Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

They’re the same thing.

If someone is genuinely interested in how to make the most money for their items, they will go and learn how to make the most money.

But for the purposes of this discussion, it’s an irrelevant distinction, because the goal is to give those “disinterested participants” equivalent profits to market traders.

Why the hell should players who want to spend 5 seconds selling their crap on the market get the same amount of profits as someone who spends a lot of time, effort and thought managing their assets?

Ohoni.6057:

Why are you assuming that people aren’t experimenting with the game’s market systems? If someone’s interested in understanding how the buy/sell functions work they’ll experiment with them. It’s not a 3-4g investment to experiment with that.

Some are, most don’t. If most did, it would be impossible for flippers to ever turn a profit because they would have too much competition and too few rubes.

You didn’t actually give me a rebuttal. You assumed that people are too stupid to use sell orders. I told you that you made a stupid assumption. Now you repeat your stupid assumption.

Ohoni.6057:

Okay, so instead of having metabattle, Anet should just tell you what the good builds are in game.

Yes, or more ideally, ALL builds should be good builds. Making a good build shouldn’t be complicated, it should just be about using the abilities that seem fun to you, and that should work out. If abilities are designed to be used in a specific configuration, then that configuration should be made perfectly obvious. One of the few things the constant trait overhauls got right is that the next system does have at least some consistency of a traitline where if you just pick the abilities left to right, they tend to synergize pretty well. They could do a better job of that though in some trait lines, and maybe highlight the intended play style for a given line.

Have you actually played this game before? By the basic mechanics of the game, it’s completely impossible for all builds to be good builds- unless you want to completely remove any real variety between builds.

Ohoni.6057:

Instead of having the wiki, ANet should smother every tooltip, item and screen with information.

In some cases, they could do more, but there is a balance involved. If it’s important to gameplay, then it should be obvious in the UI. If it’s more about lore or something, then that can be in the wiki. You really shouldn’t need the wiki to know how to play while in game, the wiki should be more about collecting info for when you aren’t logged in and want to check something.

Again… Have you played this game before? Do you know there’s a /wiki command in game? There’s a really good reason that there’s a wiki. Browsers can display information more easily, and content can be created for them more easily, than any kind of in-game system.

Ohoni.6057:

Instead of having the forums, we should be having this discussion ingame.

We could, but that would be a bit inefficient, the client is a bit bulky.

No, let’s do it. You said it yourself further down in your post, you should never need to leave the game until you’re done for the night. I’m not done for the night, so I’d like to have my discussion in-game, thankyou very much.

Ohoni.6057:

Instead of using Twitch to do their esports and community livestreams, they should develop the software to do it in-client.

Yeah, or not do it at all, whichever.

Why even post this?
It’s obvious you’re missing the point. But to actually say that you don’t want the developers engaging the playerbase? Like, what?

Ohoni.6057:

It’s an MMO. You have to leave the client sometime.

Yes, when you’re done for the night, but aside from that, you should never have to.

Good luck with that. In the meantime, I will enjoy reality.

Ohoni.6057:

Then maybe those people should learn to understand the market and understand what the wavy lines mean and what future they predict.

Again, marketplay is an element of skill. The tools are available for them to learn what to do. There is no barrier of entry beyond your own time and effort and no reason that they can’t just GIT GUD.

And again, I continue to insist that the average player should not need to do this in order to profit competitively in an adventure MMO. If they want the market to be a game of high skill, that in and of itself is fine, but the problem is that you can profit from it massively more than from any other activities, it is out of balance, and that should not stand. It should either be something that anyone can do with minimal skill and time invested, or it should be something that people don’t have to do in order to earn those same profits, it can’t be both at once.

You don’t understand the voluntary nature of trade. In all voluntary trades, both parties are winners. To call ‘profit’ competitive is a misnomer, because there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners.

Saying that the market should be a game of high skill, but simultaneously not rewarding, makes no sense. It’s like removing the points from Pac-Man. The gold is how you measure your success. Secondarily, there’s this bizarre feel of “people can be better than me, but they can never do better than me”.

It is out of balance by your metrics. This is especially funny considering HoT only just dropped which caused massive changes in prices and price structures across the entire expansion; you’re making a judgment while the market is still settling.

Anyone can do it with minimal time/skill invested. It’s entirely possible to market trade at a profit with little to no effort; you just have to think about what events are likely to happen soon and how they will impact the economy.

I hope you put some more thought into your next post because this one was very disappointing.

Sarrs.4831:

Anyone can do it with minimal time/skill invested. It’s entirely possible to market trade at a profit with little to no effort; you just have to think about what events are likely to happen soon and how they will impact the economy.

Ohoni says he wants to insure the game-resource profits of people that don’t want to think or learn. This has never worked in the real world and systems that do so are insulting to players in a game. The NPE was such a system, applied to some basic game functions. It seems the OP had at least some issues with the NPE. but wants the TP to have an NPE for trading. Makes me think that this is all about the agenda the OP has been espousing in many threads, which is getting what he wants from the game in whatever he thinks a reasonable time frame is. I find the OP heavy on opinion and light on both backing up assertions and consideration of the overall effects of his proposals — yet he has consistently refused to even respond to such claims.

100 gold is not hard to make in this game – gathering stuff alone can get you a good amount of gold.

Perhaps, but it may surprise you to know that there are many players who don’t even have that.

Also what’s the problem with not using the materials for yourself if you plan to sell them? That’s the trade-off.
When damask first released I crafted and sold every day – I postponed my ascended armor by 30 days in order to get the profit I wanted. I didn’t read a specialized book or talked to an expert to tell me to do this. It is common sense.
Something just came out = it is in high demand = sell now for a lot of money and buy it later when the new thing will be done by more people and thus will become cheaper.

And that is a sound strategy, but it’s still a pretty kitteny one, if you think about it. It means that the people who have a lot fo excess gold don’t have to worry about that. They can just buy the mats as needed and have fun with the new options available right away, while everyone else is only in a position to feed the fatcats for a while until it becomes economically feasible for them to have fun too. Doesn’t that make you sad? Wouldn’t it be better if the prices for things didn’t spike when new options became available, and everyone could afford to participate in the new developments right away?

If they did this the economy would be even more out-of-whack. Imagine the devs saying what items would be required for some super important thing in the future. Then imagine people who already have cash buying them all up then selling them for a lot more.

Well, keep in mind that I’m considering this as part of a big picture, where reselling items is no longer an option, so the worst a rich person could do is buy up what they need for themselves in advance. Short of that, I think it might be a good idea if they shut down transactions on the TP for a short period after making such an announcement, but let people continue to place/remove buy and sell orders, such that when the markets reopened, those orders could be filled, but it would allow everyone time to react and make their moves before items actually started changing hands. Yes, that might allow traders to make bigger moves than people with less capital, but they would likely be on top of things anyway so what difference would that make? What it would do is give everyone else a decent chance at getting into that market before it actually shifts away from them.

In both cases it’s a win-win. The player either improves as a player and increases his knowledge of the game – enabling him to be better off in the future or at the very least pays a good sum of money to Anet for them to continue supporting and developing the game.

You’re leaving out 3. Burning out and moving on to some other game. That happens too, you know. I’ve spent a decent amount of money on the game for gem store things, but I can’t even imagine anything that would convince me to buy gems to exchange for gold, that just seems like cheating.

So if they don’t realize it how is it a pressing matter then?

I explained that in the subsequent paragraph.

So basically let’s give people things they’ve put no effort into obtaining and that they haven’t bothered to learn how to get just because they’re upset that they don’t have them.

In this case, yes. Totally yes. I don’t believe that applies to all aspects of the game, but I simply do not believe, on a fundamental level, that adventure game players should need to understand market economics in order to do well at the adventure game. It just baffles me that this is even a thing people are defending. So long as the TP remains far and away the best way to make money in the game, it needs to be something that anyone can do with their eyes closed. If you want the TP to be something that only a few people can really get and that takes a lot of time and effort to truly master, then it can’t offer the potential of being far more lucrative than other activities. One or the other. Choose.

Would you also agree to give market traders unique skins that can only be obtained through certain types of content?
Should we give Wanze the PvP Legendary backpiece even if he doesn’t pvp just because he wants it and is unhappy? ( no offense, i don’t know if you pvp, just making a point).

I wouldn’t get into that discussion if I were you. I have a long track record of favoring the democratization of “unique” rewards.

In GW2 terms sometimes when you kill a mob you get one gem, then the award goes on an internal cooldown (8 minutes for MH2015, not sure but some number quite similar for WS). After the cooldown is up you have about a 40% chance per critter kill of getting a gem, until you do and the timer starts over.

That’s actually not how it works, although it is a common misconception. It actually works in the opposite manner, the 8-minute clock is a failsafe, not a lock-out. How it actually works is you get a Splinter, and then you can get another one instantly, potentially, on the very next mob, but the odds of that happening are crazy low. Nobody knows the actual drop rate on them, but even with maxed buffs you might only truly earn one of them every 20-30 minutes. But, there is an eight minute timer, so if you don’t earn one through RNG within eight minutes, you get one anyway, and then the timer resets. This means that instead of earning 15 of them over two hours, one every 8 minutes, you’re more likely to earn maybe 17-19 of them, the 15 minimum and a few more you go in between. Of course there are other factors at play that can sometimes make it turn out a bit less, like being overleveled for the map you’re on.

It would be kind of nice if Precursors followed a similar trend, on a much longer scale. Like having a ticking clock, separate from “age”, that only ticks while you’re in active combat. Any time an enemy dies, they have a minute chance of dropping a Precursor, but not a great one. But this clock keeps ticking, and every time it reaches some point, maybe 2K hours, maybe 5K, whatever seems fair, there is an RNG breaker and you get a Precursor Chest from which you can pick the Pre you want, but account bound. Sounds fair to me, if people play that long, fully engaged in the game, they deserve a bit of an RNG-breaker.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t exactly the “gem” currency they use, it’s impossible to buy their “gems” using anything you can earn in game, it’s just that Splinters can be used to buy some of the things they sell in their cash shops, namely characters and team-ups, but not all, such as costumes and their “Black Lion Keys.”

So changes should be made because people feel outrage at something when they don’t even know they feel outrage. I don’t even see any sense in what you’re saying.

It’s called staying on top of things. The most successful companies are the ones that fulfill needs people don’t even realize they have. Just because people can’t describe the reason they are dissatisfied with something does not mean that they are satisfied.

You can feel anything, that doesn’t change reality, and that doesn’t make you entitled to anything more.

It does not, but since this is a consumer product, making the customer happy might be a goo idea. I hate when people throw around “entitlement” as a reason to not give people things that would make them happier. Just because someone is not “entitled” to something doesn’t mean that giving it to them would not be a good idea anyway.

Perhaps I should have been more clear. Demand here is just referring to the amount of an item that people want. What the item is used for is irrelevant, what matters is that more of the item is wanted.

But the amount of an item that people want is entirely dependent on how much they need for the uses to which they want to put it. If you increase the amount needed to do a task, or increase the usefulness of that task, then it will increase demand for the product. If you’re arguing that ANet cannot reach into player’s minds and force them to want a product more, than sure, that is outside the scope of their abilities, but they can obviously create conditions that would cause any rational population of games to choose for themselves to want the item more.

I don’t know what you mean by borrowing it from future customers. No, they don’t create new supply, but they cycle older supply through again.

Right, and if they didn’t exist to do that, then the older supply never would have left the market in the first place. If the market contains 10K mithril, and a trader buys up 5K of it, and another 3K sells to other players, leaving only 2K behind, and that trader then dumps 5K back onto the market putting it back at 7K, then that scenario would not have been significantly altered had the trader never existed. He would not have taken out the 5K he took, other people would still take out 3K, the market would still contain 7K. It’s like if he were George Bailey, only when he was removed from the timeline, it turns out everyone did the exact same things they would have done without him and nothing had changed.

First of all, mithril is a pretty fast market, so I doubt several traders unloading their stocks would keep it low for very long.

I’m just making a random example using a commonly understood item, don’t go too into the weeds on it. Substitute any other market if it makes you feel better.

Additionally, sites like gw2spidy track sell and buy order numbers. It’s not like someone could buy up 50,000 mithril and have no one notice.

A further advantage for those that stay on top of the markets, but something to which 99% of players would be completely oblivious.

Keep context. This was on the subject of precursors. Moreover, if you even read what I wrote, you would know that I’m saying they can affect supply, just not demand for this item.

