Guild Wars 2

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

NA/EU are in the final phases of a money grab. They don’t need those regions now that they have China.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

And others have said the same since over 20 months, so not really a new insight.
And Karl Marx found that out already over 160 years ago because after all we still
have capitalsm here

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here…. But is it not true that if people start buying gems for this purpose, then gems get cheaper for those of us that convert gold to gems?

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

NA/EU are in the final phases of a money grab. They don’t need those regions now that they have China.

Wow. So, currently the ANet team is producing the EU/NA versions of the game, and an Asian partner is converting the game for use in China. Is ANet going to scrap at least one of the EU/NA versions while continuing to produce it/them so that the conversion to the Chinese version can take place? Or, is ANet is going to fire all the English, German, etc. speakers, hire Chinese speakers and produce the Chinese version without the partner? Which is it? I very much doubt they’d t go to the expense of producing any non-Chinese version without publishing.

Look, criticize the game’s direction all you want. I don’t like the game’s direction either. However, such flights of fancy hurt your point.

Azhure.1857:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here…. But is it not true that if people start buying gems for this purpose, then gems get cheaper for those of us that convert gold to gems?

The gems to gold conversion rate is getting worse and worse, meaning you need to spend more gold per 100 gems. As the rate gets worse, it makes more sense to simply buy the gems with real money and then spend those gems in the gem store. That is, if your time is worth anything.

Besides, even though ANet claims that the conversion rate is set by the market, we don’t know that. There is no transparency.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Sartharina.3542:

Actually, farming destabilizes the economy, because the farmers end up as the only people with money.

Sure, as farmers increase supply of things, the prices drop – but so does the value of everything the non-farmers get. People don’t get their gold from nowhere – they get it from selling the stuff they find.

In the lodestone example above, the people pre-patch who stumbled across a lodestone and didn’t need it were only getting 2 g for it. Post-patch, when they stumble across a lodestone they don’t need, they get 4 g from it.

What patch are you talking about? Currently, the only lodestone above 1G is Charged, and that peaked at ~4 gold in January, 2013. After champ bags were introduced, it dropped under 2G and was fairly stable (~2-2.5 G) until recently, where it’s up over three.

I assumed it was a hypothetical situation posted earlier by someone talking about how Farming helps the economy by bringing price down – when all it really does is puts the money in the hands of the farmers, and devalues the loot and acquisitions of non-farmers.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

NA/EU are in the final phases of a money grab. They don’t need those regions now that they have China.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

NA/EU are in the final phases of a money grab. They don’t need those regions now that they have China.

Wrong, Anet does not control what is going on in China, they merely get the royalty fee from the publisher (kongzhong) .

Between the champ bag change last September and the Scarlet invasions, a huge amount of coin was dumped into the economy until they started to nerf champ bags. This led to the development and overuse of the Champ Trains which in low level zones, weren’t necessarily a “good thing”.

The Champ loot boost is a prime example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

To keep the game’s economy healthy you need to balance coin added to the game among active players to coin removed by the various sinks. Same is true with items dropped but between salvage and forging a lot of excess can be removed.

So any activity that enough people participate in that spikes the amount of coin injected into the game will get nerfed. So speedrunning a particular Dungeon Path over all others, problem. Champ Train, problem. Farming boss chests, problem.

And this is all done because of the persistent belief that everything in the Gem Shop should be “free” if only you had enough gold. But it’s the persistent use of the Gold to Gem conversion that has raised the exchange rate so it’s increasingly difficult to gather enough gold to do so. Which generate threads about how grindy the game is.

If players surrender the belief that “everything” in the Gem Shop should be free and accept the notion that you could supplement or avoid buying Gems for the occasional item then players may not feel the need to “grind” anything, ANet wouldn’t need to nerf the grind activities and the exchange rate wouldn’t be so high.

Playing the game normal way I don’t manage to make more than 100gxmonth at the moment (I don’t flip LT, I run dungeons.) and the feeling that unless some luck (that won’t happen) will give me my precursor, I will never manage to have enough money to buy Dusk (because its price keeps going up and by the time I’ll have 1500 g (over 1 year) the price might be double) is pretty much killing my will to do much in this game.

Silvia.9130:

Playing the game normal way I don’t manage to make more than 100gxmonth at the moment (I don’t flip LT, I run dungeons.) and the feeling that unless some luck (that won’t happen) will give me my precursor, I will never manage to have enough money to buy Dusk (because its price keeps going up and by the time I’ll have 1500 g (over 1 year) the price might be double) is pretty much killing my will to do much in this game.

That’s about as much as I make, and if I didn’t spend most of it on Gems, I would easily have enough for a precursor now. Of course since I don’t do dungeons I still won’t have what I need to craft Twilight.

The problem with prices of extremely limited items is because the ratio of people who don’t understand how to use the TP, they are using it like an NPC vendor, to people who do understand, acting as a player vendor, is to high. I know they are a source of much hatred but if the majority of players didn’t give them the opportunity to skim a little money by acting as the middleman, the wealth distribution wouldn’t be so skewed so 1000g precursors or 3000g legendaries wouldn’t be a viable price point.

