Guild Wars 2

Given the usual drop rates, I’d expect the entire population of 24 servers to abruptly come into possession of maybe 10 precursors total – with 6 of them being kept by the person who got it out of the chest. The precursor market is in no danger from the other 4 suddenly being introduced…

No one “got it” because your numbers are flatly wrong. By over an order of magnitude.

And for those of us that have more than 8 character slots, sometimes you do want to just launch a second character straight to endgame, with no loss of skill because you’ve already played a character of that class through the whole game. Certainly there are maps that with any class I think “I ain’t doing that place again.” and I just craft my way directly to competitiveness for the next map that I like.

Its just terrible having all these options on how to play, ya know?

I actually would have expected the mats to be about x5 that. That’s kinda pathetic as a consolation prize for not getting any of the goodies.

I open black lion chests without complain since I actually use the “standard stuff” that has high chances of dropping – if I don’t get the uber-rare, no harm no foul. But mats I could farm in under 10 minutes? That is pretty underwhelming…

Your plan is 100% absolutely wrong.

If you are farming coin to buy mats, getting more coin will just make the mats MORE EXPENSIVE. If you want the mats price to come down you need less coin entering the system and/or more mats. If, for example, events dropped slightly less coin and one fine (blue) mat appropriate to the event level, you’d see mat prices fall, both because there’d be less coin around to drive the prices and more goods filling demands.

Spend your time farming gold and you’d better expect materials harvesters to farm YOU. Simple as that.

For me it just means I’ll hoard 500 of everything before putting the excess up on the TP. One more harvester taken out of the supply loop for a month or two per item.

I’d by extension packs to the collections tab – a pack that lets me store all currency tokens (dungeons, fractals, WvW tokens). A pack that added a row for all liquid karma. And oh my goodness a pack that offered storage of intermediate crafting components like embellished jewels and dowels. I’d buy that in a HEARTBEAT. Or one that added crests and seals spaces to the gemstones section. I wouldn’t mind a Sigils and Runes collection tab either. Plenty of opportunities to sell me more bank space in discrete, mono-purpose blocks.

I’z more packrat than a skrit.

Ended up buying a ‘The Bard’ because it was cheap.

Now staring at the heaps of T6 dust required for the Gift of the Minstrel in mild horror.

The exotic jewelry is account bound/soulbound on equip.

I’ve used my main karma guzzler character (necklace with kharmic infusion) to stuff my bank with exotic jewelry then equipped to other alts.

I’m a bit over 1/3 the way to having enough Charged Lodestones to make Infinite Light.

I’m not particularly fond of the idea of the effort to get them increasing .

Iures.2894:

Well, you have a 1/25 chance of getting a duplicate color. Nothing really strange about that. What’s the issue?

People are funny animals.

Ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 10.
After noting their answer, immediately ask them to do it again.
If people picked numbers randomly you’d expect them to pick the same number again one time in ten… I promise the number of folks that’ll give you the same number twice in a row is a LOT lower than 1 in 10.

People strangely think “random” means “evenly distributed”.

It doesn’t.

(there’s great party trick based on that used in forensic accounting …)

Kruhljak.2705:

I do think it might have helped if they’d have provided a palette of all the possible colors, denoting the new ones from the old ones, on either a tooltip flyout or a “product” page for the dye packs in the gem store.

Well, if you are curious to see the new colors, you can open the Trading Post and do a search for dyes, then sort by price. The 12 new ones have very distinctive icons and tend to fall on the first two pages if you sort price from highest to lowest (some are more then Abyss, none are less than 5g last I looked). From the TP screen you can preview them to really see if they do much for you.

Since Evon Gnashblade (or whatever, the head of the BLTC) acts as a vendor and only opens the menu if you have a ticket, I suspect they’ll just leave him and that functionality in place.

I’m likely going to pick up the Braham Shield for a character with a matching theme, but I couldn’t find a good use for the other three. They’re neat, just not for me.

The pricing on them seemed fine.

You can’t sell The Bard for 3/4 the cost of Dusk . I know, because I just bought a The Bard for 42 gold.

Planning to just sit on it and nibble away at the tier 6 mats I still need by harvesting them. My gold income is all directed at Infinite Light.

If they revamp the Minstrel and I like it, maybe I’ll actually complete the project.
If they revamp the Minstrel and I do not like it, maybe I’ll sell it for a profit as the price skyrockets.
If they do a scavenger hunt I’ll get a different precursor and perhaps dump this one on the auction hall at a loss -shrug-.

cesmode.4257:

This is kind of cheap.

