Guild Wars 2

(Somewhat long, but I think it’s important, so take the time to read and understand where I am coming from)

I get the motivation to shift focus to content, but I choke up a little bit on this, because it’s kind of…to some extent….bullkitten.

Like, first of all, there is the gap between previous communications and the current communications, in which we were sold an expansion with a new precursor crafting system that was supposed to easily allow the development add new legendaries in the future. Now, that entire system is being suspended indefinitely, because it takes too long to make the legendaries and you need to focus on more content to keep your game from tanking.

So…just man up already and call the precursor crafting for what it is. A complete failure and the heart of the problem.

In addition to it extending the development time on each new legendary, it’s a failure in and of itself, because of the imbalance in prices and time investment between crafting the precursor yourself and just buying it flat out from the market. At the time of this writing, The Legend is 1067 gold on the market, which is still considerably less the actual raw materials to craft it.

So…get rid of it. Completely. Go back to what it was before. Just design a new skin precursor, add it the loot tables and design the new legendary weapon skin.

There. Done. New Legendary weapon created. You turn out new armor and weapon skins for the Gem Store on a monthly basis. There should be no reason you can’t support this if the only development requirement is creating the skins themselves and not having to introduce an entirely new overly complex precursor collection and crafting recipes.

Yes, precursors go back to being market or RNG only, but that’s not a total loss to us as players. The precursor crafting isn’t some epic treasure hunt. It’s 10% an epic treasure hunt and 90% a giant gold sink that costs more the precursors acquired via RNG and sold on the market.

I just don’t see how this is anything, but a win win. You are already, to some extent, admitting precursor crafting was a failure and are abandoning it completely, but instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water, you can salvage the Legendary weapons themselves by going back to the old system. The system to craft the generic core components is already there; it’s just the precursors, the legendary weapons themselves and the Mystic Forge recipe that is missing.

Those generic items are long term goals in and of themselves; Legendary weapons are still long term goals (if you don’t swipe your credit card) even without the precursor collections.

Yes, I get that legendary weapons are somewhat more complex graphic designs, due to all their FX effects…but gem store weapons get released all the time with new FX effect, so I fail to see how that is the development time sink and not the precursor crafting.

I just don’t get it. We could, to some extent, have our cake and eat it too, but it would require you have to admit that the precursor system you spend a year working on and we paid for in the expansion was a failure. But, rather do that, you rather just throw out everything so you can just “suspend it indefinitely”.

And while you’re at it, make the new precursors and legendaries account bound on acquire. For the old ones it’s too late anyways.

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

I totally agree with you OP.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

I simply meant that stop-gap measures are not solutions.

They make the change, and people will just complain about precursors being RNG again. So it’s not a solution.

Totally agree … its also my opinion they should just give us the new skins just
the way the old legendarys worked.

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase..

Yeah .. but they expected to get them a lot cheaper then .. and not have the work
for the quest and then still a big goldsink for the mats. And thats why the actual
system is total BS.

Ticky.5831:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

I simply meant that stop-gap measures are not solutions.

They make the change, and people will just complain about precursors being RNG again. So it’s not a solution.

People complain about everything. We can’t base decisions based on that alone.

Don’t get me wrong; precursor collections are a great, amazing idea. But all great, amazing ideas are ultimately limited by time and money and if you don’t have both, then it doesn’t matter how great and amazing it is.

The reality here is that Legendary weapons are gone. Now, as an alternative, if we got rid of precursor crafting and thus, made Legendary weapons reasonable in development times at the cost of player experience, well, it’s still a better alternative, than not having them at all.

But a huge part of the fun of the new legendaries is the journey? This isn’t a solution, its a band-aid.

Ok, let me rephrase that, a lot of people left Guild Wars 2 shortly after launch because the only end-game goals were RNG based, and lacked agency. People will leave if Anet makes them solely RNG based again.

Dinks.2478:

But a huge part of the fun of the new legendaries is the journey? This isn’t a solution, its a band-aid.

How many journeys will you be going on with them completely removed from the game?

