Guild Wars 2

Ferguson.2157:

I do find the Skritt most interesting and humorous. I think they would be far more fun to play as an added race.

I agree that Skritt would make a more interesting playable race, but at the same time I think Quaggans are the cutest.

There’s a tonic for sale in Straits of Devastation that turns you into a baby Quaggan. It is almost unbearably adorable.

Yours is at least a truly unlucky situation.

No precursors after 10 attempts, on the other hand, is something we’d expect to happen at least 35% of the time, and that’s if the drop rate is something absurd like 10%. By most accounts, the exotics → precursors rate seems to be closer to 1%, in which case 10 consecutive failures can be expected more than 90% of the time.

The original poster was upset and hurt not to be one of the top 10% luckiest players in the game, in other words.

As has already been pointed out, though, ANet’s prices will always be higher than gold sellers’ prices, and they will likewise always be more expensive than some people are willing to pay.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Any attempt at using the black market to validate or defend a position will not be accepted by me.

Look, if you’d rather stick your head in the sand and pretend that illegal markets have nothing to tell us about anything, go right ahead.

But don’t go tattling on everyone who disagrees with you. That just makes you look extremely childish.

So the op thought he could spend 100g and get something valued at 300-400g on the trading post, and was then super disappointed that it didn’t work out?

If you could reliably get a precursor for a 100g investment, they’d mostly cost about 100g.

I mean, seriously, 40 items is 10 attempts. There are more than 10 exotic staves, so why should anyone reasonably expect to get the one precursor out of only 10 tries?

—

Whatever can be said about the RNG aspect of getting precursors, it doesn’t change the fact that this particular complaint is a lot like buying $100 in lottery tickets and then being really upset that none of them were winners.

VendettaDFA.9368:

alcopaul.2156:

and im asking you VendettaDFA, do you think the GEM->GOLD ratio is high or low? and why?

Don’t reply me “Gold sellers are illegal scums.”

excerpt from forum code of conduct:

•Do not breach the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement. Any post or thread in which a player admits to violating the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement, encourages others to violate the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement, or violates the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement itself will be removed and the forum account will be terminated.

thats pretty darn close and the mods have ultimate discretion ….

How is that pretty darn close? Sure, alcopaul doesn’t start every post with a disclaimer about not endorsing third-party gold sellers like they do on the black market page at guildwarstrade.com, but I don’t see anything coming close to admitting to or encouraging others to violate the user agreement.

Saying that black market gold is a better indicator of the actual dollar amount most users place on gold may not be exactly correct, but it’s not at all the same as saying therefore players should buy black market gold.

It’s not correct because gold seller gold must be cheaper than ANet gold in order to have any hope of competing, even if it ends up being much lower than what the average player is happy to pay for a given amount of gold. It is the riskier choice, in addition to being morally wrong in most people’s views. Therefore, gold sellers have to counter the moral cost and risk-factor cost by lowering the real money cost.

For example, suppose the idealized completely free market equilibrium price at a particular time was $1 = 1g, meaning that the same number of people were willing to pay $1 for 1g as were willing to sell 1g for $1. If ANet’s exchange reflected this, so that 80 gems ($1 worth) could get you 1g, then black market gold would necessarily be quite a bit cheaper than that, or else the sites selling it couldn’t make any money because no one would have any reason to buy from them.

Except I was replying to someone complaining about the price of masterwork items.

Not gems, in other words.

They don’t set it directly, though, since you can’t pick a custom offer price like with TP items.

More likely it’s based on volume traded, and if gems cost an increasing amount of gold it’s because players are still buying them with gold more than real money. If the prices level out, it’ll likely be because the rates are about the same.

If you think those prices are too high to reliably sell, place a buy order for a lower price. If any sellers agree, you’ll get it for that much.

“The game economy should be like a real-world economy. Except when my personal preferred style of play wouldn’t make me money in a real-world economy. Then we need to change the game economy!”

And in the real economy, people (potentially) lose money on finished products all the kitten time. That’s why certain products are discontinued.

Instead of bringing up a fictional example, consider the real example of the Edsel. It cost Ford more to produce and market the car than people were willing to pay in the same numbers, and as a result Ford lost millions of dollars during the three years it was produced.

Then they stopped making them.

