Guild Wars 2

Im sorry, but you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. And how can you talk about “damage cycles” (wtf!) without talking about specific builds.

Sorry, I’m by no means claiming any expertise on the Mesmer, this is just my own experience. I’m currently running staff – Specter/Focus, but mostly just the staff in combat. Traits seemed kind of pointless up to 40 (aside from the five points in the bottom one), I’ll see how the post-40 ones work out.

By “damage cycles” I just mean that Mesmers seem to do practically no instantaneous damage (especially with staff, which I acknowledge), and are almost entirely based on building up clone artillery barrages, maybe shattering them if that’s your thing, but in any case it takes time to stack up. They are like condition^2 builds. Like a standard power/precision type class would deal 100% damage over the course of a fight like 25-20-10-15-15-15, and a more standard condition class like a Thief or Necro might do it more like 15-10-10-20-20-25, my Mesmer seems to be more like 5-5-10-20-30-30, almost nothing up front, and then a ton at the back end of their life bar. And that’s if everything is going smoothly. If clones start dying prematurely then that can go a bit pear-shaped. I’m not saying that “Mesmers suck,” I’m just saying that having played every class a decent amount, the Mesmer is the most frustrating and annoying of the bunch so far. If it is a “LTP” issue, then it’s more of a “Learn to teach” problem on the dev’s end.

I am curious to know how best to use abilities against large packs though, since most of their abilities seem single target, maybe with a bounce, with a couple of AoE attacks to work with, and you can only assign three clones at a time, and if the guy you assign them to dies, then they just up and vanish on you. Compare that to my Necro, where I can roll up on ten guys and just Grasping Dead, Enfeebling Blood, Epidemic, Deathly Swarm, Blood is Power, and then just spam auto as all of their life bars plummet simultaneously, and then if I’m in any danger I can use Death Shroud or Spectral Walk to avoid them until my abilities come back up, and that’s without even pulling out the staff in my back pocket.

I think it’s a much needed achilles’ heel for the Mesmer. If we also had permanent swiftness, or just 25% movement speed, we would pretty much have everything.

I think most classes already do, and should have “everything.” At least in some sense. I mean, my Mesmer is certainly not my main, but I wouldn’t consider it “too much” for Mesmers to be given better movement speed. I’m more concerned when a given class hits way too hard or takes way more damage, not if they’re able to jog along at the same speed as everyone else.

I tend to agree with the OP. I’ve just got my Mesmer to 40 and it’s by far the most frustrating of the 8 classes so far. The damage done is well less than the other classes, and the AoE is terrible. Now maybe in SPvP or something it’s a better class, I wouldn’t know, and in a large event with lots of people you can do some decent support stuff, but all alone in PvE it’s a terribly frustrating class to play, since the damage cycles take so long to build, and there’s so much more micro-management in that if you’re fighting five guys, you have to spread clones out or when one of them dies you’re suddenly left all alone. My Necro would just annihilate them all in a half the time and with half the effort.

Mesmers really do need a better speed option. Most classes have perfectly good 25% perma-buffs, with plenty more ways to apply Swiftness on top.

That’s what they really don’t want. And please stop saying doing dungeons is a grind. They came up with new mechanics fir dungeons that make them different and unique. It’s far superior than the actual grind i.e. kill that monster over and over and over again.

Dungeons can be a grind. Not a huge one, but still a grind, if you’re farming them efficiently (as in getting the money for the time). Ideally players would be able to do ANY reasonable activity, just roaming the world, playing “inefficiently”, and make less, but not substantially less than the dungeon farmers and market players.

As for the economy: how is a system that is completely player driven bad?? People get rich because they know what they are doing.

For the same reason the real world economy is bad, it tends to stratify such that those at the top become more and more separated from those in the middle, and they distort the market with them.

In an economy that supports the freedom of the traders, the sellers and the buyers, there will always be people who get richer than others! That is a given!

And nobody is arguing otherwise. All I’d like to see is a tighter gap between the wealthy and the average. Maybe they could be twice as wealthy as the average player, rather than ten times as wealthy, or more.

@Ohoni i strongly disagree with you. Making money is actually easy. Every casual can at least make 3g per day (~3h of gameplay) which is the absolute minimum.

If you farm dungeons efficiently, or farm Orr, maybe, but that’s not fun. Playing the game for fun does not tend to be even a fraction as rewarding as either of those activities, which in turn is not a fraction as rewarding as high end market play. It’s not about whether you can make money or not, it’s whether the various methods for making money are in balance.

It’s natural that the market yields more income. Players who buy and sell items in great proportions will always have a better profit. That’s undenyable.