MadRabbit.3179:

Go back to what it was before. Just design a new skin precursor, add it the loot tables and design the new legendary weapon skin.

There. Done. New Legendary weapon created. You turn out new armor and weapon skins for the Gem Store on a monthly basis. There should be no reason you can’t support this if the only development requirement is creating the skins themselves and not having to introduce an entirely new overly complex precursor collection and crafting recipes.

Yes, precursors go back to being market or RNG only, but that’s not a total loss to us as players. The precursor crafting isn’t some epic treasure hunt. It’s 10% an epic treasure hunt and 90% a giant gold sink that costs more the precursors acquired via RNG and sold on the market.

+10, this. Talking to people in game last night and this would be a better solution. Even those of us that liked the crafting would still be happier with loot drops versus crafting or not having new Legendary weapons at all.

Dinks.2478:

But a huge part of the fun of the new legendaries is the journey? This isn’t a solution, its a band-aid.

How is a journey that doesn’t even exist and will never exist, a huge part of
the fun that will never be in game ?

Halvorn.9831:

And while you’re at it, make the new precursors and legendaries account bound on acquire. For the old ones it’s too late anyways.

No for this to work they need to remain account bound on equip. There is nothing wrong with some one not liking the Legendary for the Precursor they got from a drop and wanting to sell it to get one they do want to make. Also nothing wrong with people making them to sell for those that want one but don’t want to do the leg work. Gold needs to have some value in game.

Ticky.5831:

Ok, let me rephrase that, a lot of people left Guild Wars 2 shortly after launch because the only end-game goals were RNG based, and lacked agency. People will leave if Anet makes them solely RNG based again.

Ideally, yes, but pragmatically, no.

It was market based. The process of acquiring a precursor in the old system was saving up a ton of gold to buy it off the market.

I did The Legend precursor quest the first week HoT came out. Here is the exact experience: it was 10% doing collections and then 90% using gold to buy the materials to craft the precursor for a sum total that was HIGHER than what I would have paid if I just bought it off the market.

The thing is…the precursor crafting didn’t really change anything about how we go about getting precursors. To some extent, it made it worse.

And once again, to cite the reality of the situation, the people who would quit because it went back to RNG base are already quitting, because they aren’t getting them at all.

MadRabbit.3179:

And once again, to cite the reality of the situation, the people who would quit because it went back to RNG base are already quitting, because they aren’t getting them at all.

Thus, it’s not a solution to the problem.

The narcissism is palpable here.

I may be in some minority group saying this, but I enjoy having the precursor crafting. I really disliked trying to get a pre from the mystic forge and I’ve never been lucky enough to receive one as a drop. Being able to take time and work towards one or all without relying on things I can’t control is a great option to have. Removing that is about as reasonable as the current situation of not getting new legendary weapons.

In my view, I would think a more reasonable approach is brainstorming alternate methods of setting up more realistic methods of creating the journey rather than scrapping the whole idea. When the CDIs were a thing, people seemed to suggest ways of implementing armor and weapons into the actual living world and making it about finding something along the way. Including a new legendary weapon along with the LS would be an interesting way of adding the weapons without having to create events, NPCs, etc, that are all standalone specific to one journey. Incorporate pieces of the journey throughout the setup of the LS and it becomes more manageable for development and testing.

It sounds like, conceptually, a lot of the idea work for some of the missing legendary weapons was done, all that work shouldn’t be lost because the implementation was separated into its own little group that has been disbanded. I do not need a journey to be 100% standalone or some quest line that has nothing to do with anything. I do want to see more legendary weapons added in the future. For example, (I am sure this has been suggested by someone somewhere), I would like a gilded gold/energy weapon that is modeled after the Exalted with gold footsteps dissolving into an energy pattern before it disappears.

Ticky.5831:

MadRabbit.3179:

And once again, to cite the reality of the situation, the people who would quit because it went back to RNG base are already quitting, because they aren’t getting them at all.

Thus, it’s not a solution to the problem.

