Guild Wars 2

Any word about coarse sand and flax, the remaining two of the Terrible Tetrad that keeps the prices of scribing and GH upgrades up, and encourage heavy farming?

Like define “reasonable”? Or what the GW2 teams idea of “reasonable” is? Since it’s pretty clear when it comes to the cost of materials and grinding, “reasonable” is very a subjective and broad adjective.

Like is “reasonable” going to be something personally obtainable by a single individual who hasn’t been stockpiling tons of materials and gold since the dawn of GW2? Is “reasonable” obtainable without the help of an entire guild of people if you don’t all into the former category?

Because if “reasonable” is according to the same standards you have applied to everything else in HoT where players are being treated like hamsters in a wheel, endlessly grinding massive amounts of materials for little reward, because economic stimulation is priority one and player’s actual enjoyment is second, then “reasonable” is pretty debatable.

At the end of the day, you have a personal crafting profession that is intended mostly for the benefit of the entire guild, but also contains a small percentage of personal items. This crafting profession currently requires the help of an entire guild to complete and the results of that guild’s time and material investment are not owned by the guild. A player can quit the game, leave the guild or use their crafting profession to help other guilds, all three creating scenarios ripe for drama and hostility when the original guild who helped them loses out on their investment.

It seems to me the scribe profession is way more broken and controversial than just making prices more “reasonable” can fix.

Ok I have a silly idea – how about making a use out of all the newly introduced materials that aren’t flax seeds instead of them being vendor trash. Since they drop from almost everywhere in the new maps and even from map rewards, it would be nice if they had a concrete use other than crafting a few runes.

I am talking about Auric Slivers, Barbed Thorns and Leaf Fossils, as well as Mordrem Lodestones and pigments that are not brown.

Can we also have Scribe make all sub-components? It’s just weird that I have to go to other toon’s crafting profession to be able to use it in Scribe.

Question: When will the update come?

SkyShroud.2865:

Question: When will the update come?

And please… Don’t say soon™…

SkyShroud.2865:

Question: When will the update come?

Gaile Gray.6029:

We don’t have a release date for these changes yet, but we plan to keep everyone in the loop as we move forward with these changes.

I think you should just make resonating slivers a trader item, that way you control the price, taking it away from guild missions and accessible in other ways.
Like 1 for 10 silver and 10 for 1 gold, same as you do for milling basins and mortar already

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

bsansam.8546:

same as you do for milling basins and mortar already

Which, btw, would be nice to have those in collection tabs, just like all the other purchasable items.

The pigments and the slivers aren’t the main issue for me. Its piles and piles and piles of Coarse sand. However one simple fix for pigments is to stop needing brown pigment for every thing. Just have brown for lvl 0-100, red for 101-200 etc.

Not only that, the insane amount of Linseed oil needed.

As an example, for those wanting to create their own library, Only 1 Wide Library shelf would cost you….. 90 linseed Oil and 1500 coarse sand!!!! Ignoring all other components, this is WAY to high. It needs to be reduced by a factor of 10! This items shouldn’t cost much as they are DECORATIONS! Why make them so expensive.

Please Anet we want to build cool things, just reduce the costs DRASTICALLY.

I got three things here:

1. Single players should be able to level scribing profession on their own, at a comparable cost level of the other professions.

2. Leveling scribing profession to max level should be doable without “all the cool stuff for guildhalls”. Guilds will feel less dependent on supporting single players in their profession.

3. Recipes for “the cool stuff for guild halls” can be more expensive. It should feel like a team challenge to get them.

It should not feel like a punishment to a guild, if a player leaves that guild, after being supported to max profession level by all the guild members. Making leveling easier will increase the number of scribers. By keeping an eye on the points above, the situation of a scriber leaving a guild is easier to overcome.

It is not necessary to bind scribe profession progress to the guild. There’s already a lot of recipes bound to it by upgrading guildhalls. You “only” need to have a player in the guild, who can use all those recipes. Everything produced and sent to the guild will sty with the guild forever. So there is no real problem at this point for me.

Getting the profession to max level easier should be the focus.

A.net thank you, but it’s too late. the damage is already done.

This doesn’t adress the fundamental problem of scribing: It is aimed at guilds but tied to individual players. Why anyone ever thought that was a good idea is something I really do not understand. Scribing should always have been a guild-wide thing.

