Guild Wars 2

I don’t believe you.

If you really hated the game, you wouldn’t be bothered to submit your diatribe to the forums.

I’m pretty sure everyone has their rage moments. The key is to take a breath, make some tea, and watch some Total Dismount videos until there is a smile sufficiently melted upon your face that you are ready to return to the beautiful world of Tyria.

It’s all about the pails.

So you have something to do. The sooner you accept that ArenaNet does, in fact, have more wisdom into the mechanics of the game than you, the sooner you will realize that playing the game will get you to your goal faster than stamping your feet in the forums.

Most people who get lodestones don’t use them for crafting… If you could reasonably farm them all for yourself, what would be the value for players not interested in crafting with them? Nada, because there would be no market.

Stating that you want to craft two instead one “one plus reskin” already displays your obvious lack of understanding of how the game works,

Make your gold in the most efficient way you enjoy, buy enough for the ONE you need for the pair, and move on to the next thing.

Everyone wants things for free. Would you be so interested in Infinite Light if everyone had it?

The other option is a vertical progresssion game. Would you prefer to be locked out of actual content because you didn’t gain enough xp before the next level cap increase? I don"t think so.

I once said to a close friend, “if you have the same complaint about all of your exes, chances are the problem is you, not them.”

It’s amazing how far a little honesty with yourself will get you.

Soren.9316:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

For Tyra!

You have no idea how much you made me smile right now

Saving the world, one smile at a time… And thanks for your tireless efforts to run Wild Wednesdays at Tequatl, every..single..week!

I have 3 sets of ascended armor and use an exotic set most of the time on my main, because i find it doesn’t make any appreciable difference. Ascended is a gold sink for people who already have everything..you’re not missing out. Heck, I don’t even use the skins.

Side note: not inflation.

CMF.5461:

I upgrade full stacks to higher tiers when capped out on lower level mats.

try to mystic forge on the off chance for a precursor.

1) in most cases, except for half of the t5’s, half of the time, promoting costs more than the value of the end result,

2) cut out mystic forge play, those are your biggest single item source of gold. Remember, most players of the forge lose, and the high rollers are already wealthy.. Gambling is the blight of the poor.

Otherwise, keep on playing! If you have everything you need, does it matter?

I would delete half of the posts on the forum, to make it easier for people who wanted to find the tidbits of valuable information amonst all the anger, threats and should-do’s.

That said, I do vaguely remember wat it was like to be a teenager, and imagine a large percentage of the players are of a younger demographic than I.

So, I wade on, and give thanks to the wonderful developers and supporting cast who hold a stiff upper lip when they take on the challenge of reading and replying to forum messages.

For Tyra!

The things people complain about.. (Note: yes, I am complaining about complainers.) is your real life so u fulfilling that you are compelled to rage on the forum about such a trivial matter?

To add fire to the crafting magerial drop speculation…

What rarity are t6 mats? What rarity are t5?

MF is a chance to upgrade the rarity of a drop.

Perhaps this supports the claim that rarity does not affect the tier of a material drop?

Loved it. Now that i’ve been through it, end to end, a few times, it’s a trivial period of time considering the physical length of it. My favourite part was discovering the whole additional section (starting at the cauldron) after I thought it was done.

Turn off Dulfy and experience the adventure as it was intended.

To rush is to fail at the core goal of every game I can think of: fun.

Ps: i have completed all the puzzles, except for the two seasonal ones with time limits… Because time limits force me to rush.

I ran the puzzle once.. No rod. I ran the puzzle again, this time I:

speak to the skritt who wants it first

and at the end.. Voila, it was given to me!

The two people who were with me during the run did talk to the skritt on their first pass, and received it from the chest.

Why would you be looking for a dowsing rod if you had never been asked for it?

You can also use the flag system to quickly hop back and talk to the sktritt, instead of having to redo the whole puzzle again.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I would give just about anything to get that Search feature working. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to do. Believe me, I dislike that we’re missing “search” as much as you do!

Is there a way to change the form submit to create a google search query? The forum seems fairly well indexed in that engine. The function site:forum-en.guildwars2.com should help.

I imagine there are some technical obstacles, but the overall effort is likely much lower than to fix the built in search engine,

I like it as it is. I’ve played less than usual over the past couple of weeks and still got everything I needed from drops without spending the plethora of crests filling up my bags.

No method will satisfy everyone.

Talk to Kasmeer, she’s the next queen

rojak.1894:

MF affects pvp chests?! o.0

Apparently, the ones which contain the equivalent of mob loot, to make it fair for people who pvp instead of farming pve mobs for the same reward.