The narcissism is palpable here.

The broad, sweeping statements here are not palpable.

Yes, if you narrow this down myopically and look at in a vaccuum, then yeah, it’s not solution.

But if we accept that the situation is so kittened that people are going to quit no matter what, then having legendary weapons in some format for the players who remain is still better than not having them at all.

I mean, they are gone and I don’t exactly see you suggesting a workable, practical idea to salvage the situation.

Look, at no point in this discussion, will I say this is ideal, but I am approaching this purely pragmatically.

Remember it took them 3 years to perfect this collection system and thousands of hours of dev resources. All this for a system that is clearly not sustainable. The people in charge of this debacle should be fired.

There was nothing wrong with the previous system.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

MadRabbit.3179:

And once again, to cite the reality of the situation, the people who would quit because it went back to RNG base are already quitting, because they aren’t getting them at all.

Thus, it’s not a solution to the problem.

The narcissism is palpable here.

The broad, sweeping statements here are not palpable.

Yes, if you narrow this down myopically and look at in a vaccuum, then yeah, it’s not solution.

But if we accept that the situation is so kittened that people are going to quit no matter what, then having legendary weapons in some format for the players who remain is still better than not having them at all.

I mean, they are gone and I don’t exactly see you suggesting a workable, practical idea to salvage the situation.

Look, at no point in this discussion, will I say this is ideal, but I am approaching this purely pragmatically.

First off, people are allowed to critisize, without offering alternatives. An Idea should be tested as to whether it has merit before weighing relative merits.

Secondly, despite not needing to offer an alternative, I will: my solution would be to hire 6 new people so they don’t have to scrap an advertised feature. Cut into their profit margin to make good to customers, or borrow against a bankable asset if they have to.

As far as prices on the TP, dynamically lower or suspend(trasnparently) drops for specific precursors until their value goes up past the mats cost.

And, I should point out, I’m assuming here: the reason why they made the crafted precursor BoE is because the market is plastic. At the moment, you can check how much a precursor is, do the first step, save up enough for the precursor, do the mat price comparison, buy the precursor if it’s cheaper, and then finish the Journey for another precursor to sell at a profit later on if the opportunity arises.

Please no, I do actually LIKE the precursor crafting system, it was fun and gave each legendary an investment other than just money. The ONLY thing I despise and find absolutely repulsive is just how much Timegated ascended material it takes to complete tier two. I don’t want a legendary fro free, but rather, I want to work on it at my own pace and my own time, not the pace ANET has set, which for dusk was 90 days minimum, unless I shelled out a ton of gold and at which point, I might as well had bought dusk off the TP.

Making this an RNG grind because of this situation is not the solution. Why just reinstate the problem that players had complained of for years?

Going through the journey to build the precursor made the actual Legendary weapon that much more valuable to me. Throwing all your gold into the Mystic toilet or just buying off the TP is just wrong.

I don’t mind waiting for more precursor collections to be built and I think resource should come from the second expansion pack team as delivering on the promises made for the first expansion should come before work on the second. As a LONG time Guild Wars player this is probably the worst announcement I have heard.

Been saying this for a while now so I totally agree. While in a perfect world we’d have the whole package with pre-crafting, it’s still better than no legendaries at all. Especially since skin-wise apparently quite a few are already done.

I agree with the OP to a point.
Personally i say add all new legendaries the old way…rng precursors from loot table and forge INCLUDING the 2nd generation precursors that we already have.
This would possibly help keep crafting prices in check if there are more than one way to obtain said precursors.

Then work on the crafting quest for each precursor over time until they’re all completed.

Im sure a lot of work has already been done on each new legendary, it seems very backward to just scrap it all.

I’d really like to understand what the heck is so difficult about making the precursor collections. The collection tech is already in there, and the collections themselves just require items to drop. Heck, a lot of the stages are just things like “Kill this boss” or “Go to this place with this item”.

