Guild Wars 2

Please add more ways to get the precursor weapons. I dont care if they are redicilous expensive recipes or a million of karma or anything. But mystic forge is too much about luck (unless there is a 100% recipe noone found yet). You could go through hundreths of tries and not get one, while someone else gets lucky and finds precursor on first try.

About buying them on the trading post: Although I believe I have good money making methods, without using trading or exploiting or goldsellers of course, the prices on the trading post raise much faster than I can make money. Dawn of Rage for example went up over 50g over the last couple of days.
Also I dont see why I should be forced to reward some lucky guy with 150+g.

Update: Trading post price on precursors made another huge jump:
Cheapest Dawn currently for: 275g 3s
Cheapest Dusk currently for: 263g 16s
How is any legit player supposed to keep up with these daily price jumps?

I am a semi hardcore player with anywhere between 3 and 10+ hours playtime a day and it still looks redicilous to me.

Malediktus.9250:

Please add more ways to get the precursor weapons. I dont care if they are redicilous expensive recipes or a million of karma or anything. But mystic forge is too much about luck (unless there is a 100% recipe noone found yet). You could go through hundreths of tries and not get one, while someone else gets lucky and finds precursor on first try.

About buying them on the trading post: Although I believe I have good money making methods, without using trading or exploiting or goldsellers of course, the prices on the trading post raise much faster than I can make money. Dawn of Rage for example went up over 50g over the last couple of days.
Also I dont see why I should be forced to reward some lucky guy with 150+g.

This. I though Anet had learned from “that game” that you can make an extremely hard to obtain gear and still make the entire process very fun without a RNG factor involved.

I definitely agree. It wouldn’t even bother me to pay 250gold for the prerequisite because I know I can farm that up at my own pace. What bothers me is that by the time I get the 250 gold It’ll probably already cost 1000 gold.

This is what happens when there’s only 3 of a valuable item on the global TP. The sellers can make up any price they want and it’s getting stupid. At the very least they should increase the chance of getting the prerequisite, because right now the item is waaaaaaay too exclusive.

The problem is there are way to many bots, were to many exploits which went unplugged for a while so it’s questionable how bad the damage is, and there is a group of people sitting on unheard of amounts of gold. With the game DR in place, legitimate players cannot really farm more then 1 GP an hour (and that usually includes getting lucky to find a rare, blow it up for a glob and selling it). So what Archer said above is true, by the time I could farm 250 gold, cheaters/botters will have brought the price up to insane amounts.

So the only solution is a recipe with a fixed outcome of a precursor (even if it would be costly) or some other way which would put a limit on the precursor price.

I acquired a Dusk a while back when I realized that prices were going to go sky high. It cost me around 120g. At that point I had around 200 hours played, nearly 100% explored and I took my time. My time at 80 was very limited because I enjoyed every vista, spent quite a bit of time in PvP, and explored jumping puzzles and many DEs.

If you want to get a legendary prerequisite exotic I suggest saving as hard and as fast as you can. Get a full magic find set (should be 160%+ when you are done with food). Farm cursed shore. You should be making 1-4 gold per hour the first hour you farm and slightly less after that. Sell your skill points – transmuting things like silver (7-8c) into gold (40-44c) at an average rate of 250>90 will net you in the area of 50-60 silver per skill point. I sold about 100 skill points this way while farming and saving for a legendary prereq and I am sure there are other good ways to make money off your skill points too.

Once you make some bank you can also buy/sell other legendary prereqs. The price of all of them (except the underwater ones) is climbing and the supply is very low relative to the demand. So place a buy order, then sell them for proffit. This is a great way to get that final push on your way to the more expensive legendary prereqs.

Hope this helps guys.

If I would use all my 276 skill points left I would gain 136g if your claim is true. but 100+136g still not enough to afford it.

LinseyMurdock

Game Designer

The internet cracks me up. Yeah, I said that.

I know that random can be frustrating at times, but I think that it also provides joy and excitement at times.
Systems Design – Crafting, Loot, and Rewards

from the other thread. forget about it ever changing to something that requires fair EFFORT.

a dev who likes RNG… no words to express my feelings currently. i am done with this^^

“a dev who likes RNG… no words to express my feelings currently. i am done with this^^”

No quote button, again!

