Guild Wars 2

We got two patches/changes since gw2 went f2p.

1. We got an awesome funny mordrem invasion.
2. We finally can have some spare time from these exhausting blc keyruns.

We got a lot of great patches and awesome new content during this year and we all support HoT with our prepurchase.
I know anet thought alot about us old veteran players at the time you gave us our great 3rd birthday gift.

After we had so much fun meeting new player and with all these events I had a little idea. Might it be possible for the future that you add more cool and awesome content for your long paying customers and limit only f2p accounts on the fun part?

Some ideas on past decisions might be like only giving your real customers some loot drops at the mordrem invasions and only limit f2p accounts on getting no loot. Another little idea would be to limit only f2p accounts on doing blc keyruns and let all your veteran paying customers play the game how it existed for over 3 years.

I know these ideas seem crazy and really hard to realize, but I’m sure all these great and smart people at anet that created fun for over 10 years for us can think of some way.

F2P accounts are not the problem with key farming. They have no possible way to transfer the keys, loot or gold off the account.

You realize that the f2p accounts can’t transfer the scraps, tickets, weapon skins or gold made by selling a skin to another account. What is made on that account, stays on that account. The only way to do so is to buy the game, and no longer be f2p.

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

Yes, so there would be no problem only limiting f2p accounts. That’s exactly my idea^^

Bomber.3872:

Yes, so there would be no problem only limiting f2p accounts. That’s exactly my idea^^

Since they aren’t a problem, what is the point? What does it gain? Your idea has to have a point and be meaningful, for it to be considered by ANet as something they should do.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

They took a good farm and turned it into mindless RNG, assuming keys drop any more often in the first place. I’d hardly call that an improvement. This games needs less RNG not more.

Bomber.3872:

Yes, so there would be no problem only limiting f2p accounts. That’s exactly my idea^^

Your idea doesn’t make any sense.

It sounds like you want to punish F2P players out of existence. I don’t see how limiting F2P would make things better for anyone else. You seem envious of them. I suggest quitting your paid for account and start your own F2P account. You seem to think they have it better than you.

This implies you’re one of those people who thinks F2P players somehow get it better than you even though you likely paid to play years ago so it is justified because you basically paid to play earlier than them. Not only that but as a consumer you made your own decision not to wait till GW2 was possibly free in some unforeseeable future.

Maybe I am just jumping to conclusions, but a lot of this I have seen, and it is really stupid. It is as if they expect a refund.

How about, these people get a refund only if they agree for their account to be wiped, and terminated. Now they can be a few £ richer and make a Free to play account which has heavy restrictions!

Sure it may not be as fun, but they are finally savvy customers right?… Right?

OP, if you think the f2p accounts are doing so well, make your own f2p account. Heck, make 100 of them. Farm your heart out and then see that gold sit there with no way to move it off.

Besides the one week per account won’t stop F2P players. You just make a new account. Problem avoided.

Dinks.2478:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

They took a good farm and turned it into mindless RNG, assuming keys drop any more often in the first place. I’d hardly call that an improvement. This games needs less RNG not more.

It also needs more incentives to play fun content and fewer to farm repetitive, boring content. I can’t imagine many people were repeating the level 10 personal story quests because they found it fun.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

That is a massive, MASSIVE assumption that they are increasing the drop rate by any relevant amount.

I’ve played over 3000 hours over the last 3 years, do you know how may key drops I’ve had outside personal story?
2 keys.
Two

They could increase the drop rate by 100% and it would still make for only 4 keys every 3 years, or ~1.3 keys a year.

Whoopdie-do

I am by no means a key farmer, doing maybe a couple runs a year.
I’d saved up 50 keys, through the old dailies, map completion, and story, etc
Know what I got with those 50 keys when I finally used them recently?
Trash.
Tons of trash.
That’s why people don’t want to spend money on them.
There are a handful of nice things, but the odds are so stupidly low it seems paying for the chance isn’t worth it (and its not)

So they need to either massively bump key drop rates (they won’t)
Or massively bump what’s in the chests (they won’t)

ScribeTheMad.7614:

I am by no means a key farmer, doing maybe a couple runs a year.

Then you’re no worse off now than you were before. I’m confused at your objection. They haven’t made key runs impossible, they’ve simply made it so you can’t spend whole days chain-grinding them.

