Guild Wars 2

I just don’t get it, why is everyone so freaked out about the precursor crafting?
I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.
If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.
But i’m noticing the same issue with the difficulty of the monsters on the jungle, and people crying about it being hard or everything being grindy…
To be honest, I never had a Legendary, and I’m slowly working towards mine. Even the mastery system, which I never grinded it but I’m suddenly lvl 87 or something like that.
I believe the greatest issue in the gw2 community, is the fact that it developed a weirdly childish personality where a bunch of people see something different or something they wanna get yet it’s kinda hard for them to, and they start a tantrum because the can’t get it NOW.

I think the issue is that rather than people making items at their own pace, they’re forced to make them at an artificial pace set by ANet. It’s not a case of entitlement. It just seems silly for someone who could make an item in two days, to be instead forced to wait 60 days to craft that item because of an artificial time gate.

I had this issue when I was crafting ascended armor. It took me a month to complete a set despite having the resources to complete it in far less time. In this case it was celestial gear so I couldn’t circumvent the time gate by buying items on the TP, because charged quartz is account bound.

It is somewhat of a nuisance, because I’ve already put the time and effort into acquiring the resources needed. Why must I now spend more time waiting unnecessarily?

In any case, while you are entitled to your opinion, could you perhaps list what you feel are the benefits to time gating? For me personally, I can’t see any benefits. It does nothing to enhance the gameplay experience. Even old legendaries could be crafted without any time gating so I don’t see why new legendaries should be.

Raven.1524:

I just don’t get it, why is everyone so freaked out about the precursor crafting?
I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.
If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.
But i’m noticing the same issue with the difficulty of the monsters on the jungle, and people crying about it being hard or everything being grindy…
To be honest, I never had a Legendary, and I’m slowly working towards mine. Even the mastery system, which I never grinded it but I’m suddenly lvl 87 or something like that.
I believe the greatest issue in the gw2 community, is the fact that it developed a weirdly childish personality where a bunch of people see something different or something they wanna get yet it’s kinda hard for them to, and they start a tantrum because the can’t get it NOW.

Welcome to the age of entitled gamers.

To answer your question directly:

Many people expected the precursor crafting to be vastly cheaper than the old system. These people are now very frustrated since they did not receive their precursor for free with the launch of HoT and are still waiting on completing their legendary.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

In any case, while you are entitled to your opinion, could you perhaps list what you feel are the benefits to time gating? For me personally, I can’t see any benefits. It does nothing to enhance the gameplay experience. Even old legendaries could be crafted without any time gating so I don’t see why new legendaries should be.

Besides preventing a massive price spike short term and causing even more unbalance? And any price spikes with new content that requires the ressource (you think now it’s bad, what do think would happen if every person bought 60-90 times the amount of ressources from the TP at once?)

It allows crafters to have some value with their timegates and opens up the ability for players to sell the time ressource for small profits.

It allows for an easier balance from arenanets side as far as time goals they have for content.

Cyninja.2954:

Raven.1524:

I just don’t get it, why is everyone so freaked out about the precursor crafting?
I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.
If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.
But i’m noticing the same issue with the difficulty of the monsters on the jungle, and people crying about it being hard or everything being grindy…
To be honest, I never had a Legendary, and I’m slowly working towards mine. Even the mastery system, which I never grinded it but I’m suddenly lvl 87 or something like that.
I believe the greatest issue in the gw2 community, is the fact that it developed a weirdly childish personality where a bunch of people see something different or something they wanna get yet it’s kinda hard for them to, and they start a tantrum because the can’t get it NOW.

Welcome to the age of entitled gamers.

To answer your question directly:

Many people expected the precursor crafting to be vastly cheaper than the old system. These people are now very frustrated since they did not receive their precursor for free with the launch of HoT and are still waiting on completing their legendary.

Let’s not resort to sensationalism. All it does is discredit your post.

I think people were expecting precursor crafting to be an alternative means to acquiring precursors. Not necessarily a cheaper alternative, but just an alternative to praying to the RNG gods or spending a large sum of gold in one go.

The issue is that in a lot of cases, not only is the precursor crafting more expensive than than the base precursors, but it is also time gated. It doesn’t make sense to spend 1000 gold crafting a precursor that costs 200 gold on the TP, for example.

If a system is horrendously unbalanced, then naturally people will criticize it. It doesn’t mean they’re asking for freebies, it just means they’re asking for balance.

(That being said, some people do go to extremes in their complaints).

