Guild Wars 2

maddoctor.2738:

If all precursors are like that then the whole process is useless for any precursor that is worth below 400g. What’s the point in collecting materials that will give you 400g if the precursor itself is 200g, just sell the mats and BUY it instead of crafting it! The mats you got having fun and being on the journey btw.

But isn’t that the awesome thing about the (mostly) free market in gw2? Too expensive pre will be done by collections and if alot legy’s are sold the TP pre’s will get cheaper. Too cheap pre will be bought from the TP until their price raised to the point where the collections are the same worth.
So basically the TP pre price will adjust around the same area you have to pay for the collection (+ maybe something for the non gold related activities).

So instead of the current relation:
rng luck → materials price → ingame stuff (world exploration etc.) = legy price

There will be a new one:
[(Ingame stuff → material price → ingame stuff) or (rng luck)] → materials price → ingame stuff = legy price

So since it’s obvious we can’t agree if it is a problem, maybe we can suggest a better price ratio that we (people who do have a problem with the price) can agree would seem more fair. As in like total cost of crafting pre = some percent of pre’s average price on the trading post. i think i would be fine if the collection cost about half as much as the pre.

Iason Evan.3806:

Wanze.8410:

Iason Evan.3806:

Here’s how it is gonna play out: A player that wants Howler isn’t gonna do the precursor quest for Howler. They will do it for whatever precursor is the most expensive that they personally don’t want or like. They will sell that and buy the pre for Howler and have leftover money to put towards their T6 mats etc.

I thought a little more about this and i dont think its neccessarily a bad thing because it brings precursor prices more in line.

Expensive ones get produced amd sold more often and cheaper ones get bought more from the tp.

I get that and think you’re right. My issue with it is they designed account bound pre crafting around the TP instead of around being a better way for people to avoid RNG and have less frustration and more fun. Legendaries should be fun to do all the things for. It should be a good time. It shouldn’t devolve into “how can I make this thing with as little frustration as possible?” Unfortunately, that’s what it is.

Account bound precursor crafting? You mean the precursors for the new legendaries? Or did you mean the precursors for the legendaries that we can get right now?

maddoctor.2738:

Rasimir.6239:

maddoctor.2738:

Bomber.3872:

Even the most expensive pre’s cost less than 50% of a legendary. I don’t really understand why this thread is always shifted to the ‘I want it cheaper’ idea. Cheaper pre would mean cheaper legendary’s and we all now that anet since release never wanted to change that overall legendary price.

I’ll repeat one more time:
If selling the mats (means you went and played the fun part to get those mats, no skipping of the fun part) required to make a legendary earns you enough money to buy the precursor on the TP and then leave you with lots of extra gold, then what’s the point of this new system?

Having fun on the precursor journey?

Believe it or not, there are plenty of people around who enjoy traveling the world with a purpose in mind, collecting and crafting their own stuff, without caring about selling/rebuying for optimized coin gain.

Let’s say you don’t want to buy the precursor on the TP but instead you go on the fun journey to make the precursor yourself! You travel the world and complete various fun challenges, making the game much more fun and enjoyable in the process. The system works well so far.

Here is the tricky part, once you gather everything in order to craft your precursor, you realize that if you sell everything that is sellable, you will earn enough gold to buy the precursor and then have enough left-overs to begin a new one (!!!)

And to be a bit more exact, according to my calculations selling (not buying) all materials needed to craft the Colossus will net you ~400g, I used a lot of assumptions to reach that price but it doesn’t include the price to craft many of the items needed for the collection itself. For example, they tell us you will need to craft the container that will hold the oozes, you might need to craft the food for your ooze, and so on and so on. In other words, crafting the Colossus might well require materials that if you SELL them you will earn way more than 400g.

