Guild Wars 2

Fiontar.4695:

Well, let me quickly explain why it is an issue.

It is really not practical to earn the money for a precursor through ordinary game play. You might get lucky and have the RNG Gods shine down on you, getting one precursor you can then sell to fund a large portion of the cost to purchase the one you do desire. However, the only way most people will be able to afford a precursor is to either buy the gold from a gold seller, or play the TP for profit.

People playing the TP for profit start small and build their wealth over time, being able to step foot into more and more lucrative markets as they go. Raw cost is not always the determination of most profit. A precursor may provide the most profit for a single sale, by far, but those sales can be few and far between. Active, hive volume markets can be very lucrative due to volume.

The higher the price of precursors goes, the more out of reach those items are to players who actually play the game, rather than play the TP. This drives more players to either buy gold from gold sellers, play the market for profits themselves, or just quit the game in frustration.

The goal of being able to afford the most expensive items on the TP, either for personal use, or as “an investment”, likely drives a large portion of inflation at all levels of the game.

The inflation we are seeing is largely due to the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. Most players playing the game are not earning more money, they are just seeing the time it takes to earn the money to buy their leveling gear and level 80 exotics take longer an longer.

Inflation in the game is mostly driven by those playing the TP for profit, with the “market cap” increasing as ordinary players bite the bullet and buy things they need at higher prices and with longer intervals between purchases.

The highest price items just allow for those most successful at playing the market to earn more and more money doing so. Those players don’t stop playing and manipulating the commodity markets. They do, though, eventually reach an amount of wealth that allows them to easily manipulate the market on commodities and necessities.

The biggest hedge against such levels of manipulation was to be the “global” nature of the TP. Surely the markets would be too big to be manipulated by an individual? Well, goods selling for well over 20G have given them the mechanism for earning the wealth needed to eventually manipulate the global markets.

There a limit to how many orders a non-cheating trader can execute in a day. If the richest markets were ordinary exotics and T6 mats, that limit on how many orders a player could successfully manage would limit the rate of growth of TP “business”.

Precursors and other high priced items make levels of wealth accumulation practical that would not be practical otherwise. Don’t forget, they also provide the incentive for players to stop playing the actual game and start playing the TP, as well as for players to buy gold or pre-cursors from gold sellers. The highest price items fuel the behaviors that lead to inflation and these pressures can not be solved via ordinary money sinks, as those money sinks really only effect people playing the actual game, not those botting for gold or playing the TP for profit. It becomes a vicious, inflationary cycle.

You are mistaking increasing demand for rare items for inflation. Wealth consolidation does not cause inflation. Inflation is a measure of change in the value of currency (in this case gold), not the value of rare high demand items; it’s only really affected by the volume of gold in the economy, and the TP removes it. If enough players start playing the TP instead of the game it would eventually deplete gold stock in the economy, leading to deflation and a drop in price levels. TP trading only moves money around, it does not create it.

There are other factors you’re not examining too; if wealth were evenly distributed across the entire player base tomorrow, the cost of precursors would go down, but the cost of cheap and commonly traded materials would go up.

Ursan.7846:

RoyalPredator.9163:

Hey John. There are the solutions:
1st & best: ALL items, including legendary weapons should earned with skill and by completing challanges. Don’t force players to grind, farm and buy gold for it.

People keep on saying this. “Legendaries should be about skill and challenges, not money!”

Like, how do you do this while still retaining the rarity of a legendary? You can’t, unless you make it impossible for the MAJORITY of the player base to attain because they lack a certain “skill.”

Unless you propose a system which ends up in everybody obtaining a Legendary. Then there is no point is there?

This is not at all hard to do, you just make it a massive time commitment. RNG (and the resultant extreme monetary cost) is not the only way to provide scarcity. Most people who don’t care about something terribly much aren’t going to put in 6 months of work to acquire that something. You could put precursors in as 300+ Laurel rewards, and remove them from the RNG, and the rate of legendary construction would go down, despite being open to more people. And given how Laurels work, that would definitely count as “skill and challenges”. Now it’s not a very epic system, and the system should be epic, but a scavenger hunt system that works on a similar principle of fixed or relatively fixed time costs would maintain scarcity while allowing for more casual progression; instead of never being able to afford ever rising costs that you can’t keep up with, you’d instead have a very long term goal that may or may not be worth it to you to bother with, but would at least be obtainable with persistent effort.

