Guild Wars 2

I’m no politician so I don’t have a simple fix that I can throw out here as a cure all. some things are working great, others not so much. I do have a few suggestions based on some illogical price trends.

1) Crafting should be at worst zero gain. currently all crafting materials are selling for more than what you make out of them. Why? because we’re restricted to a price floor in the TP and have infinite supply so our market equilibrium is defined by the artificial limit (seriously you say you hired an economist and that is basic stuff there). I’m not suggesting capping the total supply of mats in the game (people would just horde it to jack the prices up), but the price floor on a crafted item should be a floating floor equal to the market value of the materials required to make it. At the same time I’d like to see a return to the GW1 idea that gender a of race y cannot put on armor that was worn by gender b of race z. Get rid of the armor drops, or at least require that they be customized by one of the master craftsman NPCs before being equipable (extra gold sink there). It doesn’t need to be a big cost just a bit to let you know that it had to be fitted to your character. also armor drops starting at masterwork should be soul/account bound on acquire or have vendor value = to the value of a crafted item under the above plan.

1.2) Adjust drop rates, fine crafting materials would certainly need to be far more frequent drops and armor far less common. Logically once I’m done slicing up a bandit his armor isnt going to be much use. Maybe I’ll be able to take it to a master smith and have something salvaged, but nearly every moa/drake/canine/feline I kill should have a claw or two in tact that I can chop off and throw in my pack. Control the drop rate (supply) to hit a price target. you can add/remove extra recipes (demand) to tweak the market if needed also.

2) When you do an event please clearly communicate what you expect the real money value of certain items to be. Not sure if you intended it but the cash price of the greatsaw was over $50 USD earlier today. the drop chance out of the chests either needs to be changed to bring that down, or please tell up before we throw cash into the gem store that it is intended to be an elite item on par with exotics. Many players were under the impression that it should have been on par with the cost of GW1 costumes and expected that an investment of 15-20 USD would give a fairly high chance of obtaining at least one skin. (I’m ok with random loot tables but if BL chest prices are any indication a significant portion of the player base gave up). Maybe consider adding event chests and event keys so we can at least be assured of some fun event themed goodies then make those chests and keys able to be traded on the TP, or just increase the drop rate of the BL keys in game, nothing coming out of those chests regularly merits that level of rarity.

3)The trading post: for the most part this does not need any change other than maybe giving us a way to view the buy and sell listings on the same screen we purchase/sell from. currently the only way to see all the information is to already have one of the items in your inventory. And if possible please include an indication of number of sales per minute on that page since we don’t have real time information people are just undercutting the sell price to dump it now rather than listing at the same price and getting it sold in 45 seconds. Its a perfect example of how MMO players discount the future, but that only because we have no idea when the future is. I’m very interested to now the velocity of certain commodities in the economy even if it were to be published weekly/monthly on the website you would be creating a more stable healthy game economy.

4) Bots: you know they’re out there and flooding the market with stuff. Be a bit more aggressive in getting them out of the game. require periodic authentication of reported bots. something like if you get reported for botting, have a mail sent out requesting a reply within a timeout of something like a few minutes (5-10). If there is no response then simply cease drops for that account until the response comes in. I’d actually propose requiring it of all players every 2 hours or so just to remind us that we’ve been playing for a long time. (this last idea was just thrown in because I like the number 4. I know its not well thought out, and everyone hates captcha.)

Sorry wall of text. hope one of the official people actually takes time to read and consider. I know its unlikely to be fixed and someone will just come in and say its the nature of MMO’s to be this way. To that person I just say why stick with the status quo, GW2 broke so many other MMO traditions why not one or two more?

ps: arena net is the only developer I’d expect to create a robust economy. I was more surprised that some of those ideas weren’t included (I’m sure there are technical reasons for some).