Guild Wars 2

Ensign.2189:

Wanze.8410:

The extra charge of gold for the recipe or horns clearly is intended as a gold sink. As i have no data of how much gold actually goes into the different sinks in game, i guess Anet seemed it reasonable to put one into the aquisition of those items.

I’m honestly not really sure what they’re doing with that. The ‘dangerous’ supply of money is the ‘dead’, low velocity money that builds up on accounts that have been playing a while; that’s the money that stops being sunk by TP fees, and what makes prices surge when new content is introduced as it suddenly becomes hot again to buy up whatever is new and relevant to the new update.

Putting a 5g, 10g fee on every little thing sinks a lot of money from the guy who logs in a few times a week, but doesn’t even make a dent in the big fortunes; it ends up being a sort of regressive tax on the new content. They could go through and bill everyone in the game 50g, for instance, and while that would totally wipe out a majority of the players in the game, the whales wouldn’t even blink.

Well, I am quite indifferent to the added gold tag. I wouldnt mind if they take it off and i dont mind paying it.
If there was no gold price tag on the horns/halo, you might have seen alot more people just running from rubble pile to rubble pile instead of engaging the events or rescueing citizens. Now people stopped after the got either one or both.

Essence Snow.3194:

Sorta in the same way that championing of the current system reeks of greed, selfishness, and vain attributes more so than anything else?

See how that works? Bring in jealousy and it’s basically the same deal. It is not adding to anything to the topic at hand, an ad hominem if you will.

Except for the fact that I don’t participate in the TP apart from selling what I don’t want quickly by matching the buy price consistently. I fail to see how I could be considered greedy, selfish or anything else given the fact that I don’t care how much money is in someone else’s account and I currently have 50 gold in mine. Perhaps I’m selfish because I enjoy the way I play the game and don’t worry about how others play it. Yeah… that must be it.

Vanity… I can give you that one I guess. I’m vain in the fact that I consider myself fairly intelligent and can understand how the system works just fine.

TChalla.7146:

Essence Snow.3194:

Sorta in the same way that championing of the current system reeks of greed, selfishness, and vain attributes more so than anything else?

See how that works? Bring in jealousy and it’s basically the same deal. It is not adding to anything to the topic at hand, an ad hominem if you will.

Except for the fact that I don’t participate in the TP apart from selling what I don’t want quickly by matching the buy price consistently. I fail to see how I could be considered greedy, selfish or anything else given the fact that I don’t care how much money is in someone else’s account and I currently have 50 gold in mine. Perhaps I’m selfish because I enjoy the way I play the game and don’t worry about how others play it. Yeah… that must be it.

Vanity… I can give you that one I guess. I’m vain in the fact that I consider myself fairly intelligent and can understand how the system works just fine.

Let me re-quote it for you. It was not saying you were greedy, selfish, or vain. It said that those comments, just like the one you made about others being jealous, are ad hominems. Evidently you missed that.

Essence Snow.3194:

TChalla.7146:

Essence Snow.3194:

Sorta in the same way that championing of the current system reeks of greed, selfishness, and vain attributes more so than anything else?

See how that works? Bring in jealousy and it’s basically the same deal. It is not adding to anything to the topic at hand, an ad hominem if you will.

Except for the fact that I don’t participate in the TP apart from selling what I don’t want quickly by matching the buy price consistently. I fail to see how I could be considered greedy, selfish or anything else given the fact that I don’t care how much money is in someone else’s account and I currently have 50 gold in mine. Perhaps I’m selfish because I enjoy the way I play the game and don’t worry about how others play it. Yeah… that must be it.

Vanity… I can give you that one I guess. I’m vain in the fact that I consider myself fairly intelligent and can understand how the system works just fine.

Let me re-quote it for you. It was not saying you were greedy, selfish, or vain. It said that those comments, just like the one you made about others being jealous, are ad hominems. Evidently you missed that.

And as I said, I didn’t miss it. I decided to respond the way I responded knowing full well what you meant. In other words, I no longer cared. It’s okay. The amount of sarcasm I can spew forth doesn’t exactly translate well in typed form. I should know better.

If you say so…..lol

Block second hand sales? if someone wanna sell you second hand GTX TITAN BLACK for 200 $ what you gonna say? Nop i don’t like second hand sales? Sorry but this is the most stup!d idea i’Ve heard in this game.. Play ur game, and stop crying like a little girl. Play ur own! Don’T touch traders. None your business.

