Guild Wars 2

Here’s my 1,000,000 lumen sword, fear me. Thank the devs they didn’t add lens flair to the game or we would all be blinded by their brilliance.

It only became a “lottery” once they added and promoted weapon skin tickets and that’s because most players simply discount the other items that are dropped. I have a bank tab set aside for boosters, tonics and services that get dropped by chests. I have another for BLSKs. Maybe someday I’ll decide to use them. But I never doubted that a chest with no ticket didn’t have an average value equivalent to the price of a key.

Esplen.3940:

Actually, the gem to gold to gem OR gold to gem to gold rate has been 72.25% because it’s a 15% tax going both ways.

The mathematical equation would be 0.85^2 = 0.7225 because it’s an equal “taxed” rate in both directions.

Yea, I know.

@OP

While you were saving 600g everybody else was also increasing their net worth but the rate of precursors trickling into the game remained roughly the same. This means the richest of those who want one will get them. If we had an auction house instead of a TP nothing would change other than the price may be even higher than it is even today.

Now because of the low volume of new supply appearing on the market daily, the fact most players who are selling will either match the low sell or undercut it slightly, it limits the ability of such of item to find it’s true equilibrium, buyers equal supply rate, price. That’s partially the reason we are seeing these step ups in price. It’s a price correction that shows the increasing wealth in the game. I mean that back when it was 600g, only X% of players could afford one. Now at 1200g, it’s still the same percentage of players that can afford one.

Now I don’t know what you are doing or how much gold you spend on other things but I’m only playing 60-90 hrs a month and make roughly 250-275g in that time. I’m a piker at this gold earning. I do a couple of champs, 2 minor bosses and every event and harvest every mat node I stumble upon. I don’t ride trains, farm Orr, speed run dungeon paths or play the TP. I understand the TP. I know when it’s better to sell an item than salvage it. I understand the MF and how much gold I can make with SPs. I know I can sell my Laurels for around 1g each buying T6 bags. And I enjoy the content I’m doing, it doesn’t feel grindy to me. Now if I can make that much a month with a level 80 character while still having fun doing it, I can’t see how someone playing 10x more only saved 600g and never bothered to see what the price was doing during that time.

John Smith.4610:

juno.1840:

QUESTIONS

1. What gold threshold would you use to classify a GW2 player as “rich” (yeah I know this is subjective, but let’s use the RL equivalent of multi-millionaires — my guess would be 6000g-ish, enough to buy a couple legendaries off the TP)

2. Roughly what percentage of the GW2 player population would fall into this “rich” category (probably tough since “smart” players would have their wealth in inflation-proof investments instead of cash in the vault — an educated percentage based upon your view of the data would be more than satisfactory)

3. How does this category of players effect the economy? (maybe a good/bad/neutral type of classification with a brief reason or two as to why)

Thanks!

These are value statements, and I don’t feel comfortable making value statements.

Okay. How much gold in bank would one need to have to be in the top 20% of active players? Top 10%?

I’m guessing starting at the 2nd anniversary and lasting 2 weeks to a month.

Esplen.3940:

Well, the first few gold->gem and gem->gold exchanges were either “pre-defined” or “free” in some direction.

John Smith stated the exchange was seeded with a small amount of gold and the huge amount of gems which is why it was roughly 30s per 100 gems at the beginning. The gem to gold rate has always been 72.25% of the gold to gem rate.

Right now I’m seeing Chaos Skins at 80g buy, 100g sell which is not bad for 1 ticket. Best 7 ticket skin is roughly 400g sell, 250g buy.

It’s not ANet’s problem if graphic drivers are messed up. A game is written to, in this case, the Dx9 API. Now it’s up to the video card driver company to write their software to take the output of Dx9 calls and implement them correctly on their hardware.

So this is an issue for AMD and not ANet. That said the game does have performance issues. It essentially has a main tread, a rendering thread and a slew of utility threads. Dx9 is less efficient than the current Dx11. But a lot of that goes back to when the engine was first written and what was the common hardware at that time.

