Guild Wars 2

So I tried making the Snowflake Orichalcum Earrings and I got a “That content has been temporarily disabled. Please try again later”.

Anyone else getting this?

Probably because people abused it to get “free” Ectoplasm Orbs.

A LOT of people exploited this method over and over. Some have made several thousands of gold since Saturday. Ten thousands – if not hundred thousands – of gold have been created in no time without any effort. I hope that those exploiters will get punished.

What exploit? Why did no one tell me. NOooooooo…

I’m confused, doesn’t the recipe require an ecto? How exactly does this net you ectos?

elderan.2638:

I’m confused, doesn’t the recipe require an ecto? How exactly does this net you ectos?

The main item that was part of the main build required 1 ecto, after this all that was needed was mithril. With each salvage you got back the main item and as such after the 1st salavge all that was required from then on was mithril.

Simply put, you only needed 1 ecto to get you started.

PS.
I haven’t done it at all, i just read up on how it was done.

The specific one people were exploiting was making rare mithril jewellery which only required 1 ecto. Looks like they disabled both rare and exotic to be safe.

Tribune.3782:

A LOT of people exploited this method over and over. Some have made several thousands of gold since Saturday. Ten thousands – if not hundred thousands – of gold have been created in no time without any effort. I hope that those exploiters will get punished.

You seem confused. No new gold has been created. No new gold has entered the economy. Ectos did, which lowered the price of ectos and thus made any gold you had worth more ectos. Gold changed hands but this just resulted in 15% TP taxes and gold EXITING the economy.

Orichalcum earrings would be the wrong item anyway.

What I’m surprised at is I think the craft → crack with black lion kit → recover jewel → repeat loop has been in game all along. It made leveling Jewelry BY FAR the easiest craft to level since you could retrieve your blue mats by salvaging with a good kit rather than having to farm them every single time (unlike the salvage returns of any other craft). I doubt the snowflake jewel is the only way of looping this.

And it not like you’re getting free ectos – you use mats hook and setting mats (same as you could last week…) and you burn the highest tier kits which come from chests or a not exactly cheap direct purchase for gems.

Nike.2631:

What I’m surprised at is I think the craft -> crack with black lion kit -> recover jewel -> repeat loop has been in game all along. It made leveling Jewelry BY FAR the easiest craft to level since you could retrieve your blue mats by salvaging with a good kit rather than having to farm them every single time (unlike the salvage returns of any other craft). I doubt the snowflake jewel is the only way of looping this.

The Black Lion kits one would be using for these have a gold value via the gold —> gems transfer. Even if the gems were bought with real money, it’s only a different way of achieving gold from gems. What I believe most did was actually use master/mystic kits. They have a chance of losing the jewel 20% of the time which then needs to be replaced. The snowflake jewels had clearly lower replacement cost than normal jewels – until people caught on and price of snowflakes went up. We saw it climb to 23s I think which was probably around the break point relative to ecto price at that time. Which tells us that the cheap snowflakes before that left a hefty room for profit.

Just went and checked the recipies, and I see now where things blew up.

The equivalent rare jewelry recipies already in the game take -3- embelished brilliant jewels… So if you make one and then salvage it, you lose 2 jewels. By introducing rare jewelry that takes only a single jewel, the blue materials portion of the loop becomes recursive, and the hook/setting/kit cost is a very desirable trade vs. the average of 1.5 ectos per cycle.

Changing the recipie to take 3 jewels , in accordance with the normal rules of rares would solve the problem instantly.

yes, change the recipe to take 3 jewels and ban exploiters would solve the problem.

Each time someone finds a way to get some gold everyone will call him an exploiter, for a game that requires no grind it sure needs a lot of gold/farming to do anything.

if it was not a bug they wouldn’t have disabled it. don’t you think ?
and bug exploiters are bannable.
You could have written: “each time someone exploit a bug everyone will call him an exploiter”

it was an oversight, because as usual the devs dont test these things, otherwise it wouldnt of been ingame in the first place.

meanwhile any legitamate gold farming outside of the TP is nerfed into the ground.

