Guild Wars 2

OK, people buy Gold from farmers because for one reason or another they want a shortcut, perhaps a quick cash injection, or to buy some goodie or whatever.

Recently developers have sought to counter Gold selling, and tried several methods. f2p being one of the most popular (obviously, it kills gold farming stone dead, as a major Gold seller admitted a while ago). Other methods have been tried like EVE’s PLEX, with which I’m fairly familiar, and it works pretty well.

Now, I hope somebody who understands the situation better than me will correct me if I’m off, but it seems to me that there are lots of bots in GW2 at themoment, therefore (logically, it seems to me) there must be lots of Gold being bought and sold outside the context of the Gem store.

Why is this? It seems to me one of the main reasons is that “official” Gold is just not worth it. £8.50 for like 1G is risible. In EVE, if I buy a PLEX and sell it in-game, I get enough isk (in-game “gold”) to buy a reasonably substantial amount of stuff. Not so in this game.

Why is that?

It seems to me that part of the problem is that there’s nothing much worth buying in the official store, so there aren’t enough people bartering their hoarded Gold for Gems. Where are the extra bank slots, for example? Where’s the multitude of cool Townie outfits? So long as people aren’t really buying Gems for Gold, the Gems to Gold ratio is going to stay low, and it’s always going to be worth the punter buying Gold externally if they want to buy Gold.

So: all of this is FWIW. I just want to get the conversation going, as I think it is probably the most serious problem GW2 faces at the moment. Most of the whining about the game itself is worthless and off the mark, but this is a real problem.

To be honest, this game is so young it doesn’t have a good market yet. Not everything you want to buy will come from the BLTC, but from the TP itself.

That being said, the gold to gem conversion thing seems alot like EvE plex, only someone once pointed out that the players don’t control the market price. If that’s true, then I’m not really sure how that’s going to work out and I’m wondering if people are trying to play a market game they have no way of controlling and waiting for gems to go up before selling or prices to come down before buying.

Also EvE has alot of bots even with plex. They just farm other things besides isk. There’s always a black market for something.

errr what are you talking about? the prices of gems has gone up.

earlier the price was like 25-35 silvers (in game currency) per 100 gems
now it is like 37 – 47 silvers per 100 gems

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

errr what are you talking about? the prices of gems has gone up.

earlier the price was like 25-35 silvers (in game currency) per 100 gems
now it is like 37 – 47 silvers per 100 gems

Just checked in game, high is 30, low is 25, average 27 atm. Still laughable, still a problem.

I’d like a better explanation of how ArenaNet is calculating gems to gold conversion. It seems they seeded it ~26 silver per 100 gems or about $1 USD = 20 silver. $10 ~2g

If you want to convert real $ to gems to buy something substantial in game right now it’s very unrealistic for most of us. Some examples:

• Commander Compendium for WvW (100g or $500 USD)
• Teir 3 Cultural armor (120g or $600 USD)
• Black Dye (6g or $30 USD)

• Traveling from Divinity’s Reach to Frostgorge Sound (2.5s or $0.15)
• Cost of level 80 armor repair (24s or $~1.00)

I believe they expect people will spend real cash for the small things. those who can’t will have to pay careful attention with the small cost that add quick.

you must be blind if you just checked and high is 30 low is 25….

ituhata.6830:

only someone once pointed out that the players don’t control the market price. If that’s true

It’s true.

In GW2, the price of gems is determined by a secret algorithm of ANET. During one of the betas I saw an ANET post saying the price is determined by the amount of coin and gems stored within the currency exchange.
We don’t know why ANET chose it over using the buy/sell order system of the trading post. We don’t know how the algorithm is supposed to determine the price. We don’t know if it’s working right, or if a bug has cropped up.

We don’t even know if the currency exchange eats gems or not. We know it eats coin because of the difference between the gem buy/sell price. We don’t know how that eaten coin messes with the exchange rate.

Whatever the case, I hope Anet understand that so long as the price is so low, nobody’s going to pay real money for gems in order to get in-game gold through official channels at this price. Even 30s per 100 would be hopeless. I’d say maybe 5-6G per 800 gems (£8.50) might be more appropriate. At that price I might consider it, although I’d prefer it more like 8G.

