Guild Wars 2

could we maybe add an “unsalvageable” tag akin to “unique” or “account/soulbound”? pretty please?

Hi John,
I was just wondering if there were any plans to add “giant eye” drops to any other areas of the game besides heavy moldy bags from Orr? I decided that I wanted an “Immobulus”, but they are currently non-existent at the trading post, and the cost for buying the mats to make one is through the roof! To grind for the mats would take an impossibly long time, considering the very low chance of getting the eyes from the bags. I was wondering if this material was simply overlooked. I would love to see more chances to for this to drop.
Thanks for your time!

John,

Just curious, what degrees do you currently hold?
(I am assuming you did go to school at some point to learn all this stuff)
Where did you go to school? And why that school and not another?

Thanks!

Does magic find (account, boosters, etc), other than the perseverance buff, affect loot from the lost bandit chests?

John,

I’m sure many a player invested some time and effort into building up an inventory of the holiday-specific crafting materials – specifically, many of the different kinds of snowflakes.

For the last couple of years, this had been a wise investment, as those materials would increase in scarcity in the months following the event.

However, due to the changes added this year…it seems that the market for these “holiday special” materials has flatlined and the glut of snowflakes shows no sign of abating (and actually, the TP inventory seems to be climbing).

Are there any plans to address this – perhaps by either increasing the amount of snowflakes needed by all the recipes, or adding some kind of sink to soak up the excess inventory?

It seemed such a shame to me to make these “holiday-special” materials so common now, and I hope Anet will re-think holiday event specific materials in the future and keep them specific to those holidays. For those folks who love to work with the economy, it’s nice to have these kinds of limited/rare things we can work towards at certain times of the year.

Please let us know your thoughts.

Thanks!

John Smith.4610:

Wanze.8410:

My question is:
In order to have a balanced economy, are you monitoring that ratio for all/specific items and can it hurt the economy in any way, if this ratio spikes/drops?

The short answer is yes we monitor supply.
You are correct in assuming that the TP doesn’t contain all items in the game as players tend to hang on to a large quantity of items for their personal use. It’s possible for an item to be technically oversupplied inside the game (that is that we give out more of that item than people need), but still maintain value on the TP due to willingness to sell. So the supply curve on the TP isn’t the literal supply of all items in the game, it’s really the willingness to sell curve that I’ve mentioned in other posts. Often TP prices are still a good indicator of the total supply of an item, it just isn’t conclusive.

Could it hurt the economy if something were to change and all of some item were dumped into the TP at once? Yes and no. Yes, supply shocks are bad, they’re bad for faith in stability and they’re bad balance in the game and the economy and it can be damaging. No, in the sense that our economy is massive and has a tendency to adapt very quickly to changes. This helps insulate us from any major shocks likely to happen, it’s one of the many many benefits of having a pseudo-global economy.

Why the system of double taxing on both ends of a sale?

One tax would be enough – why the extra bandwidth for a separate (albeit smaller) charge on both ends?

Why not just one “taxed” side, the one who is buying gets a break – my gosh, just listing anything “great” wouldn’t be possible for most the way the game is structured economically.

Nope, I don’t have any “extra” cash per month… I am one of those who are walking wounded (barely walking) after 40 years of working – the last 27 in IT.

I do not even have five extra dollars per month – and try being gluten intolerant in the real world…

Please change the taxation system. It is way overdone and the “game” doesn’t need the money, the players do.

atheria.2837:

Why the system of double taxing on both ends of a sale?

One tax would be enough – why the extra bandwidth for a separate (albeit smaller) charge on both ends?

Why not just one “taxed” side, the one who is buying gets a break – my gosh, just listing anything “great” wouldn’t be possible for most the way the game is structured economically.

Nope, I don’t have any “extra” cash per month… I am one of those who are walking wounded (barely walking) after 40 years of working – the last 27 in IT.

I do not even have five extra dollars per month – and try being gluten intolerant in the real world…

Please change the taxation system. It is way overdone and the “game” doesn’t need the money, the players do.