Daendur.2357:

if it was not a bug they wouldn’t have disabled it. don’t you think ?
and bug exploiters are bannable.
You could have written: “each time someone exploit a bug everyone will call him an exploiter”

And if they disabled it, how did anybody exploit it? Oh, right, they did so before it was declared a bug. That’s why I’m generally against banning for exploits(except in some really obvious cases*). Whether smth is an exploit or feature depends on the intention of the developers which we, as mere players, have no way of knowing/verifying.

*If smth requires you to jump through hoops to achieve(like, jump on this exact spot to get through/over a wall, place a boss on a certain place to disable an attack) it’s most likely an exploit. But crafting and salvaging items for ectos? That’s been a part of the game since I started playing it 3 months ago. I wonder…how many of you “ban the exploiters” have used a mesmer portal to get to a chest in a JP…or did you think devs intended you to do that?

Chances are we are not talking about ppl making a few of said items. They made tons…knowing full well what they were doing. It was obviously not meant, much like the karma deal a while back. We saw the numbers on that and I can only imagine the numbers on this. I’m sure we are talking about 100s if not 1000s per person. We have been shown in the past that we should get while the getting is good b/c there are no lasting ramifications……that imo is wrong…..I fell that those who took advantage of this to extent should have some sort of actions taken against them…..mainly loss of what was created and maybe a temp ban. They knew this was not intended, it’s as simple as that.

Doesn anyone thinks that making 100G in a day is legit?

i don t think so.

If you make your time extremely moreprofitable than it should be (without rng factor) then you know you are not only abusing the system but also damaging other players…

But possibly those people thinks only to theimselves…..

I don t think that people who got 400G in few days can hide behind any excuse….
They perfectly knew what they were doing…

They would deserve at least to lose all their money or even better have their account rollbacked to a week ago……

LordByron.8369:

Doesn anyone thinks that making 100G in a day is legit?

i don t think so.

If you make your time extremely moreprofitable than it should be (without rng factor) then you know you are not only abusing the system but also damaging other players…

But possibly those people thinks only to theimselves…..

I don t think that people who got 400G in few days can hide behind any excuse….
They perfectly knew what they were doing…

They would deserve at least to lose all their money or even better have their account rollbacked to a week ago……

So if someone buys lots of in game gold with real money, then uses that money to buy the stock of a desired low quantity product and then resells that product for twice its worth makes hundreds of gold in a day. Should they be banned too?

They are exploiting the system with their wealth. Anet surely doesn’t intend for the market to be manipulated like that at others expense, but it happens a lot.

My point is, that Anet knows their system and salvaging rares has always been a game mechanic. The only reason it got disabled was because a lot of people started making money off it. Anet doesn’t care about the few wealthy people, but when a lot of people start making money they freak out and nerf something into the ground.

Same thing when people farmed path 3 of Arah for profit. Only once the method got public and a lot of people started doing it did Anet stop it. They even said so themselves they monitored, ran metrics and then decided. No one was banned because it was a legit game mechanic that Anet intended to work the way it did. Just like this jewelry.

The difference is, once people find a way to make money off their intended mechanic, they understandably put an end to it, because they are a business and they need to make money. Doesn’t mean people did anything wrong, they were simply playing the game the way it was setup and using it to their advantage to progress in the game.

Fact is, the only reason people made a lot of money is cause it wasn’t widely known. If everyone knew about it, pristine snowflakes would have been 1g ea, mithril would have been over 1s ea and the profit of it would have been very small. The market would have corrected itself as it does with ALL crafting once a lot of people start crafting the same thing.

@Kyiv
No nobody think they were “playing the game”

Analog situations already happened in most mmorpgs, and they were exploits and bannable offense.

If you find a formula that makes you get more than you use and its clearly broken, you have to cntact support asap.

If you instead decide to profit despite you know you are damaging economy (and the game for other players) for a personal profit, you deserve to be punished.

Word play cannot hide that nobody will think ppl that abused this bug, didn t do knowing it wasn t legit.
That is just a pretentious excuse….

