Guild Wars 2

I will start off stating that I am going to use my personal experiences and opinions in the following argument.

These things absolutely must be addressed or the drop in people wanting to play this game will drop within a few days to a few weeks.

I love everything Guild Wars. I am a huge fan of ArenaNet and as an aspiring game artist ArenaNet is the absolute dream job. That being said it kills me to make this post, I do not want to do this but it has to be done if ANYONE wants to play this game at 80 for any reason other than sitting in Lion’s Arch talking about Quaggans and Gold Sellers.

TLDR; This game has absolutely nothing to do anymore thanks to diminishing returns on literally every area in the game. Too many money sinks and now nothing to make money with.

My Goal Ever since I was a wee-sprout in the Grove I gandered at the Tier 3 Cultural Armor, I knew while everyone else was working for Legendaries at 80 and saving up for that, my goal would be to get T3 armor as it would be easier overall as I have little patience to farm for months at end for a rainbow stick.

This is where the problem begins. I need to make gold. I was given multiple options for this at the time that I hit 80, all of which are pointless now.

Use the Trading Post buy low sell high, or buy t5 mats and mystic forge them into t6 (this only worked for one mat as others were a loss in money) or take a huge gamble and try to make exotic weapons from rares in the mystic forge. I chose the exchange and put my mats onto the Trading Post to be sold, matching lowest seller because undercutting would reduce my profits and it’s kinda rude as hell to do. Within an hour I have been undercut so much that the current selling price dropped by over a silver. So now if I were to sell again I would lose not just profits, but I would be in the RED. This isn’t so much as ArenaNet’s fault but rather the fault of players who do not understand 1) math, 2) simple economics such as profit and loss, 3) want to sell fast so everyone and their mom just consistently undercuts everyone else.

Continued on next post.

Leading to this result: most of items on the Trading Post sell for 1 copper more than vendor price. I don’t know why people are just so neglecting for them to ignore the fact they’re losing money, but yet it happens and it happens ALL the time. This in turn makes crafting a ginormous loss in money.

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO LEVEL CRAFTING OTHER THAN LEVELS AND BEING MAXED OUT FOR A LEGENDARY WEAPON THAT YOU WILL PROBABLY NEVER GET

I have heard people in Lion’s Arch saying they make money off crafting dyes or jewelry. I have looked into both of these and neither give a profit but almost always is a loss or breaks even. It is NOT profit if you can sell the materials for said item for the same price or more than the item. Regardless of if the mats were farmed or not, it is not profit.

My suggestion to fix the undercutting into losses to actually bolster the economy: If you want there to be a 5% listing and a 10% selling fee, make it so you can not drop to vendor price but rather 15% above vendor price (at least on crafted items), so selling on Trading post does not cause such a loss and then most items are properly priced. This way careless or stupid people will still be able to break even as if they were selling to a vendor. I am assuming that Arena Net didn’t make the trading post so 99% of all drops could be npc’d for more money. It doesn’t make sense and it hurts the economy too much to be this way much longer.
Farming is now absolutely pointless. I would farm a group of monsters in Frostgorge Sound, and it was NOT trolls. And 90% of the time I was the only person there. I had a full set of magic find + 26% from raspberry bars and 50% from a magic find booster so I could get as much as I could in an hour (I don’t like farming more than an hour at a time as I feel this makes the game miserable and not worth playing). I go to my spot 2 days ago, after an hour I had received one Powerful Blood. 6 days ago, I would get 5-6 an hour WITHOUT the booster. And I knew that there were diminishing returns and I was informed that you should farm a bit and then leave or log out for a while. I did this, I would log into an alt for an hour and play her after 15 minutes of farming. Still nothing.

I gave up farming when I realized I could make more money by doing dungeons, since the diminishing returns is too high for farming for anything to be worth it.

Continued on next post.

Dungeons Okay great, running CoF maybe 3-5 times a day, and sometimes TA because I like the TA armor and eventually would work towards the Gift for the Legendary weapon. No point in running any dungeon more than once a day now since the final reward after the first run is now 6 silver and it requires 1000 tokens for a full set of armor and 500 for the gift to which I reply: “Okay there is absolutely nothing left to do in this game to make money”.

My goal as it stands is completely and utterly unobtainable. Before I was given a window of 1 gold an hour (which by the way is not a lot since that would require 120 hours of farming or dungeons to get the full tier 3 armor). Who the hell wants to farm 120 hours to get a skin? Not me.

So my question to the players and to Arena Net is: What else is there left to do?

The answer: WvW. I do not like WvW, too much running, too little action, almost always zerg versus zerg which requires little to no skill, just who has more people with them. I am sure there are people who like this, but I certainly find it a HUGE waste of time and incredibly frustrating.

So, last possible resort to make money:

Level up alts? Sell every single item (besides cloth) to a vendor since alts aren’t farming an area, they’re moving through them so no diminishing returns.

I love how we were given plenty of ways to make money or obtain our goals once we hit level 80 and now the only thing you can do for your level 80 to make money is to not play your level 80.

How the hell does this make ANY sense?

Let’s not ignore the thousands of bugs with the zones and classes/skills/traits.

What’s the point anymore?

I want nothing more than to love this game but ArenaNet is consistently making it IMPOSSIBLE for me to do anymore. Playing it has now become not fun, but almost like a second job.

ANet wants you to spend RM in cash shop to buy gems you can then exchange for gold. Game development used to be about making good games now it’s solely about profit. Case closed.

Your post isn’t going to make ANY difference at all. Just saying.

10 dollars for 2 gold. So to make 120 gold I need to spend 600 dollars?

No, I don’t think ArenaNet is doing these things to force players to spend Real Money on Gems. The whole point of the Gem Store was to eliminate the use of RMT and to give players the option to spend real money to get optional things.

I do not believe Arena Net is that greedy. They sold over 4 million copies of Guild Wars 2, making these nerfs right now makes no sense if it was to align with the “Pay us more money for fun” route.

prodigy.1023:

ANet wants you to spend RM in cash shop to buy gems you can then exchange for gold. Game development used to be about making good games now it’s solely about profit. Case closed.

Your post isn’t going to make ANY difference at all. Just saying.

I don’t think making games was ever solely about making good games, but it used to be that making a good game was great for making profit. Now everybody wants more money so we have options like this which even though I have supported now on multiple occasions, is ruining the game. I didn’t think this would be the case and I had faith in Anet for making the gemstore something you could use but not mandatory but now it is. There is NO way to make money anymore except for buying it with gems. I wish I had spent more time pre-(game-breaking)-patch so I could have a sizable fortune compared to all of the new players.

Well, blame the exploiters. If it wasn’t for them, such diminishing returns we get to see almost on every patch, wouldn’t even have been patched. Not to mention, how useless the TP currently is. Until they change TP, golds will always be for the rich only.

The rich gets richer. The poor gets poorer. That’s GW2 currently.

LooLoo.1437:

10 dollars for 2 gold. So to make 120 gold I need to spend 600 dollars?

This simply means they have no clue about competitive prices on the in-game currency market. The intention is still the same even if tools are broken.