I feel similarly frustrated. I also feel that Ms (?) Murdock and her employers need to be schooled in the inherent dangers of gambling based systems of play and addiction.

This is the sort of design which can ruin lives – everytime I hear of someone dropping $thousands on gems I just pray that they can aford it rather than being some young person with a MMO addiction. As a UX designer I cannot in words express the scorn I feel for this.

As a gamer, I can express my frustration and agreement with the OP that there needs to be an option to obtain these precursors that comes from playing the game (even if its an option that takes the average player months) rather than this RNG based system.

Have you people even looked into the OTHER costs of a legendary? You have months and months of work before you even need to worry about a precursor. Buying a precursor on the TP won’t get you any closer.

Just don’t worry about it, who knows, maybe some time in the future there will be more ways to acquire of precursors. But for now there is no reason to have one.

Darx.9842:

Have you people even looked into the OTHER costs of a legendary? You have months and months of work before you even need to worry about a precursor. Buying a precursor on the TP won’t get you any closer.

Just don’t worry about it, who knows, maybe some time in the future there will be more ways to acquire of precursors. But for now there is no reason to have one.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Right now, the precursor is the determining bump for most people. The rest of the stuff DO require time, but the thing about them is that they have a relatively set amount of time you have to spend doing them unless Arena Net drastically changes the requirements or the methods of obtaining the requirements. Sure, 77 clovers is RNG too, but the cost does not increase exponentially over time as the precursor weapons are doing right now.

The problem is this: In a month from now, who knows where the precursor weapons will sit: It could be 1g or 1,000 g or somewhere in between. However, following recent trends, it will most likely be closer to 1,000g. If it is 1,000g, then the amount of time at which it takes to obtain it has increased exponentially. If you obtained it now, then at least you know relatively how much time remaining you have to obtain a legendary weapon. That is why this topic exists and why people are so worried. Another good thing about having one, is that they can make you vast amounts of money very quickly. Buy one know for 250g sell it in a week for 300g.

Going back to the TC. I think why they are increasing at this very fast rate is because the people who have been farming since day one have obtained everything else they need and now the demand has increased so heavily that people keep bidding each other up. The sellers see this and then increase the price even more. The other problem is that is soulbound on use making the existing unsoulbound ones even rarer.

@Darx: Not really, the precursor is currently by far the hardest part of the legendary. 2nd hardest part mystic clovers and then wvw badges.

Badges are trivial. Do the jumping puzzles with 5 characters at every opportunity and you can get them within less than 2 days.

Place a Ballista in a good spot anticipating some large attacks and you can get them while you sit around drinking coffee…

@Strill.2591 I am on a server which always has long queues until 3am. Switching server is out of question. So at best I can do each jp once a day.

I doubt that. I’m on Henge of Denravi and managed to get it. The queues for enemy borderlands are almost always the lowest.

If prices are not stable, that is because the market has not reached equilibrium. They are climbing because, based on supply and demand, people are selling them for less than they are worth.

There is a really old, famous quote:
“Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay.”

If there is one copy of an item in a market, the value is not the mean or median or all the interested buyers’ offers, it is the maximum. However, once that item has been purchsed, that buyer is satisfied and the value of the next drops to the new maximum offer. Sellers, of course, speculate that there are buyers willing to pay more than the highest currently-known offer and try to sell for more. Inflation happens, especially in a world where the economy is still stabilizing and the population is changing at a termendous rate (0-2million in less than a month!)

As time goes on and the market matures and stabilizes, the price of supplied goods and the offers of demands for that good reach a mid-point. At this point, a stable price emerges. Until then, as long as prices are rising, you’re getting a good deal because they are being underpriced. If people stopped buying them, that would be an indication the price has risen above its value—until then, as long as people keep buying, they are being sold for fair market rate or less.

That is exotic precursors on the free market in a nutshell. If you want communism, where the total value of loot is split amongst the population evenly, so all may have the best, you had better find another game.

No, there doesn’t need to be another way. And creating multitudes of threads stating the request in various forums won’t change that.

Random is a perfectly adequate method for determining the outcome of drop.

The sense of entitlement is unwarranted.