If you find what you’re doing to make gold grindy in any way, I suggest finding a way to make money in the way that you do enjoy making it. The fact that it may be slower than someone else’s way doesn’t mean a thing, unless you’re worried about getting X item is Y time, and if that’s the case, then you get to make the choice to do something else.

I don’t grind for gold, which is why I’ve made less in 18 months than some flippers make in a single month, ankitten owhere near being able to afford many of the things I want. I don’t wish that I grind more, I don’t wish I flipped more, I do wish that the activities I enjoy provided more balanced rewards relative to both other activities.

I already said, Bind on purchase will not change the fact that I will be making more gold on the TP than through other means.

Fair enough, but it’s at least step one. Step two can come next. What would step two be?

The extra charge of gold for the recipe or horns clearly is intended as a gold sink.

I assume as much, and that’s fine, but the problem is, if most of the gold ends up concentrated in the traders, then sinking gold from the other players is just insult on top of injury. Items should cost EITHER gold OR event consumables, not both. If a player has a lot of gold and just works the markets, he should be able to buy gold stuff, but never event-based stuff, while if he does a lot of event stuff and doesn’t abuse the TP then he shouldn’t ever be expected to have any gold.

You will get mostly low lvl blue/green armor and weapon drops, which salvage into t2 common mats while still having a chance for a pre cursor drop. So its not the case that you HAVE to play the tp in order to get those horns and halos.

I’m not saying you HAVE to play the TP to get those particular rewards, but they are certainly a more negligible purchase to someone who does. To them ten gold is nothing, to a more normal player, 10g isn’t an insurmountable goal, but it’s not chump change, it would be the equivalent of maybe $500 or so to someone on minimum wage, which to someone with millions of dollars would be like a meal tip (assuming they’re decent tippers).

The crafting costs for the ascended backpack are more or less in line with the costs of other ascended backpacks.

Yes, which is the problem. There are no ascended items that have reasonable gold costs associated with them.

If you have enough dragonite, shards and dust to make several armor sets but no gold or crafting materials to level your crafting, i wonder what you do with all the gold and mats that drop for you.

I currently have all my crafts leveled except for Tailor and Armorer, and have a decent stockpile of Deldrimor and Elonian, but actually equipping my characters would tap me out, and I’m still saving up to get a Dawn eventually.

If more stuff is account bound, you don’t really change the distribution of gold income at all (it is not affected by account bound stuff on the whole), you just make it matter less by having a set of wealth that doesn’t ever hit the TP. The downside? Any reward that cannot be traded is inherently much less valuable than one that can be traded; if it’s a skin or item you actually want to use, great! Otherwise it’s basically more vendor trash.

True, but that’s not that bad. I have a ton of account bound skins that I don’t use but keep around just in case. They aren’t as fun as something you can sell off for phat loot, but they are still fun if you like them, and neutral if you don’t, and if it would lead to a more balanced system then great. I’m not a fan of purely account-bound loot though, because I do value the TP’s role in offsetting RNG.

This is particular pernicious in a game where most of the end game, high value items are skins; consider how little people in general value doing fractals, despite having unique account bound rewards (in the rings and weapon skins);

I don’t know about that. I want the rewards Fractals offer. I would do fractals a lot for those rewards. I don’t do fractals because I really dislike content that ties me up in a single task for long periods of time. If you could run some sort of Fractal experience that would be in and out within thirty minutes or less, and still progress towards the same rewards as normal fractals (if at a slightly slower pace), then I’d try to do at least 4-6 such fractals per week. The rewards are fine, but almost no reward could get me to regularly do the existing Fractals (even though I’ve beat each at least several times).

Are you an idiot? Some people enjoy market manipulation. I love to see a market that is alive and exploitable. This is the only thing keeping me interested in this game. Otherwise I’d be playing EVE online which is a lot less restrictive.

And that’s fine. Go play that game. Not every game can appeal to every player, and I think this game would, as a whole, be healthier if every single player who values the market play as his core activity were driven away.

If there was no gold price tag on the horns/halo, you might have seen alot more people just running from rubble pile to rubble pile instead of engaging the events or rescueing citizens. Now people stopped after the got either one or both.

