Guild Wars 2

Essence Snow.3194:

I’ll leave this here because obviously it is needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

We know what economic inequality is. We are aware that there is a huge gap between the wealthiest players who play the TP and the average player. But we aren’t cartoon scrouge mcducks who go swimming in their money and get kicks out of watching the average player struggle to pay for what he needs as we bleed their money dry from their pockets. Every time someone comes into this forum to ask advice on how to make money, the same people you are insulting are giving advice on how to do so intelligently and safely. And no matter how many times you shout these slurs or economic inequality to make yourself feel like you have the moral high ground, you still haven’t provided any valid ways to reduce this gap. So go stand on your mountain of good intentions but stop yelling down at us how we are hurting people when that is all you have suggested.

Those ideas are the ones that I see suggested most often, but is not an “all inclusive” list of ideas. Many of the ideas come from an individual perspective and little thought is given to how the suggested change would affect the game as a whole. Everyone plays the game differently and has a different opinion of how the game should be structured. Because of this, players tend to make suggestions that they feel would benefit them.

I’ve thought about ways to change the Trading Post to “make it more fair”, but have yet to come up with any ideas that would actually be so. The problem with trying to make it fair is that there are far too many different opinions of what’s fair. One point of view could be that it’s fair in its current form. It’s obvious that that opinion is not the only one though.

If we, as players of a game we enjoy, really want to introduce change, we need to view how the change we suggest would affect the game as a whole. If we’re only going to look at it from our point of view without taking into consideration the views of others, threads like this are going to continue to be giant arguments.

My personal opinion is that the Trading Post is working as intended. It is a quick, easy, and secure way for players to buy and sell goods and acts as a gold sink with each and every transaction.

I’m going to go ahead and chime in, because….why not? I have an opinion too.

TL;DR: This post highlights what the Trading Post is currently and some of the ideas that have been brought up in this, and previous, threads. It also asks some questions to us, the player-base, as to how effective some of those suggested changes would be.

I fully understand the arguments on both sides of the fence. I’ve read this entire thread….and ALL of the other ones that came before it.

For this thread specifically, the OP thinks the Trading Post fees should be increased by 1% to balance out the gold sinks that were removed with free trait resets and free armor repair instead of reducing the gold faucet that comes from Champion Bags. Since then, the comments in this thread have taken it to the same place all of the other threads go. It’s a discussion as to whether or not players should be able to profit using the Trading Post.

Let’s look at the Trading Post for what it is intended to be. My opinion is that it was created to do three things:

• Give players that find loot in the world a place to sell their goods quickly and easily, for a price they deem worthy, if that loot is unwanted and do so in a secure manner.
• Give players that want to buy goods they don’t currently have a place they can buy them, for a price they deem worthy, quickly and easily and do so in a secure manner.
• To be a gold sink

Does the Trading Post do those three things? The answer is “yes….quite effectively” to all three. Keep in mind, it does all of those things without injecting any money into the economy. It merely moves money between players while also removing 15% of every transaction.

There are two points of view beyond this. The first point of view stems from players that don’t want to, or are not capable of, playing the Trading Post in order to increase the amount of gold they have. The other comes from players that do use the Trading Post to increase the amount of gold they have, or from players that do not see anything wrong with the Trading Post in its current form.

Many players that share the first point of view would like to see a change made to the Trading Post that limits the amount of gold another player acquire using the Trading Post to be more in line with what can be acquired through “farming”. Several ideas have cropped up along this line and are as follows:

• Tax the “rich”: Players that make over a certain amount of money using the Trading Post should be taxed a higher percentage than “normal” players. How would this actually work? How much is “too much”? As the game goes on, would this idea actually end up affecting everyone, thereby making the Trading Post unusable due to the taxes for using it?
• Bind on Purchase: Any item purchased from the Trading Post is immediately Account Bound and cannot be resold. This idea was originally suggested to combat “flipping”. While it would certainly do that, it would NOT remove the ability of savvy players to profit using the Trading Post. The programming complications that would arise from this idea would be a nightmare as well. Imagine two of every item in the game….a trade-able one and an Account Bound one. Would the two items be able to stack together? What would happen to crafting? What would happen to the Mystic Forge?
• Remove the Trading Post: Players that want to buy and sell items now do so through a Vendor. All prices are set by ArenaNet. This idea “looks good on paper” because the prices of goods will never go up. I have a feeling that this idea would greatly affect crafting. The only items that would be worth crafting are the ones that can’t be purchased (i.e. Ascended Items). Crafting would become an enormous gold sink as the items you create to level up have little to no value when sold to a vendor. Many players would avoid crafting all together in hopes of finding the items they need “out in the world”. Would this idea work to equalize how much money a player could make based on their preferred play-style, or would there be a new way to make money most effectively? Would it be good for the game to remove the single largest gold sink?
• Player to Player Trading: Introduce a secure trading window like in GW1. This idea is brought up many times by players that want to avoid the 15% “tax” from the Trading Post. This idea would be great for that, but it would be more difficult for the players as now they have to find someone selling the item they want, then open up trade with them and begin “haggling”. It also opens up a barter system. Cool idea, but it too has it’s drawbacks. The largest of which will be the likely return of “Spamadan”. The second of which would be the increase in the number of scams that happen between players. Would this idea reduce, or remove, the ability of a player to make more money through trading than can be acquired through “normal” play?

