Guild Wars 2

First, assuming English isn’t your native language, you speak quite well.

Now, for the TP. Is it easy to use? Is it convenient? Certainly. But it’s not always your best route. Personally, I like crafting my own stuff, because I feel more… Er… “Fulfilled” that way. As if I’ve actually accomplished something. I also like crafting because it’s necessary for forging legendary weapons (I believe), if that’s your thing. It’s also cool to use Transmutation Stones on armor that you’ve made to make some really sweet-looking armor.

Sometimes, however, it’s completely necessary. For example: gathering materials. Seriously, you do not want to be gathering hundreds of globs of ectoplasm by yourself to make the best gear. You’ll kill yourself somewhere along the way.

Another thing is that- especially with specific markets- you won’t want to buy your own weapons and gear. When the highest buying price is, say, 230 silver, and the highest sell price is 300+ silver, then you know the market’s in disequilibrium, and you’d be better off going somewhere else to get your gear.

One last thing: think of it this way. Instead of playing to get loot (items, gold, etc), you’re just playing to get gold. Sometimes, you get gold in different forms; maybe in, say, Crystalline Dust, or Heavy Bones. However, really, all of those things are just the equivalent of gold. Now, the Trading Post allows you to trade that gold (things that you don’t want) for things that you do want (weapons, armor, etc). That makes the game way more fun. It means that you don’t have to spend hundreds of hours just to forge one piece of armor, for example.

And it’s not like you’re cheating or anything. You’re using your gold that you earned to buy items that you want. You’re just trading, is all.

I think part of the reason we see so many people dead at events right now is because the previous status of the game forced many of us into glass cannon builds for open world event play.

I recently rebuilt my thief in ’zerker’s gear with runes of Scavenging for event farming because I needed to do more damage before things were killed by everyone else, or I wouldn’t get event credit. Survivability wasn’t needed because nothing lived long enough to be a threat. Everything was damage – damage – damage.

Now, the mechanics have shifted, but because a respec means replacing armor, the meta will be slow to respond. People have to go put together a tankier (more balanced) armor set to deal with the harder events, and that will be a huge barrier for some, and others will simply say ‘kitten this, I’m moving on’ rather than deal with the changes.

On the plus side, we don’t need to deal as much damage to get credit, so we can switch to a tankier platform, but….. it’s going to take me a week or two to get up the dungeon tokens to get different stats for my armor, and then I either have to buy the runes all over again, or buy transmutation stones or a BL salvage kit to move the runes I have onto different stats of armor.

Not fond of what it takes to respec in the face of a shift like this

It’s a pretty simple system to me.

Case A:
Players sell Gems for gold.
What happens:

• Players give gems to the Gem Exchange, Players get gold.
• Amount of Gems in stock increases.
• [Gems -> Gold] yields less gold. The price of Coins increases.
• [Gold -> Gems] gives more gems. The price of Gems decreases.

Case B:
Players buy gems with gold.
What happens:

• Players take Gems from the Gem Exchange, Players Get Gems
• Amount of Gems in stock decreases
• [Gems -> Gold] gives more gold. The price of Coins decreases.
• [Gold -> Gems] gives less gems. The price of Gems increases.

- ArenaNet/John only put several key things in the formula: For the exchange to be a gold sink, and they can change the volatility. (The amount of change that happens when someone uses the exchange.)

Gold to Gems > Gems to Gold; so it costs the “community” more to re-buy the gems they put in the exchange. (Roughly 25% more)

• You can check this now:
  Trade gold for Gems: To get 100 gems you need around 2 gold.
  Trade Gems for gold: Trading in 100 gems gives you 1 gold, 50 silver.

Note that the amount of gold in bold goes up for both exchanges when more people buy gems with gold. (Inflation of Gold is pretty common in MMOs, which clarifies why the price has been going up since the beginning)
From Case B:

• [Gems -> Gold] gives more gold. -> amount of gold goes up per 100 gems.
• [Gold-> Gems] gives less gems. -> amount of gold needed to buy 100 gems, increases.

You could say, it balances itself out. When ALOT of people buy gems with coin, like with an interesting addition to the BLTP such as quaggan backpacks: More people buy gems with coin, than people will buy coin with gems. Which means Case B happens times alot. Which clarifies the huge spike you see every time the BLTP is coming out with new stuff. Which quickly balances out as the amount of gold you can get with the same amount of gems quickly rises making it more attractive to sell your gems for gold.
Which then automatically means , in order to rebuy the gems, your community spends 25% more gold.