125 gems is kind of cheap for a lesson in random result tables: they’re random and they don’t give a gob of snot what results you’ve had previously.

Did you learn the lesson?

Air.3154:

You like to get scammed i guess then. :P

I guess you have no idea how to set reasonable expectations then.

If you buy a wad of keys/chests expecting ANYTHING beyond some boosts, a few tonics, and maybe some guild rep discoveries and loose pocket change from coin bags you are doing it WRONG. All the super shiny, super RARE table entries are exactly that: rare.

Disappointment is the distance between poor expectations and reality. Reality ain’t gonna change for you, so set your sights accordingly.

There are grey-ish shades in BOTH the pools of 25 colors. The flame packs in particular include “ash” colors in the theme, right up to an including some of the 6 new colors in the flames sets being greyish and ashen.

I usually (but not always – it is “random” not “evenly distributed”) get a new color out of each bundle of 5 I’ve bought. But 3 isolated attempts? You shouldn’t be expecting anything specific from a sample size that small.

I generally use a single invisible bag in the last slot on each character, and my characters that haul around mini’s just store them in that invisible bag so they don’t get sent to the vault every time I click deposit collectibles. After that it’s pretty easy to keep a mini out while you traipse around a zone .

munkiman.3068:

Gold is worthless outside of the game, which makes all these other currencies even more worthless, since they have next to no gold value.

Whereas I find gold is worthless IN the game because it can’t buy me Crucible of Eternity armor skins (appearance I desire) and its only tangentially related to me gaining Ascended level stats (all hail the laurel, king of currencies).

Fractals could produce absolutely zero gold and I’d still be doing them over the chore that is CoF 1 – they are more diverse and where the real terminal stat rewards are at.

Multiple currencies are the walls that keep mistakes like CoF 1 from corrupting ALL the mechanisms of advancement.

I may not have a legendary, but I do have 6/6 ascended on my main .

People buy ectos?

I generally just farm up my own, neither buying nor selling. I figure the rate I can do so is a pretty good fit to the rate I’m supposed to be getting them. For a while that rate was punishingly low, but since I shook off the permanent DR on world drops and have been able to run Maw and Fire Elemental once a day pretty much at my leisure, I’ve had enough ecto in my vault to keep me largely content that I’m moving toward my goals. My main has Ascended in all 6 slots that can be Ascended. Now I’m back to working towards Infinite Light – 75 Lodestones out of 250 so far.

Legendary weapons can go suck eggs until they provide a non-random, non-PvP (aka the trading post) way of acquiring a precursor. I’m not farming my brains out to hand the money over to another player – I’d pay 500g to a vendor without hesitation, but I’m not pumping that money into the TP churn. I’ve done my share of CoF 1 runs and they just aren’t that interesting. I find dinking around with my lower level alts for about an hour each day to get a laurel far more entertaining and ultimately more rewarding in terms of game-mechanical advantage.

I’m up to 12 keys. No ticket but still largely happy with the stuff I did get.

They are going to vary over time .

Depends mostly on if someone makes an awesome build out of them. Bucket of hit points (high vitality) isn’t terribly interesting to me…

Nihilus.3015:

Limited items need to be put into the Gem Store like the Christmas weapons instead of being put into the Black Lion Chest, if a weapon set were staying forever then put it in the BLC. I want the Fused Hammer so bad, I’d gladly pay 800 gems for a limited time weapon then gamble with the BLC.

When your willing to pay 4,000 then you’ll be making an offer somewhat similar to what they’re getting for the molten skins.

We’ve got some comparitively new and cheap skins in the store now. Buy one and make your case in terms they’ll listen to…

Oh good, I now to wait a few days before giving ANet more cash to ocnvert to gems.

KyoHanakaze.8145:

150 for a core, 300 for a lodestone. I’d do it.

Which is pretty much a sure sign that your coversion rate is low.

Try 250 for a core, and no option for a lode (go promote some cores at your own expense basically). Still so eager? Because you’d still be getting them faster than farming them in many cases.

Well, on the bright side Mjolnir does come with remarkable exclusivity. I’ve never seen one in person.

I’m working on Infinite Light (up to 56 Lodestones, the rest is trivial). I’ve only seen it in person maybe twice (not counting those &Y*#$@ing harpies ).

Those ‘similarly dificult’ legendaries swarm in Lion’s Arch like flies. You can’t swing a dead charr without shaving it’s whiskers off on somebody’s legendary greatsword.

Other than buying with a buy offer rather than clicking ‘buy now’, setting your expections when pricing it for resale relative to how fast you want/expect it to be bought, and recognizing the flipping is a FIERCELY competitive activity with many, many established combatants… you’ve got the jist of it already.

