Guild Wars 2

The champ boxes have already been nerfed… but there should be better rewards for doing harder things. Champ farming is too easy for the rewards it yields.

Oohh boy—here we go AGAIN!!!!
Why oh why create a new thread about something that has been posted and talked about in many other threads?
2 main areas (frost and queens) and because of them PVE is ruined for the entire game???? don’t think so (imho).
Mod please merge this into the other nerf the champ train threads.

I’m just tired of seeing someone typing “train?” in map chat every minute. :< and the silly nerd rage when an innocent player does a champ event on his own time.
Everyone’s so obsessed and hypnotized. :O

Well, I did read the OP and as near as I can tell it’s the standard anti-zerg complaint with a touch of “it’s all about me” added in because someone is disappointed about what other players do in the game.

Tremain.4623 summed it up the best:
Champion farm trains happen in maybe three zones in the entire game, pro tip: you have 90% of the world to do what you want in.

Step out of LA and go to Bloodtide Coast where there’s a Champion Troll that is all but ignored. And a Champion Shark. Or go the other way and step out into Gendarran Fields where there are several Champions to be slaughtered. Guess what? They’re already being farmed. Better stop that too.

My only problem with these zerg trains is simply just they make the rest of the world feel dead. To be honest we need to see the living world be an actual living world, maybe something that will drive people else where. Maybe a karma drain if you don’t go around helping people. Though this has flaws in itself as punishing people for not being the goody mc two shoes. People are on longer fighting the bigger bosses on some servers from the difficulty spike. The change may have been a subtle one over time but for someone who was playing a few months ago went on a hiatus and then comes back to everyone doing champ trains instead of doing temple runs or their daily big bosses. What could prompt people to travel the world more than stay in a single zone all day. We understand people are modivated by less effort more reward. Though what would be the carrot on the stick that would prompt people to get out there again.

The game’s boring. That’s why most people resort to farming.

At least for all that repetitive effort, there’s a glimpse of reward in the form of a shiny trinket at the end.

Veruen.2794:

My only problem with these zerg trains is simply just they make the rest of the world feel dead. To be honest we need to see the living world be an actual living world, maybe something that will drive people else where. Maybe a karma drain if you don’t go around helping people.

We been there. Anet nerfed events/karma and people stopped playing. Every map was empty. People would log in every 14 days to do the limited content and maybe 5 minutes before reset of the server and right after. LA and Dungeons were the only places that had people around. Not much has changed sadly but at least we find people in Queensdale and Frostgorge. Remove or nerf that and the game is completely dead.

I’ve ridden the champ train in a couple of places.

I can truly say that it’s not the rewards for killing a champ. If you kill a champ, you get a bag/box/mats and a few silver. I can get more doing a DE or a dungeon.

It’s the rewards for killing multiple champs in a very short amount of time that makes it very profitable.

This all hearkens back to the risk vs. rewards issue that has been a problem in every MMO ever made. Those events/quests/DEs or whatever else you want to call them that don’t give a certain volume of rewards are going to be ignored.

Therefore, I have come to believe that in order to “do away” with the need to run the trains, you don’t necessarily need to nerf the rewards. I do believe that the best way to deal with them is to make everything else worth the effort so that people WANT to go to the “vacant” zones. Right now, (to make gold) given the choice between doing a 20 minute DE in (insert zone here) that gives a pittance or running the champ train for 10 minutes to make 10x the rewards, I’ll ride the train every time.

phys.7689:

the solution to the problem is probably coming, some combination of better gold and karma rewards for DE, and an increase in demand for karma.

Which isn’t a solution at all, adding more gold to the system with how few effective gold sinks there are will just see prices climb higher as people are more willing to spend and ultimately the value of gems increase further which will likely see more people purchase gems.

If they were serious about the economy they’d stop pumping the system with gold and increase loot which encouraged trading.

Qaelyn.7612:

The problem isn’t any particular activity or means of making gold. The problem is rewarding rote repetition.

Each champion should only give a bag the first time it is killed per day. That’s how a lot of other things work, and it makes a lot of sense.

No no no. Please stop with the “once a day” bullkitten. It kittenin killed dungeons for me. These days I barely play GW2 because there is barely any point to log in.
LS is poorly executed, while some patches are better than others, they are generally just an achievement grind with no true story (Yes, scarlet sucks, “standard super-villains” from kids cartoons have more depth than her)
Dungeons, not only does it get boring doing the same dungeons since launch, but if im in the mood to clear more or want tokens from a specific one, i can only do 3 paths than have to logout and wait for the next day (if I login). Same crap with time-gated ascended (not even tradable).

