Guild Wars 2

Hi there, me again.

That’s because crafting materials aren’t always just crafting materials but have other uses that may temporarily drive up their price. In the case with iron, the Bazaar is in town and will accept iron for Zephyr Sanctum Supply Boxes. There were spikes at other times for other reasons. Same is true with all crafting materials.

For instance when they introduced ascended items, which required players to craft them for themselves caused a run on crafting supplies. Which highlighted the fact that players weren’t harvesting enough materials in the middle level zones. Which then cause a rush on middle level items on the TP to act as sources for these materials. Add in Mystic Forge promotion, where a lot of one tier item is used to make fewer of the next tier and the whole crafting market of materials, as least in the crafting areas that can make ascended items rise in price rather sharply.

Flip side is few cared about making a profit crafting on the way up. This made some items dirt cheap because supply outran demand by a huge number. That’s why silver settings are cheaper than silver ingots which are cheaper than the silver ore to make them. They just flooded the market with them hoping to get something back. That’s why there are not a lot of items players can craft and make a profit on, unless of course they had harvested the materials themselves.

In the case of Silver Doubloons, players don’t do the content where they drop, thus they are in short supply. They are only found in drops in level 20-30 zones and because leveling is so quick and easy in this game, players blow right past those zones. Charged Lodestones are the same except in high level zones and if you’ve ever been to Orr, it’s not all that inviting to visit frequently.

So it’s not rocket surgery, not enough player do the content that drops them. If they do get them they may choose to keep them for their own use rather than sell them. This leads to low supply and whenever there is low supply and high demand, prices are high. That’s why it’s a “law”.

This isn’t a flee market or tag sale or even eBay. You never know the buyer or seller. The TP is a nameless, faceless intermediary third party, a guy who looks in a ledger and tells us what the current high bid and low sell order are, produce a list of prices with amounts if we are willing to wait a moment, and ask us what we want to do. In every case they take the item or money upfront, make a note about it in their ledger. If there’s a match you’ll get a text to tell you where to go to pick up your money or item.

Sounds like you want to interact with buyers or sellers. That you want to be able to choose who you deal with. That’s not efficient when there are tens of thousands of buyers and sellers at any one time.

I’m going to be called a white knight but here goes.

In my experience, if you don’t like the food or service at a restaurant and after numerous complaints to the owners, nothing changes, you stop going there.

What you don’t do is set up across the street from them on a folding chair with a bullhorn telling the arriving customers that the service and food stink and would be so much better if the owners just listen to you. If the place is still in business and they still get an decent clientele of regulars, where is your proof that what the owners are doing is wrong? Seems to be working out for them. Parking lot is always full and people seem to be enjoying themselves as they leave after their meal, only to return again several times during the month or even week.

I know. You all wanted something different. Something closer to what you had with the first game. It’s been over a year and a half since it went live. It doesn’t look as if your comments and complaints are making any headway. So when do you give up and move on, or move back since Guild Wars is still running? When do you stop jousting windmills?

So accept what good you can find in the game now, and by some of the posts it seems very little, or look for something better. I never understood how people can stay in abusive relationships and I’m seeing some of the same signs here. We’ll give ArenaNet another chance to see if Living Story 2 is any better. Maybe it’ll be different this time.

Honestly I think there’s a calling for therapists who specialize in getting people to leave MMOs they no longer like but can’t leave for some reason.

It’s been explained in your other thread there VGmike.

A seller can either sell only to the highest bidder (actually create a sell order at the current high bid price) or set a price higher than that.

A buyer can choose to buy only from the lowest seller, which can fail if an item at that price is no longer available, or set a price lower than that.

The market then matches buyers to sellers. If a seller is selling 100 of something but the buyer only wanted 50, then you will see the price spike down to the previous high bid price and the gap between the buy and sell price narrows to as little as a copper.

As others have said, the system coded to assume the seller wants the most they can get for an item they are selling. The notion of selling it for less than the current highest offer is unimaginable. That isn’t what an efficient market does.

Back in City of Heroes the player market was set up as a double blind consignment market. When you put something up for sale, you are saying you will take no less than X for this item. Buyers on the other hand offer Y for that item, take it or leave it. Since neither side can see the seller or buyer range of prices but only the last five transactions and how many offers and unsold items are still available, setting a price to maximize your value is very different. Especially if you take into consideration that highest buy offer is matched to lowest sell offer, as long as the buy offer is higher, and the seller gets the full amount the seller was willing to spend for that item.

