@Esplen—That post was actually aimed at Calcifire. Your post wasn’t there when I started typing. :p
Mystic clovers rng should not be compared to precursor rng.. the only similarity is that both have a RNG elements, the amount of rng differs so much however, that this is where the similarities stop.
Wait, so an RNG element that is ~33% chance and you have to complete 77 times is better than the RNG element that you only have to complete once? You sure about that?
When the one you have to complete once is in a pool of 40ish rares, and 20ish exotics, and only has about a 1/5 of even being an exotic, then yes, the mystic clovers arn’t nearly as rng as the precursor..
Not even considering that exo most likely have a lower general chance compared to other exotics
Its almost like comparing a coin flip to playing the lottery.
So, remove the rares from the table by gambling with exotics. You’re bettering your odds and not costing yourself anything. And getting a 1/20 result once isn’t going to take as many tries as getting a 1/3 result 77 times, barring extreme outliers. . .
Mystic clovers rng should not be compared to precursor rng.. the only similarity is that both have a RNG elements, the amount of rng differs so much however, that this is where the similarities stop.
Wait, so an RNG element that is ~33% chance and you have to complete 77 times is better than the RNG element that you only have to complete once? You sure about that?
even if the chances of getting a perfect run of clovers is less than the chances of getting a precursor, the difference is that getting a precursor is binary, either you get one or you don’t.
even if you get the average of 33%, at least you feel like you’re progressing, with a precursor you can work for months without getting the drop and feel like all your time is wasted.
you can get 35 clovers and think “sweet, I’m about halfway!”, you can’t get halfway to a precursor (unless you buy one, and then you’re just playing into the hands of the uber rich, allowing them to buy up more precursors and tighten their hold on the market)
I’m not talking about getting a perfect run, though. I’m just talking about getting them. And getting clovers is just as binary as getting the precursor: You put mats in, you either get a clover or you don’t—and you have to come up on the “get a clover” side 77 times.
Imagine you worked a job and at the end of every week instead of having a wage you rolled a die and whatever it landed on you were paid. Now imagine that your friend rolls 10,000 multiple times in a row, but for the past 6 months you’ve only rolled a 10. And you both do the exact same work.
It’s not fun, fair, or work. People that are unlucky are not lazy.
Imagine that you and your friend work the same job and got the same wages, but at the end of the week you routinely go to a unique gambling establishment. The rules for this establishment are that the worst you’ll walk away with is 25% of the buy-in, and the best is about 1,100 times the buy-in. You don’t know all the odds, but estimates say you have about a 20% chance of coming out slightly ahead, better odds if you game the system a little.
You can gamble, and your buddy can save up. It’s the same result either way.
What’s unfair about this?
My post directly above yours addressed the TP side of things.
If there was an NPC that sold precursors for a SET amount, this whole issue would already have been alleviated already.
There is an NPC. It’s called the Trading Post and he sells it for 800g.
Sarcasm aside, you realize that the analogy being made to yours had no unfairness. If you spend your money gambling… you’re gambling. Get over the fact that you lost money.
If you buy a lotto ticket every week, you aren’t guaranteed to win the lotto.
If your friend buys one lotto ticket and you’ve bought one every week since the beginning of the lotto, and your friend wins the lotto, is that unfair?
Mystic clovers rng should not be compared to precursor rng.. the only similarity is that both have a RNG elements, the amount of rng differs so much however, that this is where the similarities stop.
Wait, so an RNG element that is ~33% chance and you have to complete 77 times is better than the RNG element that you only have to complete once? You sure about that?
even if the chances of getting a perfect run of clovers is less than the chances of getting a precursor, the difference is that getting a precursor is binary, either you get one or you don’t.
even if you get the average of 33%, at least you feel like you’re progressing, with a precursor you can work for months without getting the drop and feel like all your time is wasted.
you can get 35 clovers and think “sweet, I’m about halfway!”, you can’t get halfway to a precursor (unless you buy one, and then you’re just playing into the hands of the uber rich, allowing them to buy up more precursors and tighten their hold on the market)
I don’t see your point here. You’re basically saying that because your progress is tangible on the Clovers, it’s easier?
not easier, but it takes the edge off
let’s take a theoretical example of two guys on excercise bikes pedalling for a thousand miles, on one a tank slowly fills with water, when it hits the top, a light turns on, on the other there is no tank.