This “once a day” and micromanagement of the economy is gonna kill the game… Stop trying to force us to play every aspect of the game, its a game we paid for entertainment, so I will play w/e aspects entertain me. And if you don’t like a certain playstyle, you don’t have to play that way, but stop asking for people to be forced to play like you.

So I’m not allowed to run 2-3 times the same path after clearing the whole dungeon to get more tokens/rewards. But its ok for things to go by a daily basis, denying me the possibility to make up for the days i cant login. Genius idea….!

I agree. I don’t know if the solution is removing champion bags, but I am not satisfied with the status quo.

COF path 1 had problems, but it required some skill and organization to efficiently farm. Champion farming allows everyone to funnel into one zone or even event and leave the rest of the world vacant.

Ashabhi.1365:

I’ve ridden the champ train in a couple of places.

I can truly say that it’s not the rewards for killing a champ. If you kill a champ, you get a bag/box/mats and a few silver. I can get more doing a DE or a dungeon.

It’s the rewards for killing multiple champs in a very short amount of time that makes it very profitable.

This all hearkens back to the risk vs. rewards issue that has been a problem in every MMO ever made. Those events/quests/DEs or whatever else you want to call them that don’t give a certain volume of rewards are going to be ignored.

Therefore, I have come to believe that in order to “do away” with the need to run the trains, you don’t necessarily need to nerf the rewards. I do believe that the best way to deal with them is to make everything else worth the effort so that people WANT to go to the “vacant” zones. Right now, (to make gold) given the choice between doing a 20 minute DE in (insert zone here) that gives a pittance or running the champ train for 10 minutes to make 10x the rewards, I’ll ride the train every time.

Don’t forget, before you could repeat dungeons with alts (making the game alt friendly) enabling you to actually get decent rewards, and even repeating on the same character wasn’t that bad compared to the first time. Now you get an account bound reward of a) 1g+ / 40tokens & b) 26s + 20tokens. Not only is a) account bound daily, but you get diminishing returns on b).

Nerfing wil keep making people move to the next best ratio, and if the nerfing gets too intense, they will just lose more and more logins when people lose the ability to realistically set a personal objective they want to reach.

to be honest, I don’t find the events boring at all, I travel to find different dynamic events like securing the zyntl holy grounds, defending that fort from the undead in sparkfly fen and sinking that massive ship. Even doing that event in bloodtide coast where you help the pirate captain gather his chest then he regales you with his version of modern major general. Followed up with the durmond priory finding the discard bjorns brew out in the swamp. Hell I always enjoyed charging the gates of the citadel of flame. There are so many events in the world to do, I have yet to see them all yet. It would be nice if there was something out there to drive people out to the events in other places of the world. Not by nerfing your rewards, but maybe, a diminishing reward, maybe every time you repeat an event you get less rewards. maybe to the point where you have to scour for that karma and coin.

Yay, another person complaining about champ farming AFTER stating that they’ve joined in and done it till they had enough gold.
Sigh, it’s like saying “hey, i got my cof armour on the 3 chars i wanted, lets nerf these tokens, its too easy to get this stuff”.
Ask yourself – why do you care? jealousy? Are you SERIOUSLY playing your char in queensdale 24/7?
Champ farms are great for levelling an alt, great to stock up on that little bit of karma you needed in a hurry to finish that new PTV WvW char you made, great for levelling a few extra levels on a new char so he’s not so weak for the next zone.
Theres a hell of a lot of plusses to champ farming. Get over your issues and come up with a real problem to complain about, the extra gold people are making is easily attainable elsewhere ingame. Its not harming the economy at all. Just pure silliness.

PvE ruined itself. How many full dungeons have we received in the past year? How many new major events were added to PvE? I can only think of a few things that were added, but they didn’t necessarily improve the game for the better. Teq is one of those things. PvE was never good to start with.

I would first and for all completely remove this ridiculous antisocial bullcrap behavior of all those spamming Dungeon Sellers that have risen up, since Anet has massively increased the gold rewards for completing Arah, by making changes at the Group System.
That was absolutely not the intention of the LFG System, that people abuse it like a Dungeon Markeplace to make profit with extreme overpriced sums per person to make that way in quick time huge amounts of gold, only so that some lazy kitten don’t have do do some work. this is also completely contradictign to the sense of this game, that you can skip content by just paying an other player to do all the work for you. Thats not the sense behind an MMO.

Champ Loot Boxes have to get removed again, since Anet as implemented that crap, the zerg trains grind farming them have risen up like a plague all over the beginner maps and in the northern end game map of shiverpeaks.
Champs don’t need this 100% sure loot bag.
If they drop this bag for 100% sure, that gives money, chance on precursor ect. then its clear that these enemies get farmed ad adsurdum.