How does that take months? I’m not a programmer, so I really don’t know, but it sure looks a lot simpler than what the raid team have managed to put out.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

I’d really like to understand what the heck is so difficult about making the precursor collections. The collection tech is already in there, and the collections themselves just require items to drop. Heck, a lot of the stages are just things like “Kill this boss” or “Go to this place with this item”.

How does that take months? I’m not a programmer, so I really don’t know, but it sure looks a lot simpler than what the raid team have managed to put out.

I can’t be sure here but a lot of the old content they wanna tie this to is just not made for it. Look at the bug fix patches we’ve had after they came out. We’ve had patch notes with over 10 fixes for a single collection. So yeah, I think it’s a bit harder than you imagine. I could also be wrong tho, not a programmer either.

cranos.5913:

I can’t be sure here but a lot of the old content they wanna tie this to is just not made for it. Look at the bug fix patches we’ve had after they came out. We’ve had patch notes with over 10 fixes for a single collection. So yeah, I think it’s a bit harder than you imagine. I could also be wrong tho, not a programmer either.

I get that coding isn’t nearly as simple as it looks, but I’m really struggling to see how this couldn’t be done simply. Surely they have the ability to make a boss drop a particular item, and we know that collections are in place. What exactly is causing the issues?

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

QFT.

The most effective and easy way to bring what they promised. The prices of mats involved have skyrocketed since, and effecting the cost of other craftable items too. But I guess that makes too much sense.

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

Well tbh it’d be the same as the first legendaries~ they were RNG/Tradable till the collections for them were complete. These ones would be RNG/Tradable till the collections for them were complete. They’d have to go back on their account bound deal though. People like me would literally never obtain the precursor we wanted by luck alone. Or they can just hire more people. Maybe they need a kickstarter or start twitch streaming for donations if they’re that hung up. o.O

Ticky.5831:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

MadRabbit.3179:

And once again, to cite the reality of the situation, the people who would quit because it went back to RNG base are already quitting, because they aren’t getting them at all.

Thus, it’s not a solution to the problem.

The narcissism is palpable here.

The broad, sweeping statements here are not palpable.

Yes, if you narrow this down myopically and look at in a vaccuum, then yeah, it’s not solution.

But if we accept that the situation is so kittened that people are going to quit no matter what, then having legendary weapons in some format for the players who remain is still better than not having them at all.

I mean, they are gone and I don’t exactly see you suggesting a workable, practical idea to salvage the situation.

Look, at no point in this discussion, will I say this is ideal, but I am approaching this purely pragmatically.

First off, people are allowed to critisize, without offering alternatives. An Idea should be tested as to whether it has merit before weighing relative merits.

Secondly, despite not needing to offer an alternative, I will: my solution would be to hire 6 new people so they don’t have to scrap an advertised feature. Cut into their profit margin to make good to customers, or borrow against a bankable asset if they have to.

As far as prices on the TP, dynamically lower or suspend(trasnparently) drops for specific precursors until their value goes up past the mats cost.

And, I should point out, I’m assuming here: the reason why they made the crafted precursor BoE is because the market is plastic. At the moment, you can check how much a precursor is, do the first step, save up enough for the precursor, do the mat price comparison, buy the precursor if it’s cheaper, and then finish the Journey for another precursor to sell at a profit later on if the opportunity arises.

I’m fine with this. But testing the merits of an idea is more than making broad sweeping statements that you don’t qualify and thus, why I aggressively challenge you.

I would agree that’s a better alternative solution, if the assumption is correct that the precursor collection’s are reasonably maintainable by 6 people.

And I don’t think that’s the case at all here, which is why I think getting rid of them is the best of bad options.

Of course, I can’t prove that, since I don’t work at Anet and don’t know all the details, but very little of this make senses from an outside perspective.

I don’t see how suspending or lowering drop rates helps much. Drop rates are already so low that I have never gotten one in three years of playing. Suspending just drives up the cost of the materials, lowering them also drives up the cost of the materials as there is more and more people who need to craft them out of scarcity. These materials are also used by pretty much all forms of crafting where as the precursor drops, no matter how rare, are very specific usages. You won’t ever get it to the point where cost of a precursor exceeds the materials as long as they are produced by means other than crafting the materials and removing those entirely drives up those material costs. It’s bad for players either way…unless you make them produced entirely from the collections and not a process that is 1/10 collection and 9/10s gold sink.