Continued…..

I think I see where you are getting confused Wanze. By stack I mean the general FILO data structure, not the list of sell offerings at the same price.

Drago Ivansen.5398:

Wanze.8410:

2 items posted at 100g is a stack of offers.
1 item each posted at 100g and 99g99s99c, is not a stack as they are not at the same value.

Again you have already been chalked up to disagreeing with the foundation of the problem.

There is no problem.

Do you see signs “promoting” the TP from ANet? No, the people who are “promoting” are the ones who keep saying that the only way to make a lot of gold in the game is to play the TP and how unfair it is.

Hello all,

Please be sure to ask your questions/leave your feedback on this thread, so we can keep track for the developers. Thank you!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-Changes-Feedback-Questions

Well it’s finally settled, I am moving to China in order to finally WIN this game. Thanks!

Start mining iron.

Lion’s Arch, thy time has come, we say good bye with setting sun.

Jumping puzzles, and the bank, trading post, Asura gate. These things we will miss the most, and for them all we raise a toast.

The mystic forge in the heart of town, gobbled all our money down, but loosing it would be a shame so we will miss it all the same.

We came to you to AFK, to sell our loot, and have our say. We crafted armor and weapons made, but now it’s time we went away.

Scarlet comes to burn you down, and take from us this lovely town. But go not quietly into the night, we your citizens will stand and fight!

With tooth and claw and shining blade, flashing spell and hand grenade. Scarlet will regret this day, we will strike back and make her pay!

Once the smoke and dust is gone, life for us will carry on. Perhaps one day we can come home and rebuild you up with wood and stone.

But if that day should never come, we all remember where we are from.

So Lion’s Arch we say good bye, with STERN SALUTE… and teary eye.

You never really provided any reason WHY GW2 needs mounts, unless your reason is a cash grab. It would break most JP, Diving Goggles, Vistas, exploration as you could skip most monsters by flying.

Julischka Bean.7491:

I am an older Player. As such, I have learned somethings are just not worth getting in a stew about. I have seen my parents get older, I have seen my better half have a stroke and almost die, My beloved cat did die…This pick, and the threat of future gathering tools with perks in the gem store, to me, is not something to lose sleep over.

You don’t have to lose sleep over something to have a problem with it.

I’m a younger player, but I’ve been through similar situations to yourself. I lost my dad during summer vacation just before my senior year due to his exposure to chemicals in Vietnam. That same year we lost my Aunt who had been living with us. 2 years later we had to put my Labrador down.

I bring those things up to respond as such: I still see this pick as an issue. I still see it as something that needs fixed. I don’t think ignoring a perceived problem by “just dealing with it” means that you’ve put on big boy/girl pants, either.

Even if it’s something that’s not that important, it’s good to speak up. At least, that’s what I feel.

This thread is to provide Feedback to the Items team(or whoever is in charge of creating Items). This concerns Items that specifically provide Stats.

There seems to be a rather large disconnect between what features are implemented and what the Items team actually creates. There seems to be a lot of missing Items and a lot of Items whose acquisition is completely different from their counterparts.
Here are a few examples:

WvW Versatile Infusions
So far, the feature of Versatile(Omni) Infusions has been introduced, but only Fractal players have benefited from this. This is because all Versatile Infusions so far have +5 Agony Resistance. There are WvW Infusions that give +/- damage to/from Supervisors, but none of them are Versatile. Is there a reason why WvW Infusions cannot be Versatile?

Ascended Aquabreathers
When you implement a mechanic where the Aquabreather completely replaces your current Headpiece(including stats, runes and looks), and then you implement Ascended Armor, people also expect you to implement the Ascended version of an Aquabreather because it follows logical sense since it is also a piece of Armor. The current best Aquabreather is only Rare quality. If the feature of Aquabreathers was supposed to be scrapped instead, then just allow us to use our current Headpiece even while underwater instead. Right now this is being left in an incomplete state. Is there a reason why there is no Ascended(or even Exotic) Aquabreather yet?