What you don’t see, is the amount of gems bought with real money, and then spend on anything in the BLTP. As John said, they don’t enter the Gem Exchange gem stock.
Anything in the exchange comes from people who buy gold with the gems they have.

Disclaimer:
I think. xD

Loco.4561:

Lysico.4906:

Sorry I was typing fast and should have been clear. I am talking about in Wpvp.

Torch is inferior to our other choices. Maybe off hand sword is closer to how bad torch is.

But pistol and focus are much better then torch and the really crappy damage. I have solid stealth already with two other abilities.

It depends on your build playstyle, I use torch in WvW and have done for a while now. My current build is: 20 Dom, 20 Duelling and 30 chaos, I use hidden veil, decoy, blink and mass invis. I use cleansing conflagration, so my torch skills remove conditions and they are on a shorter cooldown. So this gives me, 4 seconds of stealth that clears conditions, AoE blind and AoE burns if I use it offensively. I also get a defensive boon with Prismatic Understanding.

Yes the iMage sucks, but he give’s me retaliation, confusion on my target which is useful and I also get a condition cleanse. It would be nice if the iMage was swapped form something that does direct damage, like the iRogue when your downed, that would be more in line with the torch as a “stealthy” type weapon.

I think off-hand torch is far, far from useless. Torch has saved me or given me the advantage more times than I can count, I personally think it’s a pretty good off-hand, just let down by the iMage.

I just checked FLIMP’s build for the first time, and it so happened that I have a very similar build that works wonderfully for me. While I believe it would be even better if Phantasmal Mage’s Confusion was lengthened as well, the fact is that as it is, it’s still useful in tandem with the other sources of confusion. Also, I don’t keep the PM alive for that long usually, since it will most probably get shattered soon enough, and the Staff is indeed my main weapon. But the stealth safety (even better now) of the Torch +additional Phantasm in a pinch is hard to bit. After trying a number of different “good” weapons (and make no mistake, they are also good options), using the “bad” weapons according to extreme min/maxers not only make me more effective, but has proved to be the most fun, which most “DPS math” seldom accounts for.

Extreme survivability AND condition damage? Yes, sign me up for that. With incomplete gear (it’s all Rabid’s), total defense with staff is 2,893, and condition damage can get almost as high as the 1,800s-can only get better when maxed out.

(There’s one weakness with the Torch IME-barring Signet’s of Inspiration’s ocassional Swiftness boon, if you so wish to temporarily equip it, you are forced to be slow, but I won’t sacrifice my build and playstyle to get either Centaur Runes or the Focus. It didn’t seem reasonable to use the focus for me JUST for the speed buff, when The Prestige is way more central to my playstyle.)

I wish people expressed their thoughts with the following added statements: “in my opinion, the Torch hasn’t proved to be a great weapon for my playstyle” rather than the definite (but wrong) “the Torch is THE inferior weapon of all available for the Mesmer.” Personal bias, even when “backed up” with situational math (usually bent towards their already established conclusions), is not the same as facts, and in this game, it’s all about what fits EACH player-I would certainly not claim that Torch is the off-hand to use for everyone out there, and would be foolish, IMHO, to state as much.

Xynn.2748:

Q:

Maybe it’s just me but with the increased loot drop, I’m afraid globs of ectoplasm are going to start dropping in price what do you guys think?

A: Supply & Demand.

Please proceed to close this thread, thanks.

If you closed every thread that could be explained away with “Supply and demand”, half the forum would be empty.

Let’s speculate:

• I think ectos should be super-cheap because they drop all the time from world bosses now. Supply increased.

• I think ectos should be expensive because they are required in nearly every top-tier recipe. Demand increased.

• I think ectos should be expensive because people are going for more than one Legendary/demi-Legendary weapon now. Demand increased.

• I think ectos should be cheaper because people are giving up on Legendary weapons because of other difficult-to-acquire components. Demand lessened.

We could go on and on. Let’s!

LiebnirGWAccount.5698:

Oglaf.1074:

Yeah, you’re victim of market manipulation. Or if you’re one of those who do not believe it exist, the victim of a witch doctor. Or some other supernatural being cursing you.

I’ve tried to see this in a lighter manner, some bugger thinks I should save more for my Sunrise.

If it’s market manipulation, then you can just wait it out. If the price doesn’t fall, then its not market manipulation, just market forces at work.

The purpose of the listing fee is to ensure adequate supply at scaling prices.