Rubble chasing during a competitive 1200 run would be rude under any circumstances. My personal style was to take it seriously once or twice per night, during which time I would never go more than a few steps out of my way to cap Rubble. If the run broke down (less than 850 saves by 40 minutes) then I might break off and pick up a few rubble, but so long as they have a chance it’s rude to do anything else. Now, if I wanted to cap rubble, I would just log in at around the 40 minute mark, at which point it was either an overflow with only a few civies, or it was at least a doomed main server run with no chance of hitting 1200, so there’s nobody getting hurt if people are doing other stuff. Then I’d typically just run a circuit. I’d skip a few of them, but get most each day, and ended the first fortnight with a total of around 600 heirlooms to spend. You could get at least one of those with far less effort.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t grind for gold, which is why I’ve made less in 18 months than some flippers make in a single month, ankitten owhere near being able to afford many of the things I want. I don’t wish that I grind more, I don’t wish I flipped more, I do wish that the activities I enjoy provided more balanced rewards relative to both other activities.

And I think thats your main issue. You want the same reward for less effort.
MMOs in general dont work like that.

Essence Snow.3194:

Let me re-quote it for you. It was not saying you were greedy, selfish, or vain. It said that those comments, just like the one you made about others being jealous, are ad hominems. Evidently you missed that.

You have to expect the ad hominems at some point when you consistent fail to actually provide arguments for people to counter.

It eventually reaches the point where, for lack of a better word, you are basically “trolling” when you are simply rehashing your opinion in many different forms instead of advancing the debate.

And the “TP is bad” crowd do give off a super heavy “jealousy” vibe, so that’s really more like their team name rather than a personal attack.

Ya’ll are funny….lol

Fenrir.3609:

The fact that not one credible, specific, evidence based argument has been given by the anti-TP crowd doesn’t seem to faze them at all. They just keep ploughing on and having a good old cry.

The worst part is they have the same attitude towards real life economies. Want to know why countries that are prospering collapse? Look no further than the attitudes of the anti-tp crowd. It’s pretty sick that they are so obsessed with other peoples money that they don’t even want anyone to succeed virtually, let alone in RL

Most people that sell their loot to the highest bidder do so because they want a quick gold return, they wont sell it for even less while having to even do one more click to check the good home box.

To a Good Home is not intended to serve “most people”. It’s intended to provide options so the Trading Post can better serve more people than it does now. If you don’t approve of economic PvP, your options are relent or not participate at all. This provides at least a little bit of a middle ground.[/quote]

There’s a lot to say about this idea. I like that you’re attempting to find a reasonable solution, but the one of the biggest problems is that nobody would do it. Secondly, (this has been said) if you want your item to not be flipped, actually sell it at what it’s worth. Don’t take less money for fast return, that’s how those markets are created. In the end, this is a very hard to explain, very hard to implement, very complicated solution to a “problem” that can be solved by just selling items at the correct price.

Many people are happy to take less money for instant return and that’s fine if that’s your preference, others are willing to wait, and someone will work in the middle to make the market more efficient. It’s a good system and it works very well, forcing people to not trade they way they want to wouldn’t be better, it would be much worse. (not that your suggestion is forcing people, this is just a general comment)

PS any flipper that’s attempting to make money on luxury items isn’t good at flipping. It’s a slow, dangerous, rarely-profitable way to attempt to make money (that’s why nobody does it).[/quote]

I accept you challenge, luxury item market here I come.

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t grind for gold, which is why I’ve made less in 18 months than some flippers make in a single month, ankitten owhere near being able to afford many of the things I want. I don’t wish that I grind more, I don’t wish I flipped more, I do wish that the activities I enjoy provided more balanced rewards relative to both other activities.

And I think thats your main issue. You want the same reward for less effort.
MMOs in general dont work like that.

Its a game, with many different activities, he wants equal reward for doing the activities he enjoys in a game.

Neural.1824:

Fenrir.3609:

The fact that not one credible, specific, evidence based argument has been given by the anti-TP crowd doesn’t seem to faze them at all. They just keep ploughing on and having a good old cry.

The worst part is they have the same attitude towards real life economies.

We do? News to me. My attitude to the TP is predicated purely on the fact that this is a game, and not even a market simulator.

And I think thats your main issue. You want the same reward for less effort.
MMOs in general dont work like that.

You aren’t paying attention. I do NOT want the same reward for less effort, I want the same reward for EQUAL effort. I feel that I’ve been putting in as much effort as anyone else, I feel that 2-4 hours of play per day for almost every day since launch represents a reasonable amount of effort, I’ve just put that effort into different activities, and as it turns out those activities don’t reward as well as others.

