Guild Wars 2

Now before I begin this is not meant as a jab against Lindsey Murdock for coining the phrase RNG is “fun & exciting” but rather to show one users reaction after attempting to create a precursor using 28 exotic greatswords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANpCfCB2ENk

Imagine how the players who have thrown 1000+ rares into the Mystic Forge in hopes of creating a precursor & have come out empty handed feel.

“Its meant to be legendary & hard to obtain”

It is. The karma & material requirements are already a massive undertaking even without the precursor. If you think farming for 8+ hours a day for 1-2 months straight for a single weapon skin is not substantial well then I would question ones priorities.

Precursors need to be made available via a vendor/recipe. One suggestion would be to require players to exchange 500 tokens from every dungeon. That at the very least requires some effort. Not just another gold sink.

I’d agree with this.
Praying to the RNG gods for insane luck is the exact opposite of “fun & exciting”, nor does it show off any player’s skill whatsoever.
I thought of tokens from all 8 dungeons as a way to buy a precursor as well. It seems like the best solution (if they are considering a change to the system). It would promote dungeons beyond getting an armour set, and show off more of a player’s skill and dedication than any amount of RNG will ever do.

I agree. The Mysitc Forge is just an endless consumer of material and items. Anet is trying to get the items out of the economy so that they don’t go stale and pile up. At least that what they said.

Well I don’t usually suggest anything on any game mechanics since I believe suggesting won’t do any good, but I will on this one.

I think it would be nice to rise my chances of getting a precursor if I contributed to solving world’s problems. That feels like more legendary.

Eg.:
RNG * (number of renowned hearts finished * a constant here / max renowned hearts) * (number of individual events finished * a constant here / max event type count) * (cumulative count of events finished / max event type count)

This way you could encourage people to do every event and give them hope saying “You will eventually get it, keep trying and rising your RNG multiplier”. Otherwise people like me are afraid of throwing thousands of weapons and getting nothing. I don’t like gambling and if I must, I would do anything to rise my chances.

^That is actually a surprisingly decent idea. Or for a less ‘done this, what now’ version, you could have the value slowly decrease with time, and be earned/restored via (presumably different, rather than just the Cursed Shore circuit) events.

Sigh… both the RNG mystic forge and the farming 500 tokens from each dungeon are terrible ideas. There is already to much farming associated with producing a legendary as is. How is more farming more “fun and exciting?” It’s not.

The best solution to make the precursor weapon more accessible and “fun” is to have a long quest chain that involves running -some- specific dungeon paths for specific items, unique to each legendary. You could even include, I don’t know, the useless and unrewarding jump puzzles littered throughout the world. After retrieving all the items/tokens, you trade it to some mysterious NPC hidden away in the vast, “exciting” world.

How about thinking outside the box a little to make the game “fun and exciting”?

Dagonbach.3485:

Sigh… both the RNG mystic forge and the farming 500 tokens from each dungeon are terrible ideas. There is already to much farming associated with producing a legendary as is. How is more farming more “fun and exciting?” It’s not.

The best solution to make the precursor weapon more accessible and “fun” is to have a long quest chain that involves running -some- specific dungeon paths for specific items, unique to each legendary. You could even include, I don’t know, the useless and unrewarding jump puzzles littered throughout the world. After retrieving all the items/tokens, you trade it to some mysterious NPC hidden away in the vast, “exciting” world.

How about thinking outside the box a little to make the game “fun and exciting”?

That’s just taking a dungeon, making it longer, and hiding the vendor. Except much like mineral nodes there’s really no ‘hiding’ it – just creating a small delay before everyone knows where it is.

An arguement could be posed that every item in creating a legendary is just a small delay.

Not everyone uses guides, not everyone wants a mindless grind. What everyone does want is a challenge outside the scenario requiring them to do the same EXACT thing every time they log in for 1-4 hours a day.

Why on earth would you do the exact same thing every day? All you’ve got to do is get sets of 4 <item type> and stick them in the bottomless gold pit until it coughs up something you want. How you actually arrive at having those items is completely up to you.

How would you arrive at having those items in a time-efficient manner other than farming PVE mobs and karma events? Buy gold via gems?

How many threads, exactly, are needed just for complaining about how hard it is to get precursors?

As many as posts as it takes to have ANET devs understand the process of achieving a small something in their fun game is more like beating our heads against a wall at a dead end job.

Useless thread, no need to create more topics of that kind. ANet doesn’t care about precursors, they WON’T change it so fast. They MAY change it after year or so. And now pray for luck. Huge amount of luck,

The mystic forge is terrible and needs to go. Let me craft weapons the old fashioned way its actually fun that way.

It would be better if they just put an item you had to throw in the forge for 500g Then we’d at least have a real gold sink.

Yep the precursors have gotten stupid. I was saving gold to buy one but the price goes up faster than I can save gold.