Constant relisting of goods benefits no one. Ever try to place a buy order for 76-80 exotic weapons? If you’re not reposting every 3 minutes or so, you’ll be lucky to have 2 orders filled ever (at least with daggers, which is the only one I’ve personally played around with). With how slow the TP likes to be on my connection and the somewhat clunky interface, if I want to save that 60s/item spread between buy orders and instant buy I have to spend around half an hour of non-stop work in game just to buy around 10 daggers.

That’s how the system currently works for that type of item when there’s no “listing fee” (obviously I mean the bidding equivalent here). It’s an awful, painful, annoying system that benefits no one. That’s also exactly how it would behave on the other end for the same class of items if listing fees weren’t required. If anything needs to be changed, I recommend adding (much much much smaller, like 1% or maybe 0.1%) bidding fees.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Demand-pull inflation…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-pull_inflation

Feel free to dispute the idea. But to say Supply and Demand isn’t inflation is not some universally held belief…

Supply and Demand is not inflation.

An increase in Aggregate Demand that causes suppliers to increase production levels and prices is inflation.

A decrease in Aggregate Supply that causes suppliers to decrease production levels and increase supply (“stagflation”) is inflation.

The concept of Supply and Demand is not inflation. Now, what happens to aggregate demand and aggregate supply might affect inflation. But Supply and Demand does not equal inflation. You could just as easily argue that it can equal deflation.

Also, keep in mind that inflation is for the entire economy, not simply individual products.

Swoo.5079:

Ecto is a currency for Arenanet.

Adding more uses for it is Anet way of keep its purchasing power since “coin” keeps losing value due to expansion of supply.

If you want to keep your purchasing power you trade your coin into ectos.

Think of ecto as real life gold – its a natural occurring currency that has other uses. The difference is that ecto has an infinite supply where gold is finite in Earth soil, so Anet needs to add sinks to remove ectos and keep its worth.

Except real life gold has no purpose except as a hard currency. Gold usage is distributed as follows:
25% industrial use
50% investment purposes
25% jewelry

For a commodity that’s supposed to keep it’s value that’s insane. If a big player, say the United States, realizes that it’s gold has no purpose except for being gold, they’ll dump it on the market. UK and Russia will follow and a troy ounce will cost 50 dollars. Bubble waiting to happen.

Compare with a real commodity with a purpose such as iron:
25% replacement of rusted iron (iron sink!)
60% industrial use
15% investment purposes
Now there’s a commodity that holds its value extremely well. The only difference between gold and iron is scarcity. But inherently, gold is worthless and iron has a real purpose AND a sink.

I think all of these “it should be about X” statements are wishful thinking. Their cost is govererned by the actions of hundreds of thousands, not the opinions of any individual. Presure on the the price responds to basically every endgame gold-tap in the game. Changes to dungeons will be reflected in ecto price. People taking an evening off to watch a big game on tv will be reflected in the ecto price. It also floats on the aftereffects of the gold sinks. …A gem store sale pulling kilotons of gold coins out of the economy will be refleced in a sudden, temporary scarcity of buyers…

John Smith nowadays in GW2 Alias Adam Smith IRL in the past XD

Olfinbedwere.5049:

Right, I’m familiar with the psychology behind perception. Neither of us know the mechanics behind salvaging, or magic find, or DR, or the mystic forge probability, or quality of loot, or the rng.

No we don’t, which is why I’m surprised you don’t trust in people who do (John Smith.)

Olfinbedwere.5049:

The rng in this game is broken for a lot of people, less now than before, because most of those people stopped playing. It’s not just the tagging, when we were getting tags we were getting garbage for loot.

Magic find is broken, the rng is broken, maybe not for you but that doesn’t mean it isn’t for others and because it’s working for you doesn’t mean the rest of us are just imagining it. And you’re telling me it’s just my perception, that’s great because that’s what they said before they turned around and said oh wait, it is broken, thanks for helping us find that bug.

So you keep on saying RNG is “broken.” I’m assuming you mean that the probabilities on loot tables isn’t properly applied to a player for whatever reason.

Which isn’t what happened. For the loot bug, the bug was simply players failing to tag mobs/events properly. Nothing to do with the actual probabilities of the loot table itself.

When you salvage things, there’s no DR, there’s no tagging mobs. So when person A and person B salvages things, there’s absolutely no difference in conditions, unlike the loot drop bug. Anet has stated multiple times that accounts aren’t marked for “luck” or anything. So it’s much harder to believe something going wrong with salvages.

Olfinbedwere.5049:

You do realize that right? You’re responding to this issue the exact same way Anet and unaffected players responded to the other issue, wow. And all the shafted players got is a “we fixed it, thanks for helping find that bug.” After three months of it.

