Guild Wars 2

So let’s start with the major issue with Hardened Leather prices. It’s required in large quantities for all armor types? First off this makes little to no sense. It takes 10-12 gold in leather just to make the insignia. It acutally requires more leather for the insignia than the actual armor made of leather? So for any set of armor you’re talking 60 gold in leather, except for medium armor it’s even more. This by comparison to Gossimer and Orichalcum makes no sense. If the next expansion follows the same increase in materials, we could be realistically looking at three times the cost for armor. The leather farm in Lake Doric may have been an attempt at a work around, it’s now a farm a single zone to earn gold and the more people assisting the better. We need a real work around that doesn’t just require players to clump in a single location.

One 10 cured hardened leather is ridiculous for the insignia for armor. This should realistically cut to 1/2 or just cut it out of the recipe completely since cloth or metal armor needing leather at all makes no sense. This single change would bring the material to reasonable costs. People could get enough scraps in two or three hours of farming for an entire set of leather armor. This would realistically reward players for their time adding to the player base and stop the need for single zone farming.

Technically speaking, leather is useful in cloth and metal armour. Metal armour often has leather for various straps, connecting parts, and padding, while many forms of clothing were reinforced with leather in medieval times.

That said, reducing the leather requirements for armour crafting may well be warranted. I think the spike in leather prices had more to do with additional leather sinks that were introduced (I remember when leather was generally the cheapest of the three armourcrafting materials), but I think the effect on armour crafting was entirely unintended.

While I agree with you, Anet has stuck their head in the sand and refuse to even acknowledge that a lot of players are not happy about leather.

OriOri.8724:

While I agree with you, Anet has stuck their head in the sand and refuse to even acknowledge that a lot of players are not happy about leather.

I’m sure they’re “watching it closely,” or some other politi-speak for “want to make it work but don’t know how yet”. :\

Though, to be fair, a few months of data should help with decision making. I guess we’ll see how it changes. If it changes.

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

One 10 cured hardened leather is ridiculous for the insignia for armor. This should realistically cut to 1/2 or just cut it out of the recipe completely since cloth or metal armor needing leather at all makes no sense. This single change would bring the material to reasonable costs.

Like, essentially zero? Like Gossamer Scraps? And like Hardened Leather used to be?

Yea but they won’t even acknowledge that a lot of players are still not happy with the state of leather. Can we not even get an acknowledgement about this? Even if it was just them saying “We think leather is fine” at least that would mean it was acknowledged

OriOri.8724:

Yea but they won’t even acknowledge that a lot of players are still not happy with the state of leather. Can we not even get an acknowledgement about this? Even if it was just them saying “We think leather is fine” at least that would mean it was acknowledged

They stated their opinion/acknowledgment during a previous AMA.

Edit:

They created the leather farm so that players would have control over the prices.

This relies on players doing the actual farm in lieu of more profitable gold farms.

If enough players do this continuously, it’ll impact prices.

Since the engi farm became popular, supply has increased significantly along with the price falling to its lowest since the end of February. The trend appears to be likely to continue so prices could fall further.

OriOri.8724:

Yea but they won’t even acknowledge that a lot of players are still not happy with the state of leather. Can we not even get an acknowledgement about this? Even if it was just them saying “We think leather is fine” at least that would mean it was acknowledged

I think you’d have to agree that this wouldn’t satisfy anyone.

Remember, we got into this mess because we complained about leather being vendor trash. Some (but not all) of the people upset about leather today called upon ANet to do something about the high cost of cloth.

Fast forward to today, and T5 cloth is cheap, T6 is just above vendor, and it’s leather that’s too pricey.

As I keep saying, I’m not against ANet increasing sources or (better, in my opinion) reducing requirements so that demand drops. But let’s not pretend that it’s going to result in the perfect equilibrium that would please everyone.

Here’s the first problem with current model from a crafting point of view. 2 clumps of ore make one ingot. For a cured leather section it takes 3. Yet you get three ore every node of Orichalcum there are roughly four to five per zone not including rich nodes. Second you get a lot of it just salvaging most items. Gossimer scraps you get a lot from salvage. As for Hardened Leather sections they are rare even by salvage standards. So it may be they wanted to inflate the value. Main problem seems to be the demand on materials. By comparison you will need three or more times the leather for every piece of armor than Orichalcum or Gossimer. So in effect they’ve made it 3+ times more valuable than other materials of the same type.

Second this needs to be stressed for an MMO a single area that has to be farmed decreases the player base elsewhere. Which if anyone has been around some of the other places in LD they can be a ghost town. They would have been better off increasing the drop rate or offering an exchange for map currency to gain leather. Both would encourage play in more than on place on a map, this is a major necessity with a game like this one where groups are needed and encouraged for events.