My point was that I keep seeing comments about how this means there’s going to be a big bump in key drops, so people will be able to get similar/the same number of keys without farming.

Which is a totally unfounded idea.
This was a move to get people to buy more keys, not to give people more free keys.
My other point was that the current contents of the chests is trash, thus keys aren’t worth buying, thus people don’t want to buy them.

Joining the bandwagon.

P4F accounts can’t sell skins on the TP.
P4F accounts can’t mail out items or gold.
P4F accounts can’t deposit the skin or gold into any Guild Bank.

This isn’t about P4F. This is about shutting down an emergent form of game play that was only tacitly allowed because ANet wanted the new player to get their first hit of BLTC rewards for free. I do suspect that by observing new player since the start of the year with both $10 accounts and P4F accounts that they were able to convince themselves that a once a week restriction would minimally the impact on new player.

I also suspect that they also analyzed who were generating the most BLTC ticket weapon skins and found that this was a very small pool of players, some with possible RMT ties.

Honestly glad keyfarming is gone.

Now if they want to improve the system, bring back gw1 methods.

Lockpicks in game drop from mobs, similar functionality to black lion keys with the following restrictions.
- Everything that is currently on the black lion chest drop table has the same weights (chance to drop)
- Chance on using lockpick to fail, Failure results in both the chest and lockpick being destroyed

Change functionality of Black Lion Keys.
- Black Lion Keys used on chest give players a selectable pool of items (Tickets, Booster, Convenience(TP to friend, Keys Etc…), Skins (discontinued), Dyes) Players can chose from 3/5 items and are always guaranteed a shot (higher chance than using lockpicks) at the rarer Nodes/Permanent Contracts

Pleases both crowds.

Like some of you wrote, I know that f2p accounts have already some limits. I want more limitation only for f2p accounts instead of all other accounts.

I think noone can deny that only since gw2 went f2p there were strange patches which somehow limited all existing accounts:

Anet often did rework different things, but I can’t recall any that had such strange effect mostly on existing “veteran” accounts:
- Short before f2p: Change of boosters. This is still strange if you think about the way how now boost enchantment powder works and that you can’t get karma boosters back.
- The “first” ingame event since f2p: Mordrem invasion. We already had scarlet invasions which worked fine ingame. If you look on all posts and problems people had with this event, its strange for me to understand why anet created it this way. Only reason I can think of is that it was especially designed for f2p player, but everyone got the same “restrictions”.
- Today’s change on blc keyruns is for me hard to understand. I know for sure that at least one dev from anet postet on this forum that keyruns are ok. Basically it was probably the main reason to make keyruns “less” efficient at the time anet changed the peronal story to be only available after you reach level 10. So why this change now after 3 years? Again the only thing I can think of is that f2p accounts somehow could do alot of keyruns and somehow gain too much out of it. (Maybe something like doing alot keyruns to get high amounts on blc keys and then upgrade the account, after that everything gained could be used).

So this are for me three major changes in a very short timeframe that kind of feel like restricting old customers for f2p reasons. That’s what my suggestion is about.

Maybe better solutions would have been:
- Boosters: The new ones could have been added as 1h versions only. That would have prevented any strange changes and would have been a nice change for all existing accounts. Instead f2p accounts could have been limited to not gain any boosters outside of the gemshop.
- Mordrem Invasions: Since loot and event rewards are char/account based, why not only limit f2p accounts on getting no loot and no event rewards? For all others it could have been like scarlets invasion.
- Keyrun limit: It seems possible to limit the gained keys to one/week per account. So why not create this limit only for f2p accounts? Then it couldn’t be abused by these.

Bomber.3872:

Like some of you wrote, I know that f2p accounts have already some limits. I want more limitation only for f2p accounts instead of all other accounts.

I think noone can deny that only since gw2 went f2p there were strange patches which somehow limited all existing accounts:

Anet often did rework different things, but I can’t recall any that had such strange effect mostly on existing “veteran” accounts:
- Short before f2p: Change of boosters. This is still strange if you think about the way how now boost enchantment powder works and that you can’t get karma boosters back.
- The “first” ingame event since f2p: Mordrem invasion. We already had scarlet invasions which worked fine ingame. If you look on all posts and problems people had with this event, its strange for me to understand why anet created it this way. Only reason I can think of is that it was especially designed for f2p player, but everyone got the same “restrictions”.
- Today’s change on blc keyruns is for me hard to understand. I know for sure that at least one dev from anet postet on this forum that keyruns are ok. Basically it was probably the main reason to make keyruns “less” efficient at the time anet changed the peronal story to be only available after you reach level 10. So why this change now after 3 years? Again the only thing I can think of is that f2p accounts somehow could do alot of keyruns and somehow gain too much out of it. (Maybe something like doing alot keyruns to get high amounts on blc keys and then upgrade the account, after that everything gained could be used).

