Guild Wars 2

I agree, DarkSpirit, we should focus on the grand hopes and dreams for what we personally would like to be able to build, and let the devs decide whether or not that is a reasonable request. No hurt in suggesting, right?

That being said: I would like to be able to retrieve the entire list of current listings out there. All in one go would be nice (don’t worry, I can handle the throughput), but just for specific items would be fine (the ids= type of parameter would be nice if this is the case). Last actual transaction for items with price and time would be great too. Being able to pull in gemstore items would be great. Exchange rate for gems to coins and back is a must have. Getting current prices out from behind the authentication barrier would also be great.

That is correct. If it never has been sold on the TP, there is no image on there yet. As of yet there is no way to get icons for items not on the TP. I would put good money on it coming fairly soon though.

eh, I’d say autolinking would be no more unfair than the existence of the guides in the first place or using VOIP in the first place. If the program automatically distributed the trek locations and told people the waypoint and direction they need to head in, THEN it might get a little unfair. But then again, if that capability is freely available to everybody anyways, it’s still fair. Just completely subverting the design of the mission.

Keep in mind that the TP icons are only the ones that are on the TP currently. I haven’t played with cloudfront myself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is just generating the image names randomly (considering they are just hex values). So I would be surprised if there was any way to convert them. Best bet would be to develop a lookup table of the image names.

Ah, my bad. Yes, it should show any events that any player on any world has ever come across. Maybe it’s possible for an event to be occuring and nobody to have encountered it yet?

It is possible for events to be in a completely inactive state and not show up in the list at all. So not all servers will report the same number of events at the same time.

That skritt burglar event description is used for different events that occur in several different maps in the game. That is perfectly reasonable output

This is one of those totally unnecessary, but absolutely awesome things. Makes me want to break out some of my old dev boards…

People from Anet have commented previously on sites like gw2spidy, and specifically said that they love that people are going through the trouble of making stuff like that and are releasing all of this API stuff so that people can keep making cool things like that. Way back when they were talking about releasing their own mobile application, the ability to buy/sell/cancel trades was part of the plan.

The TP bot thing is a bit overblown. Making money on the trading post isn’t a pure function of time invested like the rest of the game is. Even if you have an automated system that buys and sells things at a given price, people need to agree to those price points, so the time gained by automating it and not just waiting to do it yourself becomes mostly incidental. It is just a convenience. Also, if I want to play the market from my phone, that’s really my own business. Why should I have to be on my computer to stare at a bunch of numbers and text?

I am strongly in favor of letting the user decide what to release. Rawrfaec brings up many good points about the issues with this sort of thing (facebook and other social media companies have gotten in some hot water over stuff like this). Even if a user doesn’t wish to report something like their current location, I would still want to know that there are x many unidentified users in an area so that I can create population heatmaps and the like. I don’t personally have much concern about people in my guilds or friend list knowing my location, but if all the sudden there was a website that had a history of where I specifically was at a given time and when I was logged in, I would start to get a little uncomfortable.

if you don’t want all data, then make sure to include world_id. If you made that a requirement, it would be much slower for people who need to pull in data from all worlds. It would be a significant downgrade.

Not really, sites like Dragon Timer use the API but it is not actually the API itself. APIs are just little endpoints and whatnot that lets people connect their own apps to and use the data or functionality that it provides.

Already working on it: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxRLvVf4CMDkUl9RZkR6MWNxejA/edit?usp=sharing

Here’s the interactive version: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxRLvVf4CMDkYVJhSUgtdWJjOHM/edit?usp=sharing

Here’s the program to open the .cdd file: http://insight.datamensional.com

It’s a static point in time, and does not update automatically yet, it was just a proof of concept I made after the release of the new API stuff. Better things are on the way as time allows.

Yeah, that count feature reduced the run time of my ETL from around an hour to less than a minute. Being able to pull in item and recipe information from the game itself will go a long way towards making people’s Trading post apps more robust than before.

