Guild Wars 2

How did Zhaitan measure the Ruins of Orr?

He just eyeballed it.

Wanze.8410:

I want mounts and capes in make over kits as well.

What about mounts with capes? Like a super horse… or something.

Cameron.6450:

I frequently sell level 40/50 fractals with the group of friends I play with, and it’s reasonably common to see people join and try to kill off the boss without paying, despite being kindly greeted with a “hello frand, pls pay to (insert character here)”, at which point they get a quick kick, and we readvertise. You also sometimes get people who are angry that people sell runs at all, who join just to rage at you and disrupt your sale, and you need to be able to get rid of them too.

So whilst it would be great to have a way to prevent scammers, especially since anet have said they won’t regulate this area of the game, I don’t see a way of doing it without causing major problems for legit runs (selling or otherwise).

Ah, okay, that makes sense. In that case, carry on providing your services, and may you make many piles of gold. I appreciate that folks like you are there should I ever need some quick dungeon tokens.

Narrrz.7532:

I think you underestimate just how many players are out there. And there are always opportunists who will exploit a system for personal gain.

Yeah, but what are people who intentionally go afk gaining by trolling a dungeon group and getting kicked? I mean, what are they gaining besides satisfying their base urge to troll? And how many times can a player get away with that before others catch on to their troll-like ways?

Jayden Ennok.3687:

So they could just shuffle from time to time and afk while rest is working their socks off? Kicking is necessary in party management and so is the ability to find someone willing and competent to fill up the party with.

I don’t dungeon very often. Are there a lot of players that troll dungeon groups like this? Seems to me they’d develop a reputation rather quickly and get on people’s kitten lists.

Bring back my kitten jumping while sleeping glitch!

Narrrz.7532:

Wolf Rayet.4073:

For those people who are concerned about the scammers, i.e. the groups that kick players at the end of a dungeon and then sell their slots, maybe Anet could block any slot that has been emptied via “kicking” from being refilled. That way only slots that were left open from the begging, voluntarily vacated or as the result of a disconnect can be filled.

Then what do you do about afkers?

Maybe they can “voluntarily” leave the party after a certain amount of time has elapsed?

For those people who are concerned about the scammers, i.e. the groups that kick players at the end of a dungeon and then sell their slots, maybe Anet could block any slot that has been emptied via “kicking” from being refilled. That way only slots that were left open from the beginning, voluntarily vacated or as the result of a disconnect can be filled.

They are permanent.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

But that’s the beauty of the free market. The time/mats to get Colossus was lower than the price of Colossus so you bought it. This means there is one less Colossus in the game now and you also didn’t create one. Now there are less on the TP, and the price is now 450g.

The next person thinks 450g is still cheaper than making it, leading the price to rise to 600g. Now someone sees that it is 600g and that is a lot more than it costs to do the scavenger hunt. They do the scavenger hunt and sell it for 550g. This price is still worth doing the hunt so someone else does it and sells it for 450g. Now we are back to stage one and it is cheaper to buy it again. This processes continues forever and regulates the price without any intervention.

Now we can apply this same concept to ALL the precursors and something even better happens.

Player 1 wants to make the legendary torch. The precursor is only 200g, but the cost to make it by the scavenger hunt is 400g. The most obvious solution is to just buy it. Player 1 is 200g poorer, but has the precursor. The less obvious and much better solution is to do the scavenger hunt for dusk which is selling for 1200g. It takes the same amount of time as the torch scavenger hunt, still costs 400g to make, but gives you 1200g when you are done. Now you put in the same amount of work as you would have for the torch, but you get the torch + 600g (1200-400-200), now you have your precursor and are 600g richer, which you can use to put towards the other components.

In addition the cost of dusk has now fallen to 1000g. But since this is the cheaper way to get the torch precursor the supply of torches starts to dry up and the price rises up to 400g. Meanwhile people keep making dusks to profit off them and dusk price falls down to 700g.

With this new system all precursors will eventually reach a much closer equilibrium point that floats around (mat cost) + (time cost), with the higher demand precursors being slightly above and the lower demand ones being slightly below.

The exception to this is the underwater precursors which no one wants which will continue to be valued at the random drop cost and not tied to either system.

