Guild Wars 2

In all honesty, the AC fix did not fix anything. You can still skip mobs and still exploit bosses. On top of that, the new bossfights have scripts breaking faster than you can say glitch. To round it off, the critter balance now is such that only the most hardened of players can take their level 35 character through this mess.

If we are honest, AC should be a very easy dungeon tutorializing the idea of coordinated PvE team play. That there is more to this game than 100 players standing next to the right leg of the Shatterer. Something deep in the AC shimmers through, but ended up totally overgrown. There are the graveling burrows where you have to coordinate a split, there are the burrows where you need to move in a train.

AC looks to me as if too many designers and too many teams tried to “outfix” each other, while none of them really ‘got’ what the itch of playing dungeons in a team is all about. It is a good thing the same is not happening to the other dungeons right now. maybe someday there will be a coherent design idea of how to use dungeons to introduce coordinated PvE to the game instead of what we have now. Some of the Fractals have proven that it can be done. Maybe in 2015.

Not too long ago, Colin Johanson made a statement about creating a living world being the holy grail of MMO development. Maybe he just read out some PR script aloud, nevertheless, he said it. It is safe to assume that for as long as there is no financial pressure, ArenaNet will keep chasing that holy grail at the expense of pretty much everything else.

Looking at the NCSOFT quarterly reports, the day when financial pressure will be applied on ArenaNet is not likely to happen within the next 12 months.

Sure, some us do not share Colin Johanson’s opinion. There is a fair share of gamers out there for whom the holy grail of any game is gameplay; nothing else. There is a fair share of people out there who look at the aspirations of a living world and the underlying code structure of scripted events which always happen in the same way and wonder how they were ever supposed to go together.

Sometimes “new story content” with the same old class is just more of the same. That is when playing “old content” with another class comes into play as being more entertaining. Not one of GW2’s strengths, though.

What we currently see, is ArenaNet aggressively pushing the strengths they perceive to have. Push short production cycles, push the story, push daily pressuring mechanics, push achievement bars.

Let’s hope ArenaNet is using the time to work on the weaknesses of GW2 as well. Because if they are ever fixed, it won’t be a free update. There is nothing wrong with that. I certainly do not mind paying money for the good stuff, the large permanent map upgrade, the new classes, weapons, traits, etc. In short, all the stuff missing from the living story.

you guys realize the difference between “things you are able to imagine that might be there” and “areas which were actually made”.

If you jumped in that hole, you’ll find, there isn’t anything there.
Here is a video what does happen if you cross a border you should not be able to cross:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhattjBZcs4

Daily Event Tracker
http://guildwarstools.com/worldselector.php

added feature: mouseover event to get a minimap preview of target area

that’s how the RNG works. I’d be more worried if only the negative examples existed and posted in the forum. I’d put “Official hater of zBluRrYz.1347” in my forum signature to comply with your request, but it might be misunderstood too easily.

Daily Event Tracker
http://guildwarstools.com/worldselector.php

added a feature so you can manage and synch your progress across multiple machines (without requiring a user registration and password)

added soundselector and some sounds

When do you consider being done?

• Reached Level 80?
• Got max equip?
• Played every class?
• Played enough builds?
• 100% map completion?
• Seen all the stories GW2 has to offer?
• Friends playing another game?

There are many reasons why a player reaches the conclusion that he is “done” with a game. There is just as much a company can do to prevent that. Currently, ArenaNet mainly addresses one reason to shout “done”, the living story bits. That is enough for some to log in, for others it is not enough. When ArenaNet introduced ascended gear, people screamed, when more levels are hinted at, the response is equally bad. It is safe to assume that new maps, skills and traits are something which is something that may only happen in an expansion.

If you feel you are done because you reached the goals you set out to do and ArenaNet fails to excite you for something else, then that’s ok. That is a normal thing to happen with a game, but the ball is in Arenanet’s court to fix it.

http://guildwarstools.com/worldselector.php

Here is our version of how to track world events. it helps you keep track of which events you already done for the day.

• Sound Notification (on/off)
• Select/Deselect option to track which ones you got for today
• All servers, all languages
• Displays waypoints
• Website is updated from DB every 20s
• IP filter language preset

If you are into checkbox gaming hunting all those chests, let me know if there is anything missing.

If you know any good farm events to track as well, let us know.

http://guildwarstools.com/worldselector.php

Here is our version of how to track world events.