Of course it’s deniable. In an open market that would be true, but there’s no reason why the market should have to be open, as this is an adventure game, not a stock market simulator. They could easily put in controls that would make high volume constant trading into a highly inefficient system, that has relatively tiny rewards to it. Buying 100 items at 20 silver and selling them back at 30 silver is a far less attractive way to spend your time if transaction charges on those trades completely negate the profits involved.

They bought them all off for 7p ea and resold them for 9p ea. They made so much more gold than everyone else it was not funny.

No, it’s not funny, which is why ANet should hire someone who’s job it is to ensures that no such shenanigans occur here, oh, wait. . .

So you say that you lodestones are needed, but they are not. I presume you are talking about crafting legendaries, in which case you are going after an item that is purely cosmetic.

Not this again. You believe that stats are more important than cosmetics. This is not a fact, it’s an opinion. You’re welcome to hold that opinion, but just accept as fact that there are people for whom “cosmetics” are of higher value than stats, so they “need” their cool looking weapon as much as you “need” your level 80 exotic stats. Ok, taking that knowledge in mind, you can continue with this discussion.

1 Auto attack from a warrior is equivalent to 36 stacks of bleeding with 1000 condition damage.

1. Its not possible to hit 36 stacks of bleeding.
2. The time it’d take to even build 25 stacks of bleeding, your warrior would of hit the target with 3+ auto attacks.
3. If the warrior even decides to add 100b or WW into the attack, your necro’s damage is blown off the planet.

More little numbers =/= more damage.

The picture you paint indicates a class in need of severe nerfing, but doesn’t seem accurate. I’ve played warriors and never known them to be nearly so effective, particularly not against large groups. Also keep in mind that Necros aren’t just stacking Bleeds, they’re also stacking Poison and Vulnerability.

You can’t make a legendary challenging that is the point! Whatever you do people will find a way around it! Make it pvp cause pvp is challenging right?? NO!!! You’d see entire maps of people standing next to each other w8ing until they get killed then the others rezz them and that will be done over and over and over!

I don’t know, everyone has their own definition of what “challenge” means, but you could certainly involve more personal challenge in their acquisition than currently exists, and less material wealth. Making people complete every dungeon path at least once, for example. Or maybe complete a ton of jump puzzles. I don’t know, stuff. Sure people would figure out “cop out” ways of completing all or most of them, like how people use jump puzzles instead of kills to get WvW badges, or use cash money to buy precursors and other ingredients that they could farm for, but it could still involve a lot more player participation than just throwing gold at the TP.

Like you have to do all 3 CoE paths and all 4 Arah paths after each other without getting downed once.

I will say that I hate those sorts of things, like where you have to do a lot of things “flawlessly.” I wouldn’t mind if the goal was to complete each path once without dying, but only if each counted separately, so if you got one, it was cleared, even if you died trying the next you would only have to redo that one until you got it right. Still, if that were the case then you’d just have connected players “playing it safe,” chilling out at the back while the rest of the party did the heavy lifting.

Since they require gold a player can get it through everything! You don’t like dungeons?No problem just do some awesome dynamic events instead! You don’t like wvw? Well you can at least get it through jumping.

But then we’re back to the core argument of this thread, that most gameplay elements reward gold at a pathetic rate compared to market manipulation. Sure, you could “run jumping puzzles” to get enough gold to buy a precursor, it would just take you ten years if you did them every day. If players are meant to be able to earn enough gold to buy high-cost goods on the TP, then either the cost of those goods needs to be way lower, or the rewards of standard activities way higher.

And please stop pushing the fiction that there’s nothing ANet can do to stop people making money off the trading post. They choose to allow that, but there are numerous controls they could use to stop it dead if they felt like it.

If you think a necro does ungodly damage at any range I question your experience, and as a result I cast aspersion upon any opinion you have to offer on this topic.

I play a character of each class, three of them to 80 so far, the rest somewhere between 20 and 60, of them the Necro does the most damage. at least against large packs. No big numbers, all little numbers, but a LOT of little numbers, very fast.

- as long as you have a trade option players will be able to get rich through it faster than anything else

Not necessarily. They could fairly easily tweak the tax rates on trading such that the margins on trading are not worth the time involved. Likely whatever system they use would allow you to make some money off of trading alone, but it could be a laughable amount compared to even basic adventuring.

Basically, you should not be able to make money from money. There are two legitimate purposes for the existence of the Trading Post:

1. To allow players to acquire goods that they could not otherwise acquire. This means things that drop randomly, and/or that require a lot of farming. If there is something that you can’t or don’t want to earn off the adventuring world, but someone else has it, the TP allows you to acquire that item via money instead.

