Guild Wars 2

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

Actually, quite a few people who make a lot of gold make it through speculation. I know people who bought 15k mystic coins at 1.5s, when they’re sitting around 15s now. But anyone can do that and the rate of gold increase is the same (percent-wise) if you spend 10g or 100g.

But, interestingly, there’s an upper limit to how much of that you can do, because no one ever wants to put all their eggs in one basket and while you can probably buy 100g worth of toymaker tonics, you can’t buy 1000g worth. Why not? Because there aren’t that many on the market.

Sure, people do market manipulation too, but not on a scale of thousands, which is what we’re talking about here. You can flip your way into hundreds of gold, but after that, the time investment becomes prohibitive. You can market manipulate with hundreds of gold, maybe, but again, after that the cost becomes prohibitive.

EDIT: Also, a fun thing to do when people are actually manipulating the market, not just speculating on it, is to just dump all your stocks of whatever they’re manipulating, because real manipulation comes at a dramatic crash and if you can sell enough to the manipulator at the inflated prices he sets, you can basically steal his profits away from him.

Ehhhhh, yeaaaaah. I don’t really understand how something like that can get through unless people are overworked and making more mistakes than normal, or there’s not a good QA team to notice these things.

But so long as I don’t know why these mistakes are happening, I’m not going to call people lazy or bad at their jobs. I make mistakes when I’m overworked, but I should never be overworked. If I’m being overworked, even if I haven’t yet introduced, say, a gamebreaking bug, something has already gone wrong.

I don’t know where the tooltip text is located relative to “what does the tooltip actually do”, because it’s also possible that bad architecture has messed things up so that it shouldn’t be difficult to do, but is. Which, you know, sloppy and bad form. But apportioning blame doesn’t help, and speculating doesn’t even really do anything either.

I’m just gonna say, as you say, “it makes the game look unpolished, it looks unprofessional, and it’s really not helpful because it’s fixing one bug while making another. It needs to be fixed and things like this need to stop happening.”

There’s no way I can know exactly what caused it to happen, and finding that out isn’t my problem. That’s ANet’s problem, and they should figure it out and fix dumb embarrassing stuff like that (and like the other dumb embarrassing stuff like “giver gear doesnt work at all”).

Cooking, Artificing, Armor skills (leather, tailor, armor), Jeweler, Weapon Skills (weaponsmith, huntsman)

In roughly that order. Cooking needs some silver, but can be done with a lot of karma to skip expensive recipes. I didn’t use vanilla at all when I leveled mine.

use www.gw2spidy.com

Latorn.4209:

Because for some strange reason they decided to make us have essentially two separate characters in one (by separating SPvP and PvE). I will never understand that decision, and that’s why I just steer clear of SPvP in general and stick to WvW.

It’s so new players aren’t at a disadvantage in sPvP, and coincidentally means that you can try out different builds and rune sets for free. IIRC, In GW1, they were literally two separate characters, using two separate character slots.

I’d like more rewards from PvP into PvE, but I think it’s fair that PvP stuff is not affected by any PvE stuff.

Also, unless you’re willing to break the EULA and risk getting banned to do something that’s definitely shady at best and borderline criminal at worst, it’s nothing like a car lot or furniture store because

you can’t buy those items anywhere else.

How do you know a shady car salesman is cheating you? Because two blocks over there’s another car salesman selling his goods for a fraction of the price.

For obvious reasons, ANet has a monopoly on Guild Wars 2 cash shop stuff. If you want something from the cash shop, you have to buy the game, buy the gems (with gold or real money), and then buy the items from their store.

This isn’t a case of “Amazon’s selling GW2 character slots for 400 gems instead, but ANet’s telling me that 600 gems is a good deal.”