And again, they can effect both. Changing demand can be slightly slower to react, depending on how it’s done, but they can and have managed it plenty of times before. Even if you want to keep the discussion purely on Precursors, they can and have effected demand for them in the past. The wardrobe, for example, reduced demand for them a bit, since players no longer had much reason to ever own two of the same one. Pre-crafting also reduced market demand at least a little, since players had their own methods of acquiring one (however imperfect). If they reduced the costs involved in the final Legendary recipes, that might increase demand for the Pres, since people would find the final product more affordable. Adding new classes that use a weapon, or adding new effects to a weapon can increase demand for it. Even just making a weapon more “meta” for a given class that could always use it can increase demand for that Legendary. There are plenty of ways for them to manipulate demand.

Why the hell should players who want to spend 5 seconds selling their crap on the market get the same amount of profits as someone who spends a lot of time, effort and thought managing their assets?

Because this is Guild Wars 2, not “Stock Market Simulator 2.”

You don’t understand the voluntary nature of trade. In all voluntary trades, both parties are winners. To call ‘profit’ competitive is a misnomer, because there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners.

ROTFLMAO.

Saying that the market should be a game of high skill, but simultaneously not rewarding, makes no sense. It’s like removing the points from Pac-Man. The gold is how you measure your success. Secondarily, there’s this bizarre feel of “people can be better than me, but they can never do better than me”.

Because again, this is not a market simulator game. Skill at playing the markets should not determine your overall success at GW2. There is a time and a place for that sort of game, it is not within GW2.

It is out of balance by your metrics. This is especially funny considering HoT only just dropped which caused massive changes in prices and price structures across the entire expansion; you’re making a judgment while the market is still settling.

I’ve had these judgements for a very long time, but even that aside, market chaos was avoidable, and they chose not to take the steps to avoid it, so they have no excuse for the state its left things in for the short term.

Ohoni.6057:

Why the hell should players who want to spend 5 seconds selling their crap on the market get the same amount of profits as someone who spends a lot of time, effort and thought managing their assets?

Because this is Guild Wars 2, not “Stock Market Simulator 2.”

We should remove all NPCs then because it’s Guild Wars 2, not PvE Wars 2, and NPCs clearly aren’t in guilds!

At least try to make the sophistry entertaining.

Ohoni.6057:

You don’t understand the voluntary nature of trade. In all voluntary trades, both parties are winners. To call ‘profit’ competitive is a misnomer, because there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners.

ROTFLMAO.

I can only presume this means ‘no, I am not familiar with free trade’.

Ohoni.6057:

Saying that the market should be a game of high skill, but simultaneously not rewarding, makes no sense. It’s like removing the points from Pac-Man. The gold is how you measure your success. Secondarily, there’s this bizarre feel of “people can be better than me, but they can never do better than me”.

Because again, this is not a market simulator game. Skill at playing the markets should not determine your overall success at GW2. There is a time and a place for that sort of game, it is not within GW2.

You can do better than this. At least try to hide the fallacies.

The amount of gold you have is not your overall success in GW2.

Ohoni.6057:

It is out of balance by your metrics. This is especially funny considering HoT only just dropped which caused massive changes in prices and price structures across the entire expansion; you’re making a judgment while the market is still settling.

I’ve had these judgements for a very long time, but even that aside, market chaos was avoidable, and they chose not to take the steps to avoid it, so they have no excuse for the state its left things in for the short term.

My mistake. Fair enough if you think it’s been a consistent problem before HoT.

The market chaos was not just avoidable, it was intentional. They specifically placed material requirements in the way they did to increase the value of a lot of other materials, particularly t2-t4 materials- a change which significantly benefits newer players who are willing to grind for materials.

Again, this has just been disappointing. Please try harder. You said earlier that your goal is not to convince people, but to refine your arguments; you’ve done nothing but provide weak fallacies.

I knew it would be a HUGE mistake to even try to enter into a dialogue with someone like you, Wolf.

Just a (very) brief skim of your post told me I was absolutely correct.

I’m not prepared to continue this “discussion” with someone like you, or even subject myself to reading any more of your bile.

Best of luck, Ohoni.

Ohoni.6057:

100 gold is not hard to make in this game – gathering stuff alone can get you a good amount of gold.

Perhaps, but it may surprise you to know that there are many players who don’t even have that.

90% of players with 500-1000h have ~150g. The median for that hour range is ~500g. In the liquid gold category, of your own source. Factually, you are just plain wrong.

Ohoni.6057:

Also what’s the problem with not using the materials for yourself if you plan to sell them? That’s the trade-off.
When damask first released I crafted and sold every day – I postponed my ascended armor by 30 days in order to get the profit I wanted. I didn’t read a specialized book or talked to an expert to tell me to do this. It is common sense.
Something just came out = it is in high demand = sell now for a lot of money and buy it later when the new thing will be done by more people and thus will become cheaper.

And that is a sound strategy, but it’s still a pretty kitteny one, if you think about it. It means that the people who have a lot fo excess gold don’t have to worry about that. They can just buy the mats as needed and have fun with the new options available right away, while everyone else is only in a position to feed the fatcats for a while until it becomes economically feasible for them to have fun too.

You seem to have the idea that there are the people with tons of money, the people with no money, and no in-between that makes up the vast majority of the demand for these items. And I can tell you for a fact, the people who do have lots of money didn’t get to that point by spending what they had on the expensive new mats.

Ohoni.6057:

Doesn’t that make you sad? Wouldn’t it be better if the prices for things didn’t spike when new options became available, and everyone could afford to participate in the new developments right away?

I like dreams too, especially the ones that couldn’t actually be done.

Ohoni.6057:

If they did this the economy would be even more out-of-whack. Imagine the devs saying what items would be required for some super important thing in the future. Then imagine people who already have cash buying them all up then selling them for a lot more.

Well, keep in mind that I’m considering this as part of a big picture, where reselling items is no longer an option, so the worst a rich person could do is buy up what they need for themselves in advance.

And the system becomes pointless, arbitrary, and economically self-destructive for the sake of ideological goals that weren’t even achieved. What reason did we have for this change? Nothing factual, just ideological goals of one person.

Ohoni.6057:

Short of that, I think it might be a good idea if they shut down transactions on the TP for a short period after making such an announcement, but let people continue to place/remove buy and sell orders, such that when the markets reopened, those orders could be filled, but it would allow everyone time to react and make their moves before items actually started changing hands.

What are you on about? How would that make any sense? Why bother going to all these lengths?

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, that might allow traders to make bigger moves than people with less capital, but they would likely be on top of things anyway so what difference would that make?

You can’t even write a paragraph without forgetting what you started it on.

Ohoni.6057:

In both cases it’s a win-win. The player either improves as a player and increases his knowledge of the game – enabling him to be better off in the future or at the very least pays a good sum of money to Anet for them to continue supporting and developing the game.

You’re leaving out 3. Burning out and moving on to some other game. That happens too, you know. I’ve spent a decent amount of money on the game for gem store things, but I can’t even imagine anything that would convince me to buy gems to exchange for gold, that just seems like cheating.

If large numbers of people burn out and move on, Anet will take note and do something. As of now, I have no reason to believe that this is an issue; quite the opposite, leading up to (and I can only assume after) HoT, PvP was experiencing record player numbers.

Ohoni.6057:

So basically let’s give people things they’ve put no effort into obtaining and that they haven’t bothered to learn how to get just because they’re upset that they don’t have them.

In this case, yes. Totally yes. I don’t believe that applies to all aspects of the game, but I simply do not believe, on a fundamental level, that adventure game players should need to understand market economics in order to do well at the adventure game.

collective facepalm Do you understand the fundamental injustice in the statement you just agreed wi-who am I kidding, of course you don’t.

Ohoni.6057:

It just baffles me that this is even a thing people are defending. So long as the TP remains far and away the best way to make money in the game, it needs to be something that anyone can do with their eyes closed. If you want the TP to be something that only a few people can really get and that takes a lot of time and effort to truly master, then it can’t offer the potential of being far more lucrative than other activities. One or the other. Choose.

So either make it impossible because everyone’s doing it, or make it pointless because it doesn’t reward the effort put in. Your logic is nonexistent, and your justification and reasoning less so.

Ohoni.6057:

Would you also agree to give market traders unique skins that can only be obtained through certain types of content?
Should we give Wanze the PvP Legendary backpiece even if he doesn’t pvp just because he wants it and is unhappy? ( no offense, i don’t know if you pvp, just making a point).

I wouldn’t get into that discussion if I were you. I have a long track record of favoring the democratization of “unique” rewards.

Considering that he wants the PvP backpiece without actually PvPing, yes.

Ohoni.6057:

So changes should be made because people feel outrage at something when they don’t even know they feel outrage. I don’t even see any sense in what you’re saying.

It’s called staying on top of things. The most successful companies are the ones that fulfill needs people don’t even realize they have. Just because people can’t describe the reason they are dissatisfied with something does not mean that they are satisfied.

The very idea of not knowing you feel outraged is self-defeating. What, then, is the difference between not knowing you’re outraged, and not being outraged? And how do we know that this group of people that don’t even know they feel something is large enough to be relevant? Why should Anet give a flying kitten about a few people’s feelings?

Ohoni.6057:

You can feel anything, that doesn’t change reality, and that doesn’t make you entitled to anything more.

It does not, but since this is a consumer product, making the customer happy might be a goo idea. I hate when people throw around “entitlement” as a reason to not give people things that would make them happier.

I hate when people throw around ‘happiness’ as a reason to avoid the name for what they’re actually asking for.

Ohoni.6057:

Just because someone is not “entitled” to something doesn’t mean that giving it to them would not be a good idea anyway.

So just because someone isn’t entitled to something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t entitle them to it. Hmm.

Ohoni.6057:

Perhaps I should have been more clear. Demand here is just referring to the amount of an item that people want. What the item is used for is irrelevant, what matters is that more of the item is wanted.

But the amount of an item that people want is entirely dependent on how much they need for the uses to which they want to put it. If you increase the amount needed to do a task, or increase the usefulness of that task, then it will increase demand for the product. If you’re arguing that ANet cannot reach into player’s minds and force them to want a product more, than sure, that is outside the scope of their abilities, but they can obviously create conditions that would cause any rational population of games to choose for themselves to want the item more.

This made me kittening mad. Not only do you fail to provide a way for a reader to easily access the original quote, but you took it out of context and applied it to something so different from what I was originally talking about the two look nothing alike, then argued against that. I can only put this down to intentional dishonesty. That you have to remove the context, strawman my argument, then argue with that shows how weak your position is. In the past, you’ve done smaller versions of this, and I excused that with a little reminder of the context of that argument, but this takes it to the next level. I’m not going to answer what you said here, not because I can’t, but because you can’t even represent what I said fairly.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know what you mean by borrowing it from future customers. No, they don’t create new supply, but they cycle older supply through again.

Right, and if they didn’t exist to do that, then the older supply never would have left the market in the first place. If the market contains 10K mithril, and a trader buys up 5K of it, and another 3K sells to other players, leaving only 2K behind, and that trader then dumps 5K back onto the market putting it back at 7K, then that scenario would not have been significantly altered had the trader never existed. He would not have taken out the 5K he took, other people would still take out 3K, the market would still contain 7K. It’s like if he were George Bailey, only when he was removed from the timeline, it turns out everyone did the exact same things they would have done without him and nothing had changed.

At least you’re still talking about the same subject. Your example only makes sense if the trader is buying up sell orders. I find it rather ironic that you argue that only the traders know how it works, yet fail to even give them that knowledge. So let’s set up a more thorough pair of examples: there are a total of 11K buy orders, 1K from a trader. There are 12K mithril, 10K in sell orders and 2K in the hands of players about to fill buy orders. With the trader, the buy orders then fall to 9K, with 1K mithril (the non-trader buy orders that got filled) leaving the market. The trader then lists his, ending with 11K sell orders, thus 11K + 12K -> 9K +11K, a net loss of 3K. Without the trader, we start with 10K and 12K. The 2K sell to buy orders, all of it leaving the market. Thus we have 10K + 12K -> 8K + 10K, a net loss of 4K. That 1K not lost in scenario 1 is the result of the trader. It isn’t new supply, but it is supply.

Ohoni.6057:

First of all, mithril is a pretty fast market, so I doubt several traders unloading their stocks would keep it low for very long.