I think one of the reasons of why people are raging is that the precursor collection should be a very harder but a little cheaper and sure way to get a precursor, but instead now we have 2 options, you either have the expensive but easy way (buy from TP) or the hard and also expensive time gated way (collection), besides the journey itself there is no reason to do the collection.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Cyninja.2954:

Raven.1524:

I just don’t get it, why is everyone so freaked out about the precursor crafting?
I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.
If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.
But i’m noticing the same issue with the difficulty of the monsters on the jungle, and people crying about it being hard or everything being grindy…
To be honest, I never had a Legendary, and I’m slowly working towards mine. Even the mastery system, which I never grinded it but I’m suddenly lvl 87 or something like that.
I believe the greatest issue in the gw2 community, is the fact that it developed a weirdly childish personality where a bunch of people see something different or something they wanna get yet it’s kinda hard for them to, and they start a tantrum because the can’t get it NOW.

Welcome to the age of entitled gamers.

To answer your question directly:

Many people expected the precursor crafting to be vastly cheaper than the old system. These people are now very frustrated since they did not receive their precursor for free with the launch of HoT and are still waiting on completing their legendary.

Let’s not resort to sensationalism. All it does is discredit your post.

I think people were expecting precursor crafting to be an alternative means to acquiring precursors. Not necessarily a cheaper alternative, but just an alternative to praying to the RNG gods or spending a large sum of gold in one go.

The issue is that in a lot of cases, not only is the precursor crafting more expensive than than the base precursors, but it is also time gated. It doesn’t make sense to spend 1000 gold crafting a precursor that costs 200 gold on the TP, for example.

If a system is horrendously unbalanced, then naturally people will criticize it. It doesn’t mean they’re asking for freebies, it just means they’re asking for balance.

(That being said, some people do go to extremes in their complaints).

Alternative to RNGesus and the mystic forge? Check.

The majority and main complaint or major argument always brought up is that buying the precursor is straight up cheaper. Even you bring it up when comparing 1000g to 200g (haven’t seen this big a disparity yet, then again I’ve not gone through every pre available). Most people wanted the expensive precursors cheaper. No one is complaining about 200g precursors on the TP. So, people expecting stuff for less -> Check.

Precursor crafting does exactly what it was advertised it would do. It gives players an alternative to playing the mystic forge or buying off the TP. As an alternative everyone can now decide which approach he wants to take. With those 2 options there was no balance as well. Some people wasted 1k+ gold on the forge and never got their pre, others got it 3rd try. There is no reason for balance now as there was none before.

Kit.3986:

Timegate doesn’t make anything rewarding. It’s an artificial system to keep something away from you so you log in every single day to get it.

Would you log in less, after you obtained your precursor?

It’s not much higher in price if you buy all mats and craft 1 each day. prices going down. Even if you sell it all, u lose 15% aswell. I rather spend 5-10g each day for 100 days then pay 1000g at once. Even tho i know i “save” money.

I can speak for myself and what I expected and why I’m a bit disappointed too:

I’m not a rich player. I had a huge break from GW2 but I’m back for good. When I heared there would be a non-rng way to craft a precurser I was very happy because I wouldn’t spend the money to buy one on the TP.

They said they would send us on a huge journey into tyria and we would slowly collect everything we need to get the precurser. So I expected to spend a lot of time in tyria roaming, killing champions, searching for hidden items, doing jumping puzzles and when I have them all I throw some things into the mystic toilet and then craft the items together.

What we got is that we waypoint around for one hour in the world, go to a specific place, pick something up and then the “epic journey” was done. Now I have to go to a crafting station and spend hundreds of gold to craft ascended stuff. Not what I wanted, not because it is not cheap but because it is nearly the same as farming for gold and buying the whole thing.

I wanted to work hard, hike around and spend quite some time, but then get the precurser for ‘cheap’. As it is now you could either just farm gold or farm the journey and crafting mats; it isn’t really a difference because you don’t really have a real story accompanying the journey, it is just another gold sink, like everything else they make.

It is quite frustrating just because there are a lot of guys with thousands of gold that everything nowadays is a goldsink.. even when they do events like the mordrem-stuff everything costs quite some gold beside the stuff you gather.. it’s the same with the journey now.

I also think they didn’t account for the increase in price for the ascended stuff they generated with HoT. So if I need the same ammount of money anyway and the story for the journey isn’t really entertaining… why would I craft and not simply buy on the TP?

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

The issue is that in a lot of cases, not only is the precursor crafting more expensive than than the base precursors, but it is also time gated. It doesn’t make sense to spend 1000 gold crafting a precursor that costs 200 gold on the TP, for example.

I lent some T7 mats to my friend yesterday – he looked up the price before “let’s see, deldrimor should be around 2 gold.. what the kitten?!”