That meant that if you were offering an item for 10 and someone was willing to pay 1000, you got 1000 (minus fees). This led to players low balling their sell orders to sell faster and buyers low balling their offers in hope of finding players low balling their sell orders. It led to times where the last five transactions were 1000, 1000, 1000, 60, 1000. Look, someone got a deal and someone got greedy or impatient and lost.

Aeon.6397:

im a guy.. im not a fan of pine-cones on a stick that shoots rainbows. lmao

But a greatsword that shows a window into the endless void of space, oh yea sign me up for one of those.

Bet you don’t play a mesmer because of purple butterflies aren’t manly.

The Mac version is running TransGaming’s forked version of WINE so likely no.

Somebody reports said name. Mods investigate. They agree it violates the naming policy and that’s all she wrote.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-naming-policy/

I will assume it’s due to “reference sexual acts”.

Someone is offering 10g to buy an item. If you choose to sell an item for less, the system assumes you mean to sell it to the current high bidder because the assumption is you want as much as you can get from someone actively seeking that item and the buyer is clearly ponying up more than what you are asking. Buyer gets the item, you get more than you were looking for, win-win.

No reason to prevent you from asking for considerably more for your item that the current high bid or low sale price.

As for items with high sale prices, some list them assuming at some point the price will rise to that level. Other times the price may have spiked to that level and those listed items are a “fossil” of that time. The owner of that item may be using the TP has a paid storage locker, pricing an item well beyond the normal trading range.

As for mithril, Aug 30th, 2012. Someone put a sell order for mithril at 1.35s. The TP was less than a day or two old and nobody had any idea what a fair price for anything was. A week later it was 25c. Someone might have never pulled their sale order.

You can only get it indirectly with gold, assuming you are buying high level exotics. If they weren’t account bound then you could sell them on the TP and buy them directly. Since it’s only used to craft ascended items it’s just like the other ascended oriented materials you’ve already mentioned. You have to be willing to salvage exotic gear to get it. Since exotic gear does drop as well as pop out of the forge, the TP isn’t the only way to get the “raw materials” to salvage dark matter.

I might be inclined to pay gems for the ability to hire semi-competent NPCs for dungeons so I could solo them at my leisure rather than speedrunning them with hyper-caffeinated teammates. But anything that impacts my character’s basic abilities or game play mechanics should always be kept out of the gem shop.

Because I got good playing her even though she’s not a DPS queen. And in low level zones she’s a vengeful Goddess routinely taking on multiple mobs. Reminds me of scrapper lock in City of Heroes. Not as extreme here but better than the standard “oh no there’s two of them, I’m in trouble” found in most MMOs, including this one when leveling up. Especially after playing a tricked out level 80. Oh do I get into trouble with new characters.

And that commonly happens. Prices for items listed for sale tend to be on an exponential curve with the last few being wacky high. And since the listed supply was on a gentle downward slope, it’s not like someone suddenly bought all the “cheap” ones to indirectly spike the price up.

Now the limited supply and rapidly increasing price is going to drive panic buying which will push prices even higher as more of the wacky high sell orders become the current low sell price.

While having no default choice on the sell screen might, just might mind you, change some players default choice it’s more likely to annoy many, many more who will still insist and immediate sales for coin in hand. Same is true with buying, if the set your price comes up first with you needing to click “buy now” to get the low sell price list.

We are a society of immediacy. If not we would be buying everything on Amazon and malls would be closed up ghost towns. We are willing to pay more if we can get our hands on it now. No different in the virtual world. And if we are guaranteed to get it at the lowest possible price at the moment, all the better. And because of this there will always be undercutting if you choose to sell an item yourself. Because even though you are willing to wait for a better payout than selling to the highest bidder, most aren’t willing to wait a day or a week for that difference.

It’s an extremely rare item. If I got one I wouldn’t think of selling it.

Now if I got two, an extremely rare case I would but I have no frame of reference to set a price on it. If I post it for 100g and it sells instantly then I feel like I didn’t get it’s worth. If I posted for 1000g and it doesn’t sell, I wasted 50g to find that out. For whatever reason the tracking sites aren’t tracking this reliably so with no information I’m would sit on it.

Supply on the market is dropping, no new supply is coming in, all the “cheap” ones have sold out so now we’re facing the tail end of existing sell orders. We’re down to 15 from 60+ a month ago. On top of that demand shot up 50%. Bids are chasing the low sell up.

phys.7689:

Behellagh.1468:

Except the price recover shows that shenanigans like this doesn’t work even with luxury items with limited supply generation. A week later, price back where it was, even lower, than just before the spike occurred.

