Guild Wars 2

I enjoy the world map end-game content, but one thing I really hate is the amount of item management and different currency they add to maps.

For example, in the Silverwastes you have to do stuff to get enough currency to buy keys to open chests. Then, inside the chests you find items that can be opened to finally give you a piece of equipment or material. Then you will sell that equipment/material for gold. So.. why not just give you gold as reward in the first place?

Another example is the use of extractors during boss fights. So, you have to buy an item to allow you get another item in a specific situation. Then the acquired item can be opened for random equipment that will, again, become gold in the end. I really don’t understand why all that complexity that requires boring inventory management, when in the end everything resumes to gold..

But the worse part is the amount of trash items that are rewarded. Every 15 minutes in a good event I fill my inventory with lots of outdated green and even blue items, which are in fact just tiny amounts of gold occupaying inventory space. I wish I could instead play for 1 hour with no reward at all and in the end get a guaranteed exotic equipment, that would be more exciting than finding 200+ pieces of blue/green equipment.

So, that’s it. Of course the devs understand about what actually sells a game more than me, and this item complexity / inventory management / mass rewarding are probably enjoyed by most players. But I just wanted to express my opinion here, in the case the devs can hear it and eventually come with a different approach in the future for some zones.

They can’t just give you gold. Making gold out of thin air (instead of giving you items you can trade for gold with other players) would make inflation skyrocket. Then there are the mats that this game’s economy revolves around. Removing all the mats like that means the prices for them would skyrocket also. If you got exotics instead of greens and blues then those would become useless and sell for a few silver. They would become the game’s greens and blues.

A lot of MMOs do this. They want you to play that content that awards that currency in that map to get the special items from that map. If we only had gold, players wouldn’t do events in Silverwastes, Verdant Brink, Auric Basic, etc. They’d just get the gold in an easier way and go to those maps to buy the items from their special vendors. A lot of content wouldn’t be played and they wouldn’t bother creating new content because there wouldn’t be any reason to every play it.

I feel ya, bro.

I don’t know if you played GW1, but the excitement when one player got an obsidian shard or an ectoplasma glob as a drop was real. People congratulated each other . This happened about 2-3 times per person on normal mode and about 6-8 times per person on hard mode. In about one hour every member of the group had multiple drops that made them feel genuous joy.

What’s the problem with GW2’s loot system?

1. Boxes. You don’t know whether they are good or junk until you open them. At the time you get them, they’re just ‘meh’. Even if the box ends up giving you something awesome you won’t feel anything from it.
2. Junk. There’s just sooo much junk items that it’s easy to miss the awesome loot you might have gotten. Especially since autoloot is a thing. How often did you find an exotic item in your inventory wondering “when did I get this thing”?
3. Recognition. While GW1 hat only a few items that everyone knew were awesome loot and instantly recognized their value, in GW2 the typical “awesome loot” would be exotics. The problem is that you don’t really know their value until you check the TP, at which point all the potential excitement is already gone.
4. The type of awesome loot. In GW2 the typical loot that makes you feel a bit joy is exotic equipment or ascended boxes. Since there is no “sink” for these items, they would quickly loose their awesomeness if they dropped too frequently.
5. Quantity. It’s just so little that you tend to completely forget that it’s there.
6. Publicity. You never know when someone in your group drops something awesome. Conversely they never know when you drop something awesome. People might not realise it, but congratulating each other on good loot is actually what makes it feel awesome. The fact that no one is commenting when you get something nice just makes it feel average. People try to offset this by posting their loot in chat, but that’s just not the same.

In entertainment it doesn’t matter how good something actually is as long as it doesn’t feel good. My ingame wallet has been growing faster than ever before, but I still feel I’m not getting anything nice. This is a serious design flaw.

The game’s economy revolves around crafting. Most items can be salvaged to mats and sold. Any change would need to keep the economy in mind. Remove greens and blue and the price of crafting mats soar. Make exotics a common drop and they are no longer valuable but become the new greens and blues.

imo, one of the big reasons for large numbers of 1 or 2 silver drops is mob tagging. If only one person can get a drop off of a mob then the game can give better drops since drops overall are scarcer. If multiple people can all tag one mob and all get a reward then the drops are going to be low quality. The game would need to be redone to remove mob tagging to make common drops more valuable.

I have stacks and stacks of champion bags.

One day, I popped a birthday gift to increase luck and starting to opening them. After about 3 hours in Divinity’s Reach, opening bags, selling and trading items, and checking out one ascended weapon chest, I only opened about 500 bags around 2 stacks with many stacks of champ bags remaining.

So I gave up.

Lord of Rings.5371:

I have stacks and stacks of champion bags.