As for graphic settings, both reflections and shadows can load down the CPU more than one think it should. Also the renderer has problems when more players are present. You can use the Character Model Limit and Quality settings to adjust that. Limit limits the number of other players that are rendered and Quality determines how many player characters are drawn with their actual model vs a generic placeholder.

Romek.4201:

problem is more like people wait for CONTENT since livingstory 1 ends for 8 months and now we had only stupid cutscenese and textlines for another 2 months and they make a break …..

here is nothing to do in this game and no hope it will be better someday and arenanet afk

You and I count time differently. LS1 was over on April 1st. LS2 started on July 1. That’s 3 months, not 8.

And the anti-flippers come out of the wood work.

Players can try to control it but they can’t for long. Draining supply and then posting one at some massive markup just makes players sitting on precursors to pony them up on the market, undercutting the initial low sell. So what ends up happening is an uptick over the regular supply rate as players choose to dump any they have in inventory. Successive under cuts quickly brings the price back down to near where it was before the attempted manipulation.

A player would need 100K+ in gold to try to control supply for a few days, otherwise the price collapses. But the forum gets inundated by threads like this everytime it’s tried.

laokoko.7403:

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

After converting he has 62 tickets. Best 7 ticket is is 430g and best 5 ticket is 360g. So eight, 7 ticket and one 5 ticket is 3800g while twelve, 5 ticket skins are 4320g. So I don’t know where you get 3100g. Heck best one ticket skin is 100g. That’s 6300g but I doubt the price can be maintained at 100g for that many, even if sold only one at a time as to not flood the supply.

I don’t know why you keep putting ANet down laokoko. I guess you hate lock boxes/grab bags.

My opening paragraph did say it wasn’t worth it if you bought keys with either cash or gold. If you don’t care about makeover kits or uni dyes or minis or backpacks then you wouldn’t be farming for keys because the gold per hour rate is relatively low even if you can farm 4 keys in an hour, that’s still only 7gph.

So it now does play to the “do specific content to get specific award” song.

That’s the bare bones browser for the TP UI. Yes the trading post is a web page.

It’s as common as “new patch dropped my FPS” or “new patch is increased my lag”.

It’s foolish to think you can buy keys and convert the results into income at a rate better than exchanging the gems it cost into gold (assuming you paid cash). Only works if you farm keys and even then it’s a lot of farming to get maybe 410g. We are talking 240 chests for 7 tickets on average. That’s 80-120 hrs or 3.5 to 5g an hour.

Also the 3700g figure is only tickets. What about the rare minis (80g) and whatever he gets from the 10, 3-pack minis. Or the 253 unidentified dyes (70g) or the 111 dyes from the dye 3-pack? The trading post contract is 300g.

Then there’s the 9,600 gems worth of hair and total makeover kits. The 4,200 gems worth of transmutation charges. Sure you can’t sell those but the can be worth a lot to a player. 3,300 gems worth of backpack skins. 13,500 gems worth of BLSKs. The account bound stuff I listed is over 30K worth of gems. Point being it’s not all booster and stupid blue tonic crap.

No, feel free to skip it. Just don’t complain about free content. Who knows, maybe the next update has something you like.

Morsus.5106:

GrandmaFunk.3052:

you probably shouldn’t skip so much stuff.

Then maybe ANet should design some content I want to play, versus an hour long story and then a bunch of achievements for me to not do, and a backpiece for me to earn and then put in the bank and forget about.

My aren’t you picky for getting something for free.

Essence Snow.3194:

The BoH from achievement chests mitigate the need to play wvw, so kinda a moot point.

That’s why I said in theory. Is that still happening BTW, the BoH drops. Kind of upset that I don’t get random PvP armor pieces anymore to full in my wardrobe.