YOU are the one that is advocating for having superior rewards for less effort, it just happens that the game already works that way.

Neural.1824:

Fenrir.3609:

The fact that not one credible, specific, evidence based argument has been given by the anti-TP crowd doesn’t seem to faze them at all. They just keep ploughing on and having a good old cry.

The worst part is they have the same attitude towards real life economies. Want to know why countries that are prospering collapse? Look no further than the attitudes of the anti-tp crowd. It’s pretty sick that they are so obsessed with other peoples money that they don’t even want anyone to succeed virtually, let alone in RL

Don’t push your luck here. There is a whole lot different between the real world and a video game economy.

The “anti-TP” crowd, as you call them, is simply making a mistake of applying real life market externalities to those in a video game. Much of what they argue holds real currency in the real world, just a bit less so in an MMORPG.

morrolan.9608:

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t grind for gold, which is why I’ve made less in 18 months than some flippers make in a single month, ankitten owhere near being able to afford many of the things I want. I don’t wish that I grind more, I don’t wish I flipped more, I do wish that the activities I enjoy provided more balanced rewards relative to both other activities.

And I think thats your main issue. You want the same reward for less effort.
MMOs in general dont work like that.

Its a game, with many different activities, he wants equal reward for doing the activities he enjoys in a game.

This request is simply impossible to fulfill. The game is based on a variety of different activities. Thousands of players are much better than a dozen devs at figuring out the paths of least resistance, so there will always be some activity that is a little easier or a little more rewarding than other activities.

The fairest thing they can do is give different rewards for different activities, which is where things like Legendaries come into play – in the beginning, and for the first year of the game, a Legendary was exactly the same, stat-wise, as a craftable exotic weapon, but took 1000x more effort and/or money to create. The value of the Legendary came from its unique appearance, not its stats. Twilight and Dusk were the same weapon with different skins.

If they balanced all exotics to be of equal value to Legendaries, either exotics would be much much rarer and harder to obtain, or Legendaries would be much more common and less special.

The game is not designed so that everything and everyone is equal, and it is not possible to make it so.

This request is simply impossible to fulfill. The game is based on a variety of different activities. Thousands of players are much better than a dozen devs at figuring out the paths of least resistance, so there will always be some activity that is a little easier or a little more rewarding than other activities.

Sure, but that’s no excuse for improving things, all you’re doing is setting up a straw man.

Nobody is expecting a true 1:1 parity, where any two players can play the game for exactly one hour, doing two completely different activities, and receive exactly the same rewards, that’s just nonsense. It’s not unreasonable, however, to expect that spending similar amounts of time on similarly difficult systems should produce similar levels of reward, within a margin of at least 2:1 or at most 10:1 difference.

Nobody is expecting them to make it so that TP trading would be exactly equal to standard PvE gameplay in terms of gold reward, but neither do I believe it’s unreasonable to expect that the reward difference be more in the 2:1 or 5:1 range than the current 100:1+ range.

Finding the path of least resistance is to be expected, but when the path of least resistance is so far superior to any other option, developers typically consider that an exploit and plug it up. So far they’ve been taking their sweet time when it comes to the TP.

Bunda.2691:

The “anti-TP” crowd, as you call them, is simply making a mistake of applying real life market externalities to those in a video game. Much of what they argue holds real currency in the real world, just a bit less so in an MMORPG.

I actually would say the complete opposite.

Ohoni.6057:

Nobody is expecting them to make it so that TP trading would be exactly equal to standard PvE gameplay in terms of gold reward, but neither do I believe it’s unreasonable to expect that the reward difference be more in the 2:1 or 5:1 range than the current 100:1+ range.

Finding the path of least resistance is to be expected, but when the path of least resistance is so far superior to any other option, developers typically consider that an exploit and plug it up. So far they’ve been taking their sweet time when it comes to the TP.

I generally ignore your babble, but since you responded to me… the way the TP works is not an exploit. It was set up to work this way and is working as intended. While every other activity in the game creates objects (gear, tokens, gold) out of nothing, the TP removes some things from the game and shuffles existing objects among players. The more activity, the more gold is removed from the game. The redistribution of what is left is entirely up to the players to manage, not the devs.