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

Or just nerf resonating slivers needed (make them vendor purchasable) and add rare recipes/other high end or vendor scribe components that can only be acquired via guild mission and trading post.

400 scribes got there first, helped the guild/made their gold back on the tp (for the most part) and have been been supported by several other guild members in the process. It doesn’t need a special title.

Oh, and ANet, fix Freshwater Pearl drop rates while you are at it.

One other point I’d like to bring up is using Guild’s decorations towards Scribe crafting leveling.

For example I’ve spent hundreds of golds for snow piles for our guild hall and would like to limit access to them being used as a part of leveling for other members to make different decorations. Same with crates, chairs, flagpoles, etc.

Possible solution would be to make them into consumable items, even account bound to be used for crafting purposes rather than withdrawing from the Guild’s storage. Thus making each member purchase decorations they would like to upgrade themselves. Instead of possibly-upgrade-able decoration being automatically deposited to the guild’s vault. Maybe even give the Guild leader and appointed “scribers” an ability to withdraw said decoration. But only upon giving the permissions by the leader.

But don’t give a free access to all guild members to use these decorations that others made and put money into to be used as their crafting materials.

Thus preventing with possible scamming by joining a guild, using all of its basic decorations for self leveling and then promptly leaving the said guild. I mean yeah decorations stay with it, but I’d much rather have my basic decorations (ex. Red Lanterns) rather than upgraded versions (Festival Tents). I would like to keep my Lanterns. Especially since they’re bought by one’s hard earned luck balls.

With Scribe becoming less expensive it will bring more interest in people thus making leveling this crafting profession more desirable. So decorations that are already in guild’s vault should be excluded from that speed-leveling that will soon to come.

Or at the very least give Guild Leaders the ability to limit usage of said decorations if they so desire to keep certain decorations untouched by potential future Scribers.

Thank you for consideration.

Edit: Clarification.

Glad the team is looking into this and glad some changes have been made. As the guild’s only scribe I am happy that I will be able to have an easier time crafting nice things for the guild in the future.
I am currently sitting at level 353, and I will be waiting until the changes happen to get to 400. Most of the costs to get there have been covered by me over a long period of time, with occasional donations of slivers and basic decorations from some generous members in the guild. – This is an extremely important point to note, since when people see a sliver is 50s they prefer to sell it instead of contributing to the decorating effort, which I cant blame them fore even tho I wished it was different.

I am not sure how far the team has gotten into reworking recipes and stuff but I have some suggestions for how I would see scribing a much better system:

• paper: reduce the amount of planks required to craft 1 paper from 5 to 1 (it makes no sense to craft 1 sheet of paper from 15 trees)
• coarse paper: reduce amount of sand needed to craft those by 5x times (eg Extra Coarse Paper 2 sands instead of 10, Fine Sandpaper 8 instead of 40). Again it makes no sense to use a desert to craft 1 sheet of sandpaper
• linseed oil: reduce costs by 3X times (1 instead of 3, 2 instead of 6 etc). How many barrels of oil do I need to craft a chair?
• slivers: keep the drop rates as they are now, but reduce slivers used in bags of powder from 3 to 1 (tier-ing is fine -slivers,fragments,cores and lodestones, but amounts are a bit ridiculous)
• decorations such as guild chair/table/banquet table: replace the 20 resonating items with 5
• finishing kits: in case of decorations that require other crafted decorations to make (potted plants, furniture and architecture pieces upgrades etc) either remove the kits from higher tiers, or remove them from lower tiers. It is a bit absurd to have to use brown pigments 5 times in a complex recipe
• ink bottles: reduce the amount of pigments needed from 10 to 1 or 2. It makes sense to use more pigments with higher level ink bottles, but again with 10 pouches of pigment I can probably paint an entire building, with 70 pouches one can paint the entire guildhall like a rainbow
• adjust basic decoration prices (I do not feel it’s normal for one fountain to cost as much as a shrub or a candle)

Those are the main issues I have observed with the way scribing works at the moment. I have to admit it was a smart way to sink gold (and there can be no denning here) but it has put a lot of people off decorating and made them not care about the guildhall.

I also do not believe it would be wise to increase droprates on the materials instead of changing recipes since it would not solve anything except filling up guild banks with mats. I just hate when I see that I have to use a large number of mats.