@Ayrilana – They did state their opinion of it, in a round about way (I don’t remember if they said they weren’t happy with the price of it or if it was more “We wanted to give players the ability to influence the supply of leather on the market” or something else), but that has been several months ago now. And throughout those several months, people have shown that they are still upset over the price of leather

@Illconceived – I don’t pretend that we will reach a perfect equilibrium, but that doesn’t mean we should accept that leather is an order of magnitude more expensive than other T6 mats, for no reason other than the devs refuse to admit they just messed up when changing recipes with HoT.

I will continue to post this picture in every leather thread.

OriOri.8724:

@Ayrilana – They did state their opinion of it, in a round about way (I don’t remember if they said they weren’t happy with the price of it or if it was more “We wanted to give players the ability to influence the supply of leather on the market” or something else), but that has been several months ago now. And throughout those several months, people have shown that they are still upset over the price of leather

And their opinion has an expiration date which needs to be renewed every couple months? Otherwise, why would their statement before still not apply now?

Maybe they should reduce the amount of thick leather to transmute to hardened leather.

Currently it’s 25 to 1…..

I think i remember seeing during the AMA a dev response suggesting they will reduce the amount of leather needed for crafting stuff and thats it

Mini Crinny.6190:

I think i remember seeing during the AMA a dev response suggesting they will reduce the amount of leather needed for crafting stuff and thats it

That was from one of the leak threads.

A pretty easy fix would be to just make leather have a chance to be salvaged from all armor types, not just medium… Especially since all armor types need it to craft anyways.

OriOri.8724:

@Illconceived – I don’t pretend that we will reach a perfect equilibrium, but that doesn’t mean we should accept that leather is an order of magnitude more expensive than other T6 mats, for no reason other than the devs refuse to admit they just messed up when changing recipes with HoT.

Leather prices aren’t high because the devs refuse to admit a mistake; they are high because the community prefers to buy from the TP rather than farm our own.

Our options are:

• Accept that leather is going to be an order of magnitude more expensive for a while and choose to use the leather farm for our personal needs (or not & continue to use the TP).
• Keep posting about it, with the same result of ANet choosing not to do much about it.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that they went overboard by increasing requirements for sections→squares and squares→patches. But it took a long time for leather prices to surpass cloth, let alone get bent out of shape — again, at the time, the pitchforks were raised against cloth being far too high in both absolute and relative terms.

It’s possible for ANet to change the requirements again (and I’d support that), but that’s going to have a lot of trickle down effects on other markets; it’s not just going to affect leather. At which point, we’ll find another thing that bugs us about price.

I don’t really care if ANet says they made a mistake or says they made a good choice at the time. I’m more interested in why they think the status quo is better for overall player satisfaction than any of 273 things they could do to adjust supply (besides add a tedious & repetitive farm that encourages people to watch a movie while they collect loot).

narcx.3570:

A pretty easy fix would be to just make leather have a chance to be salvaged from all armor types, not just medium… Especially since all armor types need it to craft anyways.

That is actually a pretty good idea, if done correctly.

It always makes me smile to see my warrior in shiny armor that’s actually made out of one part metal and nine parts insignias/leather. Still, it looks all metal-ish…? Basically, all weight classes are wearing leather jumpsuits, with lights sewing cloth onto theirs and heavys metal plates onto theirs. Mediums have to reinforce their leather jumpsuit by adding even more leather. That makes it a leather² armor.

Somebody should do a comic about the crafting process “So, I got all I need for my metal armor: 10 ingots of metal, (shows small pile of ingots) 6 bolts of cloth (shows some bolts of cloth) … and 1.456 squares of leather. Oh, wait! (picture zooming out to show a mountain of leather)”.

Lahmia.2193:

I will continue to post this picture in every leather thread.

You do Balthazar’s work, making war against the dragon of leather and greed.

narcx.3570:

A pretty easy fix would be to just make leather have a chance to be salvaged from all armor types, not just medium… Especially since all armor types need it to craft anyways.

This would help out a lot definitely, but I would prefer the recipes for patches just be changed to require about 30% less leather

Simply put, Anet has zero interest or incentive in fixing this. They simply don’t care. They made the farm and that this literally all they will do.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Simply put, Anet has zero interest or incentive in fixing this. They simply don’t care. They made the farm and that this literally all they will do.

That’s sort of a contradictory statement… Adding the new farm shows an interest in fixing it, just a timid one, as they don’t want to totally change/break the economy.

Eh, the farm could just as well be an attempt to appease us and say “Look, its your fault now if there isn’t enough leather” than an attempt to fix this.

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Well, what do you know. People actually managed to make it happen. Looks like more efficient methods cough worked.

Well that puts my experiment to an end. I underestimated how fast that would happen, and set the buy order too high, but at least I have my leather back now.

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Yep. And it appears that the price will only continue to fall until people stop farming it with their engineers. Supply has tripled within the past two weeks and buy orders have fallen by 40%(?).

I think the April 28th attempt was someone trying to make a point about the price issue. I could be mistaken.

