(edited by Colbear.6425)
What is the difference between the cash I spend on gems with the intention of buying a bank upgrade and the cash I spend on gems with the intention of buying Tyrian gold?
Case 1: The money goes to ANet and is directly consumed.
Case 2: The money goes to ANet and (so slightly as to be unnoticeable in small quantities) reduces how much ingame gold it costs to buy 100 gems.
Case 2 is really useful for players who don’t spend real money on gems, because when players spend ingame gold on gems, they (again, so slightly as to be almost unnoticeable) increase the exchange rate and how much ingame gold it costs to buy gems.
And of course, players are willing to pay more gold for gems when new, good items are added to the gem store.
Er, are we talking about the same thing?
I’m talking about “improve precursor drop rates for players with lots of achivement points”. That favors players with lots of achievement points, and the only fair way to do that would also involve making precursors accountbound. Sellable drops should never be improved by players having more achievement points (or by players having more gifts), because that’s not fair to newer players who played just as long but for fewer days, or who played 200 hours in a month versus 50 hours spread over three months.
Honestly, I just think it’s not fair to new players if only players with at least X amount of achievements can get a precursor. I don’t begrudge other players their luck, and I think that’s really mean-spirited of you to say “you were lucky, you shouldn’t have nice things”. Why can’t you just be happy for someone who has something nice happen?
Right now, a new player who is good at playing the market or who has the support of his guildmates can get a precursor and a legendary. If we change precursors to be account-bound if you trade achievement points for it, but you can still get it otherwise, sure, I don’t really see a problem with that — but then they should take 150 hours of “effort” farming achievement points, to reflect the current difficulty of getting a precursor.
But I don’t really believe that is something players are going to be okay with, because they’ve already shown they aren’t okay with having to farm.
I’m not saying that none of these things will work, exactly. I’m saying that we need to come to an agreement about how many hours of farming a precursor should be worth.
Until we do that, there’s no point in saying “they should just set a fixed recipe” because if they do that, people will complain saying it’s too boring and slow to get what they want (charged lodestones).
I think a precursor should be worth 150-300 hours of farming. As long as it’s obtainable within 150-300 hours of farming (or 300-600 hours of just playing the game casually), I don’t have a problem with the prices.
I don’t see why players shouldn’t be rewarded for other things, like having gold or having guildmates help them or being actually good at the game (I’d love for SPvP stuff to give you non-sellable PvE stuff like karma or XP or gear too).
But none of these things is a magic bullet unless we get to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter is not “this is RNG” and it’s not “farming is boring” and for all people say “I don’t mind something slow as long as I make progress”, they’ve proven that’s not true either because they freak out every time something takes a long time to do.
We can’t look at this “problem” from the “precursors need to have different ways to get them” approach. We have to look at them from the “if a precursor should be worth 150-300 hours of effort, are there other ways to make 150-300 hours of concerted effort return a precursor?”
And right now, gold and TP price is a unified currency that means you can get a precursor without having to only farm a dungeon or only run wubwub or only sit in Orr farming Plinx (which is a fast way to get gold, but not the only way, especially now that fine crafting mats are worth selling again).
Do you think there’s a way to “earn” a precursor that involves 150-300 hours of “work” that would easily allow for players to play in a way they prefer but will still make them slow progress towards a precursor? Because that’s what gold is, right now. Even if you like running wubwub, if you’re good enough at it to earn gold, you can slowly make progress towards a precursor.
Achievement points? The easiest way to farm that after doing your daily every day is to buy salvage items at 1 point per 100 items you salvage. Which is not really a bad thing, but again ties it to gold – to the cost of salvage items.
Elite player = “player with a lot of achievement points and/or the other gifts”. Anything tied to achievement points is going to favor players who have an old account, because you get achievement points every day and that seems kind of unfair.
I’m sorry that I didn’t say “players with a lot of achievement points or the other gifts” each time, but it’s a lot of typing.
Can you please explain what part of “I’m recording each player’s request for the last four pages” is oversimplifying or twisting words? I don’t see how you can twist “I think they should use a fixed recipe” or “I think they should give you a token or other thing that you can later trade for a precursor when you use the mystic forge”.
As I said, “right now it costs hundreds of hours of farming” — it’s not fun to farm but Anet’s actively working on making playing in varied ways more profitable so I don’t think it makes sense to say “I have to farm for 150 hours for a precursor but it’s not fun” when they’ve already said “You can do other things for 150 hours to also get a precursor, and it’ll be more fun, just give us time to implement the changes”.
