Guild Wars 2

EnemyCrusher.7324:

1000 crests isn’t even that hard to get. You also get one for completing the story chapter, and you can get them from lost bandit chests.

→

Lishtenbird.2814:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

So you get easily get (at minimum) 250 crests an hour…

that means you will have to “grind” and “farm” a maximum of 4 hours for this so called “legendary” armor…

I’m afraid that 4×250=1000, not 1000. So it’s 8 hours for 2 shoulder skins. Assuming all 6 piece chests cost only 1000 crests (and not some 3000 for chest), even under ideal circumstances of doing all events in the map and tagging multiple bosses, that is 8×6=48 hours of grinding Silverwastes, 6 days of 8-hour grinding of a single map extra to the time spend for the story itself.

Conncept.7638:

Considering that five of the games classes have absolutely no boon removal, these units having retaliation wasn’t a case of encouraging people to adapt their build but discouraging them from playing at all.

5 classes out of 8 have boon removal. The other 3 (warrior, ranger, elementalist) can suck damage in, tank it with pet or heal out. All 8 classes have access to boon removing sigils.

Your other argument makes just as much sense as saying “since 4 classes out of 8 have no +25% speed signets, creating a map with a single waypoint is just discouraging them from playing at all.”

Vargamonth.2047:

If Mordrem wolves would apply lets say 4 seconds of AoE Light Aura (maybe 4s to themselves and 2s to allies to prevent a pack from keeping it up for too long) and would be granted with a 100% boon duration increase, we would have a lot more options of counterplay.
We could interrupt the scream to negate the aura, we could stop attacking for a few seconds and let the aura go away without stacking retaliation or we could keep fighting and strip the retal once the aura fades off.

I am against of any non-removable buffs.

Renn.8241:

For this reason I think it’s unlikely that Orr will ever be truly cleansed, it would throw personal story, new players, events and a whole lot more out of wack.

Thoughts?

My thoughts are exactly the same.

Draknar.5748:

Most people play solo.

Your data?

“Most people who play solo” play single-player games. When you come to a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, you play with other players, want it or not.

Draknar.5748:

I don’t really see the point in certain monsters being weak to specific classes (boon strippers) and strong to others. Most people play solo. It isn’t like a Warrior can come up to a wolf and say “oh dang, this mob uses lots of retaliation, let me go and swap to my boon stripping build real quick”.

Welcome to the mesmer world, where your 60% of damage in form of a phantasm just vapoured after the target trash mob died, and the other 10 mobs are glad to kill you while you’re hitting them with a wet noodle. So what did you say about a warrior vs. retal again?

After the chest farm nerf, I would simply rename the thread from

Silverwastes – Poor reward design

to

Silverwastes – Poor reward

NNYinsanenature.5684:

Keep in mind the update is titled “Tangled Paths” so just think on that for a moment.

Already did

jackaljag.8637:

Sometimes it’s not just a matter of speed but also sparing yourself some frustration.

This. I can chat with guildies while waiting for another party member get swamp, or refine mats, or go get a drink. Some other run I’ll be the one who rolls, and other people can relax and have fun. And we know that we can do swamp fast and efficiently, unlike many other starting fractals.

Same with speedclears. After 6-7 minute CoF p1 runs and many, many iterations of the same dungeon, it really feels frustrating to spend almost an hour (!) on p1 and p2 with clueless people. So yes, it makes sense to chill out a bit waiting for a group rather than wasting time in the dungeon.

Gearcheck: I never go that far, but there are a lot of casuals who have no idea they can ping something different. It filters them, or at least a part of them.

AP: has been discussed countless times. Yes, it is not the ultimate measurement, but 1-3kAPs are far, far often slow and clueless compared to 8-10kAPs.

InfernoHero.5687:

The problem here is that you assume all of us “Terrible Horrible Hacker Elite Macro Users” use these music macros to brag/make people envy us.

I tell anyone that asks that I’m using macros. The only thing I brag about is how awesome this stuff is.

I’m not talking about you, I actually thumbed up your post for being really honest about playing with macros. But you should agree that you cannot tell everyone you’re playing with a macro, and people will eventually assume things – that is the ultimate truth.

I remember asking about music macros myself a long time ago – playing stuff was godlike skills for me back then, while writing in Autohotkey wasn’t. Slowly, I learned to play something with sheets – and what I can do now (still not much though) feels really good; even with Bad Apple being beyond my reach, playing Dango Daikazoku and having people recognize it is great. Having someone next to you just run a macro silently – doesn’t. I’m a creator myself, and it feels like making and editing a great photo by hand, and then someone taking a picture of a postcard with an Instagram effect and getting wows.