And that’s why it’s so broken.

I get people like the collection part of it and find it fun, but the implementation ultimately netted you an extra series of quest you have to do, in addition, to spending more money than you would have if you had just bought the weapon flat out using the old system. If I am correct in my assumptions, then in addition to making the process of acquiring a legendary more cumbersome, it let them to being discontinued all together.

There is no net gain here.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

Some of the biggest complaints on the forum regarding precursor acquisition was the RNG, no journey, and anyone could buy one off the TP with a credit card.

This was resolved with the new legendary set. Although players could still use a credit card to buy the materials, they still had to do the journey as everyone else.

For the original set, this providing a means for players to work towards a precursor over time and actually see their progress. Yes, there are those that are impatient and try to do the entire process in one sitting.

This seems like a workable solution. Just about anything would have been better than what they actually did.

Ayrilana.1396:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

Some of the biggest complaints on the forum regarding precursor acquisition was the RNG, no journey, and anyone could buy one off the TP with a credit card.

This was resolved with the new legendary set. Although players could still use a credit card to buy the materials, they still had to do the journey as everyone else.

For the original set, this providing a means for players to work towards a precursor over time and actually see their progress. Yes, there are those that are impatient and try to do the entire process in one sitting.

Okay, let’s explore the merits. I’ll use my personal experience as a benchmark.

It took me literally two days to do the precursor collections when HoT first came out and I did the Legend. Then, I just had a ton of gold lying around that I threw at the crafting.

If I did not have that gold, then the “journey” of acquiring a precursor would have been the actual collection taking a very small portion of the time invested and the acquisition of the gold from farming alone would have taken months.

In practice, it’s literally not any different then it was before, outside of the addition of the collections, which some find to be fun (and they were fun), but still ultimately representing a small percentage of an overall process that is predominantly gold acquisition.

And in addition, because they chose to implement the precursors this way, where the bulk of the “journey” is the acquisition of huge amounts of crafting materials used in all other forms of crafting, it drove the price of those materials to the point where acquiring a precursor requires MORE GOLD than it did before in the old system.

That’s the key difference. If the precursors were produced entirely from the collection and did not consume trade materials from the market like the way randomly generated precursors don’t, it would be a totally different story.

But it wasn’t implemented like that and the end result is a net loss for the players trying to get the legendaries. Now, if my conclusions are correct and the development time to support is too much, then it’s caused a complete loss in players trying to get legendaries, since those legendaries are no longer going to be produced by the development team.

Now, we can all feel good that I wasn’t able to just throw all my gold at it and had to spend two days doing the collections, but if given a choice, I would rather give up the collections than incur an additional 400 gold that I pay in addition to doing the collection, because acquiring that 400 gold would have taken a lot longer than 2 days if I had not already had it and would have been boring as hell.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ticky.5831:

Precursor crafting came about from a legitimate desire in the fanbase.

Getting rid of it is not a solution at all. Not supporting it for the 12 remaining HoT legendarys is a stop gap measure(also not a solution) at best.

And no offense, but that’s also complete bullkitten.

You just made this blanket statement that you haven’t qualified in any kind of way.

How is it not a solution at all? It’s clearly a solution for the reasons I detailed.

Yet, the real solution apparently is to not have Legendary weapons at all, so we can keep a system that the development team can’t support, because “we” (not me; I was fine saving and buying a precursor off the market) wanted this precursor system.

And that’s better for everyone….for….reasons?

Some of the biggest complaints on the forum regarding precursor acquisition was the RNG, no journey, and anyone could buy one off the TP with a credit card.

This was resolved with the new legendary set. Although players could still use a credit card to buy the materials, they still had to do the journey as everyone else.

For the original set, this providing a means for players to work towards a precursor over time and actually see their progress. Yes, there are those that are impatient and try to do the entire process in one sitting.