At any rate, if they hoped they’d be able to kill Gold farming with this method, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

And, as I suggest, part of the problem may be that they need to put more useful and cool stuff in the Gem store, and fast. That way Gems will be more in demand, people will be willing to pay more Gold for them, and then people who buy Gems with real money in order to get Gold will get a better deal for Gold, and be more likely to use official channels instead of Gold sellers.

(As an aside, it seems to me that Anet are fixed on the idea of 800 Gems being about equivalent to a month’s sub. A character slot is worth about a month’s sub that way, which seems about right. It’s the exchange between Gold and Gems that’s off.)

gurugeorge.9857

Just checked in game, high is 30, low is 25, average 27 atm. Still laughable, still a problem.

that is the rate for converting gems into silvers.

well the rate may not be that high but at least it is legal.

Well, it’s a question of degree I think. If the rate you can get it through official channels is reasonably close to illegal channels, or rather, if it’s enough to get a basket of typical “stuff” in-game, then that’s going to tip the scale for the average punter. They’ll swallow a bit of a loss for the ease of getting it and to ease their moral conscience.

But if there are so many bots in the game as people are reporting, then the scales aren’t being tipped at the moment, and it looks like people are preferring to buy Gold illegally for the moment.

gurugeorge.9857:

Well, it’s a question of degree I think. If the rate you can get it through official channels is reasonably close to illegal channels, or rather, if it’s enough to get a basket of typical “stuff” in-game, then that’s going to tip the scale for the average punter. They’ll swallow a bit of a loss for the ease of getting it and to ease their moral conscience.

But if there are so many bots in the game as people are reporting, then the scales aren’t being tipped at the moment, and it looks like people are preferring to buy Gold illegally for the moment.

well i believe that in due course, anet will take action.

i.e.
- banning botters
- banning gold sellers
- banning people who bought gold from gold sellers

errr we just have to wait and see?

For now I’m glad of this, and I’m hoping I can buy a load of character slots and bank space before the prices stabilise and that becomes impossible.

We’ll see if they ever get religion on banning gold buyers/sellers and botters. For now it seems like they’re scrambling to catch up.

Bank slots IMO are a great buy. Bag slots, character slots. I don’t see other things as being all that attractive. I hate my town clothes, but there’s not many choices, and they’re all dumb. Boxing gloves?! How’s that fit in Tyria? Aviator sunglasses? Kttens! we can’t even ride a mount, let alone fly.

The $$ to gold rate is set by ANet. They can pass off some BS about it being based on the market, but THEY set the parameters, and they made the choice. They could have chosen a rate that would have discouraged outside gold sales/buys. But they decided not to. Why?

mulch.2586:

We’ll see if they ever get religion on banning gold buyers/sellers and botters. For now it seems like they’re scrambling to catch up.

Bank slots IMO are a great buy. Bag slots, character slots. I don’t see other things as being all that attractive. I hate my town clothes, but there’s not many choices, and they’re all dumb. Boxing gloves?! How’s that fit in Tyria? Aviator sunglasses? Kttens! we can’t even ride a mount, let alone fly.

The $$ to gold rate is set by ANet. They can pass off some BS about it being based on the market, but THEY set the parameters, and they made the choice. They could have chosen a rate that would have discouraged outside gold sales/buys. But they decided not to. Why?

It doesn’t matter what rate they set, it’s not going to discourage gold farming bots, which is the primary reason why the market is in such a kitten state. Until ANet deals with the bots, they will continue ruin the gold/gems market by undercutting it — no matter how low a bar ANet sets for it.

After all, it’s not like players are actually investing their time bot farming. And they don’t even have to worry about maintaining a monthly subscription to the game. They make a profit no matter what the exchange rate is. The only question is how much are they making. My guess is, with the grinding necessary to reach certain achievement plateaus in the game, business is brisk.

The longer ANet waits to address the botting problem, the more damage they do to the economy and their own bottom line.

Gems to gold conversion was not put in the game so people could just spend all their RL money and then purchase everything, that costs gold, in game. If you’re buying gems for the sole purpose of making gold then you’re doing it wrong. If you want to go that route then don’t complain that you can’t make as much as you’d like and gold sellers sell for less. If you want to buy gold from a gold seller then enjoy the account being hacked and you losing not only your in game items, but your real life money as well.

gurugeorge.9857:

It seems to me that part of the problem is that there’s nothing much worth buying in the official store, so there aren’t enough people bartering their hoarded Gold for Gems. Where are the extra bank slots, for example?