I totally agree, DarkSpirit. As it stands, the API that the trading post comes with exists primarily for facilitating its in game functionality, which is why it is a little bit more confusing than the newer API stuff just released. It was built a bit with external applications in mind, otherwise it wouldn’t be accessible outside the game at all. This hasn’t stopped people from figuring out how to pull all sorts of useful information from it and building those many excellent sites. I’ve been informed that the ability to check prices without needing to authenticate may be in the cards but right now it is necessary to prevent people from abusing the TP with too many calls. I don’t expect this to be truly outdated any time soon since right now is more of a focus on making new information available. The only changes that I know of was the last release adding the count= parameter to the trading post’s search.json and the release before that making the listings.json not require an in-game session-id. If people let me know about small changes like that, I’ll try my best to keep this up to date.

Thanks, that’s a pretty handy reference. If we could enter those all as a list into an events.json parameter, that would be super handy.

Thank you for the technical correction on the definition of a 404, Fror. Nonetheless, it doesn’t change the appropriateness of it as the error code to return. I would say that if we were using a myriad slashes to locate something (as AlSquire pointed out) that it would be more appropriate to use a 404. Since we are passing parameters, I would say it makes more sense to use something else if a parameter is invalid.

Well, a rule of thumb that we were given with the trading post API was no more than 5 calls/second. When that rule was given, there was a hard limit of 10 items at a time, so multiple simultaneous calls were necessary to pull in everything in a timely manner. Since most of these new API calls let you pull in all of the data at once (and doesn’t take an hour to do so), I’d say just don’t overlap. Last run of the events.json without parameters took me 6.5 seconds, so I would probably just run it every 7 seconds. Any faster would be presuming that your information is out of date before you even get it, which is a problem that can’t be solved by more runs anyways.

So if nothing else, wait for your previous call on that output to finish.

It wouldn’t be a 404, because that would mean the page match_details.json doesn’t exist. A 400 (which some of them already use) would be a better choice, since that usually means a syntax error. Since we’re on the subject of error codes, a 429 (Too Many Requests) would probably be a good idea if they ever feel the need to impose a rate limit on any part of the API

I believe it is possible to do any of the functions that you can do normally in those pages, such as buying and selling items, buying and redeeming gems, buying gemstore items, etc. I haven’t played with any of these functions because 1) I don’t know how to retrieve my charid, 2) I don’t want to mess with things that can cause permanent unwanted changes, and 3) I’m currently only interested in pulling out the data so I can create some nifty visualizations. I didn’t mention them in the doc for much the same reasons, as well as not wanting to be responsible for people playing with things they may regret. Of course, I welcome DarkSpirit and other people who have played with it to add to this in their own posts and make it more thorough and complete.

…Continued from above

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/listings.json?id=27321
  This will pull in the buy and sell listings for the first 20 prices as seen when you click on a specific item in the trading post. It returns the price, number of listings at that price, and the total of numbers ordered at that price. If you specify type=buys or type=sells it will return that type, but by default returns both. The data is not all listings for an item, and since only one item can be returned at a time is a much slower way of getting data out than search.json so if you have no reason to look at specific listings, just stick to search.json

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/trends.json
  This odd little output shows all the trending information you see on the main page. It has all the standard item information for the items, and a list if IDs for each category. There are no parameters for it, and may not even be up to date at a given time. I would not rely on it for much, but am including it here for the sake of completeness.

• https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/me.json
  This output actually requires a session-id that originates in game to be able to access. I won’t get into how to retrieve that particular session-id. This is what you see when you view your transactions, and requires a combination of parameters to return a valid result. The type=buy or type=sell will return either your buy or sell transactions respectively. The time=now or time=past shows either your current listings or your historical transactions.

gemstore outputs:

• https://gemstore-live.ncplatform.net/ws/search.json
  This outputs all of the information about a given gemstore item and requires either the discounted=1 parameter, the category= parameter, or the text= to return a valid list. Using a combination will limit it further. The category= uses actual words for the categories, and the following are valid: decorative, consumable, convenience, boosts, minipets, account. The text= parameter must have a valid text search after it to return results. Optional parameters are offset and count, which behave the same as the tradingpost search.json.