Major patch days can seriously fragment the data file. Occurring the same day when Microsoft pushes their patches which usually include rebuilding a good many of their .NET modules can fragment the file even further.

I didn’t say it was a system problem, just make sure that your system is up to snuff to eliminate it from the equation. That’s how you track problems done. You clear every each item until you find the culprit. Jumping to conclusions can send you on a wild goose chase.

TraceRT or pingplotter can also show drop packets along the way as well as the ping. It may be a problem with Rogers, it may be a problem from Rogers to the first hop into the US.

But you might be able to call up the include file that contains the various chances or the actual source code file that handles salvaging.

Yes, that’s one of the points being made.

No, this goes back to commander resentment. It use to be anybody with 100g could wear the taco and insist players follow them. Then it was changes to 100g and 250 BoH so you actually had to play, in theory, WvW to earn one. Changing it to account bound sort of forces that issue.

Now the OP was planning on rewarding random players a commander’s tag. That’s like the military promoting random strangers to General for winning a raffle IMO. Didn’t have a more suitable reward that was both prize worthy and pricey other than mailing them gold and deal with the gold police.

Don’t know how Microsoft pushes out their patches. But the pings seem good so you need to look at actual ping times. So /ip and check that IP in the resource monitor.

It could be patch day jitters on their servers or client software. Normally, if it’s par for the course, there will be a patch later in the day to address some issues. Just make sure your system is up to par. Maybe defrag the dat file.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I remember bad and good streaks XD if i get 2x 3 from 2 rares I DEFINITEly remember it. Today i had 0+0+1+1+0 (looks bad here, me ’omg 2/5 ecto, i hate you), +3. Net result: 6/6 ecto. Pretty satisfying.

And you can’t add, that’s 5 out of 6 unless you had a 2 in there you forgot about.

Still above/close to average in my book.

Foghladha.2506:

Behellagh.1468:

If you were planning on selling them then why hold on to them? If you promised one to someone why didn’t you mail it when you made the promise? Why by 5 in the first place? If I had 500 gold laying around I certainly wouldn’t buy 5 of these.

As for the change, probably the old “must do content to get reward” mantra even though BoH drops (or dropped, do they still drop) from achievement chests.

Did you read what I wrote? They are Prizes for a charity event that takes place this Fall, the ExtraLife Charity Event. I was holding onto them for that event.

If they were for some event occurring in the future then why buy them with such a lead time? You couldn’t remember to save 500g and 1250 BoH and not spend them until the event was over?

RoRo.8270:

:( Called my isp they said they can’t help cause it’s not a modem/router issue….

Behellagh.1468:

64.25.32.xx is an entry point to NCSOFT’s data center. Ping is reasonable to that point.

There is a Microsoft update that might be pushed to your system today depending on your update settings. It’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

How would a Microsoft update fix this issue? Just wondering.

The patch being downloaded and applied may be introducing expected work loads onto your system when you weren’t expecting it. That’s all.

Well because players expect 0.8 to 0.9 per salvage and if 40% of the time you get nothing, you remember those misses. You rarely remember the times you got 2 or 3 and they don’t seem to make up for all those misses you remember.

One reason I started documenting my salvages.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Endless_Monkey_King_Tonic

As I was saying …

If you were planning on selling them then why hold on to them? If you promised one to someone why didn’t you mail it when you made the promise? Why by 5 in the first place? If I had 500 gold laying around I certainly wouldn’t buy 5 of these.

As for the change, probably the old “must do content to get reward” mantra even though BoH drops (or dropped, do they still drop) from achievement chests.

I don’t know about this version of John Smith. Less Kosh, more Morgan Freeman.

64.25.32.xx is an entry point to NCSOFT’s data center. Ping is reasonable to that point.

There is a Microsoft update that might be pushed to your system today depending on your update settings. It’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

Market conditions change all the time. It was rare before and now can drop from bosses. There’s been no change in supply on the market, just speculators getting out ASAP while potential buyers are lowering their asking price.

