Guild Wars 2

kiba.2768:

this falls in line with anet’s anti grind policy. i admit that at times there are grey areas when it comes to interpretation or implementation of their manifesto, which as we have seen, has evolved, though the wording on the document stays the same.

if they wanted you to grind out gold, they would have left all those mechanisms alone. the fact that they did away with these methods proves that they don’t want you sitting in the same zone for hours at a time, whether it be making gold or doing something else. granted, player expectations vary wildly in both directions for what is considered fun. some love grinding, some don’t.

anet has repeatedly shown us(in both blatant and ninja-like forms) that they want us to explore the world, experience the richness of the story-telling, the art that was created and the music composed for our enjoyment.

This isn’t preventing grinding, nor is it making go and explore the world. If anything the drop rates are making grinding worse. You have to grind and farm to get anything. The benefits of going out and exploring are non existent. If they want us to do that then they need to put some incentive for it, past the initial xp and rewards for completing the map and the measly rewards for the dynamic events.

The drop rates and DR haven’t hurt the bots either, it’s only hurt the legitimate players whether it be the casual or the hardcore.

Cyrus.8261:

That’s a very good description of the progressive nerfing of any faster than basic gold income. I really wonder whether it was the extra gold income or the repetitive grinding that ArenaNet cares so much about.

IT’s the gold. They only want players that are willing to spend real money on gems for their gold. not players taht are willing to earn their gold in game.

Everyone else … The exit is that way —>… we need more room for new players that just bought another box from us. And in 3-6 months we will change the game to fit yet another demographic so we can sell more boxes.

kiba.2768:

The drop rates and DR haven’t hurt the bots either, it’s only hurt the legitimate players whether it be the casual or the hardcore.

Exactly the point of all these threads. If they are doing so well on taking out the bots then why keep these game breaking features.

And before someone comes on here and says something like “DR wasn’t about bots” uhm yes it was, they actually used that as the excuse for putting DR into the game, to keep bots from affecting the economy. It was the loot drop bug that no one saw coming and is worse then the DR.

Both need to be removed before I ever log back in again and there are thousands of players who share my sentiment.

Easy gold: farm mithril.

You can salvage every lv 60+ heavy armor, sword, great sword, hammer, mace and axe and also hit nodes in southsun and all lv 60+ maps.

Get 250 and sell at 50+ copper a piece. You get 1.25 g a stack. and it grows fast with a few hours of farming or casual play.

I’m quite tired of being broke all the time. It’s one of the one things that really is starting to put me off. No, I’m not going to pay cash just to be able to ‘play’.

God Of Fissures.8627:

there is no fun way to make money in this game. it is all a repetitive grind.

Totally. As someone who works 40 hours a week, I want to play the game when I get home and have fun. I don’t want to farm. That is absolutely boring to me. I don’t think I can ever afford all the tier 3 cultural armor.

I am Narko, and I’m here to ask you a question.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ’
No!’ says the man in Seattle, ‘It belongs to Anet.’ ’
No!’ says the man in the NC Soft, ‘It belongs to Us.’ ’
No!’ says the man in Nexcon, ‘It belongs to the shareholders.’
I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose…
To not log in…….
A little levity in this time of struggle.

VictoriousMonk.7150:

God Of Fissures.8627:

there is no fun way to make money in this game. it is all a repetitive grind.

Totally. As someone who works 40 hours a week, I want to play the game when I get home and have fun. I don’t want to farm. That is absolutely boring to me. I don’t think I can ever afford all the tier 3 cultural armor.

Just wondering…what do you actually do in the game?

TWMagimay.9057:

jaw drop Try this: Check how much gold you make doing what you enjoy. Set your expectations based on that. If you are not making a few g/day, you should probably realise that spvp doesn’t give you gold, because you don’t need gold in spvp. That’d make your time in GW2 a lot more enjoyable.

I kinda have to side with this guy. From just playing the game normally, you can make 1g/hour. The secret? Just casually doing dungeons and fractals. Sometimes when I’m bored I run “Tunnel Farm” in Cursed Shore when it’s not bugged (3g/hour) or sometimes I do Straits of Devastation meta events and help lvl70s with events.