• https://gemstore-live.ncplatform.net/ws/history.json
  This outputs items previously bought on the gemstore, and requires a session-id that originates from the game. It is the same information as the search returns, except historical based on your account. The only known parameter is count=

exchange outputs:

• https://exchange-live.ncplatform.net/ws/trends.json
  This outputs the raw data powering the little graph seen on the bottom of the exchange. With no type specified, it by default outputs the equivalent of a type=ReceivingCoins parameter, with the gem counterpart being type=ReceivingGems.

• https://exchange-live.ncplatform.net/ws/rates.json
  This is another one that requires a session-id from the game. It is what provides the conversion rates between coins and gems. It requires a coins= and/or gems= number parameter added on to return values of that type. I have not managed to get this to successfully work myself, so I think this also requires some sort of character id to be passed. I do know that it is how Gw2spidy and some others pull in data.

That’s pretty much everything I know about these APIs. If there is anything I missed that needs to be clarified or if you have anything to share, let me know and I will add it.

I like the character names.

Annoying as it is, at least this problem can be solved by assigning each ID its own name instead of relying on what the program returns. The strange thing is that it goes between categorical naming (Tower) to more specific things for the supply camps (Red Mine, Fishing Village). About as easily solvable of a problem though.

The way sites could work would be the same way a login to the trading post works: You ask to log into the site, it checks for your forum login cookie, and if one doesn’t exist, sends you to the forum login instead. No need to enter information into a 3rd party site. The problem arises in the ability to prevent that website from doing something like changing your password in the forum (this is why you are required to enter your existing password to do so). The OAuth specification would not solve this problem either. http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2013/03/oauth-great-way-to-cripple-your-api.html

Long story short, if a piece of information could be used maliciously by someone, I would not expect it to be available outside the game for a long time. Of course, if they implement an in-game API, the sky is the limit.

My guess is that it is a Southsun event. You’ll notice the crossed sword icons appearing every so often without any mouseover text.

I know enough about OAuth that I wouldn’t want anything that could give people access to my account associated with it either.

Adding on to the character API ideas:

• Full list of guild memberships
• Karma and Coin amounts
• Inventory space
• List of accomplished Achievements

I also don’t recommend hiding most of the information because it could make for some really interesting demographic data about a world, area, event, etc. Just hide any unique IDs or names and return the rest. On that note, some things I would like to see added to a Map based API:

• Current Map Population
• Number of Overflows
• Specific Overflow populations
• Ability to pull up an image of the map area
• List of hearts available
• Level scaling of Map
  A count of the number of active events would be nice too, but that can already be rolled up. As for Guild API:

• List of associated accounts (and their rep/online status)
• Number of total accounts and also characters associated with guild
• List of upgrades purchased/available/queued/etc
• Insignia image

Some of this will need to be hidden, but I think most people would like the guild name, size and insignia at least to be available to websites. Additions to the Event API:

• Level of the event
• Number of people participating in the event
• Scaling of the event
• Meta that it is part of
• If it is a Group Event

Vanilla OAuth actually has gaping security holes in its design. It is good only for associating non-sensitive information to an external account. GW2 already has a Single Sign On implementation in place that allows you to access the game, this forum, and the trading post with the same login. I would expect that anything deemed sensitive will be put behind this existing SSO login.