• Sound Notification (on/off)
• Select/Deselect option to track which ones you got for today
• All servers, all languages
• Displays waypoints
• Database checks every 15s
• Website is updated from DB every 20s
• IP filter language preset

If you are into checkbox gaming hunting all those chests, let me know if there is anything missing.

If push comes to shove, content is king. And not just linear story content which is depleted after playing it once, but real content focusing on extending the way players enact choices to interact with the game’s systems and mechanics.

To that end, GW2 players will hit a wall eventually. PvP-Minigames aside, the GW2 living story consists entirely of scripted events. Those events have a very limited shelf-life as opposed to the more dynamic systems we see in games such as DayZ or Minecraft. Two games which abandon scripted events in favor of a game which can create its situations dynamically. Sure, once you know all the components, you might get bored as well. In terms of popularity, randomized dynamic situations seem to be winning over scripted events when it comes to motivating players long term. Particularly groups of people buying and playing games together!

I assume ArenaNet has a “desired rarity” of fractal weapons for the sake of prestige or some other (warning: opinion!) nonsense.

Personally, I also rather get a skin while I still enjoy the parts of the game they originate from, instead of having to grind the weapon until I am fed up with the part of the game it belongs to. Looking at various type of recent skins and reward chests, that is not really the case with how rewards currently work in GW2 though.

Risk – Reward is no longer a game philosophy of GW2.

Instead, loot is being used to create big player zergs in PvE. Those zergs probably serve the function of reaffirming the players of there being a lot of activity in the game. If a lot of players were happily farming instances, then there might be an impression of the game getting empty and player groups getting isolated from each other.

This is why we get guild missions to concentrate populations. It is why we get APIs optimizing easy farming routes.

For the moment this strategy might appease the players who are in it for the spectacle and easy loot. Then again, no other MMOs worth mentioning have been released in the last few months, meaning ArenaNet does not even have to bother.

Between a flood of rings you don’t need and some fractal weapons you never use because you do not have the right characters, Fractals aren’t exactly the place for loot anyway.

It makes only sense that if the most rewards can be earned grinding the easiest dungeon (Cof), the hardest dungeon is the one where you practically do not get any consistent loot worth the effort.

Jimmy JimBob.2801:

@FourthVariety… why would you just play for points when you can play for fun?

So many things to do for fun in life already. Can’t have games be another fun thing.

Riverside does what Riverside knows.
(1) Defend against two factions who will probably gang up.
(2) Don’t waste a mob of players.
(3) Be quick when capturing because two mobs are probably after you at any time.

Currently, Riverside has slumped as low as it ever has in the rating, but even if the numbers have gone, the high tier ability is still there; here and there.

I know how some of the lowest tier servers use WvW as a sandbox to do something else entirely. It’s not like people didn’t ask ArenaNet to include that sort of thing even way before release. But hey, why do we have to make a choice which server to join after we buy the game and know nothing about the impact of that choice? Currently, worst case is you discover you like WvW but have to join a better server, which amounts to having to pay extra money to get proper access to a game mode. Even if you can pay in gold, it still means progress is undone, which the game never does in any other place.

deffy.1320:

That is a large amount of siege are you over compensating, i would be impressed if i were about 12 years old but as i’m over 30 and a grown woman, i shan’t.

snickers.

If you have to deal with two servers attacking you almost every week, you tend to build on the cautious side. You also develop a sense of score before bashing brains for lootbags.

Besides, siege weapon overcompensation has always been a Riverside thing. Just ask Vizu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1NbpPRrxo

I do not want to hate on what John Smith did, but when he posts at midnight PST in this forum about stuff relating to his work, we should not encourage him. Have a schedule, go home, one day later is still good enough.

In the world of GW2, even a minor offense can lead to an angry mob of players hunt you down and kill you. You stole some supplies? Somebody will come and kill you. Somebody called you a bandit? Someone will come and kill you. In a way, the players are homicidal soldiers of fortune who will just kill anybody if it promises to fill their pockets or progress bars.

ArenaNet seems to be aware of that, trying to counter-balance it by having the player feed cows, grow flowers and other stuff. But that makes it all the weirder.

Here is something to free you from your Guardian dependency.

If you are at range 900-1100 and you constantly walk left and right, the agony arrow will miss you.

(1) The arrow will take 500ms flight time.
(2) The game will read your current trajectory and place the shot at the exact spot where you will be in 500ms
(3) If you change walking direction after he fires the arrow, it will miss, provided you will have walked far enough from the predicted point of impact. Hence the use speedboosts and the the left right movement.
(4) This does not require a dodge roll.
(5) This does not work up close: arrow flight time!

