Guild Wars 2

There’s definitely something weird going on with the ecto market. A few of my guildies and I pay quite close attention to it, and a few nights ago, we were commenting because one of them had put a bunch of ectos up for ~30s, and there were over 8000 up priced lower than him. I opened the broker to count them. Then about thirty seconds later, he told me they’d sold. I refreshed, and the price had gone from ~25s to ~34s. Over 8000 had sold in less than a minute.

I’ve sold a lot of ectos since the game has started, and they’ve never moved at that rate before. They move in blocks of a few hundred a minute at most.

But they routinely say they’ve made no changes. If the company in charge says everything is as it was, and everyone’s results are well within the bounds of statistical probability, then there’s no reason to assume anything was altered. Could they be lying? Sure. But there’s absolutely no reason to think they are.

Every time a thread like this appears, it’s people using sample sizes of <100, which are totally insignificant. We don’t even know how ecto salvage works. Depending on how they arrive at the average of 0.9 ectos per salvage, or whatever the real figure is, the standard deviation could be anywhere from fairly small to totally enormous. You could require 200 salvages to have decent confidence in your results, or 3000.

Actually, about 200-250 of my salvages over the last two weeks have been exotics, using a BLSK. I’ve actually run well in this batch, and have probably averaged 2 ectos per salvage, possibly slightly higher. For every bad run, there’s someone doing the opposite…

All that stuff I said about small sample sizes applies to exotics too. But that said, 2 ectos from 30 seems extreme, like, extreme enough to be an exaggeration.

Thousands of players? Really? Are you sure you don’t mean the fifty or sixty you may have spoken to/seen post, then just extrapolated that out? People love to blow kitten out of proportion when they’re whining about something. “I salvaged 20 rares and got 9 ectos” becomes “I salvaged 30 rares and got 3 ectos! WTF?!”.

Even if if there were thousands of people complaining about lower returns, that’s the thing about randomness, there are always going to be people who run worse than expected. If there several million people playing the game and salvaging items, then over the short term there are going to be tens of thousands who get worse returns than average and tens of thousands who get better. Few people are doing sample sizes big enough to really draw any conclusions. You need hundreds, probably thousands of salvages before anything starts becoming even remotely clear.

I’ve probably salvaged 2000 rares in the last two weeks alone, and the rate has been roughly the same as it was two months ago. You get terrible patches and great patches. That’s just how it works.

Sidieon, even that would mean absolutely nothing. You’d need a sample of thousands of salvages to draw anything even remotely meaningful. I’ve salvaged nearly 15,000 items since GW2 launched, and I’ve had crazy runs both ways in that time. I’ve done 10 salvages in a row with no ectos, and I’ve done 10 salvages that yielded 26 ectos. Randomness is much more random than 99% of people realise.

Astraea.6075:

Andykay.5198:

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

I’m not sure what you mean by “the entire economy is tanking”. Prices are coming down, but there’s still people buying and selling items and making profits…

Bot banning is an ongoing battle between ArenaNet and the botters, and it was always going to be the case. I believe however, that ArenaNet may be able to respond to the influx of new bots faster than they did with the initial surge because part of the delay was due to ArenaNet developing the tools required to deal with the botters.

Prices are plummeting really fast at the moment. Fine crafting mats are one of the best indicators of this, as they’re pretty much the base of the economy. They drop frequently, and then people turn them into everything else, runes, gear, ectos, and then eventually better gear. When they fall, everything falls. And they’re steadily losing their value again after peaking. There’s always going to be some up and down, but a lot of the crafting mats have lost ~50% of their value in two weeks.

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

It feels like they’re back to some extent. I place some pretty large buy orders for certain crafting mats, and in the last two days there have been multiple cases of me placing an order for 1000 of something (fine blue mats, eg: large claw, not base materials) and having it filled within 30 seconds in four lots of 250. That seems unusual if it’s just people farming regularly.

There is no way to make a new one at the moment, but there’s no telling when Anet will bring the recipe back. That’s the beauty of the mystic forge, they can keep recipes like that in their pocket until they figure certain parts of the economy need a tweak, and then they can dust them off again.