I would prefer ANet to put in a macro recording function into instruments instead – you start recording, play, and then the sequence is saved (probably in a local file). Then you can play the file back without external utilities and clearly showing that it is a recording. That might also remove some severe lag issues which go along with playing.

I was also kind of disappointed to see retaliation removed from wolves: it gave a point to bring my more and more useless main mesmer to the new zones (even though fighting hordes of small mobs on a mesmer is terribly frustrating). Now I’m again bringing my guardian, because it provides better damage with enough utility and is more comfortable (and rewarding) to play. Again, the best classes are best, and the other classes are rendered useless; wolves were actually punishing the mindless faceroll warriors and pew-pew rangers, filling the missing PvE niches and fixing the zerker meta. These are group events – there’s no problem in making them require multiple classes!

I think that removing retaliation was a wrong way to solve the problem. I would’ve suggested instead:

• Lowering base stats on wolves to lower retaliation damage.
• Permanently remove the unremovable retaliation.
• Make the howl a single channeled skill which provides a single long-lasting removable retaliation boon that can be interrupted (for no retaliation at all).
• Probably remove the AoE effect of the howl.

I still find the reasoning behind “not gaining any in-game advantage” by using macros to play music to be very moot.

Let’s face it: a large part of online games is bragging. You can be a clerk in a small company in a small town of Far Newyourkpeaks in real life, but a leader of a large guild with thousands of gold and a full set of legendaries in the game – and you play the game to have other people admire you and be jealous.

• If you’re using a macro to automate mystic forging of precursors to get gold to buy a legendary and make people jealous, you “gain an advantage” and get banned.
• If you’re using a macro to automate playing music and make people jealous (even without accepting tips), you’re “not gaining an advantage” and it’s legit.

So it looks like the real reasoning behind these macro restrictions is economical: if a macro can affect the rate at which a player acquires gold, it is bannable; if it is not, even if it provides clear advantage in other, non-monetary aspects, it is not bannable.

Holmes and Watson are strolling through Orr. Watson notices a strange blobby creature made of tar and asks:
- What’s that creature, Holmes?
- Elemental, Watson!

thehipone.6812:

You assumed perfectly inelastic demand for what is essentially a luxury item. The way you presented it, demand was not a curve, as you claim it to be, but a vertical line ( 100 bought @ 2g, 100 bought @ 4g, two points define a line). This is severely flawed.

Yes, you’re right, I noticed later that I confused the last part and that is what timmyf might have tried to point out; the whole thing mixed several either-ors. I corrected the first post to depict several scenarios and changed lodestones to more neutral blobies.

timmyf.1490:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Why ascended or legendaries cannot be easy to acquire?

Because Legendaries are supposed to be difficult (more accurately “expensive and time-consuming,” not difficult) to acquire. That is the fundamental design of the game.

I shouldn’t have to defend the fundamental design of the game. You should have to explain why you want to change that. Furthermore, you should have to explain why the way you want to change that is to allow for people to perform the same simple action for hours and hours on end.

The burden of proving the worth of change is on the party who wishes to change things.

I don’t see where I wanted to “change” anything or said that I wanted to turn all GW2 into Silverwaste chestfarm. I’ve written enough in this thread to make it clear why moderate farming is good, and how more-than-moderate farming can affect the economy. A lot of people, disregarding entitled ones, are constantly mentioning that the game feels unrewarding and the main gameplay rewards should be improved – and they say it for a reason. People want long-term goals (like precursors) to be shorter, and preferably shorter via actual fun and gameplay; the developers, however, do not want it, as they live from a) retaining players via forcing them to grind for ultimate goals for years and trying to sell them something along the way and b) getting real cash from those players who prefer paying to grinding. So I don’t really see anything changing in the future anyway.

shion.2084:

But wasn’t the original vision of the game to travel this huge dynamic world, happen by incredible dynamic events, partake in them and marvel at the wonder while building your legend? What you mock and dismiss was actually part of the beauty of the game.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Turn your question to developers. But I already know what the (silent) reply would be: casual gaming means casual rewards; 2 years into the game, casual rewards are still enough to play all PvE (including low-level fractals); but if you want exclusive rewards, you either grind (invest time) or pay (invest money) – because GW2 still is a business.

As for your precursor and gem prices questions, these things have already been answered thousands of times (multiple times in this thread, too), and obliviously blaming farmers for it is just looking for a scapegoat.

timmyf.1490:

My assumption is that T6 mat requirements would remain the same since you didn’t state in your original post that T7, T8, and T9 mats would be introduced.