While I occasionally lose a 10$ bill in the seats of my car, on the whole I try not to be so flippant with my money.

Still, sound’s like a pretty cheap lesson in being more aware.

Could be you’re hunting int he wrong places – most critters seem to have 2 fine mats they can drop (critters that drop bags having a wider possible range but also way lower amounts of any particular material).

Were you hunting mobs that actually dop bones? Cause grawl and snow trolls don’t fit that description in my experience. Grawls drop bags and totems. Trolls I know far better for blood than bones.

John Smith.4610:

gaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnssssssssssssss

Ok, that made me laugh.

John Smith.4610:

Economists neither sleep nor leave, I was never gone, I just require interesting posts

I don’t find “blatantly erronious” to be part of the “interesting” set myself, but tastes vary.

There is nothing skillful about fighting champions when there are 10+ players present.

They are just an ugly sack of HP with Devs endlessly repeating the punchline to possibly the game’s most moronic joke: “but you always get at least a blue drop…”

I’m not there for a 66c piece of JUNK at the end of a 2 minute-kill. I’m there hunting t5 and t6 mats that drop off the mobs that die at virutally the speed they hit draw distance. -pant-froth-rage-.

Fortunately if you are out there at off hours you can get in to good zerg balls that are just a hair too small to trigger Champions. The many, many veterans you get instead are actually sort of an entertaining split between delay of game/loss of drops and tactical puzzle how to carve out their gizzards efficiently and artfully.

4g per hour is not overly hard if the sole function of that time is ‘make moar goldz’. Even after the nerf the Pen/shelt loop with an occasional break for Plinx (and sanity) will turn that easy if you vendor and TP the drops ruthlessly.

Add in that CoF 1 really is the inflationary pit/blight/engine people say it is. Two Omnomberry Bars and a good team and 6 gold an hour is pretty plausible.

So 800 gems to make a new character is out. Why?
Saving the name?
Want to sidestep leveling the new character to 80?
Want to not go through the process of gearing them up again?

Basically making a race swap available is a way of NOT playing the game. By-passing a few hundred hours on your way to a goal might have a reasonable gem cost, but it’s going to be one based on you shortening your involvement with the game by several months and the corresponding loss of opportunities to sell gems to you over that period.

Would you still be interested for say… 2000 gems per swap?

Maybe a new build has been popularized?

In any event they’re not hard to get: 42k kharma. Throw in a black lion kit if you want to pop them out for sale.

lordkrall.7241:

Fiontar.4695:

Yet another potentially huge seller squashed by insanely high pricing. They would probably have sold 100X as many at a third the price. Yep, they sure know what they are doing here at the Gem Store…

And yet there are already quite a few people that have bought several of them for their characters. So clearly it does sell quite a bit, even at the “insanely high pricing”.

Four of them, thanks.
Pretty much the only thing stopping me from outfiting more of my stable of 14 characters is that they might come up with different themed ones later, and I’d rather buy, say, 4 ice-theme picks when they come out rather than 8 fire-themed picks right now.

munkiman.3068:

I agree account bound would have made sense… and i’m certain they’d see at least a slight increase in sales doing it that way.

Given that I bought four, and could likely break down and get another 2-4 before they’re gone, I’m just as certain that setting them up as “one per acount and done forever more” would NOT increase the sales.

Yes, I’m the bad man who keeps encouraging them to do these things, but on the other hand I’m also the guy that actually proved willing to kick in 40$ to further development in exchange for a shiney (x4). Is it the best deal for players possible? No. But its a deal I find reasonable and support.

Torqueblue.1945:

It really is Easy. Not Fast, but easy…once you understand the mechanics of Alpha that is. I’ve ran the dungeon quite a bit ,but the main problem is finding a decent group of players who won’t call it quites after the first wipe with Alpha.

…wipe on Alpha.

Wipe. On. Alpha.

Wait a minute, did you say people “wipe on Alpha”?

I didn’t think that was a valid construction of the English language.

Alpha’s a punk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so much as downed by Alpha.

I’m generally in there because I think the armor sets look awesome (and charged cores do not suck) rather than farming gold, but CoE 1 is as much of a cakewalk as CoF 1.

A: I think the gems:gold exchange spikes tell us more than enough about which items prompted more total spending.

TooBz.3065:

People would say it’s pay to win (and it probably is); however, the same people who will complain that it’s ptw are the same ones who argue that ascended gear isn’t needed and can be ignored.