What does that teach you? Right the value of these mats are made by the players – just like the precurser prices.
And since everybody is free to make these things themselves they have an option to bypass the “ridiculous high price of T7 mats on the TP” – once enough people smarten up T7 will become cheaper while precursers will become more expensive.

Kit.3986:

Timegate doesn’t make anything rewarding. It’s an artificial system to keep something away from you so you log in every single day to get it.

Yes. How would you make it rewarding AND encourage people to log in everyday, while crafting the precursor/legendary? I really would like to hear peoples ideas.

Why would players ever feel it is in their best interest to have to log in everyday?

I’m mad because they’re timegating my collections by not fixing the bugs on them. Nevermore has been out for almost 2 weeks and they still haven’t bothered to fix the two collection pieces on IV. Makes sense to wait one month for content, and then wait two weeks more for them to fix the content they released without testing properly

Simple reasons why people are “mad” or frustrated about the new pre’s :

1. there isn’t a real ‘journey’
2. items needed are timegated = an artificial way to keep ppl playing and to control the market
3. the cost is even higher then just buying from the TP
4. although they are an alternative to getting them from the MF-rng, it seems they’re not really worth the time spend and cost invested seeing that it’s locked behind yet another timegate.

Players expected a journey they could finish at their own pace with less or equal cost in materials, but are now realizing it’s with an even higher cost and more time spend then just farming gold (which is still quite easy to do if you play a lot) and buying it on the TP.
That’s about it in a nutshell.

I, for one, absolutely hate with a passion time gates. But… I must admit that some are necessary. You want to craft your legendary and so what? It’s not that this game has some sort of progression. I truly truly want that Raids is this. A progression. Organized groups taking like a week to kill a boss. And then new wings are released and then new raids instances, etc. I would love GW2 to become that game.

But as far as legendaries are concerned… I truly believe that even if you have already farmed all the materials and then in a click just craft the weapon, your personal reward for that item isn’t “legendary”. Legendaries should really be about having the item at the end and saying “FINALLY”, even if it is by overcoming an artificial obstacle like time games.

Not mad. Using ascended materials to make an exotic weapon is kind dumb imo though.

I’m only mad about the bugged collections. Still waiting for a Tar Elemental Core fix on Rodgort.

Nai.2980:

Not mad. Using ascended materials to make an exotic weapon is kind dumb imo though.

The new precursors are ascended. The old precursors got introduced before ascended was.

Starfall.6425:

They said they would send us on a huge journey into tyria and we would slowly collect everything we need to get the precurser. So I expected to spend a lot of time in tyria roaming, killing champions, searching for hidden items, doing jumping puzzles and when I have them all I throw some things into the mystic toilet and then craft the items together.

What we got is that we waypoint around for one hour in the world, go to a specific place, pick something up and then the “epic journey” was done. Now I have to go to a crafting station and spend hundreds of gold to craft ascended stuff. Not what I wanted, not because it is not cheap but because it is nearly the same as farming for gold and buying the whole thing.

I wanted to work hard, hike around and spend quite some time, but then get the precurser for ‘cheap’. As it is now you could either just farm gold or farm the journey and crafting mats; it isn’t really a difference because you don’t really have a real story accompanying the journey, it is just another gold sink, like everything else they make.

It is quite frustrating just because there are a lot of guys with thousands of gold that everything nowadays is a goldsink.. even when they do events like the mordrem-stuff everything costs quite some gold beside the stuff you gather.. it’s the same with the journey now.

I bolded the important part of the mistake you made. You (and obviously a huge number of players) expected way too much. Anet gave you the very outlines of the huge journey you’re mentioning, but how huge of a journey this will be for you, is your decicion alone.
Anet provides the opportunity to make this a huge journey by using your imagination, which arguably is the easy way out – I agree on that – but nevertheless…

You can detect this “we take the easy way out” in just about any game nowadays, because the other option – a, for example, quest-based journey would lead to the very same discussion, just involving different participants.

Do not take the provided means at face-value, use them to create your own epic adventures, and the whole matter suddenly becomes much less of an issue.

Raven.1524:

If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.

Seriously? Have you looked around? Everyone is already running around with legendary greatswords of all kinds!

And they have been for years.

Timegates are bad and lazy design. Rather than a long legendary epic journey to get our precursors they went lazy and made a time/gold sink. Even more ridiculous is the time sink only exists for 1/3 of the new legendaries. I had my HOPE collection done (barring the Gerent) on day 1. Astralaria people really got screwed over.

