Guild Wars 2

Lewi, I understand what you are saying. Basically the price of an item has skyrocketed, but the rate at which we are earning gold has not increased by much. This is sadly how economies work.

Like someone quoted JS above, the “anomaly” he was detecting is basically the same thing. When you increase the wealth of players just slightly, their purchasing power increases as well pushing the prices of goods up. So basically when dawn cost 20g just a handful of players had 20g and could afford it, but as player wealth increased the price of Dawn increased proportionately to how rich this small handful was.

I don’t believe it’s against the ToSm but it should be dealt with. Botting the TP as well, we know it’s possible. (I have written code that can place buy/sells through a session key, and it’s easy to write an hft algorithm to trade on it, but doing so is against my intentions.)

If you are trading on the tp you should know better than to use one indicator for demand/supply.

Indeed, what buttercup said. I hate to quote this, but: Supply and Demand, that is the very basic. What you do is you find a site like gw2tp.com and use the processed data there to make your decisions off of. Or, you build your own data processing program and get data from APIs connected to the tradepost.

For example I have a spreadsheet which tells me what the median profit of an item is, its demand supply ratio, current market prices, amount of bids and sells within 15% of at market price, median vs. current price, and some other indicators + rate of change of many of these.

I.e I can get a good idea of where prices are moving, their velocity, probability of me acquiring them at a certain price and probability of selling them at a certain price.

Setting up such a spreadsheet or program takes time and skill, but it’s not impossible.

Finally, rumors and news are very important as it can tell you what the sentiment of the participants will be going forward.

tolunart.2095:

Chobiko.9182:

Still, I do believe something can be done to even out the value of investing ones time in killing monsters and playing the tp. Ideally you should be able to substitute one with the other.

Such a balance is hard to achieve, but I believe balancing it would be for the better.

Generally speaking, the most valuable items on the TP are also the rarest. A while back, there was a lot of speculation about the staff Final Rest because it was known to be a potential drop from the Shadow Behemoth event, but so rare that no one had put one on the TP for sale. Eventually it was discovered that there was an error in the game code and Final Rest never actually dropped.

When it was fixed, the first few weeks Final Rest actually dropped it was extremely valuable. But after a while so many had dropped that its value went down to the point where it was worth more than the average exotic staff, but nowhere near what it used to be. Although it attracted a lot of attention, once people realized it wasn’t actually as rare as they thought it was, owning it became less prestigious.

The upper limit of the TP is a process of distillation. Players pour money from many sources into obtaining the rarest items and ignore the more common ones. There is no way to balance this – if they make the rare items more common, then they become less attractive and the prices go down, while those that remain rare become more expensive. If they increase the wealth of the average player, this wealth is eventually collected by a few players who then spend more for the rarest items, driving their prices up even more.

This is how it works, and there is no changing it. You can play the game the way it’s played and grind or trade for the gold to buy the most prestigious items, or you can be satisfied with what you have and let others waste their time trying to make you jealous because their sword leaves glowing footprints.

The value of items sold on the tp is relative to demand, and demand is relative to preference and price.

Balancing the time value of killing monsters with the time value of playing the tp is a question of how to regulate supply according to demand and make the tp as open as possible to everyone who wants to trade.

As a hypothetical:

The pricing of luxury items has always been an issue because none of them have an intrinsic cost, plus it is hard to evaluate the time vale of the item. Drop rate is one such thing, but RNG is unfair by nature and there should be more reliable ways to acquire items tradeable on the tp. Items with a very low chance of acquisition should be account bound or sellable to NPCs for a price relative to its RNG value.

Sure this hypothetical would create issues, but it would have left Tyria with a rather small amount of eternities and sunrises. Now we can buy them for 3000g at the tp. With minimum wage in the US that will take you approximately a week to get.

Vol.7601:

If the price is too overpriced, the market will correct itself.

No, no, no and no… I find it interesting how people are so optimistic about “The Economy” being this well-oiled perfect machine, but that trope right there… No. Please do provide real-world empirical evidence, not fit into a model (random sample), that this is true.

That said, both of you and the OP as a point.

In one way, Player A with limited time should be able to acquire resources without having to repeat the same job over and over. It makes the player happy, and in turn, it helps retention. Retention is important for a game to sustain a healthy community.

On the other hand, we have player B who spends seemingly unlimited amounts of time in game, who will find and exploit the easiest way to acquire resources, and who will, depending on how available resources are, acquire heaps more than the players with limited time.

Luckily Player A exists in multitudes of Player B, limiting the amount of impact Player B can have on the economy. Unfortunately however this creates the rich 0.1% who everyone envies.

This is how the game should work because time = value, and ideally it should be somewhat linear, probably a small curve to account for preference.

What OP is pointing out is that “time value” for the main activities of gw2, namely killing monsters < “time value” of playing the tp. He is presenting this with anecdotal evidence, which may or may not be true, but can be dismissed as anecdotal. Still he wants to start a debate of whether or not his anecdote does come close to the current state of the game.

Which I believe it does.

Recently I got 20 gold from a random nice person in LA (claiming to distribute the wealth"). I asked him/her what his/her income stream was, and I wasn’t surprised to hear “the tp”.

In RL I do fx and derivate index trades. Sometimes I dabble in game economies, but I try to not make it my living in game, since it is my living in RL. I started reading on the bltc forums and asking around in my guild. Most people doesn’t seem to care much for tp trading (instead they grind something else for hours cough Boss Blitz cough). Still a few individuals who did told me they spend about 30 minutes to 2 hours a day and have a return of about 70-140 g a week.

I was low on gold, but decided to sit down and see what I could do with 30 minutes on the tp a day. I spent about 4-5 hours setting up a spreadsheet for recording and looking for sources of data to base my decisions off, as well as do a bit of analysis on what markets were lucrative. Then on day one I set out to trade Mystic Coins, Rags, and some other items. And every day I’d open my spreadsheet look at median values, look at trends and DSRs, and buy/sell vs. median value, then buy in the evening and sell in the morning.

With an average of 30 min a day over a week, and with 60g starting capital in one week I was sitting on 240g, of which 130g was profits from flipping, and the rest was either dungeons, fractals, eotm, or crafting + my start capital.

Again, this is only anecdotal, and I have no other data to support a theory.