if you toil all day in the hope that the light turns on you’ll start to have doubt eat away at you “will the light turn on soon? how long have I been doing this? am I just being messed with?”
if you can see the tank, you are sure there is progress occurring, you can see where you are, it could only require that final push and seeing the last little bit of water filling the tank could be what you need for that last boost of motivation.
it may be the same task, but which one is going to FEEL easier? a seemingly arbitrary end point, or a progress bar? and which of those is going to affect your mood and willingness to press on?
hell there’s an example in the personal story, when holding out in claw island you nearly always thing “will these undead waves ever end?”, now compare that to a timer or “faction control” bar. it’s an incredibly effective interface decision because it makes you think that there will be no end :P
Did. . .you essentially just admit that your primary complaint is that you can’t motivate yourself?
(edited by Iures.2894)
Thanks for the tips guys!
2) Run AC for tokens to buy Exotic Warhorns to toss into MF. Run CoF for money and tokens to buy level 70 rares (heavy helm!! for mithril and chance at Ori) for your ectos.
Lvl 70 rares give you Ectos? I thought only lvl 76+ have a chance on droping them.
Level 70 rares and exotics can give Ectos. I actually want to say that its 68+, but don’t quote me on that. What you’re thinking of is precursors, where it’s 75+ rares and 70+ exotics giving a chance at precursors (or any other 80 exotic).
Imagine you worked a job and at the end of every week instead of having a wage you rolled a die and whatever it landed on you were paid. Now imagine that your friend rolls 10,000 multiple times in a row, but for the past 6 months you’ve only rolled a 10. And you both do the exact same work.
It’s not fun, fair, or work. People that are unlucky are not lazy.
Imagine that you and your friend work the same job and got the same wages, but at the end of the week you routinely go to a unique gambling establishment. The rules for this establishment are that the worst you’ll walk away with is 25% of the buy-in, and the best is about 1,100 times the buy-in. You don’t know all the odds, but estimates say you have about a 20% chance of coming out slightly ahead, better odds if you game the system a little.
You can gamble, and your buddy can save up. It’s the same result either way.
What’s unfair about this?
Mystic clovers rng should not be compared to precursor rng.. the only similarity is that both have a RNG elements, the amount of rng differs so much however, that this is where the similarities stop.
Wait, so an RNG element that is ~33% chance and you have to complete 77 times is better than the RNG element that you only have to complete once? You sure about that?
wall of text
Take the hint, buddy.
Oh, no! How dare someone expect me to read on a forum?
Seriously, though, when did “wall of text” switch from meaning “giant post with little/no punctuation and no paragraph divisions” to “anything longer than a paragraph”?
Anyway, to all those complaining about the methods of getting precursors: The methods are fine if you actually use them. Weigh the costs of throwing rares into the forge versus the costs of buying it on the TP, and go with whichever is cheaper.
Take, for instance, Zap (I’m slowly working towards Bolt atm). The current lowest sale order is 390g. For that much, you could buy nearly 1,100 rare swords and throw them into the forge. That’s 275 attempts right off the bat, up to about 360 attempts overall if you throw all the results back. With the 1/6 rate of upgrade that I’ve heard elsewhere, that’s 64 exotics off the initial batch?
Or, you can instead toss in cheap exotics. The cheapest buy orders at the moment are around 1g, so you should be able to get about 390 of them, give or take. Call that 97 exotics back from the initial batch, another 24 or 25 after that, then another 6. . .yeah odds are good that somewhere in those 130 exotics, you have a precursor.
Or, hey, if you have 390 gold to gamble with, you also have 390 gold to just buy the darn thing.
And, of course, in the process of earning all that gold, you’ll be doing events which have a chance to drop it, or drop other exotics, or other rares to MF. . .
And if this system is functioning as designed, then it’s one hell of a dangling carrot system. It’s even more hardcore than “gating” content since at least in “gated” content, you can work and see progress til you get into that zone or dungeon. Here you don’t know if you will need 1 try, 5 tries, or 5000 tries.
I fail to see how any part of the legendary system is remotely connected to gating when it is a 100% visual difference designed to be pursued by the hard core gamer.