There are also issues related to decorating limitations and placement tools (especially removal tool), but those are a topic for another time.
So this is my feedback on this topic, and while many may not agree with me on it, I hope it presents a decent solution for an amazing idea turned bad because of economy concerns

TLDR: reduce amount of mats required for specific items used in all decos, do not increase droprates on materials

I’ve seen some of those recipes on how it took like 9000 different things to make a simple chair. XD Crazy. Making them make more sense is a great idea.

Diovid.9506:

This doesn’t adress the fundamental problem of scribing: It is aimed at guilds but tied to individual players. Why anyone ever thought that was a good idea is something I really do not understand. Scribing should always have been a guild-wide thing.

Definitely an immediate design problem if it was really meant to be a group effort, which the insane cost really proves. Can’t recall Anet actually confirming it though. If it’s supposed to make guildies pool in resources to one person it’d be better off not being a personal craft at all and just belong to an NPC in GH everyone levels up instead. Otherwise the cost needs lowered by boatloads.

• One of the decorations my guild has made was the globe that requires a gift of exploration….We were really hoping that would be the Order of Whispers globe considering it took a gift of exploration. Instead it was a tiny little globe. It doesn’t even spin or do anything. Something either needs to change with this recipe or the model of the item needs to be updated to something a little more impressive.

• Uzolan’s Orchestra I think is almost right where it needs to be for the cost vs. what you get. I think it should have required one of gift of condensed magic rather than the full gift of Magic but that’s the only change I’d make there.

• The Scribe finishing kits: I wish these weren’t so nested in one another. It’s really frustrating when you get like 8 recipies in and by the time you get there you forget how many you need of something or miscalculate something and then wind up making too many or not enough. Can you just make it a single recipe that requires x bottles, x dye, etc.

• Resonating sliver upgrades: Why does it take 2 of every other sliver/shard/core to upgrade but it takes THREE to upgrade these? That would be a huge help right there if you cut it back to two that it takes for the others to upgrade.

• Resonating Sliver drops: My guild does all of the PvE guild missions each week and it seems that the amount we receive is random. Perhaps we could get a fixed amount per difficulty type instead of the current random amount. And the other resonance thing that we sometimes get could just be a bonus on top sometimes. I’m always super disappointed to get the Rare quality resonance fragment because that means I just got gypped out of getting slivers.

• Pigments: I think since brown is currently required in everything if brown pigment also had a chance to drop from armor when salvaged (possibly just leather) and have all pigments drop a little more often when harvesting plants that would be a big help and the recipe requirements shouldn’t need changing.

Note: I am already max level scribe, but something seriously needs to be worked out so that everyone who wants to level scribe can do so for about the same cost it takes to level up any of the other crafting professions. I don’t mind it being slightly more expensive due to the fact that so many of the ingredients are new with HoT, but right now it does seem quite out of place with how much everything requires.

Farming Flats.5370:

A.net thank you, but it’s too late. the damage is already done.

No joke. I know decorations are crazy, but they’re optional. For us WvWers, scribing and guild hall unlocks for WvW buffs and items are mandatory. We’ve been rushing our butts off trying to get things unlocked as fast as possible. This is why the larger, more richer guilds have advantages over smaller or medium guilds. There are quite a few who’ve unlocked presense of the keep, +5 supply, airship barrage, or whatever it’s called, emergency waypoint, the mining upgrades needed for that stuff, and the scribes needed to craft those things. That’s thousands of gold.

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Romo.3709:

bsansam.8546:

same as you do for milling basins and mortar already

Which, btw, would be nice to have those in collection tabs, just like all the other purchasable items.

Grab stacks of both and put them in a bank tab.

Justine.6351:

Romo.3709:

bsansam.8546:

same as you do for milling basins and mortar already

Which, btw, would be nice to have those in collection tabs, just like all the other purchasable items.

Grab stacks of both and put them in a bank tab.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

Artaz.3819:

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

Or just nerf resonating slivers needed (make them vendor purchasable) and add rare recipes/other high end or vendor scribe components that can only be acquired via guild mission and trading post.

400 scribes got there first, helped the guild/made their gold back on the tp (for the most part) and have been been supported by several other guild members in the process. It doesn’t need a special title.

Oh, and ANet, fix Freshwater Pearl drop rates while you are at it.

I disagree on the part with supported by guild members. Most scribes, including me, paid for it 100% on their own.