The loadstones/cores are already a huge gold sink since I can’t seem to reliably farm them. Now the precursor is added as another gold sink. No wonder so many gold spammers are in map chat.

Yeah, those gold spammers are starting a rebound. Instead of using mail, they use chat/etc. And I’ve heard/seen many players now joke about how “they’d rather buy from the gold spammers than the gem store”, because that way, they can at least “afford a precursor, or a decent amount of gold”.

They aren’t even talking about whether they will or will not buy gold with dollars (which already tells me how serious this situation is, normally they’d be debating the ‘ethics’ of it all instead, but no, precursors and endgame is THAT strict/unfun). They’re debating: gold seller or anet. And gold seller usually comes up more, regardless of the huge risk to their account. Because, sadly, they’d rather risk an account ban in order to get some more enjoyment, rather than continue to try to play normally for the legendary.

Drauger.2158:

Well I don’t usually suggest anything on any game mechanics since I believe suggesting won’t do any good, but I will on this one.

I think it would be nice to rise my chances of getting a precursor if I contributed to solving world’s problems. That feels like more legendary.

Eg.:
RNG * (number of renowned hearts finished * a constant here / max renowned hearts) * (number of individual events finished * a constant here / max event type count) * (cumulative count of events finished / max event type count)

This way you could encourage people to do every event and give them hope saying “You will eventually get it, keep trying and rising your RNG multiplier”. Otherwise people like me are afraid of throwing thousands of weapons and getting nothing. I don’t like gambling and if I must, I would do anything to rise my chances.

This is a fantastic idea. I hope the ANet team sees this and implements it. The sillyness of the amount of treasure you have to dump into the mystic forge is ridiculous. Throwing junk into a magic portal sounds like a pretty boring legend.

I actually agree with the above. Why not make it so that completing all of the dungeons once in Explore mode rewards you with one Precursor weapon of your choice? (You can limit this to once per character to prevent farming.)

Other ideas might be that completing all of the jumping puzzles, or completing achievements like “The Emperor’s New Wardrobe”, all contribute one item towards getting a Legendary.

I see that you guys start to make precursor as hard as some full completion achievement – why not make it just a little bit more expensive, no need for all dungeons and such, just few more orichalcum and thats all. Dont forget that there is a lot to do except this one precursor thing: honor badges, badges from instances, ectos, just gifts making it short, it is not a short jump by itself then why making it even more difficult. Dusk is very thin, of course I dont know about people preferences but I guess that many wouldnt even use it if it was just a regular sword, there are much more bulky and wide than this one toothpick.

Even at $1 per gold piece a precursor would be very expensive, yet in this game it’s like 40 SILVER per 100 gems, and that’s if you’re “lucky” enough to catch the exchange rate at a good time =(

The mystic forge was suppose to make junk items useful, Why not allow us to throw 250 stacks of anything in the forge, the least you can buy 250 stack is 5s x 4 = 20s and the prices would increase, i’d say atleast 40s, have 49.5% chance to get a rare 49.5% chance for exotic, the remaining 1% can get you get store items like black lion kits and mini’s and 1000:1 chance of a pre legandary exotic.

Dagonbach.3485

How would you arrive at having those items in a time-efficient manner other than farming PVE mobs and karma events? Buy gold via gems?

Probably by harvesting ori/ancient nodes (either to sell and buy items or craft them, whichever is easier) and doing whatever events/dungeons/puzzles I felt like that particular day. It’s not hard to complete events and kill mobs without repeating the exact same ones.

para.9351:

Maybe if you guys would stop pissing all your gold into the forge then you might have enough money to buy the precursor weapon.

Maybe you should have done what I did weeks ago and buy my precursor for less than 20g.

Morons.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion that was very insightful. Perhaps the reason we have not purchased it off the TP is because A. Who has 300g+ B. We do not want to support exploiters/chinese gold farmers which have bought up a large portion of the precursor market.

A very small % of the precursors out there are actually legitimate. Also as you mentioned, precursors were going for 10-20g. Now they are 300-400g. No thanks, I’ll wait for A-NET to make a official response on the issue.

Guys, they are meant to be rare. If you give a shopping list way to get them, no matter how rare the crafting items, people will find a way to exploit it and make them not-so-rare.

This prevents that. I think it’s a redundant complaint to say “We’ve wasted hundreds of hours and got nothing back” from something that never promised you’d get what you wanted back – that’s the risk.

People should probably stop complaining about how the price of precursors “keeps increasing” faster than you can save money, seeing as most of them have largely stabilized now…

Non Exotic Precursor Volcanus will run you 200g-300g to make. It uses a gift so its expensive. Foe Fire Same thing the bow will probably require the same thing also.

As demand is right now Precursor> Unique exotics

Unique Exotics are priced at what it would cost you to purchase all mats and craft yourself + some over head for profit because Skill points = time/labor to some.

