Guild Wars 2

oZii.2864:

Snow.5269:

The amount of people opposed to make precursors actually challenging to acquire is astounding. What is legendary about going to a 3rd party site & purchasing 300g? What is legendary about sitting at the mystic forge & throwing garbage into it until you get a desired result? Absolutely nothing.

Horrible, horrible design. The only reasons a person would not support a positive change to the game is out of fear of losing “special snowflake”status, they have no understanding of other prerequisites, or they have a precursor already.

Well actually you can’t please everyone! You know cause the precursors do drop from mobs with a really low drop rate. You know like many other games in the past that have rare items. Everyone seems to not mention that.

Its obvious from design precursor is suppose to be Special Snowflake status. So you sound bitter because you don’t have one and anyone that does is some snob or think they are better than everyone else that is what your assuming. You only feel its better design because you like the idea while I may not.

What he is proposing is extremely easy to do.

What I dont get is the focus on precursors and fairness but none of you people crying about precursor prices are saying anything what so ever about the unique exotics that cost just as much as precursors.

Then the argument would look like you all want things handed to you. Cause all you need is just the weapon then. Wait some of them you need gifts for too. There is more to the TP than just precursors there are other weapons that cost just as much as the prrecursor.

Also 3rd party site = possible suspension or termination. I like how everyone tries to throw out there this little tid bit like its anets fault and they are failing the game by not changing how precursors are obtained.

BMW/Ford/Chevy/Honda Dealer= Legit

Chop Shop = Risk = Jail Time or Scam

You dont go to the chop shop to get a car cause its cheaper then the dealer do you? You can but you know the risk right. You go buy drugs from the corner drug dealer or you get them legit through prescription?

Anyone that has a problem with the current system is entitled and wants things handed to them and hold animosity to those that already have a precursor. See what I did there?

Also to the people that agree with the OP have any of you done more than one path in all the dungeons? You know there have been several paths that where broken/easily exploitable. Path 4 on Arah is dumb and as far as I know able to be completed but not the way its intended to be completed. So we are talking some dungeon master title when some of the dungeons aren’t finished. So yo know what happens then?

Everyone QQ’s anet what you doing I can’t get my legendary cause the High Priestess Dwayna regens to full health everytime she goes in Stealth on Path 4 of Arah. Or Oh Anet thats not fair what about all those people that where doing COF in 10 minute speed runs you know skipping parts?

So players just now trying to obtain their precursor are “entitled” because they have to spend roughly 30 times the amount of gold a person who bought one off the TP did shortly after release?

Wouldn’t that be the opposite of entitlement, as in we have to work infinitely harder to obtain our precursor than those who did before us to the point of impossibility?

Regarding exotics like Valcanus etc, yes they should be worth more than a precursor actually. For 2 reasons.

1. They are on par with a legendary by themselves

2. You don’t need to grind 1 million karma & a additional 400-500g in mats after obtaining a precursor.

Snow.5269:

oZii.2864:

Snow.5269:

The amount of people opposed to make precursors actually challenging to acquire is astounding. What is legendary about going to a 3rd party site & purchasing 300g? What is legendary about sitting at the mystic forge & throwing garbage into it until you get a desired result? Absolutely nothing.

Horrible, horrible design. The only reasons a person would not support a positive change to the game is out of fear of losing “special snowflake”status, they have no understanding of other prerequisites, or they have a precursor already.

Well actually you can’t please everyone! You know cause the precursors do drop from mobs with a really low drop rate. You know like many other games in the past that have rare items. Everyone seems to not mention that.

Its obvious from design precursor is suppose to be Special Snowflake status. So you sound bitter because you don’t have one and anyone that does is some snob or think they are better than everyone else that is what your assuming. You only feel its better design because you like the idea while I may not.

What he is proposing is extremely easy to do.

What I dont get is the focus on precursors and fairness but none of you people crying about precursor prices are saying anything what so ever about the unique exotics that cost just as much as precursors.

Then the argument would look like you all want things handed to you. Cause all you need is just the weapon then. Wait some of them you need gifts for too. There is more to the TP than just precursors there are other weapons that cost just as much as the prrecursor.