It staggers me, when we have amazing weapons in this game like Volcanus, Vision of the Mists, The Anomaly, Azure Flame…. The list goes on…. stunning weapons that can be earned with Farming + Achievement in Dungeons + pure investment in time…. but no one seems to care.
People are completely bypassing the Mid Game rewards, and the types of rewards that are available to the more casual gamer, and focusing on the most elite items in the game.
I know some people are fixated on the promise that Legendary will always be ‘best in slot’, but seriously, it’s no better than the other high end crafted exotics. I would not be at all surprised if we had the ability to upgrade the high end exotics to Ascended exactly the same way that they enabled the Triforge Amulet to be upgraded to Ascended.
So, why bypass the mid range rewards entirely and then protest that the most elite rewards are ‘too exclusive.’ ?
On that note, I’ve decided that my Mesmer will have a mix of weapon types. Bolt for the sword, The Anomaly for her focus. . .still trying to decide on a greatsword skin I like.
But, yeah, legendaries are crazy expensive. I would know, I just finished my first one (Dagger). That doesn’t mean they’re the only skins worth pursuing. In fact, I wouldn’t mind having Twilight if everyone and their mother didn’t seem to have it. As it stands, I’m trying to decide if I’ll be taking the Corrupted Avenger or something else. . .
So, looking at the complaints in this thread, I got to wondering: Was agony resist ever billed as more than a gear-check?
To answer, I tracked down the two news announcements talking about FotM in general and ascended gear, specifically. Those can be found here:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/leah-rivera-on-the-new-fractals-of-the-mist-dungeon/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/
Now, both of these announcements do say that progression in Fractals will be based on skill and teamwork. However, and this is important, they both also say that agony resistance will be crucial to progression. They literally say that agony resistance is “crucial” or “a must.”
Seeing that, I have to ask: Why are you so surprised that it’s a gear-check?
because of the DR system this is causing a huge imbalance and a huge gap upon earning money by playing the market sim, and for those who are trying to put their work in in farming. There is no DR on the Trading post.
Whose to say you putting in your power trading work is worth more than us trying to work equally as hard farming? How is your time worth more than ours? ANET has clearly shown their side that they value traders more than others as the DR speaks for itself. Which is frustrating to all of those players that don’t want to power trade.
I agree with this. People who want to work hard and “travel all over, collecting items and amassing materials to build your Legendary Weapon” as sanctioned by Isaiah Cartwright, are being forced to NOT travel all over and instead being encouraged, because of Diminishing Returns on drops, to attempt to manipulate the trading post.
That’s. . .entirely backwards. Traveling around killing different things will actually stave off DR entirely. Not sure what makes you think otherwise. . .
I know what it’s used for, and you didn’t even include the lodestone conversions in your list. What I’m saying is that, despite the higher demand, it’s still a cheaper item than almost half of the other mats. Listing it as a “choke point” just seems odd.
In regards to your last sentence—rising prices combined with easier access means rising income. I’m using your data to counter those who are complaining about rising precursor costs. Yes, precursor cost is going up, but so is minimum wage.
Some gw2spidy data I culled since about November 2012.
Some of the precursor costs (x250), current supply/demand (S/D), trend (S/D UP, DOWN or STEADY) and price (UD or DOWN)
Format – ‘name’ (price) (S/D) (S/D UP, DOWN or STEADY) (Price UP, DOWN or STEADY)
Blood (65G) — (5160/30608) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (STEADY)
Venom (27.4G) — (11132/11128) — (UP/DOWN) — (STEADY)
Totem (45G) — (7755/11360) — (STEADY/STEADY) — (STEADY)
Dust (36G) — (2929/30019) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (UP)
Fang (36.5G) — (3468/15322) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (UP)
Scale (30.5G) — (17360/23777) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (UP)
Claw (31.4G) — (4293/16756) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (STEADY)
Bone (13.1G) — (18342/42832) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (STEADY)Mystic Coin (22.1G) — (42210/45537) — (UP/STEADY) — (UP)
Ectoplasm (94.9G) — (5892/86441) — (DOWN/STEADY) — (UP)Based on this analysis it is highly likely that, overall, the price of acquiring legendary will go up. Currently it will cost you just over 400G for these and this is not taking into account other precursors such as ‘icy runestone’ which cost 100G for 100.