It’s true that good information and communication can be huge deciding factors in the outcome of a battle, but I think the release of the information will have fairly minor effects. The main reasons being that the primary people who are interested in this information can already receive most of that in the map, and people who are not in the map are not in much of a position to act on it in a timely manner anyways. Having more information available outside of the game or WvW proper will likely not cause people who are not interested in WvW to suddenly jump in and start playing. All the servers are still faced with the same population caps and the same information available. Even if people have the information, it still takes skill to draw good conclusions, devise a strategy, and somehow get the people on the server to work together long enough to carry it out. If someone manages to do that, I’d say they’ve earned their victory.

Yes, I suppose that is a concern if you are planning on handing the user a desktop application. I believe it is possible to specify the file that is supposed to act as the keystore in the program itself (never done it myself but I’ve seen applications do things like that) so you could probably just package it in the jar files or what have you.

You could probably determine its state by an aggregation of the entire chain of events involved in claiming the temple. But yeah, something that could determine if temples/waypoints/etc were contested or not would be more convenient.

Yeah, I already ran into that. I use something called InstallCert. This little program will make a keystore with the certs of a given webaddress. It’s all over the web since it has been around a long time. Here’s one precompiled version I was able to find: http://www.opentox.org/tutorials/q-edit/how-to-install-ssl-certificates

It’s pretty simple: The events are not currently in existence. If someone is in the middle of the chain for taking the event, then there shouldn’t be an instance in the list for the defense events. Grenth is considered unreasonably hard by most, so it’s not surprising that there are only 16 in defense. I don’t know how long an event stays in the listing, but it is likely to disappear by the time the next event in the chain starts.

Wow. I really appreciate all the tips. I’ll definitely look through that article more thoroughly.

I’ve been doing some experimenting over the weekend, and I think I managed to make some money (I didn’t take existing inventory into account when I started selling, so I’m not sure).

I’m currently trying to ply my analytics expertise to the data that Drakie over at gw2spidy was nice enough to provide me with to make my own tool, which I hope to make publicly available when it’s finished. Nice way to further my work skills and game skills at the same time.

Since I’ve been seeing this term around, I was wondering what exactly does the process entail. My main thought would be immediately buying and then turning around and selling it, but I have a feeling that what some (possibly many) people are doing things that are more elaborate. So if someone would like to explain how this process works in general, I and probably many others would be appreciative.

The Moa Chick still sold for a decent amount because it was still a bit of a far trek to all of the different areas in the game necessary. But since you brought up the Zelda method of doing various game things, which is more compelling to you: searching the world for heart containers, or waiting for them to fall out of an enemy’s rear?

It should always be about a personal sense of accomplish more than how many of something exists among a player base. This is an issue I have with the mentality of many MMO players: Everything comes down to a virtual phallic substitute where everything on a character needs to be the most expensive, rarest, and as superior to everyone else’s as possible. How many chaos gloved, black-dyed obsidian armor wearing characters did you see in GW1? Many people I know didn’t even especially LIKE the armor designs, but went with them anyways solely because of this. But it shouldn’t be about that, but about what you as a player have accomplished.

So yes, give me a complex chain of events to follow to get me a legendary. Keep me engaged, and give me a sense that I overcame something more than my own boredom

I totally agree with this. I think Valve was the first to do this idea with TF2, and I think it is a wholly despicable practice for any game. It wouldn’t be a big deal if it were just a random grab bag type of arrangement in the gem store, but the fact that the chests drop so commonly, it really feels like they’re pushing it on to us. I can’t play for more than an hour without having one of these end up in my inventory. And then they make sure to give out the keys just often enough that you are aware of what you can get from it.

Charging money for cosmetic stuff? If you want to dress up your character, that’s great! packs of random dyes and minis and the like? sure, that’s fine as long as the chances are fair to fill out your collection of whatever. But don’t go setting up your game like a hotel casino.

I totally get that not wanting to play after doing dailies feeling, and I didn’t get that in GW1 either.