So this are for me three major changes in a very short timeframe that kind of feel like restricting old customers for f2p reasons. That’s what my suggestion is about.

Maybe better solutions would have been:
- Boosters: The new ones could have been added as 1h versions only. That would have prevented any strange changes and would have been a nice change for all existing accounts. Instead f2p accounts could have been limited to not gain any boosters outside of the gemshop.
- Mordrem Invasions: Since loot and event rewards are char/account based, why not only limit f2p accounts on getting no loot and no event rewards? For all others it could have been like scarlets invasion.
- Keyrun limit: It seems possible to limit the gained keys to one/week per account. So why not create this limit only for f2p accounts? Then it couldn’t be abused by these.

B2p accounts are also limited in the things they can both buy and sell on the trading post. It’s quite possible they can neither buy nor sell BL skins.

Bomber.3872:

Like some of you wrote, I know that f2p accounts have already some limits. I want more limitation only for f2p accounts instead of all other accounts.

I think noone can deny that only since gw2 went f2p there were strange patches which somehow limited all existing accounts:

Anet often did rework different things, but I can’t recall any that had such strange effect mostly on existing “veteran” accounts:
- Short before f2p: Change of boosters. This is still strange if you think about the way how now boost enchantment powder works and that you can’t get karma boosters back.
- The “first” ingame event since f2p: Mordrem invasion. We already had scarlet invasions which worked fine ingame. If you look on all posts and problems people had with this event, its strange for me to understand why anet created it this way. Only reason I can think of is that it was especially designed for f2p player, but everyone got the same “restrictions”.
- Today’s change on blc keyruns is for me hard to understand. I know for sure that at least one dev from anet postet on this forum that keyruns are ok. Basically it was probably the main reason to make keyruns “less” efficient at the time anet changed the peronal story to be only available after you reach level 10. So why this change now after 3 years? Again the only thing I can think of is that f2p accounts somehow could do alot of keyruns and somehow gain too much out of it. (Maybe something like doing alot keyruns to get high amounts on blc keys and then upgrade the account, after that everything gained could be used).

So this are for me three major changes in a very short timeframe that kind of feel like restricting old customers for f2p reasons. That’s what my suggestion is about.

Maybe better solutions would have been:
- Boosters: The new ones could have been added as 1h versions only. That would have prevented any strange changes and would have been a nice change for all existing accounts. Instead f2p accounts could have been limited to not gain any boosters outside of the gemshop.
- Mordrem Invasions: Since loot and event rewards are char/account based, why not only limit f2p accounts on getting no loot and no event rewards? For all others it could have been like scarlets invasion.
- Keyrun limit: It seems possible to limit the gained keys to one/week per account. So why not create this limit only for f2p accounts? Then it couldn’t be abused by these.

1. Booster change. There aren’t many karma sinks. So people tend to have more karma than they know what to do with. Since it would be hard to make a karma sink and have it not affect gold inflation, they can only change the rate of acquisition. So they slowed the karma gain down. Not related at all to F2P.

2. F2P accounts can only buy and sell specific items on the TP. Those items are likely not tradeable expensive event items. No harm will be done to the economy due to this.

3. More like ANet saw that the key running was likely affecting key sales in the gem store and that during the $10 sale too many people for their liking bought accounts to key farm. F2P accounts will likely not be able to sell anything from the chest, even if it’s not account bound on acquire.

Don’t see a problem with what your solutions try to fix.

I like how key drop rates were increased from, what 0.000000000001%? In the 3 years and 2000+hrs of playing I’ve never gotten a key as a actual drop, only from PS/map completion. I have a feeling I still won’t. We shall see.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

That is a massive, MASSIVE assumption that they are increasing the drop rate by any relevant amount.