One day, I popped a birthday gift to increase luck and starting to opening them. After about 3 hours in Divinity’s Reach, opening bags, selling and trading items, and checking out one ascended weapon chest, I only opened about 500 bags around 2 stacks with many stacks of champ bags remaining.

So I gave up

Luck doesn’t affect champ bags. It only affects drops, bandit chests in the Silverwastes and containers in PvP (and maybe a couple other things). You might as well open champ bags each day as you get them, unless you like stacking them up and opening them in large numbers.

So here’s my suggestion to improve the current loot system:

1. Remove the majority of bags and make the contents drop directly. No more bagception.
2. Reduce the amount of blues, greens, yellows and even exotics drastically.
3. Increase the amount of crafting materials per salvage. Let’s say the amount of blues was decreased to 1/10 of it’s current value, then increase the amount of crafting materials gained from salvaging by 10 times.

This radical reduction of loot and especially bags is necessary to remove the “noise”. Now that you actually have a chance to pay attention to what you’re getting it’s time to introduce the treat. Introduce a new crafting material for this or repurpose an existing one.

• The crafting material must be identifyable at a glance. Therefore both icon and name must be easily distinguishable from all other items in game.
• The crafting material’s value must be as stable as possible. It should be somewhere around 2-5g per piece and scale with the current inflation.
• To make the material stay valuable there must be a constant sink that especially competitive and hardcore players use. For example buff food, but also ludicriously expensive skins (with this material being the main resource). Mobile crafting stations and other convenience items are also an option.
• The material must NOT be earnable by any other means than looting or buying on the TP.

And finally, because the true satisfaction about good loot is congratulating others and being congratulated:

• Announce loot with a TP value of more than 2g group wide.
• Announce loot with a TP value of more than 20g squad wide.
• Announce precursor drops and ascended boxes map wide.

I’d rather have stackable Bags, than the content in my Inventory. Otherwise, it fills up much too quickly.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Luck doesn’t affect champ bags. It only affects drops, bandit chests in the Silverwastes and containers in PvP (and maybe a couple other things). You might as well open champ bags each day as you get them, unless you like stacking them up and opening them in large numbers.

Thanks for the advice.

Just checked, I still have 15 stacks+72 bags to open.
It is 3822 bags and could be around 23 hours to go.

One point about stackable bags is you can give them to an appropriate level alt to open for mid level mats. A lot of people do this and removing bags would have an impact on their income (and possibly prices and supply of mid level mats, depending on how common this is).

Lord of Rings.5371:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Luck doesn’t affect champ bags. It only affects drops, bandit chests in the Silverwastes and containers in PvP (and maybe a couple other things). You might as well open champ bags each day as you get them, unless you like stacking them up and opening them in large numbers.

Thanks for the advice.

Just checked, I still have 15 stacks+72 bags to open.
It is 3822 bags and could be around 23 hours to go.

Have fun. ^^

That’s one reason to open each day instead of letting them stack up.

After creating this thread I was able to find an exotic axe after playing a few hours. I have no idea from where I got it, and I just know that after clicking several bags/seeds in my inventory I ended up with that exotic.

I believe this is a good example of the lack of excitement in the loot system, which is one of the points I tried to come with my original post. This together with the huge amount of unecessary “intermediate” items (keys, extractors, bags…) is IMO the bad part of the end-game.

I completely understand many other points, such as the necessity for gold sink, crafting, and so on. But I still believe there must be another way to do it. I think Anet should start to focus on some new great idea to turn the end-game loot system more exciting and less inventory-driven.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Lord of Rings.5371:

I have stacks and stacks of champion bags.

One day, I popped a birthday gift to increase luck and starting to opening them. After about 3 hours in Divinity’s Reach, opening bags, selling and trading items, and checking out one ascended weapon chest, I only opened about 500 bags around 2 stacks with many stacks of champ bags remaining.

So I gave up

Luck doesn’t affect champ bags. It only affects drops, bandit chests in the Silverwastes and containers in PvP (and maybe a couple other things). You might as well open champ bags each day as you get them, unless you like stacking them up and opening them in large numbers.

Also bags from HoT map bonuses which happens to have the same icons as champ bags but their description will tell you if they are affected by MF.

Complexity in currencies is a make-play solution to incentivize play (and make it seem diverse) and normalize economies. The problem with it is that it will rightly be experienced as work. Do we play games or do we work games?

The reason why the game rewards items that get salvaged instead of gold is that awarding gold (i.e., the game creates gold and gives it to you) would be a faucet. Faucets add to the total amount of liquid gold floating around the game. This causes inflation. “Making” players salvage items and sell them to other players to get gold is a sink. Sinks remove liquid gold from the game. In addition to the trivial charge for salvage kits (or Copper/Silver-Fed perma kits), there is the 15% “fee” charged by the TP. Sinks help keep inflation in check.