This last step is the one most often missed by everyone thinking they ought to be able to profit from crafting. Just as Ford would have been stupid to continue making Edsels and expecting to sell them for profit, players have to be stupid to continue making oversupplied items and expecting to sell them for profit. In this way, the game is exactly like the real economy, which Vendetta asserts “this should at least attempt to follow”: If you want to make a profit, you need to do some market research first to estimate whether you’ll be able to sell it for more than it cost to produce.

If you are unwilling to do this, then just like any company in the real world that refused to do any such research, you have no logical reason to expect to make a profit.

VendettaDFA.9368:

*In a real economy .which this should at least attempt to follow, you shouldnt lose money on the finished item

You’re using “shouldn’t” here in some kind of moral sense, as in you personally believe all finished products ought to sell for more than the price of materials. You’re not applying supply and demand at all in this reasoning, because as I said increased supply should make materials and finished goods cheaper. But you have yet to provide any reasoning whatsoever about why we should expect (in the logical conclusion sense rather than the moral one) it to decrease material prices more than item prices. And that is the only thing that would make crafting those items profitable.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Still no valid reason to craft or to believe the economy is good. I can farm ,get xp for that and dump the mats for coin.

Then you should go do that. Hundreds of thousands of the rest of us, meanwhile, will continue using crafting as the perfectly valid method for gaining XP that it was intended to be. It may not be how you want to play, but I see nothing wrong with getting 10 quick levels for a gold or two. Therefore, I am one of these “stupid” people perfectly willing to sell to the price others have offered to pay, even if it’s below materials cost. (I won’t sell crafted items so low as to lose money compared to vendors, because there’s a vendor standing right there at the crafting station. But I do occasionally sell drops this way if I’m not near a vendor and/or right in the middle of an event.)

None of what you bring to the table shows me a proper working economy

My goal wasn’t to prove that the economy is running like a perfectly well-oiled machine or whatever. My goal was to point out that the connection you’ve drawn between low finished product prices and a broken economy does not really exist.

Earlier you mentioned supply and demand, claiming that they would make selling for profit possible. But in fact, they are exactly what makes it *un*profitable. There is high supply and not such high demand for finished crafting products, so their prices are low. This is exactly what we should expect. If it weren’t the case, that would signify a broken economy.

No valid reason other than stupidity … you go craft em and lose money when you sell. I will skip the broken economy,farm the basics and have good xp and more coin than you ….. and thats a flat out shame.

Fine. You do that. As I said, I and others are willing to spend some gold on 10 easy character levels. If the best retort you can come up with is to call all of us stupid, fine. I will continue to regard you as a player who doesn’t understand economics well enough to come up with real arguments, and so has to resort to name-calling and baseless proclamations of how the economy “should” be, for no reason other than that’s how you wish it would be.

VendettaDFA.9368:

niwaar.5631:

VendettaDFA.9368:

1. Do you actually believe a Trading Post economy where the cost of materials exceeds the selling price of the resulting product is balanced?

This actually has absolutely nothing to do with the trading post at all. This has everything to do with the crafting system in general.
…

Im sorry but I didnt realize you were John Smith’s appointed spokesperson. That question as well as the next 2 were directed at him. The rest of your post could have easily stood on its own but then you wouldn’t be able to appear smart at someone elses cost, not that I think you managed to succeed.

What the actual kitten? All but one sentence of your reply is to dismiss a perfectly valid response because you don’t like how it looked like it was at your “cost”?

It was at your expense because you are wrong about the economy, plain and simple.

It doesn’t matter who your question was directed at. This is a forum, and not a series of private messages between you and John Smith. Therefore, when you ask an obviously rhetorical question demonstrating that you believe the trading system is broken based on the inability to sell every crafted item for profit, it is completely reasonable for someone else to come along and explain why your reasoning is flawed.

Can’t it be both of those? I mean, (a) and (b) don’t even really look that different, to me. If there’s enough in-game gold to make it relatively easy to get more to spend on gems, people would of course rather acquire them that way than with real money.

VendettaDFA.9368:

The instanced nodes that cause an overall glut of mats in GW2 in theory should make them cheaper to buy than the product they are used to make

In what theory?

High supply of mats means those mats should be cheap. They are. High supply of finished products means finished products should be cheap. They are too.