You might look like a nervous Nellie, but you never get hit. You only need reflection for the grubs and that can even be done by one Mesemer and one Thief.

The bubble is just the bubble, have you Ele put down frozen ground (or something similar by another profession) and be done with it.

Balance in the context of this encounter is not just how much life and damage is dealt. It is walking speed of your character, how well your group spreads out to know who is being aimed at, how well the group can contract before a grub phase, how fast the agony inflicting arrow is. Most of all, how readily reflection is available to each class and how the uptime/downtime ratio is on that.

Sadly, groups only focus on the uptime/downtime ratio of reflection, which can be a key to doing this encounter, but by far not the only one. Up to the extreme of doing the encounter with four guardians on level 80.

@Lord Byron

You could argue the jade maw is “dodged” more often by virtue of the icon above players’ heads. Putting something above a player’s head is definitely the gateway to more “Simon says” game mechanics and a higher chance of player success when asked to respond to a thread.

In my opinion, one of the major problems of PvE is how ground heavy it can be. Particularly when playing an Elementalist, the ground floor makes up 66% of the picture or more all the time. The Fire Shaman is not only covered by effects, but also by its own 2D UI overlay statusbar.

On the upside, you never end up in one of the lava pits when playing character heavy on ground targeting. Compare this to a double pistol thief, who barely looks at the ground, centers the fire shaman correctly, but more often gets surprised by lava pits. I do not say this lightly, these are my observations of fractals 38+.

This encounter has competing game mechanics and skill requirements which either force you to look up or look down. Managing those competing mechanics adds another layer of complexity to the encounter which already has sudden changes between a calm stage and a high activity stage. On top of that, it is an encounter where your utility skill choices really matter. Therein lies the difficulty of this encounter.

Naturally, if you learn to master all these things, the encounter is easy, meaning you can learn how to do it better. Just don’t expect the game to drop any hints on what you were doing wrong or Youtube videos to actually explain something.

Ranged Autoattack→ Reflect & FocusFire → Reflect & AoE Bomb
Repeat → Win

If you keep your distance and constantly move left-right, you have a fair chance of dodging every arrow, even if you do miss the dodge roll.

I like force. 5% always, no downside, no condition, no ifs no buts no stacks.

Sigil of Night + Ascalon Weapon for easy night detection, nothing wrong with that.

Sigil of Fire is great if you have a single target weapon but want to tag mobs for loot.

Some already complain about jumping puzzles being too hard. Some will not rest until jumping puzzles are tougher to complete than Super Meatboy played with a blindfold and one life.

You can use the Wiki to get a more specific location for each event and then combine it with their maps.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/3/34/Malchor%27s_Leap_map.jpg

But that only gets you so far depending on what you are trying to do. I decided to solve that problem manually, feel free to pitch in, I only started today.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ebe908e20rdneha/Gebiete+mit+Raster.zip

Thanks for the answer.

I suppose that means I can include them and just wait for them to pop up.
I can confirm the one you mentioned now returning results.

I pull a list of all events.
I pull a list of all event states
I compare both

I end up with these events for which I have no state to display.
I simply do not know which state they are in.
Could be intentionally, could be not. I list, you figure it out.

I also want to put “all” events into brackets. Some events which exist show up in neither list, but that list will take a while longer to discover.

Early example: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Prevent_Inquest_thieves_from_stealing_boxes_of_golem_parts_and_fleeing_Soran_Draa

Some of them with reasons I can imagine, some of them without any reason it seems. List of affected events attached. Rename to csv for easier import.

The stitching method has the downside of the servername printed across it. One cannot totally disable the entire UI overdraw. Plus there is different languages to consider.

Putting the raw maps without any names and icons into a fansite resource kit might not be a bad idea.

Canach’s contribution to the great dream:

If made from wood, don’t wear burning wristbands.

Maximum damage can be situational.

Thief Skill: Unload

It can do a solid 8-9k damage.
It is ranged, so there is less risk for you.
You can move, so there is even less risk
With the right build you can spam it almost indefinitely

You might not have the highest number right away, but your stream of damage never ends. When Zergers are not killing fast enough, they will die rather fast. Unload Thief does not have those issues.

I’d also say that due to mobility double dagger thief is also in the lottery for most damage that can be applied in a real situation.

Back when everybody said “I’m 80 full exotic, I’m done”, ArenaNet introduced the ascended gear to “fill the gap” between exotic and legendary. ArenaNet has been saying they want legendaries as a long term motivation.

