Guild Wars 2

Well, TBH, I had hoped for something to be done this patch because the reduction of the dust supply to 1/6th of its former levels seemed like such an obvious oversight and the consequences are likely to be 100% counter to the intended effects of other changes in T6 mat drops.

Obviously a period of rampant T6 inflation is on the way again.

I’m not really expecting something this patch….but it would be a pleasant surprise if there was.

Calae.1738:

I don’t believe this was accidental. It was deliberate. Anything they do in the game is designed to slow down the consumption of content in order to buy more time for them to create new content.

I have to respectfully disagree ~ one of the reasons for the implementation of the heavy bag drops, and the change to Orr mobs dropping T6 mats, and the doubling of T6 mats returned via heavy bags, was to increase their supply. In many ways this worked, however the reduced T5/6 dust supply removed a control on the price of T6 mats, which is why we are seeing the inflation. Very little to do with slowing anyone down since I’m acquiring T6 mats at twice the rate I used to via farming….

This is getting silly.

Obviously in the original design documents, dust was envisioned as being cheap and plentiful. I can state this with some certainty because of its use in recipes upconverting materials, a decision that was obviously taken to provide some form of control in the relationship and pricing between the tiers of materials.

Now, due purely to the price of T6 dust, there is a loss of 1G-1.5G in the conversion of T5->T6 mats, which has the knock-on effect of reducing the supply of T6 mats from sources other than drops. Similarly T4→T5 conversions are affected due to the consequential cost of T5 dust.

With last months changes to Orr drops, the supply of T5/T6 dust was reduced by over 80% however I don’t believe the consequence of this change was adequately rationalised.

A sensible solution would be to replace the silk and leather drops from bags with dust (as has already been proposed by another poster). Alternatives such as adding dust as a result of salvaging, or allowing the salvaging of something like the trophy bone drops would increase supply.

Whatever is done though, something is required to increase the dust supply, and increase it dramatically.

Interesting and thank you for the work.

Edit : Just saw that the mystic is in there – great stuff!

There does appear to be a pretty good chance of an exotic from the chests and hence, a good chance of a precursor which is why I am doing them. Loot wise though, I make a lot more from doing Orr with the recently added bags and T5/T6 drops, hence what I am surprised hasn’t dropped more, is the price of mats…

“Most beneficial way to generate income now: Farm all bosses on all characters. Nothing else is worth playtime in comparison.”

Actually the best way to generate income is still to farm regularly occurring events (e.g. cursed shore) or CoF since there is no guarantee of an event being up when you get there given how off the timers can be. In the time it takes to wait for an event to pop (esp the quickly done ones such as behemoth) I can farm 3x the values of the rares from a chest just from “junk” drops.

Buttercup.5871:

You clearly are not into cooking. Some of the products made with black pepperkorn sell by the thousands per hour, amongst others, cup of lotus fries. Yes, there is pepper stock, but this will run out over time.

+1 I am not and only really use it for leveling alts. Speaking of which though, I took my lowbie necro through Queensdale this morning and ended up with 12 peppercorns in 10 minutes, so even with supply halved its doubtful that a massive increase in price will be justified.

I had 4000+ sitting in my bank that I was VERY happy to get rid of at 50-90c. Someone had bought up (not me) some months ago, about 50000 and spiked the price – in fact this has happened several times. In other words there is a LOT of supply out there but the actual demand is…rather low…20 or so required when leveling cooking.

And THAT is what people fail to factor in more than anything – what, when you remove the speculative element, is the demand for an item going to be?

Just before the patch a member of my group got a legend….

And as a funny story, another member of the group had had TWO legends drop for them the week before (1 while grouped with me), I got a legend from the mystic forge and my characters title is “legend of the mist”.

SPOOKY!

http://ec2-174-129-236-8.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8000/gw2sp2g/

You will have to cut and paste the URL sorry. Be warned that I am considering removing the “top 5” because prices have dropped by 2/3s since I published that

I bought some gems with IRL money because if we didn’t, John would have to get a real job grin

I would love to see the design rationale for this…..

Without a doubt this should be toned down a step and content should have been phased in availability at the various tiers especially if the requirement is in a PvP centric tree.

50.

The precursor should never have been the hard part of creating a legendary.

Oh I should have added:

Personally I’ve found this patch improved rare drop rates for me. I had no less than 5 rares in 30 minutes the other evening and I’ve had rares drop across all my chars. It helps that pen/shelter is busy again….