Also 3rd party site = possible suspension or termination. I like how everyone tries to throw out there this little tid bit like its anets fault and they are failing the game by not changing how precursors are obtained.

BMW/Ford/Chevy/Honda Dealer= Legit

Chop Shop = Risk = Jail Time or Scam

You dont go to the chop shop to get a car cause its cheaper then the dealer do you? You can but you know the risk right. You go buy drugs from the corner drug dealer or you get them legit through prescription?

Anyone that has a problem with the current system is entitled and wants things handed to them and hold animosity to those that already have a precursor. See what I did there?

Also to the people that agree with the OP have any of you done more than one path in all the dungeons? You know there have been several paths that where broken/easily exploitable. Path 4 on Arah is dumb and as far as I know able to be completed but not the way its intended to be completed. So we are talking some dungeon master title when some of the dungeons aren’t finished. So yo know what happens then?

Everyone QQ’s anet what you doing I can’t get my legendary cause the High Priestess Dwayna regens to full health everytime she goes in Stealth on Path 4 of Arah. Or Oh Anet thats not fair what about all those people that where doing COF in 10 minute speed runs you know skipping parts?

So players just now trying to obtain their precursor are “entitled” because they have to spend roughly 30 times the amount of gold a person who bought one off the TP did shortly after release?

Wouldn’t that be the opposite of entitlement, as in we have to work infinitely harder to obtain our precursor than those who did before us?

Regarding exotics like Valcanus etc, yes they should be worth more than a precursor actually. For 2 reasons.

1. They are on par with a legendary by themselves

2. You don’t need to grind 1 million karma & a additional 400-500g in mats after obtaining a precursor.

1 mill karma is just a time sink not necessarily hard just takes time. So you want it fast. The mats cost about the same in some cases more for the ones requiring to types of lodestones. So you have no problem with Volcanus costing 500g but the precursor you do?

Also you don’t HAVE to do anything in the game. It is a skin after all and isn’t required to progress further. It also can drop and can be made in the forge. Volcanus can be farmed but guess that takes to long too but we don’t mention that.

That kind of goes against what your saying doesnt it? Volcanus is ok to be 500g cause I don’t have to do other parts like I would for a legendary. This sounds like a time issue to me. Since making a legendary takes a good bit of time there should be a part that is easy to complete and everyone see this as the Precursor.

The way things are going I would say Anet see’s it as the opposite since they added the Karma Jugs to increase Karma therefore reducing the grind portion as the daily and monthly with booster can get you close to 100k. They didn’t do or say anything about the price of precursors on TP.

Also you don’t HAVE to do anything in the game. It is a skin after all and isn’t required to progress further. It also can drop and can be made in the forge. Volcanus can be farmed but guess that takes to long too but we don’t mention that.

My problem is this. Volcanus can be farmed. We the players have the control over its creation because there is no RNG involved. Slowly but surely you gather mats & work towards its creation. There is progression.

With precursors the player does not have control. It is up to the Mystic Forge RNG gods. You can throw 1000 weapons into the forge & come out with nothing. Sure you can purchase off the TP. However, 300g is unrealistic unless exchanges gems->gold or purchases from 3rd party site. Even if you farm a few gold a day, who is to say the price doesn’t reach 400-500g once you get 300g?

There is RNG involved in Making Volcanus you don’t just go out and get 350 molten lodestones and 100 destroyer lodestones which are the hardest thing to get and most expensive for any of the legendaries and unique exotics. You can eventually get volcanus if you farm it but you have no control over how long that takes.

You know the precursors drop and can be made in the forge so you can eventually get 1 by those means also you just dont know how long it takes. Its the same thing for precursor and unique exotics RNG is involved with both of them.

Also your 3rd party gold seller arguement is weak.

Its against TOS go ahead buy it who cares. You will eventually be banned. It doesnt affect anybody else if you go and buy your gold elsewhere. You keep making it seem like anybody that does is forced to. Its not required.

Which I am willing to bet if prices where exactly the same would still buy the thing using gems anyway. The people that would pay would pay regardless of price because they want it fast.

