Guild Wars 2

I’ve read the first few pages and just wanted to point out that in Chinese cosmology “wood” is an element (as is “metal”). This dragons with its supposed focus on plants appears to have this sort of archetypical elemental “wood” as as its material in the same way Jormag is tied to ice.

I also felt there was a strong tie in the language used for the corruptive adjective. “Blight” is primarily a term used for disease among plants.

Fun reading regardless. I imagine we’ll find ANet’s revealtions very much along these lines.

No, people are starting to realize how hard it is to get certain things and the prices are beginning to reflect that reality rather than changing hands in pure ignorance.

penatbater.4710:

even then, its much cheaper to just buy the stuff yourself and make it if you have the cash anyway.

If you think a few thousand dollars is dirt (and those people exist) then getting the shiney without having to slog all over Tyria for the map completion is worth it. Having to perform the Ritual of Jumping 100 times for the Gift of Battle is entirely too much of a pain in the butt when you can just buy it.

CptSlater.2457:

Official answer from Support:

“If you’ve found any Legendary items for sale on the Trading Post, this is not
functioning as designed and should not be possible. We would need more information
on what you saw, as well as screenshots to investigate this issue further.”

So it’s a bug or some error in Trading Post.

Since it would take Support about 1 second to check this (its on the bloody front page), I think we can rule out them being ignorant that this is happening.

Tallis.5607:

Ulquiorra.6903:

im pretty sure less than 5% of the population has 9500gold. to burn. and if someone did and decided to spend it all on twilight then that person should have it. the end.

9,500 gold = 9,000 dollars.

Your 5% is waaaaay too high, try 0.5%.

Actually, the coversion rate gets much better when you convert a lot of gems in one whack. I’d guess you could get 9500 gems for about 6,500 dollars, Maybe less.

And percentages of population mean nothing in this case: you only need ONE buyer and the deal is done.

papryk.6273:

I wont be surprised if they go 6g each…since the droprates are kittening low and demand is rising…

The person buying them for 6g isn’t going to sell them for less than 8g.

I think the price needs to go up and go up SHARPLY before ANet will finally step in and change the drop rates or introduce alterantive means of acquisition. Swear to all that is good and holy, if the Devs would let me use gems to buy packs of random Cores (to upgrade to lodestones at my own cost), I’d be handing ANet money hand over fist.

So in a sad way, I’m glad this is happening.

That’s not manipulation. That’s the market price finally gravitating towards a faintly accurate reflection of the difficulty of getting them.

I am out farming these a couple hourse (like 5-7) a week, and have 4 to show for it. I said a couple days ago that as a harvester doing the actual work of putting these into the system, I thought their true value is more like 6-8 gold apiece.

Looks like someone was listening.

Its not a question of “brain” its a question of scale. My income is such I wouldn’t mind slapping $200 down to buy a legendary (or some other skin), not to show off, but because I find the look aesthetically pleasing and I would enjoy my character looking “better” than before to me rather than looking “special” to everyone else. My income is insignificantly small compared to some of my relatives. I have cousins who wouldnt blink at dropping 2-3000$ on a gift for for someone who would enjoy a new digital do-hickey. They are in turn small potatoes compared to some of their friends and acquaintances. The real world cash to buy 9500 gems is NOTHING to some people. Rich kids play video games too, and I will not be surprised in the least if that Twilight sells on Christmas morning after some kid gets his stocking stuffers convereted into gems, then gold.

My guess would be they freaked out so badly over the snowflake jewelry they locked the entire tier.

Just went and checked the recipies, and I see now where things blew up.

The equivalent rare jewelry recipies already in the game take -3- embelished brilliant jewels… So if you make one and then salvage it, you lose 2 jewels. By introducing rare jewelry that takes only a single jewel, the blue materials portion of the loop becomes recursive, and the hook/setting/kit cost is a very desirable trade vs. the average of 1.5 ectos per cycle.

Changing the recipie to take 3 jewels , in accordance with the normal rules of rares would solve the problem instantly.

About a third of all my loadstones came from Clover mishaps. That’s with me dropping everything and porting down to farm in Orr every time I see the temple of Dwayna is fliped.

There is a tremendous amount of discontent with the loadstone situation in general. The Devs have been silent so far, but I beleive in my heart it has got to be a bullet point on their overview meetings agenda pretty regularly.

Ok, anyone who cares about a consistent return needs to STOP using the x10 recipe. You’re punching your mean deviation through the roof with that thing and then looking surprised that a normal result is nowhere near an average result (with pretty much only the people on the low side of the hump dropping by to record their observations).

