Guild Wars 2

Rhino, you marked this as solved… how did you solve it? Also, if that assert command is giving you trouble, pull off the port number. It should just be Gw2.exe -assetsrv 62.154.232.187 Not that this helped me…

Palleon, the problem is that it’s worth $5-10, not $20+. It’s absolutely ridiculous that a whole new account with the extra features is cheaper than the features themselves as an upgrade. Do they really want me to abandon my whole account just to get the new features at the current price? Lots of awesome account bound stuff, but if you want to upgrade the account it’s attached to, you can go kitten yourself, apparently.

Try putting in a ticket. Maybe it can be refunded or merged… I’m frustrated that they didn’t put the sale up for existing customers at all =/

Is it currently cheaper to buy a whole additional account that includes the deluxe content than it is to upgrade my existing account? I know it’s to pull in new customers, but I feel like it’s crazy not to drop the price for existing customers down to at least the new account cost. =/

phys.7689:

tolunart.2095:

phys.7689:

and this is the key factor you guys just dont understand. Some people dont want to be merchants. Saying that people should just be merchants shows you there is a problem. Unless you play the merchant game, you are at a distinct disadvantage. You basically have a class disparity that comes down to merchants, and the top teir grinders coming out as the upper class.

Wanze and others have been explaining this for as long as people have been complaining about the TP. What you don’t understand is that this is not a problem.

Everyone has the opportunity and the choice to go for instant gratification and minimal interaction with the TP, or to play the TP to get the most out of it. Just like any other aspect of the game.

I don’t run dungeons. Dungeons provide a lot of loot, as well as items that are unique and can only be obtained through them. But I’m not going to demand that they do away with dungeons or give me the things I can get from them without actually going into the dungeons. Other players are not doing anything wrong by running dungeons. Dungeons are not bad.

There’s nothing wrong with the TP as it is, and players make the choice for themselves whether to use it or not. That some choose not to make use of it does not make it wrong, or broken. There is nothing that can be done, nothing that needs to be done, if players choose not to get involved with the TP.

so basically you are saying its good design to have 90% of high end items be obtained primarily through one mode of play 3-10 times faster than any other. Which is not even the prime demographic of the game.

So to be clear, you believe and understand that tp merchanting is and should be the primary method of obtainining most (not all) endgame items?

It’s not that it should be, it’s that it can be. For anyone. You play how you do, and others play how they do, and the TP normalizes most prices, and everyone progresses at the rate of their play regardless of how fast others do.

Behellagh.1468:

Take that Berserker Staff. It was more expensive Feb 1, 2013 than Apr 1, 2014. Same is true with most of the other rare staves you listed. So it’s easy to cherry pick a start and end data, not saying that you did. That’s why you look year over year.

Thanks, I’m happy to see someone with some economics knowledge in here. I chose my timeframe based on cutting off the very beginning of the data, where the markets initially normalised, and the last end-of-month before the most recent patch, where we’re still normalising. Also, I believe that all timeframes are arbitrary, but you’re right that years look less suspicious. To be honest, your data is much closer to what I was expecting.

Snow, I’d love to hear how you feel about my statements.

tolunart.2095:

This means that supply and demand do not change equally for MF-fodder and precursors. Supply of rare staves goes up faster than demand, while demand for the Legend goes up faster than supply. This leads to a shift in prices and a precursor that costs more than the components that create it. If it continues, the price difference becomes great enough that more people buy staves to throw in the MF and the gap begins to close as demand for rare staves increases.

Well, wouldn’t an increase in the supply of rares decreases the cost of throwing them at the MF, increasing the profitability of creating them, thus increasing the number of people making them?

I think that this gap just comes down to faith and volume. Most people don’t trust the MF, which adds a huge aversion factor in the market. The second problem is that not enough people have the gold to throw enough thousands of gold at the MF to offset the statistical probability involved.

In this case, I think that more people with huge amounts of gold should actually reduce the wealth gap. More gold means spreading out risk more, which means more investments in the precursor market. This would increase the supply of precursors and increase the amount of gold made from selling those rares.

munkiman.3068:

If you’re asking if the cost of rare 75-80 (lets say staves) are going up relative to the cost of The Legend, then no, no they are not. You need 4 staves to toss in the forge for a chance at The Legend.