There is no high level content that requires you to have alot of gold. There is no high level content that requires you to have Twilight, Bolt, Dreamer, Kudzu, Quip, etc. You want it and that is the issue. How fast you want it.

Snow.5269:

Horrible, horrible design. The only reasons a person would not support a positive change to the game is out of fear of losing “special snowflake”status, they have no understanding of other prerequisites, or they have a precursor already.

You’re forgetting the main reason, which is that some people don’t think the changes being suggested are positive changes at all.

And some of us don’t believe that because we want to be special snowflakes (even though legendaries should be “special snowflake” type unique weapons), or because we don’t understand the other requirements (I have no particular interest in getting a legendary, but I read the forums enough to know exactly what’s required), or because we have one already (I don’t have one and have no plans to get one).

Some of us disagree with you primarily or entirely because your arguments here are mostly stupid, and we don’t just go along with people who very passionately make crappy whiny arguments about how something in the game just isn’t exactly how they think it should be.

Starlink.6248:

Need a fix for this Horrible design.

Grow up.

A two year old can say ‘broken. Fix this.’ I even have fond memories of a kid saying this to a perfectly working toy… It just wasn’t working how he wanted it to work.

An adult can give a rational description: ‘this market is flawed, prices keep going up.’ And can even give suggestions: ‘how about you xyzzy’

Even there, many of you are failing: when a poorly placed xyzzy is used, nothing happens.

The economy in this game, in the trading post, is a free economy. Not a command-control economy. This is a NEW economy, starting from a baseline of 0.

Prices will inflate.
Elite items (those with an extremely low supply but high demand) will inflate at a compounded rate. To assume otherwise is childish.

Price controls exist. These include:
The merchant: no item value will drop below what the merchant will pay.
Crafting: no item value will rise substantially over the cost of materials.
Material promotion:: extreme surpluses of crafting materials can be converted to higher tier materials – this places a fixed relationship between like goods of different tiers, which will use surplus supply of low tier goods to fill demand for higher tier goods.
The mystic forge : the mystic forge randomly rewards rare items for some recipes, turning it into a gold/item sink for people seeking these rare items. This both elevates the price of goods obtained primarily through this random process, to not less than 1/r (the inverse of the drop rate), but also elevates the prices of the goods thrown into the forge to create them.

The precursors are from that final price control. Removing the price control would affect the price of level 80 exotics, in a way that I think would be BAD for the economy – nobody would be converting exotics into legendary precursors, and everyone else would buy a few for their characters and have done. It would tank the price of exotics, and consequently remove the ability to profit from crafting same, and consequently the the tier 6 mat prices (woot, ectos @ 2 bronze/ea, orichalcum ore @ 7 bronze), making it pointless to farm these difficult materials for profit. Like it or not, precursors are a major driver of the economy, in many ways. Removing them to ‘fix’ one problem will only create dozens more.

The legendaries are (for those who remember) are not unlike the oppressor weapons in gw1 : bloody hard to obtain at first, but before long everyone had one. Don’t give me any back talk about ‘all you had to do was complete the storyline for a free one’, the battle for lions arch has been nerfed, making it far easier than it had been at release, and until you completed that battle, you could farm all the war supplies you wanted, but you couldn’t turn them in for a weapon. And that original fight was very very hard (I have fond memories of the boss wave).

Still, the parallel exists:
You can farm the ingredients for the precursor. You can throw them into the forge. You won’t know if its profitable until you learn what the drop rates are. You can buy/sell any weapons you want/get. And most importantly: the prices will tank in time.

Want them to tank faster? Show us how the supply works. Show us, if you will, how you beat the battle for LA, so that we too know what it takes to make a weapon. Show us exactly how many exotics are used for each legendary.

The high prices are ( and continue to be) a failure in the player base to figure this out. A-net isn’t going to do our work for us, and many of the controls they do have will actually make the problem far far worse, not better. If you think you have a better fix, speak up, but please don’t just say ‘Broken, fix now!’ like a petulant 3-year old with a toy that doesn’t do what they expect.