Champs shouldn’t be fought against to make quzit profit. Champs should be fought against, because they could offer something that raises your personal character progression or because they can drop rarely something unique, that only specific champ X can drop, like how it functionized with GW1.

I really hope that Anet has seen in in the Living Word duscussion threat, that alot in the game works absolutely wrong, when it comes down to reward/effort relationships all over the whole game and that they improve this very soon with some massive tweaks, regardless of their permanent fear of making too strong changes for the economy.
The whole game must feel rewardign and not only a little hand full of specific farm spots that get zerg grinded to death for a way too quick profit compared to the main content that players should rather do, than 24/7 zerg farming champs.

Why do people make this? The answer is simple, because doing anythign else is unappealing and way less rewarding, than running brain afk around in a zerg and auto attacking champs to death…

ANet has to implement finally mechanis, that lead to the point, that people want to automatically stop this brainless behavious and rather want to revisited all of the world doing senseful things in the pve world, that should feel same as rewarding, if not even more rewardign, than beating just champ after champ.

The key to reach this goal is by raising the rewards for players, so longer they didn#t have done something specific in the game anymore.
This will lead to people wanting to revisit older maps consitantly.
Heart Quests need to become finally replayable.
There needs to be implemented finally Hard Mode instances for all Maps with a redesigned for GW2 working Vanguishing Achievements for doing these hard mode instances of all the maps.

There needs to be implemented new Dungeon Modes like Solo Dungeons or makign all of the dungeons also explorable in a persistant kind of way with new events appearign these that are special to the persistant type of the dungeon.

There need to be implemented in general alot more new DE’s to all maps in a consistant manner with every Patch all two weeks, not only always adding more LS..
Anet is way too much focused on all this LS stuff, that they seem to forget, that it is also very important to add permanently new DE’s to all of the maps, so that the maps don#t become boring and that there is REALLY always to be found new things to do with each loging. By adding tons of new DE’s everywhere on a frequent basis, Anet can then also start with slowing down the pace of how fast the older DE’s appear to balance out the old DE#s with the new DE’s.

But back to money making.. anet has to improve alot of ways for earning on a normal way some good money, without pushing us to such cheap farm methods like champ zerg train farming to our doomsday…
Crafting should become massively more profitable finally.
Someone who reaches with a Crafting Job level 400-500 should be able to craft through this things, that should bring in to the player alot more profit, than the crafting of that item should cost the player.
Anet needs to implement NPC’s, that want to buy from players on a daily regular basis a various amount of specific crafted items (for each player totally individual) and if you craft for these NPC’s EVERYTHING, until they are wishless happy, then they reward you with some real good money, so that you really don’t need to do any brainless zerg farming basically and getting your crafting jobs to max would finally have some sense in this game.

Could write more about all this, but need to go to bed xD

Orpheal.8263:

I would first and for all completely remove this ridiculous antisocial bullcrap behavior of all those spamming Dungeon Sellers that have risen up, since Anet has massively increased the gold rewards for completing Arah, by making changes at the Group System.
That was absolutely not the intention of the LFG System, that people abuse it like a Dungeon Markeplace to make profit with extreme overpriced sums per person to make that way in quick time huge amounts of gold, only so that some lazy kitten don’t have do do some work. this is also completely contradictign to the sense of this game, that you can skip content by just paying an other player to do all the work for you. Thats not the sense behind an MMO.

Champ Loot Boxes have to get removed again, since Anet as implemented that crap, the zerg trains grind farming them have risen up like a plague all over the beginner maps and in the northern end game map of shiverpeaks.
Champs don’t need this 100% sure loot bag.
If they drop this bag for 100% sure, that gives money, chance on precursor ect. then its clear that these enemies get farmed ad adsurdum.

Champs shouldn’t be fought against to make quzit profit. Champs should be fought against, because they could offer something that raises your personal character progression or because they can drop rarely something unique, that only specific champ X can drop, like how it functionized with GW1.

I really hope that Anet has seen in in the Living Word duscussion threat, that alot in the game works absolutely wrong, when it comes down to reward/effort relationships all over the whole game and that they improve this very soon with some massive tweaks, regardless of their permanent fear of making too strong changes for the economy.
The whole game must feel rewardign and not only a little hand full of specific farm spots that get zerg grinded to death for a way too quick profit compared to the main content that players should rather do, than 24/7 zerg farming champs.

Why do people make this? The answer is simple, because doing anythign else is unappealing and way less rewarding, than running brain afk around in a zerg and auto attacking champs to death…

ANet has to implement finally mechanis, that lead to the point, that people want to automatically stop this brainless behavious and rather want to revisited all of the world doing senseful things in the pve world, that should feel same as rewarding, if not even more rewardign, than beating just champ after champ.