I’m just making a random example using a commonly understood item, don’t go too into the weeds on it. Substitute any other market if it makes you feel better.

If players need it enough that the market gets low on it, the same substitution applies. That new demand makes what might have been an otherwise slow market into something fast and volatile.

Ohoni.6057:

Additionally, sites like gw2spidy track sell and buy order numbers. It’s not like someone could buy up 50,000 mithril and have no one notice.

A further advantage for those that stay on top of the markets, but something to which 99% of players would be completely oblivious.

What I am saying is that it doesn’t really give much illusion to anyone who just has the willingness to do a couple things, starting in-game: /wiki Item (takes you to item wiki page), and clicking the gw2spidy link on that page. It isn’t some obscure, hard-to-locate site with a paywall, anyone can see.

Ohoni.6057:

Keep context. This was on the subject of precursors. Moreover, if you even read what I wrote, you would know that I’m saying they can affect supply, just not demand for this item.

And again, they can effect both. Changing demand can be slightly slower to react, depending on how it’s done, but they can and have managed it plenty of times before. Even if you want to keep the discussion purely on Precursors, they can and have effected demand for them in the past. The wardrobe, for example, reduced demand for them a bit, since players no longer had much reason to ever own two of the same one. Pre-crafting also reduced market demand at least a little, since players had their own methods of acquiring one (however imperfect). If they reduced the costs involved in the final Legendary recipes, that might increase demand for the Pres, since people would find the final product more affordable. Adding new classes that use a weapon, or adding new effects to a weapon can increase demand for it. Even just making a weapon more “meta” for a given class that could always use it can increase demand for that Legendary. There are plenty of ways for them to manipulate demand.

And if you look at the two specific ways you mentioned, wardrobe and precursor crafting, they were pretty kittening huge features. Not exactly subtle adjustments. But that’s all by-the-by, anyway.

Ohoni.6057:

Why the hell should players who want to spend 5 seconds selling their crap on the market get the same amount of profits as someone who spends a lot of time, effort and thought managing their assets?

Because this is Guild Wars 2, not “Stock Market Simulator 2.”

And anyone with less agenda-tinted glasses could see the ridiculousness of both your answer, and that you even agreed with it.

Ohoni.6057:

You don’t understand the voluntary nature of trade. In all voluntary trades, both parties are winners. To call ‘profit’ competitive is a misnomer, because there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners.

ROTFLMAO.

And if you can’t address what he’s saying, you’ve already lost.

Ohoni.6057:

Saying that the market should be a game of high skill, but simultaneously not rewarding, makes no sense. It’s like removing the points from Pac-Man. The gold is how you measure your success. Secondarily, there’s this bizarre feel of “people can be better than me, but they can never do better than me”.

Because again, this is not a market simulator game. Skill at playing the markets should not determine your overall success at GW2. There is a time and a place for that sort of game, it is not within GW2.

So: this isn’t a market simulator, therefore using your understanding of the TP is an invalid playstyle. Conclusion doesn’t follow premise, and premise is irrelevant. Though how you spend so much time on being able to get things via multiple paths, yet want to eliminate one mostly because you don’t like doing it is beyond me. Or why it only ever applies to rewards from other playstyles being brought to yours.

Double standard, I can only assume.

Ohoni.6057:

It is out of balance by your metrics. This is especially funny considering HoT only just dropped which caused massive changes in prices and price structures across the entire expansion; you’re making a judgment while the market is still settling.

I’ve had these judgements for a very long time,

A very long time indeed, and in the face of many answers and explanations by many people.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Makes me think that this is all about the agenda the OP has been espousing in many threads, which is getting what he wants from the game in whatever he thinks a reasonable time frame is. I find the OP heavy on opinion and light on both backing up assertions and consideration of the overall effects of his proposals — yet he has consistently refused to even respond to such claims.

This. This is what I have been trying to explain to the OP throughout the thread. Well said, thank you.

Cyninja.2954:

Truth be told, I’m amazed people still answer in this thread. It’s about time to start a new thread and start all over from scratch.

I answer mostly because a) it’s fun, and b) maybe I’ll eventually get through. Maybe I’m just being a bit naive there.

Cyninja.2954:

Edit: I’m not even going to comment on him refusing to properly quote. Anyone who enjoyed a college education knows that context and proper quotation is mandatory to be taken seriously (or at all to be fair).

It doesn’t even take a college education, just looking at how easily false statistics are perpetuated by a lack of context and a bad source. The main reason I never brought it up was because I assumed that if I did, the OP would make, well, the accusations they did make to the person who did bring it up, and since I’m a large participant, it would have derailed the thread even more.

On a side note, I looked at Ohoni’s other recent posts. He started a thread about PvP leagues, and someone nailed it in less than 10 posts:

It just sounds like you want the prestigious PvP wings without putting any effort into the PvP part of it then.

It won’t format the quote, so I’ll leave a permalink to this post here.
Of course, the answer is: ‘yes ideally.’

We should remove all NPCs then because it’s Guild Wars 2, not PvE Wars 2, and NPCs clearly aren’t in guilds!

No. . . you aren’t really making a lot of sense.

The amount of gold you have is not your overall success in GW2.

And yet Legendary weapons, acknowledged by most as being one of the highest long term goals in the game, are determined almost entirely by gold. I agree with you in so far as gold didn’t have to be the measure of overall success in the game, but the way they implemented everything, it really is, in so far as such goals actually exist at all.

The market chaos was not just avoidable, it was intentional. They specifically placed material requirements in the way they did to increase the value of a lot of other materials, particularly t2-t4 materials- a change which significantly benefits newer players who are willing to grind for materials.

One, “grinding for materials” should not be a supported primary goal. It should be a sideshow, something you do when you pass a resource, not something you actively seek out and farm. I mean, people should be free to choose to do that if they really enjoy it, but it shouldn’t be the expected interaction, it should not be balanced around that being the default way to play.

A lot of you guys seem to be enforcing really fringe ways of playing the game as being the way players should be playing the game. It sounds like if you guys had your way, the game would consist entirely of standing around in LA with your UIs up, and running materials farm circuits, avoiding mobs whenever possible. Forgive me for finding that a bit out of touch with every marketing material every produced for this game, and a complete waste of about 95% of the time and effort the devs have spent making it.

Two, if they want to permanently change the prices of things, by creating new lasting demand and supply shifts, then that’s one thing. But creating short term chaos in the process, when it is avoidable, is something else entirely. My stance in this, whether you agree or not, is that they should always pair supply spikes to demand spikes, resulting in wave-canceling. If they create a ton of new demand, such that anyone can reasonably predict that prices will shoot up 600% and then fall back down to 200% the current prices, then they should design the long term system to be healthy at 200%, the new normal, but also introduce (and well advertise) new temporary supply sources that will allow supply to meet demand, and the price to plateau at 200% and not much higher (after a few hours or days at most of people figuring it out). and of course if players defy expectations and do something else crazy, they should have contingencies in place to either jack up supply a bit more, or pull it back a bit at a moment’s notice.

You seem to have the idea that there are the people with tons of money, the people with no money, and no in-between that makes up the vast majority of the demand for these items. And I can tell you for a fact, the people who do have lots of money didn’t get to that point by spending what they had on the expensive new mats.

And yet once you have a lot, you’re free to spend large chunks of it on nice things and still have plenty left to work with. I mean, as you point out, many players can invest 150g to learn one trade, but that might use up most or all of their disposable income, while someone with tens of thousands of gold might be able to casually drop 5000g on an item and be able to make it back in a matter of weeks through investing the rest of what they have, so why bother over such small figures? The more you have, the more you’re free to spend it without any real drawbacks.

If large numbers of people burn out and move on, Anet will take note and do something. As of now, I have no reason to believe that this is an issue; quite the opposite, leading up to (and I can only assume after) HoT, PvP was experiencing record player numbers.

What does that even have to do with anything we’ve been discussing? PvP saw an increase because people who actually play GW2 don’t PvP much, but the incoming freebie players could just hop in and do it, so it grew. Always be suspicious of “fastest growing,” statistics, that usually means they started at a very low point.

The very idea of not knowing you feel outraged is self-defeating. What, then, is the difference between not knowing you’re outraged, and not being outraged?

I didn’t say that they didn’t know they were outraged, I said that they didn’t know that they were outraged at the TP. I then went on to explain what I meant by that, which you apparently missed, which was that these players would feel generally upset, they would feel that the rewards they wanted seemed out of reach, that they were not achieving their desired goals, and that this might lead to burn out. They might not understand why the goalposts kept moving away from them, but they would still not appreciate it. They know their symptoms, they don’t like their symptoms, they just might not be aware of the cause.

So just because someone isn’t entitled to something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t entitle them to it. Hmm.

Exactly. Just because a homeless person is not entitled to food or housing, it’s still nice to give it to him anyway. There are plenty of things in this world that people are not entitled to, but if you can make them happier then why not do it?

This made me kittening mad. Not only do you fail to provide a way for a reader to easily access the original quote, but you took it out of context and applied it to something so different from what I was originally talking about the two look nothing alike, then argued against that. I can only put this down to intentional dishonesty. That you have to remove the context, strawman my argument, then argue with that shows how weak your position is. In the past, you’ve done smaller versions of this, and I excused that with a little reminder of the context of that argument, but this takes it to the next level. I’m not going to answer what you said here, not because I can’t, but because you can’t even represent what I said fairly.

If you don’t believe that my comment accurately addresses the point you believe you were making, then I can only chalk it up to you failing to make that point well in the first place. You have certainly misunderstood plenty of my comments and run with that misunderstanding in the past, so I think this “outrage” is a bit out of place.

So let’s set up a more thorough pair of examples: there are a total of 11K buy orders, 1K from a trader.

I’ll address the rest in a minute, but I’ll remind you that the context of my example was not talking about a “quick turnaround” flip scenario, which seems to be what you’re talking about, but rather the “maintaining supply” silo scenario, in which a trader buys up stock while the price is low, sits on it for some duration, and reintroduces it when the prices are high again (or just immediately relists it well above the lowest sell prices).

The trader then lists his, ending with 11K sell orders, thus 11K + 12K → 9K +11K, a net loss of 3K. Without the trader, we start with 10K and 12K. The 2K sell to buy orders, all of it leaving the market. Thus we have 10K + 12K → 8K + 10K, a net loss of 4K. That 1K not lost in scenario 1 is the result of the trader. It isn’t new supply, but it is supply.

It’s “hypothetical supply.” It never actually exists. The only way the trader would actually add to the net situation is if he bets wrong and buys more than he can actually sell. He removes 1k of the supply in the beginning, supply that otherwise would have gone to someone that would have used it, and he relists that 1k supply at a higher price later. The actual supply is not just the number of sell orders available at a given moment, it’s the amount of item in total circulation, for sale or ready to be on sale to fill demand.

What I am saying is that it doesn’t really give much illusion to anyone who just has the willingness to do a couple things, starting in-game: /wiki Item (takes you to item wiki page), and clicking the gw2spidy link on that page. It isn’t some obscure, hard-to-locate site with a paywall, anyone can see.

I think you underestimate the average players’ disinterest in economics, and overestimate the level that interest should have to be to play an adventure MMO.

And if you can’t address what he’s saying, you’ve already lost.

Sorry, too busy laughing. I mean, come on, “there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners?” Can you say that without a chuckle? I don’t even thing The Donald could say that without breaking.

So: this isn’t a market simulator, therefore using your understanding of the TP is an invalid playstyle.

If people want to do it, then that’s fine, but it would not be far and away the most effective way at making money in the game. It trivializes all other elements of the game when it comes to accumulating gold, and gold trivializes almost anything else. Again, IF you want to insist that the TP should be considered “just as valid as anything else,” then it MUST be balanced against that other content, so that the best TPers make no more than the best PvEers or PvPers or whatever else. If you insist that the TP shouldn’t be bound by rules of fairness with other types of content, then it must be something that players who enjoy other content can do without exceptional knowledge or attention.

It either needs to be something that everyone can feasibly do without taking time away from the rest of the game, or it needs to be something that players can completely ignore without receiving significantly less than those that play it.

Though how you spend so much time on being able to get things via multiple paths, yet want to eliminate one mostly because you don’t like doing it is beyond me. Or why it only ever applies to rewards from other playstyles being brought to yours.