As one of the leadership team of a ‘smaller’ guild we took a lot of solace in the claim that Anet would be embracing the minnow guilds of the game. At the great expense of our members we’ve managed to scrape out a level 40 hall, but some of the costs involved are astronomical. I don’t see how this has ever been a friendly system for a smaller guild, but even worse than the guild hall upgrade costs are the scribing costs.

One of the features we paid for with HoT was guild halls, yet we’re really struggling to enjoy it because of the sheer amount of grind involved.

Coarse Sand inflates the cost of -everything- because so much of it is required and it drops so infrequently, out of just two maps.

Brown Pigment drops rarely, has an insane BLTC cost and is required in everything.

Another very sad thing is that there is basic, simple furniture that has a cost well above reasonable. I don’t want to pay 300 gold for a tiny, ugly wooden shelf. I’d begrudge paying 10% of 300 gold.

It would be really great if we could personalise our halls, but at the moment the cost is so very prohibitive. It’s nice to see Anet acknowledge this and I hope that reasonable adjustment comes soon.

Remember the game is supposed to be fun. We should enjoy decorating our hall, and trying to scrape together thousands upon thousands of materials is the opposite of fun.

I like everything that Merris said with a few alterations:

Merris.1284:

This is an extremely important point to note, since when people see a sliver is 50s they prefer to sell it instead of contributing to the decorating effort, which I cant blame them fore even tho I wished it was different.

• slivers: keep the drop rates as they are now, but reduce slivers used in bags of powder from 3 to 1 (tier-ing is fine -slivers,fragments,cores and lodestones, but amounts are a bit ridiculous)

The first is why I think the drop rates should be increased. With overall cheaper scribing, more people are going to want to do it, which will raise demand and prices. The slivers should try to be cheap enough that guild members don’t feel like they are wasting money by donating them to the guild scribe. A cool idea was if slivers were actual decorations so guild would actually be donating them to the guild for scribes with the proper privileges can use them straight out of the guild hall.

Also, I think instead of reducing the slivers in bags of powder from 3 to 1, they should be reduced from 3 to 2. Then cut down the amount need for tiering from 3 to 2 as well. This would make the lower end recipes which were never too expensive to still have some cost to them and reduce the out of control scaling as you get to higher level recipes.

I also like this idea for sliver drops:

khani.4786:

Perhaps we could get a fixed amount per difficulty type instead of the current random amount. And the other resonance thing that we sometimes get could just be a bonus on top sometimes.

Merris.1284:

• paper: reduce the amount of planks required to craft 1 paper from 5 to 1 (it makes no sense to craft 1 sheet of paper from 15 trees)
• ink bottles: reduce the amount of pigments needed from 10 to 1 or 2. It makes sense to use more pigments with higher level ink bottles, but again with 10 pouches of pigment I can probably paint an entire building, with 70 pouches one can paint the entire guildhall like a rainbow

I think the paper going from 5 to 1 might be a bit overkill, but this is one of the annoying parts of scribing. 5 is definitely too much and should probably be reduced to 1 or 2 planks per paper.

Ink Bottles are another big problem as they compound on each other. You start off with just brown pigments, but instead of replacing those with a different color you are adding more pigment colors on top of this. To keep the recipes the same and alleviate this problem, I think the amount of pigments should be reduced but scaled based on use.

Brown and Red Pigments could always just use 1. The middle tier (Blue, Orange and Yellow) would be using 2 of each. Ink Sets that use purple would use 4 of them and the highest tier would use 6 of black and white. With a setup like this, the always used Brown Pigment wouldn’t need much per use but get used a lot while the higher tiers use more per use but don’t get used often.

All the other bullet points Merris listed out I agree with.

I agree with Merris’s comments whole-heartedly. I’ve currently paused my scribing efforts at 325.

Please add the following things that need to be looked at as well as the topics above:

1. Paper – Requires 5 pulps, this can translate into a lot of lumber…Also all kits require at least 5 papers, meaning you need 25 pulps to just make 1 kit.

2. Resonance & Built timers: The built time on several promotions are just ridiculous.
Decorations should honestly not require 24 hours to make….Max build time on a decoration should be 1-2 hours max. Adjust Resonance accordingly.
Simple or basic ones should require 1-2 mins max.