Ascended Trinkets
We are missing a really large amount of stats options on Ascended Trinkets. Valkyrie, Dire and Carrion are the most prominently missing. This is a feature that is currently forcing some players to remain incomplete by using the Exotic version of the trinkets for the stats they want, or force them to waste laurels on a different Ascended trinket whose stats are not what they want, but are closest to it. This is actually something that we were told would be implemented over 8+ months ago. Is there a reason why there are still many Ascended Trinkets stat combinations missing?

Azurite Orbs
Jewelers have a way to Transmogrify 2 Crystals into 1 Orb. Except for Azurite Orb. There is currently no way to acquire more of this item. We can even acquire Azurite Crystals through Fractals now. Is there a reason why players should not be able to obtain Azurite Orbs anymore?

Celestial and Zealot’s Stats
They did a really great job implementing a Karma/Laurel recipe to ensure all stats are available for Ascended Weapons and Armors, then they decide to ruin it all and introduce exclusive Zealot’s stats, whose recipes can randomly be obtained from a temporary event(the Marionette). The gripe here is that the acquisition of said recipes is “random”(or have a really large price difference through the Trading Post) instead of NPC-bought. Celestial stats also get a special mention here for the painstaking method of obtaining it through daily Quartz fusion, and for the fact their their Exotics had the same Recipe-collecting problems. Personally I do not quite get why Item acquisition for a certain stat is made to be so different from the other stats. Is there a reason why certain stats are made so much harder to acquire?

There should be more communication between what features are implemented, what items are correspondingly created and what players want. I dont think it is any harder to create an Ascended Aquabreather than it is to create 30 different recipes and their crafted counterparts just for new exclusive Zealot’s stats.

Please give these missing Items some thought?

The whole outcome of having craftable precursors is still largely up in the air for me.

Introducing a reliable supply for precursors will most certainly lower their prices. However, the extent that such a price drop will increase the demand for legendaries (and subsequently their other materials) is a tough one to call because it is dependent upon so many variables.

The big one that comes to mind is this: how prohibitive is the effect of precursor prices (as they currently stand) to the overall demand for a legendary? Seeing big triple digit price tags can certainly be intimidating, but what I am interested in is to what degree, especially compared to the other prohibitive hurdles blocking the way to a purple weapon. While an increase in precursor supply would surely increase the number of legendaries crafted, to what extent would that number be mitigated by the already cost-prohibitive Gift of Fortune, Map Completion and other requirements? Compared to Ascended crafting, Legendary crafters are a niche, less-mainstream demographic, and a worst case scenario would be that only people on the fence about committing to a legendary would be swayed.

Another concern is that ArenaNet may not want legendaries to be commonplace things. While more legendaries are seen everyday, it would be bad for business if suddenly they became something like WoW’s sparkle pony mount, i.e., things of beauty made tacky and unremarkable because they are literally everywhere. Mock if you must, but there is BIG money to be made catering to the “Unique Snowflake” crowd. I believe it is to that crowd that Guild Wars 2 owes much of its success. That being said, one can reasonably expect the developers and designers to tightly leash the availability afforded by such changes. Such fine-tuning could be the very reason we haven’t seen or heard much about precursor crafting at all.

In any case, I can definitely foresee the overall cost of legendary materials going up. I also foresee several possible mitigating factors which could cut into potential profits from this venture, or at least shorten the window for that profit.

Obtena.7952:

Level 21 is still not the best … you can get copper or silver. I never received a copper on my level 32 chest camper.

You might be thinking of level 20, where you might get a copper doubloon. I have 8 looters at 21 and have never gotten a copper in the last 4 months they have been harvesting.

Looking at the data:
Link
The demand is slowly falling down because it takes on average about a month to craft ascended armor. With many already completing the task, they have no need for excess they bought, therefore unloading extra supplies on the Trading Post. I think we’ll starting to see the balancing coming into place after the initial rush.

A: because warriors don’t wear light armor

LordByron.8369:

They can get 100% margins expecially when some dev suggests them to invest in ascended crafting materials to resell later -.-

So “normal” players will have their expenses doubled…..

Ok, now you’ve gone one bridge too far.
“The devs” informed everyone, using every communication channel available to them. They did not do it to “tip off” the flippers. No. “Flippers” did not need any help in that department, because what “the devs” said was beyond obvious. What happened was that the devs informed those that did not know so as to best level the playing field.

