Guild Wars 2

GW1 had a human-centric story, so it’s only logical that GW2 will draw upon that lore for story in GW2 and that players would be drawn to rolling human characters. Since DR is the human home city you will have a fair amount of story in and about there.

When Lion’s Arch was destroyed during the first season of the Living World, some activities were moved to DR and simply stayed there like Winter’s Day. Lunar New Year was created post destruction and rebuild of Lion’s Arch and was a human holiday in GW, so DR was a logical place to have it.

Size of the zerg may also be an issue. I’ve seen players not getting the boss chest in large zergs because it seems that there’s a limit on how many players it tracks tagging the boss for damage in that first few seconds. Like I said, LARGE zergs.

Being able to create a single chest/leggings piece such as long dresses. Not needing to check compatibility with every other armor piece that could interact with it (gloves to chests; boots to leggings; leggings to chest and boots; chest to leggings, helms and gloves).

TorsoReaper.8530:

If we look at the more successful F2P models (ie: league of legends), Anet gem store needs a full revamp.

1) Gem store should be the best looking UI in the whole game and faster and easier to use than anything else.
2) Gem store items should be relatively cheap so that people make lots of impulse purchases.
3) Allow people to buy gems in smaller denominations than $10
4) Because of #2, gold to gem conversion should be nerfed to encourage people to buy gems and gem to gold should be buffed to encourage people to buy gems.
5) Should be a full time staff that just makes skins for everything and very very few items should be seasonal or limited time. The vast majority should be in the gem store at all times so that people will impulse buy things constantly.
6) Get rid of stupid crap like getting black lion tickets from the chest and make the chest worth buying. If i want a skin, let me give you my money. I want to give you my money, take my money. Sell me the skin I want, not a chance to get the skin I want.

1) Agree but I’ve haven’t seen any that are significantly better than another.
2) Gems are the primary income source six months out of initial and expansion releases. Cheaper items means they either have to sell more and/or create more if many of those items are account bound.
3) Likely the reason has to do with limits and charges with the company they contract to handle processing. There may be another reason I list below.
4) The exchange rate is determined by player use of the exchange. The more players buy gems with gold, the higher the exchange rate because there are less gems relative to gold in the exchange’s vaults. The opposite is true as players sell gems for gold, the exchange rate drops. Also their is a gold sink both ways.
5) Developers of skins cost money they need to recover quickly so additional sales will finance the game’s content development. Even tougher if you also insist that the items need to be cheaper in the gem shop.
6) Chests were originally in the game as simple sample boxes of gem shop utility items. Only after you could acquire exclusive skins from them that they became “worth while” in many players eyes. But at their core they are still a misc. Gem Shop sampler.

Another possible reason for the limited ranges of gem packages. Not sure if the packages are the same size in the EU but in the US it’s 800/1600/2800/ 4000/8000 and Gem Cards in the US are either 1200/2000. Now take those sizes and look at gem shop prices. 1000 gem tools, 700 gem outfits, 700 gem backpack/wing combos, 400-500 gem glider skins, 250 gem “mounts”, 350-400 gem minis. This looks like an intentional case of hot dogs vs buns, left over gems is expected. And it’s human nature to spend rather than save any excess and in this case we have the exchange for turning those left over gems into gold.

I think most players don’t understand the true purpose of the exchange. It wasn’t ANet being nice and provide a way for players to be able to buy “cash shop” items with in game gold. The exchange lets ANet get in on the RMT market, since MMOs haven’t been able to stop this 3rd party practice in decades, without the worry of injecting “new” gold into the game, as players are simply exchanging in game gold for gems other players had already paid cash for. The automated nature hides this trading unlike other games like EVE where trading PLEX is on an open market.

Don’t forget

Ascended vending is not intended to be the optimal path for acquiring ascended gear, but rather a way for players to acquire the gear through time spent playing their preferred game mode. And while ascended vending now requires max level crafting, players that obtain ascended gear via vending will see a moderate discount in cost over traditional crafting.