44, gamer since 1980. My son is 8, got his Legendary Defender of Ascalon title at age 5.

Talk to any speciality auto manufacturer about exclusivity.. “…making only 300, and they are already sold, at 1.5 million dollars each…”

Be happy the exclusive skins aren’t much more expensive!

Save your allowance next time so you aren’t begging for an advance when something you want shows up on the gem store,

She’s protecting it from Kasmeer.. You know, heir to the throne and all. Humans are always trouble when they get a bit of power.

Seriously, I am sticking with Kasmeer being the heir..

I second OBS. It’s fabulous, and I’ve been doing video capture for a good 15-20 years.

Sony Vegas is a nice editor, but I tend to use Premiere because it’s in the Creative Suite.

I also agree with Audacity, it’s great for hard editing your sound.

There is no justification to be had in making Eternity. Be at peace with that and you will enjoy your masterpiece. Think of it like art and not as a better tool.

I love mine, and I love my Bifrost, and Dreamer, and Kudzu. Sure,I could have saved the gold, but what else would I do with it?

My pinky finger is permanently mangled from holding down control with almost everything I do in Guild Wars, over the years! This is right up there with a resizeable and centering mouse cursor.

I can’t say how the pirate chests work beyond the perseverance buff’s tool tip stating it affects them. I expect it impacts non-box rolls, like the exotic “add ons” you describe with champ boxes.

20 slot boxes… yes.. I put most of my returns from the Maize farm into the beautiful 20-slot Halloween pails. Fractal boxes are nice, but the sorting gets on my nerves a bit I’ve only got about 20 or so characters on my main account, so I empathize with your bagging requirements.

I don’t think consistency of loot is a problem you need to worry about.. there is always some sort of farm running in Tyria.

Also, if one wants to stay above the median wealth line, optimizing loot generation, whether through farming or the trading post, is a must. I have enough “end-game” rewards and gold that it doesn’t matter so much if I am horribly inefficient in my choice of farm locations.

But, it is because I do look for best return that I’m in this position!

Finally: I agree that, negative farm events are to be avoided. Amber was a co-operative and positive experience in my experience. Blix was definitely not.. and I just avoided Coil because of the vitriol posted in the forums. Ouch.

See you in game!

John Smith.4610:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

1) Do you keep a history of when people hit DR?

2) Would you do a blind study where you compare the log of when a player hits DR with their manually tracked log of when they think they hit DR? (that is, without ever revealing the data to the end user, or having a juicy NDA in place, etc etc.)

1. Yes

2. Already done.

Thank you for sharing this. I appreciate your responses.

Thanks SKATE, this is some well done work.

I can relate to your farming OCD I spent countless hours in pre-searing Ascalon, and even this game, where I try to get all the achievements done and have no expectations for getting great loot from the bags.. I do it, just because I know that over time, it will accumulate to enable me to get something big.

It is curious that magic find remains on of the most misunderstood parts of the game, from what I read and see (MF banners at world bosses, for example).

Even the latest introduction of MF affecting pirate chests… It’s affecting when you open a chest on the ground, not the content of the bags that are inside the chest. So, especially with the Amber farm adjusted to its current state, returns from MF on the pirate chest are potentially much lower than straight up mob farming.

It’s all kills per minute.. and since DR is drop/kill count based, the ideal farm is one which cycles through four level 80 maps with good scaled mob events, with a complete cycle taking about 25 minutes.

Champ bags slow down the kills per minute.. Our original introduction to these: The Krait Lab (Sparkfly Fen) and Penitent Camp (Cursed Shore).

Curse you, champion bags!

Ultra notebooks and miniUTX PC’s have crippling throttling issues. There are apps you can get to lock the fans at full tilt and CPUs at full duty cycle, but you still will want to have an 8" HP house fan under it to keep the thing from melting.

Here is a beautiful chart for mobile video card performance comparison:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Note: The Intel HD 4400 is 286th on the list.

RollingBob.8502:

I wondered if they changed something. It did seem to ease off some, much harder to get to a point where you know you are being penalized, an. It will take several days testing to see if there is a very noticable difference, but it also does seem to reset easier. Maybe that is what they changed, so that the ones falling through the cracks weren’t penalized for simply playing the game .

It may be the type of loot being farmed. Chests as as a whole, including their contents, aren’t affected (though the xp/karma reward is if you stay at the same event repeatedly). This is why the Amber farm returned a continuous stream of reward boxes no matter how long one stayed. The same happens in Frostgorge.