Still, I do believe something can be done to even out the value of investing ones time in killing monsters and playing the tp. Ideally you should be able to substitute one with the other.

Such a balance is hard to achieve, but I believe balancing it would be for the better.

EDIT:

I see many mention the risk of the TP and how you can lose everything on the TP, so the possibility of infinite gain is the compensation for the risk you take %15 tp fees and the chance of the item going the opposite way.

Sure there is direct market risk when flipping or crafting on the TP, but essentially this risk is small. Doing a dungeon also carries risk, the risk of time value lost. With minimum US wage at $7.25, you currently earn 65 g an hour. One hour lost in a dungeon the opportunity cost of +/- 65 g, and so it should be rewarded appropriately

What you can consider risk free is grinding and selling to npcs, but then you are earning less than minimum wage.

When I say that you should be able to substitute playing the tp with killing monsters, I am thinking about this in a way relative of each game modes related value at risk.

To reiterate my stand on this issue: I do not see flipping as an issue, neither do I see the rewards associated with flipping to be an issue either. Yes, people become rich through flipping items. Yes, these people comprise a small elite. However, there are many other players out there actually arbitraging (a nice way of saying “mending”) the market without making significant profit themselves. There are also a large amount of players attempting but failing, and an approximately equal amount “noise traders” (people creating chaos in the market. All of these players are necessary to the eco-system to maintain balance in it.

HHR LostProphet: There is no easy way to illustrate this, but imagine the GW2 economy as a perpetual machine. If you remove the players who earn a lot from flipping on the tp by cutting their profits, then you would end up removing an element of the economy and creating imbalance. This imbalance would lead to higher disparity between say: prices, and thus creating high profits for the player willing to participate. Thus the machine reinstated the same element you just removed, and again you have players earning obscene (obs. obsolete) profits from the TP again.

What I am trying to illustrate is that high profits to a small elite is the byproduct of having an economy that rewards by input. We simply cannot remove the people who are rich by playing the TP without removing the TP itself, and even then we would have people who got rich by trading through other methods. I.e. The economy is a perpetual machine.

What you want to do is to create less distance between you and those who earn a lot, and by far the easiest way to do this is to educate yourself in what they do. Another thing that ANet can do is to make the TP more accessible to people like yourself, thus giving a better opportunity for you and others to increase profits from another aspect of the game.

One idea I have for that is something I have explained before.

I’ll re-post the idea here. I wrote it on another thread on this forum:

Snip… A suggestion of mine is to allow for re-adjusting prices for a smaller fee (and a cooldown) thus encouraging more liquidity in the market and freeing up a lot of stuck sell orders. This would of course create a shock as players would start to see revenues and supply increase, but I think with luxury goods (which is the product category which would see the largest increase of supply) a positive supply shock would push down prices enough to create incentive for poorer players to save up money. As of now 2000 G for a certain item is not available to many players (and the reason many luxury goods trade at such high prices is the lack of liquidity (not because of low supply, but a tax trap).

Secondly giving players a few more “layman” metrics by which to price items would educate them as to the equilibrium value of many items they sell on the tradepost, and as such would encourage them to put out “sell orders” instead of filling buy orders. I believe none but John Smith has full data on the average sell/buy fillings a player does but I think many people actually do fill sell orders but as mentioned above a lot of sell orders are stuck in the above market oblivion.

People are rather oblivious to math and economics in general. Should we believe research done on player habits, most people play GW2 (and other games) to escape the reality that is exactly numbers and hard thinking. While it is only anecdotal, I cannot help to notice that as it stands now some people are even selling below vendor value due to the inability to deduct the listing fee from their sell order and believes the “Projected Profit” value is indeed what they receive upon selling their goods. You cannot call them stupid of that reason, however. That indicator is indeed confusing and not in any way helpful to players interested in selling at the market while waiting for the commander in wvw to rally and continue rolling.

The TP has had only minor improvements over its lifetime, and I think it high time John Smith and the TP team take some time to develop better metrics and interface for players to interact with. Making the TP more welcome and more educating to players who lack the time and interest is key to improving the way players view of the TP and its affiliates.

While it certainly is an entertaining idea, I think the issue that most players have with the TP and a small elite getting rich off of it is better resolved through education (like John Smith recently posted) and like I have suggested in another post here.

Throwing Karma into the mix would end up confusing and most likely crashing or near-crashing the economy as it is now. I think there is however need for some measure of intervention in the way tax is being levied. A suggestion of mine is to allow for re-adjusting prices for a smaller fee (and a cooldown) thus encouraging more liquidity in the market and freeing up a lot of stuck sell orders. This would of course create a shock as players would start to see revenues and supply increase, but I think with luxury goods (which is the product category which would see the largest increase of supply) a positive supply shock would push down prices enough to create incentive for poorer players to save up money. As of now 2000 G for a certain item is not available to many players (and the reason many luxury goods trade at such high prices is the lack of liquidity (not because of low supply, but a tax trap).

Secondly giving players a few more “layman” metrics by which to price items would educate them as to the equilibrium value of many items they sell on the tradepost, and as such would encourage them to put out “sell orders” instead of filling buy orders. I believe none but John Smith has full data on the average sell/buy fillings a player does but I think many people actually do fill sell orders but as mentioned above a lot of sell orders are stuck in the above market oblivion.

People are rather oblivious to math and economics in general. Should we believe research done on player habits, most people play GW2 (and other games) to escape the reality that is exactly numbers and hard thinking. While it is only anecdotal, I cannot help to notice that as it stands now some people are even selling below vendor value due to the inability to deduct the listing fee from their sell order and believes the “Projected Profit” value is indeed what they receive upon selling their goods. You cannot call them stupid of that reason, however. That indicator is indeed confusing and not in any way helpful to players interested in selling at the market while waiting for the commander in wvw to rally and continue rolling.

The TP has had only minor improvements over its lifetime, and I think it high time John Smith and the TP team take some time to develop better metrics and interface for players to interact with. Making the TP more welcome and more educating to players who lack the time and interest is key to improving the way players view of the TP and its affiliates.