3. Decorations requiring items that are not even in the game….like this is a major issue, none of the Mast items can be made at all…

4. Several decorations placed cannot be removed, example Vale Guardian crystal….

I would suggest you shift the scribing costs to use more variety of materials that currently see no use. Some suggestions would be:

Leaf Fossils
Mordrem Lodestones
Milling Stones

These items are abundant and hardly used at all. Swap out some sand and flax recipes with these items and you will instantly bring the price down and maybe make these slightly less useless vendor trash.

Personally, I am in a WvW guild. I was our first scribe to hit 400. I got very little help from the guild. I personally spent approxinately 5000 gold out of my own funds, to get my crafting up. To say it broke my bank is an understatement.
I am glad to see these changes wre coming, but at this point i am exceedingly disappointed it took this long to see it.
I also feel that those of us who hit 400 while it is broken, are going to get short changed in the long run, because any time these adjustments get made, they are not retroactive.

Walther, there’s a saying that something is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it.

The fact that some people have already parted with the gold isn’t a reason to avoid fixing something that’s broken. You parted with that gold of your own volition whereas I on the contrary, have boycotted scribe because it’s nonsense.

There’s simply no way you will get compensated for it, no more so that those of us who made soft wood planks at four logs a go will be compensated.

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

That would not be fair for those who were not insane bot-like farmers or had hosts of guild members gathering the materials for them. If most of the material were given by one player, but another one was the scribe, would it be fair to give the title to the one that basically pressed lots of buttons and waited for bars to fill, using the materials that took time and efforts for others to gather?

The only fair thing to do would be something like resetting all scribes back to 0, and refunding materials in mail or directly to the bank. But that may pump too many of those materials into the market.

Glad to see im not the only one stuck in a holding patter, I been holding at 362 since news came out.

The biggest problem I see with scribe costs is the fact that it is difficult to recover the gold spent mainly because materials and crafts are account bound. For that reason I can think of a few solutions:

1) Add supplementary lower level to mid tier alternatives to crafting meaning more decors that are cheaper to craft and gain crafting points.

2) Condense the scribing kit into a universal kit. This means the simple scribing kit thru the grandmasters scribing kit would be condensed into a singular kit requiring possibly a fraction of the mats from each tier. This would make the kit cheaper in comparison as you progress to 400.

3) Please, remove account bound on crafting. Why is this restriction there in the first place? Scribing has enough restrictions, we have it bad enough with cost, on top of it all, there is very minimal return on investment. We should be able to sell excess materials and decorations on the trading post to recover at least some of this gold being sunk.

Many of those who have attempted to scribe have quit or quit the game altogether. Please implement solutions that will help not only first time scribers, but the ones that have also put in the time and gold thus far into this mess, ty.

MadRabbit.3179:

Like define “reasonable”? Or what the GW2 teams idea of “reasonable” is? Since it’s pretty clear when it comes to the cost of materials and grinding, “reasonable” is very a subjective and broad adjective.

Like is “reasonable” going to be something personally obtainable by a single individual who hasn’t been stockpiling tons of materials and gold since the dawn of GW2? Is “reasonable” obtainable without the help of an entire guild of people if you don’t all into the former category?

Because if “reasonable” is according to the same standards you have applied to everything else in HoT where players are being treated like hamsters in a wheel, endlessly grinding massive amounts of materials for little reward, because economic stimulation is priority one and player’s actual enjoyment is second, then “reasonable” is pretty debatable.

At the end of the day, you have a personal crafting profession that is intended mostly for the benefit of the entire guild, but also contains a small percentage of personal items. This crafting profession currently requires the help of an entire guild to complete and the results of that guild’s time and material investment are not owned by the guild. A player can quit the game, leave the guild or use their crafting profession to help other guilds, all three creating scenarios ripe for drama and hostility when the original guild who helped them loses out on their investment.

It seems to me the scribe profession is way more broken and controversial than just making prices more “reasonable” can fix.

THIS!!! I couldn’t have said it better

Spurnshadow.3678:

Farming Flats.5370:

A.net thank you, but it’s too late. the damage is already done.

No joke. I know decorations are crazy, but they’re optional. For us WvWers, scribing and guild hall unlocks for WvW buffs and items are mandatory. We’ve been rushing our butts off trying to get things unlocked as fast as possible. This is why the larger, more richer guilds have advantages over smaller or medium guilds. There are quite a few who’ve unlocked presense of the keep, +5 supply, airship barrage, or whatever it’s called, emergency waypoint, the mining upgrades needed for that stuff, and the scribes needed to craft those things. That’s thousands of gold.