Just realize that this game has an economy, and adjustments to precursors will affect that economy. Don’t be surprised if your advice gets shot down, but don’t be afraid to give it either. You may have thought of something we haven’t, and even if we have, you’re going to learn something in our replies.

//Yamagawa

Really basic math here.

At a 20% chance of hitting an exotic from 4 rares, and a 1% chance to hit a precursor as that exotic, and recycling all your non-precursor exotics (though at current prices it is more cost efficient to re-sell every exotic greatsword that you can get more than 72 silver for), it will take 1222 rares on average per precursor.

At 16 silver per rare and a 15% trading post tax, that’s a break-even sale point of 230 gold.

Although the variance is huge, with Dusk at 300 gold and the ability to sell exotics for > 1 gold, tossing rare greatswords into the forge is a very profitable enterprise; the net expected value of a forge craft of 4 rare greatswords is well over 20% at the moment.

While I agree with the general idea, I’m not particularly convinced of your numbers (if I was, I’d probably be investing in precursor production right now).

The 20% chance of an exotic is indeed well established, and it means that you get 1 random exotic for every 16 rares you invest in (as compared to 1 random exotic for 4 exotics). This would indeed suggest that it’s better to sell an exotic if you can make more than 4 rares for the price you sell it for, but that’s dependent on the assumption that the distribution for exotics coming out doesn’t depend on whether you put rares or exotics in. Linsey’s statement in the stickied thread casts significant doubt on this.

I do still agree that it’s very likely better to put rares in than exotics, but 1% chance to hit a precursor (conditional on getting an exotic) is not the figure I would use. The best sample I’ve seen is someone who did 3318 combines, with 654 exotics, 4 Dusks, and 0 Dawns (see here), which is a 0.6% chance.

Current prices would mean ~15s per rare, so ~2.4g per random exotic you make; the EV of a random exotic with a 0.6% chance of a Dusk would be closer to 3.7g. As such, while I do still agree that the net expected profit would likely be above 20%, the risk premium is not enough to justify it unless you’re exceedingly rich to begin with. If I had (or was controlling a guild with) upwards of 10,000 gold, then precursors would be something to consider.

lackofcheese.5617:

While I agree with the general idea, I’m not particularly convinced of your numbers (if I was, I’d probably be investing in precursor production right now).

The 20% chance of an exotic is indeed well established, and it means that you get 1 random exotic for every 16 rares you invest in (as compared to 1 random exotic for 4 exotics). This would indeed suggest that it’s better to sell an exotic if you can make more than 4 rares for the price you sell it for, but that’s dependent on the assumption that the distribution for exotics coming out doesn’t depend on whether you put rares or exotics in. Linsey’s statement in the stickied thread casts significant doubt on this.

I do still agree that it’s very likely better to put rares in than exotics, but 1% chance to hit a precursor (conditional on getting an exotic) is not the figure I would use. The best sample I’ve seen is someone who did 3318 combines, with 654 exotics, 4 Dusks, and 0 Dawns (see here), which is a 0.6% chance.

Current prices would mean ~15s per rare, so ~2.4g per random exotic you make; the EV of a random exotic with a 0.6% chance of a Dusk would be closer to 3.7g. As such, while I do still agree that the net expected profit would likely be above 20%, the risk premium is not enough to justify it unless you’re exceedingly rich to begin with. If I had (or was controlling a guild with) upwards of 10,000 gold, then precursors would be something to consider.

Would you say its better to throw in 4 random rares as opposed to throwing in 4 random rare greatswords.

I have been doing this like 1 time a week and I usually make profit. I buy about 50 level 80 focuses at 13s and whatever else is bottom barrell ensuring that I don’t put in 4 of the same type I’m even using spears and water weapons.

I then chuck them in the forge and have come out with pretty good results some days its a loss but the times I have done it most have been profit. I don’t have any numbers but is usually 1.5-2g for each 50 stack of rares I grab.

Coming out with Eir Bow which at the time was selling for 14g I immediatly made my money back and then some. As I got 3 other exotics that sell at 3-4g a piece.