2. If you have items that you don’t personally want, you can sell them on the TP for above vendor prices to people with practical use for them.

These are the two fair and legitimate uses of the TP. It is not a good thing for people to be able to purchase items off the TP at one price, and then be able to sell those same items on the TP at a higher price, turning a worthwhile profit in the process. Every item sold on the TP should have been found in the adventuring world by the player who is selling it. Every item purchased on the TP should be used by the player purchasing it. The only people making money off the TP should be people ho build up huge stacks of loot via adventuring, and then turn to the TP to sell it, not people who follow trending patterns in the market and buy low to sell high.

- if you make things drop for you so recently that you can get a legendary with your loot alone than you destroyed any challenge of the original game… or made it a grind fest!

Being able to purchase legendaries with cash money have already negated the challenge factor, that ship has sailed. The “challenge” in acquiring the legendaries has nothing to do with the cash you need to accumulate to get one. That’s easy, if annoying and potentially time consuming. The only actual challenge in gaining a legendary is in World Completetion, Gift of Battle, and maybe the skill-points needed (although you can grind those out too). Everything else is just “accumulation.” If they want legendaries to be “challenging” to acquire then they need a completely different ingredients list, one that could involve zero gold, zero RNG, and just require that you accomplish a series of difficult tasks. In any case raising or lowering the cash needed to produce a Legendary would have absolutely zero impact on the “challenge” factor.

@Ohoni but what do you expect them to do? Increase the drop chance of precursors and lodestones? I can assure you that they’d rather implement equally difficult ways of getting them instead of tweaking the drop chance.

Upping the raw drop rates would be one way of doing it. I think it’s fairly clear that supply falls well short of demand for those items, among others. They need to drastically increase supply, or, in the case of lodestones at least, they would also have the option of reducing demand (by reducing the vast quantities needed for many recipes). Increasing the raw drop rate would be one method of increasing supply, but they could also offer other methods of earning those items. All that really matters is that overall supply is brought closer to demand.

The point of legendarys are that they should be hard to get. Not normally hard but excessively hard! They are designed to take years. He only problem is that there are intelligent people who manage to either gind or to TP their way up. This is not a faulty system it’s people who figuered what aspects yield the most income.

I have no problem with them being “hard” to get, I do have problems with them being expensive to get. If they made it so that they took months or even years of concerted effort then that would be something else entirely. I mean if they required that you, say, do every single event in the game several times, or max every Slayer achievement, or various other gameplay hurdles, then that would be something else entirely. What they do cost, currently, is not a great deal of effort, but rather a great deal of money, and money, in this game, is not distributed to players based on effort and skill at the game, but rather in how well you can play the stock markets.

If they readjusted the overall costs of crafting a legendary to the point where it only cost maybe 100 gold, but then required (non-optional) hundreds of additional hours of personal effort on the part of each player, then that would be an entirely different argument, but as it stands it only requires a limited amount of personal effort, and then a small fortune in gold. That is not currently the situation that “legendaries should be hard” proponents paint it out to be. Legendaries aren’t that hard, they are just very, very expensive. Cash money should not be the alternative to hard work.

And believe it or not this way nobody at all is locked out of the content. Random chances are the most fair ways for everyone. Just imagine something being impossibly hard. Like a scavenher hunt where you have to train with your guild day after day, everyone coordinating on teamspeak just to get a precursor after 3h+ of one boss. THAT would lock casuals out of the content.

Why not do both? I have no problem with RNGs, but I do have issues with RNG being the only way of achieving any given objective. Anything that you have a .00000001% of getting on a random basis, there should also be a method of earning it that has no less than a 10% chance each time you try, perhaps even a 100% chance, even if that method takes a good deal more time and effort to put into motion. I have no problem with people being able to get a precursor off a random enemy if they get very lucky, but they should also be able to earn the precursor of their choice by running various specific event chains, dungeons, jump puzzles, etc. The more methods, the more options, the better.

The only way to “make it equal” is to damage the rich people, which would be unfair because it required lots of work to get their earnings or to remove the possibility to trade completely and make everything buyable with gold that every monster drops in a certain amount…. which is boring

I do not care about them. If you are in the multi-thousand gold range at this point, then you have been doing something wrong, and I have no pity if the wages of that behavior are wiped out. You are not “too big to fail.” I think in the long term it might be a good idea to set up “high traffic” tax rates on the TP, ones that involve much higher than standard cuts of the profits when someone makes more than a certain number or value of trades over a given period of time.