Behellagh.1468:

Relisting fees are necessary. It’s there to encourage sellers to pick a reasonable price, the first time…

That’s the issue. A reasonable price should reflect costs and demand for that item. Unfortunately, pricing of items isn’t that easy just because of the lack of high friction and low liquidity in the market. Items seeing higher liquidity have a much lower arbitrage ceiling than that of those with low liquidity. See mystic coins or copper which are hovering around an equilibrium. Compare with a lower liquidity market like godskull weapons; their Profit x ROI margins being massive.

There should be a separate re-listing fee due to the lack of immediate available information for players using the tp. Thus leaving them unwilling to take on the risk of of the 15% listing fee. This causes a less liquid market open to lots of arbitrage. I think to better benefit the “normal” player we should have a separate re-listing fee; preferably not a percentage of sell price. This would mean implementing a feature which lets players adjust the price of their sell listing and it should come with a delay to prevent price fixing or scalping.

The real issue is re-listing fees not undercutting. I have made a post about it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Tradepost-Improvements/first#post4158366

I don’t see where you need help. Yes, the frontpage is outdated as it doesn’t seem to refresh and is just creating a snapshot of the current market. I do believe some of the indicators are of help; especially the 4th column: Most Traded. <- There is no indicator of traded volume available to players yet, except for that column. That makes it quite invaluable.

I’m looking at you Evon Gnashblade (“John Smith”) and the rest of the BLTC team.

Here are some feature and system requests that I have been looonging for. Please consider implementing them, and if they have been considered then turned down; could I have some response as to why?

• Tradepost Raw price history API or CSV export possibility (Or at least some proper metrics for each item under an “advanced” tab).

It helps improving information for everyone so that asset pricing becomes more accurate

• Bulk Purchase cap > 250

It’s rather frustrating to click and type the same stuff so many times.

• Buy/Sell Listings with Current price tracking.

The less we need excel to do this stuff for us the better.

• Lower (Remove) Relisting fee

This is one of the major issues on the tradepost. Most “normal” players will list their items once then never re-list them when price moves against them, if they do they lose money. Secondly, the higher the price of a single item the more risky it is to sell above or at the market; resulting in lots of luxury items listed at way above market prices. This creates massive opportunities for arbitrage at the expense of players with little knowledge of markets, thus just increasing the gap between poor and rich. Giving us the ability to re-list (reprice) the item at lower costs would greatly reduce the risk of selling above or at market, and also increase the incentive for players to actually put up sell listings and not just sell to buy orders.

If you don’t want to respond to every feature please at least give some feedback on why no separate re-listing fee exists.

Thank you

HHR LostProphet.4801:

snip

This comment does make no sense at all. I consider playing the game means doing everything exept flipping the tradingpost to get way too much gold for way too little effort. If you feel the need to claim that I want the players to play my way, then yes, they should play how I consider playing a game.

Please look at this from other perspectives than your own. Playing the tradepost does take effort and skill. You spend more time researching and actual thinking than reactive playing. If you want to argue that flipping should not be allowed in the game, then I suggest you opt for removing the tradepost, as is, a tradepost like that does encourage arbitrage.

If you do not want people to flip the stuff you sell then never sell to buy listings. Keep only to sell listings, and never buy from sell listings but put in buys. That way you make sure that no flippers profit from you.

I am, however, in the process of writing a thread to suggest ANet implement a lower relisting fee and an easier way of relisting. This way we won’t see so high margins between certain items. I.e. less opportunity to arbitrage.

Btw. I myself make money of arbitraging and scalping the tradepost. I don’t always do it, but I tend to put in an hour or two every day for it. The rest of the time I play like you want everyone to play.

MRA.4758:

-Snip-

Hence, I am wondering if a little bit of closing the gap betweens the wealth levels of players might not in fact be healthy for the game. I imagine this could make more of the game’s content broadly available for a large number of players.

And just to be clear: I don’t have an answer, I am just wondering.

~MRA

I agree in some sense that a game like this shouldn’t imitate real life by too much. Neither can it be completely different (since humans are playing it and controlling it to that extent). The problem is that since the game as an economy and it is not capped directly in any sense (no limit of gold) we end up running into something that resembles a real world simulation.

Smith probably is probably mulling a few ideas over himself. Though being an economist I think he finds it way more interesting to just watch how the simulation plays out and fixing leaks here and there (plus obviously putting in a small tweak when outrage grows high enough).

Still, here are some ideas I think can solve, or make the game economy a wee bit more interesting.

1. Global resource and gold being physically limited. Just like the Gem system there are only a certain amount of gems circulating in the game, more gems are only added when someone purchases gems with real money.

Similarly if gold would be physically limited to the amount farmed from gold nodes we would see a significant shift in player economy, interaction etc. That means gold earned from quests, and other things would be dependent on amount of gold available globally. With it we would see massive recessions, booms, draughts and crashes.

While this most likely would create more problems than it would solve. I think it would be a very interesting concept. Of course we could only have gold and not silver and copper as smaller denominations as these could potentially increase in value over gold if they were scarce. We would also see that farming gold nodes would be the new thing in game, so there should be a gold node resource cap. Similarly this wouldn’t function without a duplication system since players would own all the wealth and no npc would be able to pay for say dungeon runs.

So all in all such an idea would have to be carefully crafted. Still, it’s by far the most rad idea on changing the economy.

2. A much simpler idea is to gate gold revenue by time spent in game over a running daily or weekly period. This would essentially defer players from spending long sessions in game as the time value of gold would decrease with each hour played. Essentially this would lead to someone finding optimal game times and exploiting them for max gold gain/hour, though that wouldn’t necessarily make them any richer than others who has a lower threshold for time value.

Of course this idea would irritate significant part of the player population and so I believe gradually substituting gold gain with increased loot chances for resources would balance it out. Especially base resources which are scarce (Linen anyone?). This could even out the playfield a lot. This because, players who spend more time in game than others earn less money per hour spent in game, but more resources which they can sell at initially high prices however which will due to the increase in supply drop in price providing better prices for poorer players.

While this idea surely has a lot of cons as well, it’s much more simply implemented, though it requires quite a bit of code.

3. This one is quite controversial. Shutting down the TP, creating a bartering UI. This removes information from the market. Right now information is free, more or less. If you want to buy 250 bolts of linen: you just open the TP and check the prices of linen, since the market is global, the quote you get on the TP is the current market price (nobody can buy it cheaper at that very moment).