So not the preferred over crafting but slightly cheaper than crafting.

Pifil.5193:

OriOri.8724:

And unfortunately the amount of silk needed was put so high because of how cheap it is currently, but if a future patch changes that and silk goes back up, this recipe will never be adjusted if recent trends continue.

Yep which is why – if they wanted to go down this road of requiring crafting – the crafting part should have been some simple thing just to “prove” you had the craft at 500 and the rest of the cost should have been pure, simple gold.

If this (or some other changes) impacts the T5 market these could easily prove more expensive than regular crafting would be. I can’t see them adjusting anything if that occurs.

We can look forward to the new “silk farm” they’ll be adding in a future fractal.

Remember the TP is the primary gold sink in the game. So they want to funnel everyone desperate for mats to use it.

Ascended gear wasn’t a good value in Fractals but a great value in PvP. They wanted to fix that.

Now it’s costly in both places. Success!

I get enough of them but unsure where, unlike bloodstone dust which I know drops from world bosses even before direct mining.

It sounds like you expected prices to plummet overnight. That was never going to happen.

The purpose of the farm was to give players the ability to CHOOSE to get leather for either their personal use or to sell it on the TP. And ONLY with enough units for sale on the TP will the price ever move down.

ANet gave us a tool, it’s up to the players to use it.

Astralporing.1957:

Behellagh.1468:

They never said anything about price, it was a player controlled solution to supply. That’s what farms are. Price is totally in the player’s control in terms of selling it on the TP and setting the price.

There’s no way any meaningful change to supply wouldn’t influence prices. If anet didn’t intend to impact the prices, it can only mean they didn’t mean for this farm to influence the supply. A “farm” that doesn’t influence the supply has no point. As a farm of that resource, anyway.

Not saying that, saying that ANet’s goal was to fix a supply issue and with it, it becomes the player’s responsibility to affect price. If they wanted to affect price, they would have made leather rain from the skies for a week. At that level of supply, it would overwhelm any resistance on the TP to drop prices. At the current rate, it seems nobody is in any hurry to stop a good thing, if you are a seller.

They never said anything about price, it was a player controlled solution to supply. That’s what farms are. Price is totally in the player’s control in terms of selling it on the TP and setting the price.

Paulytnz.7619:

Behellagh.1468:

I use them to level a character every week for a weekly key farm.

I hope you do the full story for the full 3 keys and if you have HOT do that too for an extra key. HOT story is pretty fast to do so don’t overlook it.

No because earning 8 tomes a week on average is easy and there is no way I can level a character to 60 every week to get the level 40 and 60 personal story. I’m happy with one key a week.

I use them to level a character every week for a weekly key farm.

I’ve been leveling crafting up to max on each of my characters. Currently have 4 done, 2 to 500 (tailor, artificer), and two (jewelry and chef) to 400 and 2 being worked on to 500 (weaponsmith, leatherworker). When I finally roll a heavy class I’ll start on the other two.

.

I only have gotten a few drops, all heavy that I don’t need, only set I have is the one I made.

Want to dodge the time gate, buy the items off the TP, that’s why those mats are tradeable. Sure you pay a markup but crafters aren’t going to do it for a loss as they are the ones losing 15% on the transaction.

The new PvP/Fractal method will be a chunk of gold, play mode specific currency and some Level 500 doohickey you need to craft to show you have Level 500 crafting for that type of item. Plus “ascended gear via vending will see a moderate discount in cost over traditional crafting”. So it sounds like it will be a time to craft Vs time to gather mode specific currency they will attempt to balance.

Pifil.5193:

Behellagh.1468:

TorsoReaper.8530:

LinhZeri.6412:

too funny hey it isn’t undervalued now is it?.. it has a purpose now.. before it didn’t. that makes no sense lol. Im sure you so concerned on the economy of a game.. are you hording leather or something? majority of players cannot constantly get the leather they need to make their equipment and other things. I love [sarcasm] the logic of self regulated economy when you got selfish people who game the trading post have full control over everything because the source of leather is low… self regulating economys DO NOT WORK because people are all out for themselves and don’t care for others its simple. It is so crazy how this concept of player regulated economy came to be. Im sure over years it can work but the attention span of players these days is near nothing it is a cute little idea that will cause issues continually and it has since John Smith announced it.

