I’d say everything is working as intended. Farming that area is already rewarding enough by giving you gold in form of crafting materials and rares (or ectos if you salvage them). Ascended chests should have a much higher chance of dropping in more challenging content (like fractals lvl 50).
WAI != sensible
Doesn’t have any necessary correlation to something being any fun at all either. As it presently stands, drop rates on a lot of things are mathematical comedies, with the only time-effective recourse for anything that can be bought being to buy it off the tp.
Let’s just ignore elephant in the room to do with how profitable it is for Anet to make gold hard to farm in the quantities anything truly desirable goes for, because some here will sorrowfully declare such to beer Isidro’s that Anet works so anything to foster gem to gold conversion and make money hand over dust selling nothing but transient ones and zeroes for real currency – let’s just set that entire explanation for why Anet loves to foster an environment in which farming is pointless aside, despite the fact that it explains everything quite entirely and we’d need look no further at all to understand very plausible reasons for every single thing Anet had ever done to farming in this game at all.
My common symptom of that businesses are it to make money and will very typically make choices that they expect will grow their profits is rarely a popular one amongst gaming community members that deliriously believe that these companies are their friends or have some sort of higher purpose and nobler calling than ‘people in any other business’
Let’s set that aside and look at what’s left for particle explanations, because I can’t think of any that aren’t more stretched than their need to be or more payphone if facts we do not have.
We know for a fact that Anet is a business.
We know for a fact that they are for profit and not done sort of charity.
We know for a fact that they sell gems that can immediately thence be spent on many things, but can also be converted into gold.
With these three facts alone, without requiring even the safest of assumptions, one would have a very sound basis to presume that Anet would be wanting to make a fiscal profit off selling gems.
One would be utterly faultless in talking these facts and assuming that if these facts are indeed factual, several other things are likely to logically follow, such as that Anet will this have strong incentive to maker or way and very effective to works real money on gems and acquire more gold for the equivalent of one hour’s worth of minimum wage pay than they could ever earn by farming anything in the game for that same equivalent hour.
The value simply isn’t there for farming. And I laugh with mocking pity at those that think it’s free to farm tour gold even if it’s a lot slower than any other method of acquisition, including even mediocre skill at dedicated flipping and marketeering.
For over hour’s worth of my salaried time, which is roughly $17.50/hour, 24/7/365, I could buy as of the time of this posting one $15 gem card for most of an hour’s worth of my employed time. That’s 1200 gems.
To buy 1200 gems with gold at this moment, I would have to spend 187g 20s.
To convert those 1200 gems to gold, I would make almost an even 120g.
There is nothing you, I or anyone can do to make anything resembling a consistent 120g an hour. Not even the most successful tp flipping a single person could get up to will yield profits that substantive.
Farming? You’re never going to make 120g a hour farming anything. You will, very typically, spend many hours to earn a fraction of that much gold. If you can reliably make 3-6g per hour if farming anything, you’re doing OK.
Anet has powerful incentive to make farming minimally lucrative. Compared to covering gems to gold, is absolutely trivial when eating the value of farming in game versus the buying power of a single hour’s worth of minimum wage real money expenditure.
And for those of us making far more than minimum wage, with way more likelihood of having $15 to spare than 15 hours spent numbingly farming?
It’s all economics. And Anet has no incentive at all to make farming even remotely competitive with the value coefficient of gem to gold conversion.
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