However the wooden chests suggest that things are still not working as intended – I often have whites appear in the chests, and I have to wonder, how can we trust anets claim that their tests indicate nothing changed in drop rates when they cannot correctly code this new feature? Surely some piece of code is saying “if item >= uncommon: spawn (chest, item);” – wouldn’t their internal tests also be incorrectly flagging none rare components as rare….?

Navi.7142:

I am sure I don’t make 10g for that amount of events (I didn’t count it yet)… but I am convinced that no one would complain if we would earn similarly.

Have you ever thought about a minimum amount of money you would be happy about? Let say for the same events, you sell your stuff and would get ~ 1 – 2 g. Would that be okay for you, too?

Money actually isn’t the issue ~ for the most part, people would be happy if they could reasonably farm the components for whichever exotic (usually legendary) they desire for their characters. Instead people need to farm 1000G + to BUY those components and there-in lies the problem. Fix lodestone drops properly, fix precursor acquisition, and complaints would decline.

I have enough money not to miss the 18s or so per dye so I take a chance – its definitely the wrong thing to do financially but its fun.

The worst thing about this dust spike is that it makes T5 -> T6 material conversions in the mystic forge worthless, and also affects the viability of the core -> lodestone conversion; people have been crying out for more ways to obtain lodestones affordable and we have the new “binding agent” available for laurels, but the cost of dust now negates the value of this addition.

T6 dust either needs increased drop rates or a boost in the output of T5->T6 dust conversion.

Sadly still unfixed for me also and would love the option of selling this.

I came here to post about these :

1) Patch message is unclear as to what rarity should be in these chests.
2) something seems to be affecting green item drops – I just went 30 minutes without a single drop.
3) either the chests are not always spawning OR loot stays on the mob because I have looted rare (yellow) items from mobs.
4) Chests appear very slowly, meaning they can be missed, and they sometimes also go invisible if you approach them having missed one [I’ve noticed this behavior at the grawls in frostgorge near Jormag – possibly related to the slow appearing environmental items?]
5) They are hard to spot – bigger and glowing would be nice perhaps with a flash when they drop?
6) I’ve gone to loot one and its either been empty or had a white/blue item within.
7) They seem randomly stop appearing.

While I appreciate the change, since it now says “OI! Something potentially valuable dropped” it does need tweaking as does the entire loot system if we’re honest…

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

No lol. Human traders and bots will have separate behaviours.

The word you are looking for is “different” – “different behavior”.

Good bots attempt to replicate human behavior to avoid detection but tend to be less efficient than bots written with optimal algorithms to solve a domain specific problem. Things like random timings, less than 100% performance, rest times, restriction of focus etc., have to all be introduced in order to simulate human behavior. This may seem like a waste but the idea for the abuser is to automate the process, not to optimize the process.

I observed this behavior and wrote a post on this a LONG time ago (my post was “infracted” so don’t bother searching) – writing a TP bot for buying is trivial although anet did take steps to make it harder (not difficult, just harder).

For Anet though, the problem is that distinguishing (good) bot behavior from that of a committed trader is virtually impossible hence unless Anet does something radical (I would suggest blind “buy” order bidding where no-one can see the existing buy orders unless you have the item in hand to sell) botting and the TP will be an attractive way of making money.

I should also add though – the 1c overbidding on a range of TP items IS a common strategy – I used to do this on a range of armor and it was very profitable and I would repost my bids every 20 minutes (by hand). I’m sure that there are other players doing exactly the same and that IS a part of it, however I have also seen posts by less scrupulous players confirming that they used bots/scripts to automate this task.

Sadly the easy route IS human nature and it is a pity that the TP wasnt better thought out in this regard.

With a reasonable amount of gold in the bank, legendary, and my mains T3 done, I still wear masterwork jewelry on most of my chars. I will still buy masterwork, and occasionally, rare jewelry for chars because with 18 char slots [about 5 active alts] its going to take a lot more than a month to equip them all with ascended.

What might be done for is exotic jewelry ~ its just too expensive to justify on alts…although I could afford it…but if the price of ectos adjusts, I’m sure exotics will sell again.

http://ec2-174-129-236-8.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8000/gw2sp2g/

Edit: Sorry you will need to cut and paste that URL since the forum software uses the : for links – seriously?!?

Currently it costs 1g 43s 88c per conversion. I’ve found that on average I get slightly more than 6 T6 from a conversion leading me to suspect that conversion quantities are weighted towards the lower end rather than truly random 5-12. (or maybe I’m just unlucky, sample size < 50 so quite possible).

Anyways, point being it costs 1g 23s 48c to buy 6 T6 so sell the T5s and buy T6s.