I think if you thought of a spectrum of MMOs as a line between GW1 and WoW, GW2 would fall much closer to WoW. And I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game by any means. The game critic Jim Sterling said about Resident Evil 6 that the issue with the game was that it was trying to be things that were not its strong suit (being a survival horror game). I feel GW2 is much the same way, adopting the more standardized conventions of its peers instead of holding onto the conventions that made people like me keep playing it for every expansion and for the many years during which the developers slowly turned their backs on it.

I feel that it is unfair to compare a game still in its first year to a game that has had years to build upon it, but at the same time I do remember what it was like when I started playing it the christmas after it came out, before anything had been added onto it. It was already a far more engrossing experience. Being able to adjust my attributes and skills freely, not having it cost me if I die, and being able to grab henchmen whenever I wanted made it a convenient challenge. While I can understand people’s complaints about the later Heroes, the emphasis always remained creating a build that was capable of overcoming the challenges presented to you. I spent hours researching skills, existing builds, mechanics, and enemy behavior trying to find or create better builds that could get me through the next challenge. And when I reached a point with my builds that I was able to breeze through a section of content, I felt triumphant in my discovery. Until I challenged something new.

So what then is GW2? Is it a matter of creating builds to overcome all of the challenges presented to you? I don’t think anyone could say it was even that focused. There is a semblance of the core systems of GW1 in there, but not the fulness of it. All of the attempts to be more of an action game are to the detriment of this core of skills and builds. Placement was important, but now holding still is folly. The greatest challenges presented in the game are Jumping Puzzles, which are just the game trying to be something that it isn’t.

What is a sequel if it doesn’t actually build upon its predecessors? Is it really unfair to compare something that was wholly conceived afterwards to its namesake?

Yes, I prefer GW1. Absolutely. If they decided to continue giving it full support while working on GW2 I would have happily kept buying campaigns and expansions. I would not feel the same disappointment that I do now, because I would still have my continuing cherished experience, and I would have GW2, which would be a nice addition. But that did not happen, and I have already sucked the marrow from GW1 as thoroughly as I was willing while waiting for a promise that did not deliver.

Well, I would need to have the spare character slots to do that. And that really is not another way, but the same way. And I agree on the black lion keys, spending real money to get the chance to get something in game isn’t going to happen.

It probably went the way of most ideas that people say to appease their corporate stakeholders. Hopefully they will get around to creating some sort of API that will allow the fan community to do all sorts of neat things.

The bigger of my guilds has well over 200 members, and I regularly help out an allied guild that is nearing the 500 member cap. Both of them have trouble successfully doing a tier 3 bounty. Even with it being a regularly scheduled event each week, the guilds seem to only be able to pull in about 10% of their total roster. This is enough people to track down every single bounty before beginning (which takes longer than the actual bounty). But even with them all found ahead of time, taking down 6 in 15 minutes is pretty hard. I like the idea of less potential targets on lower tiers instead of just upping the number to take down, as tracking down the enemies is probably the hardest part to coordinate. I do like guild bounties and the other missions for the most part, but the tier 3 difficulties are currently a waste of time when 2 easily achievable tier 1 or 2 bounties will hit the cap just as quickly.

I agree about the lack of incentive for non-members to help people out. I believe a non-member can still open the grand chest at the end of a rush, so something similar should be done. 25s would be great, but I think just extending the world boss daily rare chest to all group events would be enough incentive for passers-by to help.

It would be nice to have a way to get some of the starting armor pieces that you can’t get any other way.

Some more retro GW1 skins would be cool too. You know you want your obby armor…

Kaaboose.3897:

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on the top 10 Talcmaster. I’m really happy you liked the list.
I play as an asura so I don’t encounter a lot of the JP camera problems other races do. I HAVE tried to do Trolls End on my norn though. That was a living nightmare!