Orichalcum earrings would be the wrong item anyway.

What I’m surprised at is I think the craft → crack with black lion kit → recover jewel → repeat loop has been in game all along. It made leveling Jewelry BY FAR the easiest craft to level since you could retrieve your blue mats by salvaging with a good kit rather than having to farm them every single time (unlike the salvage returns of any other craft). I doubt the snowflake jewel is the only way of looping this.

And it not like you’re getting free ectos – you use mats hook and setting mats (same as you could last week…) and you burn the highest tier kits which come from chests or a not exactly cheap direct purchase for gems.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

http://www.gw2armor.com/

Has every armor available and exotics too every race every gender every armor class.

Use this until a proper alternative is made. Wiki is good too.

This is NOT an acceptible substitute. Not even close.

When we can preview, we see it on races and body-builds of our choosing, using our color schemes in combinaitons we select including leaving off gloves or shoulder or boots to see the full item. Relying on third party sites to stand in for an already working functionality that has been removed is a cop-out of the worst sort.

I’m sure its a great site, but its not gonna update instantly when new gear appears, its not gonna let us rotate freely, its not gonna deliver what we already had in game until someone got twitchy that you have to click preview twice sometimes (oh noes)to clear mismatching bit maps.

Put. The Candle. Beck.

I use off-weight previewing all the time to see what Faction I want to put my alts into (check their armor appearance BEFORE choosing a faction). I also use it to check if an Item that has droped on character A is something I want to save to use on character B without going to the bank followed by having to do a bunch of logging in & out.

You created an enormous hassle to try and hide a minor bug.

Not a winning proposition.

I think its intended that you get mystic coin-based items at the rate of under 40 coins per month (30 dailies + the monthly). If you want a 100 coin item, you should only be able to get one every third month.

Buying them to exceed that rate of aquisition is strictly a luxury, with a cost based on how many people have finished everythign they use them for or given up on such specialized goals. Honestly I’m shocked they’ve priced as low as they have so far. We’re talking about a once per day per acount good, with dreadfully low surplus to utility. I probably should have bought more, because looking at them I knew I’d NEVER sell mine for less than a gold a pop.

CrakittenestAuto.9108:

I don’t quite understand why everyone hated the Halloween system. It allowed people to gamble all they liked, and then everyone else to pay in game gold for the rewards. Allowing the mini on the TP would make it easy to buy with real money. I also assume ANet made a lot of money from people trying to win big on gold.

Over halloween I bought about 10 dollars in keys, got nothing, reforged the nothing into halloween boxes and got a glowie-face shield skin. That I sold for enough money to outfit 3 characters in full exotics. Haven’t had luck like that since, but It doesn’t stop me from putting a few dollars in to the pockets of ANet every now and then. I tend to think of it as my subscription having a very flexible payment schedule .

What you WILL pay for the baby quaggan is enough to buy the gold to pay the asking price for the person who gets one randomly and chooses to sell it on the trading post.

…And let me asure you, that person is not you friend and will want a LOT of gold for their risk/good fortune.

These items are not going to be valued at 20-30 real dollars – both of them are much rarer and more highly valued by people who can afford them. Sorry, your offer is rejected as small potates. I’d guess the quaggan will settle at about $60 real dollars worth of gold (judging by the Halloween skins) and the Bank express for closer to $150-200. That may be a bit on the low side, actually.

They “screw the person before them” no more than the person before them tried to screw the buyer. If you want 20s profit from a transaction and someone else with the same goods will settle for 19.99s profit, then ther wasn’t 20s of profit there to be made (unless the demand is high enough both items get bought).

You can’t be undercut at all if you picked a price that results in your item being sold before mister 1c competition gets there to list.

Fortunately this is a trading game with an action game attached to it. No other activity is rewarded as rapidly as trading, trading, trading.

Kinda sad, really.

- goes back to farming lodestones for personal use -

MF affects drops of all rarities. Human faulty pattern recognition affects even more drops . Play long enough and its basically inevitable you’ll have a streak that catches your eye.

A mix of four 70s green, and a set of four 80s greens have very different yellow return rates in my experience. Maybe you were just flushing better loot?

I spent about 15 bucks on keys… and got a bunch of the guild influnce items. Restocked my armor repairs (use those in the fractals sometimes), got a couple boosters of types I use (Magic find, crafting XP). So overall I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

MadPig.3029:

8 hours of farming with MF gear, guild upgrade, MF cakes, and boosters, and got only 1 lodestone, and 3 rares. And that 1 lodstone droped in the first 20 minutes of spark farming. This is a waste of time ppl avoid it.