And if you collect anything BUT the precursor, you can indeed be motivated because you follow a clear path. Then you get into how to earn a precursor and all there is to do is count on luck, or grind away.

Even IF you do find a precursor, you sill got a 95% chance that it is not the one you want.

Go figure

Idea: The least armor you can wear

Icelord Diadem
Shoulders disabled
Human T3 Chestpiece
Human Ele starter-skirt
Fire God’s Vambraces
Conjurer’s Shoes

Attitude: militant

Dye: Clestial + Pyre + Heirloom
Stat: Berseker (least armor, you know)

Super Staff

To quote Jeff Grub:
“the Asura tend to have a traditional human-style relationship – parents have children.”

Source Interview:
http://www.wartower.de/artikel/artikel.php?id=622

p.s.: I am offended by the OPs lack of texture resolution.

I smirked when the thread got closed for not discussing the game, even though it tried to entertain the notion of the game being an allegory.

I suppose users are the Karka ruining paradise

Quake had a little game mode called “catch the chicken”, which is rather similar to crab toss. Even back then, the greatest challenge in order to retain the chicken was to make accurate predictions about your opponents. Even more so, since crab toss takes place in a flat space instead of an interconnected web of corridors and short cuts.

Trying to win isn’t necessarily the best strategy to learn this game mode. Imo, it is better to learn how to efficiently hunt, since this will give you the best insight into how to avoid being hunted down.

NCSOFT has to publicly publish their quarterly results and where they spend their money. This quarter they looked like this for the NCSOFT (which ArenaNet is a part of).

41% salaries
30% profit margin
2% advertising
4% payment processing fees of banks
3.7% servers and bandwidth (all NCSOFT games together)
0,3% creating retail boxes.
20% sum of really boring stuff, read the report yourself.

Activision Blizzard is also a stock company, they also publish results. They also list where they spend their money. What you need to know there is the WoW operating costs. Those include all the developers Blizzard has on WoW, the development costs of new expansion, the support for WoW and the costs of operating the game. Basically, the number is $1.7 per player. If every WoW player paid that, they would pay for all of the game and get the next expansion for free. Anything else you pay more than that ends up as net profit for Activision-Blizzard.

This is why every developer wanted to make an MMO, This is why when developers go to venture capitalists and pitch an MMO, they get funded. It is the promise of insane profit margins and for a while there was a gold-rush atmosphere surrounding developers wanting to create an MMO. Investors too. Why make the best action game in the world with a profit margin of 50%, when even a bad MMO can make five times its money back with an audience 20 times smaller than WoW?

As for ArenaNet, they employ roughly 300 people last time we heard something. Rule of thumb (read industry sites on that topic) says a studio that size costs roughly $15-$30 million per year depending on office costs and salaries. Again, look at the quarterly report on page 10, which lists the revenue directly generated at ArenaNet, which is probably the online store itself. There you can see, that the online store generated $14 million in the first quarter of 2013, so by July the selling of gems will probably have paid for all of ArenaNet’s bills this year.

Rurik:
Probably his AI, which could cause a mission to fail without the player doing something wrong. His plans never even sounded good at the time and Pre-Searing having been turned into an ugly wasteland did not make it better. He was probably a victim of circumstance.

Logan:
He does not know whether he wants to be a whiner or some cheesecake character from a Brazilian telenovela. He seems fairly competent during the personal story, but quickly turns insufferable during dungeons. Caudecus story, my oh my. Koss & Melonni anyone?

Trahearne:
He is great when the mission “A Light in Darkness” moves to the Sylvari and the vision of the future. Soon after though, he will start to take all the credit for missions the player did and that is his undoing.

For the most part the characters of GW fail, when they are too rooted in reality. Pseudo teenage rebellions, angsty teenager stunts, permanent whining instead of heroics.

Sometimes you lack the context. Destiny’s Edge for example. If you never read the book, which I suppose is 95%+ of GW2 players, you just lack knowledge of the moment which defines the state of that group. You get a quick text and cut-scene, but that is not the same as having been there.

On the bright side, we had great villains in GW1. Villains who had us believe they were good guys (White Mantle/Vizier), villains who came around and joined the heroes (General Morgahn), villains with a rational which made sense (Shiro of all people) and villains which were just demented. They were complemented with allies which were sometimes in the grey area. Glint’s Prophecy caused the human sacrifices, Palawa Yoko was resurrected by the players.