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Agreed, it cost a lot of time, effort and gold for the two smaller WvW guilds I am in to regain the plus 5 supply we had before HoT. (For me personally it pretty much cleaned out all of my savings of 2+ years playing GW2.) Scribing is brutal for everyone but at least decorations are optional. It once took 150 flax fibers to make a single guild arrow cart and I was trying to get scribe leveled up so I made some, then days later the amount was stealth changed.

HoT caused WvW focused guilds to lose everything, including the ability to claim camps and other structures, and waiting until scribing became more reasonable just wasn’t an option if WvW is the end game and reason for playing GW2. In so many ways this craft is poorly designed, balanced and implemented and truly felt rushed to meet the deadline of the expansion.

Lately I feel like that famous line of Colin’s could be changed to the current reality of an in game experience-
“I chopped down a tree, I chopped a tree down again. Hey! I chopped it again, that’s great!”
Of course it isn’t great, I might be a lumberjack but it’s not okay, I want WvW to be my endgame again.

A few suggestions:

Remove the random sliver amounts for missions- I have done weeks of missions and mostly get 1 or 3 slivers each, regardless of the mission difficulty or my participation level. How about make it a set amount, easy is three, medium is five and difficult is ten. You can also get rid of that resonance token because no one is ever happy to receive one.

Add sand to the desert borderland maps

Increase the chance of pigments from harvesting plant nodes. If the plant being harvested could have some bearing on the pigment dropped such as potatoes = brown, spinach = green, carrots = orange, onions = yellow so much the better!

Increase the chance of flax fibers from flax nodes

Add massive trees, these are like rich ore nodes but in tree form.

Reduce the amount of planks/pulp needed to make paper and the amount of sand needed to make sand paper (Seriously who comes up with these amounts?)

Reduce the amount of time it takes for most decorations to build. Putting all that time and effort into something then to be told wait X hours is just silly. The only case of time gating being needed is with WvW schematics. If it was intended to be a gold sink, that’s a pretty poor excuse for one, you’re only frustrating players.

Consider something, anything at all to give to those players who made scribe before your changes are implemented. Even if it is just a title, any gesture at all that shows you are aware of what those players went through will go a long way.

a) It is generally agreed that slivers, pigments, linseed/flax, and coarse sand are the big barriers to scribe costs. Just reducing the amount required on these would be very helpful, especially for “useless” objects like decorations.
b) some of these recipes require 6 or more sub-levels of crafting, reusing the same material multiple times; this is confusing and tedious and leads to mis-use of ingredients, increasing the costs. Can some of these levels be eliminated?

For instance, to make a kit containing sandpaper it requires:

Kit > Sandpaper > Paper > Pulp> Plank > Log

That’s 6 levels and you haven’t even used the kit for a decoration yet!

c) Yes, resonance times are ridiculous; I’ve noticed that New Year’s decorations take 1 minute (very good), but a guild banquet takes 24 hours(?). Is this to force us to buy resonance (yet another gold sink, like we didn’t put enough into scribing the material to begin with?)

d) By the beard of Zeus, please add a TP to guild halls. I keep losing my place in the recipe when I have to leave the hall to pick up materials.

What happens to big guilds who embraced this as a group project and dished out thousands of gold to acquire decorations that felt both rewarding and balanced as a group effort ?

I appreciate your forthright communication and clear intentions, Gaile and the dev team at large. We are in a much better place now than we have been in the past with respect to communication, and I very much want to recognize it.

Scribing has been a huge outlier and I’m glad that steps are being taken to correct it, because I have had zero interest in making a push into the new profession in its current implementation.

While I understand that these are just the overarching goals and not specifics, thank you. I also look forward to hearing about what Colin alluded to in Guild Chat, insofar as making HoT content less grindy in general, and what that specifically means.

Costs is one thing and tbh I’m not realy into that but could you also start to
review the WvW guild upgrades. Those are more and more available and off-prime time server starting into prime time with t3 structures plastered with those upgrades.
It makes it very hard up to impossible to flip those towers/keeps/sm.
It’s also unfun to fight zergs with 5 banners (dragon, turtle, centaur). At least you toned them down a bit.

Justine.6351:

Romo.3709:

bsansam.8546:

same as you do for milling basins and mortar already

Which, btw, would be nice to have those in collection tabs, just like all the other purchasable items.