See also: Champion of the Gods title is far rarer than the number of people who have played both GW1 and GW2.

Nebilim.5127:

This would be true if gold sellers couldn’t produce precursors. Do you know how much exotics do we need to trow in the forge to get a precursor? I remember some guilds making experiments, and you need about 80~200 exotics. So we have now a company capable of farming/botting thousands of T6~T5 mats, ectos and the rest of the crafting recipes to make an exotic greatsword, and all they need to do is just throw them out in the forge and make an item that cost 600 gold, is very desirable and high in demand and thrice the valor what they would probably spend buying the necessary items.

I haven’t worked the math, but even assuming that it is actually more cost effective to craft exotics and forge them rather than just sell the mats and ectos, then botting is the problem, not the selling of precursors; again, anything sold on the TP requires that gold be removed, not added, to the economy. And they’ve been fairly effective at preventing botting, and are continuing to work on eliminating it further. That cuts off that avenue better than anything else.

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

John Smith.4610:

Gasoline.2570:

Except right now the few people who are buying their legendaries are spending the money on gold sellers instead of anet, but, then again, we don’t know if anet or ncsoft has directly any involvement with those gold sellers. Who knows.

Goldsellers are a plague on the gaming industry, plain and simple, I would sooner associate with Ralphie from “The League”… much, much sooner

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Gold-sellers-vs-BLTC/first#post581941

If gold sellers are a plague on the gaming industry, then why are Anet selling ingame gold for ‘real world’ money? Surely the effect on players is the same (ie players can acquired in-game benefits they haven’t earned by playing the game) regardless of whether it’s Anet doing the gold selling or some other company doing the gold selling?

No, it isn’t. You should read the post he linked.

John Smith.4610:

Fiontar.4695:

John Smith.4610:

As soon as you begin referring to luxury goods as an inflationary issue I start skimming instead of reading. Within the last hour I’ve specifically said that you’re mistaking inflation for what is not inflation. Precursor prices aren’t changing due to inflation.

They are providing the mechanism for exponential earning of wealth via the TP, which, yes, indeed is driving inflation.

I’m a bit busy for the moment, can someone step in and explain why this isn’t true please?

Sure. It’s impossible to actually inflate the economy via TP transactions at all, as all it does is move existing money around in the system. It’s actually taking gold out of the economy slightly because the TP takes a tax out of every transaction, thus lowering the overall amount of gold in the game. Wealth flowing to a narrow set of individuals isn’t the same thing as inflation, which is an increase of price levels in the aggregate.

That’s why precursors are a really bad example of the economy in general, they’re extremely rare and in high demand, so there’s a low volume of trades and a high ceiling for prices; this’ll push the prices up to whatever the richest players in the game can afford, but it’s only because of their unique status as rare and desirable that allows this.

etiolate.9185:

So could someone ask a question for me? A clarification on what improving existing rarity tiers means? I assumed that this meant things like infusions, but some have already argued this will be higher item levels within the same tier. The worry is that there will be Ascended backs for 80s that are more powerful than the current ascended backs for 80s.

Chris clarified by saying that they’d be adding more stat combinations, and that if they eventually increase the level cap down the road then there was a possibility that they might increase the power of a tier of gear to compensate, but that that they’d ideally look for another solution first.

Arsenic Touch.7960:

Eolirin.1830:

Jon never said that all of the fixes to ranger would be in this build; just that there were ranger fixes coming, and that he was aware of the problem areas with the class. No one was lied to.

Take a gander at the first post where Jon posted.

I’ll quote the very important part to you, just in case you missed it.

there are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements.

So where are these “improvements”? what about what he said was even remotely applied to what we actually got?

Those are two statements: “there are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch” Which is what got patched in. Additionally, there are some significant ranger improvements being worked on. Those are clearly not done yet.

Jon never said that all of the fixes to ranger would be in this build; just that there were ranger fixes coming, and that he was aware of the problem areas with the class. No one was lied to.