Very nice post. I think people might be over complicating things. This is a free market and the various materials (whether time-gated or not) and the precursors themselves are going to find their equilibrium, and that equilibrium will automatically reflect the extra time it took to gather mats, scavenger hunt and crafting.

As you said in your post, all the precursor crafting is really going to do is bring more of a balance to the precursor market. Those pre’s that people think are overpriced will come down and those that are undervalued will go up. This will happen on its own. There will be no need for external manipulation on Anet’s part.

Even though it has the drawbacks you’ve listed, the name is too good for this to not be implemented.

Zenguy.6421:

Lol. I don’t own that market and haven’t attempted to do so. But someone else has – and very successfully. They’ve had to work hard to do that, constantly posting and reposting their buy orders, but they’ve been able to draw enormous profits out of the market as result. (I know, because I’ve been amazed at how much profit I’ve been making, even though I’ve been getting only a fraction of the supply they have and have been reposting at much lower margins than them.)

Zenguy, what I’ve bolded is the real crux of the problem. You’re not fighting against a player, you’re fighting a bot. This has been a problem with the TP since the beginning. There are 3rd party programs out there that will notify you when your buy order has been covered (gw2bltc.com, for example). I believe this data will refresh every 3-5 minutes. That’s perfectly fine and supported by ArenaNet through the API. The problem, however, is that some kittenes out there have created a macro that’s somehow always signed into their account(s) and will quickly take down all the buy orders that have been covered and then repost at 1 copper higher. A good way for you to test if this is happening is to watch one of the dyes you have a buy order on and keep hitting refresh. You’ll see how fast the bot will take their order down and then repost. It’s near instantaneous and it will be across many items. I noticed this happening a couple years ago when I was trying to flip low volume weapons and armor. There was a bot that was specifically targeting certain prefixes. I just had to give up on those items. I tried reporting a couple times, but nothing ever came of it. I’ve noticed it happening on a large range of items in the ensuing years. The speed of the reposting and the corresponding interval of time (matching the API refresh) is always the give away. Unfortunately, the only advice I can give, since ArenaNet doesn’t seem to be bothered by this behavior, is to move onto a different item. You’ll never be able to beat that bot.

Ayrilana.1396:

Only if you have a hoarding problem.

As far as caps go, I don’t see any reason that it couldn’t be increased.

I prefer to call it investing

And you’re right.

DeWolfe.2174:

I think players need to take a step back and not try to control the environment as if it’s a console game. Seeing a word and being offended is completely different than being “called” a word and being offended. Tolerance should be practiced before running to report anything in game.

Um, no. Racism, sexism and bigotry should not be tolerated. Just because your privileged kitten can’t think of a word that would be offensive to you, doesn’t mean others won’t be offended by that kitten. There should definitely be an easy way to report crap like that.

Ayrilana.1396:

What could you possibly fill 12 bank tabs with?

I can see it happening easily. I’d be in the same boat as the OP, if it didn’t go the more economical rout of buying character slots to use as mules.

OP, you should really consider using mules. Much higher space/gem ratio if you fill them up with the cheap 20-slot candy corn bags.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Of course, it’s a completely imaginary scenario, oversimplifying the entire supply of keys and demand for the contents of the chests. It wasn’t meant to “prove” anything — only to demonstrate that there are many possible scenarios and it’s too soon to speculate.

So far, I’m looking at the secondary BL chest content markets, things like backpack skins — and prices haven’t skyrocketed, which they do whenever the supply of keys drops. (They are roughly about as low as when keys were on sale for the anniversary.)

Thanks for bringing this up. After reading your post, I decided to check out Spidy to see what’s happening to the supply for the five tradable minis you can get out of the BLC’s (Holographic Scarlet, Caithe, Mai Trin, Marjory Delaqua and Kasmeer) and it does appear that there has been a significant decrease in volume (about 33%) since the nerf. I’m not sure why that’s yet to be reflected in their prices, but there are a few other secondary items that are seeing an increase in price, namely the permanent contracts, special gathering nodes and unopened endless tonics. I guess those increases might be attributable to speculators buying up what little volume there is on those particular high value items.

It is still too soon to tell, but like you said those secondary items can be a good indicator as to how many keys are dropping in the wild. Let’s see if their supply continues to drop.