The key to reach this goal is by raising the rewards for players, so longer they didn#t have done something specific in the game anymore.
This will lead to people wanting to revisit older maps consitantly.
Heart Quests need to become finally replayable.
There needs to be implemented finally Hard Mode instances for all Maps with a redesigned for GW2 working Vanguishing Achievements for doing these hard mode instances of all the maps.

There needs to be implemented new Dungeon Modes like Solo Dungeons or makign all of the dungeons also explorable in a persistant kind of way with new events appearign these that are special to the persistant type of the dungeon.

There need to be implemented in general alot more new DE’s to all maps in a consistant manner with every Patch all two weeks, not only always adding more LS..
Anet is way too much focused on all this LS stuff, that they seem to forget, that it is also very important to add permanently new DE’s to all of the maps, so that the maps don#t become boring and that there is REALLY always to be found new things to do with each loging. By adding tons of new DE’s everywhere on a frequent basis, Anet can then also start with slowing down the pace of how fast the older DE’s appear to balance out the old DE#s with the new DE’s.

But back to money making.. anet has to improve alot of ways for earning on a normal way some good money, without pushing us to such cheap farm methods like champ zerg train farming to our doomsday…
Crafting should become massively more profitable finally.
Someone who reaches with a Crafting Job level 400-500 should be able to craft through this things, that should bring in to the player alot more profit, than the crafting of that item should cost the player.
Anet needs to implement NPC’s, that want to buy from players on a daily regular basis a various amount of specific crafted items (for each player totally individual) and if you craft for these NPC’s EVERYTHING, until they are wishless happy, then they reward you with some real good money, so that you really don’t need to do any brainless zerg farming basically and getting your crafting jobs to max would finally have some sense in this game.

Could write more about all this, but need to go to bed xD

love it

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Champion bags are not ruining anything.

Before them it was running CoF over and over again.

People will always flock to whatever gives the best rewards, and I’d much rather have people be out in the open world than inside a dungeon.

And this is exactly the reason why we don’t see new zones.
ArenaNet doesn’t want to waste time, money and resources to make a new map when people will just go there, complete the content and then leave forever unless the level up an alt.
They’d much rather make the existing world as rewarding as possible than expanding it just for the sake of doing so.

By that same token, all Arenanet need to do is put an NPC genie in every starter zone that rewards you with a rare, some dragonite and a chance at a precursor for pressing the F key every five minutes and everyone will flock there like moths to a bug zapper. It’s a disgusting excuse for modern game design and should not be encouraged.

Elthurien.8356:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Champion bags are not ruining anything.

Before them it was running CoF over and over again.

People will always flock to whatever gives the best rewards, and I’d much rather have people be out in the open world than inside a dungeon.

And this is exactly the reason why we don’t see new zones.
ArenaNet doesn’t want to waste time, money and resources to make a new map when people will just go there, complete the content and then leave forever unless the level up an alt.
They’d much rather make the existing world as rewarding as possible than expanding it just for the sake of doing so.

By that same token, all Arenanet need to do is put an NPC genie in every starter zone that rewards you with a rare, some dragonite and a chance at a precursor for pressing the F key every five minutes and everyone will flock there like moths to a bug zapper. It’s a disgusting excuse for modern game design and should not be encouraged.

I dont quite see how that argument works. First of all, champ trains weren’t intended, they are a result of abusing spawn timers. Anet could suddenly randomise spawn timers and get rid of them, but there would be a metric ton of complaints and without any solutions to populate the open world, we would just get even emptier worlds.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Elthurien.8356:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Champion bags are not ruining anything.

Before them it was running CoF over and over again.

People will always flock to whatever gives the best rewards, and I’d much rather have people be out in the open world than inside a dungeon.

And this is exactly the reason why we don’t see new zones.
ArenaNet doesn’t want to waste time, money and resources to make a new map when people will just go there, complete the content and then leave forever unless the level up an alt.
They’d much rather make the existing world as rewarding as possible than expanding it just for the sake of doing so.

By that same token, all Arenanet need to do is put an NPC genie in every starter zone that rewards you with a rare, some dragonite and a chance at a precursor for pressing the F key every five minutes and everyone will flock there like moths to a bug zapper. It’s a disgusting excuse for modern game design and should not be encouraged.

I dont quite see how that argument works. First of all, champ trains weren’t intended, they are a result of abusing spawn timers. Anet could suddenly randomise spawn timers and get rid of them, but there would be a metric ton of complaints and without any solutions to populate the open world, we would just get even emptier worlds.