I expect the mystic chests to come back sometime in the next few months.

My main concern with the thief is with WvW, since that’s what I play 90% of the time. The thief is quite effective in WvW, we do good AOE damage, but it’s also a little on the boring side. As someone else said, 80% of the time we’re just spamming cluster bomb and dodging. And a good chunk of the remaining 20% is using daggerstorm when it’s off cooldown. It’s effective, but it’s incredibly dull. Sure, you can try and play other weapon sets in WvW, but nothing is even close to as effective as shortbow.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. It’s the innate flaw of having an initiative based system that there’s going to be one skill that trumps all others for every situation. If there was some more synergy in there somewhere, or something that encouraged you to use your utilities/weapon skills in some kind of order, it would probably be more entertaining, but for now it’s basically hit 2, wait for the bomb to land, dodge backwards when low on health and repeat.

papryk.6273:

My math seems pretty good since a made a nice profit while making attempts to get a precursor.
My observations and every video on YT, posts here just confirm that. Statistically you get an exotic after 5-6 tries.

just take a look at Delolith.9645 post. He used 92 rares. That’s 23 tries. He got 7 exotics. Statistically he had an exotic every 3 tries. Kinda lucky but still…that’s what I am talking about.

Hahaha. Yea, he did 27 tries and got 7 exotics. He didn’t say what order they came in. What the stats show is you get exotics roughly 20% of the time. That doesn’t mean it goes, rare, rare, rare, rare, exotic, rare rare rare rare exotic etc. Independent events are independent. It just averages out to around 20%. That’s how probability works. Just because you’ve gotten lucky doesn’t prove anything. You’re dealing with something that has extreme standard deviation. There are going to be people who do 30 combines and get literally 0 exotics, and there are going to be people that do 10 combines and get 5 exotics. There are going to be times you do get an exotic every fifth try, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Given how volatile the forge is, even a sample size of 500 combines doesn’t really mean much, and if you think it does you have very little understanding of how statistics work. And beyond that, if the chance of getting a precursor is anywhere below 1%, as it appears to be, then nobody is ever going to figure out what that figure is. People keep throwing around figures like 0.1%, but when you’re talking about something that involves hundreds or thousands of individual events, basically nobody is going to be even close to the real percentage chance.

That’s not how maths works papryk. If there’s a 20% chance to get an exotic, it means every combine has a chance to get 20%. Every combine is separate from your others.

You could do 100 combines and get no exotic, and you know what the chance of you getting an exotic next time is? It’s 20%. Hell, you could do 50million and not get one, and the chance of your next one is still 20%.

Every combine is a chance by itself, and the ones you do beforehand don’t have any affect.

You see that’s the problem. You look at it and say ‘wah wah we’ve had this many nerfs, other classes haven’t, it’s not fair.’ That’s not relevant. What’s relevant is how good or bad of a position thieves are currently in. Sit back and look at the situation. Tons of viable builds, even if they do nerf backstab. Competitive in small scale and WvW environments. The thief is fine and those nerfs were needed.

People always overreact to nerfs. They see that their class is being nerfed and then automatically start whining. I play a thief and only a thief, and I think Backstab needs a nerf. I think Pistol Whip deserved a nerf too. Not sure on Heartseeker, but that’s beside the point.

Something to understand about thieves; they have more viable builds than almost anyone. The thief is in a great place at the moment in general. P/D condition build, D/D condition build, SB AE build, DD burst build, S/P burst build are all extremely viable, and plenty of people play other combos like S/D quite effectively. Hell, you can even make a pretty solid tanky thief using P/D and healing traits. The thief isn’t a one trick pony, unless you play it like one. If a class like necros got a nerf or two, they’d be in deep trouble. But thieves? You have so much flexibility. Experiment a little!

People play games for fun, and the simple fact is, dying to a mega burst backstab specced thief isn’t fun. If their cooldowns are up, there is almost nothing you can do about it. Are there mitigating factors? Sure. That thief is a one trick pony, if they miss they’re in trouble, you have a tiny chance to dodge etc etc, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the time it’s instant death where you have no control what so ever. And that’s just not enjoyable.

