Guild Wars 2

Is anet not concerned about the price inflation of legendary precursors? Some Communciation would help. Do they not care about the price manipulation going on?

There isn’t a whole lot they can do. I mean, other than say that things can’t be sold over X value, but that’s not really much for a free market. If people can afford the items at those prices, they’ll be listed at them. If people can’t, then the people who list them will just lose out.

The prices they were selling at before were way too low. It just took people a while to realize that fact.

Given how difficult they seem to be to obtain from the Mystic Forge, I’m thinking that perhaps it’s justified that they’re so expensive. In which case it’s not price manipulation; they’re just move up towards what ArenaNet feels is their appropriate value. Early ones were from erroneous recipes or apparently too-frequent odds.

Yep. It’s also possible that the 21 karma weapon exploit generated a good number of precursors as well, despite ArenaNet’s efforts to resolve the situation.

Precursors were so cheap early mostly due to a combination of the overall lack of information, and most people not having very much gold.

Also, some people might have just gotten lucky on the Forge without many attempts, and not realised just how lucky they were.

It’s hard to say what the actual worth of the prerequisites are since the production cost to obtain them can be either 2 gold or hundreds of gold.

That said, since there only seemed to be 2 or 3 of a certain prerequisite on the TP at any given time it is very much susceptible to market manipulation. Even if it’s still only reaching the normal price, there’s nothing to stop the super wealthy from buying them up and putting them up for even higher prices.

There are some guilds monopolizing sale of these weapons. These guilds soon will have tons of gold to hold in their hands whole TP.
Do you really want that? Give us some reliable way to get them. Not too easy that everyone can get them but still RELIABLE.

What do you have against everyone obtaining them? Isn’t that why most people play a game to get a certain item cause it looks cool? Or is it that it takes away you being the special snowflake that sits in Lion’s Arch “Oh look at me, look at me” rolls eyes.. Sounds familiar? Yeah, sounds too much like the elitist jerks in world of warcraft.. And sadly some of the gw2 community is starting to sound just like them.

They should just increase chance to get precursors by a lot. It should be at least 5% (instead of the less than 1% now) when putting 4 lvl 80 exotics in the MF.

So, you think a precursor should be worth less than 100 gold?

@ Eladeriel – Do you even realize that it was ANet that said that ONLY less than 5% of the total population will achieve a legendary weapon and that is healthy for the game? So no…it is not for everyone to obtain.

@lackofcheese.5617 Last time I checked a 5% chance with exotics still means on average you need 240g worth of exotics to get a precursor.
And yes, a precursor is just an exotic, it shouldnt cost an incredible amount. Most precursors dont even have an unique skin.

Yes but they exist for a special reason. And costing 200+g upwards since they constitute 1/4th of the weapon is reasonable if you consider how much each of the Gifts cost.

they dont constitue 1/4. Remember the 3 gifts consist of several other components itself.

Malediktus, your math is off, as I pointed out here.

In any case, when the other materials you need for a legendary add up to ~400g, I think 300g or so is perfectly reasonable for the precursors.

There isn’t any inflation per say, prices seem to have reached equilibrium, this of course assumes that anet won’t release any more shocks to the market like fixing the godskull problem which doubled the price of precursors in a day. http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185 It’s been relatively stable for a week after the shock of the change to MF. I’d also expect a gradual decline in price if they fix DR like they’ve been saying they will.

Why would fixing DR make it drop? People will have it easier to make money so price will raise.
If you mean easier to get mats —> easier to craft lvl 80 rares and exotics, then you are only partly right. Its already possible to farm dungeons for loot without any dimishing returns on the loot. Thats how I collect my crafting materials. So the impact wont be that huge if at all. Personally I think precursors will raise to 1000g within a year.

Malediktus.9250:

they dont constitue 1/4. Remember the 3 gifts consist of several other components itself.

Of course it is 1/4th. Exotic precursor + Gift of Mastery + Gift of Fortune + Gift of “Legendary name”. So now check how much each Gift costs (with the exception of Gift of Mastery)….and do the simple math.

I am going after the total noumber of different ingredients, not their shady market value.

And I am going by the total number of FINAL ingredients, not their “shady” (lol) market value.

The prices for the prerequisites are hardly stable when there’s so few on the market. There are four Dusks on the global TP ranging from 250 to 300 gold.

Now we can assume that there are way more than 4 people currently farming to get one. So what happens when a much larger number of people farms up this much gold? Let’s say in a month there will be 50 people who want Dusk and have that kind of gold.

The only way for the price to remain stable is if by that time there are also around 50 Dusks on the TP. And what happens if there aren’t? The demand will once again far outnumber the supply which means that anyone selling it will have no problem raising the price significantly, after all he only needs one guy out of those 50 people to have 500 gold instead of just 300.

If the price rises enough that it becomes highly profitable to make them on the Mystic Forge, the supply will increase considerably.

Then the exotics, rares and crafting materials to make them will raise equally. You cant expect those to stay the same if it becomes profitable to gamble them.

lackofcheese.5617:

If the price rises enough that it becomes highly profitable to make them on the Mystic Forge, the supply will increase considerably.