Pyrial.2917:

Sorry Evan, but that’s a copout excuse. You ask a lot of your customers with no sign of good faith in return. You want us to advertise for you and draw in our friends to line your pockets further, yet you give us nothing to go on. You accompany all of that with, “eww it’s too good to tell you guys, just wait and see”.

Do you like me? Check Y or N
Do you like Henry? Check Y or N

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to decifer grade school questionaires.

Is this the first MMO you’ve played? Doing what you’re suggesting has historically caused fairly massive problems for other companies. ArenaNet is actually quite a bit more transparent about what they’re doing and why than most MMO developers; good luck getting any sort of updates about the status of bug fixes that are in the pipeline or getting an explanation as to why it’s difficult to make certain changes, or to even have a developer answer any sort of question about content. The level of communication that we get on these forums alone is substantially higher than what you’d typically see. And they have to put up with a lot of abuse over even that. They really deserve a little bit more respect for the delicate balancing act that they have to deal with.

And they’re asking for only one thing: patience. That is not a lot to ask for. They’re going as fast as they can on dealing with the problems people have; code and design doesn’t just magically appear fully formed by snapping fingers your fingers, and they have to balance competing priorities.

Having smoother difficulty ramps is generally a good thing, though I would argue that this should be done for jumping puzzles in the game as a whole, rather than inside an individual one. If you’re going to do timed spinning jumping puzzles that are hard, you should have smaller timed jumping puzzles that are easier. Any mechanic that shows up in the big complex jumping puzzle should show up in a few other easier jumping puzzles that have less going on.

This was the core failing of Psychonaut’s Meat Circus, the later part of which the Clock Tower seems to have drawn heavy inspiration from (not sure if that was intentional, but there’s even the little graspy hands!). Every other bit of even remotely difficult platforming in Psychonauts had plenty of simpler moments for you to learn the mechanics from earlier on, but the Meat Circus introduced multiple new mechanics and was timed on top of it; bad combination.

But you aren’t really going to solve much if you just do this in a single jumping puzzle; you need multiple exposures spaced out over wider ranges of time to really learn the skills. You’re not going to get sufficient repetition in a way that reduces that feeling of failing over and over by cutting the puzzle up into increasingly difficult bits; you need hours worth of the earlier stuff, and that means multiple easier puzzles for every mechanic you’re planning to introduce. So expanding on the Vista jumping puzzles, which are generally quite simple, by having something of more moderate complexity, and having a wider range of mechanics in both those and the more complex jumping puzzles would do far more than having the jumping puzzle get harder in stages.

As more and more jumping puzzles are added to GW2, it definitely would make sense to make sure that there’s a good spread of difficulty and complexity among them, so that there’s a good ramp between “learner” jumping puzzles like we see on some vistas, and the really complicated ones like the Clock Tower or Obsidian Sanctum. And you would probably want some sort of gating mechanics, stuff that rather explicitly tells you “don’t even try this if you haven’t completed these other puzzles”. But it really needs to span the entire game.

So you’re the one who made the Clock Tower map? It’s really good work, I’ve taken to calling it Meat Circus 2.

@John Smith, by that logic there’s never been a 100% free market in the real world either, because all sorts of things that aren’t markets themselves are capable of creating and destroying or modifying markets overnight; game patches aren’t any different than resource shortages, changing weather patterns, famines, or technological innovations (in this context anyway, obviously famines tend to kill people, but…)

So there’s absolutely no reason to worry about ArenaNet as game gods, in the context of this discussion, as the real world has to deal with disruption on the same order of magnitude. Static design is an unnecessary constraint, all you have to posit is that ArenaNet does not deliberately regulate the markets via design changes (ala the removal of excess butter from the market with temporary forge recipes); as long as you guys don’t start acting like a central bank, there’s no conflict. And of course you’d need to remove all of the things that prevent players from price setting.

That being said, please act like a central bank. There is a reason why those are a good idea in the real world, and it’s just as valid in the virtual. The limitations on price setting are also way too important to get rid, as you’d be greatly limiting the number of effective gold sinks (rampant inflation is bad!) and you’d be running the risk of making important items too expensive for poorer players to easily afford.

They need DR so that if people find a game breaking dungeon exploit that allows them to significantly bypass Dungeon content, it doesn’t result in tanking the entire game economy or devaluing the dungeon armors. This isn’t meant to be a way to slow down players or punish being efficient, but a way to safe guard the broader game against techniques that use game bugs to trivialize content.