First, when questioned on the matter, I’ve hypothesized plenty of ways for players to earn things they want from playstyles I don’t personally enjoy. For example I figured out a balanced way, in my opinion, of allowing PvPers to earn Legendary weapons without having to leave PvP, even though I personally want nothing to do with PvP. I’m generally supportive of ALL playstyles gaining access to all rewards. If I’m more vocal about the ones that particularly interest me, that only makes sense, they are the ones that interest me, but if someone else wants to fight for their area of interest, I wouldn’t fight against them.

Second, I do not necessarily want to eliminate the TP as a playstyle entirely, I just want it to be BALANCED against the other playstyles. If they can arrive at a point where time spent on the TP provides equivalent income per hour, day, month, year, as other activities in the game, then that’s fine, but I cannot accept the idea that it should be allowed to provide unchecked income when so much of the game is constrained by daily limits and diminishing returns, and that even without those would still often pay out less than the TP allows. It is not about eliminating a playstyle that I do not like, it’s about insisting that it should follow the same rules as other types of content when it comes to how much a player is allowed to earn in a day.

Ohoni.6057:

We should remove all NPCs then because it’s Guild Wars 2, not PvE Wars 2, and NPCs clearly aren’t in guilds!

No. . . you aren’t really making a lot of sense.

I’m reading back your own logic to you, just changing the labels a little. Basic algebra.

Ohoni.6057:

The amount of gold you have is not your overall success in GW2.

And yet Legendary weapons, acknowledged by most as being one of the highest long term goals in the game, are determined almost entirely by gold. I agree with you in so far as gold didn’t have to be the measure of overall success in the game, but the way they implemented everything, it really is, in so far as such goals actually exist at all.

“Acknowledged by most” hello weasel words. You can think the endgame goals are whatever you want but don’t presume to speak for people unless you can provide evidence.

Ohoni.6057:

The market chaos was not just avoidable, it was intentional. They specifically placed material requirements in the way they did to increase the value of a lot of other materials, particularly t2-t4 materials- a change which significantly benefits newer players who are willing to grind for materials.

One, “grinding for materials” should not be a supported primary goal. It should be a sideshow, something you do when you pass a resource, not something you actively seek out and farm. I mean, people should be free to choose to do that if they really enjoy it, but it shouldn’t be the expected interaction, it should not be balanced around that being the default way to play.

It’s not a supported primary goal. It’s a means to an end.
Yes, it’s something you do when you pass a resource. Guess what: It still gives you more money since HoT launched because the value of those materials rose.
If things have value, it’s kind of stupid to not expect people to grind them.

Ohoni.6057:

A lot of you guys seem to be enforcing really fringe ways of playing the game as being the way players should be playing the game. It sounds like if you guys had your way, the game would consist entirely of standing around in LA with your UIs up, and running materials farm circuits, avoiding mobs whenever possible. Forgive me for finding that a bit out of touch with every marketing material every produced for this game, and a complete waste of about 95% of the time and effort the devs have spent making it.

No, I haven’t done any enforcing, beyond ‘if you want something, earn it’. If anything I think this is projection.
You assuming that I do nothing but sit in LA and farm mining routes says a lot more about you than it does about me.

Ohoni.6057:

Two, if they want to permanently change the prices of things, by creating new lasting demand and supply shifts, then that’s one thing. But creating short term chaos in the process, when it is avoidable, is something else entirely.

No not really. That short term chaos is important. It breaks supply gluts which allows prices to move. It also provides an opportunity for those TP players you so despise to fall flat on their faces when they make bad investments.

Ohoni.6057:

My stance in this, whether you agree or not, is that they should always pair supply spikes to demand spikes, resulting in wave-canceling. If they create a ton of new demand, such that anyone can reasonably predict that prices will shoot up 600% and then fall back down to 200% the current prices, then they should design the long term system to be healthy at 200%, the new normal, but also introduce (and well advertise) new temporary supply sources that will allow supply to meet demand, and the price to plateau at 200% and not much higher (after a few hours or days at most of people figuring it out). and of course if players defy expectations and do something else crazy, they should have contingencies in place to either jack up supply a bit more, or pull it back a bit at a moment’s notice.

Again, you don’t understand free markets. Free markets create this cancelling effect; people move to provide supply to the increased demand and they make more money with their time than they otherwise would.

This is one of the most basic concepts in economic theory. That you think you can provide any insight into how to beneficially shift the economy is the strongest case of the Dunning-Kruger effect that I’ve seen in a while.

DeShadowWolf.6854:

It won’t format the quote, so I’ll leave a permalink to this post here.
Of course, the answer is: ‘yes ideally.’

hahahahaha jesus christ

Ohoni.6057:

Perhaps, but it may surprise you to know that there are many players who don’t even have that.

And that’s because they can’t even manage out the free handouts the game gives you via log-in rewards. Before HoT you could easily make around 60 gold per month off just your login rewards alone. It was that easy.

Even now you can make around 40 or so. Simply by logging in daily and doing nothing else.

How lazy/incapable do one have to be to be unable to make at least 40 gold per month provided it’s being handed out to you for basically logging in?

Ohoni.6057:

And that is a sound strategy, but it’s still a pretty kitteny one, if you think about it. It means that the people who have a lot fo excess gold don’t have to worry about that. They can just buy the mats as needed and have fun with the new options available right away, while everyone else is only in a position to feed the fatcats for a while until it becomes economically feasible for them to have fun too. Doesn’t that make you sad? Wouldn’t it be better if the prices for things didn’t spike when new options became available, and everyone could afford to participate in the new developments right away?

Yes but you fail to realize that even if you have a lot of gold you still need to take care of your finances in order to keep having a lot of gold. My point?
When ascended armor first came out I had enough money to straight up buy one or two sets flat. Did I do that? No. Why? Because I thought things through.

The game had not changed -ascended wasn’t required to complete anything and furthermore very few people would have it at the beginning – so I postponed my set for 30 days and made great profit.
I made this because I had patience and self-control. That’s my point.
Having a lot of gold doesn’t mean anything if you’re incapable of being rational with the way you play. These players need to learn how to make good decisions not just have stuff handed out to them.
This situation doesn’t make me sad – because I accept reality for what it is. I am glad that I was able to discern a good path of action and it led me to a good result for myself.

Ohoni.6057:

Wouldn’t it be better if the prices for things didn’t spike when new options became available, and everyone could afford to participate in the new developments right away?

Honestly – in my personal opinion no. The newer the content the harder it is. The harder it is the better you want your teammates to be.

People that usually have a lot of gold in game ( not 10s of thousands but over 2-3-4-5k) are usually heavily invested players that are also decent at the game, at their class and pretty knowledgeable.
So when new content comes out I’m actually glad there are some walls keeping every newbie and hyper-casual player from coming in because they would flood the potential teammate pool with less useful candidates I don’t want to play with.

Ohoni.6057:

What it would do is give everyone else a decent chance at getting into that market before it actually shifts away from them.

So what you’re asking is for a noob-proof mechanic before huge market shifts to protect people from “the economy”. Great but I disagree.
Lack of knowledge, ability and dedication should be punished in some way – directly or indirectly – this is the basis of any game.
In GW2’s core mechanics if you fail too much at fighting you die. Why should the trading post have a fail safe? Why this aspect of the game and not others?

You fell off a ledge? No problem the new “safe fall” mechanic will keep you alive.

Ohoni.6057:

You’re leaving out 3. Burning out and moving on to some other game. That happens too, you know. I’ve spent a decent amount of money on the game for gem store things, but I can’t even imagine anything that would convince me to buy gems to exchange for gold, that just seems like cheating.

I am not leaving out 3 – 3 is not a solution. I said “The solutions” – giving up is not a solution – it is failing.
I’ll counter with this – if too many people burn out and leave clearly Anet will do something about it because it’s their game and their profit that’s ultimately at stake.
Look at how the Queensdale champ farm was eventually nerfed. Many changes were made when Anet felt they were “leaking” too many players.
I simply don’t think the problem you propose here creates too many “player leaks” or, alternatively I believe that regardless of these leaks the numbers coming in are higher and thus the leaks become less important.

Also regarding gems to gold – congratulations – you are one of the few players I’ve known or heard who holds this view. I’m pretty sure most others use the system fine.

Ohoni.6057:

In this case, yes. Totally yes. I don’t believe that applies to all aspects of the game, but I simply do not believe, on a fundamental level, that adventure game players should need to understand market economics in order to do well at the adventure game. It just baffles me that this is even a thing people are defending. So long as the TP remains far and away the best way to make money in the game, it needs to be something that anyone can do with their eyes closed. If you want the TP to be something that only a few people can really get and that takes a lot of time and effort to truly master, then it can’t offer the potential of being far more lucrative than other activities. One or the other. Choose.

Well here’s another issue then – apart from the fact that I fundamentally disagree with your “yes” answer – when my answer would be “definitely no” – why just in this area of the game? Why just this aspect?
Why not give them the Liadri mini too? I mean if they want it let’s hand it over to them – doesn’t matter if they don’t even know what Liardri is.
Also this is not an “Adventure game” – I have never seen it marketed as such. This is an MMORPG. MMORPG have economies built into them.
You know what an adventure game is? The new Tomb Raider – that’s an adventure game. You seem to be confused as to what you’re playing.

Ohoni.6057:

So long as the TP remains far and away the best way to make money in the game, it needs to be something that anyone can do with their eyes closed. If you want the TP to be something that only a few people can really get and that takes a lot of time and effort to truly master, then it can’t offer the potential of being far more lucrative than other activities. One or the other. Choose.

No – because the choice is stupid. Why does there have to be a choice? Because you want there to be one? because you’re upset?
It makes sense to me that the thing that’s most rewarding and lucrative is also something that’s only accessible to a limited number of individuals that have put in the work and effort to be able to obtain it.
I makes sense to me that things that are so easy that “anyone can do them” should be less rewarding. *The more people can do something the less rewarding it should be because ultimately being bad, disinterested, uninformed and undisciplined should not be rewarded. *

I wouldn’t get into that discussion if I were you. I have a long track record of favoring the democratization of “unique” rewards.

Which would be a very poor move to make. But as you can see the developers are going the exact opposite way – with more unique rewards being added only for certain areas of the game and for certain activities. Including Legendary ones.

Legendary weapons generally have the highest amount of account bound mats needed, its pretty much impossible for tp traders to craft them.

And the trading post is an integral part of tyria, its been said many times, just because you have no skill in it, doesnt mean that Anet should remove it.

And the TP isnt the best way to make money.
The median player makes 15% loss.

There still hasnt been any evidence given that playing the tp give the best rewards on average and that those rewards, if they are there, have any negative impact on the game or other players.
Except jealousy and thats a human fallacy, nothing Anet can do about it.

Ohoni.6057:

We should remove all NPCs then because it’s Guild Wars 2, not PvE Wars 2, and NPCs clearly aren’t in guilds!

No. . . you aren’t really making a lot of sense.

We should remove all traders then because it’s Guild Wars 2, not Market Wars 2, and traders clearly aren’t running around killing mobs.

Are you beginning to see why it doesn’t make sense?

Ohoni.6057:

The amount of gold you have is not your overall success in GW2.

And yet Legendary weapons, acknowledged by most as being one of the highest long term goals in the game, are determined almost entirely by gold.

As Sarrs has already pointed out, weasel words. Nevermind that this ignores world comp, BoH, Bloodstone Shard, Obsidian Shards, dungeon gift, etc.

Ohoni.6057:

The market chaos was not just avoidable, it was intentional. They specifically placed material requirements in the way they did to increase the value of a lot of other materials, particularly t2-t4 materials- a change which significantly benefits newer players who are willing to grind for materials.

One, “grinding for materials” should not be a supported primary goal. It should be a sideshow, something you do when you pass a resource, not something you actively seek out and farm. I mean, people should be free to choose to do that if they really enjoy it, but it shouldn’t be the expected interaction, it should not be balanced around that being the default way to play.

That is your opinion and nothing more. Ironically, ‘grinding for materials’ is a pretty common way to make gold, and can be great if you don’t like the TP. And yet, at the first opportunity, you throw it out because it isn’t a playstyle you like.

Ohoni.6057:

A lot of you guys seem to be enforcing really fringe ways of playing the game as being the way players should be playing the game. It sounds like if you guys had your way, the game would consist entirely of standing around in LA with your UIs up, and running materials farm circuits, avoiding mobs whenever possible.

cough cough projection cough cough
No, I’m not enforcing anything of the type. If you enjoy something, I say play it. This is a game, go have fun if that’s what you want to do. Just don’t do something simple, then expect the rewards that Wanze spends hours each day working out how to get.