You can’t just make accusations without giving evidence, that’s not very nice. You accused me of ignoring posts, and I found evidence that showed that I had, in fact, not been ignoring posts, and that a lot of posts really were “please add a fixed recipe or some other way to grind for this item”.
My question is not “is this 150 hours of farming fun” (because it’s not and they should fix it and it’s nice that they’re fixing it).
My question is “should a precursor take 150 hours of farming or other grinding, be it farming gold or grinding tokens”?
and
“If you don’t want it to take 150 hours of farming/grinding to get, how many should it take, and how does that not make it ‘easier’?”
or
“If you do want it to take 150 hours of farming/grinding to get, I don’t understand why people wouldn’t say “i have to run dungeons for 150 hours, this is unfair” or “i have to play wubwub for 150 hours, this is unfair”, so how would they make it take 150 hours and be a) feasible and b) not otherwise unfun/unfair. Especially since you can get gold doing most things in the game, whereas 150 hours of dungeons means you have to be doing dungeons."
12. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/609004
Fixed price, trade exos for tokens (by tracking uses of the MF)
Fixed recipe.
14. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/623109
Easier, trade exos for tokens.
15. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/623308
Easier for elite users
16. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/624769
Fixed recipe
17. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/626181
Easier/cheaper.
18. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/631682
Easier for elite users.
19. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/632542
Fixed recipe.
20. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/633193
Fixed recipe.
21. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/633301
“Something based on skill” is not a real suggestion.
Easier for elite players and account-bound so it’s harder for non-elite players. (elite = played a long time, because you get achievement points for doing your daily)
23. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/635725
Increase the drop rate and flood the TP so price goes down
24. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/643691
Make alternatives to legendaries that also look cool (a good suggestion that’s already been implemented and also isn’t about precursors)
Fixed recipe.
26. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/645113
Trade exos for tokens.
That’s four pages. Sorry, guess I’m being deliberately dense and not reading the thread because in four pages and twenty-six explicit “here’s what I suggest” suggestions, I see:
Maybe 3 options that aren’t one of the ones I already named, and of those — one is “all achievements” which doesn’t address the current “issue” because that, if anything, should be in addition to existing ways to get one, one is “make a ton of new content and in a way that’s fun and interesting and similar to the personal quest lines in scope except that those are still massively buggy”, and one is “harder dungeons/do jumping puzzles” which has no attached explanation to answer the question “if our goal is to make it take 150-300 hours of effort, how will this be 150-300 hours of effort”?
Solutions, in order, from page 13 (where “do something” is not a solution):
1. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/548836
precursors requiring the dungeon master achievement and 500+ of all tokens and have it be account bound — this is “dungeon tokens”
2. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/567081
Say every time you put 4 exotics of the same type in the mystic forge, if you dont like the result, you can challenge Zommoros to a fight. If you win Zommoros says 10 pardons for my behavior. — this is “trade rare/exos for tokens”
3. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/570439
This is “dungeon tokens and jumping puzzles” and “or trade exos for tokens”
4. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/573927
This is “make it drop more often for elite players, maybe up to a limit” (which is basically “elite players get more loot”)
“Great would be to have the firsttime a Skillbased game where wealth besides trading is actually depended on your Skill? you get big award for hardmode Dungeons Like several gold ect..”
This is “make harder dungeons” and “make a jumping puzzle”, except that if you want it to still represent 150-300 hours of grinding, it’ll have to be “grind for tokens”, and if you don’t want it to be X hours of grinding, then… I guess it wouldn’t be “easier” except that I just watched a bunch of people farm the clocktower for hundreds of gold during that event, so I’d be worried it’d unbalance the economy such that “elite” players who have harder dungeons unlocked or figure out the jumping puzzle would farm it into oblivion.
5. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/580003
Fixed recipe from forge/crafting (using expensive mats), trade for tokens (dungeons, wubwub, etc), static-cost vendor (for gold), increased static income (this isn’t a different way to get a precursor, this is just “please make playing the game normally more profitable”, which they’re already working on), increase the drop rate dramatically,
6. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/583712
“No, I don’t want dungeon grinding or an expensive recipe because I don’t want to do either”
7. A lot of “something that isn’t a very low-chance RNG” but that’s not a suggestion in the way you’re talking about.
“Make elite/old players get more precursors, and make them account bound”
A quest chain with dungeons – possibly the only suggestion that isn’t actually bad, with the problem then being “but do the designers want the precursor to represent 150-300 hours of trying to get it”, and honestly considering how the personal storyline has been going, I don’t think it’s technically feasible, from a programming/testing standpoint. People are asking for a quick fix, not something that would take months to do (if we’re talking "make a quest chain that is worth 150-300 hours of work).