But why should increased supply of mats lead to increased product-to-mats prices?

Not every product sells for a profit in WoW either but its still better than GW2 where almost no pre-capped crafted items sell for more than the overall cost of the materials it takes to make them.

Sure, because people craft a lot more than they would if it were just for personal items and gold profit. They also get XP, so they get crafting levels by making whatever is cheapest. Which is the same for everyone with that craft, thus resulting in oversupply of those items (and no chance of profit).

None of which has even a teensy bit to do with whether the TP is server-wide or worldwide.

I shouldn’t theoretically be able to sell 10 pounds of mud and a bale of straw for more than the bricks that could be made by the man running the oven that manufactures them. Thats whats wrong here.

And again it has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the trading post market(s).

And if said man wants to make bricks for some reason other than monetary profit, he’d be willing to sell them at a loss. If enough other people are also willing to do this, it means the supply at low prices will match demand at those prices, and no one will have any need to pay more for items someone else lists above materials cost.

It’s old orders that haven’t been cleared yet. New buy orders cannot be placed below vendor price.

Agemnon.4608:

Works on third alt before inevitable crafting exp nerf

I doubt it. The intent from day one was that it’s entirely possible to level your character through crafting alone, it just costs a lot more gold than leveling through other means.

How sure are you that they are all exactly the same bots? Do you write down all of their names or something?

Bartho.7896:

Prices havent been stable they jumped by 160g in one week for some of the precursors.

Dawn and Dusk and some of the others that have existed long enough for stability to be possible, have been stable. Please point to the last week when any of those jumped by 160g (as in, the prices before that week were at least 160g lower than the prices after that week).

Augustus.4895:

I believe in free market economics with my MMO’s and any tax is wrong.

It’s not a tax. It’s a private company offering a service and charging a fee for that service.

Free market at its best.

There is no problem. Prices have mostly been stable for awhile, it’s just that they’ve stabilized way above what casual gamers are interested in paying, so they claim it’s botters or exploiters or the super-rich just trying to manipulate the market.

The reality is, it costs on average several hundred gold to make a precursor. Therefore they should be priced on the TP for an average of several hundred gold.

And yet, somehow, prices don’t always go down.

I agree that the selling interface needs to more closely match the buying interface, so sellers can also see more than just the most extreme two prices. But I get kinda sick of all the complainers declaring that the current setup will inevitably drive prices down, despite the obvious empirical fact that prices aren’t falling for everything, and the prices that do fall can be readily explained by supply exceeding demand.

If the market will bear 900% higher prices, it means people are willing to buy the item for that much and it was probably underpriced to begin with.

This remains true whether the people listing at 10g originally posted at that price weeks ago, or they just now posted at that price because you bought up all the 1g ones.

You’re basically advocating making it impossible to speculate on future price changes. If the only example you can come up with to support that is an item that was obviously horribly underpriced to begin with, you have yet to make a worthwhile argument.

For a 900% increase to be “bad” in any purely economic sense, it must be the case that people aren’t willing or able to pay that much. If that’s the case, then no one will buy from the 10g listings, and anyone who wants to sell will have to meet a buyer’s offer or list their item lower than 10g. However, if it’s not the case that people are unwilling or unable to pay 10g, then 10g is a fine price.

Sure, you might get sympathy with some judges or juries if we’re talking about lifesaving medicine. If you’re talking about Viagra or something, on the other hand, it will get you nowhere. And if you’re talking about a stolen car or counterfeit Rolex or pretty much any other situation where you’re knowingly supporting illegal activities for any reason other than saving your own life, you won’t get sympathy.

And since I’m pretty sure no one needs GW2 gold in order to live, we’re not talking about the lifesaving drugs analogy.

Well yeah, my point was that in addition to all the perfectly valid reasons someone might be willing to sell at a loss, there’s also the fact that people who aren’t willing to sell at a loss need to take some responsibility for their own business decisions.

If you want to sell something for a profit, then you need to be the one to ensure that’s possible, by first checking whether the selling price is more than it’ll cost you to make it.

Tallis.5607:

Hippocampus.8470:

A time limit would hurt the convenience of the TP without providing any real benefit, since those same orders could just be re-posted whenever they expire.