If legendaries wouldn’t exist, you wouldn’t see this much of posts as T6 mats, ectos, precursors (lets call them rare exotics) and other resources hardly have any other value.

Legendaries are the primary distortion in the economy. Setting them aside, the secondary distortion is the “sub-legendaries,” the various cool weapons that are generated in the mystic forge using fairly expensive recipes involving massive stacks of rare ingredients. Some of these can cost several hundred gold of ingredients to make, even though they are not legendaries. Their existence, of course, drives up the price of those ingredients.

I think this can be summed up as:

Ranged: Easier, Less Damage
Melee: Harder, More Damage

Which seems perfectly reasonable.

That may be true with some classes, I know my Thief does better up close than at a distance, but my Necro can do ungodly amounts of damage at medium range, well outside melee.

With how low the drop rate is, and the likelihood that it’s a group event (so the Anet employee would need help from the community or from quite a few Anet employees) makes that not a real viable idea. The best Anet could really do (without revealing more about it) is to attain it on the test servers.

That would prove nothing though, since the test servers have frequently had cases where something worked fine there, but then faceplanted on the live servers. I think it’s reasonable to suspect that this is a case where everything looks perfectly fine on paper, all the numbers in the flowcharts seem to be in the proper place, and yet for some inexplicable reason the thing just doesn’t work on live.

^ Why do you keep on talking about cosmetics as if it’s game content?

Why do you keep talking about cosmetics as if it isn’t game content?

Btw, not having a Bifrost doesn’t make getting a Bifrost impossible. It would be silly if that’s the case.

Of course not, notbody is claiming that it is. You’re making that circular claim I was talking about earlier. Not having Bifrost does not prevent you from gaining Bifrst any more than not having Exotic dungeon armor prevents you from gaining exotic dungeon armor, but not having Bifrost does prevent you from displaying the graphical effects that Bifrost is capable of, just as not having Exotic dungeon armor prevents you from performing up to spec in dungeons.

I’m willing to assume that you aren’t willing to even entertain this notion. Fair enough. But if so, then look at it from the opposite side. If the aesthetics of the legendaries are NOT content, and are not worth getting worked up about, then why the chase for them? I mean, if they were half as “worthless” as some of you claim them to be, then shouldn’t they be considered vendor trash? Why would anyone bother spending enough gold to buy hundreds of suits of fully functional dungeon armor in order to acquire them? I think it’s plainly obvious that the Legendary weapons have significant value to them.

The problem with his argument is that he refuses to acknowledge that there’s more than one type of item. He has stated (a couple times actually) that every single item in the game is an exactly equal luxury good. That’s simply not a defensible position to take. Even if someone were to accept the claim that every single item in the game is a luxury good, that doesn’t justify the conclusion that all luxury goods are equal or that their attainability should be related to each other.

I never said that they were all equally, just that they were all equally a luxury good, that there are not “things we need which must be reasonably priced,” and “things we don’t need which can be as ridiculously priced as anyone cares to make them.” I fully expect some items to be more expensive than others, just as I fully expect some players to have more gold than others, what I object to is the degree to which this disparity currently exists. I currently believe that some players are way too much richer than others than they really should be, and that some items in the game cost way too much more than other items than they should. Part of this is due to flawed supply/demand balancing on ANet’s part, and part of this is due to market exploitation (in the moral sense, not in the strict game rules sense) by TP-oriented gamers. I think efforts should be made to balance this out, to level the highs and lows towards the center.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I really can’t give out any hints or information, especially since anything I say is going to be intensely analyzed. So I’m going to play it safe and not comment on the size of the boss, the chest, or the rarity of the boss. I will confirm that I looked in the game data and traced the item to its loot table to the chest that uses the loot table to the event that spawns the chest to make sure everything is set up. I can also confirm that it has a very low drop rate, so running the event 5 times or 10 times proves nothing.

Couldn’t you get one GW dev to earn the item legitimately, just to prove, once and for all, that it is possible to earn legitimately? You would think that by this point at least one person would own the thing.

A good amount of those encounters you just listed can be melee’d once you get the hang of dodging the proper attacks.

Or, you know, just stay at range and never have to worry about it. The problem isn’t that melee is impossible, just that it takes way more effort, skill, and luck to survive it than staying at range does, for little to no practical advantage. The only reason to stay in melee is because you really really enjoy your melee weapons and don’t mind dying more often. You can always choose to restrict your potential by playing in a substandard way. That doesn’t indicate a state of balance.