You’re of course welcome to your own opinion on farming, but it’s far less obviously beneficial to the entire playerbase than you claim. Farming has a purpose, an IMPORTANT purpose, but there’s still the matter of degree to worry about. A 100 Champ Bag/Hour farm is hard to justify, but I give you credit for trying.

The thing I read here is “I didn’t farm easily for my ascended/legendary/whatever, so no one should.” Why aren’t you saying that getting exotics is too easy already? Why ascended or legendaries cannot be easy to acquire? Is the only reason for it the fear of losing a long-term goal in the game?

I think it is. I also think that ascended is balanced quite nicely in term of gating and being a long-term goal (not in terms of weight cost discrepancy though), even though a bit of toning down on material cost won’t hurt with all the other restrictions from NPE, the trait system and such. I also say that farming is what makes long-term goals closer for everyone, not only for farmers, especially in short term; which is also why developers don’t like farming.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

So you get easily get (at minimum) 250 crests an hour…

that means you will have to “grind” and “farm” a maximum of 4 hours for this so called “legendary” armor…

I’m afraid that 4×250=1000, not 1000. So it’s 8 hours for 2 shoulder skins. Assuming all 6 piece chests cost only 1000 crests (and not some 3000 for chest), even under ideal circumstances of doing all events in the map and tagging multiple bosses, that is 8×6=48 hours of grinding Silverwastes, 6 days of 8-hour grinding of a single map extra to the time spend for the story itself.

timmyf.1490:

Lishtenbird.2814:

You’re missing the fact that numeric representation of money is irrelevant, the value of money is. Player X then gets his first exotic drop, sells it for 50 silver, and buys 10 T6 mats for 5 silver each. Player X now gets his first exotic drop, sells it for 5 gold, and buys 10 T6 mats for 50 silver each. However if Player X runs a dungeon then he can get 20 T6 mats, but if Player X runs a dungeon now he can get 2 T6 mats.

Right. The correct way to look at this is by comparing to fixed price items such as dungeon runs. You don’t think an economy in which a single dungeon path is worth 20 T6 mats is horrifically broken?

My point is that an exotic drop could go from 5-paths-of-value down to 1/2-path-of-value. I don’t see why you would immediately assume it’s a good thing.

Firstly, how many T6 mats you need for an item in this scenario? 10 per one or some 300×8=2400, like silk for ascended? Is T6 top tier, or is there T7, T8, T9? How important is the item for general gameplay, is it a basic requirement similar to current exotics or some +100 agony for a new zone? If you’re going into fictional economy, you should show the whole picture, or the conclusions are far-fetched.

Secondly, I’ll quote this one more time:

Lishtenbird.2814:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

2. Mats become too common, continually falling in price until they eventually hit vendor price. This may seem like a good thing until you realize that the only thing that keeps most people playing the game is having long term goals. If they can suddenly buy every awesome skin they want in one day the game quickly becomes stale and boring and many players leave. This was a major problem in the beginning of the game and is why ascended gear was introduced. Devaluing ascended gear like this farm did is going to end up with a lot of players quitting and they may need to add in a new gear tier to bring them back.

See this paragraph at the very top:

Lishtenbird.2814:

In this thread, I want to look at how farming works, and why moderate farming is actually good for all players in mid-term. (In long term, the desired scarce items may be the only reason for people to continue playing, and if there are no scarce prestigious items, many players may not have a reason to play at all – but these situations will require extreme farming anyway which can only happen in an abandoned game).

Indeed, this is a problem with human psychology. Developers are trying to balance it out so that people always have long-term goals but some short-term goals are still achievable. That’s why they nerf farms which make long-term goals considerably shorter. However there always are people who believe that long-terms goals are too long and are made such to squeeze extra real world money out of players who can’t invest enough time (and I also believe this is what’s happening).

timmyf.1490:

Lishtenbird.2814:

timmyf.1490:

2) You assume demand is constant. Demand is NOT constant.

I do not assume demand is constant.

“After patch, we still have 100 players who need 1 charged lodestone per week each (demand is constant), which makes 100 lodestones per week – nothing changed.”

Then I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

Is there the same amount of players entering and leaving the game? Is there the same amount of players farming? Is there the same amount of players using the item? Are there new uses for the same item? Are the drop tables the same? Are there news of the farm being nerfed, uses added etc.? Under ideal circumstances in controlled environment, which are used in examples, demand is constant. When external factors appear, demand will go up or down based on the popularity of the item, player activity, rumours/news and speculators etc. Generally speaking, demand will be fairly constant in short term but can change over time.

