Character progression for most of us, who are now in the end game stage, is the goal of obtaining ascended gear. I am a casual player and I used to invest 1 hour a day doing my dailies and on weekends I spend my time in WVW and completing Living World contents. I soon came to realize that, such routine has brought me little progess in achieving my goal of getting ascended items. I hate grinding for materials. I’m sure the repetition in real life (eg. jobs, study) is enough for most of us and the last thing, the majority of us want is to slave away grinding for materials in a virtual world. And ANET is well aware of this I am sure, so this is where, the trade post comes into play.
Issues
As of this moment, 800 gems would get us about 45 gold and I am an unlucky player, I have never gotten a drop worth more than 10 g on the TP, so 45 gold is a great deal for me. 45 gold is enough to buy mats to get one to the level 500 in crafting and fund half of the mats needed to craft an ascended weapon. This is the power of 10 dollars in the real world. I have a job and an hour of work would enable me to safe hours and hours of grinding in this game. So if this was ANET’s initial intention, I would say they have successfully convinced me to purchase gems.
I have always love ANET’s concept of purchasing cosmetic items using gems but to purchase mats as well, it is basically telling the players that half the cost of an ascended gear can (or more in a more practical term, should) be purchased through gems. Let’s not even talk about legendaries here. Inflation in gw2 has been so bad, I do not feel its worth running the fractals anymore. 2 hours doing PVE in the fractal awards me with 1+ gold and probably 1+ gold worth of mats and ANET has given me a reason not to do this. I do occasionally run fractals, but only just for breaking routine and never for farming mats.
I love WvW and I never think of it as grind. It is slightly more dynamic in some sense because its PVP. However, amount of mats rewarded in WvW has not change even with the introduction of ascended gears. To put this into perspective, this is the amount of certain materials one will need for a tailor full set ascended gear.
(Reference from Dulfy.net)
1440 wool scrap
720 cotton scrap
1440 linen scrap
10800 silk scrap
I am sure ANET’s intention here is to create a new end game objective for players who hit the cap and they want this to be a LONGGGGGGGGGGGG term objective. But to most players, we want it ASAP. So the grind begins, and for those who cannot afford gems, they grind hopelessly away for that 10800 silk scrap, 1440 linen scrap and so on. Demand for mats increase, prices shoot up, gold loses its value and gems take over.
Solutions and Ideas
1. Reduce the dependency on raw mats for ascended items. Enable tokens to buy materials need for ascended gears. This will stop inflation from going out of hand. A good example is the ascended accessories and trinkets.
2. Another option is to increase the drop rate for materials. At level 80, I would think getting 720 cotton scrap would be more challenging than 10800 silk scrap. In WVW, please increase the variety and amount of mats in a loot bag.
3. Rather than having a seperate set of ascended gear, it would be nice if we can upgrade our exotic sets to ascended gears. Maybe introduce a little cosmetic upgrade as well (eg. fractal back piece). It would be dull to see everybody in the same ascended gear.