If you open your bank there’s a little icon on the bottom right. Click on this and you get the option to buy more bank space.

It could be made a little more visible than it currently is, but it is there.

don’t see the point myself – there is no real end game, so whats the real incentive to have cultural gear or legendary? Because you only feel kitten if you are kitten with kitten kitten gear?

A complete set of oranges runs around 12 gold and is plenty good for most players.

I don’t see any incentive to buy gold. I don’t see any incentive to buy gems either to be honest.

I agree that this needs to be seriously fixed. I bought 800 gems for a 600 bank slot (I don’t think you can buy less than that, huge waste of money that there aren’t smaller packages). So I’m left with 200 gems just sitting around that I’d like to convert to in game gold but getting 52s for 200 gems is not something I’m willing to do. If it were a gold or two I’d do it.

The price needs to go up and it also needs to be player controlled to a certain degree. Making it like the TP where people can list and also order would be great. I would just be wary of people trying to artificially drive the price down – Anet would need to put in something to combat that. In TERA the price of Chronoscrolls was driven way down below what it should have been worth so it wasn’t worth buying as a way to earn gold but it was a great way to buy cheap game time. Completely backwards from the intent of that system.

For anything whose intent is to combat gold sellers, it needs to make the player a lot of gold if they’re going to continue to use it. I don’t care how much players QQ that buying gems with in game gold is expensive because the system is not designed for them – it’s for the rest of us who actually own the gems.

The prices on the BLTC are so screwed up that, risks notwithstanding, if you want to buy something that costs gems (like character slots, deluxe upgrade, bank slots, etc.) it’s actually cheaper real money wise to buy gold from a gold seller and convert that gold to gems and use those gems to buy what you want.

Does that not seem ridiculous to anyone else?

It is ridiculous. I’m sitting here telling Anet that I’ll pay them dollars if I can get a reasonable amount of gold from it. Hi you can make lots of money for your company and your game if you just fix this stupid thing! It sounds like a no-brainer doesn’t it?

Silvard.3469:

The prices on the BLTC are so screwed up that, risks notwithstanding, if you want to buy something that costs gems (like character slots, deluxe upgrade, bank slots, etc.) it’s actually cheaper real money wise to buy gold from a gold seller and convert that gold to gems and use those gems to buy what you want.

Does that not seem ridiculous to anyone else?

It’s ridiculous if and only if ANet is going to actually ban gold buyers. I haven’t heard of even one player that was banned for supporting the gold buyers yet. We’ll see.

Blizzard famously took the position that they’d not ban gold buyers, and their system is pretty bad that way.

The only game I’ve seen where there is ZERO gold selling is the Secret World. The game is simply genius. The best MMO on the market today, sadly they didn’t purchase a higher rating from Metacritic so everyone thinks it’s terrible without playing it.

The currency in that game is Pax Romana. Its’ abundant, easy to get and it’s, wait for it.. completely useless as from a few things here and there you farm for 10 minutes or run a dungeon and have what you need.

Unless you base your currency system around fluffy stuff, minor additions, then it’s going to be exploited.

I can already see my need to get gold and working for it…no thanks. I want to have fun playing the game. I have a job I get paid for it too. Well.

Once I hit level 80 if I find that I need to have RIDICULOUS amounts of gold, (I.E. TERA, WORST GAME EVER CREATED ON US SOIL) then I’ll quit. Easy as that.

So far, after 23 levels, I have 86 copper.. LOL really? Doesn’t ArenaNet need that more that I do? Can I mail it to them somehow? Where are the money drops? I’m pretty nervous about this.

Considering the fact spammers advertise MORE expensive than the gem store, OP’s point fails. Whomever buys from the spammers is short selling himself and risking his account being stolen or banned. Stupid is the correct word. Doubly stupid even.

I don’t think you’re doing your math correctly. All of the gold spam I’ve seen advertises gold at a fraction of the price compared to the gemstore.

Right now, at the gemstore, $10 nets you 2 gold and change. If you go by what sellers are spamming the same $10 nets you almost 10 gold if you buy from them. That’s a significant difference.

The banning and the risks still apply though, if not the ethical connotations.

Just did a quick comparison on a German gold selling site I’d consider “trustworthy”.