Of course, from farming Sparks, you can also make 30g a day…

Come on guys. It’s not that bad.

TWMagimay.9057:

VictoriousMonk.7150:

God Of Fissures.8627:

there is no fun way to make money in this game. it is all a repetitive grind.

Totally. As someone who works 40 hours a week, I want to play the game when I get home and have fun. I don’t want to farm. That is absolutely boring to me. I don’t think I can ever afford all the tier 3 cultural armor.

Just wondering…what do you actually do in the game?

Anything but farm. Dailies, achievements, map completions, etc. Is farming the only thing to do in the game?

Kain Francois.4328:

TWMagimay.9057:

jaw drop Try this: Check how much gold you make doing what you enjoy. Set your expectations based on that. If you are not making a few g/day, you should probably realise that spvp doesn’t give you gold, because you don’t need gold in spvp. That’d make your time in GW2 a lot more enjoyable.

I kinda have to side with this guy. From just playing the game normally, you can make 1g/hour. The secret? Just casually doing dungeons and fractals. Sometimes when I’m bored I run “Tunnel Farm” in Cursed Shore when it’s not bugged (3g/hour) or sometimes I do Straits of Devastation meta events and help lvl70s with events.

Of course, from farming Sparks, you can also make 30g a day…

Come on guys. It’s not that bad.

BY “a day” I suppose you mean 24 hours. That evens out to 30g/24h = 1.25g/h which is a hideous amount for pursuing a long term goal such as a legendary.

And keep in mind that those do not necessarily drop 1 lodestone/h

The RNG is strong within that spot, really strong

VictoriousMonk.7150:

Anything but farm. Dailies, achievements, map completions, etc. Is farming the only thing to do in the game?

And how do you manage to not make money? Farming(as in, killing the same mobs over and over or running the same dungeon over and over) is possibly the worst way to make money in this game. Except sPvP, but that’s a whole different story. You can make money from:
- resource gathering
- dungeons
- WvWvW
- jumping puzzles
- dragon events
- various small stuff: map completion(that made me 15g for the pve part), various achievements that require you to kill things(daily, slayer, weapon master)
The problem is when you want to make 10g/h by running around. That just…won’t happen.

Ath.2531:

And keep in mind that those do not necessarily drop 1 lodestone/h

The RNG is strong within that spot, really strong

You’re right. Once I got 6 Charged Lodestones in 1 hour!

My suggestion to people remains the same however. Find something they like, and just do it!

Although another farm I’m eying out is grabbing a group of 5 people and farming the first part of Volcano Fractal.

People are complaining there’s nothing to farm. So I’m telling people things they can easily farm, and they still complain. What? No wonder ANET hasn’t commented…

TWMagimay.9057:

VictoriousMonk.7150:

Anything but farm. Dailies, achievements, map completions, etc. Is farming the only thing to do in the game?

And how do you manage to not make money? Farming(as in, killing the same mobs over and over or running the same dungeon over and over) is possibly the worst way to make money in this game. Except sPvP, but that’s a whole different story. You can make money from:
- resource gathering
- dungeons
- WvWvW
- jumping puzzles
- dragon events
- various small stuff: map completion(that made me 15g for the pve part), various achievements that require you to kill things(daily, slayer, weapon master)
The problem is when you want to make 10g/h by running around. That just…won’t happen.

I make money, and I’ve done those things on that list (except dungeons – I’ve only done 1). I’m just not extremely rich like people who have commander icons, all tier 3 armors, and all that stuff. I haven’t gotten enough gold for 1 tier 3 armor. I’m curious how much time they put into the game. I’m wondering if I have to put the same amount of time, which would take me a while because of work.

Kain Francois.4328:

Ath.2531:

And keep in mind that those do not necessarily drop 1 lodestone/h

The RNG is strong within that spot, really strong

You’re right. Once I got 6 Charged Lodestones in 1 hour!