Remove the TP, and information in the market shifts. 250 bolts of linen? Now you have to ask in chat. The chance of you finding someone selling bolts of linen is smaller and the chance you are getting it for the best price available is miniscule.

The con to this is that convenience is thrown out the window, and most players have to rely more on their own gathering skills.

The pro is that wealth in terms of gold plays a much lesser part of the equation in a player’s measure of success. Someone buys a legendary for 50g another buys the same one for 2500g.

Such a player economy is dangerous, but levels the playing field a lot more by creating chaos.

I have a few more ideas but got a bit tired of writing.

Peas out!

Wow… so much seriousness in here it almost hurts my heart. Is there no fun in some of you? It was a great prank!

I’m going to jump on the: I do not agree train.

There is absolutely no need for a HT in mmo’s if you get one shot by a boss as a thief some teammates or you are doing something wrong, or it’s meant to happen.

I think there are plenty of mmos out there with the HT. ANet is doing great not implementing it in this game.

Nick.6972:

Vayne.8563:

Nick.6972:

People played UW and FoW for years in GW1, GW2 lacks good repayable content with well designed rewards.

FoW was okay to do once or twice. UW was probably a bit better. Those who ran it for years were the exception, not the rule. A tiny portion of the playerbase, standing around in the Temple of Ages, spamming for the new meta build that people could speed run it with.

Yawn.

While I do wish there was content for you, Anet knows how many people actually did that kind of thing. I’m guessing it wasn’t a popular as some people assume.

FOW and UW was played more actively than any other GW1 PvE content, that’s a fact, I still remember 6 districts at ToA.
It wasn’t just a small minority of the player base.
And even if you copy pasted the meta build for running Speed Clear, that didn’t grant you success alone. Bad players still failed countless of teams because of being terrible.

Why GW2 is avoiding elite/hardcore instances? Because they’re hypocrites and are still trying to convince people that GW2 is “different” from other MMOs when it’s clearly not.

ANet tried to add hardcore content and you can see what that netted them. Gw2 has got a very different playerbase than gw1. It’s much larger and most people hasn’t tried gw1 before. If you want hardcore content then pvp, fotm and arah p4 is the hardcore stuff. If that doesn’t suit your taste or isn’t hardcore enough then im afraid you’d have to gather a larger following who comes with ideas on hardcore content in the forums. If ANet is only catering to a few individuals then its not going to be high on the priority list. You need to show that you are many.

tomlin.8204:

Vayne.8563:

If there’s no purpose to anything you do here, then obviously this game doesn’t synchronize with your personal taste.

But I want it to! As I said I love the atmosphere and there’s so many cute and delightful things about the game that I appreciate, unfortunately they are all activities I have done before and don’t really see any point to do them again. I guess the game is now for me like listening to music, but with interactive colours.

Maybe you are just spending too much time in game. Take some time to find new interests. Do something you enjoy a bit in game when you can. Don’t be too serious. You don’t need to pay them to play it. When they finally produce something you find worthwhile then come back. If you want to facilitate that progress, start a thread in this forum or join the CDI and try to get your ideas in.

If you want dragons or new zones, then just wait, have patience. We know they are coming. If you want something else please do join the cdi discussions.

Other than that it’s all waiting. Life’s too short to complain about a game not doing it for you. Especially this game. You are way better off telling them what you want, get people to agree, and wait, doing something else while waiting.

You need to disable autotarget to avoid that happening. It can be disabled in the general settings.

dietzero.3514:

I sometimes wonder what dream world these ‘Anet does not dictate the price of stuff’ people are living in…

It’s arguing semantics. No they don’t “dictate” the “price”. They indirectly dictate supply and demand. Thus they play a role in the price, but ultimately they do not dictate it.

darkvise.3197:

After the silk will come to 2s per piece or before?
Anet will decide to maintain this unfair price difference between the ascendant pieces?
Anet will decide to maintain this unfair time difference between the various ascendant armor?

Just a couple of numbers of the current situation:

Silk scrap 79 c required 300 = 2 g 37s
Mithril ore 30 c required 100 = 30s
Thick Leather Section 8 c required 150 = 12s

p.s. : Plz, don’t say us that this was not predictable

I believe you fail to see several things going on here.

A. ANet does not dictate prices on the TP it’s player demand / supply.

B. There will be a price discrepancy dependant on player demand. Silk is in high demand, mithril not.

C. This is armor crafting and, yes, silk will be the most required item. Silk did not exist for ascended weapons. Which brings us to D. the most important point.

D. Silk was introduced to ascended crafting very recently. Crafting the ascended threads is time gated. And there is not much of the finished spools of thread on the tp yet. When it comes to both leather and mithril their ascended refinements have been on the market for quite a while and the demand for these refinements is quite stable i.e. cost = price. When it comes to bolts of damask you’ll see the price is still quite high which in turn reflects the increase in demand for silk which is the base mat of this product.

All in all this is happening as everyone else predicted. Those of us who did probably saved enough silk to last us a life time as well. Besides that I don’t see why gathering silk is so bothersome as doing regular content would net you heaps of silk in no time.

cranked.3812:

I have been selling all my Damask since day one and will continue to do so until prices level out and fall. I love logging in every day for a free 10 gold.

Hear, hear… here, here.

It might be a good idea to take a clue from certain big software companies, that give redemption codes or offer a free upgrade to customers who bought their software right before an upgrade announcement. i.e. You announce on the date 1st of dec that from that date you’ll reward gem purchases with a gift, then it’s a nice gesture to also include purchases from 3 days before this announcement. (the grace period should be set based upon your marginal gains and purchase volumes of the previous days, e.g. how many customers are you likely to upset by not including them).

With these announcements it’s better to have them a week prior to the actual date of inception so that customers are aware of it. Especially since it is a medium term promotion (a flash sale or incentive is justified in its own right, and is a risk customers take when buying at ordinary price).

I believe adding a grace period here would be best for the customers and you. It was a mistake though to have brought up the duration of a grace period as now someone will feel left out no matter.

Trego.6182:

Chobiko.9182:

@Terrahero: The same to you, if you play warrior against ANet warrior you lose.