The three biggest choke points are ‘ectoplasm’, ‘blood’ and ‘dust’, but perhaps mostly ‘ectoplasm’.
Please note that the UP/DOWN terms don’t necessearly imply the magnitude; just the overall trend since about November 2012.
That’s funny, because the supplies of Blood, Totems, Fangs, and Claws have all gone up. This leads me to believe that people should be experiencing an increased income. After all, they’re seeing more of these valuable commodities coming in, so they’re either saving them (and their value) or selling them.
Prices for Mystic Coins have also gone up, but the supply has remained pretty constant. Again, this would lead to higher incomes for everyone.
Prices for Ectoplasm have gone up, but the supply has remained the same or increased, so people should be making more off of selling them.
Of your three choke points, the only one I haven’t been able to get to 250 without purchasing is Blood. Ectoplasms I’m selling for money, and Dust would be well over 250 by now if I hadn’t converted for most of my lodestones. I’m not really sure why you included dust in your list of choke points, considering that it’s barely in the top half of the list if you sort by cost.
Using a sigil or rune binds it to you. So, yeah. . .
in the process of trying to get mystic clovers I got a ton of lodestones….
It’s 50 silver for the 1x recipe, and 5 gold for the 10x recipe, not counting the cost of karma or skill points, which can both be converted to gold. The expected return value is much less than the cost, from what I can tell, making this not worth it except as a “bonus.”
I don’t think he was framing it as part of a complaint about legendaries, just adding that part in to give context. >_>
I’ve actually wondered the same thing for a while now. Why is it that ore → ingot takes so much longer than ingot → anything else. . .
Which would be (among others) protection against bots. And only the number of sell orders is restricted because these were placed automatically by farm bots, the number of buy orders is not restricted.
It could actually be that buy orders are also restricted. After all, it takes longer to place a buy order than a sell order, so it’d be harder to hit the restriction. If there were “Match Highest Bidder” and “Buy Full Stack” buttons in the buying interface, I have no doubt that people would get “Error attempting to buy.”
i’ve made 1 gift of mastery and could make another right now, but i only have 160g, which is about 1/10 what i will need to make a legendary.
that said i don’t agree with the OP. the aspects of the game that go into the gift of mastery should not be sellable imo.
I’m saying take that 500k karma and 200 skill points and turn them into gold. There’s no reason just to sit on them unless you think they’ll go up in value at some point. . .
OP says he has 1,000,000 karma and 400 skill points, but is short on gold. That’s enough karma for a full stack (almost) of Orrian Jewelry Boxes, and you can convert skill points to money, as well. I’m not seeing why he should be poor.
Really? It’s a bug? A bug that lasts several hours – 12+ hours in the image I provided above.
I don’t buy it.
He said it’s a bug in the graph, not a graph of a bug. That is, the values shown in the graph are not the actual values during that time, because the graph is inaccurate as a result of a bug.
The bug need only last a few moments (long enough to shoot out a bad graph) in order to provide you with the screenshot in question. And, really, a bug whose only feature is to occasionally shoot out a bad graph would be pretty low priority, to me, anyway.
They can claim to be the “sole agent” for precursors all they want. Thing is, we know precursors enter the market from non-gold-sellers all the time, so they can’t be the “sole agent.” It may very well be that they’re trying to control the market, but it honestly reads to me as “Hey, give us an extra few bucks and we’ll buy a precursor off the TP to go with your gold.” And really, that’s what it’ll boil down to, because I seriously doubt that botters are playing the MF for precursors. That means they have to be getting them off the TP.
A very simple solution, right click destroy…
No more problem…
So your solution is to ignore the problem? Gotcha. . .
That’s not at all unusual. Nor is it logical, I admit. . .
It’s actually my understanding that when combining exotics (and I’d need to find my source for this), you get items up to +10 levels. That is, 4 level 70 exotics can produce a precursor.
Dude, it’s not that hard that you need a third-party app. Will an app make you more efficient? Maybe—it depends on a couple of variables. Will you occasionally lose money? Almost certainly. That’s why you diversify.
Really, though, just go scan the markets. You’ll find something. . .
so instead of adding propper anticheat/bot protection
adding scavenegerhunt fixing bugs and so on you rather make sarcastic comments in such a thread
You assume that it’s “instead of” and not “in addition to.” Remember, “both” is almost always an option. Are there things I’d like to see changed? Yes, but I’m not going to begrudge an employee his sarcasm.
