Guild Wars 2

The new guild skins are not particularly single-check RNG.

How did you get x82 Mystery tonics? I thought they always dropped in lots of 3?

ZieBot.9832:

about 150 chests here. sold my dusk to buy gems… fml

Actually, I was kinda wondering how people were financing some of these triple digit key-buys. My paltry 6 were from WvW borderland map completions. I’m up to 58g in my bank, but I’m working on the Golden title, so I won’t be doing any big spending for a long while… If I liked the skins I might buy some gems for laughs, but none of my characters are fire-themed. Maybe next wave.

You know you’ve played Guardian too long when you forget that to most MMO players AH means “Auction House”…

Yezz.

Its the same as dumping any 4 higher level mixed-type rares in: it has around a 20% chance of promoting to a random exotic, and all of the precursors are on the exotic drop table.

“Successful” or not, this thread did make me hungry .

Kurow.6973:

I have a feeling that they’d make a lot more money if these skins were straight up purchasable with gems like the wintersday skins were, especially considering these look better in the eyes of most people.

You think that? You really think that?

You think the people who have the real and complete data from previous skin releases, the people whose not theoretical livelyhood is on the line, the people who have undoubtedly spent dozens if not hundreds of man-hours considering alternative release schemes, the people who have to make the choice of how to proceed just… screwed up?

I don’t have the slightest doubt that doing it this way nets them more money, both this quarter and over the life of the game.

Your comparisons are hilarious, since you seem to have discarded duration and up-cycle.

Always on. Always on if you are stunned. Always on if you are out of range of the enemy. Always on if you need to keep your virtues ready or have already cashed them out.

BIG difference from any of those yeah maybe conditionally sure if things are going right, not so sure when the rotary occelator is flinging effluvium alternatives you’re holding up.

It could be bigger. 100 would be nice simply as a human-readable number. Gaining a 150% or larger buff in a single itteration? Yeah, no.

Gasoline.2570:

At least it would do something, hopefully make anet see.

See what? That the MMO business is stupid to be involved in because people who have to pay nothing after the intial buy-in still caterwaul relentlessly about how unfair it all is? They have the data from past releases of similar content, and this is the model they came up with for this attempt. If this isn’t the way to extract the most value out of the effort, the next time around we’ll see something else.

Its not that I’m a fan of doing it this way, but I am a fan of recognizing whose neck is on the chopping block. The risks are theirs to take, not ours.

StormageddonBK.9842:

Maybe some anti-gambling Ministers of Parliament could be made aware of this…

Out of curiousity, what’s your endgame on this? It won’t change the way the game opperates. At most you might get the game blocked in your region, and then nobody gets to play. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…

6 chests and no ticket. 7, I guess, since one had another key in it.

Thou shalt not challenge that all non-humans exist in a state of mono-culture.

Complexity scares people.

Weindrasi.3805:

Ok…. I have a SERIOUS problem with this. WHY IS ROX WEARING MASCARA?

Two of the cats I deal with in my close circle of friends have black rings around their eyes like that – one’s a savanna, the other is a random mishmash house-cat.

They do come like that in nature, honest. It’s probably a good adaptation – cuts down glare, important to animals with pretty excellent low-light sensitivity.

John Smith.4610:

Statistically inaccurate

Surveying forums leads to massive biases including Sample Bias and Response Bias. In this case there are at least 3 other biases not being accounted for off the top of my head.

They still reperesent a better sense of the environment than we might have otherwise. Much like ecto-rates, you don’t have to have flawless accuracy to have learned something about the proposition.

From reading the reports, biased or not, I feel pretty comfortable estimating that the chance of getting a molten weapon ticket is less than 1 in two boxes…

and less than 1 in five boxes…

or less than 1 in twenty…

Heck. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s less than 1 in 90 boxes based on biased observation.

None of which would have been appearant from the patch notes alone.

Shufflepants.9785:

Have you made any effort in to calculating how much money you make over just selling the greens to vendor/TP directly instead of what you’re doing now?

No, but ultimately I don’t have to. People would not be buying greens at the prices they do pay unless in the long run doing the processing I describe pays off favorably. A number of this game’s biggest money making mechanisms are hidden behind scale:

Buying runes to toss in the MF may look like a losing proposition across 40 of them. But across 4,000 of them steady gains become more appearant. Across 40,000 runes you’re in great shape. I’m here for the long haul, so my strategies are based on a willingness to brave the RNG personally rather than selling the risk to others who will turn that profit on it because they operate at a larger scale by several orders of magintude.