Well yes of course I’ll trust what Anet says. They have all the data, and they made the game. It doesn’t mean they’re infallible, but most of the time they will be right about. If I were a betting man I’d bet on Anet every single time.

On the flipside it doesn’t mean the playerbase is always wrong. However, it’s incredibly hard to take a player’s complaint on loot seriously when the only evidence he offers is a very small sample size.

And really, that’s my original point. Your original posts asks them to “look at it.” They did. You’re still convinced there’s a problem? THEN COMPILE DATA. You may very well be correct, but until you have a substantial amount of data points to support your hypothesis, no one will take your claims seriously.

Olfinbedwere.5049:

No, that’s proof that you’re not affected in a negative way by the patch. What do your results prove for me? Right because players haven’t been effected by bugs while other players weren’t, we haven’t had this conversation a thousand times about the loot drop bug already, Rng is Rng, I’m so sick of hearing that. Was Rng Rng when people were getting shafted with loot drops? because a lot of people that weren’t effected sure seemed to think so.

You seem to be quite convinced that something’s specifically affecting your ecto salvage rates.

The loot drops, in the end, wasn’t a problem of the random change of loot tables, but rather a problem of players being able to tag mobs. Because you have to tag mobs properly to get that loot. It had nothing to do with the chances on the loot table itself. RNG was still RNG, just the tagging mechanism was bugged.

When you salvage things, there’s absolutely nothing like that. You don’t have to “tag” anything nor is there any DR effect.

So your salvage results are just RNG then. It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. Humans tend to try to find patterns in randomness, but random is random.

Also, confirmation bias. Which plays a huge role when people “think” they are being shafted.

http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/4-Randomneskittenm

Illustrates how people tend to look for patterns in randomness wonderfully!

Ursan.7846:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The way I see it, manipulation is a term with negative connotations. I’d rather call it “revenue generating transactions”.

Positive or negative connotation or not, I wish people would define what they think the term is better. The impression I get from multiple users is that they use this term to mean someone who buys out the supply in an attempt to re-sell and profit. There’s a clear and narrow definition of the motivation.

But there’s other forms of “manipulation” where it’s not all that clear-cut. Sometimes a person just wants to buy 1000000 walnuts. That will spike up the sell orders in spidy. Or someone just sees no sell listings available for precursors, and prices it a lot higher in hopes of getting more gold . Again, you’ll see a spike in spidy. But the motivation isn’t as malevolent as the posters here seem to insinuate.

I see where you’re coming from. I just wish they would stop tying the term “market manipulation” to their conspiracy theories. It’s hard to have serious discussions in the forums when players post topics akin to saying “Big Foot ate my baby”. The troll in me feels compelled to respond in kind.

Ubi.4136:

We really don’t need people manipulating the market and breaking the economy in the exact same fashion as they have done in the real world.

You’re right, manipulation is bad thing. But it’s a good thing that it isn’t happening in this game.

Is there an abbreviation/acronym guide posted somewhere on the forums because I don’t know, pardon I’m still new here, what the frak CoF1 is referring to.

Gasoline.2570:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Wait wait wait. I had no idea Anet is forcing me to sell my Dusk for 700 Gold. So if I were to put mine for sale at 400 Gold, will I be banned for not following the rules?

Man, this game just got so much more complicated.

Drop rates. Supply.

Learn to read.

I read perfectly fine:

Gasoline.2570:

All these arguments about why precursors are expensive and why gold goes up when there’s a sale are, basically, what they decide and want them to be like.

You’re making like we players aren’t the ones to determine the prices. Anet makes them rare, and we players determine the prices we want to pay. When there’s a sale of something desirable, we determine if we want to buy Gems with real money, or convert Gold to be able to buy it.

Ursan makes a valid point, where two equally rare items have different demand/values. People need to pay attention to his posts, as he’s probably one of the most intelligent posters here.

As for me, I think all these complaints come from people who have a strong sense of Entitlement, thus all the rage about market manipulation and conspiracies about Anet controlling prices when these players don’t get what they want.

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

Svarty.8019:

Grezko.7950:

Trust in the devs to make the right call

Never trust anybody who has power over you. Hope – that’s a different matter.

Not to be off topic but this is one inaccurate statement.

Read a quarter, you probably have on in your pocket. Then return with a new outlook on life.

Come on, guys, be nice—he asked a valid question. What you mean, Monsoon, is that the Black Lion doesn’t properly load for you, right? It does that for me too, sometimes, usually when I’m trying to sell something from my inventory. I just close it and try to open it back up and it usually works fine. I think it might be related to internet speed—do you have a slow connection?