Grab stacks of both and put them in a bank tab.

My bank is already full of things that should be in collection tab/wallet, thank you very much.

In the future my suggestion would be not using new social features such as guild hall crafting as a major gold and material sink as the first priority of the feature. The social features should have been the paramount reason for designing guild halls. I had 20 members of my guild flabbergasted at the extreme pricing of Scribe materials. Guilds can also be screwed over by having their “guild scribe” decide to leave. That was a glaring oversight as well in the design.

I am of the opinion that many of these things were intentionally designed the way they were. Sure, I think there could have been a few mistakes, we are all human after all and not perfect, but there were too many things that ArenaNet went absolutely silent on. If they were mistakes why not address them immediately instead of guilds dumping thousands of gold into this stuff? I had members that defended a lot of this because they had just spent 60-100 dollars on this expansion and were excited about it to the point of being irrational about what this system actually was.

This speaks to a larger communication problem that has existed for some time in this game. Addressing this stuff 3 months after launch is quite frankly unacceptable.

Guild Halls are drop dead gorgeous spaces. It’s a shame that someone had the power to take that beautiful art as a social space and ruin it by making the costs so prohibitive to guilds that want to decorate it. These spaces aren’t in the open world so that other guilds can puff their chests out pridefully to exclaim, “Look how much cooler our space is than yours.” They are private spaces for guild mates and good friends to enjoy making their own and the experience has been marred by making them gold sinks first and foremost for the first 3 months to however long it takes you all to fix the issues in them.

>This speaks to a larger communication problem that has existed for some time in this game. Addressing this stuff 3 months after launch is quite frankly unacceptable.

Sigh. Gaile: I came here to say thanks for listening, watching, and responding.

I don’t understand how anyone can read your post saying that you waited a while to see if it would balance out, you made some mistakes you plan to fix, and you are going to make other improvements, and rant like this.

Do I think the cost of scribing has been pretty ridiculous? Yep. Does it mean that our guild, with 300+ members, two of whom are in the top-20 AP list (and have cash on hand that accompanies that amount of gameplay) and with 20-60 people logged in at any given time, only has a few dozen decorations? Yep.

But seriously, READ THE OP. There’s a reason why it didn’t get fixed the first time, or thousand times, people asked for a change.

How about MORE STORAGE for all the Scribing mats?

You should either put more things into Mat Storage, or make more storage tabs available to players. With the stuff we already have to store for all the other content, most players were already maxed out on Storage Tabs, and then you introduce a new Profession and a new Craft and (besides pigment (which you added after we complained)) you did not give us the ability to store any of it.

That’s also a factor in people NOT WANTING to Scribe…. no place to put the Mats nor intermediate craft items.

Storage is currently at 12 Tabs, and should increase to 16, and ALL raw Mats need to be added to Mat Storage.

It’s interesting how it took three months to ‘discover’ this. All the time needed to get rid of several metric tons of gold in the game. And when people are settled, have spent gazzilions, now prices are lowered to bait more people into getting into the guild hall trap.

AlsoAdelas.4901:

>This speaks to a larger communication problem that has existed for some time in this game. Addressing this stuff 3 months after launch is quite frankly unacceptable.

Sigh. Gaile: I came here to say thanks for listening, watching, and responding.

I don’t understand how anyone can read your post saying that you waited a while to see if it would balance out, you made some mistakes you plan to fix, and you are going to make other improvements, and rant like this.

Do I think the cost of scribing has been pretty ridiculous? Yep. Does it mean that our guild, with 300+ members, two of whom are in the top-20 AP list (and have cash on hand that accompanies that amount of gameplay) and with 20-60 people logged in at any given time, only has a few dozen decorations? Yep.

But seriously, READ THE OP. There’s a reason why it didn’t get fixed the first time, or thousand times, people asked for a change.

The communication issues I am speaking of is two fold. 1.) If the scribing stuff affected ArenaNet’s bottom line because it was too cheap and people were blowing through scribing too quickly due to an error it would have been patched immediately. Tons of people said how expensive it was and it wasn’t even addressed. Tons of threads went largely unanswered or pertinent points that really cut to the heart of the matter went largely unanswered. 2.) Like many other things in game, I believe it was set up as an arbitrary gold sink. It wasn’t a mistake overall. Were there things that were probably gaffes along the way that added to the confusion? Sure. That isn’t what I am speaking about though. When it affects players in-game pockets it takes months to address. When it affects the in-game economy as it pertains to ArenaNet, they address it usually immediately. That’s the issue I have. As a customer, I want to come first. As a customer, I want my reasonable questions answered first. Thousands of gold for scribing was, in my opinion, unacceptable. I am leaving my feedback. I am not being rude about it, and I am sorely disappointed in how the last year and change has gone in regards to that.

