Guild Wars 2

Should the material promotion method be reworked?

As we all know, the method of material promotion is very expensive, complicated and rarely worthwhile (There are thousands of tier 5 materials piling up in the market at rock bottom prices).

Is it;

1. time to adjust the method of item promotion to make it more feasible (i.e. cheaper), or
2. irrelevant how the method is changed because the market will always make material promotion expensive.
   ?

If there is profit to be made in easy way, masses will do it untill there ain’t profit. Then they’ll continue doing it bit longer.

Currently we’re still effected by “free” skillpoints that came from SAB that effected on dust/fine material prices.

There are profits to be made in promotion market even this day – you just have to know what to promote. (40-50s per skillpoint, on averange, based on my personal data)

edit
By rock bottom t5 prices, I presume you mean silk and leather? Because fine materials still seem to be hovering above 1s. Still too expensive to start massproduction ectos.. I remember rock bottom prices of halloween….

I doubt skillpoints have anything to do with this. The problem is the t6 dust. It is very easy to end up with a lost given the 250 common/50 fine + 5 t6 dust required for the conversion. Dust + elonian wine makes the core → lodestone conversion pretty bad as well but at least in that case you can still have a chance of saving a bit of silver.

What I don’t understand is – why have Arenanet implemented a system which isn’t financially viable?

arenanet doesnt control the market prices, the playerbase does. So its not aNet’s fault if the player base makes something a loss to do

ocgreg.3910:

arenanet doesnt control the market prices, the playerbase does. So its not aNet’s fault if the player base makes something a loss to do

They DO control the prices, at least indirectly. Especially in the case of the t6 dust. They got hit twice. Once with the changes to the risen loot tables and a second time with the changes to the moldy bags.

There are two different questions here, which may have radically different answers.

1. Should it be viable for average players to make money upconverting materials?
2. Should players able to regularly upconvert into T6 materials?

The first is likely yes, since ArenaNet probably wants some sort of meaningful way to spend excess skill points, and because you can already make some small amount of coinage (4-10 silver/skill point) making Mystic Weapons.

The latter is much, much more complicated. ArenaNet /might/ want to avoid having giant bulk availability of Silk, Thick Leather, and Mithril (and to a lesser extent, fine crafting ingredients). They might not : it helps keep the luxury market loosely coupled to the base function market. If the system exists to provide a weak outlet valve for T5 materials, it isn’t intended to be economically viable in the general case. Even if they do want to having the prices of Silk and Mithril hard linked to the values of Gossamer and Orichalcum (or t5 fine ingredients to t6 rare ones), the low cost of Philosopher’s Stones and the overhead of the trading post means that these prices will constantly and quickly adjust to an equilibrium. If you’re not on the early edge, or dealing in bulk items or the lulls of the market’s cycles, they’ll be no money to be made in conversions no matter what market-available controlling ingredient is involved.

The only way to prevent or limit that is to make the controlling ingredient not market-available, which ties it instead to player time. Upping the absolute value of Philosopher’s Stones would do that — but it may not be ArenaNet’s goal, and would have other results, many of which you might not like.

Svarty.8019:

What I don’t understand is – why have Arenanet implemented a system which isn’t financially viable?

The simplest answer would be that they basically forgot about these formulas or lost sight of the big picture when they made these changes.

Khisanth.2948:

Svarty.8019:

What I don’t understand is – why have Arenanet implemented a system which isn’t financially viable?

The simplest answer would be that they basically forgot about these formulas or lost sight of the big picture when they made these changes.

Thanks for the responses everybody. More food for thought.

I liked the old times when you could get at least 50 silver (some times around 1 gold) for each skill point. Converting potent blood to powerful was fun.

I think it is just a way to regulate item price. If promotion isn’t worth while there’s nothing that need to adjust.

laokoko.7403:

I think it is just a way to regulate item price. If promotion isn’t worth while there’s nothing that need to adjust.

If that is the case then it feels like someone really messed up with the t5 materials.

Khisanth.2948:

ocgreg.3910:

arenanet doesnt control the market prices, the playerbase does. So its not aNet’s fault if the player base makes something a loss to do

They DO control the prices, at least indirectly. Especially in the case of the t6 dust. They got hit twice. Once with the changes to the risen loot tables and a second time with the changes to the moldy bags.

Yes so they do ‘indirectly’ control them but that doesn’t apply to what I said. Anet may have changed drop rates but the prices are still determined by the players listing stuff on the TP. If Anet actually had that much control over those prices than you would have thought that the value would have gone up if they became harder to obtain. which would have meant that upconverting could have been more profitable. But that didnt happen because of the players using the TP.

Its very similar (in an incredibly simplified way) to the way commodities work on the stock exchange.

Do you think that if they made the Item Promotion system result in a few more T6 materials it would;

• become worthwhile, or
• do you think T6 materials would change in value to make it equally prohibitive?

In my experience, material promotion gives you about 6% conversion rate,
(250 material A = 15 of material. Your better off selling material A and just buying material B.

It puts a maximum price wedge between tiers. Working as intended.

The problem here is just that dust prices are being driven up by recipes to make consumables and legendary gifts. Dust is used to make potions, tuning crystals, maintenance oils, and sharpening stones. Also, each legendary weapon requires 250 or 500 crystalline dust.

Not only that, I think T6 dust only come from

- bags that give t6 mats

- randomly dropped from risen in orr, which basically have a chance to drop a good majority of T6 makes, which makes it unlikely that you’ll get dust

- Material promotion, which isn’t worth it.

- Sparks, which are pretty “boring” to farm, they only spawn when when certain temples are uncontested, and they don’t seem to drop as often as other mobs drop their T6 mats, at least not in my experience. May have something to do with them being a boring farm.

What I mean by boring farm is

1. they tend to be two spaced out depending on where you go, making you use a lot of time running from mob to mob.

2. There are mobs you don’t want to kill getting in the way (Risen)

3. You constantly have to worry about losing the temple, unless you’re farming at lyssa

3b. If you’re at lyssa you eventually have to weed out all those vets that spawn, which is annoying. (not hard, just annoying)

On the other hand, if you’re trying to farm powerful blood, vicious claws, vicious fangs, ancient bone, etc There are some nice places, and alternatives if you need one.