Guild Wars 2

I forged about 2 dozen precursors last month. Made some nice money, bought some legendaries, spent WAY too much time forging as a result of how successful it was.

Now, I’m currently at over 3500 rare combines since my last one. That is 14000+ rares total fed to the forge, with over 700 exotics coming out as a result. Is that a bad streak? If the odds are 1% per exotic, try putting .99 ^ 700 into a calculator and seeing how big it is. If it’s .5% per exotic, which is on the pessimistic end of people’s estimates, there’s still only a 3% chance of seeing that long a streak with zero precursors.

It’s enough to make me think that sometimes, they tune things so that it’s actually impossible to roll a precursor, or much more unlikely than usual — maybe it’s something they do to let prices go back up a bit. Statistically, the numbers I see on the long dry spells seem to indicate a much lower probability of success at those times than the overall average would predict. (This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a streak like this.)

204 keys, got my first ticket in the last batch.

165 of those were bought (~315g) , 1 was from claw island, and the other 38 were recycled from the chest drops.

In total, the drops were:
1 fused weapon claim ticket
1 minis 3-pack (set 1)
6 black lion salvage kit
2 total makeover kit
3 self-style hair kit
25 small guild discovery
14 medium guild discovery
12 large guild discovery
50 transmutation crystals (10 stacks of 5)
62 unidentified dyes (19 stacks of 2, 24 stacks of 1)
3 dye packs
85 heavy bag of coins (774.13 silver)
8 black lion mining pick
10 black lion logging axe
6 black lion harvesting sickle
29 bank access express
23 instant repair canisters
19 merchant express
15 revive orbs
30 trading post express
18 armor boosters
15 crafting boosters
16 experience boosters
13 karma boosters
19 killstreak experience boosters
24 magic find boosters
13 pvp glory booster
24 rejuvenation boosters
25 speed boosters
17 strength boosters
2 booster multipacks (karma, magic find, experience)
129 mystery tonics (43 stacks of 3)
38 black lion chest key (used)

Free transfers (which seemed to go heavily to HOD) put GOM off to a bad start this week, and when HOM started to look unbeatable, it seemed like the whole server just checked out. That’s part of what a weekly cycle does — when a team has no chance of winning, there’s a lot less motivation to play later in the week. It also doesn’t hurt that there was new PVE content to do as an alternative to such a miserable WvW week.

I imagine that we would have been busting our tails to catch NSP, though, if anyone had given warning that we’d wind up in T8 otherwise.

My first thought for this was to keep a rating system, but normalize the scores every week to keep a fixed difference in the average score between all adjacent tiers. That would get rid of the chance element which results in semi-random gap distribution for the middle ranks, and bad artifacts on the low end that allow tier 8 to fall 330 average below tier 7.

However, if they wanted to go for a simpler solution, I’d still prefer winner up, loser down to what we have today. Every team in the middle 20 would see 2 new opponents every week, and the ratings would be completely irrelevant. Perhaps they would live on as a means of seeding green/blue/red within each tier, but they wouldn’t have any affect on gameplay. I think it’d be interesting to see more mobility in the matchups.

There is no fixing tier 8 without fixing the rating system. The key is that the point gaps between tiers are left up to chance, and not rebalanced each week as part of the new ordering.

If they had fixed that alone, then SF would have risen up in the next week, and we’d find out pretty quickly against their new opponent(s) whether ET and FC really need the population help or not (though I suspect yes). Anyway, to clarify my point #2 above, if I were doing it, I would have implemented the rating fix first and then waited a couple or three weeks to see if population transfers to ET and FC were needed as well.

It really doesn’t help anything to open up the population transfers without fixing the fundamental issue first. You have the exact same math problem as before, and now a few new problems as well. (I.E. SF will have even more trouble escaping 8 now, and tier 7 which was fine before is now imbalanced as well.)

Nice to hear that you got some new folks down there. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see SF rocket up through the ranks if they break out. It’s just ridiculous that they have to work that hard, though, without getting any tier increases to show for it.