If you have enough skill points and karma sitting around to make two gifts, there’s no reason you should be short on gold.
I believe there have been a few allegations of people being banned or suspended for this. The moderator response (that I’ve seen) has always been that the bans/suspensions were for other suspicious activity.
That’s like saying: ferrari cars are being sold every day, so clearly they must be very affordable.
No, it’s like saying that Ferrari cars sell every day, so clearly plenty of people can afford them. There’s a huge difference between “they’re affordable” and “plenty of people can afford them.” At least, there is connotatively speaking.
really? how do you know that?
It’s been tested rather extensively. Bags aren’t affected by DR or MF.
Market closes at A, reopened at B, and the slope was drawn between them.
That would be my guess, as well.
Man, some one just got owned. . .
Enoy your 5 button game gillius!
That statement lacks any and all context, but, just because I like to argue:
To a Holy Paladin: “Do you know this fight?”
Paladin: “I mash 3 until he hits 50% HP, then I mash 5”
Yep, 5-button games really are something, aren’t they?
It’s because of the superior sigil of fire that’s on it.
Is it sad that I made it as far as the 5g price and immediately assumed this with no further information?
Really glad that I’m not the only one wondering what he thinks he’s saying. >_>
I am working very hard. I play upwards of 8 hours a day, and have saved up 250g so far, but if precursor prices go up by 200g every time I make 100g, then it’s an endless cycle in which I will never be able to afford one, and I know I’m not the only one thinking/experiencing this.
You will, however, have enough money to go throw rares into the forge until you get it. I’m not saying that the MF is perfect (far from it), but for 445 gold, you could probably buy enough rares to get two precursors, barring exceptionally bad luck.
. . .
Nothing you’re saying about this graph makes any sense. Why would I not be able to plot a straight line that shows the conversion rate? I mean, that’s exactly what a straight line should be able to do.
Yes, it’s costing more and more gold to get gems. You knew that was going to happen from day one. The only way to make it cost less is for more and more people to dump their gems.
Not seeing an edit button, sorry for double-post.
So, just went to the exchange section on the TP. Worked out the formula for gold to gem conversion to
GemsOut=.00512*CoinsIn+0
What does that mean? It means that 1 gold gets you 51.2 gems. . .and that’s it. Nothing remotely abnormal about that.
Go to the gem/gold exchange rate on the TP. This is where i’ve seen this in several situations, and this is abnormal.
You’re still going to have to do a better job explaining yourself, preferably using real-number examples and logic; because I fail to see how being able to plot things to a line is bad or “abnormal.”
On several occasions I have observed the mystical plot based on ‘y=mx+c’. If this is not an indication of market manipulation then please correct me if I’m wrong
That’s. . .that’s just the standard formula for a line. . .
What in the world are you talking about?
What makes you think that Anet WANTS these items available for normal players like you and me?
To get these insane high-prices items, people have to buy gems with $$$ and convert them to gold. Anet makes money (real life money) from these extreem high prices.
Or, y’know, you can go do anything to make money. Almost literally anything. I mean, if you have very little time in your day, you can still run CoF path 1 in 15 minutes or less to get about 50 silver from events. That’s about 2 gold an hour without counting tokens, drops, or anything else.
Even if you only run it once, you get between 40 and 50 silver just from events. Then you add in the 9 silver from the three chests (assuming 3 blues each). Then the 0-6 Ectos from salvaging your 60 tokens, as well as 0-6 Gossamer Scraps. . . So, yeah, you get between 49 and 300 silver for probably less than 15 minutes of playing. It’s not even 15 minutes of difficult content. . .
Alternately, you can run around farming nodes like Orichalcum and Omnomberries. At 2.5s each, that can be as fast as 15 silver in about three minutes, depending on where they are. And that’s not counting the chance for, say, Ruby Orbs or Unidentified Dyes. . .
Note that at no point does this require buying gems to convert for money.
This changed with the new patch. Risen now drop various T6 mats and more bags, apparently at the expense of bone and dust. Which means the supply of bone and dust has dramatically decreased.
The same bags that contain dust and bones, as well as all the more expensive mats?