But it sounds like if you had your way, players would get exactly 1s for vendoring any item, and the TP would be abolished so you could never buy with that money what you need, and sell items you don’t for more than the token silver.
/s

Ohoni.6057:

Forgive me for finding that a bit out of touch with every marketing material every produced for this game, and a complete waste of about 95% of the time and effort the devs have spent making it.

And forgive me for finding it a total, projecting strawman of what we’ve said here.

Ohoni.6057:

Two, if they want to permanently change the prices of things, by creating new lasting demand and supply shifts, then that’s one thing. But creating short term chaos in the process, when it is avoidable, is something else entirely.

Or, perhaps, perhaps, the two are linked and that short-term chaos is what opens the supply/demand to the lasting change. Eh, what do I know, of course it’s Anet’s fault, regardless.

Ohoni.6057:

My stance in this, whether you agree or not,

And that is where the discussion ends and agenda-pushing begins. Your personal stance is completely irrelevant to the game.

Ohoni.6057:

is that they should always pair supply spikes to demand spikes, resulting in wave-canceling. If they create a ton of new demand, such that anyone can reasonably predict that prices will shoot up 600% and then fall back down to 200% the current prices, then they should design the long term system to be healthy at 200%, the new normal, but also introduce (and well advertise) new temporary supply sources that will allow supply to meet demand, and the price to plateau at 200% and not much higher (after a few hours or days at most of people figuring it out).

But Anet isn’t looking to price-coddle you. They want to change markets, shake things up, increase volatility. The only reason you want this to be done is so you can buy things cheaper, because you aren’t willing to put more effort into getting what you want.

Ohoni.6057:

You seem to have the idea that there are the people with tons of money, the people with no money, and no in-between that makes up the vast majority of the demand for these items. And I can tell you for a fact, the people who do have lots of money didn’t get to that point by spending what they had on the expensive new mats.

And yet once you have a lot, you’re free to spend large chunks of it on nice things and still have plenty left to work with.

And you clearly don’t understand how they got there. Hint: saving without spending.

Ohoni.6057:

I mean, as you point out, many players can invest 150g to learn one trade, but that might use up most or all of their disposable income, while someone with tens of thousands of gold might be able to casually drop 5000g on an item and be able to make it back in a matter of weeks through investing the rest of what they have, so why bother over such small figures?

Because they could make that money faster by investing that 5000g, although it’s really more like a few months, based on previous info in this thread. And here is one difference between that kind of player and the one that just leveled a craft: the latter will go to the forums and whine about costs, while the former will get to work on the gold they want.

Ohoni.6057:

If large numbers of people burn out and move on, Anet will take note and do something. As of now, I have no reason to believe that this is an issue; quite the opposite, leading up to (and I can only assume after) HoT, PvP was experiencing record player numbers.

What does that even have to do with anything we’ve been discussing?

You brought up burning out, and I’m saying that doesn’t appear to be an issue. As for the record player numbers:

Ohoni.6057:

PvP saw an increase because people who actually play GW2 don’t PvP much, but the incoming freebie players could just hop in and do it, so it grew. Always be suspicious of “fastest growing,” statistics, that usually means they started at a very low point.

It’s just an example of why this isn’t an issue. I’ve even dug up the quote (source) for it:

PvP has steadily grown in population and play hours going on nearly a year now. It’s sky-rocketed since the game went free, and the two weeks before this have been our best weeks literally since the week the game launched. We anticipate this week will be the best week login/play wise PvP has ever had in the history of Gw2.

So yeah.

Ohoni.6057:

The very idea of not knowing you feel outraged is self-defeating. What, then, is the difference between not knowing you’re outraged, and not being outraged?

I didn’t say that they didn’t know they were outraged, I said that they didn’t know that they were outraged at the TP. I then went on to explain what I meant by that, which you apparently missed, which was that these players would feel generally upset, they would feel that the rewards they wanted seemed out of reach, that they were not achieving their desired goals, and that this might lead to burn out.

Can you prove that this group is large enough for Anet to seriously care? Can you demonstrate that this is negatively affecting the game in a serious way? Do you even have any evidence beyond your word that this really exists?

Ohoni.6057:

They know their symptoms, they don’t like their symptoms, they just might not be aware of the cause.

And of course you, being the brilliant doctor you are, are the perfect person to diagnose why other people feel the way they do, and Anet, of course, must defer to you because you know just what the playerbase feels and wants.
/s

Ohoni.6057:

So just because someone isn’t entitled to something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t entitle them to it. Hmm.

Exactly. Just because a homeless person is not entitled to food or housing, it’s still nice to give it to him anyway. There are plenty of things in this world that people are not entitled to, but if you can make them happier then why not do it?

Uh-huh. Yep. And that’s why there are no laws trying to support/reduce homelessness
/s
Simply put, they are entitled to a standard of living, which is why there are places that do their best to help these people, serve them meals, etc. That’s because there is a standard of living, though to be sure, it isn’t always met. There is no equivalent standard of living in GW2.

Ohoni.6057:

This made me kittening mad. Not only do you fail to provide a way for a reader to easily access the original quote, but you took it out of context and applied it to something so different from what I was originally talking about the two look nothing alike, then argued against that. I can only put this down to intentional dishonesty. That you have to remove the context, strawman my argument, then argue with that shows how weak your position is. In the past, you’ve done smaller versions of this, and I excused that with a little reminder of the context of that argument, but this takes it to the next level. I’m not going to answer what you said here, not because I can’t, but because you can’t even represent what I said fairly.

If you don’t believe that my comment accurately addresses the point you believe you were making, then I can only chalk it up to you failing to make that point well in the first place. You have certainly misunderstood plenty of my comments and run with that misunderstanding in the past, so I think this “outrage” is a bit out of place.

Alright then, let’s make this clear. I am going to quote myself, placing what I originally said above, then me responding to your response:

That said, traders create more demand and effectively create more supply by keeping items in the market.

DeShadowWolf.6854:

Ohoni.6057:

Traders do neither. Traders do not create demand because they don’t actually use the products. Any demand they personally have is only borrowed from their future customers, it is those eventual customers that create the demand. Any supply they influence, they bought off someone else, so they do not create supply either. All they do with either is shift it in time.

Perhaps I should have been more clear. Demand here is just referring to the amount of an item that people want. What the item is used for is irrelevant, what matters is that more of the item is wanted. I don’t know what you mean by borrowing it from future customers. No, they don’t create new supply, but they cycle older supply through again. If they hadn’t added that supply back in, the buyer would have been buying from new supply.

This is pretty clear. I was explaining precisely how I was using the word ‘demand.’ Moreover, this is within the topic of how a trader affects demand. Now let’s look at your response:

But the amount of an item that people want is entirely dependent on how much they need for the uses to which they want to put it. If you increase the amount needed to do a task, or increase the usefulness of that task, then it will increase demand for the product. If you’re arguing that ANet cannot reach into player’s minds and force them to want a product more, than sure, that is outside the scope of their abilities, but they can obviously create conditions that would cause any rational population of games to choose for themselves to want the item more.

You took what I was saying out of context, applied a clarification as if it were an argument, then talked about things that had absolutely nothing to do with the previous discussion. I wasn’t talking about what demand is dependent on, or Anet’s ability to affect demand. I was talking about my usage of the word within the context of traders affecting demand. Do you see what I mean?

Ohoni.6057:

So let’s set up a more thorough pair of examples: there are a total of 11K buy orders, 1K from a trader.

I’ll address the rest in a minute, but I’ll remind you that the context of my example was not talking about a “quick turnaround” flip scenario, which seems to be what you’re talking about, but rather the “maintaining supply” silo scenario, in which a trader buys up stock while the price is low, sits on it for some duration, and reintroduces it when the prices are high again (or just immediately relists it well above the lowest sell prices).

Ah ok. Then let’s set up another hypothetical. There is a base supply/demand of 10k each, with an additional 1k demand from a trader. There are another 6k supply over the waiting period, all sold to buy orders. Over the waiting period, 5k new buy orders will be placed and 5k supply will be bought directly. That brings the values for the start of each scenario at 21k-16k and 20k-16k, the difference being the trader.
The effects with a trader:
Demand: 10k
-1k trader, -5k (from held supply), -5k (bought from sell)
Supply: 6k
+1k trader (before), -6k buy orders, -5k sell orders (buyers)
The effects without a trader:
Demand: 9k
-6k (held supply), -5k (bought from sell)
Supply: 5k
-6k buy orders, -5k sell orders (buyers)
So, with the trader, we end up with an effective 1k more supply and 1k more demand. Same ideas apply here as before.

Ohoni.6057:

The trader then lists his, ending with 11K sell orders, thus 11K + 12K -> 9K +11K, a net loss of 3K. Without the trader, we start with 10K and 12K. The 2K sell to buy orders, all of it leaving the market. Thus we have 10K + 12K -> 8K + 10K, a net loss of 4K. That 1K not lost in scenario 1 is the result of the trader. It isn’t new supply, but it is supply.

It’s “hypothetical supply.” It never actually exists.

The scenario with a trader ends with 1k more supply than the one without in both examples. That isn’t ‘hypothetical supply’ (besides the hypothetical nature of the example), you can’t just wave that difference away.

Ohoni.6057:

The only way the trader would actually add to the net situation is if he bets wrong and buys more than he can actually sell.

So you’re acknowledging that it’s real supply, you just discount it because people buy it. That makes no sense.

Ohoni.6057:

He removes 1k of the supply in the beginning, supply that otherwise would have gone to someone that would have used it, and he relists that 1k supply at a higher price later. The actual supply is not just the number of sell orders available at a given moment, it’s the amount of item in total circulation, for sale or ready to be on sale to fill demand.

That’s the basis of my example above, and you can see what results it had. And yes, the supply is the total amount. That is why, in both examples, I counted items that weren’t on the market but would be sold as supply.

Ohoni.6057:

What I am saying is that it doesn’t really give much illusion to anyone who just has the willingness to do a couple things, starting in-game: /wiki Item (takes you to item wiki page), and clicking the gw2spidy link on that page. It isn’t some obscure, hard-to-locate site with a paywall, anyone can see.

I think you underestimate the average players’ disinterest in economics, and overestimate the level that interest should have to be to play an adventure MMO.

The average player is not the point. The point is that there is no illusion, the data is open and easy to access. This is another example of you failing to provide context, I wasn’t talking about what’s needed to play an MMORPG.

Ohoni.6057:

And if you can’t address what he’s saying, you’ve already lost.

Sorry, too busy laughing. I mean, come on, “there are no losers in voluntary trade, only winners?” Can you say that without a chuckle? I don’t even thing The Donald could say that without breaking.

Still haven’t addressed it.

Ohoni.6057:

So: this isn’t a market simulator, therefore using your understanding of the TP is an invalid playstyle.

If people want to do it, then that’s fine, but it would not be far and away the most effective way at making money in the game. It trivializes all other elements of the game when it comes to accumulating gold, and gold trivializes almost anything else. Again, IF you want to insist that the TP should be considered “just as valid as anything else,” then it MUST be balanced against that other content, so that the best TPers make no more than the best PvEers or PvPers or whatever else. If you insist that the TP shouldn’t be bound by rules of fairness with other types of content, then it must be something that players who enjoy other content can do without exceptional knowledge or attention.

And you still fail to understand ~1/3 of this thread. On the other hand, by your logic, we should give the top TPers $5,000 each. After all, that’s what the best PvPers make.

Ohoni.6057:

It either needs to be something that everyone can feasibly do without taking time away from the rest of the game, or it needs to be something that players can completely ignore without receiving significantly less than those that play it.

And either way, it needs to become pointless to do. Why? Ohoni doesn’t like you doing it.

Ohoni.6057:

Though how you spend so much time on being able to get things via multiple paths, yet want to eliminate one mostly because you don’t like doing it is beyond me. Or why it only ever applies to rewards from other playstyles being brought to yours.

First, when questioned on the matter, I’ve hypothesized plenty of ways for players to earn things they want from playstyles I don’t personally enjoy.

Except the TP, because everyone knows that’s not a playstyle or part of the game.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m generally supportive of ALL playstyles gaining access to all rewards. If I’m more vocal about the ones that particularly interest me, that only makes sense, they are the ones that interest me, but if someone else wants to fight for their area of interest, I wouldn’t fight against them.