Okay, let’s explore the merits. I’ll use my personal experience as a benchmark.

It took me literally two days to do the precursor collections when HoT first came out and I did the Legend. Then, I just had a ton of gold lying around that I threw at the crafting.

If I did have that gold, then the “journey” of acquiring a precursor would have been the actual collection taking a very small portion of the time invested and the acquisition of the gold from farming alone would have taken months.

In practice, it’s literally not any different then it was before, outside of the addition of the collections, which some find to be fun (and they were fun), but still ultimately representing a small percentage of an overall process that is predominantly gold acquisition.

And in addition, because they chose to implement the precursors this way, where the bulk of the “journey” is the acquisition of huge amounts of crafting materials used in all other forms of crafting, it drove the price of those materials to the point where acquiring a precursor requires MORE GOLD than it did before in the old system.

That’s the key difference. If the precursors were produced entirely from the collection and did not consume trade materials from the market like the way randomly generated precursors don’t, it would be a totally different story.

But it wasn’t implemented like that and the end result is a net loss for the players trying to get the legendaries. Now, if my conclusions are correct and the development time to support is too much, then it’s caused a complete loss in players trying to get legendaries, since those legendaries are no longer going to be produced by the development team.

As I stated in my post, collections allow players to see their progress towards the precursor.

You may not like the precursor collections and crafting but they were implemented with a purpose.

Ayrilana.1396:

As I stated in my post, collections allow players to see their progress towards the precursor.

You may not like the precursor collections and crafting but they were implemented with a purpose.

I appreciate you ignoring everything I said to restate something I already understood. Everything has a purpose. I understood what the purpose of the precursor collections was before I made that post.

The purpose of my post, however, was to explore whether or not the precursor collections actually accomplished their purpose in turning the acquisition of precursors into a journey instead of a gold dump that could be circumvented with a credit card swipe.

The answer I present is no, they didn’t…for the many reasons I just provided. There effect on making it a journey was minuscule at best, because the bulk of the process is still overwhelming gold acquisition and in the case of their impact on the market, actually made that part of it worse than before.

I have made one and I can assure that the bulk of this great journey towards precursor acquisition begins and ends in Silverwaste chest trains, just like it did before.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

As I stated in my post, collections allow players to see their progress towards the precursor.

You may not like the precursor collections and crafting but they were implemented with a purpose.

I appreciate you ignoring everything I said to restate something I already understood. Everything has a purpose. I understood what the purpose of the precursor collections was before I made that post.

The purpose of my post, however, was to explore whether or not the precursor collections actually accomplished their purpose in turning the acquisition of precursors into a journey instead of a gold dump that could be circumvented with a credit card swipe.

The answer I present is no, they didn’t…for the many reasons I just provided. There effect on making it a journey was minuscule at best, because the bulk of the process is still overwhelming gold acquisition and in the case of their impact on the market, actually made that part of it worse than before.

There were three collections for precursors. Only one of the collections required a large amount of gold to be spent or materials to be farmed.

Ayrilana.1396:

There were three collections for precursors. Only one of the collections required a large amount of gold to be spent or materials to be farmed.

There is 23 collections for precursors and all the tier 2 collections have the war efforts quest which require a lot of materials to be thrown at them.

The total number of elder wood logs consumed by the entire Legend precursor was up in the 5 digits when I did the math on it.

You cannot acquire that number of elder wood logs single handedly; you have to farm gold. That’s the great journey of The Legend. Farming gold to buy 10,000+ elder wood logs to use in crafting.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

There were three collections for precursors. Only one of the collections required a large amount of gold to be spent or materials to be farmed.

There is 23 collections for precursors and all the tier 2 collections have the war efforts quest which require a lot of materials to be thrown at them.

The total number of elder wood logs consumed by the entire Legend precursor was up in the 5 digits when I did the math on it.

You cannot acquire that number of elder wood logs single handedly; you have to farm gold. That’s the great journey of The Legend. Farming gold to buy 10,000+ elder wood logs to use in crafting.