100% completion of achievements. I don’t actually think this one’s a bad idea, especially if it’s max one/account, tbh, but I also think it’s way too brutal and if they implement it, they should put it in ADDITION to easier ways to get it, because 100% completion of achievements represents more than 300 hours of effort trying to get it.
11. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Official-Response-Drop-Rate-of-Legendary-Precursors/605928
Something that lets you track progress — sorry but that’s really “you can buy it off the TP with banked gold”
Oh, sorry, I thought people had suggested “dungeon tokens” or “wvw tokens” or “trade rares/exos for tokens” or “trade these items” as alternatives to forging a precursor and that those were being considered as viable suggestions.
Did you have a suggestion for getting a precursor that wasn’t that? I saw the “make it drop more often for ‘elite’ players (lots of time spent playing to get achievements or achievement points)” suggestion, but it seemed pretty unfair because it meant only old players would have them, and would sell them on the market at inflated prices and would just mean old players make way more gold than new players just for having old accounts.
Well, the problem is that right now, precursors are “worth” 150-300 hours of farming for a Dusk. When inflation happens, gold will become less valuable (as is happening now with increased crafting mat prices), which means they’ll become “worth” 100-200 hours of farming instead, or possibly even eventually 50-100 hours of farming.
Is that what you want?
You mean like farming the gold needed to buy it from the TP?
Or do you mean like farming 250 charged lodestones, which is a reliable, safe way to get several MF-guaranteed-recipe exotics but that people are already complaining about not because they’re impossible to get, but because they’re very hard to get (1 per hour or so, I guess).
Or do you mean like 10,000 dungeon tokens or WvW tokens, until everyone starts saying “I don’t want to do dungeons this isn’t fair” (which I think they said when it became part of the monthly), “I don’t want to do wvw this isn’t fair” (which they say because of the monthly), or “I don’t want to farm for 200 hours for a precursor, this isn’t fair” (which they’re saying right now, but is basically ’it’s too hard’, which isn’t a valid argument).
Before the bot bannings, you were looking at a net loss of 2-4g, with a higher amount of gold you’d have to spend as an investment (which you’d get back by selling mats).
Right now, fine mat prices are up so crafting’s more expensive, and idk how much you can make off it.
We need more precursors on the market to improve stability, yes. Right now there’s several different types of people gambling with the MF:
1. People who are putting in an investment of gold and losing it through the forge – by reforging the more expensive rares, exotics, etc
2. People who are reliably putting in an investment of gold and making a profit through the forge.
3. People who put in an investment of time and craft rares to forge (using harvested mats), and make nothing – by reforging expensive rares and exos.
4. People who put in an investment of time and craft rares to forge, and make less than they’d get from selling the mats but still make a significant amount.
5. People who put in an investment of time and craft rares to forge, and reliably make more than they’d get from selling the mats.
People in groups 1 and 3 are doing it wrong and are making a massive loss and are demoralizing themselves, and that’s the problem. The problem is they’re not putting in 20g and getting out 15g, they’re putting in 20g and getting out 15g, and instead of selling that 15g of stuff and getting another 15g worth of forges, they’re treating it as 8g worth of forges (or whatever) and then reforging it — losing 7g because they couldn’t be bothered to get the cheap forge fodder instead of the expensive stuff.
And then they’re crying on the forums about it, because that’s exactly what “I forged 400 rares and got nothing back” means, because if you forge 400 rares, you’ll get about 80 rares and 20 exos back, and trust me, those 20 exos are worth 20g minimum, assuming you don’t get anything rare or nice, and those 80 rares might be worth another 10g.
Groups 2 and 5 know things that other people don’t know, and are using a gap in knowledge to make profit but aren’t going to say how (similar to how people might be making 2-3g in a good farm spot, but they’re not going to tell you where it is). The knowledge will leak out and eventually whatever they’re doing will be common knowledge and they’ll stop doing it, but other people might start.
Groups 2 and 5 are selling the precursors they make.
Group 4, eh. They’re not going to burn themselves out as quickly playing, since they’re still making gold. And I think it’s fun to gamble and see what you get, but other people might not like it as much. But then the mats they’d have sold would have been used to create more forgefodder, so I think it evens out in the end or something.
So basically, we need more people forging efficiently, to increase supply. And fewer people burning themselves out by reforging expensive things, but I don’t really know how to convince people that they shouldn’t be forging 30s rares when they could sell it and buy two 15s rares instead.