I’ve played over 3000 hours over the last 3 years, do you know how may key drops I’ve had outside personal story?
2 keys.
Two

that is a bit of bullkitten, i have 9xx hours on my account and i got TONS of keys drop.
less then a month ago i dropped two keys within 1 hour..

you see u can farm all your time in instance or afk ingame or crafting..
or you can actually go farm “trash” mobs somewhere..
even my wife with less then 200hour ingame has dropped over 4 keys..

but then again i dont do dungeons all i do is WvW (never had it there) or farm cursed shore events with mobs (not the champs) or just random spot with mobs in cursed shore to farm mindless.. they drop fine they droprate shouldnt be upped alot cus it will just kitten up the market unless u like cheap stuff and nothing that comes from chest is even rare anymore then id say ye go for it increase chance alot..

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

The drop rate does not adequately “compensate” anyone. lol

Seera.5916:

1. Booster change. There aren’t many karma sinks. So people tend to have more karma than they know what to do with. Since it would be hard to make a karma sink and have it not affect gold inflation, they can only change the rate of acquisition. So they slowed the karma gain down. Not related at all to F2P.

2. F2P accounts can only buy and sell specific items on the TP. Those items are likely not tradeable expensive event items. No harm will be done to the economy due to this.

3. More like ANet saw that the key running was likely affecting key sales in the gem store and that during the $10 sale too many people for their liking bought accounts to key farm. F2P accounts will likely not be able to sell anything from the chest, even if it’s not account bound on acquire.

Don’t see a problem with what your solutions try to fix.

It’s really hard to argument on this forum

1. So it is fair to create a karma sink which mostly effects people that paid $ for blc keys and got boost enchantment powder to convert even 2 karma to one storageable booster? I know there are people in gw2 that have too much karma, but that only because they don’t really play gw2. Karma is a valueable ressource which you have to use for alot of things and it can be converted to gold. Noone who plays gw2 alot can ever have enough or too much karma. I converted around 50-100 Million karma during these 3 years and I still need millions more.

2. I even explained exactly how f2p accounts can have an impact on the tp+economy. Is there really a step to step guide needed for some people to understand how it works???

3. same as 2. I explained it above how f2p accounts did farm blc keys during the last weeks and how it impacts on TP+economy. Yes, f2p accounts have limits, but for malicious people these limits are gone after they buy an upgrade to full account.
I understand that this is a problem, so yes it probably wouldn’t be fixed if anet had only limited f2p accounts. But they could have limitied only all non HoT accounts or all accounts younger 1/2 years. There are countless better ways to just limit the problem accs instead of creating a limit on all.

Bomber.3872:

Seera.5916:

1. Booster change. There aren’t many karma sinks. So people tend to have more karma than they know what to do with. Since it would be hard to make a karma sink and have it not affect gold inflation, they can only change the rate of acquisition. So they slowed the karma gain down. Not related at all to F2P.

2. F2P accounts can only buy and sell specific items on the TP. Those items are likely not tradeable expensive event items. No harm will be done to the economy due to this.

3. More like ANet saw that the key running was likely affecting key sales in the gem store and that during the $10 sale too many people for their liking bought accounts to key farm. F2P accounts will likely not be able to sell anything from the chest, even if it’s not account bound on acquire.

Don’t see a problem with what your solutions try to fix.

It’s really hard to argument on this forum

1. So it is fair to create a karma sink which mostly effects people that paid $ for blc keys and got boost enchantment powder to convert even 2 karma to one storageable booster? I know there are people in gw2 that have too much karma, but that only because they don’t really play gw2. Karma is a valueable ressource which you have to use for alot of things and it can be converted to gold. Noone who plays gw2 alot can ever have enough or too much karma. I converted around 50-100 Million karma during these 3 years and I still need millions more.

2. I even explained exactly how f2p accounts can have an impact on the tp+economy. Is there really a step to step guide needed for some people to understand how it works???

3. same as 2. I explained it above how f2p accounts did farm blc keys during the last weeks and how it impacts on TP+economy. Yes, f2p accounts have limits, but for malicious people these limits are gone after they buy an upgrade to full account.
I understand that this is a problem, so yes it probably wouldn’t be fixed if anet had only limited f2p accounts. But they could have limitied only all non HoT accounts or all accounts younger 1/2 years. There are countless better ways to just limit the problem accs instead of creating a limit on all.