As for those who bought it when it as a rare chest drop, it’s tough to be on the bleeding edge. When CD/DVD/Blu-ray players first came out they cost hundreds of dollars. Now Blu-ray are like $70 and connect to Netflix and Hulu now over wireless.

Katai.6240:

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Morsus.5106:

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Shadowmoon.7986:

July 1-Auguest 12
1.38 months. Closer to 1 month than 2. Nice try!

the finale doesn’t end today, it starts today.

if you want to calculate how long the half-season lasted, you need to know when it’ll end.

That’s like saying that your TV show doesn’t end on the date the series finale airs. It does, just not ‘till the credits roll, like they will in an hour or two when I’m done with this episode.

Which is my point. the credits haven’t rolled yet, the episode just started.

if you’re legitimately “done” with all the content from a release after an hour or two.. well, that sucks for you, you probably shouldn’t skip so much stuff.

Also, if you consider the length of a release to be “how long it took me through rush through it once”, then this half season hasn’t lasted a month either, it would be an 8 hour season.

Heck, if we applied this logic to TV shows, than 12 episodes of South Park is a 6 hour season!

If you skip the opening and closing credits and considering most 1/2 hour shows in the US are around 22 minutes then it’s closer to 4 hours and not 6.

Sorry, I binge watch shows. I know how to pack them in.

xDudisx.5914:

What is a grey market?

Probably means player 2 player trading.

Also college is starting up in the US soon, PAX is at the end of the month along with the 2nd anniversary. Any and all can be reasons to but the LS on hold for a month.

Shadowmoon.7986:

July 1-Auguest 12
1.38 months. Closer to 1 month than 2. Nice try!

July 1 – August 26, 1.87 months. Nice try!

From my data of 1300 salvages with a master/mystic kit

0: 40%
1: 45%
2: 7.5%
3: 7.5%

In the last 7 days I got 24 out of 29. But some days I got 1 out of 3 and other days 8 out of 5 or 4 out of 4. And even those two great returns included 3 out of 9 that didn’t yield any.

phys.7689:

Essentially the prices of precursors will continue to go out of reach as you say. And man, if they introduce new legendaries with a similar system, those prices would be insane.

But I think the point of his post is, within this system precursors of high demand will always be a problem for people who are below that high earning rate.

So then the question is whether that’s right or wrong in the eyes of the devs. Now they may only be concern with maintaining a very rare drop rate and simply let the player’s knife each other on the TP to get one. But on another thread I suggest this RNG reward/TP/gold sink system they have in place simply leads to unconventional play styles and complaints about grinding because the game becomes all about earning the almighty gold piece.

- Why don’t players play in zone X? Well no good gold making opportunities.
- Why did the champ trains come into existence? Well the devs boosted the rewards on champs and it was a quick and easy way to earn rewards.
- Why are dungeon parties so particular about another player’s equipment/trait/skill load out? So they can do the paths as quick as possible to maximize gold per hour.
- Why would a player guest on two servers just to mine T6 mats (pre Megaserver)? To earn gold.

That’s just off the top of my currently aching head. So between precursors and the almost pathological need to get stuff from the Gem Shop for free. Earning gold ASAP has shaped how players play and how they react to the game. I’ll bet that the root to most of the “GW2 is grindy” threads is because players feel the need to do content that delivers the most gold in the shortest amount of time, regardless if they like doing that content or not. It’s no longer about exploring a new world and fighting the good fight against the dragons but earning enough gold to get a precursor and free stuff from the Gem Shop.

The initial load up when you first zone in seems to try and load in all the assets first before kicking off the renderer. Once you are in the game, way pointing or gating doesn’t wait for all the assets to load into memory. That’s why I’ve seen sound delays, objects popping into existence such as walls and floors, player characters first appear as the generic models, lighting effects not starting up, etc.

