DR? (Diminished Returns)

#2 - Feb. 5, 2013, 6:13 p.m.

DR is still in place, just better now. In this last patch we adjusted DR, but how it works shouldn’t punish efficient/speed running players anymore. If you run the same path continually you will still be hit by it, but we’ve looked at the data and made tweaks in hopes it won’t be punishing players who are legitimately completing things very quickly.
We’re watching it though to make sure nothing weird happens because of it. Please do report your findings if you feel you are hit by it unfairly so we can look into it.

Since DR is a safety net system for exploits, we’re likely not going to announce when and how we made changes to it.

#6 - Feb. 5, 2013, 6:44 p.m.

Essence Snow.3194:

When ya’ll did this “tweaking” ya’ll broke dragon DR.

The issue with the dragon chests should only effect people who park characters at dragons and don’t play them anywhere else. Is this what you are doing?

lekyii.9856:

So DR also affects Fractals of the Mists?
That may be the reason for all the complains that the forum are getting about the loot on fractals…

DR does not effect fractals in the same way. What players are seeing is just RNG.

#8 - Feb. 5, 2013, 6:52 p.m.

lekyii.9856:

So DR starts if i stay “30minutes” in the same area or something?

I can’t go into specifics to how DR works since it is a safety net system, but no that is not a metric it operates on.

#12 - Feb. 5, 2013, 7:20 p.m.

Syeria.4812:

Anecdotes are worse than useless for trying to track alleged changes in RNG as people will only ever comment when things are going poorly. Of course all your anecdotal evidence is from people having poor luck, they wouldn’t ever bother to comment otherwise. It’s like interviewing people leaving a bar and freaking out that almost everyone you talked to had been drinking.

This pretty much sums things up. People rarely comment when something is working properly, and usually only bring things up in a positive light if there is a discussion about it and they feel provoked to do as such.
For instance, we recently made it possible to join and reconnect in fractals. Prior to that patch there would be a new thread nearly every other day about how bad fractals were because of disconnects, and those threads would be the most popular. But since fixing it there hasn’t been a single thread about it, or any comments. It’s just the general nature of people to happily enjoy things instead of taking the time out of enjoying something to exclaim that you are enjoying something.

#19 - Feb. 5, 2013, 7:37 p.m.

lekyii.9856:

Thats true, but why now? why only after patch ppl start to complain about the loot!?

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

#22 - Feb. 5, 2013, 7:42 p.m.

Essence Snow.3194:

^^This..I have 9 lvl 80s and had one parked at every meta event that had a chest so as to avoid WP fees.

Congrats on 9 of them. I’m working on my third now.

So long as you play the events you should be fine to park characters in a given area.

#46 - Feb. 8, 2013, 6:47 p.m.

ezd.6359:

Logic:
1) DR == anti exploit system
2) DR punish people for playing event on that character they want to
3) playing event on that character they want to == exploit
4) exploit == bannable offence

Why don’t you just ban us for not playing your game the way YOU want?

We’re working on our DR system and looking at new data all the time, and like all things there may be bugs or unexpected quirks in it. If we just outright banned people who got hit by DR, that wouldn’t be practical.
It’s entirely possible that the DR system hitting parked event characters wasn’t intended, but was a result of us fixing an exploit or other problem within the system, and it just happened to slip by us in testing.

And like I said before, DR is a safety net to prevent exploitation. That means (to me at least) that is is not the metric for us to drop the ban hammer on people – we have other data used for that. There’s different ways to possibly unintentionally hit it, and I’d think it rather unfair to ban people over it.

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

#48 - Feb. 8, 2013, 7:07 p.m.

Alur.7510:

@Robert Hrouda

Once things are tuned down, there’s a chance the DR System is going to be taken away? It felt for me more of a time “solution”, but yea, main concern is, once everything is tuned, if it is going to stay or not, you know how it can be sometimes.

I don’t think it will ever go away, because there’s always the potential for something to slip past us and enter the game. Not all players will abuse things, but the potential threat to the economy and the game is too high to go back to a system where a safety net is not in place. We saw the data from when it wasn’t in place and what things were like for CoF, and we simply can’t go back to a system open to exploit like it was before.

Of course, I am not in charge of such things. People paid much more than me get to make those decisions