Ayrilana.1396:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Yep. And it appears that the price will only continue to fall until people stop farming it with their engineers. Supply has tripled within the past two weeks and buy orders have fallen by 40%(?).

I think the April 28th attempt was someone trying to make a point about the price issue. I could be mistaken.

So much for the “challenging” portion of it, right? Why bother waiting for an organized run of the one-shot-KO track when plopping an unorganized farm gets the better rewards?

But so far, this is just a market blip. Maybe the engi farm is finally putting a dent in demand, but it’s still not significantly different from the beginning of the year nor the price drop between mid-January to mid-February, before the episode released.

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Yep. And it appears that the price will only continue to fall until people stop farming it with their engineers. Supply has tripled within the past two weeks and buy orders have fallen by 40%(?).

I think the April 28th attempt was someone trying to make a point about the price issue. I could be mistaken.

So much for the “challenging” portion of it, right? Why bother waiting for an organized run of the one-shot-KO track when plopping an unorganized farm gets the better rewards?

But so far, this is just a market blip. Maybe the engi farm is finally putting a dent in demand, but it’s still not significantly different from the beginning of the year nor the price drop between mid-January to mid-February, before the episode released.

It’s only a matter of time before someone finds a way to dumb down something that’s supposed to be ‘challenging’. Unfortunately Anet didn’t set the bar that high to begin with, so that players wouldn’t be excluded, such as if the difficulty was set to that of raids.

Yeah, it’s just a ‘blip’ right now since it started two weeks ago. It’ll take much more time to determine if this is lasting.

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Yep. And it appears that the price will only continue to fall until people stop farming it with their engineers. Supply has tripled within the past two weeks and buy orders have fallen by 40%(?).

I think the April 28th attempt was someone trying to make a point about the price issue. I could be mistaken.

So much for the “challenging” portion of it, right? Why bother waiting for an organized run of the one-shot-KO track when plopping an unorganized farm gets the better rewards?

But so far, this is just a market blip. Maybe the engi farm is finally putting a dent in demand, but it’s still not significantly different from the beginning of the year nor the price drop between mid-January to mid-February, before the episode released.

FWIW, I think there was a huge amount of pent up demand for leather that would take significant time to eat through, so even if the supply increased significantly, demand was high enough to keep it static.

Not to mention all the people farming the leather and just keeping it for personal use, because that’s time rather than money to meet the same demand. Once they get past that, it becomes more likely they will sell, and consequently we will see a significant lag between more supply in the game, more supply on the market, and finally prices starting to drop on the market.

I’ll never understand why we can’t get leather from skinning enemies. It really shouldn’t come from humanoid enemies’ loot bags. Need ore? You go mining. Need leather? You go hunting.

We’re talking a basic resource here, not precursors. It shouldn’t be at the mercy of the RNG and TP scalpers.

draxynnic.3719:

Technically speaking, leather is useful in cloth and metal armour. Metal armour often has leather for various straps, connecting parts, and padding, while many forms of clothing were reinforced with leather in medieval times.

That said, reducing the leather requirements for armour crafting may well be warranted. I think the spike in leather prices had more to do with additional leather sinks that were introduced (I remember when leather was generally the cheapest of the three armourcrafting materials), but I think the effect on armour crafting was entirely unintended.

Leather used to be cheapest because it was ONLY used in Medium Armor – Cloth was used in All armor, and Metal was used in weapons.

Patches were a good idea. The problem was they WAY overcompensated. Right now, the excessive cost of leather is crippling the prices of metal and cloth, because you can’t really spend those without leather. Metal sort of has an out with weapon crafting.

Metal and Wood sort of regulate each other’s prices thanks to the way plated dowels work, and the comparable resource consumption between them (Roughly equal parts metal and wood), and roughly similar acquisition (Salvage and harvesting. Metal’s cheaper because of Rich veins on fast-farm). Patches would have been great if they were the same. But instead, the developers decided each patch should require 3x more leather (More than twice as much of the refined material, and more to refine) than cloth, while sharing an acquisition method (bags and salvage). You can’t get Leather without getting Cloth. You can’t spend Cloth without spending Leather. And you need more leather than than cloth to spend that cloth. I’m not sure why John Smith can’t see the problem here.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, I think there was a huge amount of pent up demand for leather that would take significant time to eat through, so even if the supply increased significantly, demand was high enough to keep it static.

And once the demand IS chewed through, we’ll have the problem in the opposite direction again. They need to fix the demand.

Sartharina.3542:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, I think there was a huge amount of pent up demand for leather that would take significant time to eat through, so even if the supply increased significantly, demand was high enough to keep it static.

And once the demand IS chewed through, we’ll have the problem in the opposite direction again. They need to fix the demand.

Exactly. The kittened up demand is the problem here, until its fixed leather will never be in a truly good spot. Best they can do is put it in a not as bad spot.