Guild Wars 2

To answer someone’s question on here, the thread is still rising because it’s yet to be fixed and it’s something that’s imbalanced.

It’s a combination of price control to continue the TPcentric nature of the economy while simultaneously being a poor game design by requiring a single resource for all armor creation on every account with no alternatives. The frustration comes from the game going from an all currency (karma) system of buying gear which was way easier and more satisfying because that wasn’t designed as a tide me over in place of the lack of new content that they had (and allowed players to quickly gear up without using that as a crutch to keep people which is far superior to) [as opposed to] the grind they have now for gold for each character for each account across the board instead of simply making karma viable again as a currency.

It would be much simpler to revamp the current system so that A: people didn’t need to craft armors for each toon they could buy them somehow directly B: karma would replace the need for gold to gear up at least on the side of the armor rather than the weapons (they can keep the weapons as crafting only that would be fine) or C: allow the turn in of some other abundant resource (like the dragonite ore) to be used as currency for the harder to get items that never drop because of the anti-farming system in the game, say for the use in buying the insignias that people need to craft armor. or they could make silk not the only resource needed to make ascended armors for the other armor types out there which would prevent that resource from being the end all for the creations of the armors for every character.

Just give us the option to downscale our loot level to match the map level and this is solved. The change pre megaserver may have been wanted but now it isn’t by those of us who craft what we kill not what we buy.

A level 80 with downleveled loot could grab linen cloth or wool quite easily and prices would fall.

Mikuchan.7261:

TL;DR
Did I mention that changing the insignia recipes will solve the problem and at the same time keep the difficulty?
Also plots from simulation, because graphics are nice.
Also cloth gathering nodes.

The problem is not difficulty
The problems is not the individual prices of any material
The problem is the disproportional prices of ascended armors in relation to eachother caused by game mechanics
I’m all ok with Ascended armor being expensive and hard to get and it being a hardcore task or whatnot.
But I’m not ok with Ascended armor being more expensive and harder to get for light armor people compared to medium and heavy armor people because of nothing other than game mechanics. If it was a demand created by a high number of light armor users, then that’s all fine. But it’s not. It’s a demand created solely by the fact that light armor requires almost only damask and creating any armor at all requires more damask than anything else. See earlier post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-is-silk-going-up-in-price/4852182

Simply changing insignia recipes to require the base material of that crafting discipline instead of damask changes that, keeps the required materials per ascended material, keeps the number of ascended materials needed but balances out the cost of the different armors in the long run so that they are equal in price.

Currently the system is partially uncontrolled, there is no choice that can be made that affects the demand ratio between the materials. Damask will always be highest in demand.
There also is no choice that can be made that affects the supply ratio between the materials in a way that’s positive for cloth since cloth cannot actively be gathered.
As such, the system will continue to go out of whack as it is now.

Introducing the choice for insignias introduce what you, in systems control, call a feedback loop where a controller, the crafter, can make a choice based on some variables in the system, the price on the materials, and thus affect the demand of the different materials directly. The demand in turn affects the price. The choice will also affect the demand ratio positively for Damask since for all armors, you can choose to spend 18 non-damask materials and thus have less Damask than anything else in your armor set. Since the player can be assumed to go for the path of minimal resistance, he will go for what is cheapest and create a demand for that in favor of creating a demand for what’s expensive.
This means that regardless of supply, the materials will always be balanced in price and demand after they have initially settled with time. The prices may still go up and down, but they will do so uniformly.

Introducing gathering nodes for cloth will affect the supply side of the system and introduces a controller for the supply since the players can then make a choice that affects the supply of cloth, namely to go after the nodes and farm it. Depending on the price, more or less people will do so, which will affect the supply.
Not introducing choices for the crafting will however mean that the demand will keep trying to push damask out of whack, but there’s at least a chance that the supply may be able to do something about it. There is however not a guarantee that this will keep it balanced, it depends on how much each player is able to supply and how much they are willing to supply, while insignia material choices will always keep it balanced in the long run.

Attachments:
The plots are the result of a simulation that generated 1000 players of a random class, uniformly distributed.
The simulation doesn’t consider supply, only demand. It’s supposed to show how the demand changes depending on if the system includes a choice or not.
Demand is used instead of price, since there is no supply in the system and a price can’t be emulated. Demand will suffice for the experiment since it’s only meant to show the impact of a self-controlled system. In reality, the price would be the variable that would be used and that would create a demand which, together with supply, would create a price. However lowering the demand will always lower the price when supply is unchanged and because of that, the simulation still works.
The same list of players are used for both instances.
Players craft their own armor weight.
The initial demand values are set subjectively in order to simulate the current demand of the different materials.
The scale is not realistic, but it doesn’t matter since the point of the simulation is to show the impact of the choice.
In the first instance, the player is not given a choice but must craft the insignias with the current recipes.
In the second instance, the player will always choose to create insignias of the material that is lowest in demand.

good stuff

Ohoni.6057:

You are Entitled to your opinion, I disagree with it. I think the prices should not be so constrained and that the prices should be based on supply/demand principles.

Then maybe you shouldn’t be playing a game in which supply and demand does not exist except at the whims of the developers. The argue “let supply and demand handle it” is simply nonsensical in this context. You’re certainly free to disagree as to what the resulting prices should be, but don’t try to frame it as some sort of principled stand in the name of the free market, because the free market has never existed here.

Your 0.5->2s progression is not possible without an enormous amount of micro managing.

The markets are mostly stable over time. They would only need minor corrections here and there. And of course there would be swings, a T4 might be more expensive than a T5 for a few weeks here and there, but the target price, the natural balance point that it returns to should be along that straight curve, not a rollercoaster.

It is also impossible with the economics of material promotion where you get about 1/3 of T+1 mats from the previous. the promotion recipes cost 250 t? mats and on average you receive 80ish T?+1.

I could not care even slightly less about material promotion, but if ANet views it as a problem, they can just adjust the recipes accordingly to provide/require more/less mats. It’s not rocket surgery.

maybe i misread but i thought you said they should all be around the price of leather.

“But again, my preference would be to lower the cost of all of them to at most the cost of Leather, if not lower.”

Yes, you misread me, as I explained in the block you quoted, but apparently did not read, above those comments.

I agree with Ohoni.6057 on costs. I don’t have much money, and would like to buy cloths for cheap. Everything in this game should be made cheap, so new players can afford the same things as high level players.

It’s not even about new or old players, there are plenty of established, long-time level 80 players that do not have enough to fully gear their character, much less alts. But yeah, new players would certainly benefit.

I got lost at straight curve.

Everything I [Snipped] leads down the path of Anet having to micromanage just about everything to satisfy(impossible) your desire for price control and what YOU feel is the proper price.

Not really. We’re talking about them making one core change, a series of moves that adjusts the 18 base materials into the “T6>T5>T4>T3>T2>T1” and “M~=L~=C” paradigms. That will require a one time series of specific corrections to recipes and/or drop rates, but once achieved, it should be mostly static and require no further intervention.

Each time they make a change to the game that would significantly alter that relationship again, they would need to also make a counterbalancing change. Long story short, they would not need to micromanage anything unless they were already making a change that would shift the markets, and when they do, they only need to correct for the change they’re already making. It’s sort of a “you break it, you buy it” situation.