They can be reposted, but you got to pay 5% to list an item… People will not just list an item at some crazy price anymore when they got to pay 5% rach time they relist, they will try to get their item sold before it expires.

In my opinion, this is a good thing.

People already incur a cost if they put an item up for too much money. They pay the 5% listing fee, and they don’t have that item in their inventory ready to sell again.

But what possible benefit is there to forcing them to relist it? If something only sells below, say, 50g, then only those other people smart enough to price their items below 50g will ever sell them. This will in no way be affected at all by the irrelevant presence of someone else’s 100g listing.

If, however, the price eventually rises, why do you think someone who priced an item high earlier on should be punished for that foresight, and forced to repay 5% to relist their item at the price people are now willing to pay?

—

Like I said: still no convincing evidence that time limits would accomplish anything apart from penalizing people who don’t pile onto only those orders likely to sell in the next couple of days or whatever.

Cabbage.4085:

@Hippo,

Because it allows people to fight for a sale.

Placing a bid below the item’s vendor price should not be possible I still see many items with them like that. It needs to be fixed.

Because what allows people to fight for a sale? Can they not do that already? Could they not also continue to do that with time limits?

You can’t place a bid below the vendor price. They just haven’t cleaned out those old orders yet. Why does it need to be fixed, though? It’s not as if seeing those impossible offers actually affects anything in terms of your ability to trade things.

If Ford could only expect to get $8500 for a Mustang, and it would cost them $12,000 to make it, that wouldn’t be the sign of a bad economy that needed fixing. You know what Ford would do instead of whining about inflation? They would stop trying to sell Mustangs for profit.

The fact that crafters in this game expect to be able to make a profit on certain items, despite readily available pricing information which would tell them exactly how much difference there is between current mats cost and current finished item cost, is not the fault of inflation or of the market. It’s the fault of crafters who are bad at really simple economics and also who are apparently unable to check the Internet before making crafting decisions.

Destruction.3429:

Watching Prices on Pre Legendary go up 400% in 3 weeks is absurd from any economist point of view.

Which three weeks are you talking about, exactly? Because it’s certainly not the past three, when most precursors have evened out and seem to have reached some kind of equilibrium.

It’s not the 5 day minimum or anything like that, it’s just the opposite direction exchange rate. Essentially, there is a 15% tax in both directions leading to about a 30% difference between gold → gems and gems → gold.

I agree that it should be clearer on what the current exact price is, instead of just telling you averages and extremes, but at the same time I think it is quite clear already that the exchange doesn’t give the same rate in both directions, since the numbers shown for both directions aren’t the same at all.

No, once again, it wouldn’t.

People (maybe just you? I don’t really pay attention) keep saying this, but have yet to provide any evidence to satisfactorily back it up. A time limit would hurt the convenience of the TP without providing any real benefit, since those same orders could just be re-posted whenever they expire.

If someone wants to leave hundreds of gold (or an item worth hundreds of gold) just sitting at the TP indefinitely, why not let them?

Snow.5269:

Horrible, horrible design. The only reasons a person would not support a positive change to the game is out of fear of losing “special snowflake”status, they have no understanding of other prerequisites, or they have a precursor already.

You’re forgetting the main reason, which is that some people don’t think the changes being suggested are positive changes at all.

And some of us don’t believe that because we want to be special snowflakes (even though legendaries should be “special snowflake” type unique weapons), or because we don’t understand the other requirements (I have no particular interest in getting a legendary, but I read the forums enough to know exactly what’s required), or because we have one already (I don’t have one and have no plans to get one).

Some of us disagree with you primarily or entirely because your arguments here are mostly stupid, and we don’t just go along with people who very passionately make crappy whiny arguments about how something in the game just isn’t exactly how they think it should be.

sixfeetunder.6508:

I see the pay to win is in full effect. Besides its just an exotic with different skin.

I like how you just contradicted yourself in two consecutive sentences. If it’s just a cosmetic change, it’s not really paying to win, is it?

Yukishiro.8792:

They relaxed the anti-farm code a week or two ago. As a result there’s much more gold coming into the system. Inflation on top-end items like precursors is to be expected.

And yet, it was a week or two ago when Dawn and Dusk more or less stopped getting more expensive.