My suggestion to people remains the same however. Find something they like, and just do it!

Although another farm I’m eying out is grabbing a group of 5 people and farming the first part of Volcano Fractal.

People are complaining there’s nothing to farm. So I’m telling people things they can easily farm, and they still complain. What? No wonder ANET hasn’t commented…

you get there and typically people have mf on. when they start sure there’s a few drops. then it stops because of DR, so we dunno how long that lasts and some have mentioned that it’s account wide. so we switch to another character bam nothing again, another level 80 that can’t get anything. this time with no mf on. then we try to do dragons, we wait we wait kill it and get the chest bam nothing just some blues for about three hours of time, then we try to go do wvw we kill and we kill and nothing drops accept a few trinkets at the beginning and usually nothing T6. So then we try to go do one of the launch dungeons, we run in there after about 10 mobs suddenly the dungeon DR kicks in.

So basically you guys who are suggesting that it’s easy to farm these things are not telling the truth because I’ve been there done that. DR sets it on everything, mf is completely useless, and the loot drops off of the harder mobs are just not there. So you want us to basically play the same thing 12hours a day because it takes an enormous amount of time for DR to stop is that it? It’s not an exaggeration when it happens every day.

The only time I’ve gotten anything since this all started was right after two resets of the servers on two different days. It’s like the changes they made are so deflated that even the game has to figure out what to do just after all the numbers and timers reset. (the ones we can’t see) I got three rares from trash mobs the last time this happened two weeks ago when i was on, since then nothing.

tigirius.9014:

you get there and typically people have mf on. when they start sure there’s a few drops. then it stops because of DR

DR only kicks in after 1-2 hours or so, depending how fast you kill the same species of foes.

Go do a dungeon with another species of enemies for about 30 mins and the DR will be gone.

If you’re on Northern Shiverpeaks you can come farm with me. The more the merrier for whoever wants to farm!

VictoriousMonk.7150:

I make money, and I’ve done those things on that list (except dungeons – I’ve only done 1). I’m just not extremely rich like people who have commander icons, all tier 3 armors, and all that stuff. I haven’t gotten enough gold for 1 tier 3 armor. I’m curious how much time they put into the game. I’m wondering if I have to put the same amount of time, which would take me a while because of work.

Well, some of those people just get rly rly lucky. My partner has 2 commander tags, first one from a lucky The Legend(he didn’t even know what it was when he got it) 2nd one from Dusk(karka event, duhhh). The rest…like in every MMO, the more time you can play, the faster you get items. You just need to adapt your expectations to your options. T3 armour is over 100g…I wouldn’t expect to get it in less than 1 month without a serious time investment.

I always just have enough gold for a little bit more than what I need: to level professions and for sustenance. The trick is to be contented with that, just like with life.

I longed for the day when there is an mmorpg that makes a conscious effort to eliminate the need for any kind of grinding in a game -whether this need is borne out of game mechanics or the in-game social construct and economy- and celebrated when GW2 came out.

Its good that they’re trying to kill all these grinding mechanisms. I’m sorry for the so-called “hardcore” players who get off by doing the same thing over and over again for hours on end just to show off the fruits of their labor to other players (or to do more grinding), and believe you me, there are many times when I also feel like doing so, but there many other games out there that cater for this kind of behavior. Like Diablo 3. Or real life.

The massive nerf to rare drops has completely screwed up the game.

But I guess that’s okay, since the goal is to make the grindiest Korean-style supergrinder possible in order to force people to buy gems.

That’s not the game I paid $60 for. I want Guild Wars 2 back, I’m not interested in playing Grind Wars 2, which is what the game has become with the constant anti-fun anti-player nerfs.

You people realize that if you could still earn 10 g per hour in Orr, the prices won’t be 400 for a dusk right? it will be like 2000 for a dusk. The more gold you have in the market, the more expensive stuff gets. Its called inflation.

I don’t understand how nerf drops, or whatever mechanism-change they could possibly implement, can ever equate to “forcing people to buy gems”.

Needing to purchasing the game IS forcing you to pay for the game.