I don’t disagree that there’s inflation, or that wealth can be concentrated among an “upper class”, just that such on obvious attempt of manipulation can’t last long in a market with this many players as long as the “spice flows” supply entering the market is relatively constant. Patience is the key when using the market.

“Yeah, yeah, patience. How long will that take?”

well glass half empty glass half full, it shows that they cannot alter the prices forever, but it shows they can alter the prices when they need/want to for long enough to make big money.
Whether on purpose or not, it shows that given the right circumstances, prices can influenced solely by controllable factors in small markets, it took like a week to stabilize, and in that time a decent amount of dusks were sold at a price much greater than market value, which is actually the perfect result if you were a theoretical manipulator, pump and dump. it going back down is the perfect result because it shows you actually got away with something, rather than just selling something for what the market really says its worth.
And you can do it again.

you are right patience is the key, probably the whole key to the whole market even in other ways. The problem though is they draw you into the gamble, a buyer has to wonder, am i getting scammed, or is this the new price? Because sometimes, the prices dont go back down.

Eh well thats business, a game of how bad do you want it. TP is PVP.

They were sold to people who weren’t willing to wait. Hence patience being the key.

But we don’t know what the prices they were sold at. One of the problems is the sampling rate of the tracking sites. As it was we saw momentary drops in the low sell price for one sample period every so often. How many did we miss? How often is the current low sell price on such an exclusive item is the price nobody is willing to pay? How many players are sitting on the TP hitting refresh waiting for a deal to pop up and pounce on it? We lack the information as to what price trades are actually transacting at. We can imply some when the price dips to the high bid or when the low sell ticks up but we have no idea how many are done at what price between the sampling times that the tracking sites use.

Try this.

Honestly needs to be a sticky.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Tabs-in-Gem-Store-not-loading/3739993

Devata.6589:

Behellagh.1468:

B2P is like the admission price to an amusement park. You can ride all the rides but that doesn’t mean you can get that stuffed unicorn at the ring toss for free.

Well in that case F2P would be better as it’s the same but without admission price? Obviously the comparison is not completely accurate from a business model perspective.

People with a sub would then get in every day but still need to pay for the hunicorn.

But to keep the same example, how much fun is then one of those grab machines if you don’t get the stuffed unicorn you manage to drop into the hole?

The F2Ps I’ve been exposed to lock playable content away behind pay walls. This includes areas, classes, races and normally start you out with an inventory capacity smaller than a lunch pale with only cash can expand into something useful since you can’t sell anywhere close to where you are and if you leave to do so then the content resets. So you are forced to either travel back to a vendor or bank (which costs) to save and sell your stuff or delete some stuff in the field to make room or buy more inventory for cash. Here you can cheaply get 80 slots per character and with the ability to TP or deposit collectibles or salvage and deposit collectibles, you don’t normally encounter a time when you have to take a break and trek to a bank.

So we pay up front for the game. We get all classes, races and access to all areas. Nothing in the gameplay mechanics is locked behind a pay wall. The rides in my analogy. But if you want that park T-shirt or chance to win that fluffy stuffed unicorn, yeah, that’ll cost extra.

Note: the use of you is you in the plural sense and nobody specific.

Except I don’t see this “change” everyone is complaining about. Players are simply, finally, realizing that the gold to gem rate isn’t ever going to go down significantly due to overuse and ANet isn’t going to up the in game coin drop. They point out how to reduce the exchange rate buy converting bought gems into gold and everyone starts screaming as if this was some horrible conspiracy to turn the game into some F2P wannabe. It’s always been reliant on Gem sales but most of those upset by this sudden realization are finally facing the harsh truth. This isn’t the first Guild Wars. There aren’t going to be a string of reskins of the game every year under the guise of a “campaign”. That the longevity of the game is dependent on sales of gems, for cash. In Guild Wars if you wanted “purdy” skins you had to pay cold hard cash. Why is that so difficult to understand in Guild Wars 2? Why is that suddenly “ebil”?

Yes, yes, you all wanted expansions just like Guild Wars. But they denied considering or working on expansions since the game’s release. Even correcting NCSOFT’s own investor call statements. It’s not like they were hiding it.