I mean, personally I think it’s because there’s a pressure (real or imaginary) there that’s driving them to put out new content (lost shores, fractals, all the temporary event activities from Halloween and Wintersday), comparatively worthless content (PvP balance stuff, but then, who am I to say that my wants are more important than a PvPers), or reactionary content (“you guys complained about dungeons so we’re gonna spend a month reworking them”, “you guys complained about drop rates so we’re gonna spend a month making a new way to get the item you want”, fractals + fractal fixes).

And that pressure might be “players are leaving because there’s no endgame” or “we’re not making enough money compared to how much we’re spending on X and someone thinks this bad idea is really a good idea” or even “well the people who spend thousands of dollars on this game are asking for this feature”. Or it might be something else, who knows.

I really do think ANet needs to fix up existing content instead of trying to throw in new, flawed content, over and over again. But they seem set on adding new content instead (the event page has a thing on the top that implies monthly content updates), which, well.

I think it’s a bad call.

John, I actually have a question I’m curious about:

Do you guys ever randomly pick characters with a lot of gold and spot-check them in the logs (or look at their TP stuff) to see what they’re doing to make that profit? That seems like it’d be a pretty interesting thing to do, and would also be really telling in seeing what sorts of things are profitable/seeing exactly what market niches exist and at what rate of return.

I don’t think you understand the difference, back-end effort-wise, between “make a new thing and make it good and set a price point” versus “push a button to set a discount on this item”.

It’s not an either-or situation. ANet SHOULD add better things to the cash shop to make it more appealing. ANet SHOULD add new items with new functionality.

But the fact that they ARE discounting existing items doesn’t mean they chose to do it INSTEAD of adding new stuff.

It’s easy to think of a company as one entity, and in most cases they pretty much are, but there’s a distribution of resources here that I don’t think you understand. The people who make new items are not the people who program new zones are not the people who determine pricing.

On the forum for the site I work at, I watched some customers throw a fit because our company was “sending people to conferences instead of fixing bugs”. My thoughts to that? “That’s stupid. I’m not being sent to conferences, I’m fixing other, more important bugs.”

ANet should do both. The fact that they do one but not the other doesn’t mean they chose to do one instead of the other. It means that they should really do the thing that they didn’t do. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do whatever it is they’re doing.

I’ve been running fractals since they came out too. I’ve done a full run maybe 50-100 times, total, and I haven’t noticed anything, so… I don’t know what to tell you.

“The chances went down over the last 5-10 times I did it, I’m sure, and my friends say so too” isn’t exactly compelling data when it’s not true for me or any of my friends. At that point, it becomes a worthless hearsay argument on both sides.

Regarding the grawl fractal boss – are you sure? You guys were in the middle of combat with it and it reset while you were actively hitting it, you’re sure. Because I’ve not once seen that happen. I’ve seen the shaman reset (only when I’m in a really bad group) multiple times, sometimes multiple times in a single fight, but I’ve never seen it reset because of a bug or during actual combat.

(Exotics being account-bound is incredibly weird. I’m still trying to decide if I want to forge or salvage them. _)

Mahaedros.7085:

I really like playing MMORPGs. I feel that the companies that make MMORPGs would benefit tremendously from providing value for their loyal fan base rather than using the marketing tactics other companies use, in order to make a buck in the short term.

Steam did not make an MMORPG that I bought after the company that made the MMORPG said it was going to be a different and revolutionary experience. WalMart did not make the MMORPG I bought either…nor did Target or the Gap or any other sleazy retailer that has no problem screwing over anyone from their employees to their customers.

What do you think about Steam? They’ve certainly generated a lot of hype and maybe even profit with their limited time duration discount sales. Ask yourself if the people who buy these games at a discount would have paid full price for the game. Same goes for the cash shop- if you want to pay for something and the lower price is the determining factor, why make it only available for a brief time?

that’s the “Take Away”

Sure every major retailer employs this manipulative practice.

I don’t want to see it in the MMORPG I play.

You are fine with it?

