Guild Wars 2

I thought up something in a reply to a different thread that I really wanted to talk about in more specificity. Basically, this is a proposed explanation for why loot drops feel so bad in this game:

The thing is that almost the entire population generates supply for nearly everything. I could theoretically drop a dusk or a spark by killing a moa in a field. It doesn’t matter if I want the spark, and it doesn’t matter that the moa was 0 difficulty.

However, only a fraction generate demand for any one product. If I play a thief, I’ll really want that spark, but not personally want the dusk at all.

See the problem here? Instead of making the supply mostly account bound, ANet made mostly everything tradeable and just knocked down the supply to super low values across the board. Thus, every single player looking to getting a drop of any tradeable item will always see much lower drop rates than appropriate for the value he personally assigns the item, because somebody else assigns the item much less value than he does, and if it’s tradeable then the TP averages everything out.

TL;DR: Market tradeable gear will always, to the people who want to have it, feel like it drops too rarely. Make more loot account bound instead.

What do you guys think? I’m not an economist, so I’m really looking for somebody to word the last line before the tl;dr in a more technical way.

But couldn’t you just sell the Dusk and buy Spark with the proceeds instead? If all Precursors were account bound, you’d have the reverse problem; players who get a lucky drop, but to whom the drop is worthless. And now they can’t sell it, so it’s like a blind man getting a call and hearing, “Congratulations! You have won a state of the art Ferrari! Oh, you can’t drive? Too bad. You can’t sell the car.”

The problem doesn’t lie with the Precursors being tradable. It lies with the inability of players to work towards a fixed goal without relying overmuch on RNG (either through the Mystic Forge, or from drops). While you can just buy the Precursors outright, the increase in money supply has meant that prices for Precursors has risen, resulting in players feeling like the goalpost is constantly moving away from them.

There’s a simple solution.

Imagine a system where players could gradually over time acquire the parts needed to craft a precursor. That crafted precursor and all of its component parts would be account bound. Additionally any legendary created with said precursors would automatically be account bound.

Now you have both a method for playing and attaining and getting lucky without ruining the merits or ability of either.

Zaxares.5419:

But couldn’t you just sell the Dusk and buy Spark with the proceeds instead? If all Precursors were account bound, you’d have the reverse problem; players who get a lucky drop, but to whom the drop is worthless. And now they can’t sell it, so it’s like a blind man getting a call and hearing, “Congratulations! You have won a state of the art Ferrari! Oh, you can’t drive? Too bad. You can’t sell the car.”

The problem doesn’t lie with the Precursors being tradable. It lies with the inability of players to work towards a fixed goal without relying overmuch on RNG (either through the Mystic Forge, or from drops). While you can just buy the Precursors outright, the increase in money supply has meant that prices for Precursors has risen, resulting in players feeling like the goalpost is constantly moving away from them.

We’re not talking about precursor problems here. We’re talking about why mob drops feel worthless. When you in particular are looking for a drop, there is almost always, because of how generalized the loot tables are in this game, going to be more people who do not want the drop but get it, than those that do want it. This pushes down the market value of basically every tradeable drop, and it becomes many times more efficient to do activities with intrinsic value and buy from people who don’t want the drop and value it less.

This is why the best way to a legendary is simply to farm gold. You don’t look for the dusk or the spark or anything else in the game, you just speedrun dungeons till you can buy one.

If ANet can figure out the right amount they need to raise the odds on good loot dropping from mobs, they can remove the need to make everything tradeable. Players would feel better about loot drops, but it wouldn’t impact the economy too much as the additional loot would be account bound.

In fact, this already happens on a small scale in fractals. It feels really good pulling an exotic out of my fractals chests, even though I know it’s account bound and all i’m going to do is salvage it.

As someone with multiple accounts, umm… how about less account binding tyvm.

Figures a Sylvari would come up with such an idea. Trying to undermine Tyrian trade too now, huh? I’ve got my eye on you….. (~.-)

The biggest problem with account bound rewards is that they greatly decrease replay value, once the reward has been obtained. Thats especially true, if that reward is usable by multiple characters but you dont play with alts (ascended rings) or if the reward becomes useless after obtaining it once (skins, miniatures, recipes) because its already unlocked on the account.