Because the tax would have to be on the listing side, which would kill the ability of players to relist, and would further exacerbate the issue of poor players getting a valuable drop and being unable to afford the listing fee.

mtpelion.4562:

atheria.2837:

Why the system of double taxing on both ends of a sale?

One tax would be enough – why the extra bandwidth for a separate (albeit smaller) charge on both ends?

Why not just one “taxed” side, the one who is buying gets a break – my gosh, just listing anything “great” wouldn’t be possible for most the way the game is structured economically.

Nope, I don’t have any “extra” cash per month… I am one of those who are walking wounded (barely walking) after 40 years of working – the last 27 in IT.

I do not even have five extra dollars per month – and try being gluten intolerant in the real world…

Please change the taxation system. It is way overdone and the “game” doesn’t need the money, the players do.

Because the tax would have to be on the listing side, which would kill the ability of players to relist, and would further exacerbate the issue of poor players getting a valuable drop and being unable to afford the listing fee.

There is only 1 tax anyways, the sales tax, which is due after a transfer of goods and gold is made. The listing fee is a payment for a service, to list it on the tp.

Daehiril.2785:

Hi John,
I was just wondering if there were any plans to add “giant eye” drops to any other areas of the game besides heavy moldy bags from Orr? I decided that I wanted an “Immobulus”, but they are currently non-existent at the trading post, and the cost for buying the mats to make one is through the roof! To grind for the mats would take an impossibly long time, considering the very low chance of getting the eyes from the bags. I was wondering if this material was simply overlooked. I would love to see more chances to for this to drop.
Thanks for your time!

John is not allowed to comment on future plans.

Wanze.8410:

Daehiril.2785:

Hi John,
I was just wondering if there were any plans to add “giant eye” drops to any other areas of the game besides heavy moldy bags from Orr? I decided that I wanted an “Immobulus”, but they are currently non-existent at the trading post, and the cost for buying the mats to make one is through the roof! To grind for the mats would take an impossibly long time, considering the very low chance of getting the eyes from the bags. I was wondering if this material was simply overlooked. I would love to see more chances to for this to drop.
Thanks for your time!

John is not allowed to comment on future plans.

He would be about this as it has already been mentioned on guildwars2.com.

For most maps, the bonus reward will be crafting materials. For instance, playing in Cursed Shore could reward you with ancient bones, charged cores, charged lodestones, or giant eyes during one rotation, and powerful venom sacs, glacial cores, glacial lodestones, or globs of ectoplasm during another rotation.

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

John is not allowed to comment on future plans.

He would be about this as it has already been mentioned on guildwars2.com.

For most maps, the bonus reward will be crafting materials. For instance, playing in Cursed Shore could reward you with ancient bones, charged cores, charged lodestones, or giant eyes during one rotation, and powerful venom sacs, glacial cores, glacial lodestones, or globs of ectoplasm during another rotation.

Oh, thank you! I didn’t notice that they listed giant eyes on there. I have hope for an Immobulus again!

Mr. Smith
Would you be able to clarify some of the items on the TP?
For example, there is a rare rifle, “Rifle” that has 0 supply, and a15g sell order and a 1g buy offer.
I also remember seeing a green ring, “Ring” going for 43g.

Are these items left over from betas?
They don’t seem to be in-game and it seems a bit odd to have a sell offer for 15g…
(Of course I understand that the prices are set by the players)
Just curious…
Thanks!

I have a book that I read a few years ago:
Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games
Book by Edward Castronova
I may read it again soon. Some of you might be interested as well.
- ww

What is the reasoning of allowing infinite storage via the pickup tab?

Essence Snow.3194:

What is the reasoning of allowing infinite storage via the pickup tab?

How would you limit it?

Heck idk..maybe something along the lines of not being able to place orders if one has more than 1 page of items in their pick up tab.

Essence Snow.3194:

Heck idk..maybe something along the lines of not being able to place orders if one has more than 1 page of items in their pick up tab.