If you choose to do it the hard and uncertain way (trying to forge one yourself) instead of the easy and direct way (selling the 200-300g worth of exotic weapons you went through and buying it off the TP), then it makes sense that you might have bad luck. But even if they made a “direct” way to get a precursor, it’d still be something that takes hundreds of hours to do, and then people will be saying “this takes hundreds of hours to farm, it’s not fair”. In fact, people are already saying that about charged lodestones, even though it’s certainly possible to farm them at a slow but steady rate (it just takes a long time).
The people who are selling precursors aren’t only “people who lucked out”. They’re also people who’ve thrown thousands of exotics or tens of thousands of rares into the MF.
Also if it dropped from a unique boss, that’d be even worse – “boss doesn’t spawn often enough”, “always overcamped so I can’t see/do anything”, “it never drops because it’s super rare”, “i don’t want to buy it off the TP from someone who lucked it”, “i fight the boss once every 3 hours but if it only drops it 1% of the time then I have to spend months getting bad drops from this boss in the hopes that I might get the precursor I want”
I think the whole point of banning bots is that they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.
This also has the benefit that killing monsters for loot is worthwhile again. If you farmed Orr event chains each time, you’d get the silver as a reward and the silver for vendoring all your drops. Aside from the occasional rare, pretty much everything else would be worth 50c at best, maybe 1s if you’re lucky.
Now, you can make gold by murderating things in Frostgorge for their blood or scales or totems. Or by doing highlevel dungeons and killing the mobs and getting drops that are actually worth something again.
How many hours of farming do you think a precursor should be worth? Before, they seemed to be worth 150-300 hours, assuming 1-2g/hr running plinx (for a Dusk because no one cares about the other precursor prices).
Do you still want them to be worth 150-300 hours? If so, and you can get 2-3g per hour farming fine mats now, then Dusk should go up in price to 450-600g.
Or do you want it to take less time now?
Charged lodestones, since they weren’t affected by the price change because bots didn’t farm them, should now cost maybe an hour of farming instead of two hours. That makes them effectively cheaper unless your primary source of income is playing the market or, uh… doing other things that don’t involve killing mobs.
But who would buy the items you craft?
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24299
Sell listing volume has dropped dramatically (cancel the other options until you’re only looking at sell volume). Maybe a bunch of players are colluding to not sell their mats, or maybe a bunch of bots got banned and can’t sell their mats.
I’m betting on the latter. Especially since buy order volume doesn’t seem to have changed significantly.
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/20496
Burgundy Dye looks like someone tried to spike it (bought up a bunch of sell orders all at once, which prompted people to start trying to buy/sell some to flip). It also looks like it didn’t work. Sell price spiked, buy price spiked (at a lower rate), and then the market corrected itself really fast. Right now it’s around 6s, up from around 4s, and I wouldn’t be surprise if it either stabilized there or went back down to 4s.
A spike is when the price goes up and then down. It looks like a spike on the sale price graph. When the price of an object goes up (slowly) and keeps going up, it’s just a price increase (or inflation on the object, I suppose). It looks like a gradual incline.
Spikes tend towards market manipulation or speculation.
Price increases tend towards overall economy changes (changes in drop rates, changes in average level of the players, changes in number of farmers (read: number of unbanned bots)).
(edited by Colbear.6425)
For logging’s sake:
I’ve done over 1000 attempts with rare weapons so far (so 4000+ rares, total), and have gotten no precursor.
My total loss is roughly -20 to -60 gold, meaning I’ve made anywhere from maybe 20 to 60 gold in profit over the last three weeks (I don’t really check but I started with 20g on my alt and ended with 90g yesterday night, but I sold a few other things in the meantime).
It’s kind of boring, but I figure I’ll get one eventually.
I don’t think it’s 1/35 for exotic forging, btw. So be careful with that.
Removing bots makes the prices of items that bots farm (crafting mats) go up and the prices of items that bots buy (do they actually buy items??) go down. It may also deflate the overall gold in the economy, assuming there are a lot of people buying gold who otherwise would not (but I don’t know how many people actually buy from gold sellers so this number might be off).
x1 recipe is safer. If you’re going to be upset if you do the x10 recipe and get a 5-6 streak of bad luck and no clovers (fairly common), stick to the x1 recipe (I had a 15 streak of no-clover once, but it only sucked a little bit instead of “was depressing”).
Right now the true “cost” of getting a precursor is tied to the price of rare and exotic weapons and you’re suggesting sticking to items used in crafted weapons: which are high-volume, easily-farmable items. That… might give them more stability, and a more firm cost, but I’d worry that it would actually drive the price up.
