Guild Wars 2

Supply +5 Done

Wooo!

Congrats. Do you know what the set of upgrades your guild got is? Any chance you’ve tracked the market value of upgrades necessary for this?

So, the obvious follow up question… is it actually working?

Just making sure.

The market value of the upgrades isn’t a good indicator. If a guild buys literally everything then they’re going to make it much, much more expensive than it ever reasonably should be. For example, buying Linseed Oil will drive prices way up but is never really necessary with the Aetherium gating.

Dawdler.8521:

So, the obvious follow up question… is it actually working?

Just making sure.

:D Yes, it is actually working on all the maps where we have a claim.

Sviel.7493:

The market value of the upgrades isn’t a good indicator. If a guild buys literally everything then they’re going to make it much, much more expensive than it ever reasonably should be. For example, buying Linseed Oil will drive prices way up but is never really necessary with the Aetherium gating.

Materials have the same value whether gathered/crafted or purchased from the trading post.

The buy order price for Vial of Linseed Oil typically closely tracks the cost of crafting it from Flax Seeds bought at buy order (low) prices.

Only 2 months to grind a guild upgrade you already had pre XPAC. SOOO fun!!!! GG ANET

Yes, but we never have to queue it up to spend influence on it again. We never have to remember to pop it again. We never have to spend more influence to rush it again. Anything we claim will always have it. There is an upside

Heimlich.3065:

Materials have the same value whether gathered/crafted or purchased from the trading post.

The buy order price for Vial of Linseed Oil typically closely tracks the cost of crafting it from Flax Seeds bought at buy order (low) prices.

Yes, but the time it takes to gather Flax Seeds to make the oil is much lower than the time it takes to get the gold to buy the seeds/oil for the average player. Thus, even if the market value is very high due to demand, someone who farms wisely may spend less time/gold acquiring the item.

Sviel.7493:

Heimlich.3065:

Materials have the same value whether gathered/crafted or purchased from the trading post.

The buy order price for Vial of Linseed Oil typically closely tracks the cost of crafting it from Flax Seeds bought at buy order (low) prices.

Yes, but the time it takes to gather Flax Seeds to make the oil is much lower than the time it takes to get the gold to buy the seeds/oil for the average player. Thus, even if the market value is very high due to demand, someone who farms wisely may spend less time/gold acquiring the item.

The time is exactly the same (ignoring trading post taxes) or the time to get money another way and buy them is less.

If flax gathering is the most profitable activity in the game (it isn’t), then the fastest way to raise money would be to gather flax and then sell it.

If you were right, prices would only change due to difficulty of getting a material changing. You’re completely ignoring even the basic principle of supply and demand.

Consider how quartz shot up to 11s a piece after HoT and just recently, in the last 24 hours, fell back to 4s a piece. Nothing changed how easily quartz is acquired—if your contention was correct, that would have to be the case.

You can also consider Elder Wood, Mithril, leather in general…all the materials that saw huge price changes without any change in rate of acquisition.

Also, you need to consider how much of the material is needed for the guild hall. It is easy to gather ~25 flax seeds per character per day due to node farms. Anything beyond that takes longer due to more spacing. If a guild has 8 characters (which could be 2 players or less) gathering daily, they get 10 Linseed Oil a day. That’s enough to keep pace with Aetherium production on most paths. If they have more people farming than it is even less reasonable for them to buy on TP as the oil will just sit there doing nothing until Aetherium catches up.

Sviel.7493:

If you were right, prices would only change due to difficulty of getting a material changing. You’re completely ignoring even the basic principle of supply and demand.

No. That’s not at all what I said.

Tavern Restoration 1 requires 10 Empty Kegs, they require 30 (10 × 3) Vial of Linseed Oil, that requries 600 (30 × 20) Piles of Flax Seeds.

Pile of Flax Seeds, right now, are worth 3 silver on the trading post.

So 600 Piles of Flax Seeds are worth 18 gold. They are worth 18 gold whether I bought them or gathered them. The 600 Piles of Flax Seeds have the same value either way.

Donating them to the guild is exactly the same as donating 18 gold to the guild, regardless of whether you gathered them or purchased them.

Sviel.7493:

If a guild has 8 characters (which could be 2 players or less) gathering daily, they get 10 Linseed Oil a day.

They then have the choice of either selling that on the Trading Post and profiting from it or of donating it to the guild.

However you get material, if it is tradable and you donate it to your guild, you’re donating something with cash value. The value doesn’t change simply by changing its form.