Player regulated economy is fine, it’s the actual regulation by Anet that’s the problem. They’re the ones screwing with drop rates, salvage rates, material refinement ratios. Of course there’s a problem. We never had a leather problem until Anet created a leather problem. If you’re a new player, you wouldn’t know this but if you’re a veteran you can point to all the things Anet did to screw this up.

Yes they over compensated in an attempt to fix another problem which was over supply due to a lack of sinks. It seemed they sat down to brainstorm a fix then and came up with a list of potential fixes and implemented ALL of them when only one or two could likely fix it. At least phase in the changes one at at time and see if that would be enough. But they only seem to understand extreme changes rather than nudges.

Was it actually a problem though? “T6 leather is too cheap”. Who was that a problem for?

Nothing should be “worthless” and at 10c it was. It was junk status. People complain about minor runes now and those are worth 16c. Economics work because of scarcity. It’s as much of a problem as to much gold in the system. Creation and consumption of items need to be in relatively close balance. Too much one way or the other is bad. Too much currency in the world is bad.

TorsoReaper.8530:

LinhZeri.6412:

too funny hey it isn’t undervalued now is it?.. it has a purpose now.. before it didn’t. that makes no sense lol. Im sure you so concerned on the economy of a game.. are you hording leather or something? majority of players cannot constantly get the leather they need to make their equipment and other things. I love [sarcasm] the logic of self regulated economy when you got selfish people who game the trading post have full control over everything because the source of leather is low… self regulating economys DO NOT WORK because people are all out for themselves and don’t care for others its simple. It is so crazy how this concept of player regulated economy came to be. Im sure over years it can work but the attention span of players these days is near nothing it is a cute little idea that will cause issues continually and it has since John Smith announced it.

Player regulated economy is fine, it’s the actual regulation by Anet that’s the problem. They’re the ones screwing with drop rates, salvage rates, material refinement ratios. Of course there’s a problem. We never had a leather problem until Anet created a leather problem. If you’re a new player, you wouldn’t know this but if you’re a veteran you can point to all the things Anet did to screw this up.

Yes they over compensated in an attempt to fix another problem which was over supply due to a lack of sinks. It seemed they sat down to brainstorm a fix then and came up with a list of potential fixes and implemented ALL of them when only one or two could likely fix it. At least phase in the changes one at at time and see if that would be enough. But they only seem to understand extreme changes rather than nudges.

And many thanks DreamyAbaddon for your work. It’s fantastic.

LinhZeri.6412:

too funny hey it isn’t undervalued now is it?.. it has a purpose now.. before it didn’t. that makes no sense lol. Im sure you so concerned on the economy of a game.. are you hording leather or something? majority of players cannot constantly get the leather they need to make their equipment and other things. I love [sarcasm] the logic of self regulated economy when you got selfish people who game the trading post have full control over everything because the source of leather is low… self regulating economys DO NOT WORK because people are all out for themselves and don’t care for others its simple. It is so crazy how this concept of player regulated economy came to be. Im sure over years it can work but the attention span of players these days is near nothing it is a cute little idea that will cause issues continually and it has since John Smith announced it.

Self regulating as in “gee X is worth a lot, maybe I should try to gather some and sell it for sweet, sweet gold”. If enough players do that, the price drops until players stop doing that. That’s how all the other mats maintain their prices. So they gave players a farm, just one tough enough that most players who tried it decided it’s not easy money like flax during the early days of HoT..