It’s not really an argument. I was just pointing out that ANet wont waste time creating new zones BECAUSE people always go for the fastest route to the reward. The way MMOs are designed lately are a perfect example of humans behaving like laboratory animals. Just end the illusion, give them three shapes to match and reward them like the good monkeys they are and start developing something interesting for the rest of us.

ROUSED TO RAGE

All Champions have a new buff called Roused to Rage – for each unique player character that attacks them they gain 1 stack of this buff, which provides a small amount of power and condition damage and a moderate amount of toughness. The buff may stack to 25 and dissipates at the rate of 1 per second while not in combat. Player controlled pets and minions to not contribute to RtR stacking.

Champ farming just needs to scale faithfully to the number of number of players present. Make the fights more of a struggle when the kill is going to produce 28 champ lootbags instead of 3…

Vargamonth.2047:

phys.7689:

Vargamonth.2047:

That’s the eternal debate between nerfing whatever is on the top or boosting everything else to the same level. I usually prefer the first, and specifically for GW2 I think inflation is somewhat out of control.

people can actually afford things now. The question is how much buying power per hour of average play does the average player get. I think now, its more. Therefore i think its better for the economy as a whole. what exactly has gone up in cost much? hw much more does the average player earn now?

That depends A LOT on the item you’re seeking.

Sometimes there’s a market manipulation, an over supply/demand caused by a LS loot/recipe or just core changes that modify that supply/demand or just player priorities.
I bought 1k t6 claws during Queen Jubilee and sold them about 3 weeks ago at double price. Player incomes didn’t double in this time, they just were so cheap during QJ because of destroyer farming.

If you look at exotic weapons, for example, they’re far cheaper, but that’s closely related to tons of them being crafted and sold in order to cap professions.
If you look at gems, in the other hand, they’re more expensive than before champ bags and dungeon reward rework, even when factoring an income increase.

gems dont really represent inflation though, they represent non paying player interest in black lion items. new armors, new skins. This is what is driving gem cost up. Perhaps there is also less people selling gems for gold.

the gem exchange is more about how people value real world time versus in game time. If people feel they can earn money by actually playing the game, less people will trade real money for gems. That doesnt mean people wont buy gems, just that they wont trade them for gold.

comparing inflation to gems, i dont think that is a good idea, too many other factors involved

phys.7689:

gems dont really represent inflation though, they represent non paying player interest in black lion items. new armors, new skins. This is what is driving gem cost up. Perhaps there is also less people selling gems for gold.

the gem exchange is more about how people value real world time versus in game time. If people feel they can earn money by actually playing the game, less people will trade real money for gems. That doesnt mean people wont buy gems, just that they wont trade them for gold.

comparing inflation to gems, i dont think that is a good idea, too many other factors involved

Of course there’s not solely related to inflation. Nothing is.

Gems are going up mostly because there are new gem store items every 2 weeks, which hugely increases the demand of gems through gold.
However, this should also increase the amount of gold a paying customer gets for his gems, and even with that, the system is out of balance, mostly because that gold is not appealing at all. That’s IMHO the best indication of the inflation we are suffering.

There’s a lot of gold introduced in the system, mostly from dungeons. Different tasks, like champ trains or gathering, provide a lot of the items dungeons lack (t5/t6 materials, tradeable skins, …) and redistribute that gold through the trading post.

TP taxes are far from enough to eliminate the gold introduced in the system.
Unless investment, most goods will change hands just once, twice at best, which means that most of the remaining 70% of their value should be taken away by other gold sinks, and there aren’t really a lot of NPC services that demand those quantities.
Those cultural t3 armor sets for over 100 gold, they felt expensive some months ago … not so much anymore with the current income ratios.

So, where does all the gold go? I would say that most of the gold that doesn’t just stay, filling someones wallet up to ridiculous levels, is converted to gems.
I probably invest more than 70% of the gold I get on gems and, even without active farming (champtrains, easy and fast dungeons, …) and without selling any single material, my savings still grew up.
For a paying customer, who obviously buy his gems directly with cash, this growth should be far more obvious. Unless interested on some kind of legendary weapon, there’s just no reason at all for those players exchanging gems for gold.

Gold-Gem exchange ratio should be stable in the long run. Higher or lower, it doesn’t matter, just stable.
The current situation indicates that, while gems are more interesting than ever, gold is handgiven in such high amounts that has no value unless you are aiming for something really (and I mean, REALLY) “exclusive”.

phys.7689:

Vargamonth.2047:

The game just needs to equalize rewards as much as possible, favoring, if anything, harder content.