Hmm. . .a quick google says you’re right. It’s just I’ve only ever heard it used in reference to price increases due to printing money, so to speak.
Increasing the droprate is completely unnecessary in this case. Crystalline Dust and Ancient Bones have roughly the same supply rate: ridiculously high. Seriously, go farm events in Cursed Shore; you’ll have so many Dust-dropping mobs running at you it isn’t even funny.
And considering that I value skill points at somewhere around 10s each, I probably wouldn’t sell for less than about 480g (using Khisanth’s math, because I’m lazy). That’s a 24g listing fee.
I am just trying to say that I am losing interest in using that awful thing called TP. I rather spend all my tokens to buy 68 rares and then salvage them, or farm every T6 material by myself, rather than support those no-lifing ugly farmers.
Welcome to the world of supply and demand. As much as I hate hearing the argument about “supply and demand intersecting at blah blah blah…,” that’s pretty much exactly what you just demonstrated. Yes, the price in coin for a single ecto is going up. You know what isn’t? The amount of time it takes to get one. Go run a dungeon, you just got 0-6 globs for the first path, another 0-6 for each new path after that. And that’s not even counting dungeon drops or the money you make. That’s literally just buying token rares and salvaging them. Nor are dungeons the only path to rares. You can go do events for loot to turn into rares to salvage, or any number of other things. These are all things I would expect a normal player to do. This isn’t a failing of the TP; there’s no need to call for price limits; there’s supply and demand.
With all due respect, ectoplasms are pushing 40s, unidentified dyes 20s, T5 mats 2s, and it is unknown where T6 dust will end (double? triple?). Ectoplasm is not a luxury good… it is used in just about every single thing a level 80 could want. It affects T5 prices. Likewise, dust is a key item in Mystic Forge recipes. The current price makes these recipes cost prohibitive. There is definitely inflation – I’m not sure why you don’t recognize it here – flaws in the original argument notwithstanding.
I would argue that there’s also been a decrease in supply for all three of those items.
Unidentified dye is the easiest, since after they fixed the bug where dyes were dropping left and right the price shot up to 15s.
For Crystalline Dust, I’ll point out that Cursed Shore (a major supply point) seems much, much less populated now than it was before ~November (Karka event and Plinx nerf). Every person who would normally farm in Orr who’s instead doing a seasonal event in a low-level area is one who isn’t contributing to the supply. Same with anyone farming for lodestones, or almost any other T6 mat. . .
Ectoplasm is the most difficult to argue, I think. Aside from the aforementioned low-level events, I can think of a few contributing factors. Again, there seem to be fewer people farming events in high-level areas, which is going to affect the rare item supply, which affects the ectoplasm supply. People speed-running CoF path 1 over and over contribute fewer salvages of rares than they would running multiple paths. And of course, people playing the TP for money provide very few Ectos at all, unless that happens to be the market they’re playing.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly been some inflation, but I’m not willing to lay the entirety of the price increases at the feet of inflation alone.
I think it’s reasonable to expect inflation, the question is how much? I just compared the base level crafting components (no insignias, planks, etc) from December 18 to today and the average price has risen 60%. The greatest increase being in Engraved Totems (from 92c to 5s20c) and the biggest decrease in Onyx shards (from 35s to 8s).
I think it’s reasonable to be somewhat concerned about the market right now. Of course, this may all blow over and be a momentary price spike caused by the latest patch.
You’re also failing to account for the wave of bot bans that happened after the end of Wintersday. Decreased supply with relatively constant demand of course leads to an increase in price.
I totally agree Noerknhar, as a new player myself it’s inconceivable I will ever be able to afford a Legendary because I wasn’t able to exploit my way to large amounts of gold or abuse the MF to get easy pre-cursors: I don’t ‘play the TP’ and the game gives no way of obtaining the obscene amounts of gold those who have stocks of these must-have items demand and can get.
In other words, you aren’t willing to use arguably the best way to make money, and you’re complaining about not being able to afford things. I’m not implying you should enjoy playing the market any more than I enjoyed jumping my way to 500 badges. But if you need money, you can’t complain that there are no ways to do it.
Of course. What you did not include in your reasoning however is that the average price to craft a precursor is also rising.