Aside from that, demand is a curve. Demand can be constant, specific figures can be different if the supply side changes. Demand for Bonetti’s Rapier can be constant while it is bought in single numbers at 50g but in tens at 5g.

Ashen.2907:

1) In the real world money is generally not backed by a supply of gold. Thank heavens for that.

I already put a disclaimer but people are still nitpicking…

Ashen.2907:

2) If the supply of lodestones is cut in half in your example it is highly unlikely that the first 50 will sell at the old price of 2g each. The average price will jump almost immediately.

It depends on the information involved. Was the nerf in the patch notes, how fast people logged in, how many of them decided to relist items and lose money on it and so on. It doesn’t really matter in the end.

Vayne.8563:

There are so many flaws with the OP, I’d have to make a post almost as long as the OP to list them. Staring with the wrong name for Fractals, then talking about gear progession like that’s something people came here for, and moving on to people dying in dungeons which made them give up.

If they changed this game to make it something you play, OP, I’d leave. What you want isn’t really what this game was designed to be. It was DESIGNED to be about skins, not stats.

A rare case where I agree with Vayne.

OP, you’re playing some different game in your head. Maybe GW2 just isn’t for your mindset.

shion.2084:

Consider that farming tends to put money in a small subset of the populations hands. Lets say hypothetically even that there is no money generated or created by farming. Simply the redistribution of wealth to 10% of the game playing population will drive the price of rare objects so as to be astronomically un-reachable by those who do not also fold and do the same thing.

Now imagine there was less farming, and money was more evenly distributed between the members of the population. The price of a precursor would actually be lower I’m guessing, as 1400 G or whatever would be ridiculously impossible.

While there are arguments against this, and farming doesn’t just alter wealth distributions, you can see the reasoning. Essentially if you don’t play the farm game as well, then your just left behind would be the argument of the non-farmer. And I haven’t seen anything in this post yet to concretely argue against this.

As I said before, if a player goes around the map doing dynamic events and killing random moas, then the best he deserves really is Orr karma gear and some poultry meat. You can cry “farmers! farmers!” as much as you like, but unless you’re working really hard to earn money (harder than others), you won’t get anything – that’s basic economics and common sense.

Let’s imagine everyone in the game goes around the map doing dynamic events and killing random moas; there are no champ train farmers, no speedclearers, no Teq and Wurm guilds, no lvl 50 fractal frequenters. So how many precursors will exactly be dropped and available on the market with the current drop rates? 10 in a year, I guess. Will anyone want to sell an item which is an ultra rare drop and is available to 10 people out of 3’500’000 who bought the game, when there isn’t really anything better to do with the little amounts of money you actually get in return since no one has considerable amounts anyway? Will you be able to ever get your precursor at all, even at a prohibitive price? Take your pick – earn money faster than others or never get because there’s no supply.

More farmers – more drops – more chances at rare loot created out of thin air. Less farmers – less drops – less chances to see rare loot on the market at all; and if it does appear, people will ask you to sell your soul to get it, even if you can’t afford it now. Here, take a look at this item which is not being farmed but can be.

The core “problem” is not that some people can pay a lot of money for a precursor – the core “problem” is that there is a limited supply of precursors, and you need people to provide this supply, and people who’re providing this supply are mainly active players who are accumulating money anyway. I write “problem” because I don’t think this is a problem; be smart, play actively – and you can buy your precursor in half a year or so. This is a long-term goal and a race against other players, just like any other expensive item in an active MMO. You don’t want to race – you have to wait for the item to drop for you. But once you got your precursor, take a look at T6 mats and think about how many of those you can get in comparison to the fixed reward from a single dungeon run, and how the current “farm of the month” affected it.

timmyf.1490:

1) You assume lower prices for farmable mats are good. Low prices are good for buyers. They are not good for sellers. Let’s consider an extreme case where exotics are all worth 50 silver. Player X gets his first exotic drop… doesn’t need it, goes to sell it… it’s nearly worthless.

And you sell the items to get exactly… what? Shiny gold coins to hoard and look at? Okay…

You’re missing the fact that numeric representation of money is irrelevant, the value of money is. Player X then gets his first exotic drop, sells it for 50 silver, and buys 10 T6 mats for 5 silver each. Player X now gets his first exotic drop, sells it for 5 gold, and buys 10 T6 mats for 50 silver each. However if Player X runs a dungeon then he can get 20 T6 mats, but if Player X runs a dungeon now he can get 2 T6 mats.

timmyf.1490:

2) You assume demand is constant. Demand is NOT constant.