Mobs spawned by a DE shouldn’t drop any loot at all and DEs themselves should grant some kind of bonus reward (some amount of ore on a Dredge related one, for example) based on their length, trigger rate, proximity from other DEs, …
For world spawned champions, they probably should, as proposed, have a % rate to be an elite instead of a champion. T6 minerals/wood should probably be gotten as a t5 mining proc instead of having their own nodes, which allows alt farming.

It can be a hard work, for sure, but after some time and metric based changes, it should be possible to make almost every open world content equally rewarding.

Dungeon rewards should probably need a revision too, balancing the rewards around the completion time for an average group and the level of difficulty above regular open world content. The effectiveness of speedruns should also be factored.

your plans seem to be to make everything equally not rewarding.
Why should i do an event that has me kill 100 monsters if im getting no drops? good plan to make people avoid events even more

Yes this exactly. This is why I now have no interest in every going after any type of Legendary. Way too much farming and effort for practically nothing. An outdated graphic select-able stats. Cool but not worth the time and effort.

Waiting for the Season One reward. Still hoping but probably going to be as unrewarding as most everything else in this game.

Vargamonth.2047:

phys.7689:

gems dont really represent inflation though, they represent non paying player interest in black lion items. new armors, new skins. This is what is driving gem cost up. Perhaps there is also less people selling gems for gold.

the gem exchange is more about how people value real world time versus in game time. If people feel they can earn money by actually playing the game, less people will trade real money for gems. That doesnt mean people wont buy gems, just that they wont trade them for gold.

comparing inflation to gems, i dont think that is a good idea, too many other factors involved

Of course there’s not solely related to inflation. Nothing is.

Gems are going up mostly because there are new gem store items every 2 weeks, which hugely increases the demand of gems through gold.
However, this should also increase the amount of gold a paying customer gets for his gems, and even with that, the system is out of balance, mostly because that gold is not appealing at all. That’s IMHO the best indication of the inflation we are suffering.

There’s a lot of gold introduced in the system, mostly from dungeons. Different tasks, like champ trains or gathering, provide a lot of the items dungeons lack (t5/t6 materials, tradeable skins, …) and redistribute that gold through the trading post.

TP taxes are far from enough to eliminate the gold introduced in the system.
Unless investment, most goods will change hands just once, twice at best, which means that most of the remaining 70% of their value should be taken away by other gold sinks, and there aren’t really a lot of NPC services that demand those quantities.
Those cultural t3 armor sets for over 100 gold, they felt expensive some months ago … not so much anymore with the current income ratios.

So, where does all the gold go? I would say that most of the gold that doesn’t just stay, filling someones wallet up to ridiculous levels, is converted to gems.
I probably invest more than 70% of the gold I get on gems and, even without active farming (champtrains, easy and fast dungeons, …) and without selling any single material, my savings still grew up.
For a paying customer, who obviously buy his gems directly with cash, this growth should be far more obvious. Unless interested on some kind of legendary weapon, there’s just no reason at all for those players exchanging gems for gold.

Gold-Gem exchange ratio should be stable in the long run. Higher or lower, it doesn’t matter, just stable.
The current situation indicates that, while gems are more interesting than ever, gold is handgiven in such high amounts that has no value unless you are aiming for something really (and I mean, REALLY) “exclusive”.

but people should feel that if they play the game they can get the things they want. Gem to gold is designed for people who want a shortcut, or dont have the time or desire to get money other ways.

yes this makes it hard to get gem store items via playing, but i think thats ok, you can still get the items by buying them.

Veruen.2794:

My only problem with these zerg trains is simply just they make the rest of the world feel dead.

It’s just your feeling. The world would be equally dead (or alive, depending on server and zone) as it is now regardless where the farmers would congregate. Nerfing champ trains would not make those people go where you want them to go (if they wanted to go there, they’d have already done that).

If you want the people to be evenly spread over the world, you need to give them incentives to do so. That means more, not less rewards.

Derek.9021:

With the adding of the Tower of Terror, Anet made a pretty cool area for farming, but didn’t add enough reward incentive to direct people away from champ trains and the new Dolyak farm in cursed shore. After about a week, and people getting the achievements, it’s pretty barren.

So, you don’t want to change the system, just the location of the champ zerg from open world to inside the tower? Coz thats all the tower is. You throw a bunch of people in there and it becomes a zerg, plowing its way through the hallways. Farming this is different from farming champs…….how? All thats different is the background scenery, and frankly I’d rather see Frostgorge or Queensdale in the background than the dreary, depressing tower.

First off, the serious gold making in this game is from playing the TP. If you want to stop prices rising and afford your shineys, then go whinge in the BLT sub-forum where all the market capitalists and manipulators hang out. Running champ trains for a few silver a pop has nothing on this, so stop with the sky is falling BS and how this is ruining PvE.