As long as mats for unique exotics cause the exotic to cost close to 100g or more to craft then precursors will be priced higher than those if they are the high demand ones.

It makes sense to me.

BMW creates a car with same specs and materials as Ford or Chevy. Simple BMW brand has prestige tied to it. BMW sells car for 10-15 or even 20 grand more than Ford people still buy it cause its a BMW.

Sony Vizio expensive computer for whats inside but its Sony Vizio so it sells that high.

Alienware etc. etc.

as someone who’s planning on achieving a legendary before i retire my account, i’m sympathetic to this plight.

the bottom line is, i hate gambling. like a lot. i think it’s absolutely asinine to require gambling, not once, but TWICE (the precursor weapon, and the 77 mystic clovers), with very expensive items. for those of you saying that “it’s legendary, it’s rare, it’s supposed to be difficult to get,” i think they could forgo the precursor weapon entirely and still consider the legendary a fantastical achievement. not only that, but there are particular psychological aspects that make the exotic weapon gamble especially painful.

i think first and foremost it’s that we have absolutely no control over how long this takes. i can understand necessitating gambling at least once. the mystic clover recipe, i’ve been told, at least has possibilities of producing other legendary ingredients for you. i’m not sure about the relative values, but it feels like those combining exotics are tossing away the unsuccessful efforts almost entirely (someone correct me if i’m wrong here). i loved the idea that more completion increases your drop chances, but since you need 100% world completion for a legendary anyway, i’m not sure if that’s really useful. but i definitely agree there needs to be some active way to reduce this cost. when you’re actually throwing them in the kitten thing, you’re completely helpless as the expenses mount higher and higher. at some point you may very well realize it’s simply not worth this nonesense, but most likely you’ll keep tossing kitten in because of the sunk-cost fallacy (i’ve spent so much, it would be a waste to stop now). that, i think, is what people are reacting so strongly against. even if you do succeed, if the costs have spiraled out of control because of bad luck, the last thing you want upon legendary completion is that bitter taste of buyer’s remorse.

the bottom line is i think there are very real reasons that people are so violent towards this particular gamble, and i refuse to believe it’s something that people are defending because it’s fun. the reward scheme for such a gamble (at completely random intervals after x number of tries) is the most addictive you can devise. it’s basically a scratch n play. and i don’t find that fun in the slightest.

Markoos.7294:

Guys, they are meant to be rare. If you give a shopping list way to get them, no matter how rare the crafting items, people will find a way to exploit it and make them not-so-rare.

This prevents that. I think it’s a redundant complaint to say “We’ve wasted hundreds of hours and got nothing back” from something that never promised you’d get what you wanted back – that’s the risk.

Did you read anything I wrote in the OP?

Snow.5269:

Now before I begin this is not meant as a jab against Lindsey Murdock for coining the phrase RNG is “fun & exciting” but rather to show one users reaction after attempting to create a precursor using 28 exotic greatswords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANpCfCB2ENk

Imagine how the players who have thrown 1000+ rares into the Mystic Forge in hopes of creating a precursor & have come out empty handed feel.

“Its meant to be legendary & hard to obtain”

It is. The karma & material requirements are already a massive undertaking even without the precursor. If you think farming for 8+ hours a day for 1-2 months straight for a single weapon skin is not substantial well then I would question ones priorities.

Precursors need to be made available via a vendor/recipe. One suggestion would be to require players to exchange 500 tokens from every dungeon. That at the very least requires some effort. Not just another gold sink.

That idea sounds great to me – would cut down on the ability to “buy” a legendary. Right now if you have the RL $$$, it takes very little work relatively speaking to make a legendary.

azurrei.5691:

Snow.5269:

Now before I begin this is not meant as a jab against Lindsey Murdock for coining the phrase RNG is “fun & exciting” but rather to show one users reaction after attempting to create a precursor using 28 exotic greatswords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANpCfCB2ENk

Imagine how the players who have thrown 1000+ rares into the Mystic Forge in hopes of creating a precursor & have come out empty handed feel.

“Its meant to be legendary & hard to obtain”

It is. The karma & material requirements are already a massive undertaking even without the precursor. If you think farming for 8+ hours a day for 1-2 months straight for a single weapon skin is not substantial well then I would question ones priorities.

Precursors need to be made available via a vendor/recipe. One suggestion would be to require players to exchange 500 tokens from every dungeon. That at the very least requires some effort. Not just another gold sink.

That idea sounds great to me – would cut down on the ability to “buy” a legendary. Right now if you have the RL $$$, it takes very little work relatively speaking to make a legendary.

What? 1mil karma farming is a pain in the butt!. Sounds like you havent tried it yet. Unless you planned ahead there is no way you say hey I have the money Im going to buy a precursor.

You still have crap you have to collect.