Alright, so lets give TPers account bound currencies like the new map-based ones! And map completion Badges of Honor! And the HoT maps Shards of Glory….
Except that defeats the point.

Ohoni.6057:

Second, I do not necessarily want to eliminate the TP as a playstyle entirely, I just want it to be BALANCED against the other playstyles. If they can arrive at a point where time spent on the TP provides equivalent income per hour, day, month, year, as other activities in the game, then that’s fine, but I cannot accept the idea that it should be allowed to provide unchecked income when

The words ‘I cannot accept’ are the end of debate and the start of personal agenda-pushing. But of course that’s by the by for you, so go on.

so much of the game is constrained by daily limits and diminishing returns, and that even without those would still often pay out less than the TP allows. It is not about eliminating a playstyle that I do not like, it’s about insisting that it should follow the same rules as other types of content when it comes to how much a player is allowed to earn in a day.

And killing moas should be just as rewarding as the Vale Guardian! And the money from PvP matches should be tied precisely to the amount of money from a Dragon’s Stand run! And-okay, you get the point, it makes no sense.
But just because something makes no sense doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be added!
/s

Tigaseye.2047:

I knew it would be a HUGE mistake to even try to enter into a dialogue with someone like you, Wolf.

Just a (very) brief skim of your post told me I was absolutely correct.

If you don’t like me or what I say, that’s fine. I don’t care, I have no control or responsibility for how you feel about my words.

Tigaseye.2047:

I’m not prepared to continue this “discussion” with someone like you, or even subject myself to reading any more of your bile.

If you aren’t able to handle a discussion where people can respond to what you say and have differing opinions, you can leave. That’s fine. I see you couldn’t resist an insult on the way out, though.

DeShadowWolf.6854:

And killing moas should be just as rewarding as the Vale Guardian!

Man if you knew a good place to farm Moas I would be all up in that. Poultry Meat and Eggs, man.

Sarrs.4831:

DeShadowWolf.6854:

And killing moas should be just as rewarding as the Vale Guardian!

Man if you knew a good place to farm Moas I would be all up in that. Poultry Meat and Eggs, man.

Poultry Meat lost 80% value ever since saurians and wyvern entered the game.

But have fun farming moas.

The whole western edge of Gendarran Fields. The entire area is hell if you have any sort of bird-dander allergies.

AAAHH-choo! ((sniffle))

DeShadowWolf.6854:

Tigaseye.2047:

I’m not prepared to continue this “discussion” with someone like you, or even subject myself to reading any more of your bile.

If you aren’t able to handle a discussion where people can respond to what you say and have differing opinions, you can leave. That’s fine. I see you couldn’t resist an insult on the way out, though.

If you think me describing your comments as “bile” (which just means angry/peevish, BTW) is an insult, that suggests to me that you either don’t really know what it means and/or are coming across in a way that you do not intend.

In general, I’m perfectly happy to talk to people who are prepared to play nicely.

I’m not, on the other hand, prepared to entertain those who aren’t and/or can’t.

Having said, that, I think this particular topic is more than played out, already, personally.

Especially, as most of the regular, non-flipping, players aren’t even commenting.

Presumably, because they are far less inclined to hang out on a game forum all day and night and can see the kind of reception they will receive, if they do dare to say anything.

If you make the choice to not value any of the luxury items on a personal level, then all 7 pages in this thread become relatively pointless.

I tend to use my time to participate in activities that have the highest enjoyment value for me in the moment and less on how efficiently they generate money or give awards. Ascended and legendaries are largely just side activities I spend the cash on I earn naturally in those activities.

MadRabbit.3179:

If you make the choice to not value any of the luxury items on a personal level, then all 7 pages in this thread become relatively pointless.

I tend to use my time to participate in activities that have the highest enjoyment value for me in the moment and less on how efficiently they generate money or give awards. Ascended and legendaries are largely just side activities I spend the cash on I earn naturally in those activities.

best comment for pages.
Just enjoy the game and play at your own pace.
Unfortunately, some poeple dont like how others play and envy their progression on earning some currencies in the game.

No, Wanze, that is not the problem here and you know it.

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

Obviously, if no one wants any of the rewards (or to accumulate gold) in a game, none of this matters; but the truth is that most people do want some, or all, of them.

Assuming that is, inevitably, going to be the case (and just as well, for Anet’s bank balance, that it is), the problem is that one, niche, way of playing the game is FAR better than others at achieving them.

The “choice” in a game should, pretty obviously, not be “Play the TP, be rich IRL, or become a Buddhist.”.

Much as I admire Buddhists…

Tigaseye.2047:

No, Wanze, that is not the problem here and you know it.

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

Obviously, if no one wants any of the rewards (or to accumulate gold) in a game, none of this matters; but the truth is that most people do want some, or all, of them.

Assuming that is, inevitably, going to be the case (and just as well, for Anet’s bank balance, that it is), the problem is that one, niche, way of playing the game is FAR better than others at achieving them.

The “choice” in a game should, pretty obviously, not be “Play the TP, be rich IRL, or become a Buddhist.”.

Much as I admire Buddhists…

So please tell me how much a trader makes?
And who is a trader?
Basically anybody who uses it.
Anet cant do much about it, if people choose to sell their goods for less value instead of waiting for a better price.
I always here how much gold people make on the tp and how other content should have the same ratio.
But those people never mention how they want to implement the risk that is involved in trading into other content rewards.

And what about all those currencies and account bound mats that you cant get on the tp? How will you make those available to those who like the trading post as their content?

Would you be fine, if you would get the choice, every time you get a gold reward, to wait 1 week to 3 months (rng based) to either get 50%, 75%, 150%,200% or 300% of the initial reward?
Because thats the risk and pay out involved with trading.

And i never said nobody wants gold, i just said some people are more concerned about the gold other people get than their own.

Tigaseye.2047:

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

If you genuinely think he’s lying to try to push forward an agenda why are you even engaging him?

Tigaseye.2047:

No, Wanze, that is not the problem here and you know it.

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

Obviously, if no one wants any of the rewards (or to accumulate gold) in a game, none of this matters; but the truth is that most people do want some, or all, of them.

Assuming that is, inevitably, going to be the case (and just as well, for Anet’s bank balance, that it is), the problem is that one, niche, way of playing the game is FAR better than others at achieving them.

The “choice” in a game should, pretty obviously, not be “Play the TP, be rich IRL, or become a Buddhist.”.

Much as I admire Buddhists…

I think you missed the point MadRabbit was making.

His point was:

- he plays the parts of GW2 he enjoys
- he doesn’t care about others getting shinies before him
- playing the content he enjoys provides him with enough gold to aquire the amount of ascended/legendarys to his liking

And that’s just the case. You could even only pvp all day, and eventually you’d get enough gold to deckout in ascendedIf you stoped worrying about how much others are making but instead focused on ejoying the game, you’d greatly improve your gaming experience in GW2.

This has nothing to do with “not wanting rewards”. It has to do with “you’ll get them eventually while having fun”. Maybe stop trying to race down everything but instead enjoy the game.

It would also free you of the envy against others who can spend more time, spend more money, are better organised, are better skilled, etc.

Oh and you’d have a lot more longterm goals and enjoyment too.

I just want to chime in. Not as an economy or psychology expert but as an average player. Working towards most goals in this game isn’t fun because they directly or indirectly require huge amounts of gold. Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore and ultimately end up dropping not only the content but the game itself.

The game needs income. People purchasing gem shop items or gold with real money. Something which I’m not opposed to. However, the amount of items coming in through the gem shop only and the frequency they come with and the in-game things that requires a high amount of gold makes it so that the amount of real money required for someone who likes these things but can’t or doesn’t want to do the two most profitable activities (playing the market or dedicating entire days to grinding repetable content) ends up so high that they might as well be paying several monthly subscriptions. To just one game.

Tea.7025:

I just want to chime in. Not as an economy or psychology expert but as an average player. Working towards most goals in this game isn’t fun because they directly or indirectly require huge amounts of gold. Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore and ultimately end up dropping not only the content but the game itself.

The game needs income. People purchasing gem shop items or gold with real money. Something which I’m not opposed to. However, the amount of items coming in through the gem shop only and the frequency they come with and the in-game things that requires a high amount of gold makes it so that the amount of real money required for someone who likes these things but can’t or doesn’t want to do the two most profitable activities (playing the market or dedicating entire days to grinding repetable content) ends up so high that they might as well be paying several monthly subscriptions. To just one game.

I think you see items as too expensive not because Anet prices them too high but because other players value the required mats or opportunity costs that are involved in making them too high for your taste.
Traders just make so much gold because they offer a service of convenience to other players and are willing to wait for their personal profits instead of wanting instant gratification.
The same goes for farmers. They are willing to put in hours of (boring) gameplay in order to farm mats that other players need but cant be bothered to farm themselves.
Even if Anet would buff gold rewards for every content, it wont make you acquire your wanted items faster compared to the other players now. Because they will put in more hours, earn more gold and therefore are willing to pay more gold for the mats you compete with.

And the trader in general doesnt really care wether gold faucets are turned up or not.
If the player base has more gold at their disposal, they are willing to spend more gold for convenience and service, so he makes proportionally more gold.

If you only play 1 or 2 hours a day but want to acquire the same rewards at the same pace as someone who plays 5-6 hours, the only way would be to cap that players earnings after 1-2 hours. I doubt that that player would bother to play the remaining 4 hours and I am not sure that that would be beneficial to Anet or the game in general.

Tea.7025:

I just want to chime in. Not as an economy or psychology expert but as an average player. Working towards most goals in this game isn’t fun because they directly or indirectly require huge amounts of gold. Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore and ultimately end up dropping not only the content but the game itself.

The game needs income. People purchasing gem shop items or gold with real money. Something which I’m not opposed to. However, the amount of items coming in through the gem shop only and the frequency they come with and the in-game things that requires a high amount of gold makes it so that the amount of real money required for someone who likes these things but can’t or doesn’t want to do the two most profitable activities (playing the market or dedicating entire days to grinding repetable content) ends up so high that they might as well be paying several monthly subscriptions. To just one game.

They say a rising tide (more gold coming in to all players) lifts all boats (the players). But what happens after all the boats are lifted up? In comparison to all the other players, you’re still at the same spot. However all the other players now also have more gold to spend. What happens when lots of gold is chasing after scarce items? Prices go up. In no time at all, you would be back on the forum complaining you don’t have enough gold to buy things because they are too expensive. Nothing at all would have changed.

Tigaseye.2047:

No, Wanze, that is not the problem here and you know it.

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

Obviously, if no one wants any of the rewards (or to accumulate gold) in a game, none of this matters; but the truth is that most people do want some, or all, of them.

Assuming that is, inevitably, going to be the case (and just as well, for Anet’s bank balance, that it is), the problem is that one, niche, way of playing the game is FAR better than others at achieving them.

The “choice” in a game should, pretty obviously, not be “Play the TP, be rich IRL, or become a Buddhist.”.

Much as I admire Buddhists…

How do you know what my cause or agenda is?
If you think its accumulating more gold, youre wrong. I have enough of that, i dont need more. Personally, gold has very little value to me and there is not much i desire.

I am just arguing against you guys because i dont think tp traders are the source of all evil, in fact if there werent any speculators and flippers, the economy would be way more unbalanced because overly supplied items would go to vendor value way faster and in demand items would see higher price spikes.

The problems you guys have arent there because of the existance of tp traders, they are there because of the personal choices you make and there is nothing Anet can do about it.

I am just against any suggestion that came up here because i dont think it will benefit the game or even solve your initial problem.

Some people play by their own self-imposed rules and think it’s “cheap” when people don’t share their mental prisons. In fighting games for example some people think you’re only legitimately “good” if you do hard to execute moves but sometimes there are simple counters. Learn to counter projectiles and throw spam, they’ll find a counter to that counter, and so on.

Likewise it’s the same with the trading post. The mechanics make flipping and speculation viable and even optimal for those skilled so why not reward that skill?

Tea.7025:

Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore.

This isn’t necessarily true at the moment, mostly because of what the precursor collections did to the state of the market.

If you have a crafting profession high enough to make ascended materials, you can turn a reasonable profit just by participating in end game content, because of tier 5 materials you receive in bulk from salvaging all the greens and blues.

You can produce the time-gated ascended component from your salvaged tier 5, straight up buy the tier 2-4 materials and sell the ascended leather, cloth, plank or ingot for roughly 3-4 gold profit.