Second, from the posts in the thread, seems many of you have never been on a champ train. On my server (medium pop) the Frostgorge champ ‘train’ is usually no more than 4-8 players, and yes these can be much longer fights and not just a 1, 1, 1 spamfest. So no, I don’t want champs to be nerfed. In fact the coin drops should be returned to the way they were before they were stealth nerfed!

The Queensdale champ train is a joke. It is more about new players learning what to do and experienced players leveling alts. It is something to do while waiting for SB to spawn. No lvl 80 should waste time with this, and only goes to show how Anet kittened up the risk/reward system in this game.

Look, all I want is Cursed Shore to be the way it used to be 9-10 months ago. I liked the placed and enjoyed running the DE’s there until Anet destroyed it for the sake of ‘moving players to other zones’.

I would happily do the pent/shelter/jofast events again, even run the temples if the events actually rewarded something besides the odd porous bone. Besides this is where lvl 80’s should be, and not champ farming in Queensdale.

As for the LS … meh. Lost interest in this months ago. Did the pavilion events and ran the invasion trains back in the summer. Now, cannot be bothered and Scarlet and her pals have become very old ..

There is nothing wrong with champ bags. What they should do is increase the rewards in Orr and other level 80 zones, so 80s would go there.

Question:

If you remove many of the ways that players can make money/mats quickly, how are players supposed to stay motivated when grinding for Ascended or Legendary items?

Based on the current in-game recipes for everything, they need to provide certain “quick” methods for acquiring gold, karma, mats, etc. Otherwise, so few people would actually bother to make an Ascended or Legendary item, the game would become too casual, and it would fail.

What I wish they did was come out with specific currency for each zone. Then, when you complete the hearts in that zone, you unlock the merchant which only deals in that zone’s currency. You can only get certain items from certain zones and you can only obtain the currency for those items from that zone.

Then all the devs would need to do is scatter the materials needed for Exotic, Ascended and Legendary items evenly throughout the zones and it would spread out the population.

But, there is a problem with this, and that’s that players love working together to complete “missions”. Obviously you have Guild Missions and Dungeons and other instances, but many players love the zerg. Either you could place the opportunity for a zerg in every zone, or at least several zones, or you could limit the zergs to the Living Story.

There were many options, but it’s a little late in the game to make the changes I suggested above because the economy is essentially set and might break if it’s tampered with too severely.

Becka Williams.4978:

Just make the time for spawning longer. Like, say, 30 minutes. Done and done.

Make the spawning random.

Why on earth don’t they do this? Why do they have it set up in such a way that people can almost time when champs can be triggered like clockwork?

Stop developing LS and fix this stuff already please. There are other aspects of your game, such as champ farming, that are in dire need of attention..(along with dungeons too!)

Why do players think that just because they don’t like an aspect of a game that many others players do like, that anet should ban that activity?

cesmode.4257:

Becka Williams.4978:

Just make the time for spawning longer. Like, say, 30 minutes. Done and done.

Make the spawning random.

Why on earth don’t they do this? Why do they have it set up in such a way that people can almost time when champs can be triggered like clockwork?

Because the same would happen as if they nerfed the drops. People would simply migrate to the next best thing. And the same people that complain now that champ trains make the rest of the zones dead would complain about dead queensdale and frostgorge and ask why noone is doing champs anymore.
And they would stop being done, because they are profitable only when done in larger groups, and with fast rotation. Single champs done solo or in small groups are still not worth the effort.

Champs don’t always scale properly. In those cases a buff like Nike suggested would help to keep those fights from being auto-attack zerg fests. If the Champ could gain 25 stacks of might for instance, it means you’d actually have to avoid his attacks.

Ultimately, Rewards vs. Effort is what drives many players. Following a zerg, chatting away, and auto-attacking for loot and XP is easy. It’s got the best reward:risk/effort/time ratio in the game. To encourage players to disperse throughout the world a bit more, Anet will need to tweak the reward system for everything. Make DEs more lucrative, maybe make hearts repeatable, add more complex mechanics to world bosses but give them unique drops, add a ton more DEs, make LS releases span multiple zones, rather than localizing players to one location, add new dungeons & fractals, tweak dungeon mechanics to make them more challenging yet rewarding.

I remember playing FOW and UW in GW over and over and over again. Two reasons: a chance for some of the coolest drops in the game (chaos axes, fellblades, crystalline sword, storm bows, ectos, shards) and because it was challenging group content. And then I’d 2-man FOW & UW for an even harder and more rewarding challenge. This concept needs to be embraced in GW2 in more places.

danbuter.2314:

Why do players think that just because they don’t like an aspect of a game that many others players do like, that anet should ban that activity?

Because what you do affects not only you.

