Guild Wars 2

Artemis Noir.3804:

Could not agree more, especially given the current price of gems.
I actually take it one step further. For the last few weeks my salvaging luck with the Master’s kit has been so bad that I have simply been selling my rares. Right now one rare sells for slightly less than the cost of an ecto. Perhaps that is not a great return, but at least it is a guaranteed return.

A while ago I was lucky and received a couple of Black Lion salvaging kits for my dailies completion in two consecutive nights. Even with the BL kits, my salvage rate is still abysmal these days.. so I find it far more worthwhile to just sell the yellow stuff.

I get very good results from the master salvage kit – very rarely to I get a string of bad luck but it happens.

What have you been seeing that has you not liking them?

I forged about 200 of my 250 Doubloons from pebbles.

They can try to control the supply, but their ability to do so will be limited due to multiple avenues to attain Silver Doubloons.

If you’re going for a Juggernaut, you also need Molten Lodestones – those were about 70s a week ago, now they are 95s if not 1g by now.

There are a LOT of things you need for a Legendary and the best part about making the Juggernaut is that you don’t have to compete for Charged Lodestones.

I’ve got almost all of the expensive stuff out of the way except for the Icy Runestones and about 40 more clovers.

I just don’t see the Silver Doubloons as being that much of a problem compared to some of the other things.

Zid.4196:

Nike.2631:

The value is that people trying to craft a particular legendary will be able to advance toward their goal without having to play Trade Post Wars 2 at all.

This gem belongs right up there with Marx in the communist bullkitten pantheon.

There’s no such thing as “not paying the market”. Even if you grind all the doubloons by yourself, not selling them on the market is your loss. In economics, this is called “alternative cost”. It’s same thing that makes grinding pebbles into doubloons poor activity at the current prices.

You do gain something by grinding doubloons by yourself comparing to buying them: the spread between buy and sell. It’s not nearly enough to cover your alternative losses for not doing profitable activities like running TA, forging decent stuff, flipping, or even gathering your daily high-profit nodes.

This is mostly true, but I was listening to a podcast the other and working on some other things – I didn’t have the full attention span to “play” but I was able to forge pebbles and make Doubloons so in that sense, it was a good use of part of my attention.

Just got my 250 Doubloons – I think I made about 150 of them in the MF.

I would have been very glad to have one restore when I was hacked on GW1.

I lost easily the equal of two legendary weapons. I got my account back quickly but not the stuff – made it really sad to play any more after that.

I’m glad they put this feature in.

I doubt the TP is designed to know inherently whether or not an item is bound or not.

Think about weapons and armor – they can be bound or not bound, but it would not make sense to put that kittennctionality into the TP.

Kainazzo.5847:

Would like this looked into as well, it’s pretty obvious by the charts for this item that the price is being manipulated.

Coppers really need to be upgradeable to Silvers as well.

It’s not being manipulated and in fact, there are alternative supply mechanisms for obtaining Silver Doubloons.

The price is high because everyone who wants a Juggernaut needs these and they are rare – but resourceful players are finding some cost effective ways to acquire them…

Sorrow.7452:

I’ve done 310 conversion attempts so far and produced 8 silver doubloons. Each attempt cost 1s (1 paid 25c a pebble), I started with 992 t1 item upgrades and since I did so many attempts I got about 62 additional attempts when a pebble or mark was returned to me (I even used the T2 items.) That means each doubloon cost 38s75c…which is pretty much around the going rate.

That means if you want to break even on these doubloons you would need to sell them for 44s56c. I am not sure what the current ceiling is on these things but I have sold many for 49s99c, I’ve even seen spikes toward 1g, though at this moment I think that might be risky for a quick return. That would put you over a 10% ROI…if anyone is interested.

Of course RNG is RNG and results may vary, I was getting about 1 doubloon every 30ish transmutations until I reach the last 80 or so and didn’t see a one. The price of the pebbles is also another factor, so if the current price of pebbles is around 25c, and the current price of doubloons is around 38s you are probably better off just putting in buy orders.

A couple things:

1. If you just buy the pebbles, you pay 30% more, but even using buy orders is more costly now.

2. Are you selling the non pebble products? Don’t recycle anything except a pebble – TP the other products to further offset the cost.

3. I think you had a pretty good result – if you had used buy orders, you would have only paid about 1.2-1.6g for them and you could recover some of that by selling the T2 products.

majorkong.9073:

T1 gems are called pebbles. Four of em, any four (same or different) in the forge will yield a T1 or T2 gem, mark, or doubloon.

Prior to my semi formal experiment, I forged a lot of pebbles and nuggets and I experimented with mixing the types.

All of the gems – at least up through shards are considered “fine” and can be mixed – you can mix 3 pebbles and a nugget, lump and – I think next is shard. Orbs are rare if I’m not mistaken.

The result of the forge will be something between the lowest level item and the highest level item plus one level.

The challenge with making Silver Doubloons is that they are at the same level as nuggets, but it seems that the loot table is a lot bigger at that point and forging nuggets is twice as costly as pebbles and the results did not seem to be much better – I seemed to get a lot more marks or crests or whatever those things are.