Dungeons generate more gold than most other activities in the game, and they want to be able to keep it that way, but that means they need defense against exploits before they happen, not just responses after they happen. This is an attempt to do that, it’s just bugged and needs additional tuning. Give them a little more time.

Jestersmiles.4365:

Hey what can I say love it when noobs think their hard just because they have a bigger zerg than the other guy.

Nothing better than to shoot them off their high horse and back to reality.

Cayden’s being a jerk, but you don’t have to be one too. We’re definitely not winning by having a bigger zerg, and we’re definitely not facerolling you guys; you’ve been doing a really good job of keeping us on our toes. We’ve just been able to keep a mild lead in the points enough of the time to have our point total build. All three teams are working hard and playing well. We should be treating each other with respect.

Talgonadia, the caps are per side.

Selo, given that WvW maps are capped at a few hundred in a game with over 2 million (so far) players, I’m really content with 80% of the players not being interested in it; keeps our queues manageable. There are enough of us that find it fun on it’s own merits.

Crazy conspiracy theories that go against everything ArenaNet has said and done so far aside…

ArenaNet shoud have pretty good metrics on the silver generated from, and the repair costs incurred by, WvW, and if those numbers are indeed wildly skewed relative to PvE for the majority of players, the correct thing to do is to adjust the rewards in WvW, not to touch repair costs. You cannot make WvW repair costs cost less than PvE, or people will start queuing for WvW to repair damage incurred in PvE, and you can’t make them go away without breaking the overall economy unless you also remove all of the rewards and resource nodes.

I would be extremely surprised if ArenaNet added anything remotely resembling Realm Rank, because it cuts completely against the core of their design mentality. The power curve is very flat, and it’s meant to be that way. It’s not meant to be difficult or time consuming to get to the point where you’ve maxed out your character’s abilities.

The things that are meant to take a lot of time are almost, if not entirely, cosmetic, and this is a very deliberate design choice. It’s central to what defines Guild Wars as a franchise, and I wouldn’t anticipate them changing that. Now, some more cosmetic stuff besides the armor and weapons would be awesome; I would love to have more titles and even some unique emotes that’re tied to WvW participation. Better ways of keeping track of stats would also be great. Ranking and leader boards are kinda important, though I’m sure they already know that.

Also keep in mind that there is also a pretty big set of buffs that apply to your entire server, including the people playing PvE, that’s tied to how many points you’re pulling in for your side. Those buffs are prettykittennice too, especially if they’re allowed to build up. That’s maybe not a reason for an individual to play, but it’s a good reason for a server to.

But the biggest reason to play WvW is because WvW is fun. And that’s kinda how the rest of the game is set up too. If you’re not finding it fun, taking a break and letting the game evolve a bit more is probably not a bad idea. They will continually add to and improve things as time goes on, and it’s not like you’re paying a sub fee in the mean time.

As to the rest of your post: smaller forces most definitely can kill larger forces, I have had it happen to groups I’ve been in multiple times, and there are some tactics that may be borderline broken that can be done with fairly small groups right now; about 20 or 30 people on Maguuma wiped a group of us trying to hold a Keep that was twice their size, and took almost no losses, because we didn’t know how to deal with the particular tactic they were using. I’ve seen highly coordinated groups of 5 wipe groups of 10 players by spiking intelligently, and retreating properly.

So it can absolutely be done. I think part of the problem is that GW2’s combat is still something people aren’t fully used to, and the trait and skill interactions still aren’t fully appreciated, so we’re not really playing with the level of skill that we can be expecting to see a few months down the line. We’re still working out tactics and counters, and how best to set up builds, and which skills work best for which situations. Give that a bit more time before saying people are too hard to kill.

I won’t directly address your comments on community building other than to say that it’s not been that way in my experience, but this is probably going to be somewhat world dependent. TC’s got a community growing inside itself, and a rivalry growing with Maguuma.

There are a few things that make the system behave a little differently than you’re implying in practice: while worlds are matched with different servers, they’re also matched to near ranked worlds, so over time it’s likely that you’ll mostly be seeing the same small set of worlds on rotation; the matchmaking system doesn’t have a lot of options if it’s pulling people from within a similar ranking range, you’re maybe looking at 5 or 6 servers that’ll come up frequently. So you’ll rotate into the same set of people often enough to get a sense for them.

