Return of Reckoning

My opinion on the topic is that there are hidden reasons for opposing any change in drop rates.

First off, let's put things into perspective. We are talking about spending hours every day farming green gear, because the spawns for Lv11 mobs are severely limited and the drop rate for any individual piece is 0.01%. This gear is trash by the game's standards and vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by any changes in tier.

Now the common arguments against modifying drop rates:

Buy it from the AH if you don't want to farm!

That's all very well and good, but some jokers have decided that exploiting gold would be a wonderful thing to do, causing dramatic inflation and pricing new players (and a lot of old ones) out of the AH. Such actions are typical of the "screw the devs, screw the other side, screw the rest of my faction, only I and my guild count" mentality so prevalent within MMOs, and they create a problem which we are inevitably going to have to solve in a manner that will annoy people who worked hard to legitimately farm their gold. There's enough to deal with without worrying about people performing malicious actions for their own personal gain, and it's a sad thing that people are so willing to screw up a free project in this way.

There won't be anything to do if we raise drop rates!

This argument is extremely weak, for two reasons:

Firstly, a number of players (myself included) have the perspective that the gear reward simply isn't worth the time - and it is time. Grinding isn't fun. If someone's mind is truly occupied by killing the same mob with the same handful of skills and the same bare-bones AI over and over again, then they have a problem with their definition of fun, because it's not interesting, it's freaking mind-numbing. If someone is going to do tedious work, they should be rewarded for it in a meaningful way.

Secondly, you're as good as admitting that the PvP in the game isn't good enough to hold interest, and there needs to be a gear grind to keep the game alive. Ignoring the obvious excluded middle fallacy that's so prevalent in these discussions, namely that the time-reward balance is so poor that a lot of people DO NOT FARM AT ALL, the attraction of WAR was supposed to be that it is a PvP game. The PvE elements should NOT be brought to the fore in this design. Unfortunately, the natural solution to this problem (dropping gear from oRvR only) is not viable because of a lack of loot rolling and the current issues in RvR, so we end up with what a lot of people are calling Farmhammer.

I dealt with it so you have to as well!

Absolutely irrelevant in every way. So you put up with it. Congratulations on your high boredom tolerance and abundance of free time. That doesn't mean that the system is correctly calibrated.

OldPlayer wrote:Is this your first online project? I really do not want to sound harsh, but that is how the real world works.

If a thread and the users posting it it are not violating any rules, the thread should not be locked. Period. Anything else opens the door to weaponized locking to shut down discussions.

Thank you for your detailed post, Azarael.

May I ask if you have discussed the possibility of turning WAR into "GW2 sPvP clone" considering gear, ie. player can get everything for free or 1 copper only? That will solve inflation (gold will be useless), solve the grind (grind is boring) and make WAR "the PvP game it was supposed to be"?
That's a radical solution some players would love to see.

No discussion has taken place internally regarding the idea of radical changes, and I believe that such a change would be opposed. I myself would oppose it, as I do not believe that the game requires that progression be removed. I believe that that progression should be implemented in a way that correctly balances reward, time and fun.

The current drop rates (or perhaps higher ones) would be suitable for a setup where gear only dropped from players in open RvR, and I think that would be a solid incentive for players to get into the lakes. I do not believe them to be suitable for tedious PvE grind, which very few of us came here for.

Azarael wrote: The current drop rates (or perhaps higher ones) would be suitable for a setup where gear only dropped from players in open RvR, and I think that would be a solid incentive for players to get into the lakes. I do not believe them to be suitable for tedious PvE grind, which very few of us came here for.

Do you plan any solution of population imbalance? People tend to switch to the winning side leading not only to population but also to gear imbalance, as winning side will get more kills -> more gear -> even easier kills -> even more gear etc.

There will need to be some kind of mechanism to deal with population imbalance, yes. There will be plenty of people who will switch sides to join a zerg. It would be possible to add a droprate modifier which is linked to a function of the faction ratio, averaged over a certain period of time, within an RvR area in order to discourage the inevitable abusive rerolling.