I’m amazed that nothing has been done about the ratings system for tier 8 yet. The math is fundamentally broken for the following reasons:

1. rating points within each tier are almost entirely a zero-sum game
2. the farther above the tier average a team gets, the harder it is to take even more points from the other teams
3. the delta between tier 7 and tier 8 is over 50% higher than any of the other tier gaps

All of these things together make tier 8 essentially a black hole, that is impossible to escape without ridiculous victories week after week after week. It probably didn’t start out that way, but the tier averages have shifted around since launch as a result of teams moving up & down, and this is what we’re left with today. Take a look at the current scores for tier 8:

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

As of this writing, SF has more points than the other two teams combined, and yet is on track to lose 50+ rating points this week because they aren’t beating ET and FC hard enough.

To further illustrate, take a look at last week’s average rating for each tier, along with the delta to the next higher tier:

tier average delta
1 2170.63 —
2 1966.56 204.08
3 1789.33 177.23
4 1622.01 167.32
5 1401.75 220.25
6 1233.47 168.29
7 1062.41 171.06
8 730.90 331.50

The gap from 8 to 7 is over 50% higher than any of the other gaps.

Based on this analysis, and on personal experience, I’m really disappointed in the recent server transfer policy as well. In addition to doing nothing to solve the fundamental math problem, the allowance of transfers into tier 7 has damaged the population balance there as well (in what was previously the most balanced tier.)

Fixing tier 8 would have taken exactly two steps:

1. Normalize ET and FC upward by ~165+ points each, to improve the tier 8 average to 840+. I know this is unprecedented, but if you want to keep the current rating formulas, that’s pretty much the only way to make it reasonable to move between 7 and 8 (without 8 being the kiss of death.) This is the difference between theory and practice: the ratings system is fine in theory, but in practice it leaves the gaps between tiers entirely to chance, which has resulted in the 3rd tier 8 team being unfairly punished. The correct response is to fix the problem, and move on. (Bonus points if you can invent a method to keep the gaps between tier averages permanently normalized, going forward.) This is a “learning experience”.
2. Allow free server transfers to ET and FC only. The current policy could even make things worse for tier 8, before all is done. Considering that the transfer policy does nothing to fix the tier 8 math problem, if I were down there it would be entirely rational to escape from 8 to 7 if given a chance like this.

If any tier 8’ers are taking the jump to 7, flip a coin and come to NSP or GOM — HOD already got a ton of folks, and I’d love to see some balance come back into 7 again.

I’ve played two subscription games before, which were massively different in implementation of the concept:

1. In Dark Age of Camelot, you could build a character to max level and have them fully geared within a single digit number of weeks playing casually, and in under a week if you were focused on it. The reason to stay subscribed was that once you were geared, you were basically done with grinding — you could participate in the PVP endgame which was the whole point of the game. Perhaps some people saw gaining RVR ranks as a “grind”, but fighting other players to advance (somewhat in stats/abilities, but mostly in prestige) is hardly comparable to killing the same NPC over and over again as in other MMO’s. Which brings me to…

2. WOW. All the people I’ve seen complaining about subscription games seem to be complaining about WOW or WOW-influenced systems, where there is no endgame “plateau” that is fun in and of itself. Everything is a progression, and has to be rate limited, random chance limited, etc. to keep people “hooked” and ever getting to a steady state. I did that for a bit, and got absolutely sick of it. Very pretty game, fun gameplay, but horribly repetitive and sadistic progression design.

The benefit of a subscription game is that they actually have money to spend on development and support. Specifically support — I am continually disgusted with the level of cheating / exploiting that is ingrained in the culture of GW2, since there is absolutely no one actively trying to enforce otherwise. In DAOC you could /appeal and get a response FAST if it were something really bad; they cared about the integrity of the game. Not so with F2P — as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Exploits go on for days, weeks, even months, with no repercussions for abusers.

There are opportunities for a happy medium, like in Eve. You can pay for a subscription, or you can play enough to trade in-game resources for a subscription time token purchased by someone else. Tradeable subscription time is their version of gems, for people who want to advance faster (or alternately, play for free). It’s a simple and elegant solution that doesn’t even require a cash shop.

Why am I not still playing Camelot? I’d love to be, except:

1. When EA bought Mythic, they put it on life support. For example, they actively went in and broke the website where you could check your daily, weekly, lifetime etc. progress relative to all other players, and then they didn’t care enough to revert to the prior code which actually worked.

2. Due to the amount of time since the last active work on the game, and flagrant neglect (see 1), the population is dwindling way down. This I wouldn’t mind since the one server still remaining at the time I last played still had enough folks to keep things fun, but the Camelot Herald breakage was the real dealbreaker for me.