When I go the the royal pavilion, frequently there is no floor for a good 5-15 seconds. I’ve ported the WP near my instance in DR to do some mining and the wall/gate isn’t there for a second or two. When I gate to Rata Sum I see the lower floors aren’t rendered fully and the “plants” that light up along the top level don’t materialize for the longest time. I can run from the LA gate to the starter zone gate and they still hadn’t loaded yet. It takes longer than that. This is a SATA 3 convential HD that has 100+MB/s sequential reads and the dat file is defragmented.

At least that’s how I see it. Initially it waits until all the assets are loaded and other player characters are built before kicking off the renderer. But after that it waits for a minimum amount of time, which is fine if you were planning to run from one gate in LA to another or bring up the map to jump to a way point after gating in. You just have to put up with another 30 seconds of loading before the game appears and sounds “normal”.

Depends on what you mean be “control”. I don’t think any one person or cartel can control the precursor market. Now if you mean control as in only accessible to the very rich, well that’s a problem with supply and that has to do with the devs wanting to give legendary weapons a truly rare status and since precursors are required, they inherit the truly rare status.

With any low supply, high demand item only those with the most money will be able to get it. And as the game drags on the wealth gap increases. And since nobody can really control supply for very long of any one precursor, the prices are what the market can bear, sort of.

I’m of a mind that the various charting sites can’t detect when one is priced significantly less than what we see as the low sale price and is bought almost immediately. Those sites simply don’t sample frequently enough to notice them. So the low sell price we are seeing is the nobody willing to pay price and the actual price is much closer to the high bid.

Check out this thread, results from 1000 chests with double chance on claim tickets.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/1000-Black-Lion-Keys

Hmm, full tickets are rarer than even I thought. Scraps are in par with predictions. Thank you for the data.

Now I came along after they announced this at the start of Dec 2012. And that is really the only vertical progression they’ve done in nearly two years and how long did it really take to role it out completely for armor and weapons? It certainly not WoW’s expansion route where the first items drop from an expansion is better than the set you spent months doing raids to get.

The “fix” to the trait system was in response to the contingent of players wanting something that was found in GW1, acquiring traits from completing specific content rather than handing them to you for free. Except, to my understanding these were more unique traits in GW1 and not the “basic” ones every became use to here in GW2 for 3g and change. But hey, we can now retrait for free. You know swapping between all those individual traits you unlocked by doing content that might not be available when you had the trait points to select it or by spending a lot more in the long run than 3g and change.

Except the exchange is more of a sequestrating of gold as well as a sink. The sink is the difference in exchange rates, a 27.75% gold sink.

So cumulative gold on all players plus gold in the exchange is the total gold supply. The gold growth rate is gold from drops, vendors and the like minus the sinks, primarily the TP and WP system. The trick is not let the growth rate to go negative but also not going too positive. Everything else is simply transferring gold between players or the exchange.

Kuldebar.1897:

That was beautiful, Behellagh.1468.

Thanks for going into detail, I wasn’t entirely sure on your points in the earlier post.

I think the whole of GW2 game development is being wagged by the “degenerate” play-style; it’s manifesting in almost everything in the game now.

Thank you.

But I believe the root cause is the reward system of the game creates a positive feedback loop that in turn drives players to unconventional, unique play styles.

Due to the RNG nature of rewards, the only way to guarantee you get item X is buying it off the TP. Not a problem if what you want isn’t overwhelmingly popular or the drop rate is common, big problem if there is a huge demand and a drizzle of a drop rate. So players do whatever earns them the most gold per session in hopes to earn enough to buy one but the thing is lots of players are doing the exactly same thing. So everybody’s whose after item X are building up their gold reserves to buy one of the few available but it still will only go to the one that has the most gold. And likely that will never be you, at least not in a time frame you are looking for.

A more obvious positive feedback loop are gem shop skins, direct ones and indirect ones via tickets. So players exchange gold to buy gems to get items which in turn raises the cost of gems in relation to gold. So you need to earn more gold to get the next item at a similar gem price.