Now i am a bad example because i trade alot, so would run into this fairly often and dont know how often regular players would find themselves in the situation that there are more than 100 items to pick up, when they want to place a new bid or buy something.

I think a great advantage of the tp in gw2 is that you can sell and buy from anywhere in the world and just have to visit an npc to pick up gold and items.
At best, this would be only a minor inconvenience for most of the playerbase.
But what is this supposed improve?

Why do you have a problem with people using it as storage? I dont see how this affects the game in any negative way.

Idk what’s the problem with giving players free infinite storage in their inventory and/or banks?

I guess what I am getting at is that it seems for all intensive purposes to be a work around for players to avoiding storage limits, which is something Anet uses as incentive to purchase account upgrades.

Essence Snow.3194:

Idk what’s the problem with giving players free infinite storage in their inventory and/or banks?

I guess what I am getting at is that it seems for all intensive purposes to be a work around for players to avoiding storage limits, which is something Anet uses as incentive to purchase account upgrades.

You can only store things that you’ve bought or paid a listing fee and cancelled, so it isn’t really “free” as the only way to get things there is to pay for it.

John,

So a group of us are putting together a GW table top RPG. (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/creations/Guild-Wars-Tabletop-RPG/first#content) And we reached a point where we need to start talking about loot, rewards, and crafting. I don’t know if you’ll be able to offer any advice, but I did have a couple of questions.

- If we use the current GW monetary system (i.e. Copper, Silver, Gold), what would be a good way to determine vendor prices? Should they be based on say an average of how much coin is dropped?

-How much gold is too much? When determining coins dropped from enemies, what would be a good way to determine how much is enough, and how much is too little?

-When designing the crafting recipes, what would be a good way to determine how much material should be used?

For our system, we of course are not going to have a TP, but will have vendors from which you will be able to buy most of everything you want. We were thinking of limiting coin and gear drops to at least humanoid (or intelligent) enemies (i.e. No coins from random river skale) and chests. We also want players to be able to buy some really cool and powerful items, but don’t want to price them to where it will literally take years to get enough money or be able to buy them in the first couple of sessions of a campaign.

Any insight you could give us would be greatly appreaciated. Thanks!

John, when can we expect a new blog post from you?

And will HoT introduce the biggest changes to the economy yet?

thank you for finally solving the problem of your antibot systems thinking im botting when i turn the contents of my materials tabs into about 100 tp listings!

really appreciate the qol improvement!!!

next up: differentiate between me and a bot when i want to list 200k snowflakes? :P

pdavis.8031:

^^

I didnt factor in each different stat per armor. So 23 different stat types over 6 different skins adds in an additional 828 different pieces, just for light dropped armor. And of course you have about the same for crafted armor, and all the named light armor. So that makes up for the rest, so 3000 isnt that All that far fetched.

You forgot item level and upgrade (rune, in this case). These also matter.

That said, there’s only about 5500 armor pieces of the right level to give silk, and that includes non-salvagables. His estimate of ~1000 or so silk-bearing armor pieces should be pretty good.

Sariel V.7024:

pdavis.8031:

^^

I didnt factor in each different stat per armor. So 23 different stat types over 6 different skins adds in an additional 828 different pieces, just for light dropped armor. And of course you have about the same for crafted armor, and all the named light armor. So that makes up for the rest, so 3000 isnt that All that far fetched.

You forgot item level and upgrade (rune, in this case). These also matter.

That said, there’s only about 5500 armor pieces of the right level to give silk, and that includes non-salvagables. His estimate of ~1000 or so silk-bearing armor pieces should be pretty good.

Wow!
Talk about a blast from the past….
but yes there are plenty of ways to get silk. I dont see why it needs to be changed again.

Way point travel eats a lot of coin. That’s my only thing with economy.

I was directed here to potentially get a response to this question I have.

This is mostly a curiosity question and likely will need a Dev to answer.

After doing some digging on wiki and learning about Base64 code I created a spreadsheet to figure out what the maximum gold reference in the game was since it was the easiest way to quickly check if I understood Base64 and how the game read these codes.