Now, nobody is forcing you to buy gems. You can play the game without gems at all.

But you want to be THE best. In the least amount of time possible. And hold on now – you don’t wanna grind or buy gems for it, for the reasoning that you paid 60 bucks for the game.

But EVERYBODY paid 60 bucks for the game. So by the same logic they should allow a mechanism for everybody to be the best in the game in the least amount of time possible.

I honestly don’t see the “drop rate nerf”. What I see is a nerf to events that were dropping shedloads like plinx; plinx isn’t so frequent so he’s not so busy and that means less mobs, less mobs means less loot per run.

Ya will always get people who whinge about farming. Those people are usualy dismissed. But unfortunately Anet are destroying even farming. Constant nurfing of drops yet increasing required mats to ridiculious levels.

I love playing this game. Im in awe of the thing. But when they start to show such blatant money grabbing greed by trying to force people to buy their gold with RL cash its slowly but surely pushing me out of the door.

The games basically becoming pay to win. And thats pathetic

Some of the nonsense on these forums is astonishing. Gold being the be-all and end-all of things is a frustrating and bland aspect to have in an MMO and complaints around that are completely justified in my mind, however the argument mixing is horrific.

Lutharr.1035:

The games basically becoming pay to win.

This is utterly inane. The phrase “pay to win” refers to a situation whereby the player is pressured to spend money on game additions in order to compete with his rival players. At no point does this game share anything resembling that, in fact, I have found Guild Wars 2 to be the most casual friendly, big budget MMo I have ever played. Leveling an alt is incredibly accommodating , gearing yourself in exotic gear can be done through an absolute plethora of ways, none demanding extensive effort or even team-play and every aspect is completely accessible.

The only time consuming and demoralising effort, is if you become singularly focused on legendaries or a very few, specific Mystic Forge crafted exotics. What Anet needs to do is to spread item acquisition into different mediums that are account bound rather than through trade. By allowing everything to be sold/bought, they have had to increase required numbers for speciality items to ridiculous quantities and there is absolutely no balance between prices with some lodestones costing near on 4g and others 70s. I have mentioned it before and will utter it again, we need to be able to have a consistent yet moderated source (through dailies, skill points, dungeon completions, refreshed hearts/heart related achievements) that provides us the ability to collect soulbound, mirror high-end crafting mats.

Gold and trading should be a way to speed up and aid the journey towards special items, but we should not be pigeon holed into identifying the most effective way to earn money in order to beat inflation if we do indeed set our sights on unique weapons. I want to see a steady albeit slow progress towards an item through exploring every facet of the game, not simply through the gain of wealth.

I believe everyone has the opportunity to get the same items but I do not believe everyone has the play ability to at attain the same items. That’s a bit unfortunate.

I am not hardcore but I have received my $60.00 worth. As 80 and facing to what is needed, It doesn’t look too appealing. I have 8ish zones to explore. It’s turning out to be a poi,heart,vista,skillpoint hunt whereas I used to explore every nook and cranny. People everywhere. I went broke getting a rare set to start the grinds. I realized afterward I had forgotten about my lvl 60 skill book. ugh.. So the grinds start. I should be ready in umm, 6 months, maybe.. Longer? lol

Lutharr.1035:

The games basically becoming pay to win.

“Pay to win”!?

Its not even a competitive game. Its a cooperative game for the most chunk of it.

Bruno Sardine.2907:

Mimizu.7340:

krojack.4920:

90% of items right now sell for 1 copper over what you can sell them to a vendor.

i love made up statistics.

oddly, anything i buy from the TP doesnt fall into this “90%”

Cause you’re buying, not selling…. people who opt for the auto-sell option to make a quick buck right away often fall prey to the market players who buy low and are willing to set the prices a little higher when they sell and wait until the item sells.

It’s a common thing across all MMO’s with an auction house/trading post. WoW is even worse with pages and pages of stuff one copper cheaper than the other guy’s. Manipulating the TP isn’t tough, but we live in a McDonald’s society, where people want things now and ignore/don’t care about planning ahead.