So when should I expect to see those prices start rising again as you predict? Will they have to re-institute the harsher anti-farm code first?

This of course doesn’t address the massive godskull exploitation that went on early in the game which arenanet did absolutely nothing about.

For how many more months are you going to continue blaming all your complaints on Godskull? Do you really believe gold from that still constitutes a significant fraction of the total in-game wealth?

If so, do you actually have even a little bit of legitimate data to back that up?

What’s funny is that I just got done reading a thread in the general game discussion subforum where a bunch of people were complaining about how terrible it was that $1 worth of gold through ANet (via gems) is still such a measly quantity. The thing that makes it funny is how confident people in both threads are that their own complaints about the exchange rate are absolutely legitimate, despite the fact that their complaints directly contradict each other.

But their actions will contribute to the health of your server, in the sense that their items and gold can move in and out of your server.

Server-specific markets would help some servers and hurt others. Prices would be much more volatile and unpredictable, which hurts casual players but is great for market players (who a lot of casual players love to complain about here on the forum). Super-rare items like precursors would almost never show up on small servers, so if/when they do, people could charge pretty much whatever they want, since there’d be no one to undercut them.

A worldwide trading system provides stability and predictability and keeps both supply and demand relatively high, and doesn’t penalize smaller servers for not having enough hardcore gamers to get the really high-end items.

oZii.2864:

Precursors have not demolished the economy (hyperbole) bots have.

Personally, I’m not even convinced the economy is “demolished” or ruined or whatever people keep claiming, by bots or otherwise.

Yes, prices have gone down on a lot of things, and yes, bots do affect the economy and are bad for many other reasons reasons, but none of that means that the economy is currently “bad”.

But I clicked my mouse four whole times in the crafting UI for this item! I deserve to make a profit!

It’d be interesting to see the consequences if they just kick the bottom out from under the prices, and remove the vendor+1 minimum while also making it so you can’t vendor items you got on the TP. Then people would get to see just how worthless their crappy mid-level crafted items really are. (I don’t actually want them to do this, mind you, and continuing to allow vendor selling would make prices stabilize just below vendor price, because people would just flip those things to vendors for guaranteed profit.)

SHM.7628:

If you have to work back your waypoint costs then they are too high.

But you have to work back all costs, so that’s no argument at all.

You should be able to use them and play normally without fear of going broke. Play how you like, remember that? That doesn’t mean grind 15 minutes to use waypoints.

You can play normally without fear of going broke. Case in point, all the people who play normally but aren’t complaining in this thread.

“Play how you like” obviously isn’t meant to be taken 100% literally, because I’m sure lots of people would like to play without having to pay in-game coin for anything but epic-looking gear or whatever, and yet we’re all fine with the fact that they can’t.

No, that suggestion has been brought up elsewhere, too. The argument being that if people are already willing to sell at a loss (since selling at or just above vendor price only gets you about 85% vendor price after taxes), let them do so. Nothing wrong with the most abundant items being the cheapest.

(And stuff would likely never fall much below vendor price, anyway, since at that point it’s profitable to buy up all the cheap things on the TP and flip them to a vendor for a guaranteed (albeit small) profit.)

saurus.8290:

TheKillerAngel.3596:

To some people, the 1.50 now is worth more than the 2 later.

no becouse if that player put it for 2s it would still sell it before others

becouse TP works like this

last offered item go out first

but ppl are dumb and undercut 1c this only make prices down and we end up with powerful blood sold for 5s cuz there are million of other ppl undercuting 1c each

No, that is not how the TP works. It hasn’t worked like that for a few weeks now. So if anybody’s dumb, it’s “ppl” who still buy and sell with the mistaken belief that the system is still sometimes LIFO.

Yeah, I think it’s something like 1 level for 0-100, 2 for 100-200 (putting you at 3 levels after reaching 200), 3 for 200-300, and 4 for 300-400, for 10 total.

I may have pulled those numbers out of a kitten, but it’s something like that, rather than an exact ratio like 40 crafting levels = 1 character level.

Demand is also, as ever, not a single value, finite or otherwise. Demand changes with price, and at the moment likely decreases to zero long before we get to truly absurd prices like 1000g for one of the precursors.

If there’s a set probability of getting the item on each attempt, it’s a geometric distribution, whose average is 1/p, or 100 attempts for a 1% chance, or an average cost to produce of 300g.