And again, they don’t have to keep them rigidly locked into those boundaries, if a T3 creeps above a T4 that isn’t reason to panic, it will almost certainly happen, the important part is that it be on a trend to level off and fall back down to an average natural level that’s between T2 and T4 once the market settles back down.

Now as for mat promotion, all that would potentially require is that they do the same ONE TIME adjustment to the recipes to account for the new paradigm, but once they’ve done that, it should stay roughly the same so long as they keep the markets in check.

Now, does this mean that you’ll be able to turn any mat into any higher tier mat and turn a noteworthy profit? No, but that isn’t guaranteed today either, so who cares? Of all the elements in the game, material promotion is about as close to the bottom as possible. If they can make it work, and I have every reason to believe that they could, then great. If they can’t, then scrap that whole element, correct for any immediate impact that would have, and almost nobody will notice it happened.

Just give us the option to downscale our loot level to match the map level and this is solved. The change pre megaserver may have been wanted but now it isn’t by those of us who craft what we kill not what we buy.

I’m on the fence on this one. It would be nice to be able to farm low level items in low level zones even with high level characters, but if this happened then the price of those mats would tank, which would again make loot in those zones less valuable and we’re back where we begun. If they’re going to make a change to how that works, I would make it optional. If you want to get level 60 loot in a level 60 zone, you can. If you want level 80 loot, you can. That way if you just want to be in a level 60 zone then you can shift this setting based on which type of loot is currently more valuable to you.

I got lost at straight curve.

Yeah, that really doesn’t surprise me, but it’s ok, we all have our roles to play in life.

Mikuchan.7261:

TL;DR
Did I mention that changing the insignia recipes will solve the problem and at the same time keep the difficulty?

I’m all ok with Ascended armor being expensive and hard to get and it being a hardcore task or whatnot.
But I’m not ok with Ascended armor being more expensive and harder to get for light armor people compared to medium and heavy armor people because of nothing other than game mechanics. If it was a demand created by a high number of light armor users, then that’s all fine. But it’s not. It’s a demand created solely by the fact that light armor requires almost only damask and creating any armor at all requires more damask than anything else.
Simply changing insignia recipes to require the base material of that crafting discipline instead of damask changes that, keeps the required materials per ascended material, keeps the number of ascended materials needed but balances out the cost of the different armors in the long run so that they are equal in price.

Currently the system is partially uncontrolled, there is no choice that can be made that affects the demand ratio between the materials. Damask will always be highest in demand.
There also is no choice that can be made that affects the supply ratio between the materials in a way that’s positive for cloth since cloth cannot actively be gathered.
As such, the system will continue to go out of whack as it is now.

Introducing the choice for insignias introduce what you, in systems control, call a feedback loop where a controller, the crafter, can make a choice based on some variables in the system, the price on the materials, and thus affect the demand of the different materials directly. The demand in turn affects the price. The choice will also affect the demand ratio positively for Damask since for all armors, you can choose to spend 18 non-damask materials and thus have less Damask than anything else in your armor set. Since the player can be assumed to go for the path of minimal resistance, he will go for what is cheapest and create a demand for that in favor of creating a demand for what’s expensive.

Good try for rebalancing and I wouldnt neccessarily be opposed to the change.
But there are still some flaws, i think.

First of all, players who only play light classes and only have their tailor levelled to 500, wont be able to take advantage off the cheaper armorsmith/leatherworker insignias, only through the tp and they will come at a premium.

Timegating, depending on class and which mat is currently the cheapest, will still vary between 18-36 days for a set. Right now it only varies between 24-36 days.

I think it will only create a short supply bubble for cheaper insignias, until leather has risen in price. People might think there is an infinite amount of leather supply, and for t5 that might be true, but it looks quite different for t2 and t4 leather, which only have enough sections on the tp for about 1000 insignia. That supply will be inhaled within the first couple of minutes, considering that many people have lots of spools of elonian cord in their storage already. The supply of 2700 elonian leather squares on the tp will be bought out instantly to craft 900 insignias as fast as possible and take advantage of the existing high buy orders for them on the tp. So large scale adjustments in drops for lower tier leather have to be made, otherwise the added supply of leather for crafting insignias will be insignificant.

Rising prices for deldrimor ingots will have several other negative impacts, most notably higher prices for ascended weapons and precursors.
If ascended weapons get more expensive, it will create an even bigger class specific unbalance between 1-set users and weapon heavy 2 set classes:

• a Staff/Trident Ele will only need 8 ingots for his build
• a Rifle/Harpoon Gun Engi will need 11 ingots for his build
• a GS/H/Trident/Spear Guard will need 26 ingots for his build
• a GS/Sw/WH/HG/Spear Warrior will need 33 ingots for his build
• a Sw/Sw/M/Sh/Sp/HG Warrior will need 42 ingots for his build

And with precursors, i already mentioned the relation between the mithril price and precursor prices. To show it in numbers:
If you need an average of 2000 rare weapons to forge a precursor, for every copper that mithril rises in price, it costs 4.8g more to craft a precursor gs. If mithril should rise from 50 copper now to 1s, thats 240g extra and 720g, if mithril should rise to the 2s range that silk currently is in.

As I already mentioned, personally I wouldnt mind your proposed change but im not convinced that it will improve the situation for the mayority of the player base in the long run and therefore warrant the change. It will surely provide short term relief because there will be instant new and cheap supply available, especially from leather, but once the markets settled down, I dont see it being a viable solution.

Anet have announced that ascended will remain the top gear set for the xpac which has led to more people crafting it, increasing demand.

Post loot change that causes 80s to receive 80 level drops in downleveled areas it’s nearly impossible to farm enough low level cloth and leather from salvaged items, increasing demand for TP mats.

The volume of mats necessary to craft ascended was put in place before the change to level appropriate loot and when most mats were incredibly plentiful. Now that is no longer the case Anet have created the problem themselves. 100 bolts of silk a day is a ridiculous amount

I think any impulse to create a “T6>T5>T4>T3>T2>T1” set of values for materials is fatally flawed, leaving out the effects on supply created by the distribution of player character levels across the 1-80 spectrum.

If anything its entirely deliberate that lower level character have an easier time generating some highly prized materials – allowing them to get a toe-hold in the economy selling off their drops as they are leveling up.

Aidenwolf.5964:

Just give us the option to downscale our loot level to match the map level and this is solved. The change pre megaserver may have been wanted but now it isn’t by those of us who craft what we kill not what we buy.

A level 80 with downleveled loot could grab linen cloth or wool quite easily and prices would fall.

I agree, This would make farming the t2-4 mats a lot easier and it would have an effect on undervalued t5 mats as well by shutting down the extra t5 salvage rewards.

tigirius.9014:

The frustration comes from the game going from an all currency (karma) system of buying gear which was way easier and more satisfying because that wasn’t designed as a tide me over in place of the lack of new content that they had (and allowed players to quickly gear up without using that as a crutch to keep people which is far superior to) [as opposed to] the grind they have now for gold for each character for each account across the board instead of simply making karma viable again as a currency.

You can get lvl 80 exotic Karma armor from the temples in a variety of stat choices, this satisfies the gear needs for any content.

Nike.2631:

I think any impulse to create a “T6>T5>T4>T3>T2>T1” set of values for materials is fatally flawed, leaving out the effects on supply created by the distribution of player character levels across the 1-80 spectrum.

