Guild Wars 2

Additional comment.. I was planning to BUY “toys” to give as gifts to friends in the game. You’re not letting me give you my money, Anet!!! I don’t think I will buy copies of the game to give out, either.

QUICK SOLUTION:
Put the three “in-box” minis out in the store, just like the daily toys. I don’t care about account bound, whatever, I just want them for my collection.

Right now, other than the Wintersday items, I have the -complete- set (inc. HoM ones). So, you can imagine, how the thought of having to spend an unknown amount of money to roll the dice for two sets of three sits with me.

How will I be able to provide the latest screenshot for the wiki?

Do the right thing, ArenaNET. At least in the mini pack, you know you’re getting minis.

I love being able to see my Jack-a-lop’s paws now! Thanks.. I suppose I will have to restart the photo gallery for my mini collection.

Allisa

Iridiana.9078:

Give us a way to get 1250 Cogs to craft them all!

I’m with this. I am willing to grind for them, as long as it’s possible.

I DO have a complete collection, and I will be extremely disappointed if it is not possible to maintain this without trying my luck (ha) at the gem store. Very uncool.

But it’s not true, there other events items from the weekend were removed, but the Consortium Chest, which should be removed like everything else, was not.. which has made a potentially exclusive item into more commonplace junk, and yet another thing Anet has done to drive me away from enjoying this game that I am trying so hard to stay enthusiastic about.

Some of the armor elements definitely do not mix and match. I saw the choppy body issue you mention, yesterday, when I removed the coat from a coat/leggings combination. That’s about the most severe problem I’ve seen, most of the other problems are little bits poking through here and there.

On a positive note, they seem to be fixing the discoloured necks!

The biggest peeve I have is that the guild armor is only the coat piece! This is how I discovered how difficult it can be to find armor pieces that match.

I’d also love to see more simple outfits. Having spikes, horns, et al clustered all over the items make them feel cluttered and confusing on screen. My favourite GW1 outfit was the wedding attire, but alas, if that is released in GW2, we will still get reverted to our armor if we bump our shins while wandering around Queensdale :*(

I chose to go with a Level 51 character (and even crafted like crazy on Saturday night to get it up to there), because of the new (to PvE) effective UP levelling. So, I was completely surprised to find that in a chest that was giving people TWO legendary weapons, I’d end up with items scaled significantly lower. Many people have stated more effectively than I, the issues with this. No value for resale, useful for only a small window as you level your way past it.

Sure, it populates exotics into the BLTC at lower levels, but that’s not my problem to fix. Well, I suppose now it is.

What I’d like to see is the scaled loot to be upped to 80 to make up for the precursor failure. You should be able to do that with one nicely written SQL statement, no?

…and if people got TWO precursors in one chest (not from overflow hopping), then there must have been a pretty BIG bug in the coding. Even if you went to 1:100 odds for getting a precursor, you can calculate exactly how truly unlikely it is for one person to get two, let alone more than one.

How do you plan to fix that? Was it some hair brained scheme to bring the prices down in a quick swoop? My main suggestion after this game: Fire the person who approved the idea of putting precursors in the chest.

ps: Thanks for the minis. Not account bound and only available from chests that won’t be around in another day… Love it.

Has anyone played with a trial account? Perhaps the characters “at” level 80 when you play them? Just speculation, but I am wondering if there is some truth because of the sidekicking (which I didn’t get to experience.)

Okay, so you make the area effective level 80.. I take a lower level toon in because of that, and what happens, the chest at the end gives me level 62 garbage while people around me are getting THE LEGEND?!

After 3 hours of fighting and loving it the battle, I am fuming for getting shafted on that. I would have just taken a level 80 character.

Three hours of “yes, Anet has saved the day!”

and now.. PHHHTH.

I love my three new minis.

It’s BS – how can PROFIT be calculated? This is only NET RETURN on the sale.

In other words: if I buy a product at 1 silver and sell it for 2 silver, the BLTC system will not tell me I’ve made 1 silver profit, but 2. (ignoring taxation in this example for simplicity)

As Rodarin pointed out, gold farmers are selling their product under ArenaNET’s exchange rates, which I pointed out to them when it (gems to gold) was first announced.

To think that they pitched it as a way to combat gold farming is the most hilarious part of the issue.

Oh, that and Mike O’s quote about never making a game where people could pay to win. That was a serious guy buster.

Rodarin.6058:

Now that the gold sellers and botters are in full swing that is why gem prices and that exchanges has completely crashed, and will continue to get worse. NO ONE is buying gems, especially to trade for gold. Not when you can get gold from a third party for pennies on the dollar.

Buying gems with in-game gold is a good inflationary hedge.

You don’t need to have a permanent banker to avoid running back to cities all the time, just two accounts…

Exchange Rates pre-launch August 24th 9pm PDT (first 4 hours of trading before BLTC goes down)
40s buys 100 gems
100 gems buys 30 silver

Exchange Rates today
36s20c buys 100 gems
100 gems buys 25s92

Does anyone have record of the record lows and highs? I see 47 for gems and 37 for silver within the past 5 days,but on the graph that looks like two very strange spikes. And thoughts on the source of these?

Wazabi, you summed it all up quite well.

Anyone want some piles of glittering dust?

AcidicVision.5498:

Well I hate to give away my secret, but it may help to stop all of the complaining a little bit. Here you go: buy the competitors stuff and re-list it. If I have an item listed for 6 silver, and someone under-cuts me and sells the same thing for 5s, I buy theirs and re-list it. Re-listing at my price means I have profited 89 copper on the item. Or I re-list for a few copper higher than my original price to profit an even silver.

