It is a business. They need to make money. The cash shop is the only way they have to do so after a player buys the box. You are pissed off because they want to entice you into using their cash shop?

Welcome the the world of cash shops :)

Ive done my fair share of farming in GW2 and I have several friends and guildies who do as well from time to time. 

What have we noticed?  Waves. 

Loot waves.  For whatever reason, loot seems to drop all at once.  We farm bloods or were doing that.  We would get many in a short period of time, and then not a single one more for perhaps an hour or longer, then suddenly a bunch would drop off various mobs all at once. 

As I've said, for whatever reason, we've notced a descripency in loot.  Yet only that it happens in waves.  A lot of people have complained that they hit a loot barrier and don't get any good drops after that.  Did they try playing for another hour, farming the same mobs?  Because if they had they'd notice all of a sudden good loot starts dropping all at once again, then tapers off, then starts again, then tapers off. 

I'm talking as someone who has farmed for as long as 6 hours at a time.  My best friend has done the same, as well as a few of my guildies.  We've all noticed the same thing.  Loot seems to, for whatever reason, come in waves.  So there certainly is a loot descripency, but I don't beleive it's a loot barrier.  Instead a lot of my GW2 friends, as well as myself, believe that loot comes in waves and that if players were to just hang on and keep looting, suddenly for no reason they'll start getting really good drops, and usually all at once. 

You might get really bad drops all at once for ten minutes, or 2 hours, then suddenly good drops kick in.  But it seems to never be a steady rate.  It fluctuates all over the place.  Maybe it's designed that way purposefully.  I have no idea.

Just an update.

As predicted, an ArenaNet nameless forum moderator closed the thread after 1 month, 1256 replies and 42763 views.

It is always easier to sweep the dirt under the carpet than to properly clean it.

The only problem is that one day the pile of dirt will be too big and the carpet too short to cover it.

RJ

Originally posted by QSatu

Originally posted by MyTabbycat

I honestly don't understand why you are so upset over their reply.

They said they've received similar reports, they've done some checking and haven't found anything wrong but just in case they may have overlooked something, they are going to do more extensive testing.

What did you want them to say? OMG You are so right! The system is completely out of whack and we are going to fix it right away so that it quadruples drop rates. And to make up for your frustration here is 100000 gems for the gem store and also a full set of Legendary weapons.

As you can clearly see, that response was as overdone as yours.

Welcome to official gW2 forums! And I'm not exagerating here. This part of the internet is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'm actually frightened how terrible playerbase GW2 has.

Actually it's quite a valid response. That thread has been there for ages, basically ignored by ANet for over a month, and the entire playerbase is pretty much in agreement that something was changed because loot drops suddenly fell through the floor.

The fact it takes them a MONTH to respond to the issue and then say as far as they're concerned nothing is wrong (but they'll do some 'tests') is pretty insulting.

That kind of response is pretty representative of everything ANet does to be honest. They ignore issues on the forums until it's too late and then respond with some vague answer that either implies there's nothing wrong or they'll 'look into it' and then nothing more is heard.

ANet quite honestly have the worst live team I've ever seen in an MMO. Jon Peters even let slip that they only have TWO people working on class balance... most MMOs have at least one dev dedicated to each class.

Despite this thread (and any other in these forums dealing with GW2) bringing out the trolls I have to agree wholeheartedly with OP. I too was pissed after reading him/her nonsense about concrete date.

That somehow 1200 posts wasn't concrete enough for him/her.

You guys know the history of my posts. To think that they were taken over by money grabbing execubots just really infuriates me. 

Anyway there's a ton of posts (yes surprisingly they are all still up) on the main thread expressing people's disdain for the Stephane's nonsense. They closed down the 1200 slot thread that had pleanty of data there for a months time, and the dev team has the raw data. The fact that they aren't doing anything about it and asking people to post to a new thread their experiences says to me that they don't care, or that it's working as intended despite the comments made by JonPeters earlier in the week about how DR is still being adjusted. According to Stephane it's not and it's perfectly fine despite our perceived notions about the deal.