I do not assume demand is constant.

HenleyLegoMan.4987:

Need to point out an error: money in real life is backed by a limited amount of gold and in MMO it is produced out of thin air. -snip-

See this response:

aerial.7021:

aerial.7021:

Nicely written except for this part; “unlike in real economy where money is backed by real limited amounts of gold, money is generated out of thin air.” – that is not the truth, a government can and does generate money our of thin air too its called a ‘bail out’.

I wanted to add “generally”, or “supposed to”, or anything like it to that part, but thought no one would care anyway /sigh

I’ll just go and edit this part since people like to stick to this point and do not read the entire thread.

Wanderer.3248:

There could easily be scenarios where excess supply causes price to drop to zero. If the amber farm had been left running, I think there was a real danger that T6 matts would have ended up being near worthless bag fillers, only good for vendoring.

Taken to the logical extreme, if oversupply causes everything to end up at below vendor prices, then it’s very bad for the game.

See this response:

Lishtenbird.2814:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

2. Mats become too common, continually falling in price until they eventually hit vendor price. This may seem like a good thing until you realize that the only thing that keeps most people playing the game is having long term goals. If they can suddenly buy every awesome skin they want in one day the game quickly becomes stale and boring and many players leave. This was a major problem in the beginning of the game and is why ascended gear was introduced. Devaluing ascended gear like this farm did is going to end up with a lot of players quitting and they may need to add in a new gear tier to bring them back.

See this paragraph at the very top:

Lishtenbird.2814:

In this thread, I want to look at how farming works, and why moderate farming is actually good for all players in mid-term. (In long term, the desired scarce items may be the only reason for people to continue playing, and if there are no scarce prestigious items, many players may not have a reason to play at all – but these situations will require extreme farming anyway which can only happen in an abandoned game).

Indeed, this is a problem with human psychology. Developers are trying to balance it out so that people always have long-term goals but some short-term goals are still achievable. That’s why they nerf farms which make long-term goals considerably shorter. However there always are people who believe that long-terms goals are too long and are made such to squeeze extra real world money out of players who can’t invest enough time (and I also believe this is what’s happening).

Superior Rune of Whatever Slaying (6/6)
(1): +10% damage to Icebrood
(2): +10% damage to Elementals
(3): +10% damage to Dredge
(4): +10% damage to Inquest
(5): +10% damage to Ghosts
(6): 5% chance on hit to transform your target into Icebrood, Elemental, Dredge, Inquest, or Ghost (cooldown: 120 seconds)

Behellagh.1468:

That was several well thought out posts. A couple of additional points.

Before collections were introduced, Bonetti’s Rapier was in the 20-25 gold range and it was collections that shot the price up to the 40-45 gold range. It was pulled up to 65 gold just before the current LS chapter dropped when supply was bought up. Someone guessed wrong or knew and tried to pump and dump just before the patch hit.

Supply on the TP isn’t always a reflection of the current rate of supply flowing into the TP. A portion is “stale” with prices well above the current trade value which is why prices sometimes spike extremely as supply is drawn down exposing these “stale” priced items. Players may assume that’s the current accepted price but in reality it’s the price nobody but the most impatient would be willing to pay. In artificial supply shortages, the price tends to return near the price before the shortage because it’s difficult to control supply.

When posting, I always try to remind myself to find a balance between being concise and trying to show the full picture, so there’s always room left for “yes, but…” The speculation part of trading in GW2 looks very strong – one of the examples being Chaos of Lyssa recipes. When prices begin to rise, many people decide to hop into the last wagon and hoard some stuff for speculation and drive prices further up; when prices begin to drop, many people decide to hop out while they can and hop out, unloading the hoarded stuff to minimise losses. So the only one who knows the exact amounts of dropped, sold and hoarded Rapiers is John Smith.

Sizer.5632:

Seems like a slightly more polite version of the other complaint threads about the chest farm being fixed, which is an improvement i guess.

Still no matter what arguments you come up with to justify you deserving to farm 10 champ bags every 5 minutes with 0 effort, rational people (ie the devs) arent going to agree. If they did agree then the queensdale champ trains or any of the other easy farms in the past would not have been nerfed.

As I said before, I agree that this farm needed a nerf for the game to meet its current long term goals. The point of this thread was to show the people who overreact why the farm was good for them as players. That said, as a player I would be happy if the long-term goals were shortened and new goals were added later instead of the current policy of “invest a lot or buy with real money”; yet as a person who runs a business, I understand why ANet is sticking to this policy and I find it fair enough to keep being a part of the community.