This convinces players that they must do whatever gets them the most gold during their play session, even if they dislike that activity. Which leads to the “GW2 is full of grinding” threads. Or players get clever and find a way to use the multitude of existing game mechanics to create a way to play totally unplanned and unforeseen by the developers. So when the devs data mined that players weren’t bothering to defeat champs they decided to juice up their rewards. And that led to some clever person to come up with the Queensdale champ train.

Someone else figured out by guesting on several servers that his level 80 can mine T6 mats from multiple maps all day, switching from one server to the next until the nodes respawn on the first server. Guesting was meant to play with friends on other servers, not to strip mine their resources to line your pockets (channeling Capt Planet here).

Now we have the boss train that arrives at the next stop every 15 minutes, all aboard.

But it’s all about getting the almighty gold in hopes to buy that item you want either at the gem shop for “free” or TP. Except nobody sees that doing that makes the gem shop more expensive for those shopping for “free” and more players with more gold means the price of those highly desirable items keep increasing, always being just out of reach.

Now the only real fix for items like precursors is either increase the drop rate or make them craftable. Except legendary weapons can be considered by some as “winning” the game. Even if they never spent a dime buying gems their presence in the game is a feature. Nobody wants to play in an MMO where you don’t see other players. It’s better to live in a city of a million strangers than alone in a ghost town. So ANet really doesn’t want players to leave because their grand quest is over.

I think that’s one reason ANet decided to do the Living Story than bulk content expansions. Keep players playing every two weeks at least. Here’s something new to do even if a devoted player can polish it off in only a few hours. You are now a persistent part of the world, even if the content isn’t.

Anyways enough of my rantings. I play because it’s more engaging than passively watching a TV show. I play for fun. If that means I never get a precursor/legendary, so be it. I just enjoy running around in a pretty world playing hero, bonking nasties on the head and going though their pockets.

It’s not as kittenome necros. Seen ones plucked from over a year ago.

Awe yes, the old “only people who can afford X are rich people and evil flippers”. There is a thread I read talking about earning 30+g a day in a few hours grinding out all the dungeon paths daily and the author of that post thinks he’s a piker in terms of earning compared to others he play with.

Believe me, ANet isn’t expecting the player base to engage in flipping to earn coin. If you think flippers are simply putting in bids, turning around and list anything they bought at a 50% markup, sit back and wait for the money to pour in are certifiable. In another thread someone suggested half of the player base is flipping. That’s crazy talk. Flipping isn’t about ratcheting prices up, it’s about finding the places where there is a significant, practical gap between low sell and high buy and work that. It means that players must be selling at the bid price and buying from the sell price at a reasonable volume level where the profit after fees is worth the time finding that niche market.

Precursors are high because their daily supply is a trickle and therefore only those with the most money who want one can get it. If we had an auction system the price would be just as high or higher.

kta.6502:

Behellagh.1468:

Why do I see your 1-5 under “play the game your way” is all about the trait changes from April. Well that and discouraging degenerate play styles which caused them to nerf loot to keep inflation to a minimum and the intro zone champ trains.

I’m going to respond to this one.

What is being called “degenerate play styles” is called “Progression” in the United States. Almost every game here makes its money from players to go after champs and other monsters. It’s what Americans pay for when they subscribe to MMOs or buy access to a game like GW2. Yeah, i know that’s weird, but it’s what sells here.

The last time I saw a game like this was when Ragnarok Online was brought to the US. In RO, people leveled up their characters to the point where there was nothing left except socializing. In Japan and Korea, people are more willing to stick to such games because the gamers value socializing over progression. Not so in the U.S. where Americans thrive on endgame content. I know this from playing various MMOs (and simillar types of games) over the last 17 years on NA, EU, and Asian servers. The only thing keeping me in this game is the RP, the Sylvari storyline, and my need to see how the GW2 storyline ends. I also help the newer players when I can.