To the poster above who asked for a reward for effort, well, consider the literal chance at getting a precursor as your reward for effort. If you don’t put in the effort, you don’t get the chance at acquiring a precursor. Seems fair enough.

The random recipe is entirely sufficient to achieve a stable price in the long term, because the drop rate sets a well-defined price. The main issue right now is that no one actually knows what the drop rate is, and so no one knows what an appropriate
price is.

As we speak, players are continuing to throw rare greatswords into the forge by the thousands. The fact that we’re still not seeing many Dawns and Dusks as a result mostly serves to indicate that the drop rate is very low indeed. Granted, it may be the case that this is primarily because of recent changes by ArenaNet – if so, then a jump in price was to be expected anyway.

I suspect that Dawn/Dusk were simply very underpriced when they were selling below 100g, but the players selling them didn’t know any better for one of three reasons:
1) They ended up with a precursor through some kind of exploit, e.g. the 21 karma weapon exploit, or the lvl 65 rare exploit.
2) They got lucky and got one of these in their first few attempts.
3) They were gamblers and lost track of how much they’d actually spent trying to get a precursor.

In any of these cases, many such players would have failed to work out the true worth of those items, and so they sold them at prices that were too low.

Now, I’m not going to say that 250g is the right price for Dawn/Dusk – it may go up, or it may go down. However – although it could take a good long while – the price will stabilize eventually.

Considering that the other components for a legendary add up to something like 500g, it’s not that ridiculous for the price of the precursor to be comparable to this amount.

On an intuitive level, having the precursor make up only 1/6th of the price of what goes into the legendary just doesn’t make much sense to me.

EDIT: Turns out Belmont wasn’t aiming hir comment at me.

I estimate the chance to get a precursor from 4 rares to a maximum of 0,2% and from exotics a maximum of 1% from the data I gathered so far from youtube videos and reports on the forums and own try and error.
Dropchance from lvl 80 chests is probably 1/10000 or we would see way more than now. I dont know a single person (e.g all people from the guilds I am in) who got precursor as a lucky world drop or from chests.

@Belmont:

I don’t have a precursor, and have not exploited. However, you are right, I have no vested interest in this, becuase it really itsn’t a problem.

I’m simply a player who has experieinced enough crafting systems to realize random is ok.

I’m also a person who has lived long enough, and experienced enough, to know that I’m not entitled to anything, and outside of death and taxes, there are no gaurantees.

Not sure why you chose to make a personal attack, or accusations, but, in the future, if you do, please check the forum code of conduct before doing so.

Well, if the drop rate is 0.2%, the true worth of a Dawn/Dusk is something like 300g. If it’s 0.1%, it’s worth twice as much.

Random is bad.
RNG makes people moan and complain on the forums and I agree with them.
RNG makes people quit daily and on the other hand a 100% recipe would mostly likely encourage more people to go for the legendary etc.

When I spend 200g trying to forge a precursor and fail I will most likely quit simply because the system is bad and I have wasted my time. I’d rather work hard for something and get it for sure rather then work hard and have a 0.2% or 1% chance of getting lucky…

There should have been a recipe to start with, like a 100g recipe, hard work, effort (account bound)…
No one would have said anything like: ‘MAKE IT RNG WE HATE IT LIKE THIS’
Everyone would be happy.

The RNG isn’t the problem, the extremely low chance RNG is.

With the tiny amount of prerequisites that are appearing on the TP they appear to be far too rare for any normal player to obtain no matter how long they play.

Let’s say that 5 dusks are sold every day (I doubt that many are). This means that less than 2000 will be sold within one year. I’m guessing there are well over 2000 players who are richer than me and want Dusk for their legendary. So as long as these players can afford to pay more than I can I simply can’t compete with them and won’t be able to obtain that prerequisite even though I suspect I can get every other item for the legendary within that one year.

The prerequisite will esentially become the one wall I can’t cross because there will always be demand for them by richer players and never enough supply for me to get one as well.

That’s not true. As long as the price is higher than the average cost to make one, then once people are more familiar with what the actual RNG chances are, the supply will rise to meet the demand.

Yeah. It won’t keep rising without limit. It’ll eventually stabilize at a price that corresponds to the true success chances.

Dusk/Dawn will probably peak at 1000g. I dont think its fair for a single ingredient of legendary weapons to cost as much as 10 sets of t3 cultural armors.