If you played enough content to get enough tier 5 components to use all four timers, you can turn 12-16 gold profit a day off of that.

In addition to that, I think right now just simply banking all the materials I dont use to make ascended materials that I get from just playing content and dumping it once a week comes out to like 60-90 gold, depending on how much ecto I want to sell at the time.

I just recently made an ascended breather just because I didn’t have anything else I wanted to make at the moment in about a week and a half, mostly just by playing the game, selling the materials, and making ascended ignots and planks to generate profit to use to make cloth and leather for the breather.

And the big thing is…most of the big ticket items that require a huge investment don’t block you from playing the game you purchased.

Now, this has changed somewhat since the launch of the game. High level fractals require ascended for agony resistance and the difficulty of the new raids makes people require ascended for max stats. The developers choice to place new stat prefixes behind, in some cases, extreme time and money walls, which is probably the biggest concern I have. You can’t just hit 80 more and just have a full set of exotic in a week from karma, 50 gold, WvW tokens, PvP tracks or dungeon tokens if you want to use prefixs like Zealots, Vipers or Celestial. That is probably the biggest concern I have with the current state of the game, because players who want to fulfill certain roles with certain builds are being arbitrarily punished.

But beyond that, it’s not that bad. Even the initial investment to level a crafting skill is considerably lower now, because the precursor collections added trophy items that can level you from 300-500 for considerably less money than it took before.

It’s very easy now to get a set of ascended trinkets which will provide you with enough AR to care you into the level 30 fractals. I think it took me about a month and a half to make a full set of ascended armor for my alt, because I got 3 ascended armor drops in that time and made the other 3 pieces.

And now that I have a full set of ascended on my main and have completed a legendary weapon, my main issue at the moment is what to spend money on, because there isn’t much I actually need. There is really no pressure except self inflicted pressure.

Hell, I want an alternative set of ascended armor for my main with a different stat prefix to use with a specific build and I don’t really feel any need or pressure to craft it. I already have one set of ascended that allows me to do fractals up into the 70s; I am fine just waiting to get random ascended armor drops and change the stat prefixs in the mystic forge.

On the subject of legendaries, it took me roughly 2 years of just playing casually with no agenda of grinding to acquire the 3 gifts and bank enough money to make the precursor in the first week of HoT before the market shifted. I think that is a pretty reasonable for an item considered to be legendary and makes it’s acquisition all the more satisfying to me. Yeah, it kind of sucks someone can use a credit card to significantly speed that process, but at the end of the day, it is a cosmetic item and if that’s going to fund more content development, I am happy.

And being upset, because of the impracticality of acquiring all of the legendaries without flipping items on the TP or using a credit card just comes off greedy as hell to me and I don’t have much sympathy for.

Ohoni.6057:

I simply do not believe, on a fundamental level, that adventure game players should need to understand market economics in order to do well at the adventure game.

Luckily for all of us your belief is already reality. One does not need o understand market economics in order to do well at adventure gaming in GW2.

Ohoni.6057:

Because this is Guild Wars 2, not “Stock Market Simulator 2.”

And yet you proposed a preference for increasing precursor drops based on killing mobs despite the fact that this is GW2 not, “Mob Slayer 2.”

Ohoni.6057:

Because again, this is not a market simulator game.

You are mistaken. This discussion would not exist if market simulation was not an aspect of this game. Perhaps you mean that it should not be a market simulation game (in addition to all of the other types of game that it is). That is a different discussion entirely, but arguing to have an aspect of the game taken away from other players because you do not personally wish to participate in it is a bit off in my opinion.

GW2 is:

A combat simulation game.
A platforming game.
A roleplaying game.
A market simulation game.
An exploration game.
and plenty of others I am sure that I have missed.

Wanze, quick question if I may?

Do you have every story, slayer, and weaponmaster achievement?

Tea.7025:

I just want to chime in. Not as an economy or psychology expert but as an average player. Working towards most goals in this game isn’t fun because they directly or indirectly require huge amounts of gold. Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore and ultimately end up dropping not only the content but the game itself.

This is the nature of MMO’s. ANet set out to make an MMO that was different, but only different in some ways. They also wanted to attract players who like MMO’s. To do that, they had to include some aspects common to MMO’s, rewards and long-term goals being the two under discussion in this thread. The problem comes in because the ongoing financial health of the development company — and thus the longevity of the game — depends on maintaining a large player-base. This is true whether the financial model is sub, sub + XPac, F2P + store or B2P + XPac + store.

Tea.7025:

The game needs income. People purchasing gem shop items or gold with real money. Something which I’m not opposed to. However, the amount of items coming in through the gem shop only and the frequency they come with and the in-game things that requires a high amount of gold makes it so that the amount of real money required for someone who likes these things but can’t or doesn’t want to do the two most profitable activities (playing the market or dedicating entire days to grinding repeatable content) ends up so high that they might as well be paying several monthly subscriptions. To just one game.

All rewards don’t appeal to all players. Players who don’t care for reward X will choose to refrain from getting it. In order to keep the servers on, ANet generates as much in the way of rewards as they can manage. It’s still not enough for some players. There’s a lot of stuff because ANet needs to both provide things for people to chase (in-game rewards) and for those who want to buy stuff (gem store stuff).

Problems for individual players come in because they want more of those rewards than their play-style or life-style choices allow them to readily get. It’s certainly possible to choose to pursue one such goal at a time, play how and when one wants and get the item at some point. Such a player would be playing as he wanted, and might never run out of goals. Sure, adopting the desire for rewards of a hardcore (time spent in game) player and/or a content grinder while wanting a more relaxed play-style is a blueprint for dissatisfaction. But, who made that choice?

Ashen.2907:

GW2 is:
A combat simulation game.
A platforming game.
A roleplaying game.
A market simulation game.
An exploration game.
and plenty of others I am sure that I have missed.

Anet describes GW2 as a Living, Breathing Fantasy World. Trade and Commerce existed ever since people started interacting with each other, so i dont know why it shouldnt be implemented in GW2 as well. Trade and commerce also existed in the adventure games of old but then you mostly interacted with npcs to do so because there wasnt an online aspect of the game and you were the only real person in it.
An mmo is a game where alot of people interact with each other and i dont know why OP doesnt see trade between players as something that shouldnt exist.
If he doesnt want to interact with other people, he should play a single player adventure game.

Tea.7025:

I just want to chime in. Not as an economy or psychology expert but as an average player. Working towards most goals in this game isn’t fun because they directly or indirectly require huge amounts of gold. Making gold isn’t fun. You either play the market (something only a select few can do or otherwise there would be no profit in it) or do the easiest, fastest, most profitable but boring and repetitive content until you can’t stomach it anymore and ultimately end up dropping not only the content but the game itself.

This is the nature of MMO’s. ANet set out to make an MMO that was different, but only different in some ways. They also wanted to attract players who like MMO’s. To do that, they had to include some aspects common to MMO’s, rewards and long-term goals being the two under discussion in this thread. The problem comes in because the ongoing financial health of the development company — and thus the longevity of the game — depends on maintaining a large player-base. This is true whether the financial model is sub, sub + XPac, F2P + store or B2P + XPac + store.

Tea.7025:

The game needs income. People purchasing gem shop items or gold with real money. Something which I’m not opposed to. However, the amount of items coming in through the gem shop only and the frequency they come with and the in-game things that requires a high amount of gold makes it so that the amount of real money required for someone who likes these things but can’t or doesn’t want to do the two most profitable activities (playing the market or dedicating entire days to grinding repeatable content) ends up so high that they might as well be paying several monthly subscriptions. To just one game.

All rewards don’t appeal to all players. Players who don’t care for reward X will choose to refrain from getting it. In order to keep the servers on, ANet generates as much in the way of rewards as they can manage. It’s still not enough for some players. There’s a lot of stuff because ANet needs to both provide things for people to chase (in-game rewards) and for those who want to buy stuff (gem store stuff).

Problems for individual players come in because they want more of those rewards than their play-style or life-style choices allow them to readily get. It’s certainly possible to choose to pursue one such goal at a time, play how and when one wants and get the item at some point. Such a player would be playing as he wanted, and might never run out of goals. Sure, adopting the desire for rewards of a hardcore (time spent in game) player and/or a content grinder while wanting a more relaxed play-style is a blueprint for dissatisfaction. But, who made that choice?

Nike.2631:

Wanze, quick question if I may?

Do you have every story, slayer, and weaponmaster achievement?

No. I completed all story lines in core tyria, ls season 1 and 2 and HoT but i usually didnt go for the extra achievements because neither the individual rewards nor the accociated AP had much appeal to me as a reward.
I completed half the slayer achis and have another 40% of those on 75% or higher.
Those i didnt complete yet arent usually found in lvl 80 areas or in wvw, which i played alot before HoT.
Same goes for weaponmaster achis. only 6 or 7 maxed, i think. GS,SW, Rifle, Hammer, Spear, Speargun and Staff. Thats because i only play warrior and mostly played gs/sw/wh for the best part of 3 years. I use rifle as alt weapon in pve, if i need range but longbow is close to complete and i used hammer when i was doing guild raids in wvw.
Its hard to kill people with a warhorn ( i managed 7, from blasting combo fields, i guess) and i only maxed staff because i think kills with arrow carts (or all siege) in wvw count as staff kills.

I do have all wvw achis (except realm avenger) and eotm achis complete, though.

And now you can tell me why you asked.

I might not have expressed my point clearly. I don’t think we should get everything for free (why is that always the go-to counter argument?) nor should rewards be increased across the board. I like the cash shop model because in theory it’s supposed to let you pay for the content you like instead of paying a flat, mandatory “take it or leave it” fee. In theory. This game however, seems to only monetize cosmetics. Which means that as a person who derives enjoyment from cosmetics (putting together outfits and collecting pets) in the games they play, I’m expected to either spend all my time farming gold or pay way, way, way more than my fair share. Since the developers know that very few people can play the market and grinding is extremely off-putting after a certain point, they count on players like me becoming whales. Yes, the company needs to make money and I’m alright with setting aside a monthly stipend for it but the truth is, that gets me almost nothing whether it comes to items or gem → gold conversion. While in other games, it either gives me the whole experience or enough to make it worth my time.

No problem, one could say. I will just supplement that real cash with in-game one that I farm up. Here comes the catch. The activity most profitable is not playing the game but playing a sort of stock-market mini game within it. The second or third most profitable activities? Content that is simple, repeatable and requires as little attention or effort as possible. Like parking characters at JP chests. Logging in for laurel rewards, buying mats with them, cashing in. Or chest farming in Silverwastes. Players are encouraged to interact with the game as little as possible. Dungeons, fractals, jumping puzzles, events all around the world. Not profitable.

I do those things regardless because I find them fun. However, the game doesn’t reward me for them nearly as handsomely as it rewards the first two groups so, even with real money investment, I fall behind and everything ends up feeling out of reach. I could dedicate more time to grinding or learning market trends then exploiting them but I don’t want to. Not because I want everything for free or right this very instant but because my time is limited (by my own choosing, of course) and I think too much of it is already taken up by things I don’t enjoy. Perhaps if the currently marginalized activities got a bit of reward boost? Or more rewards tied specifically to them.

Again, not blaming the game for this or asking Arenanet to do things differently. I’m just an average gamer with average time and average skill and little understanding of game design. Just wanted to comment to show the viewpoint of someone like me. Thank you for the detailed answers from all of you!

Tigaseye.2047:

No, Wanze, that is not the problem here and you know it.

You’re just feigning admiration for that post, because it happens to suit your cause to do so.

Obviously, if no one wants any of the rewards (or to accumulate gold) in a game, none of this matters; but the truth is that most people do want some, or all, of them.

Assuming that is, inevitably, going to be the case (and just as well, for Anet’s bank balance, that it is), the problem is that one, niche, way of playing the game is FAR better than others at achieving them.

The “choice” in a game should, pretty obviously, not be “Play the TP, be rich IRL, or become a Buddhist.”.

Much as I admire Buddhists…

I told a few pages back that I have got several k of gold and don’t “play the TP” – in fact I’m pretty much playing the game as I like. And I love it when my buddy starts one of his trading episodes again as that means that he will pay me back what I lent him.

ETA: If you’re poor in this game you want too much for your time spent and in that case you can go with less and still be fine. That may sound cryptic but think about it: everything you do in this game earns you gold; farming, dungeons/fractals, champ trains, the TP. Before HoT the TP was the most lucrative (if done right), then dungeons, then champ trains, then farming. Now it’s the TP, farming/champ trains, then dungeons.