Then we have speculators. How many people bought Thick Leather Sections at 9-10c during the week we knew the Bazaar was returning and doubled their money? You didn’t need a crystal ball for that. While it’s not the same as flipping it was shifting mats from those who didn’t know better to those that did only to sell them back to those who didn’t know better.

Sartharina.3542:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Sartharina.3542:

Actually, farming destabilizes the economy, because the farmers end up as the only people with money.

Sure, as farmers increase supply of things, the prices drop – but so does the value of everything the non-farmers get. People don’t get their gold from nowhere – they get it from selling the stuff they find.

In the lodestone example above, the people pre-patch who stumbled across a lodestone and didn’t need it were only getting 2 g for it. Post-patch, when they stumble across a lodestone they don’t need, they get 4 g from it.

What patch are you talking about? Currently, the only lodestone above 1G is Charged, and that peaked at ~4 gold in January, 2013. After champ bags were introduced, it dropped under 2G and was fairly stable (~2-2.5 G) until recently, where it’s up over three.

I assumed it was a hypothetical situation posted earlier by someone talking about how Farming helps the economy by bringing price down – when all it really does is puts the money in the hands of the farmers, and devalues the loot and acquisitions of non-farmers.

Sure, if material prices go up because of scarcity due to farming nerfs, then getting a lucky drop means more coin when you sell that lucky drop. However, increased materials costs also mean more expenditure if you want to buy materials for any reason. The only ways for non-farmers in GW2 to come out ahead from a farming nerf are to not make anything with mats they have to buy and to get lucky a lot — but if they are getting fewer drops due to choice of game activity or time spent (in comparison to farmers), then they will have fewer opportunities to get lucky. Farming nerf or not, someone who avoids the more lucrative play-styles is going to generate less pixel wealth than someone who embraces them.

Because farming lets some people get ahead, especially those that can do it faster, and then the jealous crybabies demand nerfs so they can catch up. Except they won’t, because they’re too entitled to do it anyways and a cycle repeats; if they can’t have it than nobody can.

As I’ve said before, nothing can be done to satiate the nerf demanding crowd. And it’s just continuing to happen.

So it’s much easier for Anet to remove or destroy the content.

Oh, and there’s also a contingent of TP flippers that would love to destroy farming altogether since they can keep their monopoly. The have-nots are just playing into their hands.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Besides, even though ANet claims that the conversion rate is set by the market, we don’t know that. There is no transparency.

But isn’t there something legal where they couldn’t say that if it wasn’t true?

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Besides, even though ANet claims that the conversion rate is set by the market, we don’t know that. There is no transparency.

So you believe they manually set it minute to minute?

tigirius.9014:

No actually it would improve the game tremendously to eliminate the TP entirely as we’re seeing with D3 right now which incidently did exactly the same thing with their game as Anet did, create a TP system, make it the focus of the game, and give players the option of pouring money into the game to buy things from the TP while similtaneously strangling loot.

There’s something a bit more drastic that Anet did however and that’s DR.

In case you haven’t noticed already the prices in the TP are going up consecutively continuously despite losing players we saw that when it was easier to watch where players were going (ie leaving before megaservers leaving empty servers) it went up 400% over just a few months after they added loot manipulations. If that many players were leaving than farming was down and players farming wouldn’t be a factor, this is also taking into account players basic laziness when leveling crafting and their tendency to buy things with real money. I should point out also that this increase in price did NOT happen however in the beginning of the game when there were millions of players bursting at the seams prior to the loot manipulations, the more people spend of real life money the more rare the loot the higher the prices in these RMTAH type economies.

It’s repeating of history. All you have to do is follow the prices of something everyone needs, Runes, and you’ll see what I mean.

I agree removing the TP entirely would solve the problem but would also kill a lot of game play people enjoy as well as destroy the heart of what makes MMOs MMOs. Also you’d destroy one of the core design pillars on this game which is play as you want. Right now if I wanted say a corrupted weapon but dont want to farm hours for corrupted lodestones cause I just dont enjoy that I can still do something completely different say Jumping puzzles and still be working towards that. Without the ability for people to trade I would have to do it myself.

Ultimately this would solve one problem but create numerous others.

We have no clue how many players left the game and thats not counting how many people joined and thus negated the players leaving.

Of course prices have been rising, what do you expect when the ability of people to making money has also been rising. Dont you remember a time when making an exotic was considered an effort cause the 2g cost was something you had to work on for quite a while? Now whats 2g especially for a farmer?

“gems” that is all.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

They don’t care if you use the cash shop, or somebody else, because every gem you exchange for gold was once bought with cash.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Azhure.1857:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here…. But is it not true that if people start buying gems for this purpose, then gems get cheaper for those of us that convert gold to gems?