And now, due to it’s overuse converting one way, the exchange rate is 3x higher than a year ago. And most of the crazy brain schemes to bend the game’s mechanics and reward system for “phat” loot have been thwarted for now, there is a dawning that there’s not enough hours in the day to earn gold for “free” cash shop items. It was never meant to be “free” indefinitely for everything. It was a way to supplement your cash for gems. What did you all think? Only stupid people bought gems with cash? Look up “tragedy of the commons”. That’s the Gem Exchange in a nutshell. So you all poor every last copper into gold to gem conversion every time something new pops up or return that you want. Then you complain you will never have enough gold to buy a precursor or weapon skin on the TP, all the while those players buying gems are converting them to the gold that you spent, that they then use to supplement their gold to buy those same precursors and skins on the TP.

Nope, you all steadfastly insist that everything offered in the game should be free with just game play. You all might as well order the tides back because it ain’t gonna happen. And it’s not because of China. The game has always been this, from day one. That fact that you all finally woke up to that fact is a sad statement how long people can play with blinders on.

Honestly, currently leveling an engineer. I don’t have a problem. And if I need skill points I got 70+ in scrolls collected by my previous characters, which I haven’t touched on this character. Plenty of skill points in the world to visit. And oddly enough I use skill points on skills and there a limit you can use for skills, the rest is currency.

Honestly, you got your cheese moved and now you’re ticked. I understand but the devs want players out in the world they created than running the same set of content every day ad infinitum.

Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky – grind the Queensdale Champ Train!

Except the price recover shows that shenanigans like this doesn’t work even with luxury items with limited supply generation. A week later, price back where it was, even lower, than just before the spike occurred.

I don’t disagree that there’s inflation, or that wealth can be concentrated among an “upper class”, just that such on obvious attempt of manipulation can’t last long in a market with this many players as long as the “spice flows” supply entering the market is relatively constant. Patience is the key when using the market.

“Yeah, yeah, patience. How long will that take?”

Well you do have to get your butt out of the starter zone.

I just tired people are trying to blame “China” on the changes they don’t like. It’s more like since we are going to be launching in China, what do we know now about how players play and knowing that’s the outcome of our design, what would we do different. And after that what changes can be back ported into the NA/EU edition with minimal disruptions.

In China for example, guild services are cross server, doesn’t matter where the guild bank is, all guild members (if allowed) can access it from any server. That’s something they couldn’t easily do here with all the established guilds. But account wide dye and skin unlocks was something doable. Just as they moved away from soul bound gem store items (skins and gathering tools) and made them account wide, buy once and use, with charges in case of skins, as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. Yes it’s a razor/razor blade model but as long as you aren’t someone who likes changing outfits frequently then the free transmutation charges from map explore should be enough.

No, this change was put in so players are forced to participate or pay to choose traits, since they got rid off the gem store reset and no longer charge for doing a respec on your traits. If you choose to level in one zone running the same content continuously they you can pay for your traits. Otherwise go out and explore Tyria and do the content the devs created to acquire the traits you want.

So no fully leveled and traited out character via crafting anymore for free.

There isn’t a IP to zipcode/city relationship that is easily looked up. I’m not sure what methods/DB ANet uses to map IP to local. And local depends on your ISP. Mine lists my location some 45 miles away. That’s where my ISP’s local net connects to the Internet.

Use http://www.whatismyip.com to see what they list your location, click on more IP information because they search a couple of databases. Now of course if it’s in a different country or state (as long as it’s not NC Interactive’s IP in Austin Tx) then there’s a chance that some shenanigans going on.

A better way to state it is the game was optimized back when 2 cores were standard a 4 cores were high end. Combine that with a lower per core performance of AMD FX cpus when compared to an Intel i5 core and that the game scales poorly around large groups of players results in performance that will be markedly different than games built upon optimized, established, commercially available engines.

Fairly good setup for most games, so-so to alright setup for GW2. Overclocking the CPU will help a great deal. And I think the R9 270x is enough with this game.

But he’s like the reoccurring heavy on a TV series that monologues before escaping, leaving the hero with something to think about. While his PoV is important as all player’s PoV are, I not sure what percentage of the active population (not sure if he’s truly active) share his opinion.

B2P is like the admission price to an amusement park. You can ride all the rides but that doesn’t mean you can get that stuffed unicorn at the ring toss for free.

As someone stated in another thread. If the item is high volume then 1c doesn’t matter. If it’s low volume and 1c matters then your price was too high to start with.

The key to buying with bids and selling with sell orders is patience and some working knowledge about price history of the item you are buying or selling. The second is provided by a number of sites, I use GW2TP.COM, the first however is the most difficult to learn in our “on demand” world.

So basically within a week it’s virtually at the same price as before the spike.