Nope ^^

To my defence he looked very lonely! (Plus you are a thief)

I hope the rewards aren’t that different. The winning servers should indeed get a zergling reward (zerger title anyone?), but that wouldn’t be politically correct. Other than that I feel sorry for a lot of large blob server players since the queues were tremendous apparently and people who weren’t hardcore determined on waiting to enter for 2 hours would not get any achievement at all, besides one or two servers in the current matchup being nothing and so the large blob server would literally have nothing to cap.

Playing on one of the low pop servers I got a chance to do all my achievements within the amount of time spent queueing for others on the larger servers. However it was a headache due to the massive zergs and sometimes you had no choice but to cap sentries and hope you didn’t meet any roaming guilds. 100g would probably help restitute my broken armour cost.

I hope the rewards are very nice, for all who got the achievement. It’s just rewarding different types of work, one which is waiting over a long period, the other hard work over a short period.

The next season though I hope they get a formula straight so we can get some better matchups. I think the largest headache for devs is that there are 3 world that need to fight eachother… each with a similar fighting chance. With so few worlds I don’t see this ever happening. That said maybe they can figure something out. Or maybe changing the way wvw rewards people for completing objectives is the clue.

I’ve recently been thinking of rewarding map-wide for any cap. There are obvious holes in this, but it is the only thing I can think of that would promote a better strategic play style.

If you want the best roaming build you are already on the right path (gs : Sword/warhorn) Try this build when you get closer to 80; Roaming Warrior Build

Here… is a small reel of my warrior in armour. The first picture was taken on the 27th of August 2012. Since then she has gone through a lot of armour, transmutes and even a total makeover kit.

- Arya Deè

Ps. Some of these are glitches I had which turned out to give me quite trippy-looking armour.

@SeNoZind: Server time;) Plus I don’t live in the U.S. You wouldn’t know what time it is here. It could be 3am.

@AgentChaos: See my attached picture and know why healing signets don’t work. ANet gods are disabling it to win.

@Terrahero: The same to you, if you play warrior against ANet warrior you lose.

@everybodyelse: This is not AR or DR, just which world should be clear by my new attachment.

PS. There’s something wrong with my attached picture as well. And no, it’s not the party menu. The person uses Korean characters to display name, and my comp doesn’t have those.

BTW: @naphac: I know, I have 15 achievements already. I didn’t specifically say I suffered. I said this is not fun. I got the achievements through hard work, I have sm achievement and “Keep is the thing” but through considerable amount of death related to bg zergs. I feel sorry for you having a hard time getting those achievements. But I believe both SoR and JQ gave you a good challenge in the first few weeks. The only real problem I could see for you must have been the queues… Can’t even begin to imagine how boring queueing must be, I basically hotjoin every time I log.

PPS: Blue Hair… How can you win against that? Blue. Hair.

Hahahaha, amusing. No, no and no. Now, possessed got it. What’s wrong about this picture is the WvW tally.

I prefer rotating maps and I use signet of rage when I am mobile. Plus the party menu was scrambled to protect identity.

Though I think deep down you all knew what was wrong;)

I don’t want to see a season 2 even before this is fixed.

Not so much Tribulation Mode when you choose the right server to play on amirite (nvm right class)?

BG doesn’t have much resistance against SoS or Maguuma. Something needs to be done with the matchups…

(btw: Yes they found me standing watching the zerg did a mesmer port up to me and ganked)

Well this escalated quickly! I’ll be on the watch-out for any mermaids in LA. To think that they have sunk so low as to lure ships onto the rocks in the bay! Is there no end to this madness plaguing our lands?!

I just levelled my weaponsmithing to 500 and created an ascended GS. While I initially spent about 40-50g to get to level 450, the next 18 levels I exclusively refined ascended resources like bloodstone bricks, and deldrimor steel ingots. After that I took the resources I’d gathered over the month and crafted my way to 500 and also an ascended. You could throw the exotics you get in the mystic forge, feeling lucky i did that myself, but I wasn’t especially lucky. The best is to get some mystic salvage kits and salvage them. That way you get exotic sigils which can sell for up to 5-6g, you also get dark matter needed for the ascended. From level 468 to 500 and mats to create the ascended weapon I spent about 60g btw.

The crafted exotics like stated above are quite common due to them being obtainable in the mystic forge. Not however that you can earn much more by simply salvaging these.

Also when you reach level 500 you can craft certain ascended resources which sell for considerable amounts of gold;)

Chobiko.9182:

1. -snip-

2.

When it comes to some loose ends I have discovered in the game, a major loose end is the player home instance. I believe more could be done with it. First of all I feel that it’s unnatural that every player home instance in every major hub acts as a player home instance. I suggest moving the POI outside this instance and instead only allow player’s into the instance that is their home; e.g. a human can only enter their home instance in Divinity’s Reach.

A major concern for players have been the fact that they are put in the back seat of some major parts of the game. More so our home instance was supposed to evolve as we progressed in the game. There are a few aspects of the home instance which could be improved to make it more than the new source of quartz, candy corn, and “a place of power” to a player. It could also play a major role in putting the player in the front seat again.

Let’s backtrack to the Living World again. Whenever there is a new release we are sent a mail where some things are written, usually directing us in the right direction. This aspect might unconsciously feel impersonal. Much like text messaging. It’s like we are simply receiving orders from some commander telling us we better report ourselves for duty since we are needed.

This could be improved a lot with some effort. First the players should have a defined player home in their own home instance. When this is established, whenever there is a new release of Living World the player either receives a mail or is notified in some way that someone/something, is waiting for them outside their home. This way we make the story more personal. The player now travels to their home instance to find, a letter, a dying sylvari, a panicking asura, a human investigator (yes), a legionnaire, a Durmand representative, their own secretary? A negihbour even? it could be anything, but they are awaiting the player with the news of the event. Here we could have cut scenes with the player, or even battle. It would feel more personal to the player to be contacted at their home, and that in addition to some other upgrades to the home instance could vastly improve the immersion of the Living World.

I don’t mean to say that every release should be announced through the player going to their home instance, but it would be, for starters, nice to see this in action with at least one story arc. And maybe expanding to a few more later on, perhaps as the player becomes more renown in the world.