Right now, you can make precursors using a break-even forging method — so it’d make sense for their price to start going down as people stop buying them at sugh high prices (which is what I’m waiting for as knowledge slowly leaks out). If you can do that OR make them using 600g in elder wood and mithril, I worry that all it’ll do is make the price of those two items skyrocket AND make speculators drive up the precursor market by buying them all up because suddenly we “know” the price should be 600g instead of “well it’s rare but it’s just another exotic so maybe selling it for 100g is okay”.
(And then someone will say “it takes 100,000 stacks of elder wood and mithril to make? that’s impossible to farm in a reasonable amount of time, this is completely unfair and only TP players will have the gold to buy it because the mats are so expensive”)
What if, and I suggested this in another thread, they just put up a vendor for it for 1000g? Would that be okay, and if so, why? How is that not different from making it tradeable on the TP?
EDIT: ^ That’s because dungeons are easy and 1 million karma you can get in a day or two of farming, right? And 400 skill points and world completion, everyone has those? You’re not really participating in this conversation in good faith, here. Just because one thing costs gold doesn’t mean everything else is super easy and worthless.
What if they left precursor prices as they are but made the other requirements harder? So you need 250 clovers and gift of battle costs 1000 wubwub badges and you need 4 gifts of exploration forged together (so two chars) before you can make it? Would that make the “legendary” feel more epic?
(edited by Colbear.6425)
Well. Why would it be better? Because it’s easier? What if they just made a vendor that would sell it at 1000g? Would that be okay?
Yeah, I agree that right now the stock on the TP is too low and that does make it prone to wild fluctations. However, I think the stock will slowly start to rise as demand dies (as people get their precursors but keep making more) and that as long as the price remains stable, they shouldn’t have to change it.
Obviously, if the price suddenly starts to skyrocket with no end in sight, and it’s not related to general inflation (as in, all rares, exos, gathered mats, etc rise too), then they might have to step in, which is exactly what they said: “we’re watching it and we don’t want the prices to get out of control”.
But they said that and the prices are still stable, and as long as they remain stable, meh.
A fixed averaged out recipe a) isn’t really going to make people happy (just look at the fixed Gift of Light recipe – prices go up but the recipe’s fixed, and even though people can still buy one once per day or go farm one in Orr, they’re still freaking out and calling for it to be cheaper), and b) is going to eventually diverge from the “cost” of forging it.
Let’s say they make a fixed recipe: 1 of each gift that takes lodestones, in exchange for a precursor.
You know what will happen?
“ANET IS JUST TRYING TO GET MORE OF OUR MONEY”, “LODESTONE PRICES ARE HIGH BECAUSE OF THE NEW RECIPE”, “THIS ISN’T FAIR IT’S STILL TOO HARD TO GET, THEY ANNOUNCED THE RECIPE AND IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE”.
And all it’s going to do is they’re going to slowly, eventually diverge away so that forging rares will cost (let’s say) 500g, the new fixed averaged out recipe will cost 600g, and the market will cost 450g and people will continue to complain.
You know what is as good as a fixed averaged-out recipe is while the prices are stable? “Forge rares but sell exos and bank the sales from that.” Either you’ll forge your own, or you’ll end up with enough gold to buy one.
If the prices stay stable, what’s the point of an averaged out recipe? Either it costs more than rares/exos cost and people complain, it costs nothing (and then it’s not average-priced).
If it costs something people can sell but not something they can gamble with because they’re sure they can beat the odds? “WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE, ANET, THIS IS SO EXPENSIVE IT’S MORE EXPENSIVE THAN BUYING IT FROM THE TP, THIS IS SO UNFAIR.” They’re doing it with lodestones (prices are high, people should farm more lodestones to fill the market, but they shouldn’t freak out about it, and by the way you know you can promote shards to cores to lodestones, right?) and they’ll do it with everything else too.
ANet can’t just bow to the players every time something feels too hard, and as long as the price is stable, it’s not too hard. It’s very hard, yes. And it’s kinda bad that the stock is currently low enough that the pricing feels volatile, yes. But “this might be risky and we might have to intervene later” is not the same as “we should make an entirely different way to get this item that doesn’t cost gold because players think it’s too expensive”.
And if they use a way that does cost gold, well – there’s the TP, right there.
Well, that’s the thing. Yes, I think they will be. Because when those 1000 people farm their 350 gold, they’re not going to get it all at once. One might hit his 350g today, one might hit it a week from now. One might get it from the forge, or one might take a break to do something else and not get his until 3 weeks later, etc, etc.