The T5 and T6 leather glut came from the fact that salvaged level 80 leather gear yield T5 and T6 leather. And you’re right, there wasn’t a huge need for T6 or even T5 after Ascended T7 was introduced. But Ascended gear meant exotics weren’t as desired anymore so T6 was used even less. Then came HoT with “Patches”, the square recipe change, raids, scribing, Guild Hall construction, etc. And POOF, glut gone and prices 100x higher than pre HoT and here we are today. There are few means to “farm” T6 before this and even those have relatively low yields so other than doing a test “pan”, I decided against “mining” that particular tier of leather, just not profitable enough.

And nope, not sitting on a pile of stuff, well a pile I’m willing to sell as I still need to level up Leatherworking for my Thief’s ascended gear.

I sense the frustration from crafting comes from the time gated mats, which can be bypassed with gold on the TP.

The idea behind the changes is so one alternate path isn’t significantly easier than another AND to make sure those ways never become the preferred way over crafting.
Crafting ascended gear makes the economy go round. Otherwise all those mats will be going for vendor prices. There will be little motivation to level crafting to 500 and then craft ascended gear if playing PvP, WvW, Fractals, Raids, would let you earn entire sets in less time to craft it taking the time gates into account.

That’s the same reason they won’t make ascended gear tradeable, forcing more players into crafting to prop up demand for mats which keeps those prices off the ground state and keep gold having some value.

I keep shaking my head in this thread. What did you all expect, something like the flax farm in VB? Someplace you could park a couple of characters and spend a minute to “harvest” all the nodes once a day? That wasn’t EVER going to happen.

Pre-HoT T5 and T6 leather was undervalue with millions on the TP for sale. ANet does not want to see that return. So it was obvious that this wasn’t going to be a “farm” like anything we’ve seen before. They wanted to set a bar high enough that if you REALLY REALLY want leather that day, you join a zerg and charge in and clear it for a short time to get a handful of leather directly rather than all the other ways to get it, all to keep a flood of leather from hitting the TP and plummet prices back into the floor.

So in the end they gave players what they wanted, a leather farm, but one that wouldn’t destroy the leather economy again overnight. Some suggest a tweak in drop and salvage rates could have fixed the issue in an organic fashion but the issue there is players might not recognize cause and effect. ANet wanted the leather market to be player controlled and self regulating, meaning if the price is to high there is somewhere players could go and reliably get that mat until the price dropped to the point where it is no longer attractive to do that activity.

Do I think the difficulty needs to be adjusted down a bit, sure, but never to a point that the farm becomes a place to park alts at or one that can be soloed by anyone.

Ardid.7203:

Basically stop buying outfits. If enough people do that, Anet M A Y B E E E will consider spending resources on armor again. Though I doubt it would work, I’m still not buying any outfit unless it is cultural.

Second option is to wait for GW3. Then maybe they will implement a better way to make armors. Or maybe they decide to just make only outfits forever. Who knows.

That’s not going to do it. It’s cost Vs income generated. Adding more devs to make armor isn’t going to make it cheaper, just faster. Armor cost to many dev resources for a gem shop item selling at 800 gems.

TL;DR
Make it so that all outfits unlock skin counterparts in the wardrobe to help increase the diversity of armor combinations players use.

Then they wouldn’t be outfits but armor sets.

The reason that they are outfits is because it takes considerably more development time to make and test an armor set, even one weight. Development time is important because they are sold in the gem shop, where paying off the cost to create as fast as possible is important since every one sold after that point pays for game development and not just item development.

TorsoReaper.8530:

Behellagh.1468:

Here’s the thing, not all leather gathered end up on the TP. A lot of players who asked for a leather farm wanting it for personal use, not as a farm for gold.

Also we don’t see and I don’t think anybody charts it is the amount actually traded on the TP over time. The price could remain stable if players are purchasing it as fast as it’s being added to the TP, keeping supply on the TP relatively constant.

gw2spidy.com shows buy and sell listing volume.

So on the 27th of Jan they announce an upcoming “leather farm”. Immediately you see leather sales volumes increase and leather buy volumes decrease. We are now at the point where sales volumes are decreasing and buy volumes increasing. Again reinforcing the fact that the leather farm is a complete failure.