Almost all other 80 exotic jewelry takes 1 orb per jewel, and 5 jewels per item, for 5 orbs total. Passiflora takes 15 flowers per jewel, for 75 flowers total.

If they fixed the flower ingredient to be one per jewel, rather than 15, the prices would drop to perhaps double that of the other jewelry. This would be the easiest fix, but each flower is still 8-10x more expensive than the most demanded orb on the TP.

I believe they put so many in the recipes because they didn’t include lower tiers of passion flowers for making the 80 fine / masterwork / rare versions. Those recipes also take flowers, but a smaller number. To make that work, though, the flowers have to be vastly more common than they are now. Right now the TP shows over a 100x difference in the cost of ruby orbs versus passiflora, for a single jewelry item. (6.6 bid x 5, versus 52.1 bid * 75).

This is not to call out HOD in general. GOM is my home, and if someone were doing it on my server, I’d want to know too.

I’m sure that most people would not want to benefit from what a few are doing, and have their conduct called into question as well. Making people aware that this is happening lets them watch out for this kind of thing from their own teammates, and blacklist / shame the ones at fault. (At least until AN kicks them to the curb, hopefully.)

Thanks for posting the guild tag as well, I didn’t have an opportunity to get that information. I was watching it as a couple of my friends were trying to defend Sunny (they were busy with that and obviously couldn’t say anything here at the time.)

I wish they could do this and make it retroactive.

Black Lion kits were a terrible choice for salvaging these, by the way, based on market prices at the time. Using gold to buy gems, each kit costs 22-27s. BL kits don’t make sense unless the extra ectos (about 15% more) and salvaged gems (20% of the value of the salvaged ingredient) are worth more than that, and they’re clearly not in this case.

Sounds like sour grapes to me. The new recipes, through lack of foresight by the developers (forehead smack deserved) caused a change in valuation of a previously inexpensive item (mithril) which could now be converted into ectos. The early discoverers of this saw an obvious spread in the market between the old value of mithril and what the real value should be given the recipe, and bought as much of it as possible until the market caught up. When I looked at this recipe last night (I was not an early adopter), ectos were selling for ~ 24s and the expected cost per make was something around 19s, which would require a salvage value of 22.35s to break even when reselling the outputs.

In other words, it took less than 24 hours for the market to adjust to the new valuation of ingredients that the recipe enabled (mithrils more expensive, ectos cheaper) and the only people who made money were the ones who knew about it before the prices moved to their new points. That is a benefit of “exploring” new content before anyone else, but the same thing happens when new patch notes come out — predicting market trends and acting on them will make you money. This will always be true.

Since the new equivalency between mithril and ecto seems to have been unintended, the market looks to gradually be returning to where it was before. But I don’t see anything wrong with people buying low and selling high, that’s what the market is there for and the profit opportunities from such events only happen for a very short time before the TP adjusts. Crafting & salvaging is not an exploit unless the item is very, very obviously mispriced (like the cultural weapons in the first week).

Account bound would far more reasonable.

A little google searching found the skin for this, The Hunter of Rage:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/65125-pvp-steel-plated-sniper-rifle-skin-found/

I was disappointed that they removed the vendor as well. I wanted to get a couple of those, but now there is absolutely no point in my ever returning to that stupid island.

It would be worth visiting if they had left in that exotic accessory for 1k karka shells, but it’s gone now. I was planning to buy some shells to get a couple of those accessories, but then they nuked the NPC in last night’s “no content changed” (cough) update.

got back into one, join on me! and leave please after.

was it all servers or just one? if anyone is still in an event server let us know!

please leave party after guesting over so others can join too!

/join asilithiel, we’re working our way into the hive right now, have a lot of folks already.

On the topic of spawn camping — I thought GOM had a really nice setup last week when we blocked BP into their border keep, while a much smaller group of ours retook their structures. It didn’t start out as a plan, but we happened to have both the numbers to hold them in for a while, and the roaming team(s) who were able to do the back captures. It was pretty cool when it actually worked.

I’m looking forward to learning more tactics “the hard way” in WvW. I’ve never seriously considered transferring to a higher bracket — I like having no queue time, and the ability to make mistakes from time to time (or a lot!) without getting completely stomped for it..

Khronus, have you thought about putting together a GOM alliance for folks whose guilds do a fair amount of WvW? If they work like alliances in DAOC, the ability to chat with folks not in your current map could be pretty useful.