Showing Posts For fang.9526:
How about “immune to critical hits” for certain mobs? That would certainly disrupt berserker meta.
You have to see the upsides. Especially for the chief. It’s an almost death profession you can learn. I really never used it. Many event buffoods cost 10% as much and are 80% as effective as the self made stuff. However discovering colors for yourself via chief will become lucrative again.
Also it’s not that big deal, I guess colors will increase for the release of the patch, then all the common colors are gonna drop again. The rare onces will be expensive as they are now and the ultra rare ones will increase to eternity.
The new equilibrium price will be higher than the old equilibrium price. This benefits suppliers, like the chef profession as you said, but suppliers benefits are far outweighed by the losses to consumers (buyers and users of dyes). Furthermore, most consumers are likely not even in the market for dyes yet, because there are likely to be many people like me who do not buy dyes on the trading post and instead get their dyes from unidentified dye drops. If these people enter the market after the patch, the price will go up even further.
You can get dyes from tradin post, from chef (making him finally more attractive again), from the laurels trader and from the mystic forge in pvp (i guess).
I guess my point was: I believe that removing unidentified dyes will vastly decrease the supply of dyes available, increase the effort of acquiring new dyes and all because dyes are becoming account-bound.
I could be wrong, but the decrease in supply should be vastly outweighing the decrease in demand from account-bound dyes and since both demand and supply will be going down, the end-result would be an increase in price and a decrease in quantity available. (Help me John Smith!)
This wardrobe and dye change was supposed to make things better, but I see it making things worse in terms of dye acquisition.
I hope this question has not been asked before, but:
How will we acquire new dyes after the update without the trading post? I guess I want some clarification as to the “certain in-game rewards”. Will these be like once a month get 1 dye? Or will it be more common? As it is, I rely on unidentified dyes to increase my dye pool and do not buy from the trading post. Will I be forced to change my habits if I want to acquire significantly more dyes?
The way it was presented makes me think that I will no longer be able to acquire dyes without paying for them on the trading post, excluding rare special occasions or using laurels or crafting (mystic forge or otherwise). I want to acquire dyes without the aforementioned.
I am having the same problem.
I have a problem with this. I get Error 7’s in the middle of the event and then can’t get back into my world (or overflow) where I was already fighting unless I happened to be in a party.
I think Error 7 or other disconnects should put you back in the same server after you reconnect. I have missed the ends of invasions several times, including getting scarlet dead with only a sliver of health left and getting dc’ed. This is very frustrating.
Inflation is of concern to economists, of course, but Mr. Smith is probably thinking of taming inflation using the selling tax as a gold sink only as a helpful secondary effect.
By far the most important reason for having a selling tax is that it helps with two major headaches in any large market – market manipulation and high volume margin trading. In other words, there are two methods of making money while playing the market – selling average quantities of goods at high prices and buying them at low prices, or, if you are rich enough, buying and selling insanely high quantities of goods over relatively minor price spans.
To illustrate – if I buy 100 units of item X for 100 gold, and then sell them for 200 gold, in the absence of a selling tax, then i have made a profit of 100 gold at prices of 1 gold per unit for buying and 2 gold per unit for selling. This is our “normal” concept of trading.
In high volume trading, I could make the same profit (100 gold) in the absence of taxes by buying 1000000 units of item X at a price of 1000000 gold and then sell them at a price of 1.0001 gold per unit (i.e. 1 gold 0 silver 1 copper) and make a profit of 1 million units x 0.0001 = 100 gold.
A selling tax makes high volume trading much more difficult and requires a much larger margin (in other words, for a million units, you would need a much larger price change than just 1 copper to make the same profit)
The result of increasing the margin is reduced arbitrage opportunities (the ability for market players to make money simply through their actions in the market without any production/playing the game on their part). It also reduces inequalities in wealth distribution, keeping prices reasonable for more players by ensuring that the incomes of a few players do not skyrocket quickly – taking all prices with them. It also has many other effects, but I just realized how long this post is getting, so I will stop here.
I am sorry you “lost” 57 gold on your transaction, OP, but if you believe that you should be earning more on your transaction, you could always try putting a higher price. If you think that is unreasonable, then you should just think that the profit you received is the “real price” of the item. That is, you are selling it for 287 gold, not 340 gold. You cannot receive 340 because that is just a pre-tax price, not the real price. You say you want direct player-to-player selling, but that leads to gold selling and other bad practices becoming easier. This being said, I agree with you that it is a pity that the tax funds then become a dead-weight loss to both consumer and seller, and I would be interested to see if there are some possible alternative uses for the tax funds by the “government” (Arenanet). On the other hand, in a virtual economy, as many others have stated, gold sinks are needed since expansion of the money supply is unlimited.
