Cantha vanquishing report: a few numbers on pve, money, gold and green items

So, after reading a lot of threads about the state of GW economy, PvE, loot scaling, farming vs "regular" play, I decided to collect some numbers.

Specifically, I recorded the rewards through my long trip vanquishing Cantha. This should provide a good picture of PvE (and its rewards) nowadays.
It's not "hardcore" PvE, like DoA and the likes, and it's not too "casual". It's Hard Mode, after all.

I'm just delivering the numbers, not commenting them in any way. I have my opinion about the results, but I want to hear the comments from the community.

Some infos:
I did everything with heroes and henchmen. No consumables, except a powerstone in Sunjiang District. I ID'ed everything before selling to the merchant.

The chart is quite simple to understand. From left to right:
-area
-enemies killed
-time to vanquish
-"raw" gold earned: first number is total gold for that area (drops+vanquishing reward), second number is just the reward
-white, blue, purple and collectors items, followed by their merchant value
-gold items and their merchant value
-green items
-total gold from that area: raw gold drops+reward+sell revenue

Extra datas:
-gold and green/enemies ratio
-gold and green/time ratio
-drops worth mentioning: greens, dyes, tomes, lockpicks, materials
-those runes are the only ones worth mentioning (decent value at the rune trader)

All the gold items was merchant fodder. The only single decent upgrade was a perfect 5:1 vamp for hammer.

Now the numbers. I cannot copy/paste the chart, as the layout get completely red engined up, so I have to attach the .rtf. Simply open it with word or some word viewer.

well thats very nice of you to do, congrats!

Very interesting Thx a lot for putting your effort in it.

Just one question,was that 80k total and 3254.9 gold pieces per hour or I got something mixed up?

Yes, 80k is the grand total. Raw money drops+vanquishing rewards+NPC sales.

And right again, 3254 is the total gold per hour.
Actually, the real number is a little lower, as I didn't count the time to merch stuff and set heroes.

Wow, nice. Thanks for the info, dude!

Excel FTW?

Now we need around 10,000 people doing it and it'll start to be statistically-relevant. Nice stats anyway!

Kudos for recording it all! Grats on the title too

not for 5 million accounts. even considering every person playing you'd only need that many people if your confidence interval is huge (say you expect a large percentage of people to lie about their results). less than a thousand (maybe even as low as a few hundred) would be statistically accurate. For many of us, this is pretty interesting data to look at as it could be broken up into zones (with his averages).

Considering the population of the US, you don't think statistics requires results from up to 500,000+ people do you for a pubic opinion poll (the same rate that 10k from 5mil would be). Many surveys are much, much smaller as there's a lot of math behind statistics to give a good estimate.

I think it was nice of him posting, and not irrelevant.

I cant read this. Please use Excel or Calc.

Some of your results are curious to me:

1) You vanquished all of Cantha and only got 3 picks?

2) You only got 3 relatively cheap runes?

3) You only got 2 dyes?

4) You only got 1 gold every hour and a half?

These things seem way low to me.

He did it H/H. You'd only see what dropped for him and not the whole party. That said, only 3 runes is pretty low. Dyes seem ok, I find more dyes farming grawls near frontier gate than vanqing. Lockpicks seem a bit low, and monstrous fangs/eyes/claws seem a bit low too. Or maybe I just get lots of monster bits dropping for me. The gold items seems okay, but my gold item drop rate is pretty low. I tend to get more golds farming NM than vanqing areas, but that may just be me.

Anyway, nice work putting it together, though if you could put it as an excel template you could probably get more people to join in and do it too.

It's good to see someone doing this, I know a lot of us have been curious to see the stats. Nice work! : D

I wish I had the intestinal fortitude to do that type of note taking. I just completed Elona and Cantha, and down to last area in Tyria, and I cant see myself ever taking that much time to actually type all that out. Good on ya, and I think even with H/H your droprates were extremely low, of course imo Factions vanq seemed to have really crummy drops, I think elona's drops were by far the best, of course alot of that has to do with the inscriptions

So if you powered through it; you could vanquish all of cantha in a day. Thats alot of guildwars though. Probably be easier if you used people too. But nice information to know.


As for statistical relevance, its really all relative anyway. One persons level for relevance can be completely different than anothers. Besides assuming that loot tables have equal probablity for dropping the same loot for everyone, this is as good as any other random data set. All that more results ensures is that the average is more precise. As well, statistically rare loot drops (dye, golds, etc) could as well be considered as outliers, seeing as one rare drop could very double his net gold for the run.

The point is just because you think its not relevant, doesnt mean that its true. So think a little bit before you toss around words like statistical relevance.

But, I digress. Nice data none-the-less.

I couldn't agree more.. It bothers me sometimes when people like the OP go through the trouble to apply some logic to the game and its drops then someone comes by and says its worthless because you don't have a million people doing it (as we have had in other threads).

Back in my desert gryphon farming days, as well as backed by stats on how the loot is generated, I'd say this isn't necessary.

Merchant value of items created in an instance is constant (loot will be generated until its total value exceeds some value). Clearing the same zone several times, and merching everything will result in almost exactly the same value (give or take popups and random spawns). This is what the parallel farming experiment demonstrated a while back has shown.

Huge deviations arise only when dealing with player market (that includes runes, materials and dyes).

This could probably be trivially demonstrated by repeatedly vanquishing a small zone, and selling everything to merchant. An average of 5-10 vanquishes should be enough to get a fairly precise count.

The map where Kepkhet now lives, used to generate ~3000g (+/-400) for clearing all the minotaurs (cash drops + merchant sale, white items IDed as well, excluding possible player sales). I know that this figure was effectively constant. This was after AoE scatter, before loot scaling, before Kepkhet, probably before chest keys.