Actually, almost all of the games I buy off Steam are games I wouldn’t have been willing to pay full price for, so… I don’t really understand your argument here. Sometimes I’m disappointed that I wasn’t awake or paying attention when a sale happened that I might have been interested in, and sometimes other people are sad when they buy something and it goes on sale a month later.

I don’t think that means Steam is cheating me. I think it means that they’re trying to adjust their prices, temporarily, for me in the hopes that they’ll finally find a price for their item that makes me happy enough to buy it.

Ideally, they’d just offer all the games for free and I’d be able to get all of them without having to pay. But I don’t really expect that to happen, nor am I going to feel cheated if they give someone else something for free because that someone else was paying attention when I had better things to do. Someone else benefitting from something doesn’t hurt me, so why would I feel cheated?

Did ANet ever promise that they were going to continually drop gem prices for items? Because I don’t see any promises being broken here. Just because GW2 is different in one way doesn’t mean it’s obligated to be different in another way.

…Are we talking about the same thing here?

Chests aren’t affected by DR and they aren’t affected by magic find. I’ve done only maybe 5-10 runs in the last few weeks, but I haven’t noticed any changes at all. All my rares have been from chests. All my cores have been from chests. Using a magic find build on the trash mobs (grawl shamans, dredge), I’ve gotten a fair number of the heavy bags that are all I’ve ever gotten from them.

I’ve been a little unlucky with salvaging ectos out of those rares I got, but then, sometimes I salvage one and get 3, so I don’t know how the numbers work out for that.

What’s your sample size?

You guys are seriously out for blood.

What about the people who QA’d it, and let it slip through testing? What about the person who designed it in the first place (for cases like Lyssa runes coming in Karma armor)? What about the person who made a comment on the forums that got misinterpreted in a way that turned out to be false?

How do you think they should be held accountable, exactly?

EDIT: ^^^ Did it actually bug or did you guys stop attacking it and it reset because it went out of combat? I’ve never seen the former, but I’ve seen the latter quite often, which is usually when most of the party is dead and one guy’s running around ressing people and no one’s keeping aggro on the boss.

Are we talking about dungeons or fractals? You appear to be saying “i ran highlevel fractals with an inexperienced team and got beat down”, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

How much reward do you think would be fair for a 30-minute dungeon run? More than 1 gold? More than 2? I think CoF and AC already give 1g/run and CoF path 1 at the least can be done in 10-15 minutes with an experienced party.

Also I haven’t done FotM in days, but when I last did 20 the loot seemed fine – I got several rares and probably a core, as well as the standard relics + ring token + a bad ring.

Tailoring:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/2157 (use buy orders to get your insignias for 10c instead of 15c, then sell to vendor instead of on market to save on trade post fees)

Cooking:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/6471

Armorsmith:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/522 (use buy orders for the insignia)

Artificing:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/4221 (nope, this one actually looks like a loss, but it takes 25-30 crafts to get out of that range, and at a loss of 10-20c per craft, you’re talking maybe 5 silver for 25 crafting levels, at most, assuming you can’t gather your own carrots or t1 dust because it’s too difficult and you don’t have any already)

Huntsman:
huntsman and weaponsmithing are the hardest crafts to level cheaply
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/4508 would probably be your bet bet

Weaponsmith:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/6058 or http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/6889

Jeweler:
Yeah, lowlevel jewelry recipes are tough too but it gets easier at higher levels.
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/3566 (pretty lossy, you’d probably want to gather the mats yourself)

Leatherworker:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/1274

unless you mean level 25-requirement gear, which is level 75 crafting level:

Armorsmithing:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/437
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/274 (not gear, but profitable if you dont want to craft armor, just want to level up)

Artificing:
(no gear, just ways to level past that block)
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/3876
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/3851

Huntsman:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/4487

Jeweler: (no gear, you’d have to take a loss and make it up on a different level if you’re set on profit)
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/3400

Leatherworker:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/1147
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/1121 (only level 23, but quite profitable)