In my opinion, the optimal way might be to forge pebbles and any result that is not a pebble (or Silver Doubloon of course).

I hesitated to post earlier and as expected, there is a lot more demand for pebbles.

I’m not going to define cost effective because I didn’t use that word.

I said I didn’t think it was efficient, but even that word depends on whether you’re trying to maximize the utility of your time, effort, money or level of interest.

Second, there are a lot of buy orders on pebbles and I suspect it may be some time before you’re able to fill them at 11c – I was hitting between 13-15c

As to how profitable it is, it depends on your results and the price of Doubloons.

My point is not whether or not people should try this method – it’s clearly possible but I’m trying to address the despondent tone I see from people who lament that there is no way to farm these and that rich players are going to dry up the supply.

This method is what will keep people from charging 1g per Doubloon.

I tried forging pebbles to get Silver Doubloons.

It’s not very efficient (my finger hurts from double clicking) and it’s not really cost effective.

2000 pebbles forged
all products forged except doubloons

12 Silver Doubloons
31 Copper Doubloons

It’s probably a good hedge against extreme price manipulation, but it’s not a easy road at all.

This took me well over 2 hours that I would have been doing fractals or CoF so when you add in the time, it’s really a bad deal.

I got my Abyss from a gem store dye pack the first week.

I have found a few more and sold them – they’re rare, but they aren’t THAT rare.

Also, I have a theory that despite inflation and market manipulation, Abyss Dye has been generally worth the equivalent of $20 in gems, converted to gold.

I could be wrong, but it was that way when the game launched and it’s remained pretty steady – at 34g, it’s over priced…

Darx.9842:

Wow.

Rewards for doing nothing? And not just doing nothing, not even knowing something happened?!

The fact that he got Dawn.. whatever, he may just be trolling. But beyond that fact, people who did not participate in the event, should NOT be getting rewards. Complete slap in the face for those who were there.

Part of the appeal to that nice karka accessory was the rarity of it. Only one chance to get it, on one night, and never again. NOPE.

First, it’s not a “fact” that he got Dawn, it’s an assertion.

The OP’s forum history suggests a very seasoned player who most likely would understand what “Dawn” is so I find the original post which refers to it as a “named exotic” to be quite curious.

Pinch.4273:

Steam has to take a cut of microtransactions, or something. I don’t remember the specifics. So, it’s unlikely that you’ll see it on Steam.

Most games now have a monetization strategy such as DLC, boosters, etc.

Steam takes a cut of the initial sale, but they also take a cut of any DLC or cash shop items – this works fine for some companies, but not so well for others.

If they didn’t do this, you could imagine a game that is “free” to download (no cut for Steam) and then everything of substance is bought (again, no cut for Steam). I think they had to go this way to avoid incentivising this sort of workaround.

Many of the advantages of Steam already exist in GW2 – primarily the ability to download the game from anywhere and play as long as you know your login info.

Beyond that, Steam is a social network for PC gamers – it lets you keep in touch with friends and family that you play with and makes it very easy to invite people or join in their games. I also use it to give my kids games to their accounts and I don’t have to worry about lost codes or discs.

However, for GW2, I like it not being on Steam, I like to casually poke around the TP during the day without it looking like I just play all the time to my Steam friends…

GW1 became available on Steam fairly late in it’s life cycle.

I love Steam, but I don’t think GW2 needs to be there, I think they are doing just fine on their own.

This is the problem I have with the cash shop:

Some items in the game have fixed gold costs – most obviously T3 cultural armor.

Items in the cash shop have a fixed gem/cash cost.

However, the cost of gold in real money is more or less in free fall.

This does a couple things:

1. It will potentially make T3 armor a nearly trivial purchase in real cash.
2. Items in the cash shop become progressively less attractive.

Last night I used a Magic Find Booster to farm Karka – even with tons of MF, I didn’t get many Powerful Blood vials.

Now that booster costs 150 gems which is worth nearly 2g at this point.

If you convert in game gold to gems, it costs probably 2.4g (give or take)

Take any other booster and and and compare the utility of the in game gold you could have in place of the boost and it becomes hard to justify.

In my opinion, the economy is experiencing inflation, but the existence of fixed price costs creates some curious bubbles and issues.

Now if Cultural Armor was purchased with gems, it would make more sense because the cost in cash would remain constant and the effort to buy it in game gold would scale with the economy (currently, it is slowly getting cheaper)

There are fewer places to get passiflowers and their drop rate is incredibly low.

I used 2 characters to hit all of the nodes on the island last night and only got 2 of the greens. A person in our party said he had gotten the golds before and they go for 4g on the TP.

Most of the other materials have more sources which is why they cost less…

I regularly buy gems to supplement my playing (going for the Juggernaut) but I have not noticed any serious reduction in loot other than than dyes and maybe a slight reduction in rares but overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it is.

If I were cynical, I would wonder if there is a connection between gem purchases and in game “luck” except that my luck is no where near proportional to my gem consumption :P

Talyjta.9081:

Vada Starre.5194:

My computers motherboard got “static shock” apparently!