Promega.7628:

I acquired a Dusk a while back when I realized that prices were going to go sky high. It cost me around 120g. At that point I had around 200 hours played, nearly 100% explored and I took my time. My time at 80 was very limited because I enjoyed every vista, spent quite a bit of time in PvP, and explored jumping puzzles and many DEs.

If you want to get a legendary prerequisite exotic I suggest saving as hard and as fast as you can. Get a full magic find set (should be 160%+ when you are done with food). Farm cursed shore. You should be making 1-4 gold per hour the first hour you farm and slightly less after that. Sell your skill points – transmuting things like silver (7-8c) into gold (40-44c) at an average rate of 250>90 will net you in the area of 50-60 silver per skill point. I sold about 100 skill points this way while farming and saving for a legendary prereq and I am sure there are other good ways to make money off your skill points too.

Once you make some bank you can also buy/sell other legendary prereqs. The price of all of them (except the underwater ones) is climbing and the supply is very low relative to the demand. So place a buy order, then sell them for proffit. This is a great way to get that final push on your way to the more expensive legendary prereqs.

Hope this helps guys.

Can you explain how to turn skill points into gold. I have nearly 50 SP…

Like Makediktus said, even if the price eventually stabilizes, it’s going to be completely out of proportion.

My previous estimation was to obtain a legendary somewhere within 6 months, if Dusk reaches 1k gold cost it’ll become closer to 2 years assuming I play every day for several hours (and by play I mean nothing but farm).

It just seems ridiculus that the already daunting legendary recipe would effectively triple in cost because of one crazy low RNG.

This is what entitlement looks like.

Not everyone is entitled to a precursor. Not everyone is entitled to a legendary.

I made all of my money through legitimate means in game. Heck, 90% of it came from crafting items I’ve sold to other players. I was able to afford multiple precursors, the mats to make the legendary, money to discover recipes in the mystic forge (including the first triforge ammy), and still have 100k left over.

If you want a weapon that 90% of the rest of the playerbase wants too, but only a few drop per day, you better start figuring out ways to obtain more resources than 99% of the other people who play the game so you can outbid them. Much of what makes the legendaries so special is how few of them will be made, and how incredibly difficult they are to obtain.

There are many ways to make lots of money in this game without exploiting. How bad do you want one? Complaining will not help you to achieve it.

Um, 100k? I hope you mean 100g, because that’s insane otherwise.

Lol @ entitlement. All we are asking for is a fair way to get them without a low chance RNG involved. I dont care if the guranted recipe costs 250g or whatever. But I dont want to gamble or give gold to lucky people.

Call it entitlement but I kinda feel like if I play the game regularly for months on end, I should be able to obtain the legendary. Even if it’s for an entire year.

Isn’t that enough commitment? So I really also need to be the TP genious? Do I really need to put my life on hold and rush getting large amounts of gold before the prices skyrocket again and get out of my reach?

That’s like classic gear grind all over again. No matter how much gold I make, the other players will always be ahead of me so all my effort will never be enough.

Commitment I understand, but being forced to constantly compete with the wealth of other players is not my idea of fun. Richer and smarter players should obviously be able to obtain the legendary much faster than I do, but for me to be actively denied the legendary because there can never be enough of them in game seems completely unfair.

My effort in PvE should be measured by the game’s standards not by other players’

Malediktus.9250:

Lol @ entitlement. All we are asking for is a fair way to get them without a low chance RNG involved. I dont care if the guranted recipe costs 250g or whatever. But I dont want to gamble or give gold to lucky people.

Why should you care if your gold goes to lucky people? What matters is the price, not the recipe that happens to make it, or who’s getting the money.

I can, however, understand not wanting to pay gold to people who exploited and/or monopolized the market, though.

I care if people get rich because of luck. People should get rich by hard work and not by winning the lottery (or by dishonest work eg. manipulating prices in the trading post).

If you want a game where people get rich by hard work and hard work alone, don’t play this game, or most MMOs for that matter. Don’t play real life either, it won’t satisfy that desire, as nice as it would be if it did.

For a start, some people could easily get very rich in-game from buying gems with real-world money they didn’t really work hard for and ArenaNet isn’t going to stop them from doing it.