Tailor:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/2833

Weaponsmith: (no gear that’s profitable for level 75 crafting level, you’d have to eat a loss or use other items)
http://www.gw2spidy.com/recipe/5385

EDIT: Since you asked what you should do:

You should probably look into what available crafting recipes there are, as well as check which recipes are profitable. You should gather mats when convenient and use buy orders to get materials and sell orders (or the vendor) to dispose of your finished product. The game is not actually going to pay you to gain crafting levels and experience levels as fast as possible – if you want to make profit, you’ll want to do research.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/

Do you think the Steam flash sales over the last few weeks were “cheap, sleazy, under-handed, manipulative”? Some of them only lasted for six hours.

My parties usually DPS the early part (the first ranged spawn plus its trash, then usually 1-2 of the following silver ranged spawns). By the time we start getting overwhelmed, there’s usually only 40% left, at most, and it’s not nearly as hard to kite for the remaining time, because there’s significantly fewer mobs trying to chase you for not as long.

Make sure you call targets.

800g is too low. First off, someone getting one at 800g will flip it at the current 2000 to 3000 market price. Second off, it costs at least 600g to get the gold-only mats, possibly more (I don’t know remember what prices are at right now).

Buy orders are commonly at 2000, and when they pass 2500, someone almost always fills the order.

I’ve seen quite a few people successfully making legendaries TO sell, as a group or guild. Everyone pools their money and sends the mats to one player with the accountbound requirements complete already. I did the math and at 2500, it values the accountbound items (world exploration, karma, skill points, dungeon tokens) at about 1000 gold, maybe a little less.

The supply is going to outpace the demand, though, so I’m expecting the price to drop. It’s safest to fill a buy order, but buy orders have been hitting 2500 on a regular basis, so.

I’d say no less than 2500, but you should definitely be able to sell at 2000. Find out the market price on the buyable mas, remove those from the total, remove 15% from the listing price (so 300 gold if you sell at 1700), and use that to calculate what you’re selling your time (one of your two gifts of exploration, the karma, the skill points, the dungeon tokens, etc) for.

Unless you’re doing Arah, you can do dungeon builds perfectly fine in magic find yellows, which power-wise are probably not much better than level-appropriate greens. Also, most of your gold income should be from selling mats you’ve looted.

At level 80, level-appropriate blues are ~.6-1s, and level-appropriate greens are 1.3-2s, selling to the vendor. Level 80 trophies are 16c per and sometimes drop in sets of 2. This will be the bulk of the “cash” you get from vendors, while everything else (crafting mats, mostly) should be sellable on the TP for various prices. Events are worth 1s each in lowlevel zones and 1.9s each in level-appropriate zones.

Dungeons are 26s per run, plus 60 tokens (level 70+ dungeons sell rares for 30 (I think?) tokens each that can be salvaged for ectoplasm, worth 27s each right now), plus pretty decent loot (rare crafting mats like Lodestones or Cores).

And yes, you can get a full set of exotics for 42k karma per piece, you can get a full set of exotics from dungeon tokens, and you should still be able to buy exos off the TP for what, 2g per? Maybe 4g at the most, if prices have changed.

You’ll be fine. Gold income picks up really quickly once you’re 80, and using 2s greens from the TP (or 30s yellows) won’t make you too weak compared to everyone else.

I assume they’d disappear.

…But does anyone know if you’ll still be able to buy wintersday weapons with a wintersday weapon claim ticket, after the event ends? I have a spare ticket but don’t know what I want yet.

Well, there will always be players who have more gold than other players.

Do you think we should nerf drop rates after X amount of hours, to limit how much gold players can farm in a certain amount of time? Or take items away from players who have a lot of gold?

If not, then what can you really do about it?

Awesome.6120:

Arekai.5698:

Great, i wanted the princess one and tried it like 20 tries, nothing, nada. wasted like 3-4G for this bullkitten.

Last time I checked it was like 4g per attempt. I will leave you to your own depressing math on how much you actually wasted.