You can farm any of those materials. You claim that you can’t farm elder wood but exactly what are people doing at that statues in Malchor’s then? Just because you cannot see yourself farming materials does not mean that others won’t.

The collections do not have to be completed immediately. They could be used, as you know, as a mid to long term goal.

Ayrilana.1396:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

There were three collections for precursors. Only one of the collections required a large amount of gold to be spent or materials to be farmed.

There is 23 collections for precursors and all the tier 2 collections have the war efforts quest which require a lot of materials to be thrown at them.

The total number of elder wood logs consumed by the entire Legend precursor was up in the 5 digits when I did the math on it.

You cannot acquire that number of elder wood logs single handedly; you have to farm gold. That’s the great journey of The Legend. Farming gold to buy 10,000+ elder wood logs to use in crafting.

You can farm any of those materials. You claim that you can’t farm elder wood but exactly what are people doing at that statues in Malchor’s then? Just because you cannot see yourself farming materials does not mean that others won’t.

The collections do not have to be completed immediately. They could be used, as you know, as a mid to long term goal.

You are dancing around the point here. You are defending the prescuror collections on the merits that it turns the acquisition of the precursors into this epic journey that circumvents the issue of swiping a credit card.

I can tell you personally from doing one of these epic journeys, that the bulk of the time invested will be spent on the acquisition of massive amounts of materials to get past Tier 2 collection. That’s not an epic journey; it’s a gold sink. Yeah, you can farm the materials or you can farm gold and sell them for gold to buy a precursor in the old system. It’s more of the same and the overwhelming of what is required to get a precursor in these “epic journeys” can still be circumvented with a credit card.

You like all that? Cool. I’m fine with you liking that. Just don’t kitten down my back and tell me it’s rain.

Because it’s not. It’s a lot of gold.

They need to make the journeys primarily generic to reduce costs. Most of the collections should be account bound items, items which you have to acquire yourself and have a minimal economic impact. For items that are tradeable, they should be dynamic. Instead of for example requiring 100 tradeable whatevers, you should have to find a travelling merchant which trades whatever item for the legendary component. The catch is that the item the merchant wants is a variable that ArenaNet can change to manipulate the markets if needed.

If legendaries are going to be a minority content, they shouldn’t be making unique journeys for each one. Simplify the development costs however and it shouldn’t be a problem.

Some components however should be easy to vary, like having a task to locate certain NPCs or whatever. Worst case, everything can be generalized, including the basic design for the legendaries themselves. A jungle/Mordremoth themed legendary weapon set for example. With only needing 1 primary journey, the task of adding additional legendaries should be simple.

Cutting the legendary journey would only make things worse. The mystic forge alternative, the legendary journey was after all one of the launch features, unlike the weapons themselves.

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

MadRabbit.3179:

Ayrilana.1396:

There were three collections for precursors. Only one of the collections required a large amount of gold to be spent or materials to be farmed.

There is 23 collections for precursors and all the tier 2 collections have the war efforts quest which require a lot of materials to be thrown at them.

The total number of elder wood logs consumed by the entire Legend precursor was up in the 5 digits when I did the math on it.

You cannot acquire that number of elder wood logs single handedly; you have to farm gold. That’s the great journey of The Legend. Farming gold to buy 10,000+ elder wood logs to use in crafting.

You can farm any of those materials. You claim that you can’t farm elder wood but exactly what are people doing at that statues in Malchor’s then? Just because you cannot see yourself farming materials does not mean that others won’t.

The collections do not have to be completed immediately. They could be used, as you know, as a mid to long term goal.

You are dancing around the point here. You are defending the prescuror collections on the merits that it turns the acquisition of the precursors into this epic journey that circumvents the issue of swiping a credit card.

I can tell you personally from doing one of these epic journeys, that the bulk of the time invested will be spent on the acquisition of massive amounts of materials to get past Tier 2 collection. That’s not an epic journey; it’s a gold sink. Yeah, you can farm the materials or you can farm gold and sell them for gold to buy a precursor in the old system. It’s more of the same and the overwhelming of what is required to get a precursor in these “epic journeys” can still be circumvented with a credit card.