Anyway, as it stands unless you’re crafting a newer legendary where you’re forced into the collection you’re probably better off just buying one of the old precursors, probably about the same price with a lot less headache,

Well in several cases it is more time consuming AND more expensive to craft than just to buy from the Trading Post. What about the journey?! Meh … nothing particularly exciting at least for The Legend. Part of it is a “been there, done that” feeling since there are both overlaps between precursors and most of it is attaching items to old content I’ve done at least a dozen times before already.

Time is money friend.

Original precursors, you play with the wishing toilet to fish one up, or just buy one off the trading post. The new crafted precursors are forcing you to spend more gold AND time to craft them.

What people are failing to understand is that one version shouldn’t cost more time and gold to get, than the other version that just cost outright gold, otherwise what is the point? Is that really a fair balance? Why would any sane player do the crafting route? Just sell the components that are costing more gold and buy the precursor.

Players just wanted a guaranteed way to obtain precursors without having to spend more than they already cost on the trading post. So the other factor to use would be time. There are already account bound components involved that require time to harvest such as crystalline ores, but it needed more that involved and less of the costly ascended items to make.

That’s how it’s been for GW2 from the start, if you wanted something right away you bought it off the trading post, if you had time you would go grind for it instead, one or the other NOT BOTH.

I suspect Anet expected prices for precursors to eventually rise to match and overtake the prices for the crafted ones at some point, so they will not say or do anything.

Collecting 250 mystic coins is not an “epic” adventure, get that out of here.

Ragmon.6350:

Kit.3986:

Timegate doesn’t make anything rewarding. It’s an artificial system to keep something away from you so you log in every single day to get it.

Yes. How would you make it rewarding AND encourage people to log in everyday, while crafting the precursor/legendary? I really would like to hear peoples ideas.

Well, how about you ask them to do various activities in the game? Stuff that actually takes time.
Like, conquer a keep in WvW, or do x event, find y items, they could simply scatter 1000 items throughout the map (which they did), have their spawns be randomized kinda like nodes, and ask us to find them. They could simply just make all 3 tiers of the precursor collection like the first one, except that instead of knowledge you’re acquiring rare mats, and crafting them at rare locations. Like having to go to the boss room of CoF P2 to forge something in the lava there. Find a NPC that hops maps and buy a map from him which contains clues to where you can find a rare ore/wood you need, etc. They could have created a TON of fun ideas that would work, would make it actually feel like a epic quest, a epic journey, and not like a short hop and a ton of craft grind.

Most people, including myself, will complain first and foremost about the prices, simply because its the MOST glaring example of how badly designed the precursor quests were, i mean who in their right senses would prefer this method to simply buying the precursor, you can actually do the journey, and when you get to the steps that require asc mats, farm the mats, sell the mats, and buy a precursor and have a profit. Which simply means their system is so poorly designed there is NO REASON to prefer it. It spends your money bits at a time? Yes, but you can also just save up the money, or the mats themselves, when you get them all, sell them and buy the precursor, and have a profit. There’s no sane reason (except the short “quest” feel) to do the whole precursor collection, but that’s simply the first example of how thy failed at it, the second example, is that it DOESN’T feel like a epic quest, it barely feels like a connected thing, its disjointed, and after you get to T2, it stops having barely any semblance to questing.

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

This will go on until the precursors on the TP are no longer cheaper than the crafting price. Voila, balance. Just give it some weeks.

If I wanted a precursor and had the money, I would buy it right now, on the TP. Before the prices rise to what it costs to craft them.

The old precursors are not legendary, they’re exotics, and using a large amount of ascended mats to make an exotic tends to rub people the wrong way. Add in a seemingly arbitrary time gate and people start asking if it’s worth it, and start looking at other games.

Shikigami.4013:

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

This will go on until the precursors on the TP are no longer cheaper than the crafting price. Voila, balance. Just give it some weeks.

If I wanted a precursor and had the money, I would buy it right now, on the TP. Before the prices rise to what it costs to craft them.

That’s exactly why I bought Dawn the minute I realized how incredibly cheap it was on the TP at the time compared to crafting it. I’ll just have to consider the finished tier 1 collection as an expensive and boring way to gain 3 AP.

The mat cost is more than just buying it off the TP, for the old ones. For the new ones, it is still far too much about buying it, instead of earning it through gameplay.

Jana.6831:

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

The issue is that in a lot of cases, not only is the precursor crafting more expensive than than the base precursors, but it is also time gated. It doesn’t make sense to spend 1000 gold crafting a precursor that costs 200 gold on the TP, for example.

I lent some T7 mats to my friend yesterday – he looked up the price before “let’s see, deldrimor should be around 2 gold.. what the kitten?!”