When did stuffing + glue hit 4 silver each?

Have you tried doing things that aren’t grinds? Like using temporary bells, making 2 out of 5 pretty cool minis, or trying out a new seasonal weapon skin that’s currently selling for less than 10s?

The permanent bell needs to be reactivated every 60 seconds too, I heard. So literally the only difference in it is that you have a stack of bells that never depletes.

If each bell is one minute, than a stack of bells is four hours. At a high of 80c per bell, that’s 2 gold for more than 4 hours of playtime.

Exactly how long are people expecting to play the bells?

It’s possible to flip around events just fine. It’s less possible to manipulate (you + 50 friends buy up 5000 gold worth of gems and sell them right away for the inflated price). This is the same reason gems aren’t a commodity on the trading post. Besides the fact that it’d mean people would have to wait longer for buy/sell orders to fill, making a limited supply available on the trading post at various price points means that a group that can afford to buy them all up can spike the price for their own gain.

Urthona.3198:

Colbear.6425:

Do you think it’s unfair that casual players can’t afford the same things that hardcore players can?

I do when it is a whole different aspect of gameplay. I am not bothered that casual players can’t get Sunrise. I would be bothered if they couldn’t get greatswords at all.

This is a mini-game that a large portion of the population does not have access to. Ascended gear, even legendaries, with all their flaws, don’t bother me all that much, because they at least can be earned by pretty much anyone and are at least marginally dependent on actually playing the game rather than RNG or market manipulation. And there are non-legendary weapons and non-ascended gear. But this…this is not a good sign for where the game is headed

I don’t think it’s fair to say an unbreakable bell is an “entirely different” aspect of gameplay compared to a 30-80c consumable bell that you can either buy from the TP or get in sets of 3 on a fairly regular basis from the gifts or by trading ugly wool for it.

Certainly, if the consumable bells ever become incredibly rare, that’d be a problem, but that’s too far into the future to be assuming — by then, it’s quite possible more instruments will have been added.

The event scales up with dead players as well. If you have 10 living players and 20 fully dead players who refuse to go back to the waypoint, then it’ll be much harder than if you just had 10 living players.

Do you think it’s unfair that casual players can’t afford the same things that hardcore players can?

I’ve seen this, but it’s always cleared itself up after several seconds (as in, I open the window and it lags in loading the content). The TP window is actually similar to an ingame browser and the whole TP is web-based or something, I think, so it’d make sense that there might sometimes be lag, especially if there’s a lot of load on the servers or something.

Try switching to a different tab and waiting a little while, then switching back – that’s fixed it for me.

If you want a mindless grind, suggest “kill 10 champions to make your sword glow slightly more in the dark” instead.

Diva.4706:

No it is not cosmetic. You can buy a character. You can buy the gear. You can buy the ultimate “end game” skins. The fact you are equal power is not the point. You can be equal to another person, without even playing the game. Disappointing Arenanet, simply disappointing…

Buying gems and converting it to gold makes you, at most, as powerful as someone who has not bought gems. You can argue that it’s unfair that you can pay gold to buy items that give you better stats, or to level up a character to 80, but that’s not pay to win.

Pay to win is when the best free player (someone with skill and time) is strictly weaker (by equipment/traits/etc) than the best cash player (someone with neither skill nor time, but lots of money), usually by a significant amount, such as a 70% difference in dodge chance or a 40% difference in damage.

What we have here is that the best cash player can become exactly as powerful as the best free player.

It’s not the same.

Artemis Noir.3804:

Excepting perhaps Superior Runes of Divinity, I don’t think the BL kit is even worth it for expensive upgrades. Considering that right now 100 gems are costing upwards of 1.50 Gold it’s cheaper to chance it with 80%, and failing that, to simply buy most upgrades from the TP. If the current gem prices continue, BL kits won’t even be worth acquiring for Superior Runes of Divinity.

I really can’t think of a bigger waste of money than the BL Salvage kits.