If anything its entirely deliberate that lower level character have an easier time generating some highly prized materials – allowing them to get a toe-hold in the economy selling off their drops as they are leveling up.

I agree and would say that it is working as intended, and in my opinion good design.

Ohoni.6057:

Each time they make a change to the game that would significantly alter that relationship again, they would need to also make a counterbalancing change. Long story short, they would not need to micromanage anything unless they were already making a change that would shift the markets, and when they do, they only need to correct for the change they’re already making. It’s sort of a “you break it, you buy it” situation.

I got lost at straight curve.

[Snip, misplaced superiority]

So everytime they would make a change they would need to “make a counterbalancing change” to every other mat to keep it balanced? That is micromanaging. What you are saying contradicts itself, just like “straight curve”.

Structuring raw materials into a tiered pricing model would require that player interaction with supply be removed.

i.e. all gathering nodes for ore and logs would have to be removed so that individual players are unable to sate their own demand and are required to obtain their ore and logs from other players who all share in the same drop rate (just like cloth and leather).

Obtena.7952:

I don’t think it’s Anet’s logic or any inconsistency that leads me to conclude that you aren’t the kind of player suited to make ascended armor.

No kind of player should be “unsuited” to make ascended armor (assuming of course they are not unsuited for the game itself). I vehemently disagree with the idea, that the BiS armor is not for everyone.

And if some aspect of the economy promotes this way of thinking, then it needs to be changed, no matter how well it works otherwise.

eithinan.9841:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Just give us the option to downscale our loot level to match the map level and this is solved. The change pre megaserver may have been wanted but now it isn’t by those of us who craft what we kill not what we buy.

A level 80 with downleveled loot could grab linen cloth or wool quite easily and prices would fall.

I agree, This would make farming the t2-4 mats a lot easier and it would have an effect on undervalued t5 mats as well by shutting down the extra t5 salvage rewards.

tigirius.9014:

The frustration comes from the game going from an all currency (karma) system of buying gear which was way easier and more satisfying because that wasn’t designed as a tide me over in place of the lack of new content that they had (and allowed players to quickly gear up without using that as a crutch to keep people which is far superior to) [as opposed to] the grind they have now for gold for each character for each account across the board instead of simply making karma viable again as a currency.

You can get lvl 80 exotic Karma armor from the temples in a variety of stat choices, this satisfies the gear needs for any content.

Nike.2631:

I think any impulse to create a “T6>T5>T4>T3>T2>T1” set of values for materials is fatally flawed, leaving out the effects on supply created by the distribution of player character levels across the 1-80 spectrum.

If anything its entirely deliberate that lower level character have an easier time generating some highly prized materials – allowing them to get a toe-hold in the economy selling off their drops as they are leveling up.

I agree and would say that it is working as intended, and in my opinion good design.

Ohoni.6057:

Each time they make a change to the game that would significantly alter that relationship again, they would need to also make a counterbalancing change. Long story short, they would not need to micromanage anything unless they were already making a change that would shift the markets, and when they do, they only need to correct for the change they’re already making. It’s sort of a “you break it, you buy it” situation.

I got lost at straight curve.

[Snip, misplaced superiority]

So everytime they would make a change they would need to “make a counterbalancing change” to every other mat to keep it balanced? That is micromanaging. What you are saying contradicts itself, just like “straight curve”.

That’s great that it satisfies you but it’s still not being able to get max gear so gearing is a problem when they have even admitted to the game review websites out there that they went from a really easy system of getting max level gear to a sudden 180 turning it into one of the longest grinds in fantasy mmo development history.

So when silk prices rise like this and there’s a problem with getting enough for upgrading to top tier easily in a game where gear was supposed to be an afterthought there is going to be people who complain about it an just because it’s fine for you it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be the way it is right now.

Several things in this game were supposed to be afterthoughts and not the central focus of the game and gear was one of those things and silk prices and scarcity directly threaten that.

eithinan.9841:

I got lost at straight curve.

[Snip, misplaced superiority]

So everytime they would make a change they would need to “make a counterbalancing change” to every other mat to keep it balanced? That is micromanaging. What you are saying contradicts itself, just like “straight curve”.

straight curve is a geometry term, a curve isnt “required” to be straight. A curve is essentially a function.
a straight curve is a first degree equation.

Its not really an oxymoron, nor is it as crazy as it seems, much like a square is a rectangle or a parrellogram.

the real mathematic definition of curve, is closer to line than to bendy line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_curves

Wanze.8410:

Good try for rebalancing and I wouldnt neccessarily be opposed to the change.
But there are still some flaws, i think.

First of all, players who only play light classes and only have their tailor levelled to 500, wont be able to take advantage off the cheaper armorsmith/leatherworker insignias, only through the tp and they will come at a premium.

Timegating, depending on class and which mat is currently the cheapest, will still vary between 18-36 days for a set. Right now it only varies between 24-36 days.

I think it will only create a short supply bubble for cheaper insignias, until leather has risen in price. People might think there is an infinite amount of leather supply, and for t5 that might be true, but it looks quite different for t2 and t4 leather, which only have enough sections on the tp for about 1000 insignia. That supply will be inhaled within the first couple of minutes, considering that many people have lots of spools of elonian cord in their storage already. The supply of 2700 elonian leather squares on the tp will be bought out instantly to craft 900 insignias as fast as possible and take advantage of the existing high buy orders for them on the tp. So large scale adjustments in drops for lower tier leather have to be made, otherwise the added supply of leather for crafting insignias will be insignificant.

Rising prices for deldrimor ingots will have several other negative impacts, most notably higher prices for ascended weapons and precursors.
If ascended weapons get more expensive, it will create an even bigger class specific unbalance between 1-set users and weapon heavy 2 set classes:

• a Staff/Trident Ele will only need 8 ingots for his build
• a Rifle/Harpoon Gun Engi will need 11 ingots for his build
• a GS/H/Trident/Spear Guard will need 26 ingots for his build
• a GS/Sw/WH/HG/Spear Warrior will need 33 ingots for his build
• a Sw/Sw/M/Sh/Sp/HG Warrior will need 42 ingots for his build

I think a better alternative would be creating weight-locked insignia, instead of the “generic” insignia we have now. This would mean leather can only craft (and use) leather insignia, with the same being true of heavy and light armor. It’d drastically cut back the amount of fabric needed for heavy and medium classes while increasing the leather and metal needed for them.

As for the deldrimor ingots, I’m not convinced that’s going to be a problem. The highest price they’ve been at was ~7g around a year ago. Since then, the average trend resulted in the price we have now, ~4g. In fact, since last october, deldrimor has been rising in price from the ~3g low it reached. If supply for mithril really is that high, why did deldrimor go up a gold in price? Mithril alone rising in price wont have much impact since salvaging weapons almost always results in it or wood.

This means if you increase the needs for metal and leather will, obviously, go up in price, which is the desired outcome. The difficulty lies in preventing it from becoming an unreasonable outcome. Ideally, if leather rose to the same price as silk, and mithril rose to say… 65% of silk’s price, I’d think this would be a healthy change for the economy, and players in general. Particularly since mithril becomes valuable enough to actually mine whenever you come across it. Which is one thing I’ve never done. I dont mine mithril when I can fill both unrefined and refined mithril collections from salvage alone.