If all precursors are like that then the whole process is useless for any precursor that is worth below 400g. What’s the point in collecting materials that will give you 400g if the precursor itself is 200g, just sell the mats and BUY it instead of crafting it! The mats you got having fun and being on the journey btw.

the two extra account-bound skins you get exclusively from the precursor scavenger hunt?

Therodin.2970:

So since it’s obvious we can’t agree if it is a problem, maybe we can suggest a better price ratio that we (people who do have a problem with the price) can agree would seem more fair. As in like total cost of crafting pre = some percent of pre’s average price on the trading post. i think i would be fine if the collection cost about half as much as the pre.

I think that would be disastrous to the game’s narrative. If the recipe requirements to craft/collect each precursor were based on the current TP price of precursors, Arnenanet would openly declare that they consider the marketplace the most important game-play mode.

Some legacy precursors will continue to be less expensive than others. Maddoctor is correct when they say that it will more efficient to turn to the TP for some precursors. That isn’t a flaw, that is a reality of balancing cost in calories/time and gold.

maddoctor.2738:

Rasimir.6239:

maddoctor.2738:

Bomber.3872:

Even the most expensive pre’s cost less than 50% of a legendary. I don’t really understand why this thread is always shifted to the ‘I want it cheaper’ idea. Cheaper pre would mean cheaper legendary’s and we all now that anet since release never wanted to change that overall legendary price.

I’ll repeat one more time:
If selling the mats (means you went and played the fun part to get those mats, no skipping of the fun part) required to make a legendary earns you enough money to buy the precursor on the TP and then leave you with lots of extra gold, then what’s the point of this new system?

Having fun on the precursor journey?

Believe it or not, there are plenty of people around who enjoy traveling the world with a purpose in mind, collecting and crafting their own stuff, without caring about selling/rebuying for optimized coin gain.

Let’s say you don’t want to buy the precursor on the TP but instead you go on the fun journey to make the precursor yourself! You travel the world and complete various fun challenges, making the game much more fun and enjoyable in the process. The system works well so far.

Here is the tricky part, once you gather everything in order to craft your precursor, you realize that if you sell everything that is sellable, you will earn enough gold to buy the precursor and then have enough left-overs to begin a new one (!!!)

And to be a bit more exact, according to my calculations selling (not buying) all materials needed to craft the Colossus will net you ~400g, I used a lot of assumptions to reach that price but it doesn’t include the price to craft many of the items needed for the collection itself. For example, they tell us you will need to craft the container that will hold the oozes, you might need to craft the food for your ooze, and so on and so on. In other words, crafting the Colossus might well require materials that if you SELL them you will earn way more than 400g.

If all precursors are like that then the whole process is useless for any precursor that is worth below 400g. What’s the point in collecting materials that will give you 400g if the precursor itself is 200g, just sell the mats and BUY it instead of crafting it! The mats you got having fun and being on the journey btw.

But that’s the beauty of the free market. The time/mats to get Colossus was lower than the price of Colossus so you bought it. This means there is one less Colossus in the game now and you also didn’t create one. Now there are less on the TP, and the price is now 450g.

The next person thinks 450g is still cheaper than making it, leading the price to rise to 600g. Now someone sees that it is 600g and that is a lot more than it costs to do the scavenger hunt. They do the scavenger hunt and sell it for 550g. This price is still worth doing the hunt so someone else does it and sells it for 450g. Now we are back to stage one and it is cheaper to buy it again. This processes continues forever and regulates the price without any intervention.

Now we can apply this same concept to ALL the precursors and something even better happens.

Player 1 wants to make the legendary torch. The precursor is only 200g, but the cost to make it by the scavenger hunt is 400g. The most obvious solution is to just buy it. Player 1 is 200g poorer, but has the precursor. The less obvious and much better solution is to do the scavenger hunt for dusk which is selling for 1200g. It takes the same amount of time as the torch scavenger hunt, still costs 400g to make, but gives you 1200g when you are done. Now you put in the same amount of work as you would have for the torch, but you get the torch + 600g (1200-400-200), now you have your precursor and are 600g richer, which you can use to put towards the other components.