In a manner of speaking, anyway (though, he did say in the post you quoted that the price is increasing). Yes, the price in numbers is going up. However, I would argue that the time to farm from scratch is staying fairly constant (or decreasing with the increased drop rate). The amount of time it takes to mine up a few hundred mithril ore and kill mobs for T5 mats isn’t going anywhere. Yes, inflation means that you might have to farm mats yourself instead of buying them. So?
The reason for the spike in prices for t6 mats is the loot nerf patch of Nov 15th. Anet have just recently partially remedied this with bag drops but the supply decreased a lot at a time when more players were introduced to the game. I also believe that we need a new method of gaining ecto’s apart from salvage- no rares means no ectos. I’m a casual player who mostly does dailies, some map completion and dragons and atm a legendary is just a pipedream. At least the Feb monthly ‘encourages’ me to do dungeons :p
Wait, but prices were lower in December (during the “loot nerf patch”) then got higher when Anet increased the drop rate? So, the usual supply and demand relationship is just completely backwards here? I’m sure the spike in prices has nothing at all to do with the fact that they recently banned a lot of bots who were supplying mats into the economy. No, loot nerfing makes much more sense. . .
The problem is too much gold is being injected through farming. Instead they should replace the 26 silver with an item or mats instead. That way no new gold is printed.
That would at best delay the problem. People are still going to kill things, get items and sell them. There’s no such thing as “no new gold (being) printed.” Again, if everything’s inflating at roughly the same rate, you take advantage of it, not try to stop it. . .
There are, what, four important attacks Alpha does in his fight?
Earth Spikes – These hurt, and I still don’t quite know the tell for that one. Then again, it’s unlikely to kill you.
Fire Spike – Move out of the circle. Doesn’t even require a dodge.
Ice Spike – If you’re not stacked, you can usually ignore this entirely. If you are stacked, you actually have to dodge. Oh no!
Crystal – Break the crystal before someone dies. AoE ftw. . .
Everything else is negligible. I’ve gone entire fights at range not getting downed and not dodging. This is not an impossible fight, it just requires knowing the mechanics and not failing. Mind you, sometimes you just have a bad run; but the odds of the entire group having a bad fight is pretty low. . .
Buy a O Axe for 4s. then cut green wood. you will get 100 at lease manybe more. green wood sells for 10c each last i checked so 100×10c=10s 10s-4s=6s you still make out at the end and how hard is it to many 12s for a set of tools? do shatt or sunless and your done for the day for tool cost
By your own math, though:
Buy a Copper Logging axe for 24c and cut green wood. 100×10c=10s, minus the 24c investment is 9s76c. Why would I not want to make 150% of your profits for the same effort. Of course, you’re ignoring the TP cut, which makes your 10s return actually 8s50c return. 8.5s-4s=4.5s versus 8.5s-.24s=8.26s. That’s, what, nearly double your profits?
But, that’s hardly the worst case scenario. . .
Take Silver Ore. It’s only worth 7c each on the TP right now, after the TP’s cut, that’s only 5.65s if you sell 100 of them. That’s 1.65s profit if you’re using Orichalcum, but 5.09s profit if you use Iron. That’s just over triple your profits. And even this isn’t the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is using the Orichalcum Sickle on anything that doesn’t sell for at least 10c each. Note that even at 10c, you’re making only 50c in profits over 100 harvests. Oddly, that includes Saffron Thread, which is actually on-level for Orichalcum. . .
Just put them in your bank and use them on a fresh alt.
There is nothing wrong with gathering in this game. It’s great! Buy Orichalcum tools, equip a set, keep a set in spare, couple salvage kits and you’re all set.
It’s not complicated. Even if you pick up the occasional copper ore or green wood with Orichalcum Tools, it evens itself out in the end.
The few copper you may lose far outweighs the convenience of just carrying and using the highest level tools.
Not quite. If you’re gathering Silver with an Ori pick, you’re breaking even at best. Granted, Silver Ore is the worst-case scenario, but it does prove that just buying an Orichalcum Pick for everything doesn’t work. You’d only barely make money on Hard Wood Logs, though at least the other ores and logs are relatively safe. This is doubly true for sickles, though, where the material you’re gathering has to be worth 10c on the TP before you can even break even using an Orichalcum Sickle, never mind making any sort of profit.