It’s 24s for a black lion charge.

If you buy armor off the TP for 3g and it has a rune worth 4g on it, then after TP fees you’d get 3.6g for it. Therefore, you’d be making a minimum profit of 16s (minus the 20s listing fee) plus a profit from whatever ectoplasms you get from salvaging it as well.

If you get a black lion salvage kit from your daily, that 24s cost for the charge itself doesn’t apply and you make a minimum profit of 40s + whatever you get from ectos.

I’m pretty sure I’ve always averaged 0-2 from the water fractal. I got 1 from it today, which is not unusual.

Casual traders sell things they get while playing.

Farmers go out of their way to go to places with good drops, kill things there, and sell what they get.

Crafters gather crafting materials, craft items, then sell them.

Traders buy items off the tp, sometimes turn them into other items (by salvaging or crafting), then sell them and reinvest the money they got to do it again.

The black lion salvage kit is for pulling runes and sigils out of armor and weapons. It’s definitely worth the cost if you use it right.

You do know that gold sellers change their prices and if ANet ever changed their real money → gem → gold conversion significantly so that it’s really easy to buy gold for cheap, gold sellers will just make their prices cheaper, right?

“Gold sellers only charge 5 dollars for 10 gold” → “ANet charges 6 dollars for 10 gold” → “Gold sellers only charge 2 dollars for 10 gold” → “ANet charges 3 dollars for 10 gold” → “Gold sellers charge 5 dollars for 100 gold” → “ANet charges 6 dollars for 100 gold” → Inflation goes out of control becuase now ANet’s setting up a way to make currency that isn’t related to the amount of gold removed by the economy from people purchasing gems (unless you think people would ALSO be okay with “I have to pay 100 gold to get 6 dollars worth of gems”, which I promise you, they would not be).

BL salvage kits and fine transmute stones are available from black lion chests, and even though gems have gone up in price, the keys themselves are still around 70s, last I checked, so that actually keeps the price more stable for those items, at least.

Power traders do not introduce new gold into circulation, which is what he’s talking about. They contribute to the act of gold moving between players but they don’t create gold themselves. Instead, they shuffle around a lot of gold that already exists, and the 15% trading post fee (total from listing and selling) removes gold from the economy. The trading post is a gold sink. It does not create gold. It removes gold, whic causes deflation.

Gold faucets are things that introduce gold – items that are sold to the vendor, the 26s from the end of the dungeon, bags of gold, and event rewards are all gold faucets.

Also, I think the rate of making gold did change compared to what it was before and after circulation. Before, if a user farmed 20 T5 bloods, 5 event completions, and 2 rares in an hour, they would end up with (after selling the items) less gold than they would now.

Farmers who make their income through event completions and vendor items make the same amount before and after inflation. They contribute to inflation.

Farmers who make their income through T5/T6 crafting materials or rares or gathering cooking materials make more after inflation. Interestingly, they also contribute to deflation (because they sell materials through the TP).

It might be under a different name. The charr sword from Meatober had a product name that didn’t match the recipe name, when I used it.

The XP amount that pops up refers to the experience bar for your craft levels. It takes more XP to go from 120 to 121 cooking than it does to go from 1 to 2 cooking, and crafting higher-level foods gives more XP as well.

The XP you gain in your character level doesn’t pop up a number and also scales relative to your character level such that 400 crafting levels is 10 character levels (1-100 is 1, 100-200 is 2, 200-300 is 3, and 300-400 is worth 4 levels).

An index of items?

Part 1: Common Crafting Mats

Part 2: Fine Crafting Mats

Parts 1 and 2 will probably want to be further split horizontally and vertically (avg price of T1 mats vs avg price of fangs, for example), if you’re doing real stats on it.