Tea.7025:

I might not have expressed my point clearly. I don’t think we should get everything for free (why is that always the go-to counter argument?) nor should rewards be increased across the board. I like the cash shop model because in theory it’s supposed to let you pay for the content you like instead of paying a flat, mandatory “take it or leave it” fee. In theory. This game however, seems to only monetize cosmetics. Which means that as a person who derives enjoyment from cosmetics (putting together outfits and collecting pets) in the games they play, I’m expected to either spend all my time farming gold or pay way, way, way more than my fair share. Since the developers know that very few people can play the market and grinding is extremely off-putting after a certain point, they count on players like me becoming whales. Yes, the company needs to make money and I’m alright with setting aside a monthly stipend for it but the truth is, that gets me almost nothing whether it comes to items or gem -> gold conversion. While in other games, it either gives me the whole experience or enough to make it worth my time.

No problem, one could say. I will just supplement that real cash with in-game one that I farm up. Here comes the catch. The activity most profitable is not playing the game but playing a sort of stock-market mini game within it. The second or third most profitable activities? Content that is simple, repeatable and requires as little attention or effort as possible. Like parking characters at JP chests. Logging in for laurel rewards, buying mats with them, cashing in. Or chest farming in Silverwastes. Players are encouraged to interact with the game as little as possible. Dungeons, fractals, jumping puzzles, events all around the world. Not profitable.

I do those things regardless because I find them fun. However, the game doesn’t reward me for them nearly as handsomely as it rewards the first two groups so, even with real money investment, I fall behind and everything ends up feeling out of reach. I could dedicate more time to grinding or learning market trends then exploiting them but I don’t want to. Not because I want everything for free or right this very instant but because my time is limited (by my own choosing, of course) and I think too much of it is already taken up by things I don’t enjoy. Perhaps if the currently marginalized activities got a bit of reward boost? Or more rewards tied specifically to them.

Again, not blaming the game for this or asking Arenanet to do things differently. I’m just an average gamer with average time and average skill and little understanding of game design. Just wanted to comment to show the viewpoint of someone like me. Thank you for the detailed answers from all of you!

I understand what you’re saying, I just don’t see the problem. The activity that requires the most effort out of me (I have spreadsheets showing prices on stuff that tells me when to buy and sell, looking up the price of Beets every 12 hours isn’t exactly a thrill) pays me, arguably, the most. What’s wrong with that?

When I’ve got my orders in, I do boring farm like Mad King’s Lab. I used to run the champ train in Queensdale back in the day, I farm in zones where I’m more likely to get valuable drops, I open all my pvp loot boxes on a level 45 character to get as much linen as possible. What is wrong with me doing the stuff that gets me the most $$$ value for my time?

When I played WvW almost exclusively, I made no money. The loot is stinky, the drops (on a dead server) were rare, upgrades at that time cost gold, etc. Doing what you find fun is almost NEVER the best way to make money. If it was, everybody would be rich. Or rather, everyone who enjoys that fun activity would be rich. I didn’t get any payment for my time in the earlier days of PvP before it paid anything, and that was thousands of hours.

Because I want to make money, I do some un-fun things. The rest of my time in the game (admittedly little since the xpac dropped) is spent doing fun things. I would say 3/4 of my gold still comes from doing ‘fun’ things, though the less I play the less true that becomes.

When dungeons were profitable, people ran that grind all the time. Those people made a bunch of money.

If doing map events suddenly became the most profitable (and fun?) thing to do, you would still have a problem, probably even a bigger one. When everyone gets to do the most profitable thing all day, nobody actually gets rich. They just get inflated.

Tea.7025:

This game however, seems to only monetize cosmetics. Which means that as a person who derives enjoyment from cosmetics (putting together outfits and collecting pets) in the games they play, I’m expected to either spend all my time farming gold or pay way, way, way more than my fair share.

If your only enjoyment is to customize your character with armor, weapons and minis (pets dont cost anything to acquire), you can do so for free from the wardrobe and in the preview window.

I guess what you want is to show it off in game. If you are good and creative in styling your character, you can put together great appearances on a budget and make get the same WOW! effect form your fellow players.

But most players just admire rare and expensive skins and minis because they are rare and expensive, not because they are particularly cool looking.

I dont know if you would like the game any better, if Anet would unlock every skin and mini in your wardrobe and you would have nothing to work for anymore.

Because once you obtained everything you ever dreamed of in game, all future rewards you get will suck from a personal perspective.

Wanze.8410:

Tea.7025:

This game however, seems to only monetize cosmetics. Which means that as a person who derives enjoyment from cosmetics (putting together outfits and collecting pets) in the games they play, I’m expected to either spend all my time farming gold or pay way, way, way more than my fair share.

If your only enjoyment is to customize your character with armor, weapons and minis (pets dont cost anything to acquire), you can do so for free from the wardrobe and in the preview window.

I guess what you want is to show it off in game. If you are good and creative in styling your character, you can put together great appearances on a budget and make get the same WOW! effect form your fellow players.

But most players just admire rare and expensive skins and minis because they are rare and expensive, not because they are particularly cool looking.

I dont know if you would like the game any better, if Anet would unlock every skin and mini in your wardrobe and you would have nothing to work for anymore.

Because once you obtained everything you ever dreamed of in game, all future rewards you get will suck from a personal perspective.

I’m somewhat of a roleplayer (Piken Square represent) and I enjoy having various outfits for various scenarios or even just non-rp content. Love to come up with thematic things or do stuff like “dress appropriately” for the terrain and weather my character is at the moment. Same with pets. While I have some cool stuff around, it hasn’t changed much since the launch of the game. Most additions have been gem store or even worse, lockbox exclusive. These things are so expensive or around for such short time that Ihave the opposite problem of getting everything. Namely, everything feeling out of reach.

I don’t want everything unlocked but I would like either more things to be earnable through actually playing the game (like the dungeon or karma sets) or rewards to be increased for content that involves skill or deliberate player cooperation but is much less profitable than spreadsheets or activities that only require minimal effort and almost no or absolutely no socializing.

What I’m saying is, it feels odd that silently running in circles in Silverwastes or AFK’ing at world bosses is a lot more profitable than completing a dungeon, a fractal, an event chain or a jumping puzzle.

Tea.7025:

Wanze.8410:

Tea.7025:

This game however, seems to only monetize cosmetics. Which means that as a person who derives enjoyment from cosmetics (putting together outfits and collecting pets) in the games they play, I’m expected to either spend all my time farming gold or pay way, way, way more than my fair share.

If your only enjoyment is to customize your character with armor, weapons and minis (pets dont cost anything to acquire), you can do so for free from the wardrobe and in the preview window.

I guess what you want is to show it off in game. If you are good and creative in styling your character, you can put together great appearances on a budget and make get the same WOW! effect form your fellow players.

But most players just admire rare and expensive skins and minis because they are rare and expensive, not because they are particularly cool looking.

I dont know if you would like the game any better, if Anet would unlock every skin and mini in your wardrobe and you would have nothing to work for anymore.

Because once you obtained everything you ever dreamed of in game, all future rewards you get will suck from a personal perspective.

I’m somewhat of a roleplayer (Piken Square represent) and I enjoy having various outfits for various scenarios or even just non-rp content. Love to come up with thematic things or do stuff like “dress appropriately” for the terrain and weather my character is at the moment. Same with pets. While I have some cool stuff around, it hasn’t changed much since the launch of the game. Most additions have been gem store or even worse, lockbox exclusive. These things are so expensive or around for such short time that Ihave the opposite problem of getting everything. Namely, everything feeling out of reach.

I don’t want everything unlocked but I would like either more things to be earnable through actually playing the game (like the dungeon or karma sets) or rewards to be increased for content that involves skill or deliberate player cooperation but is much less profitable than spreadsheets or activities that only require minimal effort and almost no or absolutely no socializing.

What I’m saying is, it feels odd that silently running in circles in Silverwastes or AFK’ing at world bosses is a lot more profitable than completing a dungeon, a fractal, an event chain or a jumping puzzle.

There are plenty of skins that need account bound mats to acquire. Those skins will be unobtainable by players who only play the tp. So they are more excluded than players who play other content.
Of course i cant talk for all tp traders or rich players but a good portion of my personal wealth comes from the fact that i dont spend it on alot of skins, dyes, minis or other account unlocks that can be bought with gold.
I never bought a precursor or legendary directly from the tp and maybe have a handful of bl skins unlocked, that i use. The 2 legendaries that i have, i forged myself, so i also earned the account bound mats required.

If I would buy most dyes and minis and just 20% of all tradeable skins, i would have as much gold as you.

We’re getting kind of afield here, but… cosmetics were asked to do too much in this game, and the process to create them is too intricate. They’re both the endgame rewards and a source of revenue.

One positive move, imo, was ANet’s decision to have outfits be the gem store skins and armor the in-game rewards skin going forward. That said, armor which requires multiple variations (male, female, and multiple racial) is apparently hard to produce, hence the pace of presentation being too slow for some.

The issues with weapon skins bring us back around to the whole “asked to do too much” thing. Sure, some are unlocked via game, and a lot via BL tickets — which, unless you like to gamble means gold-farm and TP.

Wanze.8410:

Nike.2631:

Wanze, quick question if I may?

Do you have every story, slayer, and weaponmaster achievement?

No. I completed all story lines in core tyria, ls season 1 and 2 and HoT but i usually didnt go for the extra achievements because neither the individual rewards nor the accociated AP had much appeal to me as a reward.
I completed half the slayer achis and have another 40% of those on 75% or higher.
Those i didnt complete yet arent usually found in lvl 80 areas or in wvw, which i played alot before HoT.
Same goes for weaponmaster achis. only 6 or 7 maxed, i think. GS,SW, Rifle, Hammer, Spear, Speargun and Staff. Thats because i only play warrior and mostly played gs/sw/wh for the best part of 3 years. I use rifle as alt weapon in pve, if i need range but longbow is close to complete and i used hammer when i was doing guild raids in wvw.
Its hard to kill people with a warhorn ( i managed 7, from blasting combo fields, i guess) and i only maxed staff because i think kills with arrow carts (or all siege) in wvw count as staff kills.

I do have all wvw achis (except realm avenger) and eotm achis complete, though.

And now you can tell me why you asked.

Because it seems like there’s parts of the game that don’t win themselves from playing the trading post . I’m sure you’re fiercely, intensely jealous that while I have a miniscule fraction of your wealth I have all kinds of achievements you don’t have. Seething, even . I mean, it’s just so unfair.

We should probably start a thread where they need to add the option to buy all of them with coin because it’s completely unreasonable that all possible styles of play don’t net equivalent rewards.

Nike.2631:

Because it seems like there’s parts of the game that don’t win themselves from playing the trading post . I’m sure you’re fiercely, intensely jealous that while I have a miniscule fraction of your wealth I have all kinds of achievements you don’t have. Seething, even . I mean, it’s just so unfair.

We should probably start a thread where they need to add the option to buy all of them with coin because it’s completely unreasonable that all possible styles of play don’t net equivalent rewards.

wat

Oh it’s another Ohoni thread….

grabs popcorn

Sarrs.4831:

wat

Tradepost players make zero progress on achievements after that “I have 200 gold” one. This thread is all about how unreasonable and unfair it is that all play styles aren’t rewarded equally. If that’s true, then the only reasonable course to achieve greater parity is allow players to buy achievements.

…Or it could be the initial premise is preposterous.

You do know that there are a lot of achievements that are easier bought than earned right?

Essence Snow.3194:

You do know that there are a lot of achievements that are easier bought than earned right?

All achievements should be purchasable. It’s the only way to be fair to people who only like to play the game by staying in LA and flipping items on the trading post. Why can’t they pay for all the achievements and earn them that way? Why should they have to do things they don’t like to do to earn achievements?

Yep totally. Let us buy ESL cup 400k tournament champion achievement too! There’s nothing wrong with that…right…right?

Essence Snow.3194:

Yep totally. Let us buy ESL cup 400k tournament champion achievement too! There’s nothing wrong with that…right…right?

Why not? If the way you like to play doesn’t reward you like other ways do, why not make the rewards easier to get no matter how you play? Therefore, people who only like to play the trading post and not play to get achievements should be able to buy them.

It’s only fair.