Yet another thread on either Speculations or Conspiracies or Manipulation. If this were a drinking game, I’d be under the table already.

Geopap.1725:

Well again Im talking about oligopolyze and not monopolyze

The size doesn’t matter. These people have to make money somehow. Also there’s no such word as “oglipolyze.” A monopoly is a monopoly. The number of individuals involved does not matter.

Monopolies are when an entity controls entire supply chain, and controls prices because they have no competition. It’s impossible in this game to monopolize a supply since anyone can luck into a precursor. So in order to “monopolize” precursors, they have to buy out these precursors and re-list them for higher prices.

But flipping precursors like this isn’t very profitable, because of the 15% fee. Look at the spidy chart for Dusk. Since the beginning of feburary, it’s been mostly flat. The buy order at the beginning of febuary is around 600G. The lowest sell listing now is 680G.

If you bought a Dusk back then through a buy order for 600G, you need to sell it at 700G to BREAK EVEN. You can’t even break even, even after 2/3rds of a month gone by. It isn’t profitable at all. So I highly doubt people flip precursors. And I highly doubt there’s monopolies that exist on precursors.

You can buy and sell the end-game cosmetics of GW1, too, and yet no one complained about that. It’s curious that buying and selling the end-game cosmetics of GW2 has people in such a frenzy.

That said, it is not zero-effort to buy a legendary, either with real money via gems converted to gold or via in-game money earned as gold by any means. 1200+ gold is no small sum, and in gems that would cost $1056 US to buy outright. If someone is willing to pay an entire paycheck to ANet in order to have the gems to convert to gold to buy their legendary, then more power to them. That is a lot of real life work converted into gold, which is ultimately no less life investment than farming it all in-game. There is no zero-effort here; it’s a ton of effort no matter how you slice the cake.

I think it is very good that legendaries are allowed to be sold. It helps the economy by removing gold from the market on huge sales that the TP taxes. I think the problem people really have with buying and selling legendaries is that they have some premeditated opinion on what a legendary item should be, and the realization that ANet’s definition of a legendary item doesn’t match that person’s definition bothers them. I think if you come to terms with what a legendary is, rather than what you think it ought to be, you’ll find it all makes sense within the framework of the game. (Note: This isn’t advocating complacency, rather that you shouldn’t be trying to imprint your personal vision of the game onto ANet)

Hopefully that has helped.

Azture.8632:

I totally agree. All I am lacking now is my precursor, I am farming and playing 8-10 hours a day but the price increase each day is more than I can make each day. And those that already have their legendaries and precursors congratz but Im sure you didnt have the issue of precursors rising each day like this though, beyond the scope of anyone without a huuuge stash of gold. People are buying them just to put up for more now. Dusk was 640g 4 days ago, 700g yesterday and today its 770g.

There’s nothing wrong with prices. Why should I sell Dusk to you for 600g when someone out there is willing to pay me 700g. For all we know, the highest a buyer may go is 1200g for a Dusk.

Prices keep rising because people are willing to pay that much for a precursor. Doesn’t matter about all this market manipulation junk everyone talks about. Yes, it happens, but that doesn’t set the price. When no one bites to pay the supplier’s price it slowly comes down.

jwaz.1908:

Yes I saw this happen, but even 445g is 100g more than it was 2 days ago, which is still a huge increase that cannot be kept up with.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png

I bought my tooth frostfang for 318 gold 2 days ago. Since then, the 3 others that were listed have sold for 319, 320, and 340 gold. Then, there were no teeth on. Then, someone put one on for 599 gold, hoping to capitalize on the lack of current listings. Since then he has been undercut 4 times and the current price is 445 gold.

The price does not ‘go up and up every single day’.

Or you could just work harder like the other people who have their precursors/legendaries. You are not a special snowflake.

Are you certain they’re being relisted?

People do buy several a day.

I bought a Spark for over 500g about a week ago with a buy order. It’s gone, I made an Incinerator with it.

Quite frankly if someone has the kind of money to be fiddling with flipping precursors they could do a much higher return in other areas. Goofing around with buying precursors for 600g to put them up for 800g (680g back to them, after the 15% cut) and being undercut 15 times with having to relist being almost a certainty...not exactly a prime way to use your money.

Geikamir.6329:

It’s not fun, fair, or work. People that are unlucky are not lazy.

Milton Friedman would be proud of The Authority’s lack of intervention. He loved laziness.