I’d get 10g for 13€.
13€ via gems on the TP would result in about 4g according to gw2spidy.

Comparing this to the EVE PLEX mentioned above which I’ve used a lot in both directions (money to ingame currency and ingame currency to subscription fee):

You get a little more than 500m ISK for one PLEX. One PLEX via game time code costs 12€.
The site I’ve used above would sell me 500m for 10€.

This matches my observation in game: No one buys ISK from gold sellers.

gurugeorge.9857:

Well, it’s a question of degree I think. If the rate you can get it through official channels is reasonably close to illegal channels, or rather, if it’s enough to get a basket of typical “stuff” in-game, then that’s going to tip the scale for the average punter. They’ll swallow a bit of a loss for the ease of getting it and to ease their moral conscience.

But if there are so many bots in the game as people are reporting, then the scales aren’t being tipped at the moment, and it looks like people are preferring to buy Gold illegally for the moment.

The game just launched the gold sellers themselves do not even yet know if gw2 will be viable for them. Im already seeing a lot less spam mails or channel bots then i did a week ago.

tureliox.9362:

Just did a quick comparison on a German gold selling site I’d consider “trustworthy”.

I’d get 10g for 13€.
13€ via gems on the TP would result in about 4g according to gw2spidy.

Comparing this to the EVE PLEX mentioned above which I’ve used a lot in both directions (money to ingame currency and ingame currency to subscription fee):

You get a little more than 500m ISK for one PLEX. One PLEX via game time code costs 12€.
The site I’ve used above would sell me 500m for 10€.

This matches my observation in game: No one buys ISK from gold sellers.

The thing is that EVE actually has desirable things to exchange ISK for: subscription time. All the stuff sold for gems (except for the slots) is garbage.

Currently it’ll cost £100-£300 to buy one of the weapons needed for a legendary if you buy gems and convert them in to gold. Clearly bots will continue to farm gold because people will want substantially more gold for their real world money.

I get like 5 gold seller mails per day, some even offering 10g as low as 9€. Of course I reported them all, but its hard for people who want to buy gold to not try a goldseller if they see the low gem conversion rate. I think it should be at least 1g per 100 gems to make sense.

I don’t see the appeal of goldsellers so I really have no idea why anyone would want to buy from them. You’re risking them stealing your email and credit card information as well as stealing your game account. I mean come on we’ve all heard it, they’re notorious.

I just think a lot of people will be poor in game and complain a lot about it if they can’t make money with Gem to Gold conversion. Or alternatively if making gold in game the more traditional ways isn’t profitable enough – and no I don’t mean farming, I mean just playing the game – selling stuff on the TP, crafting, doing various PvE activities like DE’s and dungeons, and even WvW. Those are actually the ways I’d prefer to make gold and hopefully they end up being enough. But since we do have the Gem converter and I do have 200 extra gems sitting around, I’d really like for that to be profitable as well.

“It seems to me that part of the problem is that there’s nothing much worth buying in the official store, so there aren’t enough people bartering their hoarded Gold for Gems. "

I saw the exchange rate was 20 silver to 100 gems, totally not worth the gems in my book. Besides, extra character and bag slots are useful, and you just have to find where to buy extra bank space.

I wouldn’t buy gold, but I’d have no qualms about buying something in the store that I actually deemed worthy of my money. If they dropped the black lion keys to $0.25-$0.50 instead of almost $2 apiece, I may drop $10 on those, but the current price is pure insanity.

The thing here is that there are players like me who may spend a couple bucks from time to time, there are those players who would NEVER spend any real money, and there the players who will go out and drop $1000 in a weekend on gems to convert to gold to level all their professions.

In the end, it all evens out for ANet.

Hickeroar.9734:

I wouldn’t buy gold, but I’d have no qualms about buying something in the store that I actually deemed worthy of my money. If they dropped the black lion keys to $0.25-$0.50 instead of almost $2 apiece, I may drop $10 on those, but the current price is pure insanity.

The thing here is that there are players like me who may spend a couple bucks from time to time, there are those players who would NEVER spend any real money, and there the players who will go out and drop $1000 in a weekend on gems to convert to gold to level all their professions.

In the end, it all evens out for ANet.