My break points are based on greens at all levels give up their sigils/runes uniformly. Low coin value ones are great for stripping for those parts. The 70-79 I sell simply because I like to keep a small trickle of coin flowing in to cover incidentals like way points (though in truth vendoring blues is probably the larger contributor to daily operating expenses). My experience is the Mystic Forge promotes greens to yellows MUCH more consistently when all 4 are level 80, so those I reserve for that purpose. And again I always break the resulting level 80 rares for ectos myself rather than trying to sell the risk to others. My ecto return rates over the long haul are much higher than many of those that people report, so I’d rather take the chance myself. Especially as breaking rares often results in yellow sigils/runes which I can fold back into my promotion efforts there.

If you believe the ticket rate is as high as 1 in 100 (which I’m leaning towards from aggregating massive sample failures and small sample sucesses reported here), 100 attempts is still only about a 64% chance of success. Or put another way, two out of three people who do what you did got a ticket – you just happen to be the 3rd person in that scenario.

Elentari.9156:

I agree that participating in the gamble is completely a personal choice, but I have to say that seeing items being locked behind a Pay-to-Play Lottery leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Are you one of the people with bugged accounts that can’t buy gems with gold? If not its also a play-to-play situation.

I rather liked the analogy somebody made that it’s like buying sneakers and putting your name in a drawing (though in the US, companies aren’t allowed to force you to buy things to enter a drawing, so it’s not quite accurate) — the problem is that right now, the things that drop the most frequently from the chests are completely worthless, so it’s like buying a shoebox that may or may not have shoes in them for a chance at a car. Perhaps the drop-table on the chests could be tweaked to make them have better value, or the BL special items could be improved to be more helpful (the fact that the mining picks only stack to 25 while the normal ones stack to 100 is a huge strike against them).

You have some pretty high standards then for what a key should give – the boosts always have a function. The guild rep items are nice (moreso in small guilds). The bags of siler are erratic but can pay out handsomely. Armor repair canisters and revive orbs are both handy in deep fractal runs…

I had 6 keys laying around from completing WvW borderlands map completion (I seem to always get them there) and decided to use them just to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t get anything exotic, but I restocked a number of basic box-based supplies. I’ve used probably 40-50 keys over the life of my account. My expectations are well tuned towards the reality of the rewards table.

I’d perhaps like to see second chance recepies like we saw back around Mad King’s Day, but I won’t run around shrieking “shady business practices!” if they don’t. At worst, in a few months it’ll be just like seeing someone with a scythe skin on their staff: mildy unussual and interesting, but hardly the focal point of ongoing game-play.

Also, in regards to greens, my own personal policy is:

Level 80: store until they can be dumpped into mystic forge for promotion to rares (for ecto cracking).
Level 70-79: vendor.
Level 1-69: crack with master kits for sigils/runes. Combine sigils/runes in mystic forge as possible.

It takes a while, but you only need 1-2 superior runes of Divintiy out of the forge to pay back in full a LOT of rune combines. It also means that on “Mystic forgemaster” dailies, I just stroll by the bank and grab a few sets fo runes to process and then I’ve checked that one off. Easy XP on my lower level alts.

That’s just the beginning of what to exclude from TP dumping. There are quite few gathered resources that now sell at a loss on the TP. Factoring in opportunity costs of time and overhead for harvesting tools, some are at at a significant loss.

And once you get used to the ebb and flow, there are many, MANY things you can set at (well) above the lowest seller price and still move your product in under 24 hours. I recomend clicking “buy more” for each item you want to sell so you can read out the for sale offers – look not for the lowest price but the inevitable hump in sale offers and either join (for high volume items) or minutely undercut the hump. The lowest price offered for sale at this very instant is often irrelevant.

I hope its like how I envision the precursor scavenger hunt – that completing every single achievment for the Frost & Flame arc grants a once-per-account molten weapon ticket.

I’m waiting for the explosive screams of rage when its revealed that completing all achievments related to frost & flame after all 4 parts are released will award a once-per-account molten weapon ticket.

I simply cannot believe the “Boo-hoo, this is not achievable from in-game” going around here. You can buy gems with in-game gold. You buy the keys with gems…

I just saw someone with “the emperor” title today. 644g blown on a title.

You may not get it TODAY but if these skins are so amazing that you want them to be your #1 priority, you’ll get them eventually, and it won’t require contributing to the upkeep of the game (via RMT). Come on guys, this thread is in the same dang forum the lords of the universe brag about making 10-30g per hour. That’s gonna add up to quite a few sets of 5 keys over the next few months… If you want them.

My pleasure .