That is the real loss of GW2. Now we just have dragons, evil, rooooar. Good guys did not improve, bad guys were reduced to being one dimensional. It was ok in EotN because there the good guy buddy allies were great.

Say what you want about Kormir, sure, she screwed up big time, but you as the player stepped in.

Ask yourself this: where in the world is it ok to promote gambling to teenagers?

GW2 is not an adult only game. It also does not matter how collectible card games and Kinder Surprise gets away with it. They are just as wrong. Nintendo learned that lesson hard and started to remove the slot machines from Pokemon in Europe, when they cam under fire for “promoting a false perception on gambling”. (You could only win more money by playing more Pokemon slotmachines, you never lost in the long run).

The damage ArenaNet is inviting is not so much of a financial nature but one of reputation.

You could always buy backpacks with agony resist for money.
You can buy amulets and earrings for laurels
Earrings and rings for guild commendations

Even if all fails, you can still join a team with AR=0. IF you look for a team an gw2lfg and promise not to make too dumb mistakes, most players doing some daily or twink run will still have you. I certainly take AR=0 newbies when leveling my twinks and it never was too much of a hassle.

Just remember how changes to regular dungeons were hyped and how players responded to the change of Acalon Catacombs. Have you done Colossus Rumblus lately? It is still glitch hell with NPCs and players try to “out-bug” each other.

Living story seems to bring in players, particularily bring them into the store. Everything else appears on hold or scrapped, with expansions being actively denied.

Bad times for high level coordinated teamplay. GW2 did not have much of that to begin with and it seems that development of that type of play has died down entirely. Fotm is stuck in the mud.

Agony in GW1 was just a story gimmick. It established a type of enemy as “invincible”. You then did one mission and suddenly the invincibly enemies could be face-rolled. Agony was nothing more than a plot twist.

Agony in GW2 serves as a gating mechanic. More importantly, it hurts newbie players far more than it does the experts.

Considering the costs, agony also is a mechanism to undo all your fractal rewards. Fractal tokes will be consumed by backpacks. The money you earn will be consumed by upgrades requiring as little as 250 globs of ectoplasm. On top of that, you need to spend a lot of time outside the fractals to earn amulets and earrings only useful inside the fractals.

So why would the living story need either agony as a mission gimmick, or a gating mechanism?

Sometimes the campy dialog will break the immersion, or the narrative of a given situation.

One example is the “secret message” decryption mission from Flame & Frost.

The setup of this mission is finding messages sent by an undercover agent. The agent is established as a rare source for information and his dead drops are very limited. You would expect such a person to make every message count. But instead part of his messages are wasted on bad food and “I need a vacation”. Basically comic relief posts.

Another example is the Flame & Frost dungeon. A lot of rather depressing topics. Weapons plants, people enslaved, letters of dead people to their children, a dark unhappy environment of dust, dirt and lava. And then Molten Firestorm appears and we are back in zany luchador territory.

This will happen often in the game. There is a specific setup, but the game cannot hold the mood and will eventually break the narrative along with it.

Just as Assyrian said, you cannot just dump an expansion out there with just 400 new hearts that work the same, with the same bunch of scripted events triggering more scripted events. Who do you want to fight? Yet another dragon?

The important number concerning WoW is “cost per User”. For WoW, that number is $1.7 (i.e. not even two Dollars). That covers the Blizzard development team, the development of ongoing patches AND new expansion, it covers support, it covers advertisements and it covers server costs (which are ridiculously low). Anything above those $1.7 you pay per month is pure net profit.

Activision-Blizzard is a publicly traded company, they have to publish their business reports quarterly. It is all in there, if you are willing to read. If they drop from 9.1 to 8.3 M subscribers they will get around to addressing that, but in terms of raw performance the game will still be the most profitable on the planet by a longshot.

If you look at the revenue from GW2 across all quarters which mentioned GW2 income, then NCSOFT made roughly $175 Million with the game so far. Sure, GW2 took a long time to develop any has probably cost somewhere in the ballpark of $60-$80 million, but that still makes it a success in any book.

As for players getting bored after 1000h, big deal, that is what expansions are for. If gamers were playing one game forever not buying the next, even Colin would start to make a frowny face.

Another important figure, thanks to microtransactions, NCSOFT earned somewhere between $44 and $58 per user. Depending on which user number between three and four million you are willing to guesstimate. This is also a very respectable number, considering that NCSOFT most likely does not even get half of what a box retails for. (vat tax, retailer, wholeseller, distributor, etc.)

