possibly a token based system that enables you to see your progress towards it (i.e. concept 2 or 2.5?). These drops are too important to people to be left totally to chance or some invisible system. Since the aquisition method for precursors hasn’t been changed quickly enough they have now become too interwoven with the rest of the economy, so this will impact the TP of course.

Also, it’s important to keep the possibility of good drops even right after one has been ‘handed’ to you by one of these systems. Otherwise you will have to play the game knowing nothing of much value will drop for ages.

A token or new currency is not the way I would head this… It brings us right back to gold, karma, dungeon tokens and every other currency in the game… Do we really need more? Instead of dropping those rares or exotics into the forge you have a proven method of obtaining a precurser by just buying it with the gold you just got selling those same weapons. I have over 5k hours in the game, 18k achievements, I have never had a precurser drop… I am not complaining, if everyone had a legendary, would it really be legendary? If you say precursers are to expensive, then one should consider nerfing the champ farms and EotM again. Less gold chasing same number of goods equates to lower prices. Inflation on the high ticket items is what is forcing everyone to farm and gamble away there earnings in the hopes of striking it rich. Its an endless loop and the people that get hurt in that loop are the casuals or people who can not put 6 hours a day into the game. Any increase in the amount of mid level goods(rares, exotics) has to result in a lowering of the drop rate of high level items(precursers). Inevitably if you raise the drop rate of precursers and or those mid level items without controls in place, it will lead to a cheapening of a legendary and I am sorry if you think everyone should get one as a participation trophy.

As far as I am concerned we should treat this in a capitalist way, you work hard you can get what you want, items you have earned you should be able to do with as you wish including selling of items you buy with dungeon tokens or karma.

As I mentioned before why not just revamp MF, make it a little more important with a for sure outcome at some distant point with a diminishing RNG, and remove the coding that I think we have proven that is there where it rewards those who took a long brake while overlooking those dedicated players that play almost daily.

Yeah, I understand intellectually how magic find works, but I don’t feel luckier with a 3% drop rate for something worthwhile instead of a 1% drop rate. I do notice it in aggregate, but that’s in aggregate; my moment-to-moment experience is still ‘blue, green, blue, blue, green’.

I think some of the fatigue people feel with RNG is tied up in the ‘two blues and a green’ running joke the playerbase has, and I think there’s a few reasons for that:

• It seems that level 80s get a special loot table, and that loot table mostly consists of blue and green iron/soft wood weapons. The algorithm used to generate items is pretty transparent, so this equipment feels very formulaic very quickly. Level 80 characters see the same things over and over again, so it feels like characters are most likely to receive unexciting weapons – essentially, junk the game has misclassed as valuable.

• Magic find improves the item quality roll, but upgrades from blues to greens mean very little to players because green weapons mean very little. This means players don’t really feel the effects of magic find while they’re evaluating what’s changed.

• The game often disagrees with players on whether a particular item is valuable; it’s not particularly exciting to get a “rare” lodestone that sells on the TP for close to vendor price. (The signets in JP chests are a particularly egregious example.)

• It’s much more frustrating for an RNG to ‘fail’ and not give you something you are anticipating than for the RNG to deliver something you didn’t expect instead. The level 80 drop tables being the same everywhere really contributes to this, as the items that are specific to that creature are less likely to drop at level 80.

• Because players have to kill so many enemies to get rare drops, and so many drops stick around in the inventory, the rare drops don’t feel satisfying. A good rare drop feels like the player hit the jackpot, but because players can easily judge how often they’ve lost, it feels like the game took pity on them instead.

I did notice that the chests in Dry Top were guaranteed sources of cloth. This is an interesting solution to the ‘two blues and a green’ problem; providing a reward that has a predictable value and the chance for a valuable find. The other items probably shouldn’t be the same things you can get out in the world, though.

I feel that introducing blue and green quality bags and salvage items might affray some of the frustration. I don’t recall seeing a lot of talk from players who quit while levelling being dissatisfied with the loot system. (Green quality crafting materials is a trick – probably I’d make them a salvage item that breaks into a number of blue crafting materials with a chance at a level-appropriate rare mat instead.)