Kasima.8143:

Lishtenbird.2814, this is a great thread. Thank you so much for posting this! It was needed.

You’re welcome.

phys.7689:

i remember in another game, there were so many various means of earning money, from growing plants, to crafting, to fighting 100s of weak monsters to fighting one huge super powered monster, to hunting a rare monster, and even hunting treasure chests and robbing enemies. eh well. whatevs.

Over time, certain types of gameplay will become obsolete anyway, while other types will become most profitable. Let’s take a look at GW2: you can still earn money

• by running dungeons (and fractals in highly organised groups),
• by playing seasonal content (Halloween, Crown Pavillion…),
• by playing new zones from LS (and crafting/selling unique mats),
• by playing the semi-WvW EoTM map,
• by hunting champs in old zones (Frostgorge and Orr),
• by killing certain mobs in old zones (linen anyone?),
• by doing world bosses and temples,
• by hunting Tequatl and Wurm in highly organised groups,
• by crafting daily ascended mats (but not mid-tier stuff which became obsolete because of drops and crafting used for leveling),
• by converting skillpoints and karma from open PvE,
• by playing on the TP (flipping),
• by soloing dungeons and selling paths.

And that’s aside from more and more non-tradeable thingies which become available by playing certain content and don’t require pure gold. So isn’t GW2 actually the same as that “another game”?

You don’t have to only play dungeons if you’re casual; but if you want to go around the maps killing random moas and joining dynamic events, the best you deserve as a “casual” player actually is some poultry meat and Orr karma gear.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave us a hatched dragon “replica” to eat dragonite and empyreal

I’m genuinely curious about where this “taxi” term originated from (the one which means “invite people to your party so that they can join your version of the map”). Some people use “ferry”, but “taxi” is rather widespead. Was it a specific guide, or another MMO, or our collective mind?

aerial.7021:

Nicely written except for this part; “unlike in real economy where money is backed by real limited amounts of gold, money is generated out of thin air.” – that is not the truth, a government can and does generate money our of thin air too its called a ‘bail out’.

I wanted to add “generally”, or “supposed to”, or anything like it to that part, but thought no one would care anyway /sigh

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars -

The name of the series comes from the Guild Wars, a series of conflicts between Tyrian guilds which led to decline of humanity and allowing the charr to invade Ascalon, and other events of the first series of the games.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Guild_Wars for further info.

Tao.5096:

doesn’t change the fact that prices of those exotics are simply high because of collection stuff.

Summer has ended and it’s snowing. It doesn’t change the fact that Alice still wants to get field flowers from Bob.

Tao.5096:

And funniest thing is that amount of supply barely changed.

The funniest thing is that you call a 12 times increase (21→270) “barely changed”.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

1. creates a split community. The people who participate in the farm quickly gain wealth, while those who don’t are left behind. This leads to a rich get richer, poor get poorer scenario where the community is fractured.

How do you measure “wealth”? Is it directly tied to being happy in a game? What is more important – amount of gold in the bank or being able to get the thing you need after several fixed reward dungeon runs because others have farmed enough of it and brought the price down? How long will a farm live until it balances out with every other thing in the game and put everyone on equal ground?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

2. Mats become too common, continually falling in price until they eventually hit vendor price. This may seem like a good thing until you realize that the only thing that keeps most people playing the game is having long term goals. If they can suddenly buy every awesome skin they want in one day the game quickly becomes stale and boring and many players leave. This was a major problem in the beginning of the game and is why ascended gear was introduced. Devaluing ascended gear like this farm did is going to end up with a lot of players quitting and they may need to add in a new gear tier to bring them back.

See this paragraph at the very top:

Lishtenbird.2814:

In this thread, I want to look at how farming works, and why moderate farming is actually good for all players in mid-term. (In long term, the desired scarce items may be the only reason for people to continue playing, and if there are no scarce prestigious items, many players may not have a reason to play at all – but these situations will require extreme farming anyway which can only happen in an abandoned game).

Indeed, this is a problem with human psychology. Developers are trying to balance it out so that people always have long-term goals but some short-term goals are still achievable. That’s why they nerf farms which make long-term goals considerably shorter. However there always are people who believe that long-terms goals are too long and are made such to squeeze extra real world money out of players who can’t invest enough time (and I also believe this is what’s happening).

Aenesthesia.1697:

It’s like Anet’s message is: want to play for fun? ok, have fun with the limited content we throw at you. You want to play for rewards? switch your brain off and be prepared to throw your day in the trash bin.