It’s only mob loot (and the maize farm was a 1-item loot table mob drop), which is easiest to test in maps like Cursed Shore, where diminishing returns introduces the opportunity to have its greatest impact. That is.. players who spend hours in the map, running Plinx every half hour while waiting for the temples. Scaling up the temples to have massive numbers of monsters… and of course, remember, there are 3 temples to wait for.

Note, it’s not the time spent there, but the number of kills… which is proven by:

In the Maize farm, the number of trick or treat bags farmable before DR appears, from what I read of other players reports, based on drop count and not on clock time.

Removing DR, on the other hand, most definitely relies on clock time. Change maps, take out a few random mobs, wait 20-25 minutes, take out a few more, then WP back to your farm.

so tl;dr: my view is that it is the reward structure for maps that has changed more than the DR code itself.

Essence Snow.3194:

The numbers do not tell the whole story. 4/5 dentists recommend brand x toothpaste. Well that’s nice, but it means almost nothing. Here we have 26 for one hour on a Monday morning. Again that’s nice, but it doesn’t tell us much of anything. He also noted that not including Halloween we have not had triple digits in that category either. Now we can take a high of 99 and a low of 0 and assume an average of 50 per hour (ofc this is only if we take any of the numbers to mean anything what so ever). 50 per hour times 24 hours equates to 1200 players per day hitting DR. Woohoo this is going places….lol. Now we have 8400 per week. Knock that down to 4200 for repeat offenders and take a high estimate of 400k concurrent….carry the 1…and calculating…calculating…calculating……..You have a better chance of hitting DR than of getting a precursor! Virtually nobody divided by 2 gets a precursor.

Except getting a precursor is random, while dimishing returns has no randomness whatsoever. I appreciate your attempt to state the size of the problem, but once again.. this is why I am asking why it even exists if it has such a marginal impact.

At best, it’s a bot-flag. At worst, it’s a penalty against the most dedicated… or obsessed, depending on your perspective.. players.

Yes, that is also what I got out of it.. Hence my question.

I liked NPE until last Friday night, when a returning friend logged in and we were unale to progress his personal story, because he was at 21 and it required 30.

He got, instead, his first experience doing leveling in EoTM

Pac Man, the definitive proof that people like to grind

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Unfortunately by then the damage to the economy would be done and irreversible.

Using a baseless assumption to claim a flawed premise.

Apparently, a certain economist has stated that Diminishing Returns is no longer “a thing.”

I’m going to take this as true, for the case of my request.

If it’s not a thing.. I graciously request that you disable it from the game, even temporarily as a test.

Perhaps it’s used as a “bot check” method? I additionally suggest you leave in a flag to tell when a player would have entered DR under typical conditions, so you can continue to track it.

Watch for a few days/weeks and see if people notice.. and what impact it has on the supply in the game.

Heck, it might even help you better catch botters, since they will be more likely to stay in one place to farm

Thanks!

John Smith.4610:

Ayrilana.1396:

This is about DR. Is it based on when you kill something or when you pick up the loot? I vaguely remember people stating during the Blixx farm to pick up loot in 4 min intervals to slow down DR. Assume you’re allowed to answer this of course.

I cannot speak on the specifics, but I will say that it’s not really a thing anymore. In the last hour 26 people hit DR. Virtually nobody ever hits DR.

It’s not a thing anymore because veterans like me have a better feeling for when we’ve hit the DR boundary and how to rinse it off (invigorating!). It still annoys me that I have the potential to be in the middle of Melandru and not notice that the evil mechanic has quietly taken hold of my soul.

That said, there is “loot DR” and “reward (ex:karma) DR.” Are these tracked together?

..and of course, questions you probably cannot answer:

1) Do you keep a history of when people hit DR?

2) Would you do a blind study where you compare the log of when a player hits DR with their manually tracked log of when they think they hit DR? (that is, without ever revealing the data to the end user, or having a juicy NDA in place, etc etc.)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Generally speaking, the level of non-randomness seen in pseudo-RNG is so small as to be unnoticeable by even the posters in this thread pooling all our data. Coincidences happen, so it’s not proof of anything that the OP has seen several of the same items popping up among their acquaintances and friends.

That said, OP is correct in suggesting that the choice of pRNG tool could matter, especially if seed selection isn’t properly managed. And OP is also correct in thinking that ANet chose one tool or another and someone could tell us. OP is also probably correct in thinking John Smith would be a good person to ask.

However, I can’t imagine why ANet would give us that sort of information. Those who don’t understand pRNG or probability can’t make use of the knowledge; those who are intimately familiar with the details might be able to take advantage of such data. But more importantly, the vast majority of us, who only think we know something about the topic, would draw incorrect conclusions based on insufficient information about how GW2 actually works. As Trahearne used to say, “this won’t end well.”

tl;dr it’s most likely that the question is moot and even if it weren’t, it’s not in ANet’s best interests to tell us.