Say if you give the player actual credit in the world, change a few lines of random npcs espcially inside or around the home instance and the areas where the player has contributed to saving. Even in some random places have npcs say; they have heard about you and how you climbed on top of a nasty dragon and struck it to the earth for it never to awake again. This is another aspect of the game which could possibly improve immersiveness of the living sotries as well. Especially if we make rumours act like real rumours where the further away they are heard the more bizarre they get. A tale of how Scarlet struck the Queen’s Pavillion and of how the player drove her away. Could be retold by a quaggan in Lion’s Arch as how a Giant Snake came out of a great hole in Divinity’s Reach crushed the city, and how a valiant hero, the player, split the giant snake in two.
Now going back to the home instance. A major tweak is needed to the quality of life in the home instance, add some vendors selling foods, ingredients, various recipes. During certain events have merchants selling event specific rewards and goods in the instance. Add access to your bank (chest). And as long term goals maybe adding a “Hall of Monuments”, Living Story npcs like refugees that tell some of the Living Story arc they were part of. Also I believe the Laurel Vendors should be relocated from standing near the bank to inside the player home instance.

Finally, the Living World reward system needs to be revamped slightly. One thing is some of the rewards being ridiculously easy to get, another is things like the halloween skins and mini-bloody prince, being nothing but an endless farming session. I like how things are rewarded as you complete certain achievements, but I feel some of the achievement rewards are not directly tied to the achievement itself. e.g. a krait obelisk shard doesn’t just pop out from an achievement. While the current system is convenient it sort of break the immersion when you receive achievement rewards like the zenith skins. I believe this could be improved with a “hall of monuments” where you would have to talk to some npc to receive the achievement rewards.

That is all I have to say for now, I believe. Thank you for reading.

1.

I have a few things I wanna bring to this discussion. As a former game designer I notice a few loose ends in the design which can be brought together with a bit of effort and hopefully make the players a bit happier!

Let me start by saying that I am really impressed by the bi-weekly releases, they keep us busy and gives us an incentive to check in every two weeks at least to see what all the new stuff is about. It’s a great way to keep retention!

That said there is a downside to these frequent releases, and I noticed that the last three releases have been experimenting with a solution to this problem; namely the short-lived duration of these releases. Take for example Bazaar of The Four Winds we were warned that the Sky People would leave after two weeks and so we had to spend our time well before they left. Now, I, like many here really enjoyed the new map! The vertical design was amazing! Unfortunately as the Bazaar disappeared the map disappeared as well. Maybe it was resources on your side, but I was genuinely sad to see that map disappear. Although you probably hadn’t designed for it I think leaving the map there but having the Bazaar gone would have been a really nice gesture. Still having some of the vendors (maybe relocated) and also the activities still there would have been great.

The example above is not exactly what the real problem with the bi-weekly releases has. The real problem is the switching between story arcs confusing players and ultimately forcing them to not pay little attention to the story. I see you have started experimenting with keeping several living world releases running at once. And I hope that if it works well then we could see individual story arcs lingering in the world as we progress in the other story arcs. This would imply having about 4-5 living world releases running at once, and I’m not entirely sure of the impact of this on your resources, but I hope it’s something that can be implemented.

For some story arcs this wouldn’t be feasible.. like the Queen’s Jubilee, or the Bazaar. But keeping elements of the Living World behind for those who want to seek it out, maybe even allow for completing a few achievements that are still possible to do (like the torch running in Queen’s jubilee, or crystal gathering in the Bazaar) would make the story feel more alive.

TBC

Talissa Chan.7208:

Why is this thread still going? Anet are looking into the ignore thing and now its become just a thread talking about word origins and meanings which is different in every country. Please lock this now anet, nothing constructive going on here just pointless debate and kittening.

Agree.

-edit- I see you added to that later Coglin, good.

I also suggest ANet close this down before this escalates more.

Maybe reopen another thread not mentioning the homophobia part and only the ideas on ignore/chat filter/LFG system.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Chobiko.9182:

-snip-

Those are my 2 cent.

I like your 2 cent, have a dollar. I think you’re definitely hitting the right ideas in terms of the profanity filter.

I actually got a better idea for them. Create a chat filter just like a robots.txt where the player can add / remove words they wouldn’t like to see in the chat. That way instead of ignoring everyone you could simply add words as you saw them pop up. give an option to add wildcards and lower case/upper case optional formatting, and boom you have all the freedom in the world to filter out whatever you find it offensive. Say someone don’t like “jesus” popping up in chat or “allah” can add it to filter and you don’t need to see it again.

On a side not I was not aware that the ignore button doesn’t ignore in all chat instances. I find that a bit weird, as ignore should be the same as block or mute. I haven’t ignored many people (only gold sellers) and don’t use the profanity filter so I have little idea of how they actually work.

I do however find it sad that people cannot enjoy this game when certain things that offends them cannot be avoided.

I agree that the (mis)use of the term gay is a problem in society today. The OP is very right in it being offensive and if OP wants a place to go to where he will not be subjected to the same harshness he/she encounters in real life then GW2 should be just that place. The problem is that everyone else from the same real life is in GW2 as well so it becomes a game of escaping the same people you meet in real life again.

While the report button is to report personal attacks, general offensive behaviour. The ignore button is there to give one the opportunity to mute people whose behaviour one doesn’t like in general.

I believe however that the profanity filter is there to filter out general slurs… I am not familiar with what is filtered but I suggest filtering the word gay and all the derivations of that word. At least then you wouldn’t be able to tell whether someone said “That’s so gay” or “That’s so s****y” etc. I think also the profanity filter currently makes **** instead of kittenizing the words. I, for one, would think it better to kittenize it, or just remove the slur itself.

What I don’t like about that suggestion myself is that gay shouldn’t be considered a profane word. However it’s so common in today’s slang amongst the “kids” that like it or not we have to deal with it having lost its “sexual” connotation and instead become a synonym of “queer” “weird” or “funny”. Remember “queer” used to be a word for “homosexual” as well, that one too turned derogatory.

So while I agree that “gay” shouldn’t be considered a profanity, it’s so commonly used in a derogatory way in this society and you cannot shield yourself from the misuse in gw2 unless you filter it out of the chat. We cannot ban everyone misusing this word as this would ban quite a significant proportion of players. We cannot attempt to educate people through gw2 about not using the word, as this would be the wrong channel to educate people on the use of this “term”. So what we are left with is simply to give the player the choice of filtering it out of chat so that they are not exposed to the misuse of this term.