Aidan Savage.2078:

I think a better alternative would be creating weight-locked insignia, instead of the “generic” insignia we have now. This would mean leather can only craft (and use) leather insignia, with the same being true of heavy and light armor. It’d drastically cut back the amount of fabric needed for heavy and medium classes while increasing the leather and metal needed for them.

As for the deldrimor ingots, I’m not convinced that’s going to be a problem. The highest price they’ve been at was ~7g around a year ago. Since then, the average trend resulted in the price we have now, ~4g. In fact, since last october, deldrimor has been rising in price from the ~3g low it reached. If supply for mithril really is that high, why did deldrimor go up a gold in price? Mithril alone rising in price wont have much impact since salvaging weapons almost always results in it or wood.

This means if you increase the needs for metal and leather will, obviously, go up in price, which is the desired outcome. The difficulty lies in preventing it from becoming an unreasonable outcome. Ideally, if leather rose to the same price as silk, and mithril rose to say… 65% of silk’s price, I’d think this would be a healthy change for the economy, and players in general. Particularly since mithril becomes valuable enough to actually mine whenever you come across it. Which is one thing I’ve never done. I dont mine mithril when I can fill both unrefined and refined mithril collections from salvage alone.

Weight-locked insignias would greatly increase the long term timegate for medium and especially heavy users to at least 36 days (unless you buy additional mats). Even though a heavy set would only need 34 deldrimor, both heavy classes need alot of deldrimor as well for their weapons, usually at least 20 additional ingots for their build.
Even if deldrimor would be valued at about 65% of silk/leather, like you predict, i dont see how that improves the status quo. It only shifts the current problem from light to heavy.

And the price rise of deldrimor since oct last year actually is precursor related.
If you check the mithril price, it had two value bumps, one at the end of october and 1 during dec/jan. The first one was triggered by Halloween, the lab dropped alot of fine t5 mats, which suddenly went from 3.5s to 2.3s. That meant a rare gs was suddenly craftable for 18s less and a gs-pre 360g cheaper to forge on average. That sucked alot of mithril out of the market very fast.
The same happened during wintersday, with the addition of snowflakes, t5 fine mats lost another 33% value, lots of pres got forged and mithril supply couldnt keep up, until precursor prices fell so much, that profit margins went smaller and the influx of snowflakes stopped.

The price spike a year ago to 7g for deldrimor was caused by the watchwork knight backpacks that consumed alot of iron, so i think a good idea to increase the value of deldrimor without impacting the market of precursors too much, would be to increase the requirements for iron/platinum in the recipe, which would allow for the same mithril consumption.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Bernie.8674:

I’m having trouble buying your assertion that the two issues are independent. Many proponents of the existing system have repeatedly made the claim that the system works precisely because you go to obtain an intermediary item (gold) and exchange it for the item you’re looking for (silk). If silk were available from a vendor for a fixed price then I would agree that the two issues are separate.

No, he’s saying that there are two separate issues the complaints are based on. Either your core complaint is the price of Silk, or your complaint is the direct availability of Silk.

And I was saying that the issues are not separate. It’s not either/or. The price of silk depends partially on its availability.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

So in the case of it being available – If you were given a direct source to farm Silk, but the price remained the same as it is, would you still complain?

Yes, I would complain. However, this is like asking me whether I would be upset if I ate a four course meal and was still hungry afterward. Yes, I would be upset, but I seriously doubt I would still be hungry. The same applies here. If I were given a direct source to farm silk that didn’t involve hours of waypointing and map-hopping from boss to boss then I would utilize that instead (like I did with foxfire clusters). However, I also know that plenty of farmers out there would do likewise, increasing the silk supply on the TP. The sheer number of sellers would naturally raise the number of undercutters, thereby lowering the price. The basic premise of the price remaining the same is flawed, so my answer to that question is irrelevant.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The opposite would be – If the price were low, but you didn’t have a direct source to farm Silk, would you still complain?

I probably would complain less (I prefer to gather my own mats, but I’m not typical). Leather is a good example of this. I’m always running out, but since a full stack is about 20 silver (the cost of 10 silk scraps), I just buy it off the TP as needed.

Wanze.8410:

Aidan Savage.2078:

I think a better alternative would be creating weight-locked insignia, instead of the “generic” insignia we have now. This would mean leather can only craft (and use) leather insignia, with the same being true of heavy and light armor. It’d drastically cut back the amount of fabric needed for heavy and medium classes while increasing the leather and metal needed for them.

As for the deldrimor ingots, I’m not convinced that’s going to be a problem. The highest price they’ve been at was ~7g around a year ago. Since then, the average trend resulted in the price we have now, ~4g. In fact, since last october, deldrimor has been rising in price from the ~3g low it reached. If supply for mithril really is that high, why did deldrimor go up a gold in price? Mithril alone rising in price wont have much impact since salvaging weapons almost always results in it or wood.

This means if you increase the needs for metal and leather will, obviously, go up in price, which is the desired outcome. The difficulty lies in preventing it from becoming an unreasonable outcome. Ideally, if leather rose to the same price as silk, and mithril rose to say… 65% of silk’s price, I’d think this would be a healthy change for the economy, and players in general. Particularly since mithril becomes valuable enough to actually mine whenever you come across it. Which is one thing I’ve never done. I dont mine mithril when I can fill both unrefined and refined mithril collections from salvage alone.

Weight-locked insignias would greatly increase the long term timegate for medium and especially heavy users to at least 36 days (unless you buy additional mats). Even though a heavy set would only need 34 deldrimor, both heavy classes need alot of deldrimor as well for their weapons, usually at least 20 additional ingots for their build.
Even if deldrimor would be valued at about 65% of silk/leather, like you predict, i dont see how that improves the status quo. It only shifts the current problem from light to heavy.

And the price rise of deldrimor since oct last year actually is precursor related.
If you check the mithril price, it had two value bumps, one at the end of october and 1 during dec/jan. The first one was triggered by Halloween, the lab dropped alot of fine t5 mats, which suddenly went from 3.5s to 2.3s. That meant a rare gs was suddenly craftable for 18s less and a gs-pre 360g cheaper to forge on average. That sucked alot of mithril out of the market very fast.
The same happened during wintersday, with the addition of snowflakes, t5 fine mats lost another 33% value, lots of pres got forged and mithril supply couldnt keep up, until precursor prices fell so much, that profit margins went smaller and the influx of snowflakes stopped.

The price spike a year ago to 7g for deldrimor was caused by the watchwork knight backpacks that consumed alot of iron, so i think a good idea to increase the value of deldrimor without impacting the market of precursors too much, would be to increase the requirements for iron/platinum in the recipe, which would allow for the same mithril consumption.

i dont think you should be creating too much demand in lower level materials, especially not ones that are already at a pretty good price point like iron/platinum. Mithril is a bit low.

I know it ties into precursor price, but if precursor price demands mithril to be 40-50 copper, i dont know if thats a good thing

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Who’s asking for absolute parity? A little variance here and there is expected. Silk scraps at 2000% the price of leather despite being gathered in the same manner goes beyond the bounds of variance. If you don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium why were the crafting requirements for silk adjusted to begin with? According to IGN’s tailoring guide bolts of silk only cost two scraps two years ago. Obviously this was done to maintain some kind of equilibrium. Now that the equilibrium has clearly been thrown out of whack, this decision may need to be re-evalutated.