Part 3: White, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange Weapons and Armor for levels 70-80 (their average prices)

Part 4: Generic Dropped, Crafted, Randomly Forged, Mystic Forge Fixed Recipe Exotics (later Ascendeds instead)

Part 5: Ectos

Part 6: Gems

Part 7: Consumable buffs

Part 8: Superior Runes and Sigils

Part 9: Minis

But at that point you’re basically indexing the entire set of tradable items, so.

Speculators cashing out and/or bots getting back on their feet.

Haha, Jabberwock’s got you there.

I don’t mind saying “50% off” and using a comparison to the base price of an item to get that number, but it’s pretty deceptive to do the math one way for a less desired item and then do it a different, more favorable way for a more desired item in order to make the deal look “better” than it actually is (where “actually is” refers to “how we market the deals for the other items”).

Aww, that’s really sad!

It sounds like you just need to be in a better (or more populated, anyways) guild. There’s a lot that are just for people who are looking to dungeons. There’s also www.gw2lfg.com, where I think you can post so anyone else who uses that site can see it.

Anyways, I hope you have better luck next time!

Well, why would they buy it from you instead of crafting it themselves then?

It looks like the Cleric and Knight Maces sell for profit if you sell them by using sell orders and can wait a little while for someone to buy it.

Astraea’s exactly right here. The reason there’s such a steep tax on converting gems to gold and vice versa is to prevent players from treating gems as just another commodity and shuffling it around to make profit. Which makes it easier for their stats guys to see things like “how many gems does the average player have”, “how many gems does the average player buy with gold”, etc. (And also makes it more resistant to players trying to manipulate the price.)

I’ve bought a ton of gems with gold, and I don’t have any plans on reselling them — they’re all going to go into new gem store items (once they get added) and character slots.

People buying gold from gold sellers will always happen, because gold sellers will always undercut ANet, and the only way to make the exchange rate “better” so people will buy gems for gold instead of going to goldsellers (aside from the ethical and risk factors) will be by making players willing to pay more gold for gems.

Which means making gems more expensive to buy with gold. Which means making highly-desired gem-only items. Of course, then people will complain that gems are too expensive to buy with gold, but you can’t please everyone.

It’s important that either a suggestion follow the initial “vision” the devs had OR gives an argument why it should be changed. If we want to have a conversation about “should precursors cost 150-300 hours of farming”, that’s one thing. If we want to have a conversation about “the RNG is unfair and here’s a solution that won’t fundamentally change how hard precursors are”, then we have to temporarily agree that “precursors should, for the sake of this conversation, cost 150-300 hours of farming”.

I personally think precursors should cost 50-100 hours of farming and maybe 100-200 hours on top of that to get a legendary. In fact, I would really like to have an interesting conversation with people about whether or not they should be fundamentally easier to get, and why/why not, or whether there’d be a viable way to convert the 150-300 hours of farming to 200-350 hours of playtime (such as by making everything you do be more comparable income-wise to farming Orr). More solo events in random areas would be nice, since events are worth 250 in lowlevel places and 350 in Orr, when you’re level 80, which means it’s 2/3 of the reward and if we made say, events spawn more often, that’d be kinda neat.

But I can’t say “take the RNG factor out of precursors and also let’s use this way to get them that’s coincidentally only going to take half as long” because then I’m trying to make two different arguments about two different things.

Does that make sense? It’s why “make precursors drop more often” is a different argument from “make precursors buyable with skill points” even though both of those are “solutions” to the “precursor problem”.

Also I think people don’t like expensive fixed recipes because everyone’s freaking out about the fixed recipes of named exotics costing hundreds of lodestones that are going for 1.5-2.5g each right now.

Have people changed their mind on that? I’ll be happy to revert my stance on that if you can show instances where people are satisfied with slow-but-steady progress on things, such as expensive lodestones or dungeon sets.

(Except that dungeon sets actually got changed to be easier to get because they reward 60 tokens for the first run now, instead of making you have to grind them at 20 tokens/run over and over. Which I agree with and think makes it more fun, but was definitely devs deciding to make something take less time because people didn’t want to farm for a long time to get what they wanted).