I’d also like to point out that the “speedclearers” you speak of have a choice: sell the materials they get or save them for later (for example, because “the devs” told them these would become valuable). They generate the materials on the TP, no “flipper” can do that. The “flipper” can only react in that sense, his/her actions are bound by, or are the result of – the actions of those that generate the materials. For example, I’m always amazed when people decide to sell an exotic, event-based temporary recipe for 3 copper and later turn around and accuse the “flippers” that selling it for 3 copper was a bad decision. This goes two ways, don’t blame everything on the “flipper”, who in the latter scenario probably had to reserve several bank spots for those recipes for a period of 6 months before the recipe in question became profitable (with the risk that it would still be worth only 3 copper after 6 months).

In this debate, don’t just take any argument and twist it in your favor. There are reasonable arguments to be made; this is not one of them. Quite the contrary, in fact.

It’s because the Azurites have come and gone people. The world does not wait for you. Those who were around then could do a lot of trading with those guys, learned recipes and plans from them and could stock up on crystals. Their memory remain, but they are back traveling the skies.

The Silver Doubloon Debacle

THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION THREAD!
Although I will post possible solutions to this supposed problem here, suggestions to change the functionality of silver doubloons should be posted in the Suggestion Forum found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions !

THIS IS NOT A FLAMING/COMPLAINING THREAD!
As many know, something is up here and we are here to discuss fact/opinions and opposing facts/opinions. Complaining alone is not constructive and attacking the way people play or what they discuss here will only further the problem. Posting facts and how you feel this affects players or the market in the long run goes a long way. Thanks for your discussion!

FOR OUR MODERATORS!
These threads have everything to do with Silver Doubloons and the supposed problem. Also, some are suggestions but the discussion still pertained to the problem or may lead to a possible solution. Please merge if you can and thank you!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons-4
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Suggestion-to-fix-silver-doubloons-issue
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons-is-this-for-real/page/3#post2963943
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/please-make-a-recipe-for-the-silver-doubloons
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons-3
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-doubloons-2
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons-Sort-it-out-Anet
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Doubloons-hints-on-getting-them
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Silver-Dubloon
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Vial-of-Quicksilver-Recipe-Fix
This post will update any new threads which may come to light or have been missed.

OUTSIDE RESOURCES!
This is some information outside of the forums about silver doubloons.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Silver_Doubloon
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24502

Please let me know if there are any other good resources out there on silver doubloons and I will add them!

They should fix the condition duration bonus also. Currently doesn’t work.

Some guild is cornering the market to raise the price of precursors and silver doubloons in some unforeseen way!

The recently discussed anomaly in the price of soft wood made me take an overall look at the economy of basic crafting materials. The profit to level curve in GW2 is relatively linear and flat compared to the MMO norm of exponential growth. This is generally good for the economy. However, in such a setting even slight irregularities in the supply/demand process cause noticeable side effects.

To see these effects, I compared the values of different basic materials, ordered by tier. The following table excludes jewelcrafting metals copper, silver, gold and platinum. The values listed are buy values of refined materials in silver on Sep 23, 2013.

 
In a perfect situation all values would increase as a function of tier, roughly in step with the profit to level curve. Significant deviations from this behavior are an indicator of a structural supply/demand problem.

As already mentioned, the price of soft (T2) wood is irregularly high. One factor to this is the requirement of using 4 logs for one plank instead of the usual 3, but even if this were corrected the value would still be quite high at 4.86 silver. However, the forces caused by the recent addition of T7 crafting have not yet been completely relaxed. Thus, one could suspect that in the long run the value of soft wood will drop around the same level as hard (T4), provided that the number of required logs is indeed reduced to 3.

When ignoring the soft wood anomaly and tier 6 for a moment, the table shows a peculiar trend. The price increases from kitten T3 as expected, but after that it drops! Overall, T5 is the cheapest material of the five, instead of the most valuable.

There are several factors to this behavior. One that can’t be controlled is that the active player population is tilted toward the upper end of character level, thus producing more higher tier materials than lower ones. The thing that could be controlled is that T5 is currently a waste product of T6 acquisition. All the basic methods of producing the desirable T6 materials are guaranteed to also produce much larger quantities of the undesirable T5 materials, flooding the supply side.

The recently introduced T7 recipes tried to address this basic problem by consuming different amounts of materials per transmutation, 20/10/20/50 for tier 2 to 5, respectively. Looking at the results and comparing the ones affected by this force to the one that isn’t (cloth), one sees that the measure is not sufficient. T3 is still anomalously high, and T5 anomalously low.

However, there is a very simple solution that can correct the situation. If players can downgrade materials, either by salvaging or transmutating, then the price structure will naturally adjust itself. It is possible to achieve the “correct” structure by using right process cost and yield parameters for the process T_X + Catalyst -> N * T_X-1

While this is not very realistic in the physical sense, neither is flinging fireballs from your fingertips.

Zommoros is buying them, he ran out.

Hate to pop the bubble, but you cant put adorned jewels into armour pieces.