You like all that? Cool. I’m fine with you liking that. Just don’t kitten down my back and tell me it’s rain.

Because it’s not. It’s a lot of gold.

No dancing around here. I’m also not going to address the rest as I already had in my initial post. I suggest you re-read it.

MadRabbit.3179:

I don’t see how suspending or lowering drop rates helps much.

Pretty easy. Halve the drop rate, and assuming there is no change in the number of people Mystic Forging(or a huge influx or decrease in players) and half the number gets produced. Stop them from dropping and no more get produced. As supply decreases, gold prices on the precursors increase, possibly to the point where they’ll exceed the mat costs in the crafting.

Transparency on the relative drop rates would be important for 2 reasons:

1) So that people don’t get upset at a nerfed drop rate

2) Being transparent would likely also lower the supply, as the rates diminish, people would be more hesitent to use the Mystic Forge to try to craft the.

The reason you don’t understand is because the human mind doesn’t comprehend probabilities intuitively. You see a 90% chance and feel cheated you don’t get a return on it. You see a 10% chance and assume that you never get a return on it. You see a failed 50% roll and assume the next 50% roll is going to succeed(gamblers fallacy).

I remember arguing about XCOM with someone, and they thought the RNG was “bad” in it, because someone described a chain of events with a probability of 1-in-118,000; but I had to explain to him that the game sold about 2 million copies, asuming(VERY conservatively) everyone who played it averaged 100 rolls in a playthrough, it really wasn’t unlikely to hear one of those 2 million people report the story.

They could have made precursor crafting easy and successful. What they did was make a mess out of. Precursor rng was the problem that could have been fixed in many ways. They traded godly luck for overly complicated crafting process.

Halvorn.9831:

And while you’re at it, make the new precursors and legendaries account bound on acquire. For the old ones it’s too late anyways.

RNG dropped precursors can’t and shouldn’t be account bound because if any of my characters get a precursor long bow drop, it’s entirely worthless, might as well give me rocks. That’s why RNG drops, the TP and it’s usage fees are all interconnected. You need to be able to turn some drop that isn’t useful to you into something that is.

Now Legendaries, oh yeah, they never should have been on the TP.

Behellagh.1468:

Halvorn.9831:

And while you’re at it, make the new precursors and legendaries account bound on acquire. For the old ones it’s too late anyways.

RNG dropped precursors can’t and shouldn’t be account bound because if any of my characters get a precursor long bow drop, it’s entirely worthless, might as well give me rocks. That’s why RNG drops, the TP and it’s usage fees are all interconnected. You need to be able to turn some drop that isn’t useful to you into something that is.

Now Legendaries, oh yeah, they never should have been on the TP.

Yeah, I think precursors should always be tradeable, but I have no problem with the actual legendary being account-bound.

I am someone VERY glad they gave us Precursor Crafting. Sure, it may have ended up costing us 12 legendaries, but it gave me, my friends, and a bunch of others I know 23 (And soon to be 24) more.

Why not both? they can place all those legendary with RNG based on HoT Maps and later (or never) finish the precursor hunt collection. Please ANet! do this!

Behellagh.1468:

Now Legendaries, oh yeah, they never should have been on the TP.

Why should people that enjoy the crafting even if not the owning of the weapons not be able to sell something they crafted. Its up to the player if they want to buy one or not. They still had to spend some type of resource to acquire it, be it time, mats, gold or gems. There are very few items of true player value in game, you shouldn’t restrict that. Not to mention to craft it someone had to still go through all the steps to make it, so if they want to trade the resources they acquired to do so, why not.

On top of that have been involved with helping others make Legendaries for other friends. If this was set to not be trade-able then you just eliminated this kind of thing from game and removed more group play. Which the more you do, you reach a point where, why group. We can chat on voice and be playing single player games if its each to their own.

2 cents.