From a gold or gear point of view, this game only cares about how much time you throw at it, and how repetitive the things you do are. More time + more simple, repetitive stuff = more gold or gear

Just the opposite of what it should be, if you ask me.

In an ideal world, a game has infinite new things to do with infinite amount of cool rewards for it. In real world, developers have that much real world money to develop that much content, and have to gate rewards behind repetitive grinding and/or real world money to keep players playing until they come up with something new. That’s how all MMOs are, it’s business.

Part 3. The Infamous (Mis)quote: Play How You Want.

Yes, some farms are toxic, (borderline) exploitive and harm other players’ progress. But this is not an excuse for saying “farmers are baaad”. Firstly, because this is not true: farmers are the same players as you, they just have different priorities. Secondly, because gamers are human, and human psychology has been studied enough to make wise game design decisions preventing toxicity in the first place.

• You may be playing for “fun”, spending an hour on a CoF path with your Nomad’s rifle warrior killing every single critter, and the process itself is what you seek. You might never go out of your way to get something you want, because doing boring stuff is boring, and you may just buy gems or skip on the item altogether. That is fine as long as you enjoy it (and have 4 more people who share your view in the party, that is).
• Other people grind mindlessly for months, looking for best places to maximise gold per hour, because a shiny item in the end of the journey is their definition of “fun”. They will do it until they reach their goal, even if they have to act like zombies. And this is also fine as long as they enjoy it (and do not offend other players or block their progress, that is).

When you have both types of people in an MMO, you can get a healthy economy and a healthy community, where some people spend their time and provide supply (and find it fun) and some people spend their money and provide demand (and find it fun). The Silverwastes chest farm was a good example of how a farm can be healthy (just open LFG and choose a farm/non-farm map) and fun to an extent, as well as showed us how collective farming can actually draw prices down. I think this was an interesting case, and we will learn something good from it.

Cheers, and good luck with your “mindless farming” or “casual playing”, whichever you prefer!

There are already enough threads on the topic, the most active ones being https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-Unintended-Failure-that-was-SW/ and https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/s2/Issue-with-zerg-shoveling/

…of Marionette.

’nuff said!

Even though I think this farm will (and should be) slightly nerfed, I still have a very positive attitude towards it.

This farm being a mindless boring experience or an exciting challenging experience is fully in the hands of the player. I personally have switched my guardian build from a DPS/tagging build to a support one, and I really enjoy timing and chaining all the CC, blocks and heals to interrupt thrashers and pull away hyenas from chests, or to group mobs together and burn them down, or to rush and revive Osa, or to skip hordes of deadly Mordrem up the stairs to light the signal bonfire which calls for the air strike. If you actually do a bit of every defence event, you get enough shovels to keep the farm going forever; they say it’s around 1 shovel per 5 events, so if, say, 75 people tag an event (which they should anyway if they’re in the area), that’s about 15 shovels per event extra to shovels from achievement maps – quite okay if you ask me. If you combine it with fun chat in Teamspeak with guildies or map chat – then it becomes even better.

But yes, I also agree that part of the popularity of the farm goes to the anticipation of the nerf. I believe this farm was (yet another) design oversight: hoping that people will play the game as intended just because the game says so rarely works with gamers. With that many cases in the past, I figured that possible unintended farms would get far more attention now. Like, the first thing I thought when I read “Chests can be opened by everyone in the map” was “Wouldn’t people group up in a train to maximize the returns? Isn’t there any limit/cooldown on these chests?” But since Maize Balm farm was oficially completely okay… I don’t really know anymore.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/s2/Ogden-part-3-Unfriendly-for-Mesmer/

Don’t think it’s been mentioned: “about face” doesn’t always work, depending on the camera view you’re using; IIRC it’s ignored if right mouse is held. Having it work in all camera modes would be both a camera and gameplay improvement.

It’s been datamined by that_shaman. People on reddit are speculating that it will be a PvP track reward.

Pennry.9215:

I’m waiting for the C&D from DC. :P

Not sure I’m aware of the abbreviations

Theundersigned.4761:

It’s not that Guild Wars 2 is becoming more like other games, it’s that many games in general have frequently adopted myths and legends from a variety of cultures around the world.

This.

And once you have ~100 basic myth flavours and 36 basic plots but 100 000 games, books and movies, things eventually start repeating themselves. In the end, it’s not really about the plot as it’s already happened in other creations before, but about the flavouring details which make it desirable.

As for games adopting myths, I really liked how ALfheim Online spoke about a future MMO system which will be automatically scanning Internet for myths and generating quests based on those; unfortunately, that was one of the really nice concepts which got buried in the over-haremy novel and a poor anime adaptation.