In addition the cost of dusk has now fallen to 1000g. But since this is the cheaper way to get the torch precursor the supply of torches starts to dry up and the price rises up to 400g. Meanwhile people keep making dusks to profit off them and dusk price falls down to 700g.

With this new system all precursors will eventually reach a much closer equilibrium point that floats around (mat cost) + (time cost), with the higher demand precursors being slightly above and the lower demand ones being slightly below.

The exception to this is the underwater precursors which no one wants which will continue to be valued at the random drop cost and not tied to either system.

Psientist.6437:

Therodin.2970:

So since it’s obvious we can’t agree if it is a problem, maybe we can suggest a better price ratio that we (people who do have a problem with the price) can agree would seem more fair. As in like total cost of crafting pre = some percent of pre’s average price on the trading post. i think i would be fine if the collection cost about half as much as the pre.

I think that would be disastrous to the game’s narrative. If the recipe requirements to craft/collect each precursor were based on the current TP price of precursors, Arnenanet would openly declare that they consider the marketplace the most important game-play mode.

well it is, is it not? (screw you forum software)

Imean,it’s even in the names:

World vs World

Player vs Player

Player vs Economy

Calcifire.1864:

Psientist.6437:

Therodin.2970:

So since it’s obvious we can’t agree if it is a problem, maybe we can suggest a better price ratio that we (people who do have a problem with the price) can agree would seem more fair. As in like total cost of crafting pre = some percent of pre’s average price on the trading post. i think i would be fine if the collection cost about half as much as the pre.

I think that would be disastrous to the game’s narrative. If the recipe requirements to craft/collect each precursor were based on the current TP price of precursors, Arnenanet would openly declare that they consider the marketplace the most important game-play mode.

well it is, is it not? (screw you forum software)

Imean,it’s even in the names:

World vs World

Player vs Player

Player vs Economy

Lol…thank you

edit: More seriously, What some people are asking for is immense regulation of the legacy Precursor market, the equivalent of state sponsored price fixing.

I am not a huge fan of the use of Ascended Crafting materials in the Precursor crafting and them not having any Ascended wepaon qualities until the further work to be done to make them legendaries. Especially if we are going to be in a fairly high double digits of amounts needed. Ascended Crafting mats are obnoxiously time gated, and expensive.

I would nto mind the ascended mats IF the timegates were removed.

Can anyone give me some reason for the timegates in the first place? It makes no sense to me, and just seems like they wanted some trivial reason to make ascended items take longer to craft. Just throw a timegate in!

gricks.1897:

I am not a huge fan of the use of Ascended Crafting materials in the Precursor crafting and them not having any Ascended wepaon qualities until the further work to be done to make them legendaries. Especially if we are going to be in a fairly high double digits of amounts needed. Ascended Crafting mats are obnoxiously time gated, and expensive.

I would nto mind the ascended mats IF the timegates were removed.

Can anyone give me some reason for the timegates in the first place? It makes no sense to me, and just seems like they wanted some trivial reason to make ascended items take longer to craft. Just throw a timegate in!

( Sad but true: ) Time gates are there to preserve the market. I know, it’s a refrain I’m tired of hearing as well, but I get the reason.

If the time gates were removed, people who buy missing materials off the market. Demand goes up. Silk would suffer from this the most, since those with the most money could ignore the cost, buy up all the silk on the market and either sell it back as Damask for inflated profit or remove it entirely by making Ascended gear.

Limiting to once/day keeps the prices from rising too sharply.

The objective of Precursor crafting was never to make it easier to get a Precursor (the design is not intended to match the COST of buying one, but rather to match the amount of effort/time required to forge one). The objective of Precursor crafting is to give players a non-RNG method where progress can be advanced towards the goal.

mtpelion.4562:

The objective of Precursor crafting was never to make it easier to get a Precursor (the design is not intended to match the COST of buying one, but rather to match the amount of effort/time required to forge one). The objective of Precursor crafting is to give players a non-RNG method where progress can be advanced towards the goal.