At least they help Anet with money and might have spend work in real life, thats still fine with me, but buying up low items on trading post to sell them for more so people who really want the item for themselves is awful attitude. And imo not better than using exploits.

So anyone who makes money by buying and selling on the trading post has an “awful attitude”?

I agree that exploiting in order to get all that gold in the first place is deplorable (though only if they knew what they were doing was an exploit), but I don’t fault people for buying low and selling high when the opportunity presents itself.

If someone is able to buy something and resell it for a higher price, what that means is that the original seller was simply selling at too low a price, under the current market conditions. Because of that, it was an inevitable consequence that someone else would benefit at the expense of the person selling the item for too low a price. What difference does it make who gets to profit?

lackofcheese.5617:

So anyone who makes money by buying and selling on the trading post has an “awful attitude”?

Making money =/= cornering the market, as I’m sure you’re well aware. Why the need to play coy.

It absolutely is in Anet’s best interest to allow this to continue, from a monetary perspective. From a customer satisfaction perspective? I would think not.

Yes, because they make goods unneccesarily more expensive for people who need something. In GW1 there was still a use for them since there was no trading post. But now since everyone can easily use it from anywhere, theres really nothing positive traders add to the economy.
In GW1 they could buy up small amounts of something and sell someone a bigger amount of it for a higher price. (Saving me time to look for several people selling me small amounts) But trading post makes this completly obsolete.
But even in GW1 I disliked traders, because they often didnt stay with this kind of business but actively tried to rip off people by making them think something is worth much less than its actual value or the opposite if they were trying to sell something.

Cornering the market isn’t really possible when the mystic forge is still here and remains capable of spitting out legendary precursors.

Personally I don’t care if people get super rich from luck, hell I don’t even care that much if it’s exploits as long as it doesn’t completely destroy the economy.

I only care if a certain aspect of PvE is locked out from me for years because i’m not and never will be among the 1% richest players. That’s exactly what I hoped to get away from when I started playing GW2.

The rich players will be able to make the legendary 10 times faster than I do. By the time I make one nobody will even care, I just want it for my personal sense of achievement.

And now you’re telling me I don’t get to have it because I’m trying to obtain it at my own pace? And you’re calling me entitled?

The line between having or not having the legendary should be whether you’re willing to put in the time and effort not whether or not you’re among the richest players in the world.

lackofcheese.5617:

Cornering the market isn’t really possible when the mystic forge is still here and remains capable of spitting out legendary precursors.

Actually, I misread the post you were responding to, apologies. However, I absolutely do think with the very small supply we have now, and with the (relative) ease people were able to acquire them/build up large profit margins before (with low-level exotics), it is entirely possible to manipulate the market at this time.

It paid to rush content and take advantage of things early. New players won’t be able to benefit from that, and can keep falling further and further behind.

Like I said, I’m OK with it taking me ages. I’m not thrilled with the idea of it being ultimately all a matter of chance, or the knowledge that something, despite potentially devoting years to acquiring it, is out of reach. There are enough buzzkills like that in real life…let’s leave them out of fantasy.

Archer.6485:

Personally I don’t care if people get super rich from luck, hell I don’t even care that much if it’s exploits as long as it doesn’t completely destroy the economy.

I only care if a certain aspect of PvE is locked out from me for years because i’m not and never will be among the 1% richest players. That’s exactly what I hoped to get away from when I started playing GW2.

The rich players will be able to make the legendary 10 times faster than I do. By the time I make one nobody will even care, I just want it for my personal sense of achievement.

And now you’re telling me I don’t get to have it because I’m trying to obtain it at my own pace? And you’re calling me entitled?

The line between having or not having the legendary should be whether you’re willing to put in the time and effort not whether or not you’re among the richest players in the world.

I do agree with you except by the part of “when i make mine no one will GaF about it” i loved the skin, i dont care if people will look at me and say “wow, you got yours NOW? srsly”, i want to log into my account just to see that freaking awesome sword in my back, i will never do a single normal step again, i want to move in the word just by spamming my 3rd greatsword skill (the warrior one, forgot the name) just to see the AMAZING effect it produces in the skill.