Vayne.8563:

Have you tried guesting to a busier server? Not only might you find less contested waypoints, but there may be more people around to help you with them.

Are you suggesting that after paying money for the game, he should pay more money to “fix” a problem with the game? Even if he can change server paying gold, it will undo a fair share of his progress, if he can even afford the 60g.

Ascalon Fractal:
Today, player portraits did not reset after the fractal. It was the first one we got, I entered from LA when everybody was just in and I did not enter Dessa’s lab. Do not know, if that has something to do with it.

Map completion is an individual challenge done for personal gain. The reward is such that you do not help anybody but yourself upon completing it.

And yet still it is also a goal for which to attain you are mortally dependent on the performance of others. Your home server, which many players picked rather uninformed, plays a huge role, whether you can carry out your personal task or not. This is a very visible divide.

But maybe the divide is there by design? Being forced to pursue an otherwise single player PvE oriented goal of map completion in multiplayer WvW softly coerces us into a mode of interaction beyond the regular gameplay. One way to look at this is as a means to cleverly force players to do something they do not know and have them discover whether they like it or not.

However, too much confidence is put into the scenario wherein players like WvW upon just playing it. I have seen ArenaNet try similar things with PvP modes when interacting with their community. Nobody there present really hated playing that PvP match, but nobody was converted into a PvP player either. The desire of the player precedes the options menu of a game. The player is the master, the game is the servant. Even if we choose to follow a path of relative insanity, or seem to be slaves to the whims of the game, players still act out of their own volition and serving a purpose; recreational madness, if you will.

Since we do not live in a bubble, the circumstances of our lives and daily interactions will determine how we choose to engage with games, which motivations dominate and which attitudes towards performing inside the game are displayed. It is much more subtle than casual vs. hardcore, PvE vs PvP, penny pincher vs. whale. Player motivation can be something utterly alien to the developers. It can be something they did neither design for, nor made sure it could exist in the game.

Map completion is such a cause. The only reason to go for the added map completion in WvW is to get the legendary. For which you also need 500 WvW badges of honor. See, it is intentional to force you there.

The real important question to ask the developer is:
when are you going to start appreciate players for what they do, instead of introducing something players want as an excuse to stuff content down their throats they did not ask for?

You want the legendary, does that mean you want WvW?
You want the ascended gear, does that mean you want dailies? Or join giant guilds? Or play specific content?

GW2 is at its best when it enables you to do what you like with persons of the same mindset. It is at its worst, when players of different mindsets form uneasy alliances in hopes of reaching a goal together. It is at its worst when you decide to suffer through something to get something and then never do it again. Ask yourself, what do you want and what does that thing try to make you? Reward you for the fun you are having, or force you into uneasy alliances? My advice, have fun, reject everything else.

To be honest, you yourself do not want MF in dungoens. First, it impacts your team’s performance negatively; it drags others down which is not nice. Secondly, in most dungeons you fight only very few enemies really. Any temple event in Orr will have five times more enemies “per minute” so to speak. The looting of enemies in dungeons is not “where it is at” so to speak. You could go for +money, which is the far better option due to the silver dropped by champion bosses. +Money can be done by ascended amulet infusions which have no downside, a runeset with far less negative impact than giving up inscriptions and nourishments nobody will complain about.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I so miss the days when you couldn’t get survivor AND defender of ascalon on the same character.

Wait so you can currently can?

how do you get defender of ascalon without dying?

daily quests we introduced to pre-seering a few years back.

Assume we would both play the game until we opened another 2000 dungeons chests.
Assume the precursor drop rate was 1:750
Assume that we would have it all play out and come to the conclusion of me getting five precursors and you none after 2000 dungeon runs.

This is what the PRNG system looks to a developer. He has a working knowledge of the result pool. He has a determined chance. However, an element of randomness produces two results which are two totally reasonable results to have within that system.

The chance for you to end up empty handed in this example is 6.9%.
The chance for me getting five precursors is also 6.9%
(sure, took me some tinkering, but you get the point, I hope)

So while the cost of opportunity is the same for both of us, the result can make a difference which nobody would describe as fair.

This is because the PRNG system is absolute fair on paper, but random events can be a total tyrant with no self-correcting influences.

In the system I proposed, the chance is still 1:750. But after 2000 chests, we would not be at 0-5 (or any other combination) but either at 3-2 or 2-3; no other distribution possible. A strong regulatory valve attempting to reward similar effort with similar results.

We still have the very small chances for loot, while achieving a far superior distribution by having the system self-correct itself.