1. You don’t get to decide who does play and does not really play GW2. What they spend their karma on, if anything, does not determine if someone really plays GW2 or not. And like I said, there aren’t many karma sinks. Not everyone needs or wants a ton of gold or at least doesn’t want it enough to convert their karma. Now, could they have given a couple weeks to a month’s notice that the choose your own booster was going to lose karma as an option? Yes. But the drop in the karma booster has NOTHING to do with F2P accounts. Nothing. Zilch.

2 & 3. F2P accounts can not buy and sell whatever they want on the TP. There is a very specific list. I highly doubt that the BLTC ticket weapons are on that list of things they can buy or sell. If you have proof, show me.

So, what else in the chests aren’t account bound that can be sold and do you have proof a F2P account can even sell them?

They can’t even BUY or SELL dyes.

And if they buy the game, then they are no longer a F2P account and therefore don’t have the limits and would become part of the loyal customer base you wish to support.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

My point was that I keep seeing comments about how this means there’s going to be a big bump in key drops, so people will be able to get similar/the same number of keys without farming.

Which is a totally unfounded idea.
This was a move to get people to buy more keys, not to give people more free keys.
My other point was that the current contents of the chests is trash, thus keys aren’t worth buying, thus people don’t want to buy them.

People keep saying:

• the drops are trash — no one will buy
• key farms were nerfed to increase the purchase of keys

Neither of these statements make much sense, upon close examination.

• Keys have always been a popular purchase. Any time they have been slightly discounted, the gold:gem rate has increased a lot. ANet doesn’t need to increase the rate.
• There’s no evidence that anyone who key farms would be likely to buy keys instead; nearly everyone who farmed them did it because they liked it or because they consider it to be more cost effective — neither of those things are changed by this change.

I think it’s much more likely that they wanted to distribute the rewards (such as they are) more evenly across the community: with key farming, only a narrow fraction of players get a chance at skins; with a higher drop rate, everyone gets a chance.

Of course, the success of that that goal depends on the ensuring that just as many keys drop in the open world as used to drop from key farming. And we have no way to test that: we don’t know how many keys got farmed; we don’t know how many are dropping now, spread out across hundreds of thousands of people. Our best guess will be following prices on the next set of BL weapon skins: if that spikes up and never returns to the old equilibrium of 80-120g/ticket for (most) new skins, then we can speculate that is because fewer tickets are available. (Even that might just mean that a ton of people are sitting on 1-9 scraps.)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• There’s no evidence that anyone who key farms would be likely to buy keys instead; nearly everyone who farmed them did it because they liked it or because they consider it to be more cost effective — neither of those things are changed by this change.

Other than the rate they can get them. Key farmers had it down to a science, even after NPE. It affects any player who key farmed more than once a week.

But none of the OP notions that it’s all the P4F’s fault makes any sense and seems more like the inevitable extension of the P4F kneejerk reaction since the predicted doom and gloom hasn’t materialized in the two weeks since P4F went live.

Seera.5916:

1. You don’t get to decide who does play and does not really play GW2. What they spend their karma on, if anything, does not determine if someone really plays GW2 or not. And like I said, there aren’t many karma sinks. Not everyone needs or wants a ton of gold or at least doesn’t want it enough to convert their karma. Now, could they have given a couple weeks to a month’s notice that the choose your own booster was going to lose karma as an option? Yes. But the drop in the karma booster has NOTHING to do with F2P accounts. Nothing. Zilch.

2 & 3. F2P accounts can not buy and sell whatever they want on the TP. There is a very specific list. I highly doubt that the BLTC ticket weapons are on that list of things they can buy or sell. If you have proof, show me.

So, what else in the chests aren’t account bound that can be sold and do you have proof a F2P account can even sell them?

They can’t even BUY or SELL dyes.

And if they buy the game, then they are no longer a F2P account and therefore don’t have the limits and would become part of the loyal customer base you wish to support.

Again fine, if YOU don’t need karma. That doesn’t mean there is too much karma, that only means you don’t use it. And of course the change was because f2p. Only f2p would have gained too much karma if anet wouldn’t have change it (hint: personal story items).

For the Rest, please stop writing f2p accounts have limited TP access. I know this, I knwo exactly what is limited and what not. Again f2p accounts are mostly used by new people to test or through malicious people. Fact is malicious people did farm blc keys for two weeks. Fact is that every f2p can farm anything and as soon as they buy an acc upgrade they influence TP+economy.