Avoid it HOW? Those lodestones on the market don’t materialize out of the void. Someone had to pry them out of a spark’s cold, dead carcass.

The price hasn’t NEARLY reached equilibium yet either. Given the pure pain in the rump value (I’ve farmed 4 so far) the asking price should be more like 6 or 8 g. And when a price should be higher, it’ll get there sooner rather than later.

ANet has GOT to do something about the availability of the yellow mats in general. Its sinking any sort of reasonable expectation of progress on the game’s Omegagrind.

Kinda have to remember that ingots are worth LESS than the ore used to make them – because by making the ingot you have squeezed the XP out of them. Pretty much ANYONE who could use an ingot also hes the recipe to make the ingot themselves if the ore had been available. The same applies right on up the production chain.

Its a big part of why mid-tier food is worthless on the market – you’ve already sucked the useful part out of the materials – the XP. Now you just have the sticky pie-like residue to offer .

Some rune effects trigger off the elite skill rather than “6” heal, but yeah. They tend to be quite precise in their trigger conditions.

I’m working on Infinite Light + Flameseeker Prophecies myself…. one blood-soaked Loadstone at a time, chiseled from the badlands of Orr with blade and banner.

If you want to see Infinite Light live… go hunt harpies. Tragically, every birdbrain on Tyria has one. Could I kill say… 10,000 of those instead? It would be easier

snicker If anyone sells Infinite Light for less than 800 gold, they’re taking a huge loss just on the loadstones, much less the orichalcum blades and skill points invested to make one.

The offers up on the TP are absurdly low. Bad comedy absurdly low.

Seriously? What do you think? You accepted the deal that was available.

Just got a lovely little run of 6 ectos from cracking three yellows I crafted, with those 6 ectos becoming 3 clovers, a loadstone, and 2 rounds of perfectly useful piles of t6 mats.

23 clovers so far, just kinda plodding along.

Now that I am in on the idea of crafting yellows for ectos, a couple of my crafters are comming along nicely also extracting crafting/adventure xp from the heaps of T5 mats I’ve been hanging on to all this time. 4 crafts mastered, no crafts left lower than 150. And I have about 8 of the yellow dowels left from my weaponsmith reaching 400 so my huntsman should see some explosive leveling once she reaches 375.

The packs are not nearly good enough to compete with gem->gold->unidentified dyes yet. When the price of unidentified dye gets over 40s, maybe. And maybe not even then. The packs really aren’t a good deal.

I am collecting all the colors on a single main. I just open every unidentified I get, and keep duplicates until I can pump 4 of the same tier through the Mystic Forge. Progress is slow now that I have 158 commons, 60-odd uncommons and 30 of the rares, but I’m still creeping forward.

For a while I did sweep the TP regularly searching for dye and sorting by price to pick up the cheapest ones. Some to fill in gaps in my collect, some to dump in the MF. When the lowest price for an identified dye is less than 1/4 the price for an unidentified, there’s potential savings to be reaped.

By the way… You all know that you get substantially improved returns when you trade in higher numbers in a single transaction, right? Selling 2000 gems gives you a lot more gold than selling 1000 gems twice.

Likewise, spending 2 gold on gems, gets you more than spending 1 gold twice. If you are buying gems with gold, you might get better results if you save up a bit more first.

Bluesavanah.8562:

I find the whole concept so hard to understand. The most likely candidates to convert gems to gold are casual players with limited time. But past getting an exotic armor set and weapons why would they do it more than once ? So realistically there’s never going to be a supply big enough to drive the prices down.

Even if it reached a point where you could craft a Legendary from one 2000 gem purchase how many would bother ?

Well, I typically pay about $1,500 per year on commissioned art of my on-line characters, so I’m perfectly willing to spend $80-$120 as a reasonable expense of my hobby to get my chatacter to look right in games so that when I commision art I can just point at a screenshot and say “Like that”. The problem for me is the weapon I want for one of my characters costs about $750-$800 dollars for the loadstones (I’m farming the orichalcum myself beause doing that is comparitively relaxing). $750-$800 is simply far beyond my means, same as I rarely commision a piece for over $200.

Thing is I’m not casual. I can put in a huge amount of time per week, and even with that time I’ve only managed to gather 4 (5 if you count unconverted cores) charged loadstones ‘off the landscape’.