What does that teach you? Right the value of these mats are made by the players – just like the precurser prices.
And since everybody is free to make these things themselves they have an option to bypass the “ridiculous high price of T7 mats on the TP” – once enough people smarten up T7 will become cheaper while precursers will become more expensive.

They won’t, not easily at least. Precursor prices on TP are restricted by the average cost of massforging them – which depends on the cost of t5 mats. And in case of t5 mats, it’s mostly the supply that sets the price, not the demand (or rather, not the demand for forging precursors – that’s a drop in the bucket in the whole t5 market).

Shikigami.4013:

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

Except there’s no increasing demand. All the players that will go crafting route are players that would have bought the precursor in the previous system.

The supply on tp is the same, the demand for precursors is the same, but the demand is now divided between crafters and buyers. So, in the “worst” case, if there are no crafters, the prices would remain the same they were before. The more “crafters” there are, the more demand for precursors on TP will lower. If the demand will lower too much, the precursor price will drop below its forging price (as is the case with low demand precursors like underwater ones already).

And t7 mats will not go down, because ascended are still in demand, more than ever.

Ragmon.6350:

Kit.3986:

Timegate doesn’t make anything rewarding. It’s an artificial system to keep something away from you so you log in every single day to get it.

Yes. How would you make it rewarding AND encourage people to log in everyday, while crafting the precursor/legendary? I really would like to hear peoples ideas.

By actually designing a quest chain that’s engaging, has an interesting story to it, and takes time to complete but feels like an actual journey that you’re undertaking.

Y’know. Instead of standing by the crafting table and requiring people to log in every day to continue, since not everyone can log in every single day.

Requiring events to be failed in order to trigger an event that is needed is pretty kitten design. Nothing legendary about it, it’s just lazy. Oddly enough atleast for the new pistol this a non-issue until after you get the precursor.

RustyMech.9876:

Requiring events to be failed in order to trigger an event that is needed is pretty kitten design. Nothing legendary about it, it’s just lazy. Oddly enough atleast for the new pistol this a non-issue until after you get the precursor.

This is my biggest issue with precursor collections. Requiring events to fail is terrible design. For one, there shouldn’t be rewards for failure and we see enough of this already in events that spawn champs or another event that gives better loot if you fail it. Second, it’s dependent on you waiting for an event to happen, and hoping, praying that someone doesn’t come along and complete it after you’ve been standing there for an hour waiting for the event. Some players will stop if you ask them, but not all will, and honestly I don’t really blame them. Why should they stop playing for my sake? But it’s a huge pain when progress on something you’re doing gets stalled not by anything you do or fail to do, but just because of someone else who isn’t even doing anything wrong.

If I had a dollar for every “why do people have a different opinion than me, if only they’d be me, there would be no problems” thread, I not only would never have to work again. I’d be able to buy the state of New York.

Wanze.8410:

Would you log in less, after you obtained your precursor?

I’m going to answer this question as if it’s about the legendary itself: Would I log in less?

Probably not because there’s still a metric ton of goals to work toward and content to enjoy. Would I feel less pressured to log in without a goal as huge as a legendary? Probably.

Would I actually log in less? Not necessarily. In fact, long-term I’d probably play more, instead of tending to get burned out from crazy goals and never wanting to play again.

That said, this question coming from the guy who could buy Manhattan if it was for sale in the game, I’m not sure what sort of point you’re trying to make.

Personally I wanted the precursor to be obtainable via alternate currencies, like how it was with high value stuff in City of Heroes. The legendary crafting mastery is basically just an experience dump to get an alternate way to pay more money for the precursor.

Crafting a precursor should not cost gold or anything that can be converted to gold. It should have been a longer-term method for players who don’t have the kind of money to buy the item outright, creating a dichotomy of “cheap, but a lot more time and effort” vs “expensive, but immediate”, with the mystic toilet as a wild card.

Shikigami.4013:

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

This will go on until the precursors on the TP are no longer cheaper than the crafting price. Voila, balance. Just give it some weeks.

I’m legitimately not sure if you’re trolling or not. Either way, things getting more expensive is explicitly the kind of “balance” that nobody but the robber barons actually wants.

Time gate indeed.. seriously who wants to sit for 50 days to refine charged quartz daily.. This has got to be the most lamest thing they could have come up with. Not only does your GH use charged quartz.. but essentially a lot of things as well, so you’re down to being selfish and hoard the charged quartz for yourself.