There is nothing to be done here, and JS popped in very early in this thread and said this. No matter how much people complain, that is not going to change.

If you don’t like the current distribution of items and gold, the best remedy is education. The more people understand how the TP works, the more efficiently they can use it and the less potential wealth exists for each knowledgeable individual to extract from the TP.

If there are 100 players “playing” the TP, each can make a significant amount of money from it. If there are 1000 players doing the same thing, the amount of money available to each goes down considerably. At 10,000 players the rewards are constant but small and at 100,000 players the rewards will probably be less than spending the same amount of time running the champion train.

My point was always if players simply stopped using the TP as a vendor and actually enter a bids when they want to buy and price the items they want to sell the coin that once went to a few stays in the pocket of the player using the TP for themselves instead simply being a supplier and a consumer.

But players simply don’t care about maximizing the earnings and savings from using the TP this way, they would rather have the immediacy.

morrolan.9608:

Bunda.2691:

The “anti-TP” crowd, as you call them, is simply making a mistake of applying real life market externalities to those in a video game. Much of what they argue holds real currency in the real world, just a bit less so in an MMORPG.

I actually would say the complete opposite.

So say it. What are the negative externalatis produced by the TP? (And don’t just say “wealthy players,” because that is not a problem in and of itself.)

Bunda.2691:

morrolan.9608:

Bunda.2691:

The “anti-TP” crowd, as you call them, is simply making a mistake of applying real life market externalities to those in a video game. Much of what they argue holds real currency in the real world, just a bit less so in an MMORPG.

I actually would say the complete opposite.

So say it. What are the negative externalatis produced by the TP? (And don’t just say “wealthy players,” because that is not a problem in and of itself.)

Since all other methods are restricted….pecuniary externalities.

I generally ignore your babble, but since you responded to me… the way the TP works is not an exploit. It was set up to work this way and is working as intended. While every other activity in the game creates objects (gear, tokens, gold) out of nothing, the TP removes some things from the game and shuffles existing objects among players. The more activity, the more gold is removed from the game. The redistribution of what is left is entirely up to the players to manage, not the devs.

This doesn’t justify some players making vastly more money for themselves than through other ingame activities in the same amount of time. Nobody is arguing that the TP doesn’t act as a gold sink for the economy as a whole, but that is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. There are plenty of gold sinks in the game and if they need to add more they can do so, the TP’s role as a gold sink does not make it so invaluable that its abuses cannot be touched.

If there are 100 players “playing” the TP, each can make a significant amount of money from it. If there are 1000 players doing the same thing, the amount of money available to each goes down considerably. At 10,000 players the rewards are constant but small and at 100,000 players the rewards will probably be less than spending the same amount of time running the champion train.

Yes, but 1. some players don’t enjoy playing the TP, and they shouldn’t have to if they want to do well any more than a player should have to play a specific class in order to be capable in the game. Other options should be equally as rewarding.

And 2. the game does a poor job of educating players, and even the advocates of these systems are cagey about it, giving vague hints but rarely giving direct hints unless the market in question is already out of their personal system. There are even sites out there that will teach you which strategies are best, but only if you pay them cash money to do so. This does not seem like a system that wants to be inherently fair and free for everyone.

Of course some players could be using the TP more efficiently than they do, but they shouldn’t have to.

But players simply don’t care about maximizing the earnings and savings from using the TP this way, they would rather have the immediacy.

I still don’t buy that. I still don’t buy that players with FULL knowledge of the systems choose immediacy over near-immediacy. I still believe that those that “choose immediacy” are doing so more out of ignorance than choice, and that’s not their fault, because the game makes little attempt to teach them right from wrong, and not every player of an action/adventure RPG is or should have to be an economist.

So say it. What are the negative externalatis produced by the TP? (And don’t just say “wealthy players,” because that is not a problem in and of itself.)

Wealthy players, which is a problem in and of itself.

If you doubt that, then answer this hypothetical: in the game, all classes are reasonably balanced. There is, however, exactly one build, one combination of class, stats, and traits, that is obscenely powerful. This build is nigh-invulnerable and deals thousands of times more damage than any other combination in the game, able to completely roll over any content it comes across. Now you don’t have to play that build if you don’t want, and the other builds are still balanced against the content, but if you like and if you can find that build, you are magnitudes more powerful than the average player. Do you feel that the existence of that build is something that ANet should do something about, or is it fine because “powerful players” is not a problem?