Also, as people have mentioned, you can see Guild tags, and I have a healthy respect for SFD at the moment, especially if there’s a moderately sized group of them. But if your world is fluctuating in the rankings more, or has just had worse luck in getting paired with the same people, and you’ve got less guilds running around in your matchups, I can see how it’d kinda suck.

You hold towers so you can take or defend keeps. You hold keeps so you can have quick reinforcement points and push out further into the map. Complaining that holding a point just gives you map control is a little weird; WvW is fundamentally about map control. The points system doesn’t cause that, the inherent gameplay does. If matches didn’t reset and there was no victory, people would still be fighting over them, because that’s what you do in a set up like this, it’s all about territory control.

That being said, the points system does have issues in it’s set up. It’s too easy to get into completely hopeless situations well before the match is officially over, for instance. If there’s a 20k lead the day before reset, the other teams may as well give up; they’d need to have a 200 point advantage for more than 24 hours to close that sized lead. Even coordinating with each other against the leader, it’d be very difficult for either team to come back from that. So the points system creates pacing problems and leads to a fragile dynamic for keeping things interesting all the way up to victory. The teams have to keep things really close all week if things are to stay competitive. So that could stand to be addressed.

Yeah, interesting tactics all right. shakes fist

We’ll get you back for that, eventually

Oh, out of curiosity, are you guys able to maintain near constant stability buffs while in that death ball? I’m still a bit unclear on what does and doesn’t obey the 5 person AoE limit; if you can maintain stability, I’m not sure there’s a non-siege counter to that, and I think that tactic maybe needs a bit of a nerf. If you can’t, then there’s a way around it, and, annoying as it is to deal with, I’d be upset if they took it out.

It’s extremely hard to get 100% against evenly matched teams; you really need to be in a dominant position. A reset wouldn’t fix that.

And unless a team was so sure of their ability to continually recap everything that the bonus points made more sense, no one would actually want their upgrades reset, and a map reset would do that. So what this would do in practice is make it so that no one capped the last point on a map if they happened to be wildly ahead during certain hours.

You need a solution that helps the losing sides hold territory and push out more; tweaking the outmanned buff, or giving the losing sides something more they could do with the NPCs and dynamic events in the zones, could, for instance, be potentially helpful. As the matchmaking system gets better, we’ll also see less completely unbalanced matchups in general, and that’ll help more than anything else.

I can assure you that’s not happening either. The major guilds in TC and the major guilds on Maguuma have been mercilessly slaughtering each other.

Instant rez items aren’t supposed to work in WvW, so if they are, it’s a bug.

There really is no alliance; Maguuma’s been taking our stuff frequently, where they can, when they can. They’ve been giving us a bit of trouble on our BL tonight, even. A pack of SFD were being extremely obnoxious at Dreadfall Bay. Strong tactics, but really annoying to deal with; I respect how good the stacking play was, especially since they managed to kill a larger force that was reinforcing itself, multiple times, but also hate. So much hate. ;p Well played guys.

So to the extent that we haven’t lost much, it’s been because we’ve been pretty decent at holding our stuff, not for a lack of them trying.

Also, there’s a certain order to the maps, and where we (and Maguuma for that matter) push out from, and what we try to take first. If Ehmry happens to own those areas, they’re going to get hit. For example: when you take one of the keeps that’s next to the enemy spawn it is going to get pincered. Which is why we made a concerted effort earlier to let you guys take Dreadfall rather than Maguuma, though you weren’t able to hold it long enough to prove an adequate diversion :P That three way turned into a real mess. And Maguuma was holding our attention enough to prevent us from even trying to take back SH, which we would’ve really liked to have done.

If a team was good enough to take over the entire map, what’s going to stop them from doing so again? It’s really hard to 100% a map unless you’re completely overwhelming the other teams in numbers and coordination. If you’ve got 100% of a map, you’re dominant in a way that doesn’t depend on your holdings.

So a map reset is most likely to just result in the dominant team taking the map over again and again, which does very little except give them more money, karma, and xp for capping all of those points.