The beauty of this is.. that unlike other time gated ascended refinements you can easily buy off the market to make up for the lost of time.. this is very nicely account bounded. So you sit through your 50 days =D

Cyninja.2954:

Raven.1524:

I just don’t get it, why is everyone so freaked out about the precursor crafting?
I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.
If you want everyone running around with twilight and stuff, making your weapon skin feel common then fine.
But i’m noticing the same issue with the difficulty of the monsters on the jungle, and people crying about it being hard or everything being grindy…
To be honest, I never had a Legendary, and I’m slowly working towards mine. Even the mastery system, which I never grinded it but I’m suddenly lvl 87 or something like that.
I believe the greatest issue in the gw2 community, is the fact that it developed a weirdly childish personality where a bunch of people see something different or something they wanna get yet it’s kinda hard for them to, and they start a tantrum because the can’t get it NOW.

Welcome to the age of entitled gamers.

To answer your question directly:

Many people expected the precursor crafting to be vastly cheaper than the old system. These people are now very frustrated since they did not receive their precursor for free with the launch of HoT and are still waiting on completing their legendary.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

In any case, while you are entitled to your opinion, could you perhaps list what you feel are the benefits to time gating? For me personally, I can’t see any benefits. It does nothing to enhance the gameplay experience. Even old legendaries could be crafted without any time gating so I don’t see why new legendaries should be.

Besides preventing a massive price spike short term and causing even more unbalance? And any price spikes with new content that requires the ressource (you think now it’s bad, what do think would happen if every person bought 60-90 times the amount of ressources from the TP at once?)

It allows crafters to have some value with their timegates and opens up the ability for players to sell the time ressource for small profits.

It allows for an easier balance from arenanets side as far as time goals they have for content.

The biggest entitlement of the whole thread is you sir.

No-one expect it to be cheap or easy, but no-one expect they implant a system that only benefit “rich casuals”. or “rich casual who uses credit card”, and expect everyone to do the most boring thing ever (collecting 30000 woods or ores) to make a precursor.

If this system is only benefiting rich casuals, then the TP option were there long ago that those rich casuals can buy them a long time ago. The rest who’re looking forward to this system are those hardcore players who’re dedicated to work hard for their precursors, but got slapped in face because it’s another system that only benefit rich casuals.

To make things worse, Anet asks for the SAME MATERIALS across all legendaries , both old and new, as well as guild hall, everything put into the same bracket, without adding any extra way of getting those t7 materials . This is what people getting mad at the most.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Let’s not resort to sensationalism. All it does is discredit your post.

I think people were expecting precursor crafting to be an alternative means to acquiring precursors. Not necessarily a cheaper alternative, but just an alternative to praying to the RNG gods or spending a large sum of gold in one go.

The issue is that in a lot of cases, not only is the precursor crafting more expensive than than the base precursors, but it is also time gated. It doesn’t make sense to spend 1000 gold crafting a precursor that costs 200 gold on the TP, for example.

If a system is horrendously unbalanced, then naturally people will criticize it. It doesn’t mean they’re asking for freebies, it just means they’re asking for balance.

(That being said, some people do go to extremes in their complaints).

Basically, people asked for one thing and Anet gave them something else, that looks kinda like what they asked for but isn’t really what they asked for. Like if I asked for a Playstation for Christmas and got A Tale of Two Cities. I mean, they’re both entertainment! And both enable me to “enter fictional worlds,” but that’s about where the similarity ends.

I think the bottom line is, there’s a portion of the playerbase (in terms of my analogy) who just wanted the entertainment and fictional world in some form. And then there’s the portion who specifically wanted a Playstation and nothing else. Well, the first chunk got what they wanted. The second one didn’t.

I didn’t have any expectations about the system myself, cause I wasn’t paying much attention prior to its release, but what I would have hoped for is an account bound precursor that was mostly acquired through an adventure-like process. Or a precursor that could be acquired with numerous different currencies (albeit with an expensive price tag).

But I think Anet didn’t want to give up their pet economic structure surrounding the precursor market. I’m pretty sure, for example, that precursors have affected the exotic weapon market since their inception and still do, to a point. Now they have integrated precursors even more into the economy, rather than less.

Which is probably a gems to gold fueled decision. If this game had no micro transactions, precursors and legendaries would probably be an account-bound process start to finish. It’s either that or GW2’s obsession with having a functioning RL-like economy, though I’m inclined to think that the two are not that far apart in motivation.

You’re right OP. There are too many over privileged whiny brats. That is just the way things are now. They all feel they shouldn’t have to earn anything and it should be available to them immediately. There’s also the “I could sell all the mats and just buy it cheaper off the TP.” argument about opportunity cost. I don’t understand why people are complaining about that. Just do it. Sell your mats everyday and move on I’m sure you’ll eventually have you coin needed to buy it. Nobody is forcing them to do the collection but they still want to complain about it. Another complaint is " ANET said they were making it easier and cheaper to obtain precursor." Anet says a lot of things they go back on.