If the price skyrockets from 350 to 500 to 700 and doesn’t stabilize, then that’s a problem. But it’s been stable for weeks now, and I’ve watched items fluctuate, but Dawn’s pretty much sub-350 now, Chaos Gun is seriously sub-150 now, Bard and Rodgort’s Flame and Venom and those less desirable ones have been consistently dropping at a slow rate, and so on.
Precursors are still being introduced to the market at a steady clip – look at the “how many rares to forge a precursor” thread and you can see the anecdotes:
“I threw in a few hundred rares and got my precursor” or “I gambled and got a Legend, sold it and bought more rares, got a Zap, sold it and got more rares, until I ended up with nothing.” That’s one guy making several precursors, and he might have ended up with nothing, but that’s because he didn’t quit while he was ahead.
Literally five posts up is “I just had a precursor drop for me”. For every person who posts here, there are people who have had the same thing happen to them but who haven’t posted.
Think for a minute – how many rares do you get in an hour or two farming Plinx? How many people do you think are farming that? Now, more importantly – how many of those rares are actually on the TP? Because all the ones that aren’t? They’ve been thrown into the forge.
What about elder wood and mithril that gets sold? How many of those do you think are getting bought per day, because the price certainly doesn’t seem to be going down, which means demand certainly isn’t low. I’d bet a lot of those are being crafted into rares too. Or dungeons that are run, maybe 2-4 chests per dungeon, 5 people looting each chest for each run that’s made, across the entire game.
All those things contribute to the supply of precursors on the market. How many legendaries does one person even aim for? We’re talking 500 skill points and a million karma and 500 wubwub badges and world completion. But once people get one, are they really going to aim for more? Are they still going to be willing to pay 350g for a second twilight (or 200 for a bolt precursor or 150 for a quip or whatever)?
There are waaaaaaaay more than 15 Dusks in existence right now, they’re just already earmarked for personal use, and as more people hit level 80, and more people get their precursors but keep farming and/or keep gambling rares, the supply’s gonna keep going up.
You asked “Well they changed it once and made people extremely upset but now it cannot be undone or changed or it would make people extremely upset”
I answered: “The reason they changed it was because they were fixing a bug, not responding to complaints, so they’re two entirely different things”.
Dungeon rewards ARE working as intended, but I feel like difficulty level was not, where it was too high and people were finding it more worthwhile to exploit dungeons than to play them as intended.
How many precursors do you think were made from that bug? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?
If you haven’t even found any t5 totems or scales, you are seriously farming in the wrong places and not quickly enough. Get a couple friends so you can kill things faster, go murderate some skales or uh, sons of svanir or something, and then promote 50 of your t5 mats to ~10 of your t6 mats using mystic coins and skill points.
Mystic coins come from your daily and skill points come after you hit 80 and get more xp.
Or if that’s not efficient, sell them on the TP and buy the mats, but it sounds like you don’t want to do that, even if it’ll save you money.
Prices are stabilized, and they’ve stabilized at 350g for literally the most desired item in the game and sub 250 for most others. Assuming you farm for two hours a day to earn 3g/day, you can get one in 3 months. One and a half months if you also gather for 3g/day but only do it once a day because you don’t have alts. Assuming you can’t play the market because you don’t know math.
You know it also costs 120 gold to get a legendary too, right? Because you have to buy runestones and the two crafted recipes?
You can’t just randomly accuse people of being cheaters because they’ve somehow farmed more than you and/or are luckier than you and/or don’t gamble with bad odds but instead buy an expensive item off the TP. That’s hardly fair to them.
I’d be pretty upset if I worked really hard and farmed 200g and decided that instead of throwing it all in the forge I’d buy a Chaos Gun for 130g on the market instead. And then suddenly you’re just saying “oh he’s a CLEARLY a cheater who abused an exploit” just because I disagree with you.
Why do you have to be so rude?
There’s a difference between “not working as designed, there was a bug” and “working as designed, but people are complaining”.
Okay, the price of gold → gems is very similar to the price of gems → gold (there’s a trading fee taken out, but they change at the same rate).
Pick one:
1. gold → gems is expensive so one gold gives very few gems.
2. gold → gems is cheap so 100 gems gives a lot of gold.
Obviously, it can’t be profitable to buy 100 gems, trade it for gold, and then trade it for more gems than you started with, all at once, because that would be an exploit and people would quickly get infinite gold, which would destroy the economy and basically destroy the value of the currency.
So which do you want?
Do you want 1 gold to give very few gems, so it’s more expensive for players who don’t use real money to buy things from the black lion shop?