And nobody suggested banning anything. The idea is to make the rewards match the risk and/or effort, to encourage a variety of activities and good use of the game’s resources.

Astralporing.1957:

Because the same would happen as if they nerfed the drops. People would simply migrate to the next best thing.

Then they can tackle that. And continue until people are doing a variety of things and not just pumping the heck out of whatever is easy.

Best game I ever played was the one where the first day I asked which class was most powerful and every response was “none is inherently better than the others, just play what you like”. That applies to activities as well.

Astralporing.1957:

cesmode.4257:

Becka Williams.4978:

Just make the time for spawning longer. Like, say, 30 minutes. Done and done.

Make the spawning random.

Why on earth don’t they do this? Why do they have it set up in such a way that people can almost time when champs can be triggered like clockwork?

Because the same would happen as if they nerfed the drops. People would simply migrate to the next best thing. And the same people that complain now that champ trains make the rest of the zones dead would complain about dead queensdale and frostgorge and ask why noone is doing champs anymore.
And they would stop being done, because they are profitable only when done in larger groups, and with fast rotation. Single champs done solo or in small groups are still not worth the effort.

this is the truth, the only way to make people not feel like they are wasting time not doing the optimal money activity, is making other content more rewarding. They need to increase the value of karma, increase the value of skill points, and create new content that is interesting in more areas. They also need to make people aware of this content.

danbuter.2314:

Why do players think that just because they don’t like an aspect of a game that many others players do like, that anet should ban that activity?

Because they have some fantasy in their head of their perfect MMO. But what they don’t realize is Champs work because of the way they are setup. If they are changed to something like longer timers people will just stop doing them. They won’t go do what these players are looking for they’ll do whatever is the most efficient way of making money so that they can go do what they want. Only reason I play this game is because right now WvW season one is sorta fun. Trying to get an Ascended weapon done so when waiting in que I Champ train. If there was no champ train I wouldn’t be out doing the world garbage in this game I’d be just sitting in one of the cities playing another game on my other monitor waiting for que.

Then when the que pops it depends if I’m doing something interesting in my other game then I just tap forward or something every now and then to stay in the WvW world. When I’m done with whatever I’m doing in the other game I may mess around with WvW for whatever time I have left in the evening.

But the game trying to force people in to doing what they want will not work. They’ll just play other games. Like what happened when LS was released. People didn’t like the idea of being forced to grand out boring PvE Fractals for their PvP gear and left of other games. Did it before and after Season one is over will probably do it again.

When you have top population servers like Jade Quarry have utterly empty Orr maps, so much so it’s almost impossible to get the temple events done for dragonite, you have a problem.

Get rid of the champion farms. They are too much reward for no risk or effort.

a t s e.9614:

I think champions should give the loot bag only if you tagged at least 10% of the dmg. That means it will be capped at 10 players , so peoole will have to spread out instead of running a zerg of 50.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how math works. If you had fifty people and, hypothetically they all did an equal % of damage, then each person would only have dealt 2% so no one would get any drops.

If you removed champ rewards then people will just find another way to farm. The problem lies more in how/why people play games than the game design itself.

Top 10 highest dmg I mean , it would have a cap.

The PvE game already grossly over-favors berserker glass-cannons over anything else. No need to add the DPS kitten race to the overworld too.

If you want people to stop farming the same champs over and over, stop giving them good loot over and over. If there’s diminishing returns on doing the same champion, people won’t keep doing it. If there’s not a central place repeatedly giving out loot, a zerg can’t form around it.

Qaelyn.7612:

Astralporing.1957:

Because the same would happen as if they nerfed the drops. People would simply migrate to the next best thing.

Then they can tackle that. And continue until people are doing a variety of things and not just pumping the heck out of whatever is easy.

They have already tried that approach. Instead of people doing variety of things, they were getting pretty close to a dead game. Every time they nerfed something, people left that place and didn’t return. They didn’t spread out. They congregated in places that were just a tiny bit better than everything else.
The only way to make everything exactly even is for everything to not give any rewards at all. That would kill the game really fast.

If you want for people to spread out, you must make rewards there at the level enough of potential players would consider decent. Currently, there are only few such places and activities in the game.

Qaelyn.7612:

Best game I ever played was the one where the first day I asked which class was most powerful and every response was “none is inherently better than the others, just play what you like”.

Yeah, i thought like that as well in the beginning. We learned very fast however, that it simply wasn’t true. That the game you describe never really existed.

Well, at least people have something to do, while waiting for a WvW queue to pop, instead of afk’ing in LA. It’s not as rewarding as some are making it seem, if you don’t like it happening in open world, just bring back pavilion or something similar, so people can farm in peace.