It doesn’t work like that. A lot of people won’t buy something if they feel they aren’t getting value for their money. If 800 gems got you say, 10g, or there were some really awesome items to buy in the gem store, a hell of a lot more people would buy gems. It’s not as black and white as ‘some people will spend loads of money and some will spend nothing, regardless of price’

I’ve seen numerous posts here, and on reddit, of people spending insane amounts of money in this game. One guy spent $2400 to level all his professions two weeks ago and details the experience on reddit.

I’ve also seen people claim that they won’t spend a dime.

Obviously there are people who will spend money on something they deem “worth it,” as I am one.

Also, I specifically said I was not going to be buying GOLD. I would only buy a real product from the store itself.

I report the gold sellers that mail me in game, and many of those advertising in game chat (if I am not rushed). I do, however, see how little they are asking in comparison to the exchange rates. There is the disconnect as to why the gems for gold system is not making the game unprofitable for illicit RMT sellers.

Krighton.2138:

The only game I’ve seen where there is ZERO gold selling is the Secret World. The game is simply genius. The best MMO on the market today, sadly they didn’t purchase a higher rating from Metacritic so everyone thinks it’s terrible without playing it.

The currency in that game is Pax Romana. Its’ abundant, easy to get and it’s, wait for it.. completely useless as from a few things here and there you farm for 10 minutes or run a dungeon and have what you need.

Unless you base your currency system around fluffy stuff, minor additions, then it’s going to be exploited.

I can already see my need to get gold and working for it…no thanks. I want to have fun playing the game. I have a job I get paid for it too. Well.

Once I hit level 80 if I find that I need to have RIDICULOUS amounts of gold, (I.E. TERA, WORST GAME EVER CREATED ON US SOIL) then I’ll quit. Easy as that.

So far, after 23 levels, I have 86 copper.. LOL really? Doesn’t ArenaNet need that more that I do? Can I mail it to them somehow? Where are the money drops? I’m pretty nervous about this.

Something does not add up with this post…

First off TSW failed because it is niche and it is Funcom… Everyone that played AOC saw that name and wrote it off immediately.

Secondly I can go into game right now and hit like 3-4 nodes (any node lvl does not matter) and sell that for more coin than you have. I could also complete a few hearts and get a little extra coin mailed to me seconds after completion. You do know about that right? What game are you even playing? I have 10g at lvl 73 and I just play the game with its natural flow.

“Once I hit level 80 if I find that I need to have RIDICULOUS amounts of gold, (I.E. TERA, WORST GAME EVER CREATED ON US SOIL) then I’ll quit. Easy as that.”

I thought Tera was Korean?

“First off TSW failed because it is niche and it is Funcom… Everyone that played AOC saw that name and wrote it off immediately.”

TSW didn’t fail, and at least they achieved PvP balance in that game (apart from some factions being more popular but I mean as far as class goes since there are no classes and everyone has access to the same PvP builds).

This is pretty much what the problem has been and will be for a long time unless something happens. Right now 800gems costs $10 lets say you sell all 800gems you make about 3.25g now if you look at gold sellers they are selling way more gold at that same price.

Like all the stuff in the gem store can easily purchase by farming items then selling. The only things that might be a bit hard is like the digital deluxe upgrade. After that the next hardest would be like the character slot, bag, and bank slots then maybe a few other things depending on if you want a bulk of that item(s). Most of that people don’t really want but maybe the dyes, mini pets, and the outfits.

For the person that says they have 10g okay so you must not be using the waypoints at all if you are there is something wrong with that picture. Reason why I say that is I’m lvl80 it takes about 2s to waypoint from one end of a zone/area to the other and like 3s+ to go half way across the map.
Also quests/hearts wasting like a few minutes doing that gets you like what maybe 4s from loots as well finishing the quest/heart. That’s enough for a one way trip to a waypoint pretty much.

It seems to me there is a few things people would like to have, like for instance the cultural armor its looks awesome but for 120g for the whole set. You also have the legendary weapons that will take awhile to gather materials for as well cost a pretty penny.

Another thing I have notice lately me and a few friends were doing CoE explore mode doing all 3 phrases. This was when TP was down for a couple of days. We were losing money rather than making money because of repair bills as well salvage kits.