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

Shiyo.3578:

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

It isn’t what they literally did. I’d look into what micro-manage is and what he was referring to.

Ayrilana.1396:

Shiyo.3578:

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

It isn’t what they literally did. I’d look into what micro-manage is and what he was referring to.

he did micro manage, but i think the point he was making is he doesnt want to micro manage everything.

Micro managing is actually supposed to happen, its just not feasible for one guy or force to do it. Unfortunately we do not have a real economy or business structure, we cant do things like innovate, or replace goods, we cant alter amounts, and we dont have much direct control on many things. Therefore, at times, it will fall to Anet to micro manage, i dont really think its avoidable.

this of course is – the negative connotation.

Basically someone has to pay attention to the details when things go wrong. In a normal economy, people in the industry would do this, but in this case its not possible.

I think if ascended was a real product, deals would be made to lower the cost of silk, or they would pay the magi tech engineers to figure out how to build insignias out of other materials, or use less resources per craft.

one-off corrections =/= micro-management

phys.7689:

Ayrilana.1396:

Shiyo.3578:

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

It isn’t what they literally did. I’d look into what micro-manage is and what he was referring to.

he did micro manage, but i think the point he was making is he doesnt want to micro manage everything.

Micro managing is actually supposed to happen, its just not feasible for one guy or force to do it. Unfortunately we do not have a real economy or business structure, we cant do things like innovate, or replace goods, we cant alter amounts, and we dont have much direct control on many things. Therefore, at times, it will fall to Anet to micro manage, i dont really think its avoidable.

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

Astraea.6075:

one-off corrections =/= micro-management

well if thats how you define your terms, thats fine.

But then i think most people are asking him to make one off corrections, not micro managing as you define it

Ayrilana.1396:

phys.7689:

Ayrilana.1396:

Shiyo.3578:

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

It isn’t what they literally did. I’d look into what micro-manage is and what he was referring to.

he did micro manage, but i think the point he was making is he doesnt want to micro manage everything.

Micro managing is actually supposed to happen, its just not feasible for one guy or force to do it. Unfortunately we do not have a real economy or business structure, we cant do things like innovate, or replace goods, we cant alter amounts, and we dont have much direct control on many things. Therefore, at times, it will fall to Anet to micro manage, i dont really think its avoidable.

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

whatever definition you want to use is fine, Ill go with what you say. But this means that people want the type of changes he has made in the past, not what you would define as micromanaging.

Basically they want the overall system fixed so that the demand/supply relationship for silk in ascended isnt one that creates an unbalanced value for different armor types by its very design.

phys.7689:

Astraea.6075:

one-off corrections =/= micro-management

well if thats how you define your terms, thats fine.

But then i think most people are asking him to make one off corrections, not micro managing as you define it

Asking him to make constant corrections over time is micro managing.

A specific item (the “micro” in an economic sense) was adjusted (“managed”) a few times to raise its market value. I don’t even call this a bad thing, so long as it’s not done too often. Silk has become a pretty decent market because of the changes, but those changes have presented other challenges.

Arguing semantics doesn’t produce solutions. It’s a waste of time.

When silk was virtually worthless the change in bolt of silk creation (it used to take 2 scraps to make a bolt) served to deplete the material from the game however, they also changed how silk was obtained when they changed loot from down leveled to level not map appropriate. These changes need to be addressed as silk, cotton, and linen should never cost more than gossamer.

Anet are quick to increase values but impossibly slow to react when a change unbalances in their favor.

phys.7689:

Ayrilana.1396:

phys.7689:

Ayrilana.1396:

Shiyo.3578:

Page 15, and a reminder that damask is 100 bolts of silk instead of 50 like every other ascended mat, and also over 4x the price of every other ascended mat. Anet designed this item to be more expensive so that silk would be useful, and forgot to revert it back to 50 bolts of silk per damask after silk became insanely expensive.

So anet, why won’t you revert this change, or change some of the ascended backpiece recipes from >>15<< damask to 15 elonian leather?

John is probably never going to even acknowledge this fact because he knows he’s wrong and he straight up refuses to admit to his mistakes or fix them. Sucks for us players, I guess.

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did, you changed silk bolts from 2 scraps to 3, then made it take 100 bolts of silk per damask instead of 50 like every other ascended material. Which actually made sense at the time, except that leather was equally as worthless and you didn’t do the same thing to leather.

It isn’t what they literally did. I’d look into what micro-manage is and what he was referring to.

he did micro manage, but i think the point he was making is he doesnt want to micro manage everything.

Micro managing is actually supposed to happen, its just not feasible for one guy or force to do it. Unfortunately we do not have a real economy or business structure, we cant do things like innovate, or replace goods, we cant alter amounts, and we dont have much direct control on many things. Therefore, at times, it will fall to Anet to micro manage, i dont really think its avoidable.

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

whatever definition you want to use is fine, Ill go with what you say. But this means that people want the type of changes he has made in the past, not what you would define as micromanaging.

Basically they want the overall system fixed so that the demand/supply relationship for silk in ascended isnt one that creates an unbalanced value for different armor types by its very design.

Refer back to John’s post and who he was responding to including their post. I believe you missed that which is what’s causing the confusion.

EDIT: This is the post that John was likely responding to.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-is-silk-going-up-in-price/page/10#post4848745

First of all, players who only play light classes and only have their tailor levelled to 500, wont be able to take advantage off the cheaper armorsmith/leatherworker insignias, only through the tp and they will come at a premium.

True, but 1. most players do have two or more crafts leveled, 2. Even if they have to pay more than cost to buy sigs off the market, it would still reduce the price of buying them relative to the current prices. Depending on how silk prices balance out, buying a leather sig off the market might even be cheaper than making your own silk one. 3. your concerns assume that you will only be able to use one recipe per craft, ie, tailors would only be able to make them from cloth. Why? If the point is to correct imbalance, and the assumption is that the imbalance in prices would remain, then why would they not allow all three crafts to make the insignia with whichever of the three recipes they prefer?

The supply of 2700 elonian leather squares on the tp will be bought out instantly to craft 900 insignias as fast as possible and take advantage of the existing high buy orders for them on the tp. So large scale adjustments in drops for lower tier leather have to be made, otherwise the added supply of leather for crafting insignias will be insignificant.

Fair points, and they need to take that into consideration. They need to make sure that long term supply is set up in a way that will naturally account for demand (increasing the flow if necessary), and they need to communicate these changes very clearly, so that players will understand the nature of this bubble better, and hopefully it won’t bubble as much.

As an aside, I really think that ANet needs to do a better job of reducing market spiking when they make changes to the game. You know that if they announce these changes, certain markets would spike, and they do to, so why not make it impossible for them to spike like that? Lock down Buy orders on related markets for 24 hours after the announcement, so that people can pull their orders at what would likely be a “too high” price, for example. Or lock Sell orders if they know a price will rise significantly, and let people pull them out without transaction fees. Basically, if ANet is making a change that they know will cause massive market swings, why not give players fair warning that this is happening and time to do something about it before the market is actually allowed to shift? This is why with the stock markets companies tend to make potentially negative announcements after the markets close.