There is already a way like that. You can progress towards the goal of buying a precursor with by farming gold. Those precursors were initially obtained by RNG but i have never seen a time when there were no precursors of a certain type on the TP so it is safe to say that there will always be one on there that you can work to buy. Players wanted a third option that wasn’t entirely dependant on RNG or farming large sums of money. This method (seems) to bring the money farming plus a lot of running around.

Therodin.2970:

mtpelion.4562:

The objective of Precursor crafting was never to make it easier to get a Precursor (the design is not intended to match the COST of buying one, but rather to match the amount of effort/time required to forge one). The objective of Precursor crafting is to give players a non-RNG method where progress can be advanced towards the goal.

There is already a way like that. You can progress towards the goal of buying a precursor with by farming gold. Those precursors were initially obtained by RNG but i have never seen a time when there were no precursors of a certain type on the TP so it is safe to say that there will always be one on there that you can work to buy. Players wanted a third option that wasn’t entirely dependant on RNG or farming large sums of money. This method (seems) to bring the money farming plus a lot of running around.

Farming gold was trying to hit a moving target though, as the amount needed changed with supply and demand.

This new method has a fixed cost for everything, allowing you to have a measurable sense of progress.

Basically, the old ways of obtaining a Precursor were either 0% complete or 100% complete. The new way allows you to increment your completion by some value between those giving you a feeling of accomplishment that was lacking in the old system.

It’s not intended to make it easier, it’s intended to provide a more measurable and predictable experience.

mtpelion.4562:

Therodin.2970:

mtpelion.4562:

The objective of Precursor crafting was never to make it easier to get a Precursor (the design is not intended to match the COST of buying one, but rather to match the amount of effort/time required to forge one). The objective of Precursor crafting is to give players a non-RNG method where progress can be advanced towards the goal.

There is already a way like that. You can progress towards the goal of buying a precursor with by farming gold. Those precursors were initially obtained by RNG but i have never seen a time when there were no precursors of a certain type on the TP so it is safe to say that there will always be one on there that you can work to buy. Players wanted a third option that wasn’t entirely dependant on RNG or farming large sums of money. This method (seems) to bring the money farming plus a lot of running around.

Farming gold was trying to hit a moving target though, as the amount needed changed with supply and demand.

This new method has a fixed cost for everything, allowing you to have a measurable sense of progress.

Basically, the old ways of obtaining a Precursor were either 0% complete or 100% complete. The new way allows you to increment your completion by some value between those giving you a feeling of accomplishment that was lacking in the old system.

It’s not intended to make it easier, it’s intended to provide a more measurable and predictable experience.

As well, the current TP price of legacy precursors does include the effect of RNG. If you but a legacy precursor of a type that is actively MF crafted you are paying to avoid the risk of making only one precursor. The people who are MF crafting legacy precursors must craft many of them before they get to a predictable cost.

An aside about linking the crafting recipe to the TP price:

The QUAGGAN SMASH! scale has plenty of native ambiguity, but I would estimate the volume to be equivalent to:

(Why is silk so expensive?)squared
multiplied by
(We waited 3 years for this!?!?) squared

with a standard deviation of
(Trahearne!)

maddoctor.2738:

Rasimir.6239:

maddoctor.2738:

Bomber.3872:

Even the most expensive pre’s cost less than 50% of a legendary. I don’t really understand why this thread is always shifted to the ‘I want it cheaper’ idea. Cheaper pre would mean cheaper legendary’s and we all now that anet since release never wanted to change that overall legendary price.

I’ll repeat one more time:
If selling the mats (means you went and played the fun part to get those mats, no skipping of the fun part) required to make a legendary earns you enough money to buy the precursor on the TP and then leave you with lots of extra gold, then what’s the point of this new system?