I don’t particularly want to buy gold at ANY price with the couple k of gems I already have. Doing so will only put more coin into the hands of traders who will turn around and use it to launch new buy-walls.

What I do want to do is buy some sort of T6 random mats-packs or for the love of all that is fluffy and kitty, some sort of random Loadstone pack. That way I can meet my crafting needs without contributing to the ongoing mudflation of the game.

Give me that option and I’ll buy more gems, the transaction ANet really wants to see happen.

Clever, and reasonably amusing. I’d enjoy adding those recipies to my book.

The value of spreading this information isn’t in whether or not it lit some marketeer’s pants on fire. Or if someone made .3 or .7 gold per hour clicking the MF into submission.

The value is that people trying to craft a particular legendary will be able to advance toward their goal without having to play Trade Post Wars 2 at all. Pebbles are not only cheap at the TP, they are comparitively easy to just harvest yourself from the landscape.

Let me get this straight. People are unhappy that their unskilled labor (’cause clicking the MF does not take any level/skill qualifications – a fresh minted toon can do it as well as an 80) took a largely junk commodity and turned a profit while fulfilling a demand for one of the most exclusive items in the game?

Seriously, if you’re too good for that profit, just let the people trying to make a Gift of Quicksilver do the work themselves. Now that they know how, the demand should basically evaporate.

This is why I want to see a “recycling” MF recipe for rare (yellow) crafting mats. The 40-to-1 price disparity between the loadstones says there’s a demand deep enought to see the less valued loadstones/cores/shards/whatever get converted at random in the hopes of hitting the desired types.

Harmful to harvesters, advantageous to crafters.

Also a bit harmful to ANet since they can’t see the consequence of having a ‘real’-harvesters-only economy yet – in terms of the current drop rates driving crafters into a fury, throwing up their hands at having to spend hundreds of gold to achieve any sort of medium to long term goal, and quiting this game forever long before any rational correction is made .

Its not bad planning. It’s as deliberate as there being no direct trade function sparing us from solid walls of “WTS x” in zone chat. If you are doing a heap-ton of trading you MUST manage your stock before you can roll your coin into the next wave of deals.

Big thanks to the OP for pushing the button on that. I’ve been looking at that recipe in the wiki and wondering what it exactly looks like for a while now .

And yes, there is clearly somebody at ANet with a serious obseession with Charged Loadstones in charge of the recipies. In this case it’s part of a set (the Gift of Light weapons all have a shared theme) but they show up an awful lot as components of singular items too.

So three months later it is three times more arduous to get a legendary… should we look forward to being 6 times harder in another six months?

This is just a bit silly in in terms of rewarding early adopters. Its not like the economy has particularly leveled out yet and a sustained expection of effort required can be put forward. If started playing in month 1 you could get it done by month 2. If you started in month 2, you could get it done by month 4. If you started in month 4, it’ll take you 8 months…?

I don’t think even the ANet folks who can track things top down quite anticipated how many of their systems are reliant on huge populations that are just not there anymore. All of Orr suffers from this and they are at least launching a special team to look into that. Really, there could be a lot of benefit for them if they’d just set and announce some general expectations on time played to address the little outline that pesters every single player on the character select screen, reminding them every single log-in that they’re supposed to at least consider pursuing a Legendary…

The other trick mentioned in a nearby thread – go do The Maw event with low 30th level characters – has worked very well for me, generating several silver dubloons this evening. I’ve now parked three 35th level characters there to farm this while they are of the appropriate level to get the chest to drop silver dubloons. And as my other characters hit the appriate range, I’ll move them out there for a while.

Sorry, not planning on selling them, but at least I won’t be part of the demand driving the price up.

At the other end of the spectrum I casually farmed up 17 corianderseeds, got bored looking for them, bought the other 8 for 40s and executed my rare grey dye recipe – which turned out to be Celestial and is now gracing my Guardian. I have only ever made 1, but I am considering having a second go next time I harvest at least 10 coriander seeds myself.

RNG cuts both ways, clearly.

It was me. I bought the 1,000 cheapest of them on a hunch. I think I droped a whole 4 gold, so that’s not really a spike, is it?

Its not a display of ignorance to think that flippers aren’t in it for altruistic reasons…

Arbitrage servers a purpose, but that purpose servers sellers, not buyers. The purpose is to drive the price up and provide immediate gratification to sellers – not value to those sellers, gratification. Arbitrage is all about recognizing that something is selling for less than what people will pay for it. I just got 3 charged loadstones in the last hour and a half of farming for them out on Orr. If I were a professional farmer rather than a person intending to craft with them, I’d be ecstatic that I just popped 12g of goods off of low-grade trash mobs. Thats a good return on time. More people should be doing it.

