Guild Wars 2

Before anything, I want to say that I read the update notes for the August patch, and as a former GW player I APPRECIATE the effort put into elaborating the crating system and nerfing CoF.

Huge changes. More importantly, it carries the message that you are still willing to make huge changes to core game systems. It is partially what gave be the incentive to write this post. But I’ll get to the case.

After a year – and purely from the love of my heart, with the intent to help – I would like to point out two things that I noticed about the crafting system (and this is regardless of the upcoming uptade), which may be what is conributing to the faulties of crafting here, and two suggestions. May it help you greatly.

• 1: The way how Karma works is pernicious to Crafting:
  Two things: You use money for everything. You use karma for less things.
  When buying the next level of gear merely for the stats, people will prefer to buy Karma gear because they usually have an abundance of Karma. This devalues mid-level crafted items, greatly. They are practically worthless.

Suggestion: Instead of actual gear, make the karma rewards Appliable Skins, and increase the base cost of NPC Merchant gear to make people prefer to buy gear that was crafted by other players. (You obviously do not need to touch Exotic 44k karma armor.)

• 2: Syndicates are running the Trading Post:
  The market is being manipuated high time. The facts are the following: People farm materials with bots and make items with zero material costs, at a much higher rate than any normal human can, undercutting everyone else to the extent that there are actual items at the trading post that you can sell to the NPC Merchant for a higher price. Which is distasteful. There isn’t any level of fairness here, and frankly, banning bots is not doing jack to how well the factual Black Market is functioning. Leave struggling with the symptom. Simply destroy the incetive.

Suggestion: A small ammount of control to the market; put a minimum price on the items, based on item level. There has to be actual profit made from crafting, even if people buy all the materials, because there is an element that you did not calculate in, which is skill. A lvl 400 Cook can craft items that a lvl 1 cannot. That skill has a fiancial value. You have to calculate that into the equation. It’s not only about the ingredient costs. People and their skills are materials aswell, and the curret system practically devalues the human element.

• Additionally: The syndicates who control the market have to go. You have to think up a working solution that kills their incentive.

I hope I made some people think over there. Take increased notion of the whole Karma part.

You don’t have to respond, but take notes and discuss them. It’s worth the time.
You are welcome. I hope my post was helpful.

Lots of fun and kittens.

chronus.1326:

Suggestion: Instead of actual gear, make the karma rewards Appliable Skins, and increase the base cost of NPC Merchant gear to make people prefer to buy gear that was crafted by other players. (You obviously do not need to touch Exotic 44k karma armor.)

I don’t know if it’s the wording or the whole suggestion, but to me this just screams “I want to make easy profit by crafting!”. And honestly, that’s a bit disturbing.

And let’s be honest, majority of people won’t be spending their karma on buying skins for a lowbie. I know that I only started personalizing my skins when I got to level 80 exotics.

For me personally, I crafted my own gear. Granted, I bought some of my first few sets because my friend told me to do that. However, eventually I ended up crafting to make my own gear. And I would think that it’s what goes on with most people.

Suggestion: A small ammount of control to the market; put a minimum price on the items, based on item level. There has to be actual profit made from crafting, even if people buy all the materials, because there is an element that you did not calculate in, which is skill. A lvl 400 Cook can craft items that a lvl 1 cannot. That skill has a fiancial value. You have to calculate that into the equation. It’s not only about the ingredient costs. People and their skills are materials aswell, and the curret system practically devalues the human element.

There is already a minimum price for items. You cannot sell items on the TP at below vendor price.

And by the way, you’re wrong. There is no reason why crafting should guarantee profits. In fact, even your suggestion will not work. The TP is common for all the servers. That’s a crapton of players. If you make crafting directly profitable, what will happen is that all the sale slots are going to be filled. What you’re seeing with things like Black Lion Chests will happen with items: there will be millions of sale offers on the TP. And the end result? It won’t be profitable, as you’re pretty much guaranteed to never sell your item.

Honestly, to me this post just seems like a typical complaint post. You want to make easy profit with crafting. You think that the reason things are expensive is because there’s some mafia that’s pushing up the prices of… rare materials.

Olba.5376:

chronus.1326:

Suggestion: Instead of actual gear, make the karma rewards Appliable Skins, and increase the base cost of NPC Merchant gear to make people prefer to buy gear that was crafted by other players. (You obviously do not need to touch Exotic 44k karma armor.)

I don’t know if it’s the wording or the whole suggestion, but to me this just screams “I want to make easy profit by crafting!”. And honestly, that’s a bit disturbing.

No. It is literally impossible to make any profit on crafting here as the price of the created item is almost the directc sum of the prices of the individual materials, with zero margin derived from the crafting skill you have reached, meaning that it’s more fiancially benefitting to just sell the materials themselves instead of investing in a crafting tree where you cannot even earn back the ammount you have invested, as the created items are often even lesser in value than the materials used in creating them – see mid-level weaponsmithing or armorsmithing – which is not how a market functions in any society except maybe in fascist dictatorships run by maffia cartels.