I have no idea how to explain the issue more clear. It’s not that hard to figure out alot of ways how f2p have a bad influence. Thats why anet changed common ingame mechanics. Thats what would be nice if these limits would only be for the f2p issues and not on everyone.

Bomber.3872:

It’s really hard to argument on this forum

That may be because your arguments seem fundamentally flawed.

The scarlett invasion events were not fine. There was a lot of trouble around people actively working against the event goal to increase their loot chance instead of actually finishing the event, which did lead to some nasty situations. By taking the loot drops out of event mobs they’re trying to get people to focus on the actual events rather than individual drops. Whether they’re successful in their goal or not is another question, but at least to me this seems to be primarily aimed at a part of the old player base that’s more interested in “gaming the system” to increase their gold gain rate than at the new people (who, as far as I’ve seen, are mostly interested in just playing the game as a whole and not nearly as focused on their rewards ratio as certain veterans).

Key runners, again in what I see in game, were mostly veterans, too, and not the ones that occasionally buy gems with cash. I know of people that had a habit of doing at least one key run a day, and sometimes as many as thirty in a week or two. They’re the ones that have their banks full of black lion weapon skins and make good gold trading those on the trading post. The new people that I’ve met are again too busy playing the game as a whole to even think about keyfarming.

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

Rasimir.6239:

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

Yes exactly, but why put these restrictions on the veterans after these 3 years? Your example with some veterans doing alot of keyruns and getting gold out if it, is that bad? In my opinon keyruns are a fun ‘mindless’ part like silverwaste or like world completion for the 10th time.

And on f2p, I think you didn’t understand what I wrote. Like you wrote (and others), it seems that you think f2p are like these new naiv player that test gw2 and if they like it they buy the upgrade. Of course these f2p kind is wanted. I never wrote anything that would matter for these real f2p player. I’m sure these wouldn’t do xx keyruns per week either.
The problem with f2p in general is that there are of course people trying to abuse it or be bad. These kind of f2p could and did farm hundreds of blc keys and yes everything they get is limited at first. But after these ‘bad’ people upgrade their account, they can flood the TP, the market, or the gold exchange, because then there are no limitations left.

All change that happend seems exactly to prevent such f2p issues. Thats again why I would love it if these limitations would only exist for f2p accs and not on all.
Because for veteran accs these restrictions make no sense at all.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Key farming was dumb and never should’ve existed in the first place. Slaying it and increasing the Key drop rate to compensate was a very player-centric thing for ANet to have done. F2P has nothing to do with it.

I had like 6 BL keys drops over almost 7000hours, and never had enough scraps for a single ticket even with 2 100% completed world explorations.
So how exactly anet will compensate that, make drop like x1000 from current one?

Bomber.3872:

Rasimir.6239:

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

Yes exactly, but why put these restrictions on the veterans after these 3 years? Your example with some veterans doing alot of keyruns and getting gold out if it, is that bad? In my opinon keyruns are a fun ‘mindless’ part like silverwaste or like world completion for the 10th time.

Only ANet has the metrics, only they know how many keys were actually farmed by what part of the player base, and how that impacts the economy. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that they want to spread the key aquisition across the playerbase more evenly as suggested by the fact that they’ve upped the drop rate of keys at the same time and only impacted the aquisition rate of a rather small group of players expressly “farming” a bunch of keys by the same method in a short time frame.

You can still farm a key/week by playing the lvl 10 personal story, just not several. I still doubt there’s many people who have regularly farmed keys that way, and if they indeed will drop more often now to people just playing whatever content they enjoy instead of being concentrated on those people who farm personal story, then that’ll be a plus in my book. If it works out in the end we’ll see …

Bomber.3872:

The problem with f2p in general is that there are of course people trying to abuse it or be bad. These kind of f2p could and did farm hundreds of blc keys and yes everything they get is limited at first. But after these ‘bad’ people upgrade their account, they can flood the TP, the market, or the gold exchange, because then there are no limitations left.

All change that happend seems exactly to prevent such f2p issues. Thats again why I would love it if these limitations would only exist for f2p accs and not on all.
Because for veteran accs these restrictions make no sense at all.

