Guild Wars 2

I’m going to be opening a large number of loot bags over the next few days, and wanted to log the data for the wiki’s drop rate research project. However, I’m also fairly lazy about this sort of thing. Is there a way to have the game create a text dump of the chat log automatically for me so I can just import the “game messages” chat data into Excel without me needing to manually track my drops by hand as I make them?

when I do this all the time (hehe), I would just clear my inventory of everything the bag would give them (and everything else, to avoid clutter). Open your 300,000 bags, then see how many of each thing you got out of it. it’ll auto-add-up everything for you. I doubt wiki cares what order you got things in, just what the percentages are for each obtainable.

In the chat window, you can have it just show you game messages. For bags, it would look something like “You got 1 pile of dust”. I’m not sure how far back it goes – it definitely gets cleared each log out, but I would expect you can copy/paste it.

Mystic.5934:

when I do this all the time (hehe), I would just clear my inventory of everything the bag would give them (and everything else, to avoid clutter). Open your 300,000 bags, then see how many of each thing you got out of it. it’ll auto-add-up everything for you. I doubt wiki cares what order you got things in, just what the percentages are for each obtainable.

In the chat window, you can have it just show you game messages. For bags, it would look something like “You got 1 pile of dust”. I’m not sure how far back it goes – it definitely gets cleared each log out, but I would expect you can copy/paste it.

The issue with opening bags and checking inventory is that sometimes you receive “3 Gossamer Scraps.” That’s one receipt of Gossamer, but looks like 3. I believe the sentiment on the wiki is that they’d like to know the percent chance of something occurring (i.e. counting that as 1) rather than average loot receipt (i.e. counting as 3).

As for copy-paste, I guess I’d never tried selecting text like that. Is it actually selectable and available for copy-paste? While inelegant, that should be good enough for my purposes.

Well, unless I’m doing something severely wrong, you can’t select text in the chatbox and therefore copy-paste won’t work. Seems like I’m stuck with manual counting unless anyone else has any ideas.

well shucks. I knew you could copy/paste what you type into the chat, but I had never tried the chat box.

You could always do a printscreen, type something to differentiate one pix from the other, then count it up that way later .. have an official count in case you lose track?

ok, long shot but here’s an option: expand chat to fill the screen (how big can you make it? I’ve heard of people doing this, but never able to do it myself). take a screen shot of every page. print them all out. put them all in a scanner that recognizes text and scan them. scanner can save it as text, which you can then copy/paste into excel. There might be a non-printer-to-scanner option (import picture, export text), but I don’t know about it.

If you can accurately scan text, cool! Otherwise I agree with Jayne that a screenshot is your best bet. Set up a tab that only has, hmm, the loot messages and maybe /say, then go somewhere distant enough or instanced so no one will /say near you. Loot bags until your chat window is nearly full, /say Screen One or something similar, screenshot. Rinse and repeat.

Then you can go to the screenshots and use the Snipping Tool (if you have Win7) to crop down to just the chat box if you don’t want to work from raw screenshots.

An exportable chat log would be so useful for you and for many others, too, especially RPers that would like to quickly post adventures.

well, I confirmed I’m unable to select what’s already been posted in chat and the logs. still can’t get chat window larger than the last 15 posts or so.
Since this isn’t as easy as we want, may I suggest a smaller sample size for the drop rate of the individual possibilities? out of 1,000 bags you’d get a pretty good idea of how often 2 scraps of silk drop vs. 1 scrap of silk. Most of the things dropped are just 1 at a time. Then you can give the “how much of each can you expect” with the full 300,000 bags.