Which is why some have maintained that precursors are currently underpriced, despite how expensive they are.

(I would expect the price to be higher than the average cost by more than just the 15% necessary to profit after taxes, because the 50% of people who spent more than average will want to at least break even, and those who spent average or below average will be happy to charge the same price.)

You said “award the exploiters on the TP and botters”. The only way purchasing a precursor would award those people is if they are the ones selling it.

So yes, you really were accusing anyone who sells the weapon of exploiting.

ryokoalways.3450:

Account bound on equipment is one method in which to limit artificial inflation. It would make the player buying to use the item, not to flip it. To have this implemented though, preview through TP would first need to be necessary in my opinion.

If it’s account bound, it can’t be sold on the TP. Period. So no, it wouldn’t have this effect.

Alternatively (and one I would prefer), you can just add a time limit for an item on sell. Currently (as far as I can tell), the item can be listed indefinitely. If a time limit (say, 3 days per listing) is implemented, then artificial inflation can be mitigated since you would just be throwing away money if you are not pricing it at where buyers would be willing to buy. This would put the power back in buyer’s hands.

Power is already in the buyers’ hands. If you haven’t noticed, buyers have to agree to the price either way, and buy orders for precursors aren’t much below sell listings, relatively speaking.

Snow.5269:

Right now the way legendaries are currently designed a person would be silly to throw anything into the Mystic Forge. 1-3g attempts with a 1% chance of success? No thanks. I like many other refuse to, so what exactly is getting removed from the economy?

It doesn’t matter if you and some others refuse to, when others are singlehandedly throwing in hundreds of exotics or thousands of rares. With that kind of volume, the economy doesn’t need all that many people willing to do it.

Most of the precursors still in existence are the result of early exploits & were hoarded. Very few new precursors have been reportedly made/found.

Do you have any reason to believe this beyond sour-grapes bitterness that others have been luckier than you?

If our entire economy is that dependent on precursors to survive then something is terribly, terribly wrong.

I’m pretty sure no one is buying tier 1-4 materials or sub-level-70 weapons in order to get precursors. So the economy isn’t dependent on precursors to survive, though they do play an important role in the supply and demand of high-end stuff.

Good to see that sour grapes jealousy is still alive and well in this thread. “I don’t have this amazing thing yet, therefore everyone who does must be exploiters or botters!”

I really don’t see how making them soulbound or account bound would help anybody. It’s not like people with enough money to pay several hundred gold for a precursor will suddenly magically not have that much money if precursors are taken off the market. All the gold in the game comes from vendors and events and renown hearts, and a sizeable chunk of it then leaves the game via the TP. Removing precursors from the TP would really have very little effect other than removing quite a large gold sink from their sales.

Snow.5269:

(Most of which are the product of early exploits)

Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this bold claim? People seem to like making it a lot, whenever someone has a new legendary (see the Eternity thread) or a lot of money or more than one precursor or whatever. As far as I can tell, it’s just a bunch of sour grapes from people who are crabby that they aren’t doing as well in-game. You don’t have to accept the fact that you’re either not as good or not as lucky as someone else if you can conveniently accuse them of using an exploit, but that doesn’t make your accusation true.

These precursors are the reason behind a vast majority of the problems we are experiencing with the economy right now. A handful of players with so much wealth over precursor transactions it has impacted every other commodity.

I also have a hard time believing any of this. How does a lot of wealth in the precursors exchange, even if it is ill-gotten, explain the price fluctuations of low-level crafting materials?

Colonel Kernel.7506:

There are 5 pages, prior to your post.

My post is on the 5th page, meaning there are about 4.5 pages prior to it.

It was a rhetorical question, anyway, just like the title of the thread has apparently become.

arabeth.2361:

Guys: congrats on your achievements, but in all seriousness: put the game down and go outside for a little while! I am not judging, or jealous: I am concerned for your health.

Concern trolling is still basically trolling, even if you dress it up in nice clothes.

In any case, were you aware that just sitting on the character select screen gets logged in the total hours? Which means that you can leave it that way while you sleep or eat or go to work and it’ll look like you’re spending your whole waking life playing GW2, when in fact you’re just not bothering to log out completely every time you go do something else.