I always try to slap some money in the hands of people who entertain me. I had a peice of art I’d downloaded and used for my desktop for a while. I found the artist at a convention and bought some of his prints and told hem I wanted to make sure he got some of my cash because I’d used his work as my desktop. …He seemed startled.

Since I usually buy keys for BL-chests only when I want to restock my boosts, I’m generally satisfied after 5-10 boxes. I also like the guild rep items you can get. Anything beyond that is usually a startling surprise.

I keep the Gem store on a steady diet of about 25$ every other month (my equivalent of paying a monthly fee for a game I like). Things like new box goodies may change the precise way I spend those gems, but they don’t do much to my overall budget.

Disapointment = the distance between faulty expectations and reality.

(I looked at the fusion weapons… while well done, there are none that I really need to enhance the look/theme of any of my current characters. Firey weapons aren’t exactly a novel addtion to the game…)

When it gets down to 8g (buy offer that succeeds, not sell offer) , I’ll probably buy one. If you want more than that for yours, you’re looking for someone else to be your customer.They are nice, but I’ve seen them in the hands of Guards and they look so-so with their skills, and the mis-aligned FX makes them look like kitten-litter-lumps when a necro uses them (though that may be fixed eventually).

Your understanding of the word “shafting” is very different from mine…

I beleve the satchels use the chest piece, not the shoulders?

I like Volcanus, but there’s no class that natively has (red) fire effects when using a 2H sword. If I could make a more fire themed warrior-type I’d be all over that too.

I explored mystic coins with about $40 real money. I taught me a lot about how sell orders does not equal supply.

John Smith.4610:

Let’s calm down a bit, this isn’t getting us far. Instead let me ask this.
Here are the assumptions that I’m operating under for this question:
1. You feel that PvE and TP have difference levels of gold earning
2. You feel that PvE and TP should have the same level of gold earning

What would be your plan for implementing a reward system that would achieve what you desire, given the constraint that you may not get rid of the trading post?

I realized that when I read this, I automatically reformated it in my brain before answering it, and that I should probably share that process a little.

The question is really asked from inside the trading post looking out, by a hypothetical person who thinks in terms of gold earning as BEING the the game. I suggest that for people who like staying out in the virtual sun and stabbing things to death to take their loots, “gold earning” is not the end-all be-all of the game in the first place.

1. I feel that PvE and TP have different levels of gold earning – is True

But.

2. I feel that PvE and TP should have the same level of gold earning – is False

What I actually want is~

2. I feel that time spent in PvE and TP should have the similar rates of advancement towards endgame goals.

Most of these goals are cosmetic, so lets look at some of them.

Suppose I want Final Rest for my character – a rare drop skin. Even with timers to make it easier to only hunt the Shadow Beheamoth in periods when it’s likely to spawn and the explosion of Final Rest’s TP price due to speculation, it is still vastly easier to buy it than to acquire it from its one and only drop table. The drop rate revealed by one of your fellow Devs was nothing short of soul crushing for people who would like to earn one through sword swinging rather than coin purse swinging.

Suppose I want Infinite Light – a rare crafted skin. I AM the guy that goes out and farms high-level sparks/air elementals for hours at a time trying to lure Charged Cores out of the RNG. I run CoE when my dungeon-running friends are on. I do fractals all the time. In other words, I do what I’m supposed to (maximizing chances) to actually introduce charged cores/lodestones into the environment. And even with my ‘harvester-only’ relationship with the market as a money-making tool it is still roughly 2x faster for me to buy charged bits than to get them to drop (I have over 50 lodestones now, about 1/3 of them from drops).

Suppose I want a Legendary – the end product of a whole epic journey showing your mastery of all facets of the game (or some similar bit of grotesque over-hype by your director). I’m gathering T6 mats by hand because I’m in no great rush, but anyone here will tell us both that I should just make gold (run the hell out of CoF or AC or play the market) and buy them if time is at all a factor.

So, when I made my suggestions, most of them related to “the way we get paid” for Adventuring. Adventuring for coin is a sucker’s bet all it does is fatten you up to get fleeced at market. I want better chances to make progress towards my goals, not to gain the medium that I then MUST take to the market to move forward.

Until recently, once you turned 80, anything you might want to do, you can do faster by amassing gold, and that in turn incentivized amassing it quickly. I really do appreciate the introduction of the ascended gear tier, as outside of the triforge amulet it actually does decouple an endgame goal from Gold Acquisition. While I’m not pushing hard in fractals beyond the teens I can appreciate there are skins unique to those who do WHICH CANNOT BE BOUGHT. While I’m not in a big guild I can aprove of new guild weapon skins that reflect (and display) that sort of focus in someone’s play and cannot be bought. And eventually, as more of these endgame rewards move out of the trade post and demand getting a bit more virtual sun, I’ll even find strictly coin-based rewards like cultural armor a bit more charming.

