Guild Wars 2

Oh yes, it is a luxury (beyond the bank slot and possibly the BL salvage chest), but I’m not advocating everyone having everything. People with a lot of gold or cash should be able to buy anything/everything they want. The problem is that everyone can’t even afford a single purchase at the moment without bankrupting themselves.

Honestly, if the gem store was cash only, I wouldn’t really have an issue with this. Its giving the extra option to the lucky few who got precursors (and the trading post players) that makes it seem unfair to me. I’m currently playing the TP myself, so could afford the things I actually want (still losing a huge chunk of my gold). But it doesn’t seem right that players are forced to use such tactics in order to keep up with the curve. A casual player, playing normally, should be able to get an extra character/bank slot 3 or 4 months into the game.

I honestly think the fairest solution is just to give everyone who had a registered account on that day a chest, including those who already finished the event and got one. This would benefit the people who were in the bad timezone, the people who actually had life commitments, the people who got disconnected, and still reward the people who actually finished the fight. The people who were too lazy to do the event get more than they deserve, but I don’t think people resent others having something unjustly as much as they resent not having the chance to get that thing themselves.

Admittedly, this is least fair on the people who spent a couple of hours fighting the thing and then DCed, but I’m sure that many people in the bad timezone would have much rather had the chance to fight it than what they actually got.

Oh yes, I’d like to see numbers too. I could be COMPLETELY wrong about this. My suspicion is that about 2-5% of players are contributing to about 20% of the gem purchases. There will be additional players who are buying gems to trade back to gold, but they don’t count as they will eventually balance out the market.

I am not claiming the spike started because of the chest. The Lost Shores caused that. I am saying that the chest may well have kept the spike going, rather than allowing it to level out/ go back down after the event.

I agree in principle that gems aren’t too far out of control just yet, but I think you underestimate the difficulty. Gems are doubling in value every month, meaning that starting now someone doesn’t have to collect 16G in two weeks, they need to collect (about) 24G. Even for a level 80 player this is a big ask without playing the market, and because the price is continually doubling it isn’t something they can just take their time over. Even a casual player can eventually get Twilight (in theory) by simply investing enough time over several years. If the price of gems accelerates beyond their means, then they can never utilise the gold to gem function of the shop.

Also, bear in mind that if they start now, earn 24G, and then spend it all on a character slot, then that puts them all the way back to square one. They have an extra slot and zero money. This just seems hugely unfair.

Yeah, except in a few situations, the time it takes to manually enter the numbers is currently the only reason not to undercut. This would mean that people selling junk in their bags would just hit undercut as well, and bring the WHOLE low price market down to vendor value.

No. No no no.

Not quite. Assuming my premise is at least vaguely accurate, then the people who already had 200G would already have spent money in the gem store, and thus this actually makes the problem worse. The Karka event redistributed money from people who had already bought the things they really wanted (and thus were unlikely to buy much more) to people who didn’t.

This argument also applies, to a lesser extent, to the big traders. Basically, a small percentage of players have huge amounts of money. This is absolutely fine on the trading post because it is possible to get materials in game (I like that legendaries are stupidly hard to get), but that means they are driving up the price of gems, which can only be got through the gem store for cash or gold.

In both instances, ignoring the top 5% of player spending could prevent casual and mid-tier players being excluded from the gold to gem aspect of the store.

I think that ANet must be aware of this at this stage. I think the overall feeling towards Lost Shores, and the decline in the non-FotM gameplay since will have gone noticed.

I also think that the loss of positive word of mouth, combined with the damage done by running the free weekend over an incredibly buggy and lag-filled event, will have done enough to worry the finance department.

Basically, the developers do care about the game. They care about it a lot. I think the Lost Shores was a big mistake, and I think they know that. The game is still excellent, and I doubt they will make a similar mistake again. I think we can therefore justify some optimism for the future

That said, a little more communication regarding this might be nice. They’ve been VERY open in my opinion, and communication has been a long way above zero. I still think maybe a bit more talk with the user base would be good.

Oh, I don’t think it affected the Gold economy, I think it affected the Gem store.

To put it simply, let me use a couple of assumptions:

1) Players with less than 10G do not spend very little in the gem store.
2) Playes with more than 200G spend a lot in the gem store.
3) The Karka event turned a lot of players with less than 10G into players with more than 200G.