The problem that many people have is they rechuck the exotics in the forge. Then they are basically all in.

I do think it’s better to throw rares into the forge than exotics right now, and even with the 15% tax it’s probably better to sell the exotics you get than to throw them back in. For many types of rare it’s also better to make them yourself than to buy them; current material prices are pretty reasonable.

However, I’m not sure about mixed types, given that some precursors are worth much less, e.g. Venom at 15g. After all, the cost to make a rare greatsword yourself is only 15s or so. I guess if you can get the rares at a much lower price – perhaps 10s or lower – it would be a good idea to go for mixed types.

At a 0.6% hit rate on Dawn/Dusk at 15 silver per greatsword, you break even at selling the random exotic greatswords at 1 gold each. Unfortunately the profit margin depends an enormous amount on that hit rate, and it’s ridiculously difficult to pin down a hit rate so low; we’d need a sample size on the order of four million forges, for example, to confidently pin it down to the nearest tenth of a percent. That is just not going to happen.

In any case this isn’t going to be a reliable moneymaker for anyone with less than 5000 gold or so to throw at it, so we’re not exactly talking a practical scheme for most people here.

Data!
: 3318 combines, with 654 exotics, 4 Dusks, and 0 Dawns (see here), which is a 0.6% chance.

Er wait… what’s with the 3318 combines producing only 654 exotics…. oh, @#%^!
That’s working from rares up to precursors, and no actual levels are mentioned. This inserts extra unknown variables into the data! Booo! (Don’t mind me, data is Serious Business to me, and while that represents an impressive pile of data, but with the variables all it can do is give a crude guideline — were all the items level 80?)

Best I get with this data is approximates (see assumptions):
Conversion from green to rare: 18.39-21.10%
Conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dusk: 0.7414-6.356%
Conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dawn: under 1.821%

All these use 95% confidence, and the Dawn estimate is made using a pessimistic form of the Rule of Succession (Laplace was a hopeless optimist about the sun rising tomorrow).

Assumption 1: All items are (at best) level 80. They may have been lower level, meaning that actual outputs may be higher for level 80 inputs.
Assumption 2: The drop rates have not changed since the data was made (A-Net has made very public that drop rates in other areas of the game have changed. It would be foolish to assume that no such adjustments were made here – It would also be foolish to assume that A-Net would announce changes to the mystic forge drop rates, to do so would cause controversy to no good purpose).
Assumption 3: The drop rates are not influenced by bugs in the mystic forge output (‘no drop’, and ’shouldn’t create a precursor, but did anyway’ scenarios).

Gamblers: Use at own risk. The 6%+ end of the drop rate seems optimistic, but the data set is small. I’d encourage using the low end of the error margins for avoiding drastic disappointment that you are sure to get at the high end.

//Yamagawa

Yes, if you want to be more reasonable you’d be looking at a range of probabilities, but I don’t get how you can end up with a confidence interval that doesn’t include the actual sampled rate of ~0.6%.

Also, when you use data with rares and not exotics but you estimate the “conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dusk”, you’re also assuming that using exotic greatswords will have the same distribution of exotics that you would get from using rares.

The comment about godskull exploiters wasn’t just a general comment about the % of the wealth they still have.

The point is that when the godskull exploit was fixed the amount of precursors coming into the economy went down. Therefore naturally driving up prices. At the very same time, the people who used the godskull exploit were left with an inventory of precursors and/or huge cash reserves they could use to buy up existing precursors and relist them for large profits.

The point is that the godskull sploit was just a huge snafu no matter how you look at it. It set the initial price of precusors at an artificially low level, causing a lot of anger when the price “spiked” suddenly. It also left the sploiters with massive cash funds they could use to further inflate the market.

Brief (and wasted) inflation there.

And the rate is correct. The 0.6% or whichever makes the assumption that you are evaluating the rare->Legendary transmutes (Step A * Step B), I evaluate only Exotic->Legendary in my calculation.

No, 4/654 (4 Dusks out of 654 exotics produced) is about 0.006 or 0.6%. Your math is off.

Rare->Legendary would be 4 Dusks out of 3318 combines, or ~0.12%