But daaaayaam, I hope you guys re-work legendary acquistion for armor slots into something that can’t be massively side-stepped by a wad of gold.

John Smith.4610:

I tried it with larger time periods, but the quantities at each price point needed to be accounted for in a moving subtraction, it would take more time than I currently have.

Not surprising or even disapointing. Just looking at the data and pondering the meaning that can be derived.

Redscope.6215:

Another reason why putting out tradeable loot specific information ahead of time has great potential to damage the market.

I’m going to take slight umberage with your use of the word ‘damage’ in this context. Advance information causes ‘change’. If the market has a hit point bar, that bar is labeled “user confidence” and I’d argue damage is done to that in two primary ways: introducing large changes too often and failing to follow through on announced changes.

Telling us in advance causes change, and a little change keeps market use interesting and dynamic. Telling us and then not actually delivering on at least the letter and preferably the spirit too? That’s pretty ugly for any and every facet of the game. On the whole as consumers of entertainment we DEMAND the game change, and change constantly. Not providing change would actualy be a fatal deathblow.

Just think how practiced John Smith is going to be in strategically stirring things up 2 years from now .

John Smith.4610:

As a quick aside I ran the numbers by day on the maximum and minimum prices ectos sold are per day for the first two weeks or so of the month. Remember that this is the theoretical MAXIMUM profit percentage one could make at the tipping points, not including the tiny quantities as the maximum prices and a million other things:
Day MaxGain
1 13.03%
2 11.95%
3 13.87%
4 9.30%
5 10.98%
6 10.00%
7 11.21%
8 10.51%
9 11.28%
10 10.24%
11 6.94%
12 9.09%
13 9.87%
14 11.22%

You’ll notice that it never break 15%

Nice. More info always welcome. I take this as solid evidence that to profit off ectos you need an attention span longer than that of a house fly .

I imagine if you increase the span to 120 hours, with spans starting every 24 hours you’ll see a few 5-day periods were tremendous profit could be made – though I’d call that ‘investment’ rather than ‘manipulation’ .

And while I would prefer to make adventuring more rewarding, if balancing the rates of progress is a real goal, there is another way to curtail TP gains…

Anything purchased from the TP becomes account bound:

You can buy it to use it.
You can buy it to process it (selling the newly created item if you like).
You can buy it to eliminate a rival seller’s offering to maintain your desired price point.

You CANNOT buy it to re-sell it.

Again, not my first choice here, as this market works better than most I’ve seen in MMOs, but in the infinite-inflation-verse that City of Heros degenerated into, something like this would have been a godsend.

You don’t have enough coin on hand to pay the listing fee?

Ok… since my ussual concerns are about the binary nature of content gating I’ll just throw out there what I really want…

I would like to recieve 1 guild commendation for every 1,000 influence I earn for a guild, no matter how large or small.

My rate of acqusition can be appaling compared to the members of bigger guilds, but I’d like to be in the running, that’s all.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

…rock star?

Also, judging by the norn cultural set, that would be heavy armor.

You are hereby granted 1 cool point. .

I’ll double check, but I thought it looked medium .

What class wears medium armor and can go Mace/Shield?

I’m slightly jealous.

The politically correct term is “pack rat”

(I am so a pack rat, virtual and in real life)

PS. ANet, its obvious the bank UI is designed for up to 10 tabs… what hoop do you want us to jump through to unlock those last 2?

I think after being shown 150,000+ ectos change hands daily, in ghost-goo we can trust.

Ooshi.8607:

Eagerly anticipating the manifesto for this revolution!

“I swung my sword. I swung my sword again. Hey, I got something of value for it instead of more mudflating coin!”

Ooshi.8607:

You are only at a disadvantage if your principal goal in GW2 is to maximize your potential gold/hour ratio.
I could spend 100% of my game time TPing stuff and make loads of shinies, but what would be the purpose?

My pricinciple goal is to build certain specific skins. Since all skins except fractal weapons can be BOUGHT OUTRIGHT, the disparity I want to address is that adventuring is slower that (successful) trading in advancing towards those skins.

tl:dr – DON’T give us more gold for adventuring – it’ll just get stripped off via the TP that much faster . Give us more worth for adventuring – then we can actually make the things we’re working towards with less reliance on the TP to offset the shear monotony of the grind.