And if you are arguing about the slots getting loaded because more people will actually see a point in trading their hand made things; the Karma change would actually create a higher incentive to buy hand-crafted things, and they would be still be cheaper than NPC Merchant items, while Karma would give only skins, save for 44k exotics which is endgame. Which in exchange would create an incentive in people to make and sell those items, which is the point of an economy.

Currently, people are selling all the things that they do not need, instead of creating the things that other people need. It is all backwards. The high-quantity bot farming groups which control the prices are a fact. People do not hate profit. They want to make profit. Undercutting is normal, but the prices have gone so low in a year that the direct control is obvious. Nobody but high-quantity farming communities make any money out of this, most of which they spend on illegal gold selling anyway. It is all kitten and cancer.

@OP

If you seriously think non-exotic equipment is worthless because of hordes of bot farmers crafting stuff… well, you’re half right. The “bots” are NPCs, and they drop dozens and dozens of blues and greens to every single player for every level they gain—and on top of that you have people making equipment for no reason than to level crafting. There is, quite simply, such an abundance of them that they have no value. Simple economics.

Yes… which is a central design flaw in my opinion, a step dowards contemporary mmo armor system that should not have been made. Still, just taking Karma out as it is now would help it a little bit. It wouldn’t save it. Thats why I added the minimum price in the second point too. Those two together may reach something. What else do you want? The perfect suggestion is still “you should’ve just remade Guild Wars with better graphics”. But that’s more like a “what if” arguent, as it is impossile to do that at this point. Personally, I would’ve used all the copious hype bandwagon commerical viral marketing on that, instead of damage control, because then there would had been no damage to control. Feeding the old system to the casual kids is easier than imagined. People eat up everything in the right coating. That’s what they do right now too. And it would had been better to the economy in general.

But anyhow, putting my ever-returning distaste apart, let’s focus on what we can still improve. What you have said is not “simple economics”. It’s not even economics. What I said was simple economics, but apparently not simpe enough, so let me simluify it even more.

“Supply is where the demand is.”

That reads: Supply should be where the demand is. Supply without demand is pointless. It is not a sign of a working economy. It is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Currently we have an overproduction market instead of a supplying market.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Just because you do not know how to, or do not believe that it matters, or do not believe that it can be changed, it doesn’t mean that people cannot make suggestions.

I agree with the OP.

It’s inadmissible that Crafted Items are more expensive than the items they are made of.
Crafting needs to be more than a gold sink for leveling, or a stepping stone to enter end game content.

Crafting – wich takes dedication and effort – should be better than your average means to acquire gear – not just equivalent, and certainly not inferior.

Not entirely related, but I loved Guild Wars 1 NPC Traders – who bought and sold items with a margin of profit – wich was a sink, in itself.
The value they sold or bought items for was directly connected to supply and demand.
Players could trade directly, to their benefit as well.

If implemented in a true MMO, it would really give it the feel of World.

Now let’s talk of a way to implement these NPC Traders in GW2.
1 – There are all kinds of “NPC Traders” in the game.
2 – These traders include “Rune Trader”, “Fine Material Trader”, “Cooking Ingredient Trader”, “Metal Trader”, “Wood Trader”, etc.
3 – Any items from the Black Lion Trading that are also sold by NPC Traders, and are placed for sale below the price the Traders are willing to offer players for the items, are automatically bought.
4 – Any items from the Black Lion Trading that are also sold by NPC Traders, and are placed for sale above the price the Traders sell them for, won’t be sold anyway.
This creates a floor and a ceiling.
5 – There should be places like Restaurants and that you can “Cook” for, and Garrisons that you can craft gear for.
These would be handled just like the Dynamic Events that require you to deliver X items. There would be NPCs coming near the “Discipline Masters” and shouting their needs, like “Restaurant X is in need of a Chef! It’s just down the street, to the left.”

The reward would be a value that is considerably higher than the sum of the materials used to make the items, according to the NPC Traders.
There might be some Karma thrown in as well, or other kinds of prestigious rewards such as Chests with random materials and a chance to obtain a rare Recipe.

Actually, I’ll make a thread about this in particular.

Nurvus.2891:

5 – There should be places like Restaurants and that you can “Cook” for, and Garrisons that you can craft gear for.
These would be handled just like the Dynamic Events that require you to deliver X items. There would be NPCs coming near the “Discipline Masters” and shouting their needs, like “Restaurant X is in need of a Chef! It’s just down the street, to the left.”

This is actually an enormously creative idea that I could not even think of! And yet so simple. I fully support this or anything of the sort. It’s great to have people like you around.

It’s something that would not be enough in and of itself either, but it would certainly contribute to a better market.

Although I’m afraid of a phenomeon I noticed where devs never implement such ideas out of fear of getting drama for blatantly stealing them. Kinda funny. And sad. Would be good to talk to dev about this one day. There’s lots of calculative corporate fear. They undervalue player good-heatedness to maximalize profit. It’s terribly ani-human-contact in an artisic indistry as art is the most humane thing ever. I think somewehere deep down both parties know that this is not right.