Why aren’t you using the wallet?

Because bag slots are in the gemstore. I think it’s one of the not completely evil tactics once you remember they need funds to release new content.

That said, I would be happy to see these moved to the wallet. Along with foxfire clusters and blade shards moved to depositable materials.

- For the millionth time, there are no culinary applications for bloodstone dust. None. No good can come from feeding it to living beings.
- Pfft, what do you know? I’ll take the dust to the streets and start my own food cart. I’ll be rich!

Just sayin’

The face animation looked kinda weirdly stretched to me – probably since their models just aren’t made for close-up shots. But still okay, better than the ones during the final scene of Scarlet kill.

And yes, my mesmer was also fighting ghosts in the background, and some phantasms were running around during the scene with Marjory and Belinda completely oblivious to everything

I don’t think anything changed: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-about-Russian-language/

I would like to have support for Cyrillic in chat and mail, though. Chatting with Russian friends who’re not that good in English via transliteration is so frustrating that it’s easier not to write anything at all. But I also see problems with it, since many Russian players are into offensive talk and there won’t be anyone who can “decipher” this stuff on ANet’s part if anything’s reported.

I wasted a lot of time on this boss. I had two major problems:

1) I was basically left with GS3 and close-range auto, or rather sword 2 and sword auto for attacking when attuned. It was slow. It was boring. It was frustrating. It increased the chance of making a mistake and having to start over (which I had to twice).

2) You can’t blink past the beams! If you try, you get bumped mid-way… and thrown into the AoE. And die and start over. So the mobility skill which most mesmers use can become fatal.

This is not the first time when mesmers have been left aside: IIRC, the attunement achievement during fight on the Breachmaker suffered from the same problem, and the Nochtli achievement in Dry Top too. Do ANet developers test these things on mesmers? Are we so few that it’s not worth fixing something in PvE for a single minor class?

Just wanted to thank the people who created the stunning visuals and reworked the glittering audio in this map.

The focus on Queensdale and Divinity reach style of medieval fantasy in GW2 has always been a shortcoming for me; I’ve been fascinated magical by places like Jade Maw fractal, the Branded areas and the Grove instead. Some may say that “plain is stylish” and “shinies are cheap” and point in the direction of the korean grinders. And yes indeed, the eastern visuals are usually far more to my liking – probably since I also enjoy collecting gems IRL (and taking pictures with them too, in case anyone’s interested) and such, but this zone proves that the superior gameplay concept of GW2 can coexist with shiny magical landscapes of those games.

The gameplay had some issues for me, though, but those have already been mentioned by other people in the Ogden part 3: Unfriendly for Mesmer thread.

So again, thank you!

Same thought

See this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/out-of-Combat-bug/ and this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/In-Combat-bug/

Evan Lesh.3295:

Zaxares.5419:

I had a MAJOR lag spike two days ago in Battle of Kyhlo. It eventually disconnected me, but the weird thing was that I was still able to chat normally in Guild chat, even though my /say and /map chats were not showing up.

This is pretty interesting. Whispers and guild chat does not go through the game server that you play PvP on. That implies you had an interrupted connection to the game server, but not our other servers.

This happens quite often, I remember it in Labyrinth (for sure) and (most likely) during Tequatl. You can see the guild chat updating and can answer, but all players/mobs are stuck standing, spamming a single skill or running in the same direction. This either resolves in some time and the action restores, or you get DCed with an error message and booted into character select. The last time it happened I didn’t even get any error message; the game just switched to character select after a massive lag.

Orion Templar.4589:

This does appear to be fixed now. When I enter combat the arrows above the skills disappear as expected. When I exit combat, the arrows reappear.

I’ve been in Ascalonian fractal a couple days ago. I was able to switch skills exactly once, after which the arrows disappeared completely. My bad for posting it in this thread though, not this one – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/out-of-Combat-bug

Being able to taxi yourself to a new empty/almost full map would be a good feature. You often need a new map when you’re grouping with guildies (Tequatl, Dry Top, Labyrinth, Crown Pavillion…), or an old map when you’re alone but want to get on a populated map. I believe the “guild map spawn” was datamined some time ago, though.

Meanwhile, all you can do is join a large guild with active players or join/post LFG. There’re usually quite a lot of taxis there for popular events.

I’m astonished that this still hasn’t been addressed in the recent major patch.

Vukorep.3081:

-back to my ranger now-

Eeeehr… What exactly stops you from doing the same reading and watching on your lvl 80 guardian?