LordByron.8369:

@Kyiv
No nobody think they were “playing the game”

Analog situations already happened in most mmorpgs, and they were exploits and bannable offense.

If you find a formula that makes you get more than you use and its clearly broken, you have to cntact support asap.

If you instead decide to profit despite you know you are damaging economy (and the game for other players) for a personal profit, you deserve to be punished.

Word play cannot hide that nobody will think ppl that abused this bug, didn t do knowing it wasn t legit.
That is just a pretentious excuse….

Once again………

So placing buy orders for cheap on the TP then reselling them for a profit is an exploit in your opinion? People are getting out more than they are putting in. People buying the whole supply of an item and re-listing it at a higher price for personal profit, damages the economy and hurts other players. Just like you said this method did.

What about crafting an item and selling it for more than you put in for ingredients?

So the TP and crafting is broken in your opinion cause there is profit to be made?

Also what exactly was the bug? Salvaging upgrades and ectos has always been in the game and will continue to be. Is the recipe a bug? Or was it an intended recipe that Anet just was ignorant about their own game mechanics and didn’t see the potential of said recipe?

Using your reasoning there is a fine line between legit and not. Anet did the right thing, they shut down the recipe and will probably adjust it to require more jewels and therefore fixing the issue. That is the right thing to do and the only thing they should do.

Sounds like sour grapes to me. The new recipes, through lack of foresight by the developers (forehead smack deserved) caused a change in valuation of a previously inexpensive item (mithril) which could now be converted into ectos. The early discoverers of this saw an obvious spread in the market between the old value of mithril and what the real value should be given the recipe, and bought as much of it as possible until the market caught up. When I looked at this recipe last night (I was not an early adopter), ectos were selling for ~ 24s and the expected cost per make was something around 19s, which would require a salvage value of 22.35s to break even when reselling the outputs.

In other words, it took less than 24 hours for the market to adjust to the new valuation of ingredients that the recipe enabled (mithrils more expensive, ectos cheaper) and the only people who made money were the ones who knew about it before the prices moved to their new points. That is a benefit of “exploring” new content before anyone else, but the same thing happens when new patch notes come out — predicting market trends and acting on them will make you money. This will always be true.

Since the new equivalency between mithril and ecto seems to have been unintended, the market looks to gradually be returning to where it was before. But I don’t see anything wrong with people buying low and selling high, that’s what the market is there for and the profit opportunities from such events only happen for a very short time before the TP adjusts. Crafting & salvaging is not an exploit unless the item is very, very obviously mispriced (like the cultural weapons in the first week).

It wasn’t even making money. Maybe a way to get ectoplasms cheaper (22-23 S) but I never actualy made money this way. Not even with Black Lion Kits. I made about a few hundreds of em and went from 30 G to28,5 G and 15 Ectoplasm. While at start I used my own supply of Ores. And this morning wanted to again made a buy order of 500 Ores be4 I went to bed woke up made 30 Hooks and Settings with the bought Ores. And turned the 15 Ectos into new Snowflake things. Too find out it doesn’t work anymore.

And about ppl saying we should get a ban for this well oké maybe it is a new item. But it could fit in the Economy pretty well. The prices of T5 Fine crafting mats also rice and drop by the price of ectos. If they go to 30 Bronze each again there will be ppl making thousands of Rare weapons/clothes for around 15 S each to salvage them for ectos. That is just how the economy works.

To compare it with items that are sold by NPC for 10 % of the price is just wrong.

ReMarkable, not to mention the fact that the snowflakes are a limited time item and therefore even after the market corrected itself, the recipe would eventually vanish as the supply of snowflakes disappeared.

Black Lion kits were a terrible choice for salvaging these, by the way, based on market prices at the time. Using gold to buy gems, each kit costs 22-27s. BL kits don’t make sense unless the extra ectos (about 15% more) and salvaged gems (20% of the value of the salvaged ingredient) are worth more than that, and they’re clearly not in this case.