Or do you want 1 gold to give a lot of gems, so it’s more expensive for players to pay ANET real money to get gems that they can then trade for gold to buy things from the TP?
You can not have both.
My record looks a lot different from that, but it holds trade secrets and lots of boring crafting prices. I do, however, really like the fact that
a) You have a fractional number of attempts, really now?
b) None of the rares you get are worth anything because that 25s for a staff, you’re gonna throw it into the forge instead of sell it to buy cheaper rares.
c) You have nearly a 6% rate of exotics per rare which is really interesting when it means 100 rares should you 6 exotics but 25 tries should give you fewer than five. Again, because you’re not counting your rare results as having value, even when they’re worth more than 15s.
d) You’re valuing exotic level 80 weapons at less than 1.5g on average.
50 slots costs 2500 influence and you get 1400 from finishing your personal story.
What prices are you artificially inflating? If you’re making a buy order, you’re offering to pay more than what other people are paying – which is good for the seller.
Then, you relist it at the lowest (or undercut by 1c) sell price, which is good for a prospective buyer.
This means that someone who wants to sell and is willing to wait (by putting up a sell order) has to offer a price more friendly to the buyer (ie, lower than a trader would offer it) and that someone who wants to buy but will wait (by putting up a buy order) has to offer more to the hypothetical seller.
This, in turn, benefits people who don’t want to wait to buy or sell items. What’s wrong with that?
EDIT: Well, I guess buying up the lowest sell orders and relisting them higher is kinda mean, but with the 15% fee (5% listing, repeatedly if you have to relist, and 10% always), that’s riskier to do because you have to be able to force the sale price to increase more than 15% to even break even, and you can’t undercut people who undercut you without paying listing fee again and eating into any potential profits.
That’s what the listing and sale fees do to make it harder for people to manipulate the market. Whereas if there was no fee, there’d be less “danger” in saying “i’ll buy everything less than 15s and force everyone who doesn’t know the true price of this item to buy it from me because I have all the stock”.
That’s what market manipulation is. Flipping is buying with a buy order and selling with a sell order, generally, or buying during a low-demand time period and selling during a high-demand one. Neither are artifical manipulation.
(edited by Colbear.6425)
So, interestingly enough, if you try to buy, say, 250 chili peppers at 4s each, and you make a typo and type 40s each in the buy order box and don’t realize it before you hit the “buy” button, and also have enough gold on-hand, what will happen is it’ll buy up to 250 chili peppers at up to 40s each.
I made a typo like that once, where I tried to highlight a 2 and turn it into a 3, but it turned into a 23 instead. Lucky for me, I didn’t have a large quantity ordered.
Unless the user’s also buying up any chili peppers that are lower than his price, and putting up buy orders for the same, to prevent anyone from getting chilis at less than his price, I’m not really sure you can prove market manipulation with this one.
I’d like to remind everyone that it costs around 20-40g to “buy” a level 80 alt by leveling all its crafting skills, and that as long as people are willing to pay gold to powerlevel their characters, there will be a lot of places that won’t be profitable because players are just trying to recoup as much of their investment as possible, and anything is better than nothing.
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Colbear.6425
Maybe you should be more efficient with your time if your idea of farming earns you less than 50 silver an hour. Also, there weren’t nearly as many exploited karma weapons turned into precursors as you think there are.
If you even pay a little bit of attention to this forum and other forums, there’s tons of people talking about looting a precursor from a mob or getting one in their first ten forges or whatever.
What makes you so sure that the people selling their precursors didn’t spend a hundred gold throwing things into the forge for it? Why are you trying to drag other people down? If they were lucky, why can’t you be happy for them?
The “letters” you get from NPCs are not the same as the letters you get from real players (or from the BLTC)
I’ve gotten a ton of gem shop items from it – dye pack, black lion key, boosters, etc.
Seems like pretty awesome loot to me. (No exos yet, but I’ll do some more runs tomorrow and see what I get.)
I really think that’s what would have happened here if they didn’t “nerf” it by making it a once/day thing instead of a “all the time” thing. Because then people would be saying “people who do this event all day are getting more things than us, by a lot” (because they would be), “and that’s not fair” (because it isn’t).
And then they’d think “this is boring but if I want to make gold, this is what I have to do,” and that’s a problem.
No, I mean. “I feel like I have to do this dungeon even though I don’t enjoy it, because I want/need X unrelated item, and it makes me unhappy.”
That’s unfortunate, and players shouldn’t have to feel that way. They shouldn’t have to feel like “I have to farm 10 hours a day to keep up with inflation” or “I can’t invest in items because their prices will all drop to vendor right away because of an event” or “I want to do something else but if I don’t farm this highly lucrative event, I won’t be able to afford something I want.”