Having fun on the precursor journey?

Believe it or not, there are plenty of people around who enjoy traveling the world with a purpose in mind, collecting and crafting their own stuff, without caring about selling/rebuying for optimized coin gain.

Let’s say you don’t want to buy the precursor on the TP but instead you go on the fun journey to make the precursor yourself! You travel the world and complete various fun challenges, making the game much more fun and enjoyable in the process. The system works well so far.

Here is the tricky part, once you gather everything in order to craft your precursor, you realize that if you sell everything that is sellable, you will earn enough gold to buy the precursor and then have enough left-overs to begin a new one (!!!)

And to be a bit more exact, according to my calculations selling (not buying) all materials needed to craft the Colossus will net you ~400g, I used a lot of assumptions to reach that price but it doesn’t include the price to craft many of the items needed for the collection itself. For example, they tell us you will need to craft the container that will hold the oozes, you might need to craft the food for your ooze, and so on and so on. In other words, crafting the Colossus might well require materials that if you SELL them you will earn way more than 400g.

If all precursors are like that then the whole process is useless for any precursor that is worth below 400g. What’s the point in collecting materials that will give you 400g if the precursor itself is 200g, just sell the mats and BUY it instead of crafting it! The mats you got having fun and being on the journey btw.

Keep in mind that Anet did mention a time element when trying to match the precursor crafting value to the value of existing precursors. You keep trying to fill in the gap that you see with more direct costs through crafting without considering that the gap (not necessarily all of it) consists of the value of the time spent doing the various tasks.

Otherwise, if they’re doing what you think they are, none of the precursor collections would be worth doing since the material costs would equal the cost of precursors on the TP but disregard the time spent doing the tasks which you could have used to farm gold.

The issue isn’t that there is time investment. At least, that shouldn’t be most people’s concern. The problem would be as someone stated, if it’s 400g (based on current prices) and enough time needed that you could easily earn 400g, that’s an estimated cost of 800g. Now, everyone considers their time to have different value, and that is based on if you are having fun or feel like you are grinding, but still. That is a big cost. And it’s made worse because this is taking additional mats out of the economy on a larger scale, which it appears it’s not necessarily going to use the mats that could really use some kind of sink, like t5/6 leather. Instead it may put additional stress on some more valuable materials. If that is the case, and this ‘requirement’ of ascended needed for raids (use ‘requirement’ loosely as they are apparently balancing raids based on ascended, and some will see this as a challenge to do it only in exotic, especially after the mechanics are figured out), this could put additional pressure on materials if whole new sets are made en masse, as expensive runes aren’t recoverable without spending a high cost to get extractors so converting stats aren’t ideal for everyone (as rune/sigil is lost on forging, so it comes to lose rune, or make new set. That decision isn’t as clear cut as it may seem, there are myriad reasons why someone might make a new set instead of changing stats on a current even if the rune isn’t expensive).

I know John pays attention to it all, and he has a lot of control over the ways these things are implemented, but he’s looking at the health of the economy as a whole. Perhaps having all t6 and silk even more expensive again is a good thing for the economy, it isn’t a good thing for a lot of people that “aren’t swimming in thousands of gold”, which seems to get said a lot.

Short of it is, as some prior posts, if the cost to ‘craft’ the precursors is the same as buying on the trading post, what is the point? Some will do it to feel more like they worked on it, others just for something to do, but if the net cost not counting time is practically the same, or even half of the cost, again I ask, what is the point? I know we are missing a lot of information to make this clear, they might reveal it before HoT, but I know they try to be careful to not shock the market too much in any one direction but…

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Short of it is, as some prior posts, if the cost to ‘craft’ the precursors is the same as buying on the trading post, what is the point?

The point is that now every related drop you get moves you closer to completion of your project, meaning you can obtain it without spending any gold.