If ascended weapons get more expensive, it will create an even bigger class specific unbalance between 1-set users and weapon heavy 2 set classes:

This is certainly a problem, but a completely separate one that ANet should resolve separately. In principle though, I agree, the recipes for weapons need to be adjusted so that all one-handed weapons cost roughly half the resources of two-handers. Maybe even using some sort of “lesser inscriptions” that use half the resources as standard ones (and unlocking one unlocks both, of course).

And with precursors, i already mentioned the relation between the mithril price and precursor prices. To show it in numbers:
If you need an average of 2000 rare weapons to forge a precursor, for every copper that mithril rises in price, it costs 4.8g more to craft a precursor gs. If mithril should rise from 50 copper now to 1s, thats 240g extra and 720g, if mithril should rise to the 2s range that silk currently is in.

That’s in the current market. In a few months, players will be able to craft their own Precursors, so maybe MFing won’t be necessary. And maybe with the current methods and rates, it would become prohibitively expensive to MF Pres, but they could fix that. If it takes an average of 2000 weapons today, and that makes them cost more, then maybe they could increase the drop rates of pres to only require an average or 1000, or 1500, or whatever the balance point would be, so that the cost of the mats needed would remain consistent with the new pricing level.

You make the argument that making these changes would destroy the way current precursor crafting would work, and maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make other changes to that market that would allow it to continue functioning just fine.

If anything its entirely deliberate that lower level character have an easier time generating some highly prized materials – allowing them to get a toe-hold in the economy selling off their drops as they are leveling up.

New players would still be able to sell off their mats and make a decent amount (if less than the current model), but would also be able to afford to keep their crafts up with their leveling, rather than hitting spikes where leveling a craft from 100-200 costs more than from 300-400. I don’t think that having mid-tier mats costing more than high-tier ones benefit anyone in the long run.

So everytime they would make a change they would need to “make a counterbalancing change” to every other mat to keep it balanced? That is micromanaging. What you are saying contradicts itself, just like “straight curve”.

No, they only need to make a change to the impacted material itself. If they make a change that increases the supply of “mat x” into the world, then they either need to cut off an equivalent existing supply so that overall supply remains stable, or they need to add a new use that will burn off that supply, a new recipe or NPC “customer.” If they make a change that will reduce the supply into the world, they would need to either add new supply elsewhere, or reduce the need for that mat by altering recipes.

The more temporary the initial change, the more temporary the corrective measure would need to be. And it’s not “micromanaging,” it’s just “managing.”

Structuring raw materials into a tiered pricing model would require that player interaction with supply be removed.

i.e. all gathering nodes for ore and logs would have to be removed so that individual players are unable to sate their own demand and are required to obtain their ore and logs from other players who all share in the same drop rate (just like cloth and leather).

No.

Ohoni.6057:

your concerns assume that you will only be able to use one recipe per craft, ie, tailors would only be able to make them from cloth. Why?

The supply of 2700 elonian leather squares on the tp will be bought out instantly to craft 900 insignias as fast as possible and take advantage of the existing high buy orders for them on the tp. So large scale adjustments in drops for lower tier leather have to be made, otherwise the added supply of leather for crafting insignias will be insignificant.

Fair points, and they need to take that into consideration. They need to make sure that long term supply is set up in a way that will naturally account for demand (increasing the flow if necessary), and they need to communicate these changes very clearly, so that players will understand the nature of this bubble better, and hopefully it won’t bubble as much.

As an aside, I really think that ANet needs to do a better job of reducing market spiking when they make changes to the game. You know that if they announce these changes, certain markets would spike, and they do to, so why not make it impossible for them to spike like that? Lock down Buy orders on related markets for 24 hours after the announcement, so that people can pull their orders at what would likely be a “too high” price, for example. Or lock Sell orders if they know a price will rise significantly, and let people pull them out without transaction fees. Basically, if ANet is making a change that they know will cause massive market swings, why not give players fair warning that this is happening and time to do something about it before the market is actually allowed to shift? This is why with the stock markets companies tend to make potentially negative announcements after the markets close.

In a few months, players will be able to craft their own Precursors, so maybe MFing won’t be necessary. And maybe with the current methods and rates, it would become prohibitively expensive to MF Pres, but they could fix that. If it takes an average of 2000 weapons today, and that makes them cost more, then maybe they could increase the drop rates of pres to only require an average or 1000, or 1500, or whatever the balance point would be, so that the cost of the mats needed would remain consistent with the new pricing level.

You make the argument that making these changes would destroy the way current precursor crafting would work, and maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make other changes to that market that would allow it to continue functioning just fine.

I assumed that every profession can only use the insignias crafted by that profession because that was exactly mentioned by the user that my post was responding to.

I just said, which concerns I have to make clear that its not as easy as switch this recipe or that requirement and everything will balance out.

Your constant suggestion of blocking markets for a while when they get changed due to new updates is a very good example of micro managing.

Your argument that precursor markets might change with HoT is irrelevant until HoT goes live.

I don’t think trying to directly manage the aggregate price of silk is appropriate. If there is a cost difference, in Tyrian gold, between crafting a set of heavy, medium and light Ascended armor; that difference only warrants attention if there is also a corresponding difference in the cost, measured in time, of gathering the materials directly.

There is a difference in cost, measured in time, of gathering the materials directly.

All three armor types require the same amount of materials except for ore, leather and clothe. The material needed is not relevant; only the number of units required, the reliability of an acquisition attempt to discover a specific material, and the frequency with which a player encounters an opportunity to attempt acquisition.

(For instance, a mithril ore node and the home instance watchwork node have 100% reliability but vastly different frequencies. Mithril ore nodes are plentiful while the single watchwork node must refresh every 24 hours. Materials only available by salvaging drops have a low reliability but very high attempt frequency. Imo, that frequency is still lower than nodes )

A full set of Heavy Ascended armor requires 86% of the t2-t5 material units required for a full Light armor set. 37% of the units needed for a full heavy set can be acquired from a 100% reliable, high frequency source.

A full set of Medium Ascended armor requires 89% of the t2-t5 material units required for a full Light armor set. Both medium and light armor materials share the same reliability and frequency.

Even if all materials where gathered from a node that never ran out and never had to refresh; a player collecting to craft a full Light set would have to gather materials for a longer amount of time.

phys.7689:

good stuff

Thanksies

Wanze.8410:

First of all, players who only play light classes and only have their tailor levelled to 500, wont be able to take advantage off the cheaper armorsmith/leatherworker insignias, only through the tp and they will come at a premium.

I disagree. If it’s cheaper to level a new crafting skill to the point where you can create ascended insignias (will take around 50g to 400 at the moment and another 50g to 500) then it’s worth doing. At the moment, that will be worth it with a margin of around 100g (cloth armor is about 200 gold more expensive) if you only craft a single set of armor. That’s 500g (100 + 200 + 200) if you craft 3 sets of them (one for each light class). As prices change, this will of course change.

Timegating, depending on class and which mat is currently the cheapest, will still vary between 18-36 days for a set. Right now it only varies between 24-36 days.

If you’re making the materials yourself in the current system, then a cloth set will always be 36 days and a steel or leather set will always be 24 or 25 days. (Stating that it takes 24-36 days, while true, is very missleading since it’s a set number for each weight class).
Good point. That brings up another part of the unfairness of ascended armor.
Making it minimum 18 days for leather and cloth and actually minimum 16 days for steel and therefore somewhat equal for everyone would be much better in my opinion.
However it’s the material that is timegated, not the armor. You can have friends help you or buy materials from TP.