The “need 3 hands to play thing” is exactly why I said people could “bite me” if they didn’t like me clicking skills. It’s expected, by a large number of players, that you do NOT use your mouse to click skills but rather remap all of your skills to accesable buttons or combinations of buttons near your movement keys.
Either that or use a Naga Mouse. I’ve gotten plenty of comments from people telling me I shouldn’t be complaining about not being able to re-assign my left CNTRL key becuase I shouldn’t be trying to click skills in the first place!

My main is an Asura warrior, and I still have the camera bumping issue in many puzzles. Since all characters have the same size hit box, the smaller size tends to make me jump earlier than I need to clear jumps that are just barely within jumping distance. Expecting that level of precision or some of the outlandish mid-air maneuvering that’s required in some JPs is something that pretty much no actual platforming game would do.

I tend to click skills 6-0 just because it’s easier than moving my hands. Of course, when the champions start chasing me (and it’s almost always chasing me) I can’t afford to let go of the camera to do that, so I’m holding A and S with my pinky and ring finger, and stretching to activate my utilities with my index finger. Honestly, if I have to buy a whole new peripheral to play the game, I would want it to be the headset that lets you control your computer with your brainwaves.

I thought he meant more polished than a reflective finish like Juggernaut, but I get what you’re saying.

Many of the colors seem to have differing levels of shininess as it is, but I like the idea. Two tone colors like you see with some car paint would be even cooler. Then I could truly be a technicolor warrior.

You know, it’s nice that I’m not the only one to feekl this way about much of this. I agree with most of these points, if not necessarily their order.

10 – Yeah, I don’t get that ad either.
9 – WvW can be a fun little diversion, but I prefer PvE by a long shot. Totally hate the fact I’m going to spend huge amounts of time doing it (or at least the JPs) to get my legendaries. I think the idea that 3 sides somehow makes it balanced automatically has been proven false. if one side is drastically dominating, a game enforced cease fire among the other two sides could help balance that out.
8 – Get rid of MF altogether. It just plain shouldn’t exist. I feel like I’m given a choice between cheating other players or cheating myself. As far as loot in general, having rarity effect stats was a step backwards from GW1. Rare skins alone were enough.
7 – same as in the video, not going to reiterate.
6 – I feel like I am forced to do exploits in dungeons. That makes me feel lousy. I don’t like doing them because even if I’ve done it a dozen times before, getting through it can be like pulling teeth with certain build combinations.
5 – I actually was thinking the same thing about instancing all zones. I don’t mind running around by myself, but I avoid Group Events because it’s unlikely there will be enough people to do anything that doesn’t give a chest at the end. Just because we’re all sharing instances doesn’t mean we won’t still fight for our WvW server.
4 – Group Events need a better risk/reward. They give the same as regular events, so there’s no reason to do most of them. If all group events gave the daily rare that the big ones, that would probably be enough.
3 – No excuse for not having a LFG tool. GW1 recognized the need years ago, and that worked really well. Another step backwards.
2 – Yeah. Why is there no deposit and withdraw all buttons on the bank? again, step backwards. How come I don’t see a big yellow message pop up saying they are going to be shutting down the login server while playing in game? Why don’t patch notes show up while the game is loading?
1 – I was actually really surprised after playing the betas that they released the game when they did. There were so many obvious rough spots that I figured we had at least another year from the first beta. Many of those still exist. That’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. The fact that there are ANY traits that don’t actually apply their effect is unbelievable. That’s deterministic, easily testable, and part of the core gameplay.

Another thing I would add is JP screwiness. There are many cool ideas in the JPs that would make great levels in a platformer, but are too much for the fairly simplistic jumping mechanics and free range, physically bound camera. Not to mention the collision near the edge of thin objects not being able to tell if you landed on a platform or bumped your head against it.

Another thing a friend of mine mentioned is that since standing still is basically suicide, the game pretty much takes 3 hands to play: one for movement keys, one for mouse, and one for skills/misc buttons. I find myself regularly making weird stretches and occasionally hitting the wrong key because of this. But this is a deeper problem with the combat system that might not be fixable.