From my work I found this result…

Max Gold Binary Value:
000000 011111 111111 111111 111111 111111 111100 111111

Max Gold Base 64 Value:
[&Af////8=]

Max Gold:
429,496g 72s 95c

An interesting thing was that using [&Af////8=], [&Af////9=], and [&Af/////=] all yielded 429,496g 72s 95c – which is why I concluded that this is the maximum value that can be achieved.

Am I correct? Additionally – What happens if someone reaches this capacity and goes beyond it?

I’m very curious to know :O

Original Thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Likely-Dev-Question-Maximum-Gold-Capacity/first#post5081977

So John is effectively not posting anymore. Wasn’t the forums restructuring meant to encourage more dev activity?

Wuselknusel.4082:

So John is effectively not posting anymore. Wasn’t the forums restructuring meant to encourage more dev activity?

I would guess he is pretty occupied with HoT but I agree with you. SInce the restructuring this thread got very silent, even though they stickied it, which it wasnt in the old BLTC Forum.

It’s been 3 weeks. Isn’t that about the same amount of time as Gaile’s been missing?

Edit: Nope, she’s only been gone two weeks.

Hi Economists! Would you say that the proliferation of account bound stuff is a sign that the free market cannot exist and that it must always be regulated to some degree?
In conversations with my friends, they tell me we live in a “perverted” or “warped” version of capitalism and that total deregulation would be better.

Svarty.8019:

Hi Economists! Would you say that the proliferation of account bound stuff is a sign that the free market cannot exist and that it must always be regulated to some degree?
In conversations with my friends, they tell me we live in a “perverted” or “warped” version of capitalism and that total deregulation would be better.

I just think its a conscious choice anet made in order to avoid everything being made available for gold/cash, so there are account bound rewards.

binding on use (gear) is probably in place to “simulate” deterioration.

Svarty.8019:

In conversations with my friends, they tell me we live in a “perverted” or “warped” version of capitalism and that total deregulation would be better.

as in irl?

total deregulation can lead to things like sweat shops, because suddenly you dont have minimum wage.

a lot of the perversions are for the better and weve discovered them through trial and error…

Svarty.8019:

Hi Economists! Would you say that the proliferation of account bound stuff is a sign that the free market cannot exist and that it must always be regulated to some degree?
In conversations with my friends, they tell me we live in a “perverted” or “warped” version of capitalism and that total deregulation would be better.

First, history proves them incorrect and also demonstrates that in the absence of regulation to protect everyone, there will remain regulation to protect those who own the most. How anyone can understand pure socialism can’t exist because people are corrupt but thinks pure capitalism can exist is beyond me.

Second, it’s impossible to have complete deregulation in a game because the game provides all items and, both directly and indirectly, provides all currency to players. They always decide what drops and what doesn’t, and have the ability to change that at any time.

And even given that, account-bound items have nothing to do with a regulated economy, it’s about game mechanics. For example, let’s take a look at the precursor masteries. Those don’t exist because it’s impossible to grind the amount of gold for a precursor, they exist because people want a way to earn their precursor and avoid RNG. They are account bound because they are intended as special rewards that players can work towards, and I believe it’s been said that while the precursors you get are not tradeable, the legendaries you receive will be.

Complete deregulation leads to the most efficient markets, however our relatively new “sensibilities” find some aspects of efficient markets “unethical” so we try to craft regulations to combat those aspects. This usually leads to severe unintended consequences and rarely adequately addresses the aspects sought.

I’m not going to argue economics on an MMO message board, even if it’s about game economics. But to believe that it is possible for mankind to exist in a world where people who own the most land and money don’t ensure they have the means to control who owns land and money is extraordinarily naive and not backed up by any period in history ever.

wwwes.1398:

I’m not going to argue economics on an MMO message board, even if it’s about game economics. But to believe that it is possible for mankind to exist in a world where people who own the most land and money don’t ensure they have the means to control who owns land and money is extraordinarily naive and not backed up by any period in history ever.