As an end note I am talking solely about the general “this-” “that-” “-is gay” or just the general “gaaaaaaaay”. And not the “you’re gay” or “you f’*** gay”, other non-acceptable profanity. The ones using such profanity deserves suspension.

Those are my 2 cent.

I’m afraid you might be missing some hotkeys here. TAB was and is a “cycle target” key, it’s not a “target nearest” key. You can assign “target nearest” to TAB if you prefer that, although if I understand it right, it’s bugged right now.I also suggest hotkeying “call target” and “target called target” to some more practical hotkeys, but hey.

The way they intend the new “cycle target” system to be, as far as I am aware, is to make life easier for everyone facing champions and players with spawns in pvp. “Cycle target” would pick a target close to you and then start cycling through in what seemed like almost random order. Now it picks the highest ranked mob or player and cycles through to the lowest. This is practical due to the nature of some classes that use single targeting, and also to avoid targeting yellow mobs. The new system also targets players in pvp instead of mesmer clones or necro/ranger pets. This helps players that find it hard to target the correct player in pvp and should help making certain fights more balanced (and others imbalanced, they probably need to see how mesmers and rangers/necros fare on this).

In thread with Ohoni though, I feel the targeting system is still lacking in certain aspects like ability to click npcs during battle and double clicking ground to untarget during battle. I often use mouse and keyboard to navigate a battlefield and end up untargeting or accidentally targeting an npc which is really frustrating. I am happy they fixed it so we don’t have to cycle through to the higher ranked mobs as this is usually what a player wants to attack in a fight. (Although I get the point of wanting to target mobs some times, but for that you DO have the target nearest hotkey, this hotkey seems to be bugged now however).

To come at this from a different perspective.

People here wants to implement pauses as a counter-measure of something that shouldn’t happen in the first place.

If a dc happens then the team of which a player dc will suffer; thus we implement pauses to remedy something like that happening.

Dc is (most of the time at least) client side issues; e.g. loss of connection, graphic driver failure, client error, etc. What should be worked on is to limit the amount or chance of dc. This should be much higher priority than finding a remedy for dc.

Now knowing that you are entering a tournament with monetary rewards or rewards of importance to you. I assume most of us would at least make sure we are least likely to dc. E.g. I have seen the example of people blaming windows update for suddenly wanting to restart their comp. <- That is player’s fault and I find that such ignorance doesn’t deserve other players waiting for you.

On the other hand you have people living far away from the servers or who have low bandwidth who’d still like to play and who dc due to their situation (which cannot be improved). It’s for these people that we hope to see optimisation of client/server to prevent dc.

When it comes to implementing pauses themselves; there is no way in my opinion you can justify implementing them without creating more problems than what you had at hand to begin with. With pauses you create problems such as “tac pause”, “dc trolling”, “pause exploitation”. Any of which can only be remedied by removing pauses.

So we are looking at a scale here where we have “dc” on one side, and “pause exploitation” on the other. Since this a choice of which is the greater evil I believe it is adamant that we as players are left with a choice. Do we want to play in a tournament where dc is punished or do we want to be subjected to possible pause exploitation.

Implementing pauses should therefore be optional; decided by the shoutcaster/admin of the tournament. It should also be explicitly stated whether pauses are enabled or not in a game so that the player can enter knowing what s/he chooses.

In the end what should really be done is optimisation, optimisation, optimisation, to reduce dc.

Why not just remove the xp you get from using the skyhammer…?

I already feel like gaining rank is quite a struggle. I only play hot join though, because I am afraid of tourneys and custom arenas, because I suck, I don’t know what I should do, whether it’s ok to join and I don’t have the time to research it. I want to get better but I don’t have much time to devote to studying builds, practice rolling, practice skill rotations etc.

I feel like the system works just fine now, I am progressing slowly, but as a casual player I’d expect no more.

If there is a problem where players are misusing a mechanic, remove the mechanic that can be misused. In this instance it seems to be xp gained from using the skyhammer, so why not just remove it, lower the cast time and remove xp. That way it can be used for what it was intended for in tourneys. In hot join it will likely not be used anymore just like the trebuchets in khylo.

Please do not award xp only at the end of matches or start capping hotjoin, this will ruin the experience for many casual players. I’d like to still exit a mismatched match or exit if a need to and still earn the rank points and glory I earned myself before I exited. If you force everyone to play a full game to keep the little glory we made then you risk alienating many of us.

sPvP like WvW were supposed to be inclusive, and not focused on only the core players. This seems to go well for WvW, but in sPvP core players are complaining. sPvP is rightfully not a system easily balanced for both core and casuals. Catering for more casuals will often mean core players can more easily farm rewards. Diminishing returns is something that can counter such problems. Another is to remove the mechanic if it isn’t vital to the game. E.g. removing CoF is not viable, but using diminishing returns would be.

Off-topic, but: You have an economist on-board. I’m curious who exactly are doing the game metrics and systems, but if it’s not the economist, why not include him. The ones that are best at designing game systems are not computer science engineers, big data engineers, or mathematicians. It is actuaries, and risk/portfolio managers, who are. I know that usually the ones who design the metrics and systems in these games are either computer science engineers or mathematicians, or completely unrelated degree holders. But getting someone who has experience with option pricing, risk management, and financial rocket science has great merits to developing the game system, just sayin’.

dejay.2598:

3 million boxes and one year later they still haven’t implemented 1 successful feature for spvp

99% of their population is gone and they can’t even admit it

What the what? 99% of the population?? Where’d you get that from? If you think they haven’t implemented any one successful feature (leaderboards, maps, custom arenas, 1v1), what WOULD be a successful feature to you?

I can’t think of a single thing that would be more successful than the leaderboards per say.

Of course they can improve in incentivising PVE players to try SPVP by adding useful stuff you can transfer into PVE as well (like the bags). Or they could add some of the minigames into the mists. Or make the Heart of the Mists place a bit more interesting by adding something to do there when relaxing (jumping puzzles)? Idk anything I can think of adding would be second rate at best.