I have seen a person on my server with the Commander title or w/e on the map. After wiki it and knowing how much it costs before searching on wiki. It costs 100g, A 100G!!!!!!!
Now this person either bought gold or was kitten lucky and their huge guild had a drawing to see who wins the 100g that they have been saving up. That part right there seems to me the only faster/easier way to get the cultural armor as well the legendary weapons.

Sure, whatever that secret algorithm is, however it arrives at its magic values for exchanging gold and gems, the assumption here is that it’s about buying gold. Looked at as a way to buy gold, it is undoubtedly a horrible, nasty, no-good thing, but what if it’s not about buying gold but buying gem shop stuff?

Let’s flip it around and look at it from that perspective. One of the things that I have seen dev after dev on general game forums get roasted over a fire for is the perception of bleeding players dry with IAPs. And this game IS loaded with IAPs. $30 for playing all professions, over $50 to max bank storage, $5 per extra bag slot per character. You could easily find yourself paying more than triple the base price of the game if you unlocked all the account upgrades via buying gems directly… but what about viewing those upgrades as a gold sink as you get your characters all high level and are just looking for somewhere to spend your game currency…

Ta-da! You can finally finish unlocking the rest of your bank tabs and bag slots without spending a dime of your real money. At these exchange rates, ArenaNet gets to avoid the non-tinfoil hat wearing peasants with torches and pitchforks over the fact the game has over $200 of practical IAP upgrades built right in because at the general exchange of game currency to gems, that over $200 worth of IAP can be had on the exchange for under 100 gold (actually around 50 gold at current prices). Looked at in this way, you’ve got the perfect system: the impatient (or merely generous for supporting ANet) can buy gems outright for some or all of their account upgrades, the rest of the people can wait until they get enough game currency raised and do it for “free”.

I just don’t think this was ever meant to be a way for “legitimate” players to buy 120G for T3 gear, I think it’s a way to keep their tip jar from getting spit in.

100g isnt impossible to farm, I got over 80g without trading or any exploits or lucky drops.

Malediktus.9250:

100g isnt impossible to farm, I got over 80g without trading or any exploits or lucky drops.

So are you saying 100g is easy to get and it shouldn’t take you a long time to get? If so why is most of the items in the TP worth 2c-5s each and not more.

I didnt say its easy, but its far from impossible. Obviously you have to spend several hours a day repeating stuff more often than you enjoy. But the game is only 1 month old now. I bet in 11 more month everyone will laugh about 100g.

Basically I agree with Chip. The rates are set the way they are so as to really cut down on the number of people who will be willing to go the personal plastic route to things like a full set of T3 cultural gears, mats for legendary weapons and so on — to keep some things in the game “rare”, as it were, by making the plastic route very, VERY expensive for people who would be willing to go that way.

E.G., at current rates the full T3, for ~120g, would be around USD 450-500, since USD 50 for 4000 gems would net around 13-15g. Now, some people will spend that, sure, but the NUMBER of people who will is much less than if the rate were closer to USD1 = 1G, which is what it is with illegal gold sellers. That drops the price of a full T3 to USD 120, which is still a lot, but 75% less than it is now, and that means demand for that would be much higher that at the current price point. That means keeping that gear rare. The same holds true for legendaries and their mats and so on. It’s designed essentially to make it very, VERY, expensive to really “B2W” in the cosmetic/prestige gear game.

So lemme get this straight: You’d rather see the price of gems shoot through the roof, to the point where the gem store is completely inaccessible to all but the most time-rich non-MT players?

Sorry, but the rest of us who don’t have deep pockets nor all the time in the world to devote to farming would rather not see that.

DusK.3849:

So lemme get this straight: You’d rather see the price of gems shoot through the roof, to the point where the gem store is completely inaccessible to all but the most time-rich non-MT players?

Sorry, but the rest of us who don’t have deep pockets nor all the time in the world to devote to farming would rather not see that.

That’s true, too.

The question for me is what are the underlying parameters of their algorithm for the pricing of gold to gems and vice versa. I can understand the interest on both sides of the exchange in keeping the gold value of gems lowish (makes it harder to B2W and easier for regular players to buy stuff in the store), but I’d be interested to see if actual demand for gems from the holders of gold being low is a major factor here.

The problem is simple:

For some weird reason, game companies seem to allow the design of the “systems” in their games to be done by utter amateurs.

