Guild Wars 2

My premise is that Gold Sellers & Bots exist for one main reason. To power level through grind. Grind = Player Time and Time = Money. So if I have a job that pays $30 hour, then every hour I spend grinding and not having fun is work and so that equates to $30 an hour I could be grinding at a job. This means it would be easier to pay for gold or bot in order to get back to having fun.

The core creator of grind in GW2 is crafting. Combine this with the trading post and you have the perfect recipe for gold sellers and bots. By tier 2 certain crafting is very difficult and grind kicks in. For example when you need 8 small fangs to make 1 item and you need 80 of the items to level your crafting, you are looking at 640 small fangs. There are plenty of trees, mines and food items, but when it comes to items that drop off creatures, you have to spend hours and hours in the same area farming to just get enough of them, to be able to get your crafting up high enough. It is so boring that you will find yourself going out and adventuring. This means all items you craft are useless to you, except maybe backpacks when you first get to a new tier.

The Trading Post makes it easy to get supplies, but supplies that are in demand are expensive. So that small fang will cost you almost 2 silver x 640 = 1,280 silver or 12 gold, 8 silver. As a low level character you aren’t making that much money from adventuring. By 50th you might be able to start drumming that up. So GW2 actually encourages you to pay them to buy gems, to buy gold as the legit way, to avoid grind. But if you were to calculate prices, gold sellers give you twice as much gold as GW2 does for the same money. So what does GW2 mean when they say it is legal, they mean they get your money and not someone else. But if they really want our money, they should fix the game so it works in their favor.

What this has done is cause HUGE numbers of gold sellers to appear in the game as there is a HUGE demand to be able to buy crafting supplies. Not just crafting supplies, also the desire to have the best equipment in the game, especially when there is competitive PVP. The bots come from gold sellers, but also from players who don’t want to sit around grind killing creatures for 8 hours to get the supplies. Or they don’t have the money to spend on gold and so the bot grinds the gold for them.

How can this be fixed?

1. Eliminate the Trading Post.
2. Allow trades via mail and in person.
3. Allow players to setup shops when they are off-line.
4. Make drops guaranteed for items that come from creatures.
5. Reduce the items required to level.
6. Transform high level crafting into a more interesting crafting system.

I am sure many people have other wonderful ideas, but this is what I can see to fix the situation currently.

Eliminating the trading post would encourage us go find our own crafting materials more or get them through our guilds and friends. Thus encouraging more group effort. By having players set up shops, you could still go places to find and buy items in some quantities, but it would prevent a player from buying 2,000 of the same items. It would also eliminate finding the BEST equipment drops, which would send players to crafters more often as the selection would be more limited. Guaranteed drops would make it just like mining or cutting down trees. Making crafting easier would make the craft items more useable to a player as he levels through the game.

Finally reaching the highest level should expand the crafting into unique items that are the best in the game. Where the crafting is blended with the questing.
Quest & Crafting

1. Special recipes drop while adventuring
3. Research via story lines to discover the items for the recipes
2. Finally these items demand questing with a group and doing dungeons

Alas I doubt such changes will come to GW2. What is more likely, is that they will start selling large quantities of crafting supplies on the gem market. Thus being able to make money for themselves and players getting crafting supplies cheaper than buying gold via a gold seller.

floweringmind.4678:

1. Eliminate the Trading Post.
2. Allow trades via mail and in person.
3. Allow players to setup shops when they are off-line.
4. Make drops guaranteed for items that come from creatures.
5. Reduce the items required to level.
6. Transform high level crafting into a more interesting crafting system.

1- Eliminating the trading post is a ludicrous idea mate it is one of the most unique and best features of GW2, where else besides EVE have you seen a global trading post ? with buy and sell orders ?

2- direct player trading ? seriously you totally bit your own tongue here mate, you want to eliminate gold sellers yet you want to arm them with an M-16 rifle ?
direct player trading undermines the market big time guess what those high demand items you’re after without the trading post the price would go up exponentially.

3- this one is also ridiculous, I remember a game called Perfect World International
it had offline player shops in towns, boy was that a mess all major cities littered with shops all over the place it was like moths to flame, you couldn’t get more than 10fps in any town
it looks more like a beggars market than a city.

4- you can use magic find upgrades to up your chances of that fang dropping by as much as 30% or 50% even with the trading post version of magic boost.

5- hmm I don’ know how I feel about this one, maybe lower the amount of creatures parts required, to reduce the grind.

6- No idea what you want but isn’t it there already ? for example to make legendary weapons you need 400 weapon-smith, there is your more interesting crafting right there legendary weapons and armor.

floweringmind.4678:

1. Special recipes drop while adventuring
2. Research via story lines to discover the items for the recipes
3. Finally these items demand questing with a group and doing dungeons

1- NO discovery works wonders already, making recipes drop from adventuring just makes for more grind.

2- NO it would force people to do certain story lines, the game is all about play the way you want not forcing me to do stuff I don’t want.

3- NO thank you, imagine if it was impossible to make legendary weapons by yourself that i’d be annoying alright.

Latinkuro.9420:

floweringmind.4678:

1. Eliminate the Trading Post.
2. Allow trades via mail and in person.
3. Allow players to setup shops when they are off-line.
4. Make drops guaranteed for items that come from creatures.
5. Reduce the items required to level.
6. Transform high level crafting into a more interesting crafting system.