The way I see it, there are two main points of contention when it comes to Scribing costs:

1. The cost to level Scribe is disproportionately expensive when compared to other crafting professions. As others have mentioned, you need to be either an exceedingly rich player, or have the support of an entire guild to fund the various guild upgrades and materials necessary to get Scribe to 400.

2. The cost to craft WvW upgrades and (especially) decorations is astoundingly high, often for not very much return. As someone above pointed out, when it costs 300g to craft a simple (and ugly) chair, something is seriously broken. If you’re intending to use Halls as a gold sink, aim for quantity, not quality. Make decorations very cheap, then let players go wild just crafting and filling their hall with hundreds of various items.

The four main bottlenecks that I can see are:

- Resonating Slivers
- Brown Pigment
- Coarse Sand
- Flax/Linseed Oil

At the bare minimum, the amount of materials needed for each of these needs to be looked at. Otherwise, I basically agree with the bulk of Merris’ post when it comes to preferred changes to Scribing costs:

Paper – Reduce the amount of planks required to craft 1 paper from 5 to 3, or maybe even 1. On its own the wood cost isn’t that terrible, but the demand is also causing conflict with people who are going for Legendaries, where an extreme amount of Spiritwood is causing demand bottlenecks.

Sandpaper – Reduce amount of sand needed to craft those by 5x times, as Merris suggests. This is a big requirement for decoration crafters, since every single decoration needs a Finishing Kit, which needs sandpaper. Alternatively, introduce a new way to acquire Coarse Sand, by giving us the ability to salvage Lumps of Ambrite into Coarse Sand (perhaps 2 or 3 per Ambrite?). Ambrite is currently languishing at vendor prices on the TP, and this would help boost demand. As an additional bonus, Ambrite is only obtainable via the maps Dry Top and Silverwastes, so this would mean players still need to visit those maps.

Linseed Oil – Reduce costs by 3x times (1 instead of 3, 2 instead of 6 etc). While Linseed Oil isn’t as bad as the other materials thanks to the easy access to the Flax farm in Verdant Brink, this will also help ease the pressure for smaller guilds trying to build upgrades and that need tons of Empty Kegs.

Resonating Slivers – I believe the drop rates are fine as they are now, but reduce the slivers used in the various bags of powder from 3 to 1. I don’t want to kill their value completely so that players who do guild missions that aren’t interested in Scribing can still sell them for some extra cash, but I believe that the average Scribe should be able to farm the majority of what he needs without needing to turn to the TP.

Ink – Either reduce the amount of pigments needed from 10 to 3 or even 1. Alternatively, reduce the requirements to 5, and overhaul the pigment system so that higher dye pigments do not need to use lower pigments as a baseline. You’ll notice that all the higher dye pigments are around acceptable prices while the lower one goes, the most costly they get.

Can we get a sink for Foxfire Clusters and Ambrite? Especially Ambriite, I feel it’s a shade you guys introduced a new crafting material only for it to be… well, useless.

I wouldn’t mind if Mushrooms were also used in recipes. Portobello Mushrooms, Sawgill Mushrooms, etc.

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

No. You’ve decided to level scribing. Why would there be any compensation?

Hmm. To be honest, i believe that scribing should be easier to level up personally but the big or better looking decorations must need mats that require the entire guild to pitch in. This is needed to create a long and steady progression as well as goals for thr guild. Anet can then bring more more and more decorations slowly at the high price ceiling so we as players have a consistent reason to actually farm for stuff.

MikeiMighty.5197:

As an example, for those wanting to create their own library, Only 1 Wide Library shelf would cost you….. 90 linseed Oil and 1500 coarse sand!!!! Ignoring all other components, this is WAY to high. It needs to be reduced by a factor of 10! This items shouldn’t cost much as they are DECORATIONS! Why make them so expensive.

Indeed, and don’t forget that it also needs 1500 Ancient planks, and 4500 Elder planks. :P
I once counted the total cost for this item, and it was around 900g which is a bit too much for one shelf.