Heimlich.3065:

Congrats. Do you know what the set of upgrades your guild got is? Any chance you’ve tracked the market value of upgrades necessary for this?

I’ll have to re-assemble the list, and no, we didn’t track the value-at-time of the items when they were being used or donated

Thanks you, Downwood. I’d like to compare your actual set of upgrades to some that I’ve theorycrafted. Several planning spreadsheets can track the monetary value of the inputs for each upgrade (at current prices).

My point is that the gold value is not a good indicator of the difficulty of getting the guild hall because the difficulty of obtaining the items is not directly tied to their price. I was not saying that they magically change in value when used for the guild hall instead of sold on TP.

If Linseed Oil costs about a gold to buy and we value 5 Oils at 5g, it is a bit misleading since the time it takes to make 5 Oils (about 10 minutes daily with 4 characters) is far less than the time it takes to make 5 gold. Thus, using the market gold cost tends to make people freak out and think that the guild hall grind is worse than it is.

Ley-line infused tools still stuck.

Downwood.3192:

Yes, but we never have to queue it up to spend influence on it again. We never have to remember to pop it again. We never have to spend more influence to rush it again. Anything we claim will always have it. There is an upside

True. It comes with a huge cost. Congratulations on the accomplishment.

I haven’t seen this in T5 yet. I imagine it will be a couple of weeks still.

Hehe grats, we’re getting ours this Friday. Few days late as we didn’t prioritize upgrades until a few days after we claimed guild

Sviel.7493:

If Linseed Oil costs about a gold to buy and we value 5 Oils at 5g, it is a bit misleading since the time it takes to make 5 Oils (about 10 minutes daily with 4 characters) is far less than the time it takes to make 5 gold.

What if I told you that the times are exactly the same (minus 15%) by definition.

1. Gather flax for 10 minutes.
2. Make Linseed Oil
3. Sell the Linseed Oil on the Trading Post
4. Collect your money

Ah, I see. I did not consider that because it is literally impossible to both sell it on the TP and donate it to guild hall at the same time. Thus, when talking about donating it to the guild hall it is necessary to discount using it as a gold making device. One cannot, after all, sell the oil to make money to buy the oil in any reasonable manner.

So, yes, you’re right, congratulations. Unfortunately, that technicality has zero real-world application. It doesn’t make the gold value any better of an indicator of the necessary effort.

Sviel.7493:

So, yes, you’re right, congratulations. Unfortunately, that technicality has zero real-world application. It doesn’t make the gold value any better of an indicator of the necessary effort.

It’s an incredibly good measure of the opportunity cost of those donations to your guild. I.e. If I donate 100g worth of materials, then I could have chosen to sell them instead and spend 100g (actually 85g after TP fees) on my characters.

That is very relevant. Guild Hall upgrades are a big sink of player time and effort and wealth.

My past calculations (which are theorycraft) on this would put the likely cost of OP’s Guild Hall upgrades at about 7000g. That is a lot of GW2 money and/or player time spent to replace a 200 influence (40 silver) consumable.

When PT get +5 this friday we have probably spent around 1000-1500 g outright from donations. The rest of the materials we farmed or bought by selling donated materials.

Right from the start we requested every resonating sliver and memory of battle got donated and we spent a whole weekend farming EOTM for memory of battle (back when they were 15-20s pp) to then sell and buy other materials for upgrades as we reached them. We hit our gold target / materials needed about 3 weeks ago and our guild hall has been on autopilot since then, with the majority of us off playing PS2 as WvW is dead.

Kind of a shame really we were all so hyped and put so much effort into this in the first month, for us to finally reach it and most of us aren’t playing lol.

Sviel.7493:

Ah, I see. I did not consider that because it is literally impossible to both sell it on the TP and donate it to guild hall at the same time. Thus, when talking about donating it to the guild hall it is necessary to discount using it as a gold making device. One cannot, after all, sell the oil to make money to buy the oil in any reasonable manner.

So, yes, you’re right, congratulations. Unfortunately, that technicality has zero real-world application. It doesn’t make the gold value any better of an indicator of the necessary effort.

opportunity cost is economics 101 bro

That’s the point. The gold value measures the opportunity cost of making the guild hall. It does not accurately measure the time/effort necessary.

Sviel.7493:

That’s the point. The gold value measures the opportunity cost of making the guild hall. It does not accurately measure the time/effort necessary.

They are the same thing. Actually, a closer analysis would show that opportunity cost underestimates the actual cost, but that’s not something I want to get into right now.

They’re only the same thing if you get all the materials for the guild hall and then sell them in order to buy all of the materials for a guild hall.

