Guild Wars 2

I wanted to register discontent with this whole Ascended and Infused item thing.

I’m an intermittent player. I don’t particularly enjoy playing through content in order to play through other content. I want to go straight to the content I want to do at a particular moment and do it immediately. The current design of the game makes than eminently possible. If I want to go do something, I can wander over and do it. Infusion makes that not possible.

I also don’t enjoy grinding up items. Exotics were annoying, but I rationalized that as being essentially the same as the first set of max gear in GW1. In other words once you’ve got it you can focus on the builds and the content and the fancifying. Not grinding of course, because farming and similar make me unhappy and bored. If I wanted to play a Diablo style grind-em-up game where you plow for power, I’d go buy Diablo III. I don’t. I want to play a game where I can focus on fancy cosmetic upgrades for my Battlin’ Barbie while beating up other players and mobs on an even playing field.

Thus far I’ve paid ArenaNet $130 for this game (2x $60 for box, one of which was for brother, and $10 for a costume) and ~$200 for the original (box, 3x expansions on release, character slots). I’ve liked ArenaNet’s games since ‘05 and I’d like to continue liking them. I’m sure you’d like me to continue supporting your ability to make them and buy fancy things!

So please don’t add in things that make me materially weaker than other players in certain parts of the game. If you want to add in an infusion mechanism, make it explicitly a part of the dungeon. If you want to make higher levels of the dungeon difficult, make them difficult. Paraphrasing another theme park builder, ‘players, uh, players will find a way.’

John Smith.4610:

Lunesta.3742:

The economy (and prices) were moving up over the first two weeks, but have definitely deflated over the last week. Exotic tailored good prices have gone from 30-40s over cost to 50-60s BELOW cost. Very strange, this has to be novel for a MMO.

When something new is first released, there is a set of early adapters who discover and profit off the new items/markets. Because there is relatively few early adapters, prices are artificially high as supply is much lower than demand. As more players enter the market, the the price falls.

(I wish I could insert graphs)

This is a change in market saturation. It happens in every mmo because the new markets are introduced so frequently.

Could deal with this through a number of mechanisms. Most obvious solution would be the quantity style helicopter drop to get demand going (give everyone currency either through increased trophy prices or the mail). Krugman talks about that with his famous baby sitting club example that everyone has read a billionty times. Quantity theory is kind of out of date but then MMOs have unusual features (as has been alluded to) that make it relevant.

Other option would be more along the lines of Woodford/Sumner aggregate demand management. Not as sure how to do that sans a financial sector (oh how badly I wanted to take out a loan for speculation on the gold-gem index at release) but buying lowbie items and trophies for slightly above market could help get cash into the pockets of players.

I wish dungeon tokens were tradeable* as that’d provide a seriously obvious currency surrogate for quasi-OMO management. Late game would be handy to occasionally nuke the value of tokens by selling them for less than the market cost in order to reduce player wealth, for example. Worked amazingly well with ecto in GW1, players saw their stockpile reduced in value by about half after some changes to UW.

*Might conflict with the objective of giving “meaning” to the prestige armor but I have a feeling that a floating exchange rate set by players would give provide a significantly better metric for analyzing which dungeons sit where on the difficulty index based on the price at which this or that token is exchanged for gold. It’d be trivial to laser in on problem areas like CoF pre-nerf with the market providing an advance warning system.

And can I just say — apropos of nothing, obviously — that following the ToC and not referring to members of the staff in discussion results in seriously convoluted posts?