I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say here. Yes, each attempt takes 4 items, but then the average number of attempts is something like 100-200, making it 400-800 items to make one.

Anyway, after I posted last time, I realized I can run the numbers myself. So I’m looking at the price difference between (YYYY-MM-DD) 2012-11-01 and 2014-04-01. I am using GW2Spidey’s numbers, and using only the “daily moving average” number so that we get less spikey numbers, and I’m using the sell price, since it’s the instant gratification price. The items I chose are just randomly chosen staves that are rare, lvl75+, that have enough history.

The Legend started at 368g, ended at 819g, a 122.55% inflation.
Rampager’s Soft Wood Staff of Bloodlust: 23.63s and 46.62s, a 97.3% inflation.
Rampager’s Krait Crook: 26.73s, and 53.69, a 100.86% inflation.
Carrion Flame Staff of Air: 38.69, and 50.04, a 29.33% inflation.
Cleric’s Soft Wood Staff of Energy: 23.78, and 43.49, a 82.88% inflation.
Berserker’s Soft Wood Staff of Restoration: 23.55, and 45.44, a 93% inflation.

The average % of inflation across the items there is 80.67%

So, across 17 months, The Legend has experienced an inflation that is higher by 40% compared to that sample of weapons that can be MFed into it. That’s about 50% more inflation.

The question is, is this a problem with excessive demand by overly rich TP barons, or is it just not enough people are willing to throw things into the lovingly dubbed Mystic Toilet?

I’m pretty sure nobody is arguing IF there is a wealth disparity… Or at least they shouldn’t be. The real question is if it matters.

I’m going to use a couple economic terms: “nominal price” which means the value of an item without accounting for inflation, and “real price” which means the price adjusted for inflation.

So, on the argument of “well, inflation gives me a moving target”, what I have to say is that inflation also gives you a moving profit. A lot of the gold you make from just regular play is from selling items. Sell them on the TP, and as inflation brings up nominal prices, inflation brings up your nominal profits, and the real profit is the same.

Yes, I recognize that not everything inflates at the same rate, but that’s going to be the case with or without flippers and barons.

There is some talk about precursors. I’m not trying to get a precursor yet, but I did some quick research to get a reasonable grasp on it. So, precursors can be “crafted” in the slot machineMystic Forge. This is done using weapons of level 75 and higher. If someone converts these weapons into a precursor, they are increasing the demand for those weapons. Consequently, the price goes up for the weapons and the crafting materials for those weapons. Proportionally. This means that casual players who get the weapon drops and sell or salvage them (and sell the mats) are making more nominal gold than before the precursor was crafted.

The higher the price for the precursors go, the more profitable it is to create more, and the more likely people are to create them, and the higher the nominal prices for the mats go, and the higher the nominal profits for the casuals go.

This applies to all of the high-end craftable and salvageable items.

I think this is verbose enough to leave it here.

Edit: Since there is a sort of “what information should we test with the data” question… I think it would be very relevant to know if this is accurate. Does the inflation of precursors, etc, follow in line with everything else? Especially with the things that are pre-precursors and pre-precursor crafting mats?

One potential reason for changing them to outfits for future compatibility and development reasons is if the devs want to create sets of clothing that don’t have to take other pieces into account at all. If all town clothes that couldn’t be converted to skins for one armor class or another became either a tonic or an outfit, there becomes zero conflict issues to resolve between outfit items. This means faster development and massively greater flexibility (on the dev side). An extreme, and terrible, example of this would be a giant chicken suit or… like… maybe a Taimi’s mech outfit?

IF that is the intention, then allowing for town clothes customization as it was before would create a whole additional tab for “customizable outfits”, which would both be excessive and take more time than it is worth.

This is just speculation about the reasons for their decision, of course, but I think that it’s possible we will all be happier with getting a much higher volume of much more unique outfits.

But hopefully no giant chicken suits!