Grimshetara.3265:

At the start, we had a reasonable way of gold income without Diminishing Returns (DR) . It didn’t make us instantly significantly richer, but it helped, and we were satisfied with what we earned. Then, because of the bots ( presumably, since ArenaNet is biased against them and is responsible for introducing new stuff), Diminishing Returns was implemented, and we earned less. That is one hit to our gold income.

Moving on, as you all know, Plinx WAS the most manually profitable way of earning gold. It wasn’t much, but we could get by with what we earned there. However, due to some inexplicable reason, the event chain was nerfed. This hit us hard. Second hit to our gold income.

Hitherto, selling gathered materials such as Orichalcum, Ancient Wood Log etc. was very profitable. We could net a tidy sum to last us through. It needed patience, but we thought this was a stable income that will not be hit. Unfortunately, it was. Orichalcum and Ancient Wood Log prices took a dip, for reasons I do not know, and yet again, gold income was affected. Third hit to our gold income.

So, with so many hits to our gold income, we had to improvise to pay the bills. Here comes the Arah bag farm. This was highly profitable, with roughly 5g per hour. Honestly, it is an significantly above average income, and also provided the ONLY STABLE income, since we are guaranteed the loot, unlike the kittening RNG-run sources of income (Magic Find, Rares, and Exotics). This became popular, and many people who disregarded ethnics (This is a fact) run them for many hours. Sadly, it seems we are not allowed to earn gold. ArenaNet, surprisingly quickly, “fixed” this and our income from this was halfed.

What is left, then? Fractals Of The Mist ,Trading Post? The former plays a ridiculously large factor of the oh-so-mighty-and-revered RNG, while the latter requires impressive economic skills to profit. Add to that that Fractals Of The Mist is undeniably hard to find groups of our specific level.

One recently discovered way of income is running Dungeons of Citadel of Fire and higher, converting the tokens into 30token rares, and salvaging them for Globs of Ectoplasm. Now this again, is RNG. Profit is luck based whether you get a Glob of Ectoplasm or not. From personal experience earlier today, salvaging 15 of these netted me nothing but a drip of mithril. This may be due to supreme bad luck, but still, it is an example of the negativity of RNG.

As of now, the remaining source of income is either via RNG-dependent sources, Trading Post, or Running Dungeons by itself.

This thread, is to place the facts on the table, and let us discuss how we can attain STABLE gold, or are we even allowed to. This is also a show to ArenaNet that RNG is not the best way to reward players. It is guaranteed rewards that are attractive. The Arah bag farm is proof of that. The negative response to Gem-Store chests are proof of that, as well as the Mystic Forge.

They did the same thing in the first game. Any decent or enjoyable source of income was removed, and you were forced to either play through the same repetitive missions over and over or farm high end areas with some boring invincible build.

I have read parts of this, but not the whole thing. Personally I believe the worst thing Arenanet has done with this game is let the players determine the prices of the market and gold to gem to gold pricing… Fair enough let there be some play in the item pricing but a min and a max price should have been set for each item. I remember when I first started playing GW2 and I could buy Dawn for 5gold. Wish I brought it back then when I was going to, little did I know I needed it… There wouldn’t be any need for trying to find suitable ways of finding gold to get your way through if the market was controlled a little better and all the control of the pricing wasn’t left in the hands of the players to determine…

Just my thoughts, it has probably already been said…

VictoriousMonk.7150:

God Of Fissures.8627:

there is no fun way to make money in this game. it is all a repetitive grind.

Totally. As someone who works 40 hours a week, I want to play the game when I get home and have fun. I don’t want to farm. That is absolutely boring to me. I don’t think I can ever afford all the tier 3 cultural armor.

I wish a company could just listen for once to us and ponder the thought and at the very least come up with some type of server variation for people like us. Otherwise these aren’t games but virtual lifestyles. What was the last board game for example you played that when you left, others continued to play and when you get back, too bad… you were left behind?