Therodin.2970:

We have always had a non RNG way, buying them off of the trading post. So what people wanted is a new way with less cost and more grind.

What Anet appears to be delivering is “same cost, more grind.”

Calcifire.1864:

the two extra account-bound skins you get exclusively from the precursor scavenger hunt?

They’ve already said that the people that have a legendary or precursor already need not worry, because lower tier skins will be automatically unlocked when unlocking a higher tier one (just as buying and unlocking a legendary now unlocks the precursor skin as well).

Neural.1824:

Therodin.2970:

We have always had a non RNG way, buying them off of the trading post. So what people wanted is a new way with less cost and more grind.

What Anet appears to be delivering is “same cost, more grind.”

What would be better then? More cost, less grind or less cost, more grind? (They aren’t going to give you both less cost and less grind so that’s not an option).

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Neural.1824:

Therodin.2970:

We have always had a non RNG way, buying them off of the trading post. So what people wanted is a new way with less cost and more grind.

What Anet appears to be delivering is “same cost, more grind.”

What would be better then? More cost, less grind or less cost, more grind? (They aren’t going to give you both less cost and less grind so that’s not an option).

More cost is the tp option. This one should be more effort, less materials and gold required.

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Neural.1824:

Therodin.2970:

We have always had a non RNG way, buying them off of the trading post. So what people wanted is a new way with less cost and more grind.

What Anet appears to be delivering is “same cost, more grind.”

What would be better then? More cost, less grind or less cost, more grind? (They aren’t going to give you both less cost and less grind so that’s not an option).

More cost is the tp option. This one should be more effort, less materials and gold required.

Which, based on what we have seen so far, is true.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

But that’s the beauty of the free market. The time/mats to get Colossus was lower than the price of Colossus so you bought it. This means there is one less Colossus in the game now and you also didn’t create one. Now there are less on the TP, and the price is now 450g.

The next person thinks 450g is still cheaper than making it, leading the price to rise to 600g. Now someone sees that it is 600g and that is a lot more than it costs to do the scavenger hunt. They do the scavenger hunt and sell it for 550g. This price is still worth doing the hunt so someone else does it and sells it for 450g. Now we are back to stage one and it is cheaper to buy it again. This processes continues forever and regulates the price without any intervention.

Now we can apply this same concept to ALL the precursors and something even better happens.

Player 1 wants to make the legendary torch. The precursor is only 200g, but the cost to make it by the scavenger hunt is 400g. The most obvious solution is to just buy it. Player 1 is 200g poorer, but has the precursor. The less obvious and much better solution is to do the scavenger hunt for dusk which is selling for 1200g. It takes the same amount of time as the torch scavenger hunt, still costs 400g to make, but gives you 1200g when you are done. Now you put in the same amount of work as you would have for the torch, but you get the torch + 600g (1200-400-200), now you have your precursor and are 600g richer, which you can use to put towards the other components.

In addition the cost of dusk has now fallen to 1000g. But since this is the cheaper way to get the torch precursor the supply of torches starts to dry up and the price rises up to 400g. Meanwhile people keep making dusks to profit off them and dusk price falls down to 700g.

With this new system all precursors will eventually reach a much closer equilibrium point that floats around (mat cost) + (time cost), with the higher demand precursors being slightly above and the lower demand ones being slightly below.

The exception to this is the underwater precursors which no one wants which will continue to be valued at the random drop cost and not tied to either system.

Very nice post. I think people might be over complicating things. This is a free market and the various materials (whether time-gated or not) and the precursors themselves are going to find their equilibrium, and that equilibrium will automatically reflect the extra time it took to gather mats, scavenger hunt and crafting.

As you said in your post, all the precursor crafting is really going to do is bring more of a balance to the precursor market. Those pre’s that people think are overpriced will come down and those that are undervalued will go up. This will happen on its own. There will be no need for external manipulation on Anet’s part.