I was going to refute that, but then I realized that any Dev that accidentaly tried to injest such and absurd statement would just spit it out, so nevermind.

munkiman.3068:

There is one specific thing i’d like to see changed with the TP, that is selling to a buy order.

Is what you said, but what I read was…

yet another player:

There is one specific thing i’d like to see changed, that is for a gold sink that actually works and affects me to be closed.

You would? Really? How shocking. Sorry, did I say shocking? I meant provincial. What an incredibly bad idea for the management of this game. Very nearly ANY change that puts more coin into your hands (rather than more tradable goods) is just throwing another log on the inflation bonfire. You wouldn’t end up any richer for it, you’d just ratchet up the TP prices that much further.

Pirlipat.2479:

Uhm, in a way it does. For example when your inventory is full and you need room to pick up new items and there is no vendor near the place you are.

It is possible to, you know, discard things. Without taking any loss whatsoever .

I have a whole list of items I know can only be put on the TP at a loss (and a whole bunch of them are 25c…). I just drop them off at the NPC vendors whenever I wander by.

etiolate.9185:

I hate the online gambling aspect of these skins. I don’t buy black lion keys due to it. I would be far more likely to buy the skins if they were available directly via a set price on the gem store.

Then I hope you like looking at other people’s whistfully, because you are never going to have one.

Straight up question – would you pay 4000 gems for one?

(that hugely lowballing the cost assuming they’re as common as 1-in-50 in the boxes…)

Actually John Smith mentioned that a BUG in the plotting software. If you look back at the graph a day or two later that region will be replaced with a correct trace of fluctuations over that period.

Randulf.7614:

Sadly the TP is being manipulated on some of them. The number available has been the same on one for 2 days, yet the price creeps up 1g a day..

Thinking that first-day prices of an item with an unknown rarity were going to be stable is a bit… ‘wishful thinking’ I guess. The prices are moving towards what they should be for something so hard to get. Figure the gold cost for buying 500 gems vs. opening a pack of 5 and getting one of the new ones at all, much less the exact one you wanted… yeah. Noticiably undervalued the first day.

Chasind.3128:

the new dye colors look exactly like the old dyes…………. no reason for me to buy it…
waiting for transmutation sale so I can buy them with my hard earned ingame gold >:’3

If you can’t tell them apart I pity you. They are a bit like the previously existing color Illumination – dyes are actualy made up of (at least) two colors – a main hue and an undershade. Only a few of the normal set have a high enough contrast between them that you can see the effects as certain armor details seriously pop.

All of the new set have this effect.

lordkrall.7241:

Of course, but stating they are “outrageously rare” would be just as incorrect. Another thing to keep in mind is that I didn’t state it as a fact, I said SEEMS, which implies not knowing but thinking.

Or in a population of millions, today you got to be outrageously lucky .
I dont’ think they are as rare as fused weapon tickets, but I’m not ready to base my wild guesses solely on the 5 that I bought and opened either.

I’ll be surprised if there ARE new tiers of metal. I’d much rather they produced new 1-80 campaigns than bump the level cap.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I didn’t know that Mjolnir was required to craft.

There’s not much leverage to be gained there- the game is not required to play. For people who put aesthetics on par with or ahead of in-game power, its as important as geting your exotics, tuning you runes, and working up those Ascended.

I’m up to 56 out of the 250 charged cores I’d like to have. Would I like them to be a little easier to come by? Sure – that would make my farming them a little less soul crushing and it would bring the price down a little. Maybe it would make Infinite Light a little more common about town, but I want it because it’ll go with my look, not because it’ll set me apart.

I thought that the Orrian Boxes were a good step forward. Again the conversion rate is brutal (I just opened 100 in a batch and got 4 lodestones, none of them charged), but still appreciated over the previous condition.

So while I’m not on board with “FIX IT!” I wouldn’t mind a very small amount of “take pity on those of us who don’t grind COF 1 relentlessly”

I didn’t even have to click on it to KNOW this thread’s actual title was “Gem prices should be more favorable to me”.

Of the $120 of gems I’ve bought since the pickaxes came out, I’ve converted about $72 of it to gold. If the $ to gold ratio continues to rise, I’ll buy some more, and it’ll go back down. If it starts falling now, I probably won’t chip in more money to support this game’s developement again for a while.

You’ll have your cheaper gems again some day, but right now its time for the conversion rate to favor people with real disposable income who don’t feel like running COF 1 like an automaton.

Is this conversation tied to the full moon or somthing?

Charged lodestones are brutal to acquire. We tread this ground literally once a month. They came down quite a bit when the Orrian Jewelry boxes came out, and that’s about all that has changed in the landscape.