I think it will only create a short supply bubble for cheaper insignias, until leather has risen in price. People might think there is an infinite amount of leather supply, and for t5 that might be true, but it looks quite different for t2 and t4 leather, which only have enough sections on the tp for about 1000 insignia. snip

Yes, leather is about as infinite as cloth. I don’t see how this is an argument? I’m not proposing that you change the recipe to leather. I’m proposing that you change it so that the market decides. Leather will raise in price, that’s one of the points with the system. As will cloth lower in price. And a solution to the limited supply of leather and cloth is proposed earlier here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-is-silk-going-up-in-price/4850840 ; namely gathering nodes.

-Weapons-

Yes, I do agree that the impact on weapons may be a real thing. However I don’t agree that because you have 1 slot for a weapon, that means that 1 weapon is what you use. A staff elementalist may want a scepter, focus and some daggers sometimes as well depending on the situation. While being the answer to much, staff isn’t the answer to everything. And I would question underwater weapons in their entirety when it comes to ascended. But they are there, so sure.
A solution to the wood / metal imbalance could be a similar one to the one of cloth where you can choose more or less wood or metal for the inscriptions depending on which crafting discipline you use. For example:
Artificer: 6 Wood
Huntsman: 3 Wood, 3 Metal
Weaponsmith: 6 Metal
A solution to the class imbalance would be to allow weapon swap -out of combat- for all classes or introduce build templates and that way, people can slot more weapons regardless of class.

As I already mentioned, personally I wouldnt mind your proposed change but im not convinced that it will improve the situation for the mayority of the player base in the long run and therefore warrant the change. It will surely provide short term relief because there will be instant new and cheap supply available, especially from leather, but once the markets settled down, I dont see it being a viable solution.

It’s nice that you’re not minding it, but I’m not proposing it to make things cheap though. I’m proposing it to make things balanced.
It will make it worse for leathercrafters since their leather will grow more expensive.
It will make it better for tailors since their cloth will grow cheaper.
Metal may become more expensive as well, but that will also mean that more people will go out and mine metal and supply it, which will make all of the materials cheaper in the long run. The same will happen with leather and cloth if gathering nodes are implemented.

Wanze.8410:

I assumed that every profession can only use the insignias crafted by that profession because that was exactly mentioned by the user that my post was responding to.

If that was me, which I assume, then the insignias are still the same object.
Usable by any crafting discipline to create any ascended armor.
They’re just, like Gift of Blades, crafted with the material that is primary to the crafting discipline that crafts it.

I’m a little late to the party. Did anyone previously suggest that Ascended Armor only offers like a 1% increase? Ascended weapons by far are worth more of your time than the armor. Just think of Ascended Armor as your “progression”

Mikuchan.7261:

It’s nice that you’re not minding it, but I’m not proposing it to make things cheap though. I’m proposing it to make things balanced.
It will make it worse for leathercrafters since their leather will grow more expensive.
It will make it better for tailors since their cloth will grow cheaper.
Metal may become more expensive as well, but that will also mean that more people will go out and mine metal and supply it, which will make all of the materials cheaper in the long run. The same will happen with leather and cloth if gathering nodes are implemented.

If you just want to balance things out, remove the different kinds of common mats and merge leather/cloth/metal/wood into 1 material that is available in 7 tiers.
So it doesnt matter anymore, if you chop some elder wood, salvage some leather armor and a greatsword, you will always get the same material and it can be used for every armorcraft and weaponcraft.

Easy fix which would balance everything out but you would lose alot of variety and immersion.

Mikuchan.7261:

Wanze.8410:

I assumed that every profession can only use the insignias crafted by that profession because that was exactly mentioned by the user that my post was responding to.

If that was me, which I assume, then the insignias are still the same object.
Usable by any crafting discipline to create any ascended armor.
They’re just, like Gift of Blades, crafted with the material that is primary to the crafting discipline that crafts it.

Aidan savage proposed to craft related insignias.

Wanze.8410:

Aidan Savage.2078:

I think a better alternative would be creating weight-locked insignia, instead of the “generic” insignia we have now. This would mean leather can only craft (and use) leather insignia, with the same being true of heavy and light armor. It’d drastically cut back the amount of fabric needed for heavy and medium classes while increasing the leather and metal needed for them.

As for the deldrimor ingots, I’m not convinced that’s going to be a problem. The highest price they’ve been at was ~7g around a year ago. Since then, the average trend resulted in the price we have now, ~4g. In fact, since last october, deldrimor has been rising in price from the ~3g low it reached. If supply for mithril really is that high, why did deldrimor go up a gold in price? Mithril alone rising in price wont have much impact since salvaging weapons almost always results in it or wood.

This means if you increase the needs for metal and leather will, obviously, go up in price, which is the desired outcome. The difficulty lies in preventing it from becoming an unreasonable outcome. Ideally, if leather rose to the same price as silk, and mithril rose to say… 65% of silk’s price, I’d think this would be a healthy change for the economy, and players in general. Particularly since mithril becomes valuable enough to actually mine whenever you come across it. Which is one thing I’ve never done. I dont mine mithril when I can fill both unrefined and refined mithril collections from salvage alone.

Weight-locked insignias would greatly increase the long term timegate for medium and especially heavy users to at least 36 days (unless you buy additional mats). Even though a heavy set would only need 34 deldrimor, both heavy classes need alot of deldrimor as well for their weapons, usually at least 20 additional ingots for their build.
Even if deldrimor would be valued at about 65% of silk/leather, like you predict, i dont see how that improves the status quo. It only shifts the current problem from light to heavy.

And the price rise of deldrimor since oct last year actually is precursor related.
If you check the mithril price, it had two value bumps, one at the end of october and 1 during dec/jan. The first one was triggered by Halloween, the lab dropped alot of fine t5 mats, which suddenly went from 3.5s to 2.3s. That meant a rare gs was suddenly craftable for 18s less and a gs-pre 360g cheaper to forge on average. That sucked alot of mithril out of the market very fast.
The same happened during wintersday, with the addition of snowflakes, t5 fine mats lost another 33% value, lots of pres got forged and mithril supply couldnt keep up, until precursor prices fell so much, that profit margins went smaller and the influx of snowflakes stopped.

The price spike a year ago to 7g for deldrimor was caused by the watchwork knight backpacks that consumed alot of iron, so i think a good idea to increase the value of deldrimor without impacting the market of precursors too much, would be to increase the requirements for iron/platinum in the recipe, which would allow for the same mithril consumption.

While it would increase times for heavy and medium armor, it would also prevent a potentially catastrophic fall in price of silk as first leather is used to craft the insignia, then transferred to mithril, before finally settling on whatever is the cheapest material. By locking it to same-weight only, while silk will remain where it is, leather and mithril will slowly increase in price to a more reasonable level. While I agree that increasing mithril’s cost can impact weapons, due to their efficacy, weapons are usually the first thing upgraded to ascended tier (~5% increase in damage output from exotic→ascended weapon). This would mean that it’d end up being the armor put off longer, unless one’s going for fractals, in which case armor isnt needed til 30+ fractals to have agony resistance.

I’d be interested in what JS would think the potential effect of a weight-locked insignia would be as well, as he might have a more insightful position on what such a change could have.