I mean, it’s called a Legendary weapon, because it’s hard to get, and the timegate makes it more rewarding.

Nope, it’s called “Legendary” because that’s a cool sounding advjective, just as “Exotic” (which everyone has) and “rare” (which everyone receives 5-10+ per day and mostly junks) are cool sounding words.

They should not be super easy to get, but neither should they be super expensive. Accumulating gold should not be a significant component of making a Legendary weapon (or accumulating large amounts of things you can buy/sell using gold). 99% of the effort put into getting a Legendary weapon together should come in the form of gameplay activities for account-bound items.

Many people expected the precursor crafting to be vastly cheaper than the old system. These people are now very frustrated since they did not receive their precursor for free with the launch of HoT and are still waiting on completing their legendary.

Yes, these people are also, conveniently enough, made entirely of straw, much easier to punch without bruising your delicate knuckles.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Crafting a precursor should not cost gold or anything that can be converted to gold. It should have been a longer-term method for players who don’t have the kind of money to buy the item outright, creating a dichotomy of “cheap, but a lot more time and effort” vs “expensive, but immediate”, with the mystic toilet as a wild card.

Shikigami.4013:

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

This will go on until the precursors on the TP are no longer cheaper than the crafting price. Voila, balance. Just give it some weeks.

I’m legitimately not sure if you’re trolling or not. Either way, things getting more expensive is explicitly the kind of “balance” that nobody but the robber barons actually wants.

I am not trolling and you lack insight into psychology.
People are NOT upset that the crafting method of precursors costs a lot of money. If there had been no precursors on the TP, people would have been happy to finally be able to craft them, and when facing a big pricetag would have said “Oh well, it is a legendary so it is expected to cost a lot”. Remember that this crafting path was not put into the game to provide an easier or cheaper way to get a legendary, but to provide an alternative way.

Now comes the TP and people see that there are precursors there cheaper than the cost to craft it. Instead of saying “Oh wow, that precursor costs less than its crafting price because mats prices are currently superhigh due to guild halls eating them all, I am going to sell all my mats that I planned to use for crafting and buy it before someone else does” people complain about crafting not being worth it. That is all there is to it. Once the cheapest precursors are sold, I believe that prices will slowly balance to close to the cost of crafting. And of course, once the guild hall upgrades are mostly done (which will take a while) material prices will go down again, and so will the price of crafting a precursor.

What if guildhalls never get done?
It would be in Anets interest to keep adding new stuff to the guildhalls or else they will turn into desolated places of wasted resources.

Shikigami.4013:

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Crafting a precursor should not cost gold or anything that can be converted to gold. It should have been a longer-term method for players who don’t have the kind of money to buy the item outright, creating a dichotomy of “cheap, but a lot more time and effort” vs “expensive, but immediate”, with the mystic toilet as a wild card.

Shikigami.4013:

The situation fixes itself over time. Several people who realize that a precursor on the TP is cheaper than making it themselves will probably buy it on the TP. What happens when the supply of sellable precursors stays the same (we have to assume it does, as the craftable ones are not sellable and ANet said nothing about an increased droprate) but an increasing number of people buy one? The price rises.

This will go on until the precursors on the TP are no longer cheaper than the crafting price. Voila, balance. Just give it some weeks.

I’m legitimately not sure if you’re trolling or not. Either way, things getting more expensive is explicitly the kind of “balance” that nobody but the robber barons actually wants.

I am not trolling and you lack insight into psychology.
People are NOT upset that the crafting method of precursors costs a lot of money. If there had been no precursors on the TP, people would have been happy to finally be able to craft them, and when facing a big pricetag would have said “Oh well, it is a legendary so it is expected to cost a lot”. Remember that this crafting path was not put into the game to provide an easier or cheaper way to get a legendary, but to provide an alternative way.

Now comes the TP and people see that there are precursors there cheaper than the cost to craft it. Instead of saying “Oh wow, that precursor costs less than its crafting price because mats prices are currently superhigh due to guild halls eating them all, I am going to sell all my mats that I planned to use for crafting and buy it before someone else does” people complain about crafting not being worth it. That is all there is to it. Once the cheapest precursors are sold, I believe that prices will slowly balance to close to the cost of crafting. And of course, once the guild hall upgrades are mostly done (which will take a while) material prices will go down again, and so will the price of crafting a precursor.

Your theory is like 1/10 correct only.