Thank you for being the one person to clearly demonstrate their ability to clearly comprehend and respond to my question. So many voices that appear to just love to hear themselves speak..

It was refreshing to see that there are a few people educated enough to discuss the performance benefits of non-cryptographic quality pRNG’s..

Guild Wars 2 having a bespoke engine in no way proves that it has a home built random number generator.

Anyhow, in closing, there are only two likely answers to the question, and drilling down to the time period of the original game’s launch, probably only one that makes any sense.

laokoko.7403:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

but to me it is academically interesting to know is there is some statistically possible predictability to such an outcome because of limitations in the random generation algorithms.

Do you have any computer program background?

Yes.

Enough googling later and I have, at least, the answer to a) language and more importantly, b) most likely compiler. (Unless this has changed, but I would be shockingly surprised.)

Still more to learn…. This is more fun that speculating on the living story.

Wanderer.3248:

Without knowing whether the sequence of numbers is used for an account, for an instance, for a map, for a server, of for some other group of players, this discussion is meaningless.

Even if there are runs, you don’t know who those runs affect.

Yes. I’m not looking for replication, I am curious about the quality of the numbers being generated and how that affects rewards potential.

It may not be a realistic goal to predict whether one success may be an implicit precursor to the next, but to me it is academically interesting to know is there is some statistically possible predictability to such an outcome because of limitations in the random generation algorithms.

Sariel V.7024:

Allisa: look for red posts in the other thread, because I’m pretty sure JS has already said he isn’t going to divulge details on the RNG system GW2 uses.

I try to read everything he posts and I don’t recall seeing it (insert complaint about forum search here).

I appreciate that there are a number of very intrlligent and knowledgable people here, offering their insight into some of the reasons that i posted to provide a background to my question. Inhave read all of it and have’t learned anything new, in spite of it.

Perhaps i should have taken out ny anecdotes, altogether.

The closest i saw to an answer is that we won’t find out, because the information is proprietary. I also expected this, but was hoping to at least get a “no, i can’t say” or “sure, it’s this!” answer to the core question.

Please?

Nice graphs. Prices shot right back up after the farm correction. Hope you saved your twisters!

Oh, it’s only the ruby that went back up..

Linen with a level 57 was beautiful. Got a nice ascended Knight’s armor chest at the same time. Loot tables looking good.

Bonetti back up to 13g last time I checked.

Deflation rocks the world..

This is the best example I’ve seen of players working cooperatively to create a successful farm.

1. LFG tool actively used to group people by interest. We just learned this from the Labyrinth event!
2. Completion of events is necessary to advance the farming. I saw one person suggest failing an event and they were shut down and/or ignored by the group.
3. Players are working for the advancement of the group, knowing that running out of shovels means the event will die. Heck, I often have a hard time getting the green lines with so many people using shovels!
4. Players will almost always res the dead, because of the single waypoint.. and no one that I’ve heard complains about it being lazy, etc.
5. There will always be event “leeches,” as one person above pointed out for the world boss events.. there aren’t enough of them for it to make a difference. And really, who cares, I don’t find a shortage of loot because of them. That said, these “leeches” are also people who need to go take a bio break or grab some food…

The downside is the potential to drive the price of items down, and distract people from doing any of the other content. Especially so because there is the expectation that the farm will get shut down, encouraging people to “get what we can, while we can.”

Cursed Shore has historically been the main farm in the game. Even with it fully occupied, there are people spread across all of the other maps. I think we often underestimate what the total player count at any time really “looks like.” Estimate 100 players in an instance. How many are playing at once, 50,000 maybe? That’s 500 instances across everything, if every instance is full. I suspect that the average player count is far in excess of that.

Finally: The Story. There’s only so much story that the writers can create, so everyone has enough time to play it. I’m on ..(blush).. EVERY DAY. Should I re-do the story events constantly? I’ve done them, thanks.. and I love them! This is something for after the story is done – it is not detracting from the story.

Anyhow, that’s my 50s.

Please read the wikipedia link I added to the original post.

Noooo… I am asking a technical question!!! Please do not hijack this thread talking about how the brain works and math paradox problems. There is a real and finite answer to my question.

To clarify: I am a logically minded thinker who knows what gambler’s fallacy is.

laokoko.7403:

I have no idea.

Yep… And no, that’s not where I am coming from.

Wanze.8410:

Why do you direct your question at the game economist then?

Read paragraph 1 of the original post.

Wanze.8410:

Try this sticky thread for questions about the economy

This isn’t about the economy.