I've personally given up on this title until they fix this but not just for loot issues. Engineers as a class have suffered injustices when compared to the other classes in the game in regards to pve. It's been almost four months now and they still haven't taken engineers out of the beta testing stage and what's worse is every single significant patch has nerfed engineers even more under the excuse of "versitility taxation" which classes like "the king of versatility" Elementalists haven't endured in the slightest. So I'll be watching but from afar until they solve these issues. Hopefully next year they can bring in someone who has a brain and can actually dedicate some time to a calendar because whomever they have doing the priority bug list over there doesn't know what the hell he's doing. (yeah engineers REALLY need three to four patches for underwater combat because underwater combat is THE most important combat ever!)

Originally posted by RedJorge

 

...You and your company need to realize with whom you are dealing with.

From all the posts I read here I can surely affirm that in this thread have posted people with twice your age, with family and huge responsabilities, with professional careers that would pale the careers of all your staff put together and with effective and executive power in their everyday businesses that most of you can not even dream of...

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4YbO_1mvA

EDIT: not a personal attack, just a visual parody

The answer was an absolute joke and showed another time, how totally out of touch ANet is with their own product.

The overall handling (or rather ignoring) of the issue and finally closing of the topic just shows how out of touch Anet is with their community. I can very well see why alot of people are upset.

My personal conclusion is that they will never get another cent from me -nor in the cash shop and neither for an addon.

Originally posted by RedJorge

We complain because we CARE. We come here to inform you and your company and vent our frustrations about the shortfalls of this game because we LOVE it.

'Caring' does not make you more immune to observational bias.

We used to do the Annual lecture about: "Yes, it is a PRNG. Here are statistical analysis of the random numbers produced. Like most PRNGs, it is insufficiently random for cryptography, but much more than sufficient for gaming purposes."

That tends to just confuse consumers who lack the statistical mathspeak to understand the testing routines involved.

There is some kind of a silent loot nerf though, and trash mob tagging has been berfed. Over the past 10 days even.... I used to get drops off all the trash mobs by the canons during Claw, now I'm lucky if i get a junky ice crystal.  White items are few and far. I will say Orr produces plenty of loot during some of the DEs, though I have noticed fewer moldy bag drops. Mats have been fudged a bit. I think this may be a way for them during holiday times to produce better gem sales by fudging loot drop percentages, or due to the replacement of certain drops with holiday packages.

I mean, it would be in their best interest to do this and no surprise to me at all. In fact I expect this since it is a good way to drive better gem sales for gem to gold conversions.

The sheer fact that they posted this:

we don’t think that the randomness mechanism is misbehaving, but we’re running some data to be sure there isn’t anything unexpected going on. So far nothing shows anything suspicious but we’ll keep gathering data and analyzing it.

Tells me all I need to know, one being that they have full control over the "randomness mechanism" and two being that they have been actively gathering and analyze the data for a while. Yeah gathering and analyze to make sure profits stay healthy. Yeah I know that many mmorpg devs do and have had control over these things since the dawn of mmos. But the weight of this for sub based mmos vs. those with cash shops is not something one should over look. Furthermore, to stay silent for several weeks and then come out and basicly say: "Oh pffft! We been checkin this stuff out for a while and so far we ain't see nothing suspicious." doesn't exactly pass the smell test. Yeah nothing suspicious for you maybe.

Honestly a better answer would have been:

Because we use a anti farming software along with our RNG script, it may appear at times that you are not getting drops like you may have gotten in the past. One scenerio could be that the AFS is actually overriding the RNG script when it's not suppose to. But now that this has been brought to our attention we are asking our players to give us feedback on items which may not appear to be dropping as frequently as before so we can rule out this scenerio. And with your help, we can figure out if we need to rewrite any script effecting drops or further tweak our anti farming software. Thank you.