No one said anything about that at all. That’s the natural result of financial acumen and has been the primary purpose of government since the concept was invented.

I want this thread to rise from the ashes like my account after over a year of neglect!

Question:
Are all people with goods worth more than 25k gold(or insert other random number here) in their possession being monitored?

Disdroid.6109:

I want this thread to rise from the ashes like my account after over a year of neglect!

Question:
Are all people with goods worth more than 25k gold(or insert other random number here) in their possession being monitored?

Why would they?

Personally, i keep all my valuable stuff in my personal guild banks, which would make them ineligible for evaluation.

mtpelion.4562:

Complete deregulation leads to the most efficient markets, however our relatively new “sensibilities” find some aspects of efficient markets “unethical” so we try to craft regulations to combat those aspects. This usually leads to severe unintended consequences and rarely adequately addresses the aspects sought.

not true at all.
complete deregulation leads to extremely ineffecient markets. Capitalism only works if parties play by the rules.
some examples of extremely ineffecient things
monopolies
collusion

Unregulated capitalism, even with those things in mind tends to lead to huge heights and crushing falls, which overall isnt really the most effecient economy either.

phys.7689:

mtpelion.4562:

Complete deregulation leads to the most efficient markets, however our relatively new “sensibilities” find some aspects of efficient markets “unethical” so we try to craft regulations to combat those aspects. This usually leads to severe unintended consequences and rarely adequately addresses the aspects sought.

not true at all.
complete deregulation leads to extremely ineffecient markets. Capitalism only works if parties play by the rules.
some examples of extremely ineffecient things
monopolies
collusion

Unregulated capitalism, even with those things in mind tends to lead to huge heights and crushing falls, which overall isnt really the most effecient economy either.

You just provided examples proving me right but drew the wrong conclusion from them.

Question: What was the thought process on the ecto gambling?

to the best of my knowledge the ecto market is one of the most stable ones we have with steady supply and constant demand. While the last thing the game needed was more rng based win big or lose it all style systems?

John, with all the beef between Evon and the Consortium, did you ever entertain the thought of introducing an alternative way of trading apart from the BLTC, run by the Consortium and different laws and regulations of trade?

Conski Deshan.2057:

Question: What was the thought process on the ecto gambling?

to the best of my knowledge the ecto market is one of the most stable ones we have with steady supply and constant demand. While the last thing the game needed was more rng based win big or lose it all style systems?

At a guess it was a way to remove value from the market in a fairly controlled manner. If the system was sophisticated, the RNG could be … biased when set goals are achieved in order to maintain interest in the gambling mini-“game”.

Hi JS,

Q: Why are stuff account/soul bound?

Looks like they took the sticky away.

Well, this thread died anyways ever since they closed the old BLTC Forums.

Wanze.8410:

Looks like they took the sticky away.

Well, this thread died anyways ever since they closed the old BLTC Forums.

And a real shame.

While I didn’t take part much in those discussions, having a dedicated forum to the economy allowed for long, ongoing discussions over days and weeks. Something that is almost impossible in a fast thread generated general discussion forum.

Goodbye long discussions. We hardly knew you.

I have a question:

Will there be a ton of new currencies in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, to prevent long-serving and established players from instantly getting new in-game purchasable content? For example, a new Karma-type currency, so players currently with over 1million karma can’t just get everything instantly?

Wanze.8410:

Looks like they took the sticky away.

Well, this thread died anyways ever since they closed the old BLTC Forums.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Must save bookmark now since forum search is a mythical beast.

Behellagh.1468:

Wanze.8410:

Looks like they took the sticky away.

Well, this thread died anyways ever since they closed the old BLTC Forums.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Must save bookmark now since forum search is a mythical beast.

Or, we’ll just have to keep asking interesting, pointed questions to keep it on the top page and lure out JS to respond some more.

Oh .. i have a question :

How many money would it cost me, with the actual TP prices and a normal RNG rate
to craft and salvage all the ascended gear i need for a new legendary ?

Let me guess .. its in the 1000-1200 gold area to compensate the precurser hunt ?