Originally Posted by Fay Vert

Feel free to poll the in-game player base and report your findings, but until then, threads and polls like this are all we and ANet have to go on to guage popular opinion on the matter.

This is all we have so we can't ignore it.

Originally Posted by Gli

I bet if you'd ask a random selection of GW players instead of a specific subgroup that's likely to be much more informed by merit of being, well, forumgoers, you'd have a huge number asking "WTF is lootscaling?"

Originally Posted by Fay Vert

Do you think that the poll is wrong and that the full player base would prefer loot scaling in?

Originally Posted by AshenX

I am sorry but if your point boils down to the "fact" that if a few people believe strongly enough about somethng that is must be true then yes your instructors, etc. have been fooling you. Examples of strongly held beliefs from the past that were vehemently supported

Originally Posted by Fay Vert

Well now that is just silly isn't it?

How on earth do they log how a player feels about a feature or update?

Originally Posted by Fay Vert

Originally Posted by Loviatar

best example from very long ago the very same group so opposed to LS was and posted/polled here oppossed to guaranteed salvage/rune trader as it would slash their income.

according to guru the players hated guaranteed salvage.

Originally Posted by Loviatar

they will not reverse it to benefit a tiny very exclusive minority of players

Originally Posted by cebalrai

Now you're making a straw man out of my point. You're exaggerating my point to be so extreme that no logical person would agree to it.

Stop with your distortions please.

1) Nobody is saying they should get gold for posting on forums and chatting.

2) Nobody is saying that different play styles should have matching incomes. Stop making things up - I never said that. Nobody else did either.

Anet said that solo farming will still be more profitable than playing normally. Which it is. Sounds good to me.

So please stop making things up that I never said. Stop intentionally distorting my point. I never said "Anet should keep LS in place and take it a step further to equalize everyone's income".

Originally Posted by Fay Vert

No no no, not so fast. That in no way explains how they guage how players feel about loot scaling. How do players flock to loot scaling? Sure they will observe a lot less farming going on in the regularl farming spots, simply because the loot nerf killed it. That doesn't tell them how players feel about it, it doesn't tell them if players preferred it.

Originally Posted by Fay Vert

If you bothered to read you will note that I have highlighted the problems of sample representation. Stop pretending that a poll doesn't have relevance, it clearly does, the question is how much and how significant is it.

Feel free to poll the in-game player base and report your findings, but until then, threads and polls like this are all we and ANet have to go on to guage popular opinion on the matter. I see no problem in a discussion on how relevant or not that opinion is. Until ANet starts putting polls in-game this is the best feedback they have got, if they were to simply discount all player feedback on forums as being unrepresentative then there really is no point in the forums existing or the devs bothering to seek feed back at all is there?

This is all we have so we can't ignore it.

Originally Posted by MoriaOrc

I think that based on the results of this poll, there is no way we can reasonably predict how it would look if we were asking the entire player base (say through the "Xunlai Polling Agent" or a login screen announcement pointing to the official website). The average forum-goer is part of a very small subset of the entire GW population, and often has very different views about the game compared to the average player.

I think that the following factors would decrease the value of such a poll anyway:

1) Many players, even here on the forums, don't know very much about loot scaling. We've seen more then enough uninformed posts over the last 70 pages (more near the beginning). I think the majority of the player base wouldn't even have the vaguest notion of what it is, let alone how removing it might affect the economy. Many will vote anyway.

2) I think this is especially true among those who benefit more from LS: the low end / "casual" players. LS allows them to afford things they want on the low-end market, like runes, weapon mods, cheap max weapons, and crafting materials. However, many probably picked up the game after LS was implemented, and have no basis for comparing its effects, if they've even heard of it. Very few would likely vote, even though the represent a significant portion of the player base.

Because of these issues, using polls to determine the course of action on specific, somewhat complex issues like this is a bad idea. Investing the time to understand LS and its effects is something most of the voters will not do. A better way is to have a small group who does understand the issue (ANet design team in this case) make an informed decision in a way that involves informed community members in a debate over the issue (forum threads like this one). People who do care about the issue get their say, and the decision is based on the merits of going one way or the other.

Originally Posted by strcpy

Were I Anet what I would be looking at is retain rate of new players, retain rate of old players, and amount of items purchased (both in terms of sheer number and gold spent) before and after loot scaling. That will tell if it is popular or not - in fact it would directly say that people *are* flocking to the game because of loot scale if the rate significantly increased.

They stated they had two goals - one was to hurt gold sellers and the other was to reduce the price of items for the casual player to be able to afford base stuff (armor, runes, etc). Unstated was that they wished to retain players and have them purchase new chapters, expansions, and GW2 (the two stated goals are the means they thought this would occur).

As of now the gold seller thing is becoming mostly moot due to other changes. However prices most assuredly have deflated by a LARGE margin so that part of the goal was very much met. Somewhat unstated was that they wanted solo farmers to make, at best, roughly two times what a person in an 8-man group makes (the reduction of the gold gap between the haves and have nots causing the higher prices). Again, they pretty much succeeded here. So complaining that you don't make a whole lot more than a person playing in a group is only confirming that what they did works - the lounderthat is chanted the more they know they have done what they wanted with respect to this.

As to retain rates - dunno and we can't know unless Anet tells us. We all have our anecdotal evidence of our friends in game and the experiences are all over the place. Like Loviator I give them the benefit of doubt, in the past when things have negatively impacted those rates they changed them. Plus given the amount of complaining in general my other bet is that the amount of people who are now purchasing full sets of equipment and casual to mid level retain rates are higher (those two groups making up most of the *game* population, though forums tend to be mid to high).

I can't say I like loot scale very much, it pretty much made my favorite farming spots worthless (and they were anything close to high end either) and I still prefer those spots over what I do now. Since I normally only have short periods of time to play I also prefer to do short runs for merchant fodder and that no longer really works well (of those that do I hate - say Raptor Farming - so I never get around to doing it). I could also afford stuff better back then. But then, I was part of the group they wanted to reduce so I very much know complaining that they did what they wanted to do isn't going to get things to change.