Tree.3916:

I’m a little late to the party. Did anyone previously suggest that Ascended Armor only offers like a 1% increase? Ascended weapons by far are worth more of your time than the armor. Just think of Ascended Armor as your “progression”

If it was suggested before, it was off topic then and it is off topic now.

Ayrilana.1396:

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

The same way that decreasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt would be micro-managing. That is effectively what he was referring to when he said “micro-managing.” Now that the silk surplus seems to have resolved itself it might be time to revert the earlier change. If it wasn’t micro-managing then it wouldn’t be micro-managing now. You can’t have it both ways.

Wanze.8410:

Mikuchan.7261:

It’s nice that you’re not minding it, but I’m not proposing it to make things cheap though. I’m proposing it to make things balanced.
It will make it worse for leathercrafters since their leather will grow more expensive.
It will make it better for tailors since their cloth will grow cheaper.
Metal may become more expensive as well, but that will also mean that more people will go out and mine metal and supply it, which will make all of the materials cheaper in the long run. The same will happen with leather and cloth if gathering nodes are implemented.

If you just want to balance things out, remove the different kinds of common mats and merge leather/cloth/metal/wood into 1 material that is available in 7 tiers.
So it doesnt matter anymore, if you chop some elder wood, salvage some leather armor and a greatsword, you will always get the same material and it can be used for every armorcraft and weaponcraft.

Easy fix which would balance everything out but you would lose alot of variety and immersion.

I think gathering nodes for leather and clothe would have the same effect, preserve variety and immersion, and still promote P2P trading. The only reason for a ‘time cost to gather materials’ differential is to promote P2P trading and the use of currency.

phys.7689:

yeah but his point was why does he need so much silk specifically, then he mentions he may just level a different class.
its not just the ascended grind but the silk grind that he was talking about.

No, actually it wasn’t his point, you just made that his point. He didn’t mention anything about the silk other armor classes needed relative to light armor. He was just unhappy he was unable to craft ascended armor after having amassed what he indicates to be a massive amount of material wealth.

Ohoni.6057:

No.

Yes. Yes it would. Your nonsense protestations to the contrary.

The only way that supply can be controlled is if PLAYERS are unable to impact the rate at which they generate it.

That is a fundamental fact which your nonsense cannot escape.

Bernie.8674:

Ayrilana.1396:

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

The same way that decreasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt would be micro-managing. That is effectively what he was referring to when he said “micro-managing.” Now that the silk surplus seems to have resolved itself it might be time to revert the earlier change. If it wasn’t micro-managing then it wouldn’t be micro-managing now. You can’t have it both ways.

Why do people assume that the changes to the refinement of silk bolts and their high requirement were only meant to get rid of surplus silk?

I think its way more reasonable to think they introduced those changes to have silk high in price as it is the only material used in all armor classes.

Crafting ascended weapons didnt really occupy the player base for a long time after it was released, so they made sure that armor will take significantly longer

Psientist.6437:

Wanze.8410:

Mikuchan.7261:

It’s nice that you’re not minding it, but I’m not proposing it to make things cheap though. I’m proposing it to make things balanced.
It will make it worse for leathercrafters since their leather will grow more expensive.
It will make it better for tailors since their cloth will grow cheaper.
Metal may become more expensive as well, but that will also mean that more people will go out and mine metal and supply it, which will make all of the materials cheaper in the long run. The same will happen with leather and cloth if gathering nodes are implemented.

If you just want to balance things out, remove the different kinds of common mats and merge leather/cloth/metal/wood into 1 material that is available in 7 tiers.
So it doesnt matter anymore, if you chop some elder wood, salvage some leather armor and a greatsword, you will always get the same material and it can be used for every armorcraft and weaponcraft.

Easy fix which would balance everything out but you would lose alot of variety and immersion.

I think gathering nodes for leather and clothe would have the same effect, preserve variety and immersion, and still promote P2P trading. The only reason for a ‘time cost to gather materials’ differential is to promote P2P trading and the use of currency.

But Anet doesnt want to bring the cloth price down as long as it ensures that ALL armor classes need a long time to craft.

Bernie.8674:

Ayrilana.1396:

How is increasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt one time over the 2.5 year span of the game micro-managing? How is creating a new recipe which requires 100 bolts micro-managing? I seriously suggest looking up exactly what it means because it did not happen in regards to silk.

The same way that decreasing the number of scraps needed for a bolt would be micro-managing. That is effectively what he was referring to when he said “micro-managing.” Now that the silk surplus seems to have resolved itself it might be time to revert the earlier change. If it wasn’t micro-managing then it wouldn’t be micro-managing now. You can’t have it both ways.

No. One off changes are not micro-managing. Check out the post that he was referring to.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-is-silk-going-up-in-price/page/10#post4848745

Wanze.8410:

Psientist.6437:

Wanze.8410:

Mikuchan.7261:

It’s nice that you’re not minding it, but I’m not proposing it to make things cheap though. I’m proposing it to make things balanced.
It will make it worse for leathercrafters since their leather will grow more expensive.
It will make it better for tailors since their cloth will grow cheaper.
Metal may become more expensive as well, but that will also mean that more people will go out and mine metal and supply it, which will make all of the materials cheaper in the long run. The same will happen with leather and cloth if gathering nodes are implemented.

If you just want to balance things out, remove the different kinds of common mats and merge leather/cloth/metal/wood into 1 material that is available in 7 tiers.
So it doesnt matter anymore, if you chop some elder wood, salvage some leather armor and a greatsword, you will always get the same material and it can be used for every armorcraft and weaponcraft.

Easy fix which would balance everything out but you would lose alot of variety and immersion.

I think gathering nodes for leather and clothe would have the same effect, preserve variety and immersion, and still promote P2P trading. The only reason for a ‘time cost to gather materials’ differential is to promote P2P trading and the use of currency.

But Anet doesnt want to bring the cloth price down as long as it ensures that ALL armor classes need a long time to craft.

Imo, the role of cloth in Ascended armor recipes has more to do with promoting economic activity than time gating crafting the armor itself. Even if the role of cloth were to slow down production, we are left with the disparity between armor weights.

Weight locked insignias would increase the cost disparity, measured in time, between armor weights. The majority of materials needed to craft heavy armor would come from 100% reliable, high frequency sources. Combine this with an increase in the number of days required to craft time gated materials and more players may fill their demand quantity by gathering and not by turning to the TP. An increase in the TP price of ores is not guaranteed.

Ayrilana.1396:

micro managing.

phys.7689:

one off corrections, not micro managing

Bernie.8674:

If you don’t micromanage markets …..

Shiyo.3578:

John Smith.4610:

You don’t micromanage markets to maintain equilibrium. Not only is it an incredible amount of work you can never be wrong in, it’s not physically possible inside a live game environment.

You assume that absolute parity is required inside of tiers, I don’t necessarily agree.

Except this is LITERALLY what you did,

Astraea.6075:

one-off corrections =/= micro-management

Everyone is throwing around accusation about micro managing the TP and market. I brought up the term earlier in THIS thread in reference to the t6>t5>t4>t3>t2>t1 price lock subject. Not everything suggested would be micro managing. the Silk change was a well thought out, intentional market shift by the devs to bring value to a core material in the game. Now that the material has value they can do adjustments to the market without destroying it through rewards. Also the “use elonian leather/deld steel for insignias/inscriptions” suggestion wouldn’t be micromanaging.