More practically, someone will see 7,000g and think ‘it would take ages to farm up 7,000g’ and thus consider the hall impossible. In fact, by farming the materials directly, the hall is very obtainable. By extension, the guild could instead farm up 7,000g (by selling guild hall mats) and ignore their hall but that’s sort of a moot point when talking about the cost (in time/effort) of building a guild hall.

Sviel.7493:

In fact, by farming the materials directly, the hall is very obtainable.

This is the opposite of true.

If the value of the materials is 7000g, and gathering lets you get 10g of materials per hour, then it will take 700 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.

If the value of materials is 7000g and doing Fractals gets you 20g of cash per hour, then it will take 350 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.

The only relevant numbers are the value of the materials and the income rate of whatever activity you perform to get those materials.

I’m sorry you think otherwise, but I can’t think of a plainer way to explain that.

If 1 person can farm 10g of materials per hour, 10 people can get the whole 7000g in 70 hours. That’s about a month (35 days) of playing 2 hours a day which is about how long it takes to get the Aetherium you need anyway.

I would consider that obtainable.

Heimlich.3065:

Sviel.7493:

In fact, by farming the materials directly, the hall is very obtainable.

This is the opposite of true.

If the value of the materials is 7000g, and gathering lets you get 10g of materials per hour, then it will take 700 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.

If the value of materials is 7000g and doing Fractals gets you 20g of cash per hour, then it will take 350 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.

The only relevant numbers are the value of the materials and the income rate of whatever activity you perform to get those materials.

I’m sorry you think otherwise, but I can’t think of a plainer way to explain that.

It’s a lot less simple than what you’re describing, and I think you’re missing Sviel’s point (perhaps he could have worded it differently).

Yes, if the value of the materials needed to level a guild hall to +5 supply is 7000g, then the opportunity cost of donating those materials instead of just selling them is 7000g.

But a significant amount of the materials can be obtained through means which are both highly time-efficient and also highly time-gated. I.e., flax farm, ley-line infused tools, elder wood farm, mystic coins, etc. Sviel’s point is that if you use the most time-efficient means of obtaining the materials, even if it means your daily rate of acquiring them is highly gated, then the total time spent acquiring them is fairly reasonable.

So yes, if you are measuring the effort of obtaining a guild hall in terms of the maximum sustainable rate of gold/hr acquirable in the game, guild halls are going to seem like a huge time sink. But if you measure it by the total amount of time spent at the highly time-efficient, time-gated farms, then guild halls seem like less of a time/effort sink and more of a waiting sink.

BrickFurious.7169:

But a significant amount of the materials can be obtained through means which are both highly time-efficient and also highly time-gated. I.e., flax farm, ley-line infused tools, elder wood farm, mystic coins, etc. Sviel’s point is that if you use the most time-efficient means of obtaining the materials, even if it means your daily rate of acquiring them is highly gated, then the total time spent acquiring them is fairly reasonable.

That’s the same as saying that there are some activities in the game that are time-gated and make above-average money.

That is true and relevant and doesn’t contradict anything I’ve ever said about guild hall upgrades.

I also have friends and guildies who stress themselves unnecessarily about the cost and timing and effort of GH upgrades. I see the cost as something that detracts from the game. I hope that the improved money rewards from fractals helps them manage that stress better (WvW activities are still a terrible way to fund WvW guild upgrades).

If you find the 7000g cost of upgrading to a +5 supply claim reasonable, then I disagree, but it’s OK for you and I to have different opinions on that.

Heimlich.3065:

If you find the 7000g cost of upgrading to a +5 supply claim reasonable, then I disagree, but it’s OK for you and I to have different opinions on that.

If the most total time-efficient way of me doing it involves farming flax on my characters for 10 mins a day, and then playing WvW as I normally would…then yes that’s reasonable to me.

That’s kind of my point, Heimlich. 7000g doesn’t sound reasonable. Gathering the mats over time using the high-efficiency methods like node farms does.

But they’re actually the same thing, considering that if we don’t build the guild hall, we eventually could earn 7000g whenever someone else has done the upgrade while earning 0g.

The cheaper way to do it would be, since the price is always varying, we could wait until the price crashes and buy all the materials directly, using the 7000g we’ve earned so far.

That says, I think it’s basically either gold-sink (for people who rush for it) or time-sink (for people who could just wait for unknown time, since we can’t really predict the price).

Sviel.7493:

Consider how quartz shot up to 11s a piece after HoT and just recently, in the last 24 hours, fell back to 4s a piece. Nothing changed how easily quartz is acquired—if your contention was correct, that would have to be the case.