Yes, you follow the same logic as the short sell method I mentioned above. Smart.

knightblaster.8027:

I think the reason for that is that not very many people have purchased gold with gems via RMT … at least not yet … so it isn’t having a pricing inflationary impact at this time. That could change over time.

The exchange rate on Gems to Gold going down implies that there have been a large number of people purchasing gold with real money through ArenaNET, though.

Each time the the trading post came back to life, the rate would slide down at an alarming rate. Then, when the BLTC crashed, it would slowly climb back up or stay flat.

Now that trading has been functioning regularly (for the most part), the rate has slide. There isn’t a huge demand to scoop up inventory anymore as people are seeing the prices of items get pulled down by the sell side risk.

mulch.2586:

Still, there are some opportunities there. Just not as many as there would be in smaller, server-sized markets where a few high rollers can become dominant market makers more easily.

Thank you!
This is exactly it. Protectionism is, from what I experience, about greed.

Personally, I’d rather be a whale in the ocean over a sturgeon in the river.

At first I was surprised to hear two writers call for regional protectionism. How is there regional disparity in a video game?

Then, I realized that the servers are grouped in real-world regions.

Since there is a real world monetary influx, it means that those in countries like the US have more disposable income to throw at their gaming problems, which in turn means more wealth to buy out of the market as needed.

This would make it more of a seller’s market, then, which it’s not.

So, right now, I’m going to go with this being a product of US protectionist brainwashing more than economic common sense.

I’ll start this out with my primary concern:

The post-transaction tax is undocumented, in-game.

As the majority of traders realize that they are losing their earnings to a hidden tax, the number of sale listings will dry up. The listing fee is enough of a hit already to scare people out of trading (see the above statement about the problem of continuous front running). This may drive up prices, and mop up any “excess” gold generated within the game. At the same time, I find it quite shifty to clearly state the smaller tax, then make no reference to the larger one. This has the potential to really blow up in ArenaNET’s face, because…

Gems can be purchased with real dollars, then converted to gold.

The ability to use real dollars to create gold is the biggest inflationary driver for the game. We’re not in a closed economic system. There is an “invisible magic hand” that generates wealth out of thin Tyrian air, in much the same way the Federal Reserve does.

Since there is no ability to cash-out gems back to real dollars, increasing vendor costs, severe taxation and a continuously dropping exchange rate are the methods that can be used to slow inflation.

I would be very surprised if ArenaNET was not aware of this right from the start. Listing and post-transaction taxes result in real balance sheet earnings for the company, because of the gems-to-gold exchange system.

As the taxation drives sellers out of the system and increases prices, late joining players will be more likely to make gem purchases with real dollars to help them catch up with those of us who were here right from the start, which wasn’t possible with Guild Wars 1.

Decreasing exchange rates (demand) and increasing item costs due to sell side risk mean increased real dollar value for each in-game copper piece, which I am estimating is meant to balance out real dollar purchase inflation.

The real problem, though, is that ArenaNET is, without clear documentation, taking away gold (copper, whatever) that has been purchased with real dollars. It’s one thing for the customer to be a bad trader, but it’s another thing to secretly siphon profits out of their trades.

Users get banned for finding and using exploits within the game (which is great, I am with this). How does it work when a real (not in game) vendor is, and I say HOPEFULLY unintentionally, exploiting its customers misunderstanding of the trading system to take an undocumented profit?

SLIDING EXCHANGE RATES

From the beta events, I prepared by doing my gems-to-gold exchange at the first few minutes of pre-launch, predicting that the rate would only go down. At 9pm PDT on August 24th, the exchange rate opened at 30 silver per gem. Each time the trading post went up, the rate went down. We see it settling now at around 18-19. Predictions for the future?

ONE MORE THING:

This market opens the opportunity for a wealthy (or well stocked) player to short sell. As a previous poster mentioned, there are many times when you will see a sell order posted at significantly less than the market rate. In a slow moving commodity, this extreme front running can have that cascading effect on decreasing the price and drive it down quite quickly. Far from this being a “stupid trader” trying to get their deal through fast, the seller may use this technique to hammer down the price of a product, then purchase a large allotment at the now significantly reduced price. As long as the short seller can eat up all of the low prices quickly, they can then drive the market back up and sell at the “normal” price, once they have scared sellers out of the commodity.

I see the tax as an unfair burden on the novice trader and a potential windfall for the astute one, who understands market dynamics through real world experience.

BTW, I also somewhat agree with the poster who stated that the lack of a stable trading post for the first few weeks of this game has the potential to crash the game’s economy.. BUT, since it is a game, ArenaNET does have the ability (and has done so in BWE’s) to manipulate it however they see fit to correct it. How good a job they do, well that’s up to John Smith now, isn’t it? Hopefully he realizes, by now, how incorrect his BWE economy infographic was.

BTW, there is a question in the middle of the above post What’s going to happen? Document the tax in game or remove it?

I think the 10% tax would have been fine if it was documented in the same way the listing fee is. Right now, it is ripping off those who haven’t noticed and driving away sellers who have. Making for-profit selling so difficult will dry up the sale orders and make it harder for buyers to get their goods, and drive up the prices. It’s too easy to hammer risk-free lowball buy orders at the system all day to drive sellers away.

When will we see either 1) pre-sale notification of that tax (right now I feel that it is exploiting players who don’t calculate their returns because they don’t expect to be dinged another 10% after the first 5% fee was clearly stated) or 2) drop the tax.

This tax is not an effective way to curb inflation. Since there is a gems-to-gold exchange from real dollars, it does provide ArenaNET with real profits. If this is on their financial forecast sheets, it’s not going to go away anytime soon.