This includes the system on how to make a profit for your company. There is the old subscription-paradigm, which kinda worked well. But everything else I see, seems weird, inefficient, unattractive to large amounts of customers, etc. GW tries something else, but tbh, I don’t understand the details of the plan. Because I don’t see how the B2P paradigm is gonna bring in extra money. But even if B2P can bring in extra money, I don’t how the way ArenaNet does it, is optimal.

The same is true with many other “systems” in MMOs.

• E.g. how are going to do itemization while leveling ? (AoC and Vanguard really messed that up. I think many more MMOs did).
• How are you going to keep people excited with new gear while leveling (tip: buying all your gear on the TP/AH is not exciting).
• How are you gonna make PvP fair ? (tip: giving the best players negative handicap doesn’t make sense (handicap as in golf handicap)). GW does better than average here.
• How are you gonna keep your PvE-players happy after they ding max-level ? (tip: making all your dungeons one difficulty-level, and make them all super-hard, isn’t gonna make your average PvE-customer keep playing).
• How are you gonna keep the best players from finishing all content in a week ? (WoW has the wrong mechanisms. GW is even worse, imho).
• How are you gonna keep players excited about their own progress ? (Removing progress, like GW2, isn’t gonna win you extra customers. Making all content trivial, giving away gear “for free”, and only making the heroic mode of the newest raid challenging is going to upset the middle majority of your customer-base).
• Same with this gem/gold/cash-shop discussion. No system, on consistency, nothing smart at all.

So many “systems” I see that are the same in all MMOs. And in so many games, I so many bad designs and implementations for those systems.

The game worlds in MMOs become more and more beautiful. There are more talented and experienced artists in the industry every day, it seems. I think the majority of the budgets for games (including MMOs) must go to the artists who develop the world, the characters, the animations, the textures, etc, etc.

But why can’t a MMO developer hire a smart guy, with a background in gaming, and a maybe a background in accountancy or economy, to do this stuff ?

Why do they hire some freaky nerdy 35y-old kid, who probably played EQ1, and never grew up, to design the overall system of PvE gameplay at level-80 ? And let whole hordes of customers walk away from your beautiful game ? $50M or $100M budgets, and they let some joe-average design critical parts of their business plan.

It blows my mind.

marnick.4305:

Considering the fact spammers advertise MORE expensive than the gem store, OP’s point fails. Whomever buys from the spammers is short selling himself and risking his account being stolen or banned. Stupid is the correct word. Doubly stupid even.

lolwut. From what I’ve seen in chat the general gold seller rate is five times better than the one provided by Arenanet.

When someone is a vet, it doesn’t mean he knows his stuff. It also doesn’t mean he can come up with new ideas. All it means that: 1) he never moved on in his life doing something new, and 2) he can tell great stories about “the good old days”. If you hire a bunch of EQ1-vets to design your new MMO, you might get a great new game. But you could just as well get a crappy new EQ-game.

I used to work at the very small top of a very big industry. That top was full of veterans. Half of them were useless. (Well, that’s exaggerated. But they were certainly not anything special).

Maybe ArenaNet should hire John Romero to design their games for them. He’s a veteran. “Can’t go wrong with veterans” !

The game is perhaps the worst money grab by a company that I have run across. I would much rather pay a monthly sub and know that I can farm and do whatever to make my money. I wonder how many people have melted their charge cards to be uber in a world that only exists for a few, and matters only to that few.

I know I watched some of my guildmates do whatever, get banned, spend tons of cash, all in the name of being first, the best, the greatest, whatever. I play for fun, period. I win, I win, I lose, I lose. I log off and none of it matters. Isnt that what games are? A brief release from life stresses, not a source of more stress.

Anet has taken extreme care to ensure that at some point, you will spend some cash on the game. DR on event reward, farming, etc. Really? Could you be more obvious? I doubt it. Looking at the prices on the Trade thing, really, a month in and a single item is 100g??? Doesnt that wave a red flag the size of a football field to all, it should.

I am fortunate to have disposable income, whether or not I choose to spend it on pixelated gear or not, well that remains to be seen, so far, nope.

People who do not have the money to compete will leave the game quickly, at least thats my opinion. Too many issue with too many things to keep folks engaged, the dollar is the boss some of the players will never slay, sad, but….. My opinon anyways, ymmv.

So a game company that developed and sold over 4 million copies of a well-received game “doesn’t know their stuff”?