No it doesn’t. It shows number of bids and number of items listed for sale and the high bid/low sale prices. It doesn’t show how many are actually sold between players.

Here’s the thing, not all leather gathered end up on the TP. A lot of players who asked for a leather farm wanting it for personal use, not as a farm for gold.

Also we don’t see and I don’t think anybody charts it is the amount actually traded on the TP over time. The price could remain stable if players are purchasing it as fast as it’s being added to the TP, keeping supply on the TP relatively constant.

Could it be possible that ANet internally considered Season 3 of the Living World to always be part of HoT? That they assumed we would realize this without it needing to be said outright with the HoT marketing material? That this is how they could rationalize kitten price tag on content that didn’t meet the bar other MMOs set as expansions?

Just tossing that out there.

The original Lake Doric map surrounded DR and looked VERY different to the much smaller one we got.

Caudecus expected the ritual to fail with the fake aspect.

1) If it did fail, the group doing the ritual may have simply decided to lie and createkittene Lazarus to seize control from Caudecus with the detonation and absorption of the bloodstone as a way to empower their stand-in. Problem with that is them helping us, what’s their “long game”.

2) The ritual “appeared” to succeed and someone or something else is pretending to seize control of the White Mantle for their own ends, maybe that’s just a bonus, with the first being consuming the magic of that bloodstone.

3) The ritual did succeed with only 4 pieces and we got a mostly Lazarus with mostly Mursaat powers. If he encounters the other aspect would he suddenly go full Lazarus or are the aspects like a RAID array and could still restore Lazarus with 4 of the 5 but it will take time to reconstruct the missing portion?

Not sure what I would like to see more.

Players have been asking for a leather farm to farm leather for crafting. Sure they could have bought it off the TP and farm for gold instead but they specifically wanted to farm for leather the same way you could farm for wood and ore.

Simply the word that a leather farm was coming caused a correction in both T5 and T6 leather sections. There looked to be an attempt at a price correction for T1-4 when it dropped a week ago but that’s iffy at best. Of cloth or leather, I see a bigger shift in cloth which wasn’t a problem before. I chalk that up to all the unstable rags being dropped by raves of White Mantle, getting salvaged and resulting cloth getting dumped on the TP.

Seems like I answered this very question once already today.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/When-is-the-next-balance-patch

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5svug8/the_head_of_the_snake_devs_here_ask_us_anything/ddi9nwp/?context=3

I believe MO said in the last AMA before the next PvP season. Nothing more exacting than that.

Oh no, there is a population drop, that’s obvious. I’m simply just saying lack unbound magic when having airship parts doesn’t mean all of those players have quit outright, that’s all.

It simply reaffirms what we see with income. Three quarters before HoT launch (Q1-Q3 2015) total income was 63,195 million KrW, the three quarters after HoT launch (Q2-Q4 2016) total income was 46,079. 27% drop.

So yes, an casual observer could draw a conclusion that HoT drove away players. Another is that the hype before HoT’s release kept players who would have left anyways around longer, simply delaying the turnover. And of course that ignores other games as a reason for the loss, since there is only so many gaming hours in a day.

Now what’s reported as GW2 income is NA+EU income only, since China is lumped in with royalties. Looking at regional income, NA+EU income dropped 4.4% from the previous quarter. GW2 only dropped 2.9%. So the game is beating the regional income drop.

What are those wishes? All I’ve seen oft repeated is make it more like MMO X with mounts, open world dueling and gear treadmill; or returning to the overly complicated build system of Guild Wars where everyone copies the current meta someone clever figured out, giving the devs something to nerf for the next balance round; or add more sources for gold/mats so they can get everything they want with as little effort as possible?

The game was marketed day one with three game modes. We’ve seen what happens when ANet focuses on one and ignore the others. They aren’t going that route again so everything is being worked on which means stuff gets delivered slower.