If backstab lost 15-20% of it’s current damage (even post assassin signet nerf), the combo wouldn’t one shot people anymore but it would still be an incredibly effective skill. A zero cost, instant cast attack that hits harder than almost any other, and you want to whine about it? Jesus. D/D will still be plenty playable even if backstab takes a hit. Suck it up and learn to adapt.

In conclusion, this thief thoroughly endorses a backstab nerf.

The price is poor because it’s the only T6 mat that has no mystic forge recipes. The others get consumed in the hundreds with people making various weapons, but the essence won’t even go into the mystic forge.

Add to that the fact that the runes it produces are largely useless, and you have one extremely pathetic item.

Yea this always bothered me. Surely it has to be useful for something? I assume it drops at the same rate as other tier 6 rare mats, but it has basically no purpose.

Yea it’s frustrating. It’s not a specific error. It literally just says “error trying to sell” or something like that. Once you’ve sold 7-8 items in a small space of time, you can’t sell more. There’s clearly some sort of hard cap. And it doesn’t reset all the way, it resets gradually. If you hit the cap, then wait 20 seconds, you’ll be able to sell a single item more before getting the error again. You have to wait a minute or so for it to reset all the way.

As someone who routinely mystic forges large quantities of items and then sells the result, this is really annoying. It can add 5-10 minutes to my sell time.

Yea, the new interface is annoying. The area to click to change the quantity is tiny and the whole process is much slower than it was before.

I’m saying, it’s silly that I have a big stash of terrible superior runes and I can’t forge them to turn them into different superior runes. Every other equipable item in the game that I know of can be forged, but superior runes can’t. It makes no sense.

Even things like yellow orbs (beryl orb etc), which have no exotic equivalent, can be forged for the chance to get a different yellow orb.

No Superior runes show up in the mystic forge window. Only Major and Minor runes.

This seems like a weird decision. You can forge basically everything. Even items that can’t give you a tier upgrade, eg: yellow orbs, can still be forged for the chance to turn your unwanted items into something more useful. But with superior runes you can’t. If you get ones you don’t like, you’re left to sell them for just above cost on the TP, or in the case of dungeon runes which are soulbound, vendor them for 2s.

I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to forge them.

Yea, with low droprates like 15-20%, the variance in your results is going to be huge. The smaller the chance of something happening, the larger the variance is going to be. It’s perfectly reasonable that you do 10 lots of 20 combines and get 30% exotics, then do 10 more lots of 20 combines and average 15%. It would even be reasonable to do a couple of lots of combines and get no exotics. It doesn’t mean anything changed, it’s just how probability works.

Any system with luck involved will have results that are way away from the actual percentage.

Tomcat, even if the drop rate is much higher, eg: .1% or something, that means there will be plenty of people who will never ever get the drop. It doesn’t even make him particularly unlucky. In the example, 50% of people would get a drop rate lower than .1%. He’d just be on the wrong side of average.

In any case, that’s gotta hurt. I personally like the luck element, but it sucks when you’re on the wrong end of it. I know the feeling =/

Geogaddie, what armor is that? It looks awesome.

Well, I did more testing. I didn’t FRAPS anything, but I feel like if there is a problem, it’s with weapons/armor, possibly just rare – exotic. I just ran 800 runes through (200 conversions), and even at the tail end, I had batches of three or four major – superior conversions in a row. It’s hard to think there’s any DR in play when that happens.

It could just be a string of bad luck, but I did experience this after the patch. I went through about 160 rare daggers (40 combines) and got two exotics. I was in full exotic magic find gear with a magic find booster. Ordinarily, that would have resulted in 6-10 exotics.

Now like I said, there’s obviously RNG involved, but that’s a pretty big deviation from the norm.

This is incredibly bad at the moment. I’ve never had this problem in WvW before, but now entire fights occur without the enemy rendering at all. All we can do is madly tab target around and spam our basic attacks, hoping to hit something.

It’s happening for our entire guild and it makes WvW completely unenjoyable. Whatever it was it has changed recently, since things were fine before.