Yeah, you’re supposed to only do it once, and then maybe once a day or something. That’s how I feel these events SHOULD be, unless you find the gameplay fun (like Rumble whatever, or spvp or dungeons – which, again, people feel like they have to do to get loot, which is kinda unfortunate).
Uh, do… you not enjoy the game then? Maybe you should take a break and come back in a month or two when there’s more fun things to do. Maybe you should do something that isn’t grinding?
There are new minigames. They don’t really give you any gold, but some people think they’re fun and I want to try them in a few minutes.
The whole point of a game with no subscription fee is so that if you feel there’s nothing left to do or explore or play or try, you can quit and come back in two months.
I mean, I kinda think they should have made it give a guaranteed exo once per day per char (and only one of the chests would).
But look, they had to do something. You can’t possibly believe that all your weapons should be worth vendor price, which is was very well could have happened (and has already happened with blues/greens because of how often they drop).
Also, I don’t think their intent was that players would feel like they had to farm one event over and over and over again, for the entire event, which is what would have happened if they’d left it.
It’s supposed to be fun the first one or two times, and then get less fun – which it would. Even if the loot stayed the same, you’d be thinking “ugh, I have to keep going but I’ve been farming for 10 hours and i’m really sick of it.”
They did nerf the drop rate. It still gives you two chests per character per day. How is that not fun the first time?
You know what’s not fun? “Orr is the best way to farm karma and gold so you have to farm in Orr.” This would have just turned into that, if they didn’t make it so that after the first two chests per character per day, you didn’t get the rewards (except for the generic “completed an event” reward.)
EDIT: The exo I got was on a level 80 character, by the way. My level 29 character didn’t get any in his two tries, but, well… I was on a level 29 character, he probably shouldn’t be getting level 80 exotic weapons anyways.
Then do you do things that aren’t farming? Do you not do jumping puzzles? Do you not SPVP? Do you not level up alts?
The problem wans’t that the loot was nice. The problem wasthe loot was getting worse and worse by the hour. A level 78 exo used to be worth 70s, then it was worth 50s, then it was worth 20s, and within another day or two, they’d have been worth 5s and people would have been complaining that not only was the loot bad, but that all their previous exotic weapons were worthless.
It was seriously, noticeably impacting the market and it was doing so too quickly to be controlled.
And I mean if you’re still getting half the loot but only twice a day per character, I’m not sure I’d call that “worthless”. Maybe now that exo you get for doing the event will be worth 70s instead of 10s.
After the nerf I still got an exotic, I just couldn’t farm it over and over.
EDIT: ^^ Katz, it wasn’t once a day. It was 10 an hour.
The point of going to a zone is that it’s supposed to be fun, not just profitable. That’s why everyone hates Orr – it’s the most profitable place so people who farm feel like they have to go there to do it, but no one likes killing all the Risen or running around it on their own.
It wasn’t a bad fix, it was an emergency fix. When something’s on fire, you do whatever you can to put out the fire, THEN you repair the damage. The economy (for exotics) was on fire, they had to do something as quickly as possible, and this was probably the easiest.
And that’s assuming they really wanted you to to be able to loot a chest every 20 minutes, because there’s not a single other event that spawns a chest at the end that has a 20-minute quest chain. Not a single jumping puzzle, not a single champion mob, not a single dragon can be farmed every 20 minutes for the same loot.
Well, for one thing, the exotic market went down by 40% and would have gone down more if they hadn’t fixed it.
Seems like it’d be kinda unfair for players who paid, say, 25g for a Charrzooka to log in after 24 hours and learn that oops, it’s only worth 1g now, and they should have waited instead of buying it.
Are you guys seriously telling me in a thread asking how many items you put into the forge you’re not counting all the items you put in when you report them?
If you do this:
Your math is bad – 200 /4 = 50 plus you get another 50 weapons from those attempts which is a further 12 (with 2 left over) which gives you in turn another 3 attempts (with 3 left over plus the previous 2 left over gives you 1 more attempt).
In total 66 attempts.
Then you’re putting in MORE than 200 exotics into the forge (and not selling any of them because none of them are profitable, I suppose, so you never get a named exotic worth 5g?)
Then again, if I say Forge Attempts: 100, no one knows if I mean I tried 100 times to get it (meaning 300-400 rares, depending on whether or not I count putting the result back in) or I put 100 rares in, which is only 25-30ish attempts. So I guess it’s too late to care about that.