If those people intend to upgrade their account to a paid account anyway, what’s to keep them from paying up-front and then go on a farming spree? I really don’t see your argument here, there’s no difference whatsoever between an account going paid now or later, other than that they’ll have a bit of wealth piled-up to put into the economy at one point instead of having that spread out over a few more weeks.

With an economy as large as this game’s, that’s literally a drop in the ocean. Even if they farm hundreds of keys, with an average of maybe 20 keys per ticket, that’s still only a handfull of skins and a one-time occurance. Check one of the trading post history sites around, and you’ll find that the impact on the overall economy of such an event would be minimal in the long run.

Well OP I bought the main game 3+ years ago and:

• payed 74.99
• played 7357+ hours, and HOT isn’t lauched yet..
  In effect I
• payed 0.01 euro/hour played… rounded up

Bomber.3872:

Rasimir.6239:

To me it seems like those limits you are complaining about are aimed at the veteran player base first and most, so making them excempt from the restrictions would kind of defeat the purpose. On the other hand, f2p accounts already are severely restricted, I don’t think it’s in ANet’s interest to make them feel really 2nd rate by making it harder for them to even get drops. After all, they don’t have as much advantage from the drops anyway, since they can’t trade it, and by the time they upgrade they’re as much a paying customer as you and me and entitled to all their riches.

Yes exactly, but why put these restrictions on the veterans after these 3 years? Your example with some veterans doing alot of keyruns and getting gold out if it, is that bad? In my opinon keyruns are a fun ‘mindless’ part like silverwaste or like world completion for the 10th time.

And on f2p, I think you didn’t understand what I wrote. Like you wrote (and others), it seems that you think f2p are like these new naiv player that test gw2 and if they like it they buy the upgrade. Of course these f2p kind is wanted. I never wrote anything that would matter for these real f2p player. I’m sure these wouldn’t do xx keyruns per week either.
The problem with f2p in general is that there are of course people trying to abuse it or be bad. These kind of f2p could and did farm hundreds of blc keys and yes everything they get is limited at first. But after these ‘bad’ people upgrade their account, they can flood the TP, the market, or the gold exchange, because then there are no limitations left.

All change that happend seems exactly to prevent such f2p issues. Thats again why I would love it if these limitations would only exist for f2p accs and not on all.
Because for veteran accs these restrictions make no sense at all.

Seems to me all these issues are about paid accounts, not f2p ones, all your abuses are about things that a paid account can do too or needs a paid account to impact anything at all
Not really f2p issues

The big problem in all of your arguments is, that according to you all the f2p accounts can only spread their malicious influence on the game after an account upgrade for 50$.

And now please explain how the influence of f2p accounts can be so much worse than the influence of the 10$ fully functional accounts that you could buy at the beginning of this year.

If f2p accounts were able to screw the whole economy, the 10$ accounts would’ve already done so, long long ago.

I’m really confused. Why would Play for Free accounts ‘farm 100s of keys’ in two weeks, rather than paid accounts. Is there something special about having a P4F account? Was the $10.00, or even $40.00 once-only barrier keeping players away from key-farming? Considering it would cost $50.00 to ‘cash in’ on these 100s of keys, I really don’t understand why this horde of people waited to descend on GW2 once it went P4F and key-farm.

The theory sounds based in some kind of odd dislike for those using Play for Free accounts to me, but maybe I’ve just misunderstood. =/

As has been already explained to you OP, ANet’s computers can see people farming keys. If bots were doing it, it would be even more noticeable. If accounts were cycling through and farming keys sequentially, they could see it. If they wanted to, they could selectively deactivate the keys from the f2p story.

Your theory hinges on ANet seeing f2p accounts farming keys and being unable to selectablely target them to stop the problem. Since ANet has shown they have no problem removing the key to nerf key farming, then your theory that ANet can’t do the same for f2p makes no sense.

Bomber.3872:

Some ideas on past decisions might be like only giving your real customers some loot drops at the mordrem invasions and only limit f2p accounts on getting no loot. Another little idea would be to limit only f2p accounts on doing blc keyruns and let all your veteran paying customers play the game how it existed for over 3 years.

That’s completely ridiculous. How is an f2p account not a ‘real’ GW2 player? There’s already sensible restrictions in place, there’s no need for skewed ones such as giving no loot to free players. Lol.