Anet need to put more appealing stuff in the gem store and stop using farming as a way to force folks to buy gold. The whole DR is a BS excuse to force people to guy gold. They didnt do this to combat bots, and if thats an actual truthful statement then its totally idiotic. Combat bots, dont punish your players.

if I wanna farm to craft something it shouldnt take 75+ hours of farming to get 250 t6 mats. I ended up getting the back that was cheapest and not the best stats wise for my build just so I could have some AR before I got my rings.

If their policy is to have a game thats casual friendly then why are the mats dropping once in a blue moon and the ammount needed to craft is through the roof? So casual gamer = bottomless wallets now?

Has anyone noticed a change in open world drops of rares since last night patch?

tigirius.9014:

Has anyone noticed a change in open world drops of rares since last night patch?

as in they hardly ever drop, and if they do and ya try to salavage they aint giving ecto’s like they should do. Even with BLTC kits?

We should all start reportng this to support and to bug reports weekly until they do something about it.

VictoriousMonk.7150:

God Of Fissures.8627:

there is no fun way to make money in this game. it is all a repetitive grind.

Totally. As someone who works 40 hours a week, I want to play the game when I get home and have fun. I don’t want to farm. That is absolutely boring to me. I don’t think I can ever afford all the tier 3 cultural armor.

This and the precursors.

If ANet doesn’t want this game to be grind based, precursors should be predictably obtainable through non-rng sources, and NOTHING should be rare enough to let anyone charge several HUNDRED times the value of its contemporaries on the trading post like they do with precursors.

BTW, as of 11/15 patch, I haven’t gotten much better than blues from world event chests.. chest after chest after chest.. while others get 2-3 ectos a chest.

This smacks of some people perma-slapped with DR while others are perfectly able to make gold.

Next thing you know ANet will put “texperian” “tequifax” and “tyrans-union” into the game so anyone who doesn’t already have 3 figures in gold will be penalized in their transactions, just like in the real, post-crash world.

As it stands, i’m saving tyria “for free”.

kiba.2768:

this falls in line with anet’s anti grind policy. i admit that at times there are grey areas when it comes to interpretation or implementation of their manifesto, which as we have seen, has evolved, though the wording on the document stays the same.

if they wanted you to grind out gold, they would have left all those mechanisms alone. the fact that they did away with these methods proves that they don’t want you sitting in the same zone for hours at a time, whether it be making gold or doing something else. granted, player expectations vary wildly in both directions for what is considered fun. some love grinding, some don’t.

anet has repeatedly shown us(in both blatant and ninja-like forms) that they want us to explore the world, experience the richness of the story-telling, the art that was created and the music composed for our enjoyment.

this is my personal opinion….but i feel like the hardcore gamers want what they want right now and if they don’t have it, they throw a tantrum, which usually involves ranting here on the forums and has a collateral damaging effect on other players who read their posts.

if you’re no longer having fun…why play? this game has a rather large audience from casual mmo player to grindfest mmo player to dungeon crawler and people after ‘phat lewtz.’ anet can’t please everyone so invariably, someone will get angry. if those players don’t vibe with this game…go play something else.

Making it hard to grind out gold and having an anti-grind policy are not the same thing.

If there were an anti-grind policy then you wouldn’t have a need for the gold being ground out. However Anet pretty much disproves that their stance is antigrind when they make you pay to move around the map and pay to repair your equipment. When money is required to play the game and the only way to get that money is by grinding, then you cannot argue you don’t have an anti-grind policy.

The fact that money takes a long time to grind also tends to show that there is in fact a progrind philosophy in place. If there were an anti-grind policy in place then you would tend to see veyr high rewards for very little time investment. When you need a large time investment for very little reward, that tends to lend more evidence to a pro-grind philosophy than an anti-grind philosophy.

plasmacutter.2709:

This smacks of some people perma-slapped with DR while others are perfectly able to make gold.

It just means your RNG is bad.

So is mine, btw. Part of why I hate RNG is another NCSoft game, AION’s, RNG system. I had to stop playing because I couldn’t even enchant and socket my gear because of the unyielding RNG.