The gems to gold conversion rate is getting worse and worse, meaning you need to spend more gold per 100 gems. As the rate gets worse, it makes more sense to simply buy the gems with real money and then spend those gems in the gem store. That is, if your time is worth anything.

Besides, even though ANet claims that the conversion rate is set by the market, we don’t know that. There is no transparency.

You’re right we have no way of knowing if they cheat in the conversion rate but we can see if it looks geniune or not. Back in november 2012 gold → gems flactuated between 80s – 1g. based on this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/What-is-your-gold-per-hour-and-how
at the time seemed most farmers where making about 2g per hour. So the market decided 100 gems are worth the income from 30mins game time. Looking at november 2013 according this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/For-Science-Champ-Farming-7-3-gold-per-hour/first several people seem to agree the rate is now 7.5g per hour. In nov 2013 gold to gem ratio was 7g 70s per 100gems now its 1hr of game play per 100gems for farmers that double the price but seems still pretty reasonable. Today Farms are closer to 10g per hour (op claims 7.5g / hour on google if you look for gold per hour may 2014 guild wars 2 you can see several videos showing 12g per hour. ) Exchange rate is currently 10g per 100gems still in line with 1hr per 100gems

now I understand if you’re like me and generally barely make 25s per hour and been like that since launch you’d see the whole thing fishy wonder how come it keeps rising and rising. But its rising inline with farming income which is something you’d expect to see. Thats why sometimes you need to nerf a bit farming because in any player driven market prices will be set by the wealthiest players provided their are enough of them to sustain said market.

ArchonWing.9480:

Oh, and there’s also a contingent of TP flippers that would love to destroy farming altogether since they can keep their monopoly. The have-nots are just playing into their hands.

Without people farmers flippers would have no items to flip. Flippers are the middle men. Farmers that sell items trying to make fast gold lose money to flippers because of this. Since the market is global, it is extremely hard to have a monopoly on any of the crafting item markets.

The rare item market that is a different story. Precursors, black lion skins are extremely limited. So controling one of those market takes thousands of gold but few have that much money or are willing to do a long term investment like that.

Please, stop this nonsense. They’ve nerfed QD champtrain for obvious reasons and they (overly) nerfed Queen’s Gaunlet because it was way too rewarding in the first place.
One might get the feeling that they don’t want you to farm. But on the same time they have diminishing returns which renders normal farming impossible. The dungeons also got no love since the start. They made some QoL changes to PvP and WvW but never actually expanded the gameplay. So what does ArenaNet to do?
To play the living story, obviously. But other than that, we honestly don’t know. It seems like they have no concept how to improve GW2, no direction to follow.
That’s the underlying flaw. We need a statement from ArenaNet what they want to do, in which direction they want to lead the game, so we can judge thembased on that. But claiming to know their intentions based on the recent changes is nonsense.

Yes, communication certainly needs to be better and evident on their own forum. It does feel like they are just experimenting and throwing stuff out there without fully thinking things through – the ideas aren’t all bad, but many things about this game that have been implemented seem half- kittened, and I think that’s starting to hurt the game.

frans.8092:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

They don’t care if you use the cash shop, or somebody else, because every gem you exchange for gold was once bought with cash.

Yepp .. and also everybody who DON’T wants to pay real money should be happy if they bring other people to buy gold for gems, because that gives us better conversion rates if we want to change gold for gems.

That the rate gold→gems gets worse all day only means that not enough people actually buy gold for gems.

Also i think that the conversion rate has simply grown with the amount of money i can make.
When i bought my first endless gaterhing tools the cost was around 25-30 gold i think, however at that time i made 2-3g/h. Now they cost 100g but i also make 6-9g/h, so in the end i must farm not much longer now to get one.

frans.8092:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

They don’t care if you use the cash shop, or somebody else, because every gem you exchange for gold was once bought with cash.

Except that isn’t the truth. The Exchange was founded with an enormous amount of gems at launch, according to John Smith. While the majority of the gold that gets paid for gems is likely from players, most of the gems you get from paying gold are likely still the original ones the exchange had at launch.

Actually I think that megaservers allowed people to farm at excessive amounts with more people, that caused more inflation. I think that’s the cause of these nerfs.
Even at the most of very-highly populated servers, champ farming spots were empty and people didn’t want to farm them with solo or with several people due to time/gold ratio.
Then megaservers allowed all servers to farm easily 7/24. I think the solution is, an acceptable level of limit for champ bags per day, not nerfing singular loots. That would be good for normal people, and bad for excessive-farmers and gold sellers.(main causes of inflation)

I just looked at my history, it was 17 days ago when i bought Kudzu, at that time i was down to 640g, now i’m again at 1360, so thats over 700g in 17 days, and that was mainly with harvesting Iron, Platinum, Ori, Ancient Wood, Lemongrass and farming Arctodus for T6 mats.

So there are still ways to farm even solo without following trains, only thing you need is to have some alts for harvesting