Devata.6589:

Like I said I do not NEED anything it being a game. The game itself is optional so with that everything in it is. But you are right to point towards the game-play mode because depending on the game-play mode it may or may not hurt you. Do I NEED a mini? No. Would I have a lot of fun hunting down mini’s in the world? Yes. Do I have fun needing to grind gold or buy them with cash? No. Does it then effect the game-play? Yes it does.

They never said or implied that anything they added to the game wouldn’t be cash shop only. It’s just like DLC in standalone games. You only get it if you buy it.

And stop using the “do not NEED because it’s a game” line. You bought a game. Nothing in the cash shop has any long term benefits to your character’s ability to do anything in the game. You’re the one who can’t resist the pretty baubles in the cash shop and sticking to the “buy and play for free” mantra to mean not paying one red cent more unless it’s an expansion like dear old Guild Wars did and choose to grind for gold. And even though it’s been explained numerous times that overuse of gold to gems will make it cost more the next time you use the exchange you have decided that will be the only way you will get an item from the cash shop even as the amount of work required to earn the same amount of gems skyrockets (3x in a year).

You do have to admit that this game doesn’t nickle and dime you over content, slots, storage, outfits like many F2P games do.

I understand that you’re upset that all the “new” looks are in the store. ANet has to keep customers coming to the store so they need to keep introducing new items or bring back ones that they removed until demand builds up again. I know you find that practice anathema but it’s the business model ANet chose to fund the running of a true MMO with a stream of free content. But you hate that too because the new content requires attendance due to it’s temporary nature Vs an on demand availability.

Well maybe the game isn’t really for you if you object to ANet’s choices. That’s okay, no game is something that agrees with everybody. Sure you loved Guild Wars but this isn’t nor it every was going to be a rehash of Guild Wars. I loved Master of Orion and MOO2 but MOO3 blew. Que sera, sera.

Saw this over on the Chinese Guild Wars 2 site. A group that does stop motion shorts decided to have a few recognizable anime/manga characters take on Rytlock.

Don’t thing they’ve gotten the Bazaar yet. I believe it’s been said they there will be a time delay between our content and theirs.

It looks that they are having a contest in each telecom region, which has their own servers, as to who can get to Level 80 fastest. Winner gets a iPad mini and some in game reward. Fastest time is 41 1/2 hours.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/act/eightevents/whosking.html
http://gw2.kongzhong.com/announce/20140516/1713.html

They are also giving away a Mazda 3 with a GW2 skin.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/news/20140526/1755.html

But that’s how MMOs in China normally make their money. I can see the question about continuing income being important to KongZhong’s investors. That’s why the 25% number Vs 10% is important.

All that the slew of fake 1c orders do is push items onto the TP Top 10 Bids list.

Starting a bidding war and pulling out once it gets high enough I can understand and that can be, well the upping of bids, by bot. Unless manned however you could end up with items you don’t want.

Since it’s a fix price gems per dollar, the rate at the exchange is still valid, simply multiply the gem to gold rate by 0.80. But since you are comparing from year to year the adjustment factors out.

Wouldn’t it be obscured by the crafting window? And since most crafting stations for the same craft are different then could a generic leather crafting animation look odd depending where it’s done?

Gewd you keep ignoring that TP player’s gold comes from other players who steadfastly refuse to keep the gold themselves by simply selling to high bidder and buying from low seller. If players took the time to submit their own bids for items they want and sell items they don’t want then TP player’s gold faucet is turned off.

If people willingly throw their money away in the streets then why complain that there are people with shop vacs competing to suck it up?

Smarter AI would result in longer completion times for events and dungeons which will result in screams of NERF because loot/hr drops.

If one week retention is a metric commonly used for F2P MMOs in China, makes sense to include it in the conference call. Remember B2P is something being tried there for the first time.

The 198 yuan edition is like the Hero’s Edition.

I figure the Gold Sellers are gone within a day so I purge every few days. No regular player had annoyed my to the point where I would put them on an ignore list.

Shakkara.2641:

I want female armor that not only fully covers, but also does not show boobs in any way.

In particular heavy armor that does not have any breast-cups. Currently there’s not much choice in that regard.

Breastcups are totally unrealistic for heavy armor. You don’t need them as armor will just flatten those boobs. And it’s dangerous as they deflect blows and arrows right at your heart. All historical examples of women in platemail (for example, Jeane d’Arc) had them wear identical platemail as men do.

That is what I want for my characters. I’m female in real life but I play mostly male characters because I totally hate most of the female armor.