Ok, done rambling.
TL;DR John Smith is running things well. As usual. Because, you know, he’s the man and stuff.
I have my own issues with the dungeon for monthly. I have a small child and I must play schizophrenically. I cannot focus on the game for even 15 minutes at a time without having to go do something else.
Now, I am not going to suggest abolishing dungeons as OP did. However, it would be nice to have one of the two following possibilities:
1) pick and choose which monthly achievements you want (like they are already planning for dailies)
2) partial rewards for partial completion. For example, if I finish 3/4 of the monthly tiers, give me 75% of the rewards.
I guess I should clarify that I mean long-run exploration and/or non-achievement related exploration.
Thanks for the feedback. I, for one, don’t mind paying for waypoints either. This is not about whether or not paying for waypoints is a good idea or not, it is about whether the current rate structure gives an incentive to explore in an optimal way.
In other words, which do you prefer: paying less to waypoint short distances and more to move long distances or vice versa?
The argument is that paying more for short distances encourages foot traffic within a particular zone and paying less for long distances makes people more comfortable switching between zones or moving from their current zone to a dungeon or things like this.
I get that waypoint costs are trivial for some people. However, we are talking about marginal incentives here. That is, all else being equal, which rate structure would encourage players to explore more without penalizing those who really want to fast travel too much?
I propose decreasing costs to distance traveled.
In the current system, we see increasing costs to distance traveled. This discourages people from traveling to different zones, particularly if those zones are far away. This, in turn, has the effect of keeping far away, lower level zones unpopulated and frustrates people who are, for example, traveling from Orr to Frostgorge or anything of similar distance. Many people resort to using the heart of the mists as a lower cost alternative, but this also entails many loading screens and even then you will pay a cost if your final destination is not Lion’s Arch.
On the other hand, one of the stated goals of the waypoint costs system is to encourage exploration and participation in the world by making fast travel less palatable. I would argue that in fact, by using increasing costs to distance traveled, you are reducing rather than increasing exploration.
My reasoning is as follows: exploration involves two main things: 1) traveling between zones and 2) traveling within a zone. The main complaint for those who want to encourage exploration is that no one stops to “smell the roses” and everyone just skips content by traveling using waypoints. However, if you think about it, is it realistic to expect someone to “stop and smell the roses” if the distance they must travel is extremely far (such as Orr to Frostgorge)?
It seems to me that to enjoy the scenery, we should be encouraging foot travel within a particular zone and discouraging waypoint use within a zone. However, we should also be encouraging more zones to be populated by making access to them easier (and lower cost) and thereby encouraging travel between zones. By inversing the current waypoint rate scheme, we can accomplish both of these goals.
For those who are impatient and prefer not to travel by foot, they can still pay a (larger) price to move short distances (with perhaps a slight discount if they are traveling to the waypoints at the entrances/exits to a particular zone, but not as deep a discount as if they were to switch zones).
In summary:
- Invert the current waypoint rate scheme to encourage travel between zones with low waypoint costs and discourage waypoint travel within a zone (with high waypoint costs) as compared to the current system which does the opposite.
Potential Counter-arguments:
- it is inconvenient to spend a long time on foot travel
- waypoint costs discourage waypoint use just by existing (all methods have downsides – no costs, increasing costs to distance traveled and decreasing costs to distance traveled are all guaranteed to make at least someone unhappy)
I have the same problem. I have a ticket open with support about it at the moment. I was told that my RAM was insufficient and that my drivers were out of date, but you guys seem to have more than sufficient RAM from your test report and you have the same exact problem as me: loads approximately 30mb then closes with no error message or anything.
Hi Phys, economist here by training and I have to agree with John Smith. You haven’t demonstrated effective knowledge of how a free market works.
In a free market, we have perfect competition. What this means is that the “fools” at the low end are just outcompeting on price. The fool is the person who expects prices to be higher because he wants them to be. In other words, while you complain about them making a loss, money is actually coming into their accounts while your higher-priced items remain unsold. In a perfectly competitive market, economic profit (including opportunity costs) should be 0 and there should be no opportunities to “play the market” through arbitrage at market equilibrium. You are right that this system creates high income inequality, but this is working as intended for a perfectly competitive free market as the TP is intended to closely resemble.