Azarael wrote: If a thread and the users posting it it are not violating any rules, the thread should not be locked. Period. Anything else opens the door to weaponized locking to shut down discussions.

Threads that exist 20 more times...

Azarael wrote:My opinion on the topic is that there are hidden reasons for opposing any change in drop rates.

First off, let's put things into perspective. We are talking about spending hours every day farming green gear, because the spawns for Lv11 mobs are severely limited and the drop rate for any individual piece is 0.01%. This gear is trash by the game's standards and vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by any changes in tier.

Now the common arguments against modifying drop rates:

Buy it from the AH if you don't want to farm!

That's all very well and good, but some jokers have decided that exploiting gold would be a wonderful thing to do, causing dramatic inflation and pricing new players (and a lot of old ones) out of the AH. Such actions are typical of the "screw the devs, screw the other side, screw the rest of my faction, only I and my guild count" mentality so prevalent within MMOs, and they create a problem which we are inevitably going to have to solve in a manner that will annoy people who worked hard to legitimately farm their gold. There's enough to deal with without worrying about people performing malicious actions for their own personal gain, and it's a sad thing that people are so willing to screw up a free project in this way.

There won't be anything to do if we raise drop rates!

This argument is extremely weak, for two reasons:

Firstly, a number of players (myself included) have the perspective that the gear reward simply isn't worth the time - and it is time. Grinding isn't fun. If someone's mind is truly occupied by killing the same mob with the same handful of skills and the same bare-bones AI over and over again, then they have a problem with their definition of fun, because it's not interesting, it's freaking mind-numbing. If someone is going to do tedious work, they should be rewarded for it in a meaningful way.

Secondly, you're as good as admitting that the PvP in the game isn't good enough to hold interest, and there needs to be a gear grind to keep the game alive. Ignoring the obvious excluded middle fallacy that's so prevalent in these discussions, namely that the time-reward balance is so poor that a lot of people DO NOT FARM AT ALL, the attraction of WAR was supposed to be that it is a PvP game. The PvE elements should NOT be brought to the fore in this design. Unfortunately, the natural solution to this problem (dropping gear from oRvR only) is not viable because of a lack of loot rolling and the current issues in RvR, so we end up with what a lot of people are calling Farmhammer.

I dealt with it so you have to as well!

Absolutely irrelevant in every way. So you put up with it. Congratulations on your high boredom tolerance and abundance of free time. That doesn't mean that the system is correctly calibrated.

OldPlayer wrote:Is this your first online project? I really do not want to sound harsh, but that is how the real world works.

If a thread and the users posting it it are not violating any rules, the thread should not be locked. Period. Anything else opens the door to weaponized locking to shut down discussions.

This is exactly the kind of response I have been asking for, detailed and informative. I do see that people want "hard", but people misuse the word. Long periods of time does NOT equal hard. It's not "hard" to get gear, it also isn't fun grinding for it. If there was flair, extravagance and loads of mobs popping dead at the same time, that feels rewarding. One mob at a time, with no flash and the AI only doing one thing, that is not. There's different kinds of grind to achieve the same thing. Grinding PvP for awesome gear, for example, is rewarding, and fun. And again, killing one type of mob over and over, not fun.

Drops are wrong, devs know it, should it be changed, yes, devs know it, is this the 100th thread about it yes, no surprise the last one got locked because i dont see anythng to discuss, it will be worked on when it can be worked on.

satekh wrote:I do see that people want "hard", but people misuse the word. Long periods of time does NOT equal hard. It's not "hard" to get gear, it also isn't fun grinding for it.

Couldn't agree more with this. The usual response to a comment like this is "you don't want to work for it". My response is that I play the damn game to have fun. If you're gonna work, do so for something useful and productive. Otherwise, play to have fun. That's how all games should be.

I don't understand why people are complaining about drop rates. Get some rvr and AH gear and do PvP. The core of this game gets blanker because most of the players are farming. Its so not important to have the damn BIS gear to succeed in fight but you seem not to understand that. Imo all PvE mobs should be removed so the SCs and rvr lakes are more populated