Balancing 8 classes is a never-ending effort, not even WoW has reached perfect balance yet. Just as there will always be someone ganked 14 times by someone more skilled than them coming to the forums crying that the ganker’s class is OP. I think people should keep looking at the classes when they themselves and others play them and see what works and what doesn’t, and report what doesn’t work. That helps devs.

And if you have any good suggestion for what would be a “successful” feature why not tell us. Because obviously we need it if 99% of the player-base is gone.

They should fix the queue system, for one. It’s been bugged for some time.

Then they should implement idle kicking, so it becomes more of a lucky draw of people who wants to play instead of afkers on the main waiting (evt. someone will work around an idle kick system, but generally it should make things better).

Other than that, what they should do is make sure that overflows are not unnecessarily created. Right now if you are in an overflow waiting to get into the main server, you might at some point be asked if you want to “Travel” to the main server. You click “Travel” and get sent to a less populated overflow, it’s like a Japanese “batsu”-game. This problem requires a fix.

Alternatively they should allow us to choose overflows. Much like how Age of Conan handled server instances. Have a UI element that lets us switch between overflows and also (alternatively) shows us the waiting-line for the main server. I realise this requires a bit of dev resources, maybe more than it’s warranted for right now, but I believe it’s something many people would be happy about seeing such a feature added to the game.

Be careful about such a password. “Wiwahiwhilwhr94”; while this might be strong against a dictionary brute force attack, this password has too many recurring letters and a few common password tropes like double 0-9 digit ending. If you want to create a very strong, very secure password you should always aim for 16+ characters including 2+ numbers, a good mix between upper and lower case, and also 2+ special characters. The problem with such passwords is that they are indeed hard to remember. That’s why inventing a system for such passwords is much easier. This system should only be familiar to you.

To give an example: Say you decide on a common password length of18 characters. You use a 2-5-2-7 combination where you input a number and a symbol before and after the first word, and a 7-letter word after that again, Then finally you add another symbol and letter. So;

“1&Staín2+Finally3D”

Such a password would only be discovered by being given away. Or if you had a whole nation trying to crack it.

While the password doesn’t need to be as messed up as the above one you can easily create your own system and then use it for every password you need. All you need to do is make sure you change out half of the letters, by changing words or symbols or a mix. Just keep the system the same and you’ll find that it’s easier to remember. You can also use words from different languages, backwards, use special characters, etc. And if you find it hard to remember, try to use words or symbols that make sense to the password you’re trying to make. For guild wars 2;

#1Jen#2naIs#3Hot#!

There should be in my opinion a 15 minute window of inactivity before kicking to character select, in every map, except home instance (for roleplay reasons). I find it really weird that they don’t have such a mechanic. There are so many people parked in the wrong places so many times, they get killed or are in the way of some event scaling it up. So why hasn’t there been implemented a server kick when idling?

Sea of Sorrows in a sad sad state when it comes to Teq. I’m also never on in peak hours… Literally have no idea when they are in my timezone, but from what I have seen it’s been terrible.

Invite me too, please!

I’d like an invite as well thank you

Hi,

I’d be slightly worried. It might be a bug, or it might be someone actually hacking your account.

Change your password. There are good hints about how to make a strong one but something like:
"Englishsoundingword"+"RandomSpecialcharactersandnumbers"+"Otherinventedword""etc.etc."

Is often very easy to remember and strong passwords. (Granted they are over 16 chars long)

Also add two-step verification to be sure.

If you experience that you have been hacked, and especially after the change of password, then I’d start to look at my connections, the computers I log in from etc. it usually means someone is spying on you.

A common password on the net, is like using a simple ward lock on your door in the U.S.

Morrar.1764:

John Smith.4610:

ilr.9675:

John Smith.4610:

market manipulation.

… well that’s unfortunate that the head Econ guy doesn’t see “Flipping” as Manipulation.
…

Keep in mind there is a difference between Moving along the Supply Demand curves, and shifting the supply demand curves….

Again a rather simple and uninformative post on the matter… You asked us to prove market manipulation and yes you failed to define it yourself (just like the OP). However, if you had read the topic, you’d have seen it moved beyond that and we did define manipulation.
…

“Flipping” is unfortunately not viewed as market manipulation by the majority these days. It’s common practice in inflating economies. GW2 has an inflating economy. The reason for this is that market value is always determined by consumer utility in the end. Lest the product has a short life cycle (like our halloween costumes).

The real problem for the GW2 economy is that it’s slightly mirroring the real world. Exogenous problems interfere with the economy making it unstable for the majority. In GW2 the problem is bots, they inflate the economy through tireless acquisition of gold. ANet recognises that and tries to combat them. The problem ANet is facing is that botting practice is far larger than they can handle. Furthermore it is phased by a population not scrutinising botting, but actually willing to buy their gold and/or implement bots themselves.

You shouldn’t be concerned about alleged “market manipulation” or “virtual stock markets”. It doesn’t hurt the economy as long it isn’t facing exogenous problems like bots.

What you should do is go about with a zero-tolerance for bots. If you care so much about this you should gather what information you have on bots (forums, tactics, download sites, etc.) and mail it directly to ANet support staff. You should also be careful of what you buy at the BLTC, and also report, denounce and shame anyone who participates in botting, buying gold from sellers and selling gold.

The root of this problem lies in people willing to pay gold farmers for gold. If we keep a zero tolerance for such people they will find themselves excluded from the community, which for most people is undesirable.

They are banning bots in the dozens. It takes time and it’s a process to go through each reported account and verify botting. Especially when people are reporting over 100 individual accounts several times a week. Imagine that about 400,000 players of which maybe 10% report an average of 100 bots. that’s 400,000 reports of which probably 80-100,000 are individual accounts. Now this is just guesstimating wildly. But you see what I am getting at. It takes time. And unfortunately it’s easier to create a bot than it is to ban one.
Now for reference I have only recently seen bots and reported all of them. This is on SoS and I have only encountered <10 bots…

I noticed this a lot of times when playing that event dialogues between NPCs tend to play even though I am standing far away from them. A way to reproduce this is to go to the Ascalonian Catacombs, and wait outside the dungeon for the event on the other side of the hill with the harpies?… You’ll notice that the dialogue is loud as if the characters were standing right beside you.

I jump at this as I sometimes see no-one around when an NPC starts to speak.