Phalanx Armor for men, so totally awesome.
And for women? Ugly helmet, ugly torso piece, ugly everything. So disappointing

Even Game of Thrones does it right, with heavily armored women like Brienne running around with platemail identical to male ones. THAT is the look I want for women!

So you want Brenne of Tarth style armor.

Mystic.5934:

http://legendsrpg.com/gw2.php?forge=yes (direct link for material promotion in the MF)

[spoken in a stilted way as if reading from cue cards]

I use to spend hours toiling on farms to earn a paltry living. With Mystic’s method, I can now earn big time money spending only an hour a day from my home instance.

[/testimonial]

Thank you Mystic.

;)

Zanshin.5379:

I understand that but wouldn’t it make sense that a skin that you have bought with real money wouldn’t require charges at all? I don’t know, this just seems logic to me.

But before if you wanted two character to wear the same Gem Store skin, you had to buy it twice. Now you can duplicate it at will for just the cost of transmutation charges.

Which is loosely based on the Gem Exchange rate because the Gold Sellers need to keep in front of our rate as it goes up.

i7 doesn’t really have 8 cores. It has 4 real cores but tells the OS it has 8 because it can run at a slightly higher efficiency if it has more work to do. The OS assigns work to the real 4 cores first because the performance gain from the 4 fake cores on average isn’t that significant, less than an additional core worth of performance.

The AMD FX-8xxx/9xxx actually has 8 cores but each core is significantly slower than one of Intel’s. However it scales fairly linearly from one to eight cores.

Now when someone says “unparking cores” it means not powering down or stepping down the clock rate of cores that aren’t being assigned work because the work threshold of the active cores have decreased to the point that the remaining cores can handle it. While powering/revving up cores is nearly instantaneous, it’s still nearly, a little bit of time is wasted. Usually setting your power profile in Windows to performance eliminates parking altogether but any power saving/fan noise reduction features are disabled.

@Gewd

Sounds like you are determining you 300% figure from the Exchange’s rate of Gold to Gems. Actually it’s 200% or 3x but not 300%. Minor nick-pit.

Major nick-pit is the Exchange’s rate has absolutely nothing to do with purchasing power of gold relative to TP prices. The exchange rate is mechanically determined based on the amount of the remaining gems in the exchange’s vault Vs gold in the exchanges’s vault. The more players convert gold to gems, the higher the rate goes as gems decrease while gold increases in the exchange’s vault. We could have zero inflation on the TP while the exchange rate rises 200% in a year.

The increase of the exchange rate just means players love trading gold for gems and haven’t taken the hint yet that this only raises the rate higher.

They come with the first charge for free, all other times it’ll cost a charge. It was true before the wardrobe change as well. Outfits don’t allow mix and matching but can be dyed and just temporarily change your appearance. Achievement based ones are don’t cost as part of the reward and I believe can’t be dyed.

Nexon, which is entirely F2P/Cash Shop based, makes it’s billion and a half dollars off of 10% of the active players. 11% last quarter with an average of $35-36 spent that quarter.

Not that much different from the amount spent on a year long subscription plan, averaged for a quarter.

I play with a Llano APU, no stand alone video card. The A10-7850 is at least 50% faster on the CPU side and GPU is significantly faster at least by a similar amount.

If you are willing to compromise on what is “acceptable” play with graphic settings and resolution, the setup should be fine. I run my rig at 1600×900, high settings with DoF and best filtering turned off. I get in the 20s roaming the wilderness. I can easily get over 30fps if I was willing to turn off reflections and dial down shadows. But I accept that in Boss Fights and WvW zergs that I can get frame rate in the single digits. I can boost it into the teens with performance settings (keeping sampling at normal) but I rather have pretty than fast.

But don’t hope for pretty at 60fps most of the time and 30fps in zergs. Not going to happen. You are building for easy transport and extremely small form factor. It would likely be noticeably faster than an Intel CPU if you are relying on the integrated GPU for graphics. Intel might be able to surpass it in zergs however since that stresses the CPU over the GPU.

But if you are use to a much faster system right now, it will be a step down.

That’s my opinion, I could be wrong.

OP, if your friends like food X but you find it meh or bleh, do you try to understand why your friends like it? Why are you trying to disregard your feelings just because others like it? Stop trying to conform. Maybe this game just isn’t for you. It doesn’t float your boat; light your fire; light your boat on fire; whatever. It’s okay to disagree.

What I like about the game is it’s free to play after purchase and it’s extremely solo friendly. That’s it for me.