Only if you can throw enough tries into the mystic forge to reach a stable average. Trying to reach an average with such a low drop rate is incredibly hard since it needs a bigger sample size. If you don’t have the money to do enough tries to get an average of at least 10 prerequisites (which is huge) then you’re still just gambling and that can turn unprofitable fast.

Malediktus.9250:

Then the exotics, rares and crafting materials to make them will raise equally. You cant expect those to stay the same if it becomes profitable to gamble them.

Sure, they would go up somewhat; this has already happened to Mithril and Elder Wood, for example. However, since these things are supplied in rather large quantities and so are not particularly susceptible to massive price hikes, the resulting pressure push the prices of precursors downwards more than it would push the prices of the materials upwards.

Besides, your proposed solution of having an alternative recipe for making precursors would have the exact same problem – upon introduction of the recipes, the materials involved in those recipes would go up in price.

Archer.6485:

Only if you can throw enough tries into the mystic forge to reach a stable average. Trying to reach an average with such a low drop rate is incredibly hard since it needs a bigger sample size. If you don’t have the money to do enough tries to get an average of at least 10 prerequisites (which is huge) then you’re still just gambling and that can turn unprofitable fast.

This is wrong for a couple of reasons.

(1) Most importantly, the supply of precursors comes from every player in the world; a stable, averaged behaviour could easily be achieved over every player in the entire game, and provide a significant supply of precursors.

(2) While it’s true that if you wanted to 99% guarantee a precursor, or 99% guarantee a profit, you would need a massive investment, you don’t need those kinds of guarantees for gambling to be a good idea. As long as you know that the gamble has a positive expected value (i.e. would turn a profit on average), then it’s still a good idea to do it.

(3) In conjunction with (2) and (1), a point many people seem to fail to realise is that choosing to gamble on the Mystic Forge doesn’t mean you have to gamble away all your gold. If you have good reason to hold onto some gold, then you can easily choose to use the Mystic Forge in moderation (perhaps one or two batches of rares per day). Tens of thousands of players gambling a little bit at a time could easily serve to provide a significant supply of precursors.

(4) Large guilds, or rich traders, probably would in fact have enough money to safely mass-produce precursors if the price rose high enough. Competition between such guilds/players, and more importantly from any other players who happened to get lucky while doing some casual Mystic Forging, would prevent price-fixing from occurring. Consequently, the price would not be much in excess of the average cost of making one – perhaps something like cost + 15% tp fees + 10% profit margin as a rough estimate, though the profit margin would fall over time.

If theres a recipe for it, its possible to collect all materials yourself and not be affected by a price jump.
I rarely by anything from the trading post anyway, since I dont want lucky people and traders to make any profit.

So you basically don’t want to participate in the game’s economy then.

@ Lackofcheese

The fact that like you said the supply of precursors comes potentially from every player in the world is exactly what worries me. How can there be only 4 dusks on the global TP then? There are precursors that I haven’t seen on the TP in forever.

This means that:

a) Only a negligable portion of the population is making a profit off of them.
b) Only a negligable portion of the population is getting supplied by a precursor.

Anet are clearly advertising the legendaries as a major endgame PvE feature but right now such an insignificant portion of people have access to it you’d think it wasn’t even in the game.

I could be wrong of course and there will be a lot more of them popping up soon but right now I have reason to be concerned. There seems to be a lot of people going at it at the mystic forge right now and all I’m hearing are negative results. Has there even been a confirmed precursor created since the godskull hotfix?

There’s probably a couple of factors involved in this, the biggest being the extremely low chances involved. It could even be as low as 0.01% from putting 4 rares in for all we know.

For the moment, I think the main reason there’s so few of them is that not very many people are trying to make them just yet. In future, more and more people will get interested, and more and more people will start to dump weapons into the Mystic Forge. Yes, demand will also increase, but if the price goes up, the supply will increase accordingly.

At this point in the game, it was expected that a huge minority of people would be able to get legendaries, so I don’t see that as a problem either. If anything, I think there are a lot more precursors around than there were meant to be, because of people taking advantage of several exploits.

Yes, the extremely low chances involved are exactly what the problem is, that’s why I’m saying it should be changed.

Judging by how fast I’m selling Carrion Krait Slayers (cheapest to craft 80 rare greatsword) I would say there’s a plenty of people trying already, most of them in futile attempts.

I get it, you think the market will balance itself and maybe it will but I’m not so sure. Just looking at real life you can see how badly the economy can go (I don’t see the large supply of food in developed nations reaching the demand of starving third world countries, probably because someone is making a killing off of it).

And the mmo economy is even easier to manipulate, inflate and completely ruin. It’s happened before, what makes you so sure it won’t happen again? What’s so ideal about GW2’s economy that makes it safe from from exploit and imbalance?

Ah, so you’re one of the people who has been competing with me on the whole Carrion Krait Slayer enterprise then, eh?
^_~

As for the chance of a precursor, I think 300g is an appropriate price point at the moment. If the chance is actually low enough to drive the price higher, then maybe it is too low, but I’m not convinced that that’s the case just yet.