(Charged) quartz crystals drop from Wintersday presents.

All this aside, we’re a WvW guild and therefore we chose very early to work towards the goals of maximizing our WvW unlocks. Supply +5, Presence of the Keep, and Airship Defense were outlined on Day One as our goals. A plan was put into place to maximize the build efficiency of the guild hall to get to these points with maximum speed.

The materials cost was, frankly, irrelevant next to the worth we placed on the goals. This was and continues to be a guild-wide initiative and has been a great thing for bringing our guild together for a common purpose. A purpose which we as a guild have knocked out of the park.

CERN has done an amazing job of stepping up and getting everything that we’ve needed to make each and every materials goal that we’ve asked of them. As the head of the Guild Hall development, I have been consistently humbled by the generosity of the guild.

I’m pretty impressed by how well you guys have done and sincerely wish that I didn’t have to fight you day in and day out.

So how much did it cost to get back a guild upgrade (+5) that your guild had previously? Granted it is permanent now, but still amazes me that we are dumping so much gold in the the Grind halls for not really all that much in return….

At the risk of sounding like a kitten murderer…

The cost for the upgrade was exactly what was listed: 20 badges of tribute, 200 large scales, 100 mystic coins, 50 piles of crystaline dust, 50 leaf fossils, and 25 evergreen lodestones.

In the process of getting to +5 we got a lot of other cool things unlocked as well. We now have 8 permanent auras that we either had to pay for twice a day, or simply never used because they were inconvienent. We never have to pay extra influence to rush things. We have a pile of other upgrades that we can build and use. We have guild siege blueprints. We have a load of boosts we can get at our guild tavern. We have a nice arena that is coming along quite well.

For all that we had to spend a lot of materials to get the prerequisites and guild level 37 required for +5 supply, it’s not like those things in and of themselves aren’t useful. They’re being used a lot and we love having them as well. If you look at the sum total of things that it took to get to +5 you miss the fact that they were all useful in and of themselves and that the only amount of that which was really spent on the +5 was the mats and aetherium for just that +5.

It’s not like the mats, time, and money used on all the items for the prerequisites was spent into a void.

If you think that you’re getting ‘not really all that much in return’ you should really be talking to the person that is in charge of your guild upgrades. A proper path to +5 should not only be efficient, but for the most part, filled with practical and useful upgrades that also benefit the guild.

I do have a spreadsheet that shows everything we have but due to the way that I put it together, I don’t have a historical record of the order in which I bought them. I should have thought of that but I was focused on watching where we were going, not what we’d already done.

Downwood.3192:

At the risk of sounding like a kitten murderer…

*Snip

Yeah, I get that. Not having to cue up things, or rush them via influence is a great thing, I am definitely not saying that those things are worthless, but most of them were already available to a developed guild. We are basically paying a very large sum of gold for the new convenience plus a few this and thats.
That coupled by the massively overpowered nature of some of the tactivator upgrades. All of the banners are more than OP. So basically, if you have a huge guild that can afford to get all the upgrades and buy the banners it’s going to make the guilds who can’t afford those things even weaker… It seems to be getting dangerously close to pay to win… Farm to play…

I will ask Downwood, how many of the mining speed upgrades did you have to invest in to get to +5 as quickly as you did?

We stopped at Rate 4 speed (25 seconds per aetherium) and then of course had to get capacity 5 for SMC claiming. We could have gone rate 5, but doing the math it would have pushed our +5 back by three days, even though it would have in the long run brought everything past next tuesday up. It was an acceptable tradeoff and after our level 40 expansion, we’ll be returning to snag Rate 5 and 6 in the next few weeks.

also. Just going to leave this here

Aren’t those auras supposed to double? Is the doubling just not listed in the tooltip?

Sviel.7493:

Aren’t those auras supposed to double? Is the doubling just not listed in the tooltip?

At the top of the screen, he has 25 supply, so that doubling seems to have worked. That makes that buff especially strong.

Yes, do not fret, the Presence of the Keep buff is a separate icon than the Aura buff. It basically mirrors it and applies it again as a separate buff.

25 sup _

2 person guild catas are back, but at least it requires a keep to do it.

Sviel.7493:

25 sup _

2 person guild catas are back, but at least it requires a keep to do it.

Gonna be fixed, no doubt. Plus, small guilds wont make guild catas anyway.

Sviel.7493:

25 sup _

2 person guild catas are back, but at least it requires a keep to do it.

or 2 person guild siege golems.