You’re forgetting that some people had something along the lines of dozens of BL kits lying around in their banks doing nothing from dailies / BL keys that were found. I, for instance, had like 6 BL kits I was never going to get through normally, and converted them all into something like 200 ectos in half an hour. For something I got for free and would never have feasibly used, that’s a damned good trade. I also consider the new bank space that freed up for me a bonus in the conversion.

So I crafted about 30 earrings a couple of days ago and put them in the forge for commendations. I was planning on doing it again today only to find that it was disabled.

The questions I have is why didn’t they shut down the creation of the exquisite snowflakes too?

I just made 45 exquisite snowflakes using 90 orichalcum ingots and 45 ecto, which I acquired breaking down rares that I spent many hours farming.

I spent about 17 gold to make these which is over half of my current net worth. I hope there is some way for those who weren’t exploiting to have some sort of recourse.

Careful.. another thread in a different forum got closed and it was stated by a mod that it is not up to the community to determine what is an exploit.

I hope this kitten kitten will get punished,and now becouse of them cant make own things that require snowflakes.I hope all the gold the have did to get it to 0.becouse of stupid ppl like the the market prices go crazy.
So GTFO kitten

Kyiv.9621:

ReMarkable, not to mention the fact that the snowflakes are a limited time item and therefore even after the market corrected itself, the recipe would eventually vanish as the supply of snowflakes disappeared.

Yep exactly what I was thinking. It’s amazing to me that the very people who are trying to “protect” the economy are themselve harming it in horrendous ways. Thus the need for people to do this just to make some gold so they can actually play the game normally which (I’m sorry to say) would be the vast majority of those who used this as a method to get some gold (not those who just play the TP all day and do nothing else in the game)

So they nerfed the recipe to require 5 ectos now. Problem solved I guess.

is 5 Exquisite Snowflakes a bit much since it only takes 3 Exquisite Opal Jewel to make the Candy Corn Orichalcum Amulet?

So, I read the new update and saw that they cost the normal amount. Fine. I go buy the mats so I could make those earrings for my guardian. But why can’t Anet mention in the update note, that YOU STILL CANNOT CRAFT THOSE KITTEN EARRINGS?
Hope they fix this soon or I’m going mad…

Ksielvin.1587:

Tribune.3782:

A LOT of people exploited this method over and over. Some have made several thousands of gold since Saturday. Ten thousands – if not hundred thousands – of gold have been created in no time without any effort. I hope that those exploiters will get punished.

You seem confused. No new gold has been created. No new gold has entered the economy. Ectos did, which lowered the price of ectos and thus made any gold you had worth more ectos. Gold changed hands but this just resulted in 15% TP taxes and gold EXITING the economy.

No new gold. Just the few taking from the many.

This wasn’t a money making scheme within the intended framework of the current supply controlled system. Pristine snowflakes are easy to get, easy to farm and after two weeks when they were gone the ectos market would have been completely shot. Long after pristine snowflakes are gone, people farming would have one less way to make money. Overall, since ectos are the main supply controlled ingredient in a lot of items, the ripple effect would be significant. The rares ectos come from are considered rare for a reason.

Not to mention people were probably able to use this exploit to effectively get black lion keys for nothing. That creates a whole other bunch of questions about gems price conversions getting even worse, etc.

One needs to see the forest for the trees.

All right, so the patch last night “fixed” the recipes. These now require 5 jewels to craft.

So why is the content still “temporarily disabled”?

The mithral ones are seriouslly worse than masterwork. you get 1 less stat than a secondary value, 1% less MF and only 1% boon from the upgrade slot.

WTH this isnt worth the 3 jewels, when masterwork is byfar vasty superior, it was worth the 1.

Though I honestly cant see how ANet didnt see that this would be exploited, its kinda obvious.

It is really sad that they are allowed to keep their ill gotten gains and continue playing while those of us who struggle to get but get worse because of DR and loot nerfs. They wont be banned cause they need the players. I wish there was a 0 tolerance to this stuff.

eh… them getting free ecto is a bad thing. But you should instead look at this as an opportunity to invest in ecto you know it’s artificially low right now, and will go up again soon.
also, now is probably a good time to sell excess over-priced snowflakes and mithril