This pretty much re-inforces what we have been saying. The manifesto has been strayed from and it will probably continue.

"Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee."

"It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment."

http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto

They started it with Fractals and have little reason to stop because people haven't all left. The longer you stay, the more you say that you approve. It doesn't matter how many times you post or how eloquent you can make complaints. If you don't stop logging in - you aren't hurting them at all or getting a change affected. Hey, grind if you want for nothing.

I never got one exotic drop the entire time I played though I heard others did. I got so little gear that was light armor drop while questing, I hit level 80 still wearing level 40 gear and my highest jewelry was level 6 or 9. Understand that thoroughly... I played... 40 levels... and got... 0 gear drops that my character could equip... FOURTY LEVELS.  I got 4 yellow items post 80 drop, a whopping 4 and they were all weapons, one my character could equip. I was in the highest level zones, doing the highest level things and getting shit. Pure and utter shit. Let's be honest here.

I once had a contest in chat to see who was wearing the lowest level gear at max lvl. I always thought the drop rate was low and imagined I was under that bot ant-farm code because I could go 7-10 creatures before I even got one grey item. Surprising to me to read that other people actually got loot. I could not imagine what I got getting WORSE, good thing I'm staying gone :)

And, and, my PVP world bonuses never worked. They claimed that it was only happening to people that transferred, ernt, never transferred once. Stayed on one server the entire time. I didn't even KNOW other people were getting them for months until I found a complaint thread explaining what they should show if you got them.

Originally posted by Corehaven

 

What have we noticed?  Waves. 

 Loot waves.  For whatever reason, loot seems to drop all at once.  We farm bloods or were doing that.  We would get many in a short period of time, and then not a single one more for perhaps an hour or longer, then suddenly a bunch would drop off various mobs all at once.

Rolling average and two thresholds that drive a drop multiplier.  That would create the waves as described.

If I recall correctly, there is a similar mechanism in GW1.  I farm there regularly when I'm bored.  Sometimes it's mega drops, other times the identical farming will produce very little.

From all the posts I read here I can surely affirm that in this thread have posted people with twice your age, with family and huge responsabilities, with professional careers that would pale the careers of all your staff put together and with effective and executive power in their everyday businesses that most of you can not even dream of.

 

I got as far as this paragraph. Then I decided that, if you're going to stoop to a childish "my dad is bigger than your dad" way of making your point, then your point isn't worth reading.

ANet will think so too.

---

Originally posted by AlBQuirky
It is a business. They need to make money. The cash shop is the only way they have to do so after a player buys the box. You are pissed off because they want to entice you into using their cash shop?

Welcome the the world of cash shops :)

---

Anyway seems like they took some actions and improved drop rate like some hours ago, as today I got less bugs and more drops then usual.

May be all these posts made difference.
Main time I feel like GW2 is nothing we waited for... Sorry to tell but I got more fun with my 4 GW games, was not poor and got a lot to do.

I see GW2 need some improvements, so or more changes to make it better will come or game will just die fast.

I directly responded to this matter in a video that Anet actually checked out and found nothing wrong with it.

Check This

It's the gamer not the system just because you lose one way to do something. Doesn't mean your handcuffed thats just a lazy mind looking for the easy way out. I support them by buying gems when I want to. I am NEVER EVER forced to or even compelled to by GW2 system. If you feel forced to buy gems quite frankly your not doing it right. Don't blame the company honestly blame your lack of research or info on the matter. Because me and about 20 other you tubers put it out there how to own the economy in this game. And it's not like we are hiding your just not looking. So yea post like this get my official your lazy dismissed stamp.

For anyone complaining further beyond my post. I challenge you make a video and post it using my or anyones methods for gold/karma/loot drops. See if you still struggle or have ANYTHING to whine about. I am for surely not a fan boy check my combos post on the gw2 main forums Im all but calling the company out. But right here I see lazyiness crying and Im calling it out.