A 4 minute run around Southsun Cove yielded me over 20 passion fruit – supply on passion fruit is just too high to justify a price > 20-40c imo.

I was in lost shores this morning – 5 underwater bots, 4 bots doing the shelks, 4 bots doing karka’s. Amazingly I saw a player doing the jumping puzzle!

Quick trip to frostgorge and my favorite team of bots are still at the grawls – a week after I last reported them.

No sorry, a mass ban hammer has not been waved.

Contradictory indeed.

Just add them as a reward at 200-400 crowns and have done with it. We’re bored of this song and dance just to get one item.

Tolmos.8395:

Everyone is in fractals. Go to LA and you’ll find everyone. Just run those until 80, you’ll get better rewards anyhow.

Open world is still waiting for its stimulus patch from Anet. It might be a while.

Sadly this is the truth – rather than blame Anet, fractals was a response to the “need to grind” communities clammor.

ColinJohanson.2394:

This project was delayed in favor of having the specific folks required to build it skill-set wise working on solidifying the core of the game. You’ll hear more about our ecosystem in the future, but we’re not actively working on this project, in favor of making sure the core game itself is as fun and rewarding as possible.

Edited to add: We’ll discuss what sort of projects we’re doing instead in more detail in the blog post later this week, and even in more detail as the Jan/Feb/March releases get closer.

Colin, you do realize that there has been a VERY talented and involved developer community drawn to GW2 and all you have to do is release the APIs to enable us to write this stuff? While I understand that any company looks first at how best to monetarise it’s assets, where the resources cannot be justified for development this is often an ideal opportunity to engage and empower your community…

So you average about 80, and saw minimum of 30 and max of 250 on combines?

I tried to manipulate a rare dye a while back as an experiment – the price returned to its old level within 24 hours and there was a greater supply on the TP than before I started.

Hence my advice is to wait OR go for some of the other colours as others have advised; many of them are so close to the “rare” colour you will be really hard pressed to tell the difference and indeed, may find that you prefer them more.

Sadly false buy orders are very common on rarer items – the exotic mini buy prices often drop low and then suddenly shoot up since there’s (i suspect) 1 or 2 players actively manipulating that market.

Now is it against the rules? I sadly suspect not.

Ozzel.5634:

nice guild …
may I ask you for something …. can you predict price of mystic coins ? (up/down/steady)
I have some coins for sale and I’m guessing when to start selling

Might as well all try this one – disclaimer: I hold about 6 stacks as part of my “inflation busting” investments.

I see mystic coins becoming a severe bottleneck in the future given that they are one of the few in game resources which cannot be “farmed” effectively. Sure many people don’t use them but every legendary requires on average @250, there are a multitude of recipes which use 20-100 of them, and future content updates for ascended items are likely to incorporate them as a component.

Ascended items took over 30K out of circulation in a week, current supply on the TP hovers at @12K (yes, I know the numbers are far higher than that)…its possible that the price on these will explode by March given that there just isn’t the volume to support another set of Ascended style weapons, let alone the demand for the Mystic Clover recipes if a scavenger hunt is introduced.

I would buy now if you plan on going for ascended items or a legendary and personally hold stacks in the expectation that the price will outstrip general inflation.

Edit: Just realized that it was the karka event that accounted for the 30K drop and that ascended items only require a minimal number of coins, hence the increased demand is only really likely with the scavenger update.

Having heard about how this actually worked and how some people exploited it (300+ ecto’s an hour!) I have to agree, its an exploit.

HOWEVER I have also heard of people who made 5G from it being banned. Surely there needs to some level of leniency…

I have everything bar the precursor for my Mesmer, most of my guild mates are in a similar position. Scavenger hunt, January please.

Someone now has @20K peppercorn bought at over the average price and the market is rapidly returning to normal since the demand isn’t that great for it. Ouch….

The Blue Ace.2850:

While legendarys should be hard to acquire the problem is the games purpose is to make everyone feel equal, no forced healers or tanks.

However with the lodestones there is a serious unfairness.
100 molten lodestones for players who use a hammer, 75 gold.
100 charged lodestones for players who use a greatsword, 400 gold.

If your casual player and don’t believe in playing the market, (which I think myself is ruining the spirit of the game.) then your gonna have to spent so many more hours on getting gold than other players.

Its just unfair, simple as that.

The simple solution to this would be to implement an NPC/Mystic forge recipe to allow for one type of core/lodestone etc to be converted to another thus equalizing the price across all rare components.

Similarly the conversion between 1 type or precursor and another would solve the issue of some being more valuable than another.