ANet chose to finance the game with a gem store and for that to pay the bills, it has to sell stuff that costs little development time to make. So we get bundles, items rotated out and return, and outfits over armor skins. You have an idea of what to add to the shop that they haven’t offered yet, lets hear it. As long as it’s not buying power.

While it’s a cool throwback to GW1 lore, will it actually matter to the non-raid story at all? Glenna is going to be keeping this discovery on the DL at the Priory.

And like the first set of raids, anyone can accompany a raider who cleared a raid wing for that week to enter and explore without needing to do the fight. For everyone else who want to learn, there’s always Wooden Potatoes or any of the other YTers who record and share raids or talk about lore.

Devata.6589:

Behellagh.1468:

The mods shut the last one down because it became an infinite loop of the same binary discussion where both sides simply restated their OPINION at the other. All we can do, and could ever do, is supply theories as to why there was a drop in income in 2015 before HoT to income in 2016 after HoT.

It’s all reading tea leaves, entrails and runes to determine reasons since ALL we have as fact is the INCOME numbers from the quarterly statements.

While that was happening, it’s not complely true. New information did come in that thread overtime. Like the https://gw2efficiency.com/
analysis of maddoctor and the more detailed reports that another person found, and somebody was just to do a more detailed analysis before that thread was close. So while some discussions where going in a loop, there was also overall progression.

Anyway, lets not go back to that thread. I linked it here simply because it showed the data from pre Q4 2016. But this thread is not supposed to be an extension of that thread so please lets just talk about Q4 2016 again. Why people think they are what they are and what has to be done to get them higher.. if anything needs to be done. Maybe people think it’s fine like this.

That is what this thread is about.

That analysis has at least two problems. First it requires self reporting. Players sign up to use that site, it doesn’t represent a balanced sampling of the player base.

Second just because players have item A and not B doesn’t mean they stopped playing altogether. It just means they haven’t bothered playing on those maps that drop B. They may have left, they may now be busy with real life so they don’t play as frequently as they once had or they rather play in core Tyria because VB put them off HoT when it first dropped.

The extra “waypoint”. Look at it from ANet’s PoV. They are changing up the BLC from Lunar New Year to LWS3E4. So envelope goes away as does the pet. You need to replace it with something.

Well part of the episode deals with a supply depot so toss in two T6 crafting bags as the guarantee, so nothing you really need to make from scratch, just like all previous season common drop.

That leaves the uncommon seasonal slot which has had something new, only available from the BLC. So far they’ve had two gliders (Halloween and Wintersday), a mini (Lunar New Year), a staff skin (Wintersday) and Episode 3’s waypoint to the Bitterfrost Vantage Point. I’m not include the Braham Outfit since you could buy it at the same time from the Gem Shop.

They just did a mini. White Mantle outfit and glider already in the gem store along with the Shining Blade Backpack/Glider combo, therefore they wouldn’t unique to the BLC.

So from that train of thought, that leaves a waypoint to somewhere that might be useful but not so much that there’s an uproar about it (like last time). So that’s how we got Noran’s Safe Room Pass and Key. There’s a waypoint already nearby. Chest isn’t anything to write home about. Completing the maze once gets you a mastery point.

/deadpan yay

I don’t envy ANet. They are stuck between a rock and a much bigger rock when creating items and deciding where to offer them.

kurfu.5623:

It was never about “breaking immersion”… some SJW-type complained that the female stretching animation was too sexy, and got it removed.

If that was the issue then they could have simply pulled that one animation from the list.

The issue is they switched from the old “cut scene” style dialog to in game dialog for story. So now they have this old system from before HoT that they aren’t using anymore so it’s now even less of a priority to “fix”. Since new work is never ending, old work simply piles up on the “when there’s time” pile.

They never said precursors were going to be cheaper. Just that we didn’t have to rely on RNG drops/MF to get one if we didn’t want to pay someone who was lucky in getting one.

The revision for new precursors from journey to recipe simply reduces the time to get the precursor and legendary since it’s simply a material sink now. Like I said I saw the HMS Divinity live within an hour of the patch drop as some people just have the mats and gold to crank one out.