1- Eliminating the trading post is a ludicrous idea mate it is one of the most unique and best features of GW2, where else besides EVE have you seen a global trading post ? with buy and sell orders ?

2- direct player trading ? seriously you totally bit your own tongue here mate, you want to eliminate gold sellers yet you want to arm them with an M-16 rifle ?
direct player trading undermines the market big time guess what those high demand items you’re after without the trading post the price would go up exponentially.

3- this one is also ridiculous, I remember a game called Perfect World International
it had offline player shops in towns, boy was that a mess all major cities littered with shops all over the place it was like moths to flame, you couldn’t get more than 10fps in any town
it looks more like a beggars market than a city.

4- you can use magic find upgrades to up your chances of that fang dropping by as much as 30% or 50% even with the trading post version of magic boost.

5- hmm I don’ know how I feel about this one, maybe lower the amount of creatures parts required, to reduce the grind.

6- No idea what you want but isn’t it there already ? for example to make legendary weapons you need 400 weapon-smith, there is your more interesting crafting right there legendary weapons and armor.

1. First off this isn’t EVE. This is a fantasy world and a global trading system just promotes gold sellers.
Almost all MMOs have auction houses and they ruin the game, it doesn’t matter if they global or local to a server.

2. If there is no market, then there is no market to undermine. But fine, keep it the way it, it would be even better as the people trading would have already have established trust systems with the current mail system.

3. I was thinking more like you pay a monthly fee to have a shop in a city. So it would be an actual building in the city. So people wouldn’t be sprawled outside on the streets like beggar market as you say, not that I mind that.

4. I didn’t know about that, but I still think it is a ridiculous broken system.

6. If you read further down in my post you would get a clearer idea of what I was talking about.

The reality is all economic systems in MMOs are broken and don’t really work. They are just designed to be money sinks. Everyone fights (including you) for these systems and then complains about gold sellers.

One thing I forget to mention is that I would ban all money being traded between players. That would actually be the easiest fix right now. Remove that from mail and gold selling might go away without any other change.

Latinkuro.9420:

floweringmind.4678:

1. Special recipes drop while adventuring
2. Research via story lines to discover the items for the recipes
3. Finally these items demand questing with a group and doing dungeons

1- NO discovery works wonders already, making recipes drop from adventuring just makes for more grind.

2- NO it would force people to do certain story lines, the game is all about play the way you want not forcing me to do stuff I don’t want.

3- NO thank you, imagine if it was impossible to make legendary weapons by yourself that i’d be annoying alright.

Yes, Yes, Yes. I know you like grind but the rest of us don’t.

Your problem is, your reasoning is faulty. Gold sellers and bots exist for one reason… Because they can make money. There will always be those that want to have everything handed to them, and they are the ones those bots target.

1. Eliminate the trading post will do one thing… make people advertise in /m chat all the more. The trading post has been down enough that those of us that actually are on to PLAY this game can tell, without ever clicking it, if it is down. Just see how many are offering items for sale.

2. allowing trades via mail already is done. You mail, I mail, voila! trade via mail. In person would be nice, simply for convenience. But it will do NOTHING to stop the gold spammers.

3. Shops are an extremely stupid idea. Sorry, but there you go. If I want to buy something, I want it for the best price, not the price Joe Schmoe has in his shop, because his is the only one there. You are simply decentralizing the trading post into a bunch of individual locations… where we will see spam from people all the time to go BUY FROM THEM!

4. Which drops? Should all of x monster give blood? and all of y give dust? No. Just… No. I would much rather have it random, personally. Yes, I’d like it increased a bit, but I definitely do NOT want it to become a ‘ho-hum, I need blood, time to go kill 17 drakes’. I like playing the game. If you can pinpoint what is going to come from where, consistantly, then it removes a need to play. This game is not all about crafting, believe it or not.

5. Why? Don’t you level fast enough? Sorry, but if you want to level, you can hit from 1 to 80 in about 2 days. Just hit the events, follow them around, and you will be there. Along with lots of loot. This game does not require ITEMS to level. It requires you to PLAY… which is what you seem to not want to do.

6. A more interesting crafting system? Again, this game is not about crafting, so much as crafting is a small part of this game. It is interesting enough… when you get to 400, and want to make uber gear, you have to have about 500 skill points PER ITEM to use the mystic forge for that amazing gear.

I wish to, at this time, point out that you seem to think your ideas are wonderful, given that you say others may have OTHER wonderful ideas. You are the only one that thinks your ideas are wonderful, it seems.

Next set:

1. no, we don’t need special recipe drops. There are recipes at some of the heart vendors, recipes at the trainers, and all the discovery ones out there. That is more than enough.

2. That is silly as well… If you have a recipe, you have the ingredient list. What do you expect, a recipe name to drop, along with quantities and no item list? You just are not thinking.

3. And what about those of us that don’t like doing dungeons? Or don’t want to run in a group more than the dynamic events? Do we just miss out because YOU want things to go your way?

All in all, this is simply bad. You want to stop gold spammers, make a button saying ‘gold spammer’ for both chat and mail, and if more than 10 people report the same person in 5 minutes, that person is blocked from chat pending investigation.

1. Eliminate the Trading Post.

This is where I decided to comment and close this tab. Yeah. Great suggestion there.