Therefore, the Karka event resulted in a lot of players spending a lot of money in the gem store.

So, this hasn’t really affected the casual players (who wouldn’t have bought stuff anyway), but it might have affected the mid-tier players who at one point could have afforded to buy a few things in the store, and now can’t.

I know it didn’t add gold. I redistributed it. Specifically, it redistributed it in a way that allowed ‘casual’ players, and mid-level players to spend all they wanted to in the gem store.

A player with say, 10 gold, won’t spend a lot of that in the store. A player with 200-300 gold will. The Karka event turned a lot of 10-gold players into 200-300 gold players. This means that the people who lucked out on the chest can buy EVERYTHING in the store, and everyone else can buy, at a push, one or two items.

Casual players can still spend real cash. I have no issue with the store making money. The problem is that the store is supposed to be usable without spending real money. If someone wants to buy lots of costumes, keys and bank slots with real cash, great. The problem is that lots of players in the casual/medium tier can’t utilise the secondary function of the gem store.

Why would it mean preventing them from using the gem exchange? What I’m suggesting is that if the gem purchase market is being affected by a small percentage of players (e.g. those who got precursors in the Karka chest), then it would be fairer to ignore their purchases in calculations.

e.g. If the top 5% of players (in gold terms) are buying 20% of the gems, then taking them out of the equation would give everyone else a break. If that top 5% comprises a lot of people who were handed the money from the Lost Shores, then this seems fair.

As I have no data at all to work with this is something of a speculative/inquisitive post.

Basically, the Lost Shores event created a large pool of people with a HUGE amount of extra cash. Now, I’m only speaking personally, but had I been able to attend the event and got a precursor (or similarly expensive item), then the first thing I would have done would have been to sell it and buy gems.

Now, I don’t consider the precursors likely to have effected the gold market that much, but given that the number of people buying gems will be significantly lower than people using the TP, I am more inclined to think that maybe this event had an effect.

So, two questions:

1) Is it likely that the Lost Shores event had the additional consequence of driving the gem prices up?

2) Could ANet make the market fairer on less hardcore players by removing a ‘top tier’ of players from the gem calculations? This would prevent events like the Lost Shore and RNG having even more negative consequences on players, which seems like a good thing considering the recent atmosphere.

Also, I’d just like to note that I do not think gems should be extremely cheap. I was happily working towards getting enough to buy a new character/bank slot just prior to the Lost Shores (I thought the price would come back down), and was actually considering it to be a fun challenge/reward balance.

Okay, I haven’t actually played FotM yet. I will soon, and I do want to, but I’ve had other things I wanted to do first. These suggestions are to try to limit the effect that FotM is having on the rest of the gameplay experience.

1) Move the portal out of Lion’s Arch. I miss Lion’s Arch being a place where I could pick up interesting information from map chat, or feel like there was an actual community out there. The whole LFG chat feed is ruining the experience. If the FotM portal were moved elsewhere then Lion’s Arch might go back to being a community hub rather than a dungeon entrance. Maybe it could even move to somewhere like the straits and there might be enough people hanging around looking for groups for the Balthazar statue fight occasionally

2) More controversial, and I’d need people who actually play it to give an opinion. Limit fractal runs to once a day/ a few times a week.

Honestly, this is me wishing the FotM hadn’t been introduced. I miss the maps having players in them, and I think this dungeon destroyed that. It’s too late to simply remove them (I haven’t tried them yet so don’t actually want them removed entirely myself), but this seems like something of a compromise. It might also make people feel better about playing the rest of the game if they don’t have the niggling idea that they could be getting more loot in the fractals.

EDIT: I do want to make clear that this isn’t meant to be read as a complaint. I love the game, and I think the recent complaints have been excessive. These suggestions are intended to help improve a game I currently really enjoy, and return some of the previously great aspects to it .

That sucks, well thanks both of you for the info.

Thanks. Do I really have to tie a social network to it? I can’t just use the register form?

Hey, has anyone else tried/managed to register at GW2spidy? I was trying to set up a watch list, but the site just refreshes when I hit ‘register’.

Thanks