Guild Wars 2

A lot of the trouble with champion zergs, Scarlet invasions, the Crown Pavillion, etc. is based on the absolute drought of loot that has been experienced over the past year. First we had Farming Punishment thrown on us, then the problems with drops in Nov/Dec/Jan timeframe that were supposedly “bugs”, then the introduction of highly desireable items, along with the growth of the userbase. When the champ loot changes and Queen’s Jubilee hit, there’s no wonder why people went overboard with their play time and so on. Someone at Anet must really get off on watching people scramble for table scraps. Probably some monetization megalomaniacal mindset, but I digress.
What Anet can’t seem to get right is balance. We don’t need everything for no effort, and we certainly don’t need it within two hours, but we also don’t need to be calculating up a 4 year time frame of playing an hour or so a day just to achieve the goal of crafting something. It’s not just legendaries. I was looking up Mjolnir earlier. 350 Charged Lodestones. At the rate those drop for me, I’ve had around 4 since October of last year, and to build Mjolnir, you need 350 of them. They simply don’t drop.
It’s alright for something to not drop as much, but when you get to the level of some T6 mats and such, it’s so out of proportion it’s easy to question the mental capacity of the person behind the design. Sure, there’s a supply of things like lodestones, but it’s not the demand that is driving the prices up, it’s the discrepancy between drop types.
Add to this the ridiculous fact it’s far simpler to just farm champs or run scarlet invasions to make the gold to flat out buy the items, but at that point, why bother crafting at all? Just save the gold and buy the kitten ed thing outright. Everything on the TP has a max of some infinitesimal profit over material and tax costs anyway, so it’s not like you’re saving money by buying the components.
Bottom line on it all is that Anet needs to pull their head out of their kitten and wake up to the balance issues which are creating most of the problems they are facing right now in the first place. That or they should just remove crafting completely, because they obviously don’t “get it”.

Neural.1824:

What Anet can’t seem to get right is balance. We don’t need everything for no effort, and we certainly don’t need it within two hours, but we also don’t need to be calculating up a 4 year time frame of playing an hour or so a day just to achieve the goal of crafting something. It’s not just legendaries. I was looking up Mjolnir earlier. 350 Charged Lodestones. At the rate those drop for me, I’ve had around 4 since October of last year, and to build Mjolnir, you need 350 of them. They simply don’t drop.

The issue is introducing items to the economy in different avenues in which many different play style groups play. They had a hard time in the past, with the advent of orrian boxes, champ loot boxes, and upgrading them bags of goodies it has helped. But the issue you are pointing out remains – scarcity of a particular item you actually need in order to make what you want. With the random drops we get we have no guaranty that we will get what we need to make a rare weapon.

Where as I totally get your point, I disagree that the newer content is at fault. I feel that the newer content is much better at balancing the resources than the old patches (CoF P1 farm ridiculousness), and while ANET does make mistakes (Cough deadeyefarm cough) they try to address it and fix it. We are going a step in the right direction, but we have to make baby steps with introduction of goods.

Sure the ascended weapon crafting was a huge shock to the system, but it overall promotes a healthy life cycle for the market in which goods are ACTUALLY being used (instead of speculated massively with). And it was a sink of lower tier mats, not really high tier mats.