I wonder wether GW2 maybe is not really good for PCs… it’s already the third case I hear from (someone in my neighbourhood and I myself lost a gaming PC short time after installing GW2).

GW2 is not breaking computers. The only plausible situation where it could be a factor is a computer with a compromised cooling system (due to excessive dust or a fan failure or maybe a loose heatsink).

Even then, most computers will shut off before reaching damaging temperatures and there is nothing GW2 could do that any other demanding (heat generating) software couldn’t do.

I’d chalk it up to coincidence.

I would be surprised if you could change your race – it would affect your personal story, cultural items and racial skills – sounds like too much to me.

The Karma armor in Orr is available in soldiers stats (except the helm) and also in some dungeons.

If you get it in Orr, be careful, each temple vendor sells a flavor with a different rune, but the stats vary by piece – so if you want it consistent, you need to visit a few different temples.

Not sure about trinkets, but most people then go knights / berzerkers

I farmed the area with my guardian for a little over an hour. Most of the time I was in a group with 2-3 other people (Warriors and Guardians)

I found 35 potent blood, 9 powerful blood and lots of trash loot and blues / greens.

I transmuted the potents into 8 more powerful blood and did pretty well.

Try to team up with at least one other person – it goes faster it’s safer – not to mention loot drops seem to be better with a group.

The only MF I had was an Omnomberry Bar.

drifter.8453:

I think MF gear is a wasted stat slot. The devs just added MF to make players think they will get better loots when wearing it. MF is just another tool used for the devs so players will waste all kinds of coin to purchase gear with MF bonuses on it, and other MF bonuses. A way to gold sink more coin. Why wouldn’t the gear have MF on it by default if this wasn’t the case?

I doubt the devs designed the game to grief ALL other players that do not have MF gear. Meaning the person with MF gets better goodies ALL the time, compaired to the one that does not. Why would any company design a game that will give better loots, only if that person has MF or any other weird stat then the person who does not.

I much rather have a player in my group with a better stat in that slot. IE power, toughness, vitality, damage, etc. then someone with a wasted stat slot such as MF.

I went MF Draconic for my first Exotic armor set for my Guardian. I was skeptical, but I’m not any more. When farming Plinx, I get 2-3 rares per cycle when I have all the MF running and 0-1 when I don’t.

That said, it does make you feel a lot more fragile so my Karma armor is mostly soldier stats and outside of chain farming, it works much much better.

Group MF is an interesting idea, but it’s not going to happen. The whole idea behind MF is to give skilled players the option to play “Hard Mode” with reduced practical stats in exchange for increased reward. If you’re doing dungeons in MF, you’re doing it wrong and it may be that groups need to gear check people if it’s that big of a concern.

I think you should have a manager for each profession that listens to the community and advocates for bug fixes, balance issues, etc.

A lot of people in my main profession feel that the developers closest to the balancing process strongly favor certain professions over others and we see those professions receiving more communication and interaction.

I doubt it’s actually the case, but it’s easy to feel like there is a certain amount of favoritism or at least a blindness to the issues affecting some professions.

A couple things:

1. I like my HF Ele, but I watched a video with an Asura Ele and the chatter drove me crazy. They sound like an annoying, precocious pre-teen.

2. I think you should have an option to hear at least the people around you (or in your party) when they declare things. I play with my dad a lot and he’s always laughing at what his character says – it’s a shame we can’t have an option to hear others.

I bought some of the $15/1200 gem cards at game stop last week. One store said they didn’t have them, but when I went in, they did.

I wish they were at more big box stores, I would pick one up when I go shopping.

You’ve left time out of the equation.

The ability of players to earn in game gold is only limited by their time to play.

For some of us, our time to play is very limited because we work a lot – so Anet has created a way for us to trade money we created in the real world (by trading time for money) for money in the game.

Making gems less valuable may help you, but it hurts people who buy gems with real money and since this is a great source of revenue for Anet, I don’t see any incentive for them to do so.

You would be shocked if I told you how many gems I’ve purchased and I would buy a lot more if the exchange rate were better.

I was willing to try it because I don’t like the costume that much, but it lets you put in any other matching green so I’m assuming you will get back a random, non interesting item.

This is my main character in Exalted armor with a holiday color scheme (Abyss, Grapefruit and Emerald)

I would suggest that Anet consider putting the Trading Post API feed on a 10-30 minute delay. Let people check prices, trends, inventory, etc, but if you keep the real time information in-game, it might help curb manipulation.

If you have 10 or so emails from other players, you won’t get new emails.

Check and see if you can delete some email – not the stuff from the game, just from other players.

The problem is that even if you hit your hero panel which shows only items you can equip, you might have several weapons, each with the same icon/skin and you have to look at the stats of each one, then equip it.

It’s clearly a design/balance decision to not allow Elementalists to weapon swap in combat, but it would be nice to let me equip my favorite staff and daggers to conveniently choose what I want before engaging.

Does anyone know if the ore vein cool down is per character or per account? I wonder if you could just make a bunch of alts and run a mining route for 10 minutes on each one and then switch over?