They do such a good job dancing around player names in GW2 dialogue that I think they could find ways to make more solid references to our GW1 characters. And even if the specific character you’re named after didn’t do all of those things, there was still someone who did.

I don’t really think the unknown soldier tomb is a reference, just because of the unknown part. Considering you traveled with them the entire trip to Kryta, they would have remembered your name.

Seems like all the heroes and henchmen are the ultimate spotlight stealing squad, since they’re getting statues, and monuments, and book deals, even though you were the leader. Didn’t someone at least write our biography?

Already had. Since I hadn’t heard from them for a while, I guessed that it was due to them using URL encoding extending the length beyond what the programs could handle for whatever reason. When I changed it to a version that had enough characters lobbed off the end to fit, it worked fine. Doesn’t mean that’s why it didn’t work, but it very well could be.

When they did send me a response, it looked like some canned email that they probably send everyone who got their account hacked or lost their password. And they changed the title to “Account Lost.” with the period and everything. So I replied with a message of what the problem actually is, what I did to solve my own issue, and what they could do to prevent this from happening.

I’ve worked as support previously, and I’m sure they’re completely swamped right now, so they have my sympathies. At the same time, it’s their job to read these things, and I don’t feel like mine really was. If I even get a further response back, I’ll be impressed.

HOM was great, gave a great sense of accomplishment to see all those statues lining the walls. I think putting it in the home district would be great. After all, when towns in real life have current or former residents they’re proud of, they build statues and open museums dedicated to them.

First, I would like to commend Xericor for taking the time to do something as tedious as kill the same few enemies repeatedly and record the data from it, and thank him for putting himself out there with an analysis that would undoubtedly get him a good deal of flak. While the data set is too small for definitive answers, It’s still very interesting.

There are some odd things happening, such as the increased rate of loot dropping in the middle (significantly higher than the overall rate). I would really like to look closer at that, but it seems accompanied by slightly higher kill rates (assuming the time numbers are always 1 item/kill, it could just be multiple drops per enemy throwing the numbers off), which actually runs counter to what most players assumed in GW1 about the kill rate. I would say it’s just the randomness if it didn’t seem to span half an hour and 46 kills.

Individual types is much less definitive because the numbers are so low for them. Trophies is in the single digits altogether, and tend to be more or less just randomly spread throughout the data, so we can’t even say for sure if it changes or not. Junk doesn’t seem to have much of a pattern either even though it is definitely more plentiful. Items on the other hand, have a pretty clear drop off for the last half hour. If you compare the first 50 enemies to the last 50, it’s 8 vs 3 and no items drop for the last 30 enemies. Again, small numbers, but it looks like something is happening.

Based on these numbers, I would hypothesize that kill rate actually is the biggest determinant over whether or not you get loot, but the rate of items will actually drop after killing enemies in an area enough times. I would also like to conjecture that we aren’t dealing with a single loot table, but with actually multiple. Each major type could be randomly selected separately (low probabilities in each table). This would make probability modifiers like anti-farming, magic find, etc. more manageable since improving the odds of one thing won’t push out another.

Thanks again for the data, I’d love to see more like this. If anybody plans on doing something like this again, I suggest a few things. First, take a sum total of the merchant value of all the goods on an enemy including coins. This can be used to avoid double counting issues and makes it easy to check for an overall change. Take the data down to individual enemies, and record time down to the minute or half a minute (This is known as the lowest level of granularity). This can make it easier to group the data in different ways. After that, record each type of item dropped separately, but associated with the specific enemy. And when you give it to whoever you want to analyze it, don’t summarize it ahead of time, it tends to make it harder to work with.

Also, keep it in excel, csv, or some other standard format. I would be happy to throw some data into the fancy software I play with for a living and post charts and things all over the forums but I’m not manually entering the data unless I am gathering it myself, which probably won’t happen because I tend not to have the time. But please, feel free to post more data like this.