There is a reason to have currencies for each zone meta. If there were, say, one currency that could be used to unlock every reward, then players would play only the content where they could get the most currency for the least effort. Tying zone rewards to specific currency ensures that players must play that zone’s content to get those rewards. It also makes it more likely that when someone wants to play that content, there will be others there to do it with. Since zone events cannot be soloed, this is a good thing for any player who is late to the party, who took their time getting what they wanted or who just likes that meta.

My biggest beef about the various currencies is not that they exist. It’s that they take up space in my bags. If the game is going to award such a thing for every zone (or more than one — looking at shovels and bandit keys), it would be nice to have a key chain/currency purse.

Path of Exile has an infinitely better reward system.
In that game you honestly leave junk drops on the ground.

Gold doesn’t mean anything unless there is something to buy. That is why materials are rewarded, and that also makes the zone unique in some regards.

It’s also significantly harder to actualize your wealth as well. This is intentional. It also creates a market for the variance convenience tools like salvage kits and whatnot.

Redfeather.6401:

Path of Exile has an infinitely better reward system.
In that game you honestly leave junk drops on the ground.

I wiki’d it. Does it have a trading post? The description of the economic system sounds very different from this game, to the point where it doesn’t sound comparable.

“Path of Exile is unusual among action-RPG games in that there is no in-game currency. The game’s economy is based on bartering “currency items.”

If it’s barter only and no currency then things that are to much trouble to find a person who wants them will be left on the ground. There’s a difference between rewards are so great that junk is left on the ground and junk is left on the ground because it’s too much trouble to find a buyer.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Redfeather.6401:

Path of Exile has an infinitely better reward system.
In that game you honestly leave junk drops on the ground.

I wiki’d it. Does it have a trading post? The description of the economic system sounds very different from this game, to the point where it doesn’t sound comparable.

“Path of Exile is unusual among action-RPG games in that there is no in-game currency. The game’s economy is based on bartering “currency items.”

If it’s barter only and no currency then things that are to much trouble to find a person who wants them will be left on the ground.

The trading post is evolving. You use public stash tabs in your bank to store items you want to sell. That type of tab allows you to set asking price and buyout price, as well as put some kind of note to buyers. Searching the trading post requires going to it’s own website, and buying requires that the player whose selling be online. The game is free to play so it’s still evolving. The searching system will be implemented in-game over time.

It’s the fact that standard currency items, used by both NPC and players, are actually consumables that is great. As each item can be used to buy from NPCs or players, but each type of currency item can be consumed to perform a function. The functions range from necessary, to useful, to luxury. And each tier of consumable usefulness and drop rarity is what dictates their value.

Junk items can be very useful as a crafting base, so players can afford to be very choosy in what they pick up, as they don’t need dozens of crafting bases. A crafting base is a junk piece of gear with a very good base stat. Players then use consumable items to build off that good stat to slowly evolve the item with extra stats and mods that increase the usefulness and value of the item. But crafting is a whole nother pickle. XD

Just for fun here is someone crafting. Turning a junky item into something very good. They are using Master NPCs to help craft, which is an option even though players can do these things on their own to get better results at higher risk rates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjZrgqFVgdo

BunjiKugashira.9754:

So here’s my suggestion to improve the current loot system:

1. Remove the majority of bags and make the contents drop directly. No more bagception.
2. Reduce the amount of blues, greens, yellows and even exotics drastically.
3. Increase the amount of crafting materials per salvage. Let’s say the amount of blues was decreased to 1/10 of it’s current value, then increase the amount of crafting materials gained from salvaging by 10 times.

This radical reduction of loot and especially bags is necessary to remove the “noise”. Now that you actually have a chance to pay attention to what you’re getting it’s time to introduce the treat. Introduce a new crafting material for this or repurpose an existing one.

• The crafting material must be identifyable at a glance. Therefore both icon and name must be easily distinguishable from all other items in game.
• The crafting material’s value must be as stable as possible. It should be somewhere around 2-5g per piece and scale with the current inflation.
• To make the material stay valuable there must be a constant sink that especially competitive and hardcore players use. For example buff food, but also ludicriously expensive skins (with this material being the main resource). Mobile crafting stations and other convenience items are also an option.
• The material must NOT be earnable by any other means than looting or buying on the TP.

And finally, because the true satisfaction about good loot is congratulating others and being congratulated:

• Announce loot with a TP value of more than 2g group wide.
• Announce loot with a TP value of more than 20g squad wide.
• Announce precursor drops and ascended boxes map wide.