I rather see a new legendary/precursor set every LW episode that takes virtually zero time to get than not.

The mods shut the last one down because it became an infinite loop of the same binary discussion where both sides simply restated their OPINION at the other. All we can do, and could ever do, is supply theories as to why there was a drop in income in 2015 before HoT to income in 2016 after HoT.

It’s all reading tea leaves, entrails and runes to determine reasons since ALL we have as fact is the INCOME numbers from the quarterly statements.

Well I wouldn’t use the presence of unbound magic as an indicator. I haven’t stopped playing it’s just I take my sweet time before I get around to do story and in this case LWS3 maps require doing the story to get in them unlike LWS2 or owning HoT. I finally got around finishing LWS2 episodes last summer and haven’t done any of the story chapters in HoT that I didn’t need to do to unlock the mastery system.

I’m just not a story person.

Amaimon.7823:

Behellagh.1468:

Yes you can. The item buys you one key and a permanent port into the safe room, which after the first key you will have to leave and do the heart to unlock the vendor again to get another key.

Then I don’t get the problem of OP.. there’s a lifetime supply of those keys

I think he believes there is some super advantage with that item, therefore the notion it’s only available as an uncommon drop from the BLC as a “cash grab”/P2W where in reality it’s barely a convenience item.

I know more people upset over previous “exclusive” glider skin/mini pet from previous seasonal uncommon item in chests.

Yes you can. The item buys you one key and a permanent port into the safe room, which after the first key you will have to leave and do the heart to unlock the vendor again to get another key.

Oddly prices for leather haven’t been affected much, cloth on the other hand …

It really isn’t as useful as you may think. It’ll get you there but you still have to leave and do the Heart to unlock the vendor for the “free” key. Considering how close the way point is, doesn’t really save you a lot of time.

zealex.9410:

theres honeslty a little replayability value to most content pve wise the endgame is basically dailies and weeklys this and the fact that the cash shop in gw2 is very very playe firendly to the point that you can farmt he gems for what ever you like.

You want little replayability in PvE, try Blade & Soul. It’s an MMO on rails.

Einlanzer.1627:

I’m surprised anybody ever bought BLK. Not only are they fairly poor value, but, unlike with most gambling systems in video games, there’s nothing particularly exciting that can drop from them.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

The hover over text for BLC says;

“Contains up to four items including a seasonal item, a convenience item, and a progression item. Exclusive skins not available anywhere else can be found inside.
Preview available.”

The preview panel of the chest has the line;

“Every chest awards 3-4 items from the following seasonal list.”

I don’t think always displaying a 4th slot that most of the time has a sorry/red x/whammy in it will make the players feel better than have a “surprise” 4th slot appear when they click on the open button.

And yes, the iteration of BLC before this new type had a guaranteed but random booster in it. Also the overall drop rate for the two items players cared about from BLC, Black Lion Claim Ticket Scraps and Black Lion Claim Ticket hasn’t changed even though we lost the chance of two scraps or two tickets.

The Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlock gives players an item they don’t have from the most of the tabs in the Hero panel short on an exotic. For me this is a throw back to the notion that the BLC is a sampler of what’s available in game rather than a chance to win “big money”.

HeavyFerrum.5408:

the trading post is SO effective , iv started playing about a year ago but bought the expansion recently and now starting using the trading post , im making a lot of money suddenly, whats the catch?

The catch is you are leveraging questionable decisions made by a fairly sizable portion of players who use the TP. It seems players prefer immediacy than a later but higher payout, so most sell item drops to the highest bidder rather than putting it up for sale themselves. Fear of it taking too long to sell; the posting fee; impatience; not knowing the item’s salvage value; or simply decide the amount they are losing out on by not selling it themselves seems too minor to be bothered. Same logic goes with buying, want now not later for less gold.

That means if someone is willing to pony up the gold for bids, if the price is right; and is willing to wait out on a sale (or salvage and sell off the results) can make money.