Material cost spike the first time WHEN people finally found out the precursor recipe of most popular weapons. (This is when Anet patched the bug of Collection 1 on most Precursor weapons)

Material cost spike a 2nd time WHEN they figure out Nevermore eats another 90 Spirit-woods, and can ONLY be crafted.

Guild Hall is only the minor issue here because not everyone is working too hard on their guild halls.

The reason for price spike is obvious: Anet put every precursor in the same bracket, consuming same material in an extremely huge quantity, so big that most people do not have that many saved up despite playing for 3 years. To make things worse, they do not address the supply issue at all by providing more ways to get low tier materials or t7 materials, while simultaneously INCREASING the material components crafting quantity (Like some materials need 4 base material to craft 1 now).

It’s like they’re intentionally creating this price spike to make regular players suffer, so that they are more prawned to spending real money for gold in game. This is what making players most angry. They’re breaking/ manipulating the market in a way that hurt many casual players because of their lame precursor crafting. Even normal players who only want to train crafting, or only want to craft some ascended weapons for themselves got hugely impacted by this change, that they need to cost TRIPLED for the same product now.

It comes down to time.

Think of it like this. You work to get paid right? What did you get paid for? Your time.

Money is time and time is money. Very simple.

When you put the time into making Ascended Armor or Precursors by gathering all of the gear you expect that at the end of that your time is equal to the outcome. That’s how real life works. If you are getting paid 8 quid an hour for your labor and then are expected to work that time again without pay you have the Ascended Armor and Precursor crafting system.

Could care less about time gate, im more upset with them gating certain requirements behind events that are required to fail before triggering the event you need.

Eirdyne.9843:

It comes down to time.

Think of it like this. You work to get paid right? What did you get paid for? Your time.

Money is time and time is money. Very simple.

When you put the time into making Ascended Armor or Precursors by gathering all of the gear you expect that at the end of that your time is equal to the outcome. That’s how real life works. If you are getting paid 8 quid an hour for your labor and then are expected to work that time again without pay you have the Ascended Armor and Precursor crafting system.

And when it comes to Precursor crafting, you not only have to spend time on collecting materials, you also have to do tons of extra work.

If you collect those materials yourself, and then SELL it on TP, you’d only need to collect 70% of the material and save the whole process of scavenger hunts to get the precursor.

In short, if you choose to craft precursor, you spend triple amount of the effort (MORE time and MORE gold) for the same product on TP. This is why people are mad.

It’s like the whole time-consuming processes has 0 value, and you still pay more for the material cost.

And before people bring out the price stabilizing theory bs, Anet would be releasing new legendaries every 3 months, which are only craftable, and also COMPETING the same materials as old precursors. It’d take at least 1~2 year before the price can come down because every few month there’d be a price spike in material once again.

If Anet doesn’t solve the root of problem, nothing will change.

My issue is timegating. Timegating creates an unnatural delay in progress, independent of skill or difficulty. It simply delays things when you might have already obtained everything else you need to progress. Does it make me log in every day? Sure. Does it make me want to keep playing after I obtain it?

No. No it does not.

I find being FORCED to log in on arenanet’s schedule to get the precursor done as soon as possible, regardless of any prior preparation, farming, and leveling I have accomplished only serves to make me not want to log in at all. I grudgingly log in because I need to, then leave the game as soon as I can because of the awful taste in my mouth it provides.

Difficulty, I am good with. A collection quest I am good with and actually like. But time gating? A forced, flat out brick wall with no flavor, no real context, no anything but still an absolute? That turns me off. It actually lowers my enjoyment of the game.

I already did my farming. I already did my effort. I already have the materials. Let me make some actual progress towards my goal instead of stonewalling me.

Kit.3986:

Timegate doesn’t make anything rewarding. It’s an artificial system to keep something away from you so you log in every single day to get it.

Exactly. People need to start using their brain. Ask yourself how on earth does a system that forces you to log in every single day to craft a time gated material and log out (most have all their collections already) “legendary”?

It’s easy as hell to get all the required materials for the collections, all you wait on is the time gated crap.

If Arena Net really wanted their legendaries to mean something, they would gate the materials behind difficult content such as raids ect.

That would be legendary, that would feel like you worked towards something very hard to get……there is nothing epic about making time gated mats lets be real. The only reason to gate mats is to keep you logging in every single day to show good population data and other various business related reasons.

I thought there was going to be some “epic quest” that involved a number of different aspects including the “scavenger hunt”.

Personally I’d like to see them bring back all of the LS episodes (S1) and then do something like “Get all the achievements (or extras) through all story elements of the game.” Get people doing things, rather than just farming.

This could be one part of it, possibly even account locked so you could do an epic journey for a soulbound precursor.