Guild Wars 2

I’m currently in the market for some Celestial exotic armor. Why is Charged Quartz account bound and time gated? From my perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. I could understand one or the other, but both? It causes the the Celestial Insignias and Inscriptions to be relatively inaccessible. Not to mention it means their availability is inconsistent with the other Insignias and Inscriptions. Beyond that, it’s not like Celestial is super desirable anyway, so I don’t understand why it’s all account bound.

Can someone explain this to me? I feel like, currently, if the market were to put a price on Charged Quartz, the price of the Grow Lamp would be impacted (downward) – and not much else that I can think of. Am I missing something? Was charged quartz important for something in S1 that necessitated time gating and account bound?

Or maybe presursor crafting will take stacks of charged quartz?? That’s really the only other reason I can think of.

It’s because they didn’t want the millions of quartz crystals introduced at the Zephrite ship to tank the market for exotic weapons, crafting materials, and forgeable exotics like precursors.

The way it’s set up now, only people who care about celestial will make celestial, and the far larger “toss into the forge for a precursor,” market doesn’t affect this & vice versa.

Jacobbs.9468:

Beyond that, it’s not like Celestial is super desirable anyway, so I don’t understand why it’s all account bound.

Before Magic Find became account-bound, the celestial stats included an MF bonus, so they were very very desirable at the time. Maybe that is one reason why it was implemented this way.

Secondly, it gave us all a reason to mine 25+ quartz a day in the Labyrinthine Cliffs during the first release, that was before we had home instance quartz nodes.

Beyond the first Zephyrite release, it is still giving us something to do: Sure, many times it would be more convenient to have something available instantly instead of having to do stuff for it. A button saying “complete all dailies instantly” would be clicked by almost everybody. But I personally enjoy it more when I have to work at least a little for what the game gives me. For instance, running around Tyria and picking up spoons from karma vendors is many times more fun to me than buying all ogre weapons from the trading post.

All time-gating results in a number of players to log back on to GW2 daily, which is, of course, desired by ANet from a business point of view.

So much for the “why would they do that”.

Now why is it such a big deal? I crafted a celestial armor set back when it was released, and I didn’t suffer that much from not having it available on the first day. If you just mine your home instance nodes and charge a crystal daily, you’ll get there sooner rather than later. And you’ll feel satisfaction and happiness every time you craft one of your items, which is better than just feeling it once when you buy a complete set on the trading post.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Jacobbs.9468:

Beyond that, it’s not like Celestial is super desirable anyway, so I don’t understand why it’s all account bound.

Before Magic Find became account-bound, the celestial stats included an MF bonus, so they were very very desirable at the time. Maybe that is one reason why it was implemented this way.

Secondly, it gave us all a reason to mine 25+ quartz a day in the Labyrinthine Cliffs during the first release, that was before we had home instance quartz nodes.

Beyond the first Zephyrite release, it is still giving us something to do: Sure, many times it would be more convenient to have something available instantly instead of having to do stuff for it. A button saying “complete all dailies instantly” would be clicked by almost everybody. But I personally enjoy it more when I have to work at least a little for what the game gives me. For instance, running around Tyria and picking up spoons from karma vendors is many times more fun to me than buying all ogre weapons from the trading post.

All time-gating results in a number of players to log back on to GW2 daily, which is, of course, desired by ANet from a business point of view.

So much for the “why would they do that”.

Now why is it such a big deal? I crafted a celestial armor set back when it was released, and I didn’t suffer that much from not having it available on the first day. If you just mine your home instance nodes and charge a crystal daily, you’ll get there sooner rather than later. And you’ll feel satisfaction and happiness every time you craft one of your items, which is better than just feeling it once when you buy a complete set on the trading post.

Thanks for the info, really could do without the tone though.

when it was released, time-gating charged quartz slowed down quartz consumption so the market wouldn’t crash.
currently there is no reason to time-gate it other than an unwillingness to make changes just for convenience.