I’ve got alot of Progression-obsessed friends going back to WoW or heading over to ArcheAge. We’re losing alot of good guilds & players because of the situation with the content and progression. This is bad for newer players because there are less to people to teach others to master the harder classes like Mesmer and Ranger.

I know that this isn’t your point but let me expand on mine. First when I say degenerate I mean a play style not foreseen by the developers that crop up due to exploiting the game’s mechanics and reward system.

Speed runs through a dungeon is a degenerate play style since it means avoiding encounters to get to the end quickly. The abuse of that has led to the various nerfings of loot from doing them. If the extraneous encounters aren’t needed to get the reward then why did the devs bother to include them? Players are taking advantage of the leash system. If the system didn’t exist speed runners would end up pulling a huge number of mobs onto their flanks when they rush to do the next boss chest encounter.

In my previous MMO speed runs led to a reward change that replaced a random exclusive reward from list X to a skee-ball ticket system with the number of tickets based on the data mined completion times and a vendor to trade your tickets for the previous acquirable items. And they would update the ticket amounts periodically base on the latest data mine. How’s that for a nerf.

Taking advantage of the way point system, champ respawn rates and number of champs in a zone so you can dash from one champ to the next just as it spawns is a degenerate play style. I admit the champ train concept was clever combination of understanding the spawning locations, transit times and respawn rate to minimize down time between champs but I’m fairly certain the devs didn’t expect anyone to formalize it as an activity that one would play for hours. It was partially the devs doing when they significantly boosted the champ rewards due to players ignoring champs but the train wasn’t an outcome they expected.

This game was never suppose to be about Progression. They threw the ascension level gear at those players. But they would never be satisfied by a horizontal progression system to begin with. As for content I can understand players wanting to binge on new content the way they binge watch a TV show’s season when they first pick up the box set. But here it’s one episode every two weeks and in the instantaneous gratification culture in the US that simply isn’t enough. They would blow through the content in a day. Me? I’m still doing episode 1. I’m ecstatic that the LS this time around doesn’t “force” me to complete it if I want the reward at the end of it. So it’s more “play it my way” than before.

But heck I’m a “care bear”, a casual player who should be playing Hello Kitty according to some. But I think I’m more of the target demographic than the OC min/maxing, speed running, leet PvP, MMO players that are leaving to look for their ideal game. I wish them luck finding their white whale.

Ayrilana.1396:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Svetli.4276:

abusing it to gain wealth NO
tp flipping is abuse of the game SO NO IT MUST NOT BE PART OF THE GAME !
buy and sell timer will fix that

• Who defines it as abuse?
• Who defines what is ok and not ok to do to “gain wealth”?
• Who defines what is part of the game?

I think the answer to all of the above is ANET and they haven’t put a buy / sell timer in the game (nor ANY restrictions on TP use….18 months after release), so I’m going to take that as an indication you are simply wrong in all your assumptions.

Perhaps they DO need to come up with a method to thwart automated (BOT) trading, but I’m not sure how they do that.

I remember checking his post history and saw something a long the lines of him saying that flipping is bannable in WoW. He’s applying that to this game.

Edit: Here’s the post I was referring to

Svetli.4276:

in wow you get ban for flipping items
here you get a f medal

Which actually isn’t true since there are current flipping threads on their forum. Most likely any bans was due to market manipulation and not flipping but I can understand that some see no difference between the two.

Gems are created from scratch when you buy them with cash. Since your choice is either spend them in the shop for items or exchange them for gold that was already in the game, it doesn’t really affect the economy because those buying gems with gold is looking to spend them in the gem shop which destroys them.

To build on tolunart’s wonderful analogy, at the start of the game, the gold box only had a little gold while the gem box was filled to the brim. The value of the two boxes are the same. So as the gold box fills while the gem box is emptying, to keep the value of the two boxes equal, it means that the remaining gems are worth more than at the start of the game.