John Smith.4610:

Let’s calm down a bit, this isn’t getting us far. Instead let me ask this.
Here are the assumptions that I’m operating under for this question:
1. You feel that PvE and TP have difference levels of gold earning
2. You feel that PvE and TP should have the same level of gold earning

What would be your plan for implementing a reward system that would achieve what you desire, given the constraint that you may not get rid of the trading post?

In some respects we saw it, and now ANet is backpedaling away from it furiously – the Mega-Boss chests made it possible to advance towards endgame goals (which generally require hundreds of ectos) steadily and reliably by swinging your weapon instead of swinging your coin purse. The anger I have with the change to the rare-or-better reward becoming once per event per day per account is that those of us who had invested time in gathering XP (rolling and leveling alts) are being cut off from the rewards of doing so, while the people who invest time in amassing gold seem to be the chosen ones who must never be ‘shocked’ or impeded in any lasting way.

The obvious means of making the Trading Post less profitable are present in most other MMOS… Limited listing time. I actually don’t support that here, because I like the generally thriving market you have here. What would be nice is if the person in charge of adventuring rewards was as commited to a satisfying Player-Adventurer experience as you have been to a satisfying Player-Merchant experience.

One oddball suggestion I’ll throw out there is Dynamic Events should not drop coin as a reward – instead they should drop blue or better crafting materials of a tier comperable to the level of the DE. Reduce the amount of coin comming into the game while increasing the VALUE of an adventuring player’s holdings. Reduce mudflation and increase the worth of the economy as a whole.

Dungeon rewards might get a similar look-see to see if there is a way to slightly reduce direct coin (and the inflation it promotes) and replace that with a higher rate of acquiring valauble goods. Peple run dungeons for cores as much as they do coin. Make the last boss drop 1 core per player automatically, and halve the last boss’ coin rewards or something similar. In that example you make progress towards cosmetic goals more accessible doubly so – by making the lodestone gathering less onerous and slightly down-scaling one of the biggest raw money-gathering tools makes all money a little more useful.

First, thanks for trying to alleviate some of my concerns.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I’m pretty sure if we had ascended weapons, there would be a ton of ways to get them.

There are multiple ways to get ascended accessories, but with 40 laurel vs 12 guild tokens, the time of players in big guilds is considered about five times more valuable than that that of players in small guilds. Extending that trend to other slots is kinda discouraging.

I am glad its not a binary proposition like many MMOs (if you dont’ raid, you can NEVER get the top tier gear) but it’s still a bit frustrating. I play, I spend money in the gem store, I hang out and socialize with folks via chat and voice, I run group content with two other much larger guilds… but if I don’t kneel, I get second class citizenship in the game as a whole?

Healix.5819:

Considering my current rate at getting more than 1 rare in a chest is about 1 in 3, farming the chests on multiple characters is still better than playing in the open world. Unless the change additionally nerfs drop rates, I really don’t see it changing anything. The dragons will still be a great way to AFK for rares, so I fully expect overflows to still be common after reset.

Since farming dragons on and off for months I think I got 2 rares total, I don’t for a MOMENT think that second rare I’ve gotten a dozen times since the change to include auto-1-rare or better came from the infinitely repeatable junk-filled-chest.

I’m pretty sure once we have the auto-rare calved off into a sperate pile, people will see that the times they get 2 rares are times the auto-rare reward happened to be 2 rares, NOT 1 auto rare + 1 OMG the chest finally spit out something more than trash…

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Ascended weapons may be available from guild content at some point in the future, but that hasn’t been decided yet.

I think I just vomited a little in my mouth.

Which is sad, because on the whole I like what the blog was trying to convey.

Tawa.3180:

All you miss out on is fancy guild tokens.

That’s funny, but not in a good way.

I just want the “pet fix” to be relevent to ALL pets.

Ranger spirits.
Necromancer minions.
Guardian spirit weapons.
Engineer turrets.
Thief guildthieves
Warrior banners. …Oh, wait, their pets are immortal. Nevermind. Good to know there is at least one set of pets not murdered by dodge-or-die…

A scavenger hunt is comming, but its a long way off. In the mean time your options are:

1. Wait. Maybe one will drop for you while you wait.

2. Putter around trying to make one yourself while you wait.

3. Hand over a buttload of gold to someone who was either luckier or braver than you who already did one of the first two choices.

On the whole I’d rather flush gold/mats down the toilet than promote the sale of precursors, but opions vary.

Under Web.2497:

A thief has literally 4 hit me = downed = dead (with boon hate that will now be 2 hits)

For those actually watching the interview, you’ll see that thieves without boon hate are going to hit a little less hard in general, and that the lynchpin of your 4-hit-and-down experience, mug, is on the chopping block.

Mesmers were not specifically mentioned as getting additional boon hate BTW.