To me (and i guess for a lot of people here), your last sentence would be changed to "The line between having or not having the legendary should be whether you’re willing to put in the time and effort not whether or not you’re among the luckiest players in the world. "

Anet, would be too much to ask you to AT LEAST bring this issue/suggestion to your tables?

I do agree that in the short term, it’s possible for some players to manipulate the market and profit off others, mostly due to the absence of information about the forge’s drop rates. It’s going to take a long time for prices to stabilize as players slowly realize how much it actually costs, on average, to make one at the Mystic Forge.

On the whole, though, I think the precursor greatswords were just wildly underpriced when they were at 60g. I wish I had been smart enough to realise that this was the case, but sadly I was not.

lackofcheese.5617:

Cornering the market isn’t really possible when the mystic forge is still here and remains capable of spitting out legendary precursors.

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Sure there’ll be more of them eventually, but they seem to be coming out at a far too slow rate. Has at least a hundred Dusks dropped so far? Good news for a hundred players. How long untill there’s a thousand? Still doesn’t help me because I’m not among the best and richest 1000 players.

I’m not even close to the richest 1% and in a 2 million playerbase that’s 20000 players.

So what happens to the guy that wants to make Twilight but there are a 100000 players who want it as well and are way richer than that guy? He’s going to have to wait for over 100000 Dusks to drop and be posted on the TP, that may as well take forever.

Or he can try his own luck with the mystic forge, which considering the current drop rate will probably take forever as well.

How can everyone complain about the DR being completely broken and overtuned but can’t accept the same reasoning for an overtuned RNG.

Belmont.4682:

Archer.6485:

Personally I don’t care if people get super rich from luck, hell I don’t even care that much if it’s exploits as long as it doesn’t completely destroy the economy.

I only care if a certain aspect of PvE is locked out from me for years because i’m not and never will be among the 1% richest players. That’s exactly what I hoped to get away from when I started playing GW2.

The rich players will be able to make the legendary 10 times faster than I do. By the time I make one nobody will even care, I just want it for my personal sense of achievement.

And now you’re telling me I don’t get to have it because I’m trying to obtain it at my own pace? And you’re calling me entitled?

The line between having or not having the legendary should be whether you’re willing to put in the time and effort not whether or not you’re among the richest players in the world.

I do agree with you except by the part of “when i make mine no one will GaF about it” i loved the skin, i dont care if people will look at me and say “wow, you got yours NOW? srsly”, i want to log into my account just to see that freaking awesome sword in my back, i will never do a single normal step again, i want to move in the word just by spamming my 3rd greatsword skill (the warrior one, forgot the name) just to see the AMAZING effect it produces in the skill.

To me (and i guess for a lot of people here), your last sentence would be changed to "The line between having or not having the legendary should be whether you’re willing to put in the time and effort not whether or not you’re among the luckiest players in the world. "

Anet, would be too mach to ask you to AT LEAST bring this issue/suggestion to your tables?

Ye that’s pretty much my sentiment because ultimately I only want it for myself and the joy of having the awesome skin. And it’s really depressing to think I might never be able to get it because I’m being blocked from obtaining the final piece because of the elite driven economy.

Archer.6485:

lackofcheese.5617:

Cornering the market isn’t really possible when the mystic forge is still here and remains capable of spitting out legendary precursors.

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Sure there’ll be more of them eventually, but they seem to be coming out at a far too slow rate. Has at least a hundred Dusks dropped so far? Good news for a hundred players. How long untill there’s a thousand? Still doesn’t help me because I’m not among the best and richest 1000 players.

I’m not even close to the richest 1% and in a 2 million playerbase that’s 20000 players.

So what happens to the guy that wants to make Twilight but there are a 100000 players who want it as well and are way richer than that guy? He’s going to have to wait for over 100000 Dusks to drop and be posted on the TP, that may as well take forever.

Or he can try his own luck with the mystic forge, which considering the current drop rate will probably take forever as well.

How can everyone complain about the DR being completely broken and overtuned but can’t accept the same reasoning for an overtuned RNG.

Hence the problem has little to do with cornering the market, and mostly lies in the low drop rates.

If Dusk has a 0.01% chance of coming out when you put 4 rares into the mystic forge, you would simply be an idiot to sell it for less than 400 gold or so, because that would be the average cost to make one.