Instead I’m a crafter pleased to have advanced 1% towards my goal of creating an Infinite Light. I don’t even look on the TP for them anymore because its a waste of my time to buy them compared to farming them myself. Unfortunately that means there’s only one sensible activity for advancing my goals. Maybe somebody else wants to arm the power traders with the coin to block them again on the next hot property -3.6g of that 4g going into their warchest for the next bit of arbitrage. Me, I’ll be keeping my coin for travel expenses to Orr.

Parthis.2091:

No one trying to get specific lodestones would spend gold for gems to get the packs.

I would. I would right. this. second.

No one trying to make consistent money would invest into the ever-increasing gem market.

We have an “ever increasing” dye market and it seems to be inflating just fine.

The reality is that the gem store should never be a way of acquiring base materials; it would be very, very bad.

100% disagree. I’m buying the benefits of time played. Given a choice, I’d rather do that by buying time played harvesting (time acquiring material) than by time played running a dungeon and vendoring everything (time acquiring money).

I made a suggestion a while ago; lodestones are lodestones. Introduce an un-schooled lodestone (i.e. NOT Glacial, Molten, Charged, etc). Make them drop off all level 80 mobs. Low rate, but considerably higher number of mobs that can provide them.

In order to make them into Charged or Molten or.. etc, introduce a simple gameplay mechanic. i.e. Double-click a lodestone inside Mount Maelstrom while the Great Destroyer is present to make it a Destroyer Lodestone. Jormag for Glacial, Shatter for Charged, etc etc. When a lodestone becomes attuned to a school it becomes account bound.

Its ambitious, but it would be a start at leveling the discrepency between the T6 rare mats and their useability.

I’d settle for when a loadstone is purchased off the TP it becomes account bound. Buy them ‘cause you are gonna use them, not because you’re gonna use your wealth to block another player’s progress.

For a short term solution that’s consistent with the rules of the game at large and far less work to implement, check out…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Rare-Material-Recycling/first#post968956

Sorry. Double post.

I got 1 in (roughly) half an hour of farming… Then the Temple of Dwayna flipped back and the mobs all left.

I got 2 of them in (precesely known) 40 minutes of farming… Then the Temple of Dwayna flipped back and the mobs all left.

In both cases I was in impromtu 3-man farming groups (we met while farming, then teamed up FOR GREAT JUSTICE!). The others reported their drop rate went up after I joined (because I’m awesome like that) but obviously we were killing faster with three people than any 1 character could hope to. We also obliterated that tedious Veteran Risen Knight event that ping-pongs all over the hunt-path like the stupid vermin he is. Was nice to see him die in seconds. Thats what you get for hanging around a Veteran AIr Elemental spawn point!

The issue in my experience is less the drop rate (which is painful, make no mistake) its that the opportunity to farm at all is limited to 2 hour windows after an 5-15 people 6-stage event in a largely depopulated zone.

Obviously I need more farming time to draw any conclusions, but my intial attemps and some discussion with others met actually on the field doing the work makes me think the drop rate is a bit better than 1:hour if you are grouped.

I’m struggling to get my ussual online buddies to join me on Guild Wars for regularly schduled play. I think a well meshed team of 5 might beable to flip the Temple of Dwayna, in which case I’ll be able to at least try for the hair-ball-icious things at a time of MY choosing (spend 45 minute flipping it, 2 hours farming). But for a solo player like I am now… Ooof. Not appealing.

Personally I think this relates to the Temple of Balthazar and the general lack of sense of permanence and accomplishment – the Temples need to stay flipped (much) longer.

…And that evil-kitty-butt “siege” event at the westernmost camp in Malchor’s Leap needs to die in a fire at the bottom of a well. It’s too long, too irritating, and going on too fluffy OFTEN. When we secure that camp, make the Risen leave it alone for 4 hours, not (seemingly) 10 MINUTES.

“Have the odds gone up that someone didn’t notice their averages until they hit a dry patch?”

“Nope. That remains a universal constant.”

I am slowly building the 2 universal Legendary gifts so I’m at least sorta ready should they intruduce a legendary weapon I think looks good for one of my character themes (several exisitng ones look good, jiust not for my characters), or they introduce legendary armor that rocks on toast.