Many times the reason you get bags is BECAUSE there’s so much loot. HoT maps? You can get champ bags AND random loot from the chests. Champ trains? Imagine have to fall behind every 10 minutes because your inventory’s full instead of stacking up champ bags?

IndigoSundown.5419:

My biggest beef about the various currencies is not that they exist. It’s that they take up space in my bags. If the game is going to award such a thing for every zone (or more than one — looking at shovels and bandit keys), it would be nice to have a key chain/currency purse.

I agree with this.

Turning map specific items a currency that occupies no inventory space would already fix 70% of the problem. We would still have issues with the lack of excitement of finding new loot, but inventory management is indeed the worst part IMO.

To fix the excitement part, maybe they should do something like adding at least a guaranteed good quality reward after a long chain of events. I have to say I enjoyed when in Diablo 3 they added those guaranteed great drops after killing bosses, since at least this way I had a goal to pursue when logging on.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Redfeather.6401:

Path of Exile has an infinitely better reward system.
In that game you honestly leave junk drops on the ground.

I wiki’d it. Does it have a trading post? The description of the economic system sounds very different from this game, to the point where it doesn’t sound comparable.

“Path of Exile is unusual among action-RPG games in that there is no in-game currency. The game’s economy is based on bartering “currency items.”

If it’s barter only and no currency then things that are to much trouble to find a person who wants them will be left on the ground. There’s a difference between rewards are so great that junk is left on the ground and junk is left on the ground because it’s too much trouble to find a buyer.

I’ve played Path of Exile for a couple of years now, at a casual level. It’s an amazing game in some ways. In other ways, including loot, it’s… a bit less amazing.

The “currency items” in Path of Exile are various orbs that drop, with varying effects. One might change the prefix of an item, another a suffix, yet another will randomize the numeric value of a rare item. If you remember ecto and armbrace valuation of items in GW1, that’s a good model for how Path of Exile works. A unique item might have a value of 10 chaos orbs, or 1 regal orb, or whatever. I personally find it sloppy and very difficult to wrap my head around.

Path of Exile encourages item hoarding. If you think half a dozen bank tabs in GW2 is a lot, you should see the dozens upon dozens people have in PoE. It’s overwhelming! There’s literally hundreds of different items to collect, and they all have an actual purpose, not just some nebulous “Oh I might want this some day” purpose.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I hate trading in Path of Exile. It’s awful. Chat channels flooded with item spam that would make you beg for the relatively sedate days of GW1 trade chat. You have no idea how much you can get for your currency, nor do you know, unless you do some extensive research, or trust someone completely, what value any particular item has.

Imagine being in a foreign market, where you don’t recognize anything, the currencies are all unknown to you, and you’re trying to buy some things that you want. Everyone’s shouting, they want your big shiny coins for this item or that item, and you have no idea if the big shiny coins are the best ones, the worst ones, or what.

Enjoy the well-defined currencies you have here in GW2. Be thankful for them. The alternative could be much worse!

Agree completely with OP.

FAR too many currencies and paralleled items, especially since HoT.
Hell… even all the different champion chests.

Redfeather.6401:

Path of Exile has an infinitely better reward system.
In that game you honestly leave junk drops on the ground.

On the other hand all currencies take up space.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

If it’s barter only and no currency then things that are to much trouble to find a person who wants them will be left on the ground. There’s a difference between rewards are so great that junk is left on the ground and junk is left on the ground because it’s too much trouble to find a buyer.

Trouble finding buyers is at best half the reason an item is left on the ground.

The endgame in PoE is mapping. Maps are items that drop and you place it in a map device which opens 6 portals to a randomly generate instance. Each time you a person enters a portal it is consume therefore you can only enter any given endgame map 6 times. If you pick everything up you will run out of portals. Also some item bases are never going to be good. Six(maximum number) mods with perfect tier 1 rolls on a Simple Robe is still going to be a bad item(although you could probably find a buyer for that due to novelty factor).

We need a keyring/wallet extension for shovels and mordrem body parts and crowbars and chak eggs and writs of rata novus and such. Maybe even a wallet for quest items too.

Beyond that, it’s not too bad. Without a gear treadmill, you can’t get exciting gear drops, only map currencies and useful salvage fodder.

I want a foreign exchange vendor where I can transform one currency to another. Just to reduce the amount of leftover foreign bills I have from each new vacation (map)

Hexinx.1872:

I want a foreign exchange vendor where I can transform one currency to another. Just to reduce the amount of leftover foreign bills I have from each new vacation (map)

The ley energy/matter converter converts between airship parts, aurillium ore, and ley line crystals.

Thank you, +1 to you for helping me