Oh and allow doubloons to be crafted reliably somehow before that goes crazy too

The economy has returned to the state it was in before the bots were banned but with a much reduced drop rate of rare/exotic items causing inflation at one end, and deflation at the other.

The effect of this is that normal players earn less gold during their playtime (due to cheaper prices of common/fine/rare items), while the things they want to buy become more expensive (exotics or other rare components in high demand).

Personally I find this state of affairs very depressing….

Today, me, roughly 90% MF from equipment + 26% Food + 50% MF booster.

2 Rares (edit:) in 1 hour with the MF boost.

DR noticeably kicked in after 30 minutes or so but I had been farming there previously – quantity and quality of loot just became awful. Switch areas, had 10 minutes of decent loot followed by garbage (whites, occasional blue) then boost ran out and I logged off in disgust.

@Anet. To come back to my original point (a few posts back), WE need to be told how MF/DR SHOULD be working, and then we can report whether this is what we are experiencing. As things are now, something is seriously wrong and it is not fun.

@Stephane : Actually, can we turn this around please?

Can Anet provide some data on what players should EXPECT in terms of the drop rate of rares/exotics items on a per hour played basis at level 80?

I ask this because many of us believe that there was a significant reduction in rare/exotic drop rate at various levels of Magic Find (%) after the Nov 15th patch and it would be easier if we could tell you NOW if our experiences match your expectations, otherwise you are not going to get data, just anecdotal evidence.

P.S. Please take a look at the prices on exotic items as evidence. They are now dropping so seldomly that soon new players will just look at the game and quit frustrated that they will never be able to purchase even the most simple of exotic dropped items. You should also be able to analyze your own data to see if the drop rate has significantly changed.

Peetee.9406:

I see no problem with Legendaries being sellable.

The person that put in the hard work is getting a reward whether it be in the form of a legendary or in the form of gold.

Except pretty soon it wont be “people” selling them, it will be gold sellers using hacked account resources and any player who wishes to sell one will have to sell lower than them.

I had fun the first few times but became increasingly frustrated (my last team were actually competent for the most part but we still lost).

I had expected a few weeks of flowing exotics since the economy is totally knackered at the moment between the low rare/exotic drop rates and bots depressing the prices on farmable items. Instead we have a stream of ugly cloths and a Christmas event with near zero incentive to replay once the achievement is done.

I think the Risen have the right idea with this Tixxmas nonsense

The range is 5-12, however I suspect the average to be somewhere between 6 and 7 given that whenever I have done transforms 5 & 6 and by FAR the most common results.

With the current low price of totems you are better off farming or buying them outright atm:

— Elaborate Totem —-—————————————————-
T5 COST : 89s 47c (79s 10c)
T6 RESULT VALUE: 87s 12c (87s 00c)
MAX PROFIT : 6s 82c
PROFIT SP : 13s 64c
—————————————————————————————————

Basically you would save (on average) 7s.90c per @6 by converting T5->T6.

Before I go and dump a ton of skill points into this, could anyone tell me what the range and average returns are for for converting common crafting materials via the mystic forge? This info is missing from the wiki

I only have a single data point converting 250 plat -> mithril ore which returned 72 mithril.

If you have any data points, please let me know the conversion/tiers…

Its been in existence since beta and it basically IS the trading post but because of the quirks of the in game browser, it doesn’t work in standard browsers.

Oh and its very bot friendly (don’t get me started) :/

You should get it when finishing the instance…

Its for a ventari mini pet – are there any other frames?

If there are thats a serious problem since we wont have enough cogs for them all….

+1

I bought 10 chests and got 2 mini’s so your friend got unlucky – however that is exactly the problem with RNG.

Minis should have been either tradable hence no need to buy the chests if this is all you want, or should have been via a pack.

Wolf Fivousix.4319:

@morphemass, I see your point now…. So you believe that Lodestone Promotion is the best way to make cash from the skill points? Even with the Bottle of Elonian Wine price? I was looking at the Charged Lodestone price, 2 Charged Cores (2,4g)+Elonian Wine = 2,65g. If we sell CL at 3,15g (current lower price) we’ll have a 2,67g income (after taxes), 2s profit. That happens with all Lodestone/Cores.

Did you used T5->T6 Material Promotion for you calculus?

Conversion of any mat is highly variable in terms of its return, there’s never any one item which is consistently better than another. I’ve yet to see an instance of anything less than T6/Lodestones providing a higher return though although I would expect mystic weapons to eventually catch up.

As a side note I’ve opened about 100 sacs since the patch, and had only single T6 materials. If they did change it I doubt its a 50/50 chance of gaining 2xT6 mats…