But in the situation that it is a 1v1 and you are left with either melee or ranged, and you have to fend for yourself, I prefer melee weapons and am way better at handling 1v1 that way.

Yes, but dungeon encounters are rarely 1v1, and so 1v1 match-ups aren’t really relevant to discussions of weapon skills vs. dungeon balance. All I know is that I played a dagger/dagger Thief from 1-80, but as soon as I decided to tackle dungeons I moved almost entirely to Shortbow, and am far more survivable with it than when I pull out the daggers (which I use in some encounters, but many are far too risky for that).

In the case it is a 1v1 moment, it could be that you are the last survivor of your group on a boss nearly dead, or got ambushed by something while separated from your group.

Those are cases where you die, the party wipes, and they all have to respawn. Dungeon encounters are not balanced in such a way that they can reasonably be soloed. If something ambushes you while you’re split from the party (which should not happen), then you’re typically better off just running away (which is typically easier with ranged weapons), and regrouping with your team. Dungeon encounters just aren’t balanced for 1v1, they are balanced for at least 2-3 players concentrating fire on however many enemies there are. If there is one enemy, it’s 5 v 1. If there are five enemies, it’s 5 v 5, with all five players attacking as many of the five enemies as they can at a time.

Again, it doesn’t matter what people want to do. The choice is up to the player. however, luxury gear shouldn’t (and doesn’t) restrict ANY of those choices.

You keep ignoring that the lack of what some consider “luxury gear” prevents people from choosing to shoot unicorns out of their bow, or have a glowing skybox on their greatsword. If you could pick up the Legendary skins and effects for a couple of gold then you’d have a perfectly valid point, but as things stand now, all you’re saying is that people’s rights to have affordable max stats is more important than their ability to have their ideal character appearance, and that would be an opinion, not a fact.

No it’s not a circular argument. Not having exotic armor actually makes it slightly harder to get more money by farming. You do less damage, things take longer…but your functionality is actually worse. Legendary? Nope.

Yes, but again, making money through farming is not the ultimate, universal goal of the game either. People’s goals ar etheir own, and not everyone’s involves taking on the toughest content, or most efficiently farming, or anything else that you seem to think should be considered universal goals for everyone to bow down to. Having lesser gear does many certain activities more difficult, just as not having Bifrost makes the activity of “running around with a rainbow trail” practically impossible to achieve.

This is the crux of your misunderstanding (if you’re not just being obstinate and arguing for the sake of arguing). Whether or not a specific player wants to complete a specific part of the game is irrelevant. Mushrooms are not considered a luxury good, even though (like many people) I don’t want to eat them. Milk is not a luxury good, even though lactose intolerant people generally don’t choose to drink it. The fact that these people don’t choose to use an item does not make it a luxury good.

Yes, but as this is a game, nothing is necessary. Running dungeons is not necessary, therefore the gear needed to run those dungeons is not necessary either. Nothing is necessary, everything is a luxury. If you want to argue that the gear needed to run a dungeon is a necessity for that task, then by that same token the bow needed to fire unicorns is equally as necessary for that task.

They are equally luxury, they are equally necessary, the only distinction is which task you consider to be of value to you.

I will give the fact that if you gather all the mats yourself. You might come out with a profit.

Not really. Even if you do gather all the mats, and can produce the item “for free,” you’re still expending those mats, and if they sell for a higher price on the TP than the final product then it is costing you money to make that product.

Again, it doesn’t matter what the player likes or doesn’t like. The player can choose what he plays. Not having a legendary though, isn’t gating him from any content though. While not having gear, period, will prevent him from doing many many things.

Yes, but you insist on missing the point, which is that the things that gear might gate someone from might not be activities that they care to do. If not having orange gear gates you from doing certain activities, then that is only a problem if you care to do those activities. There are plenty of things you can do without having to cross that gate. Conversely, if what you want to do is swing a disco ball around and have mirror-shard steps, then not having a Moot is the gate to that experience. They are both equally valid paths, and each are gated by lack of access to the necessary equipment.

…By getting that legendary weapon, duh? Because not having that legendary weapon isn’t going to hamper your efforts getting it in the first place. This is why it’s not a luxury item.

That’s a circular argument. Not having exotic armor doesn’t prevent you from getting exotic armor either. The point is that not having exotic armor gates your access to high-tier dungeons, just as not having Sunrise gates your access to streaming skyboxes from your sword.

It doesn’t matter what your personal preference is. You can choose however you like to play, but in order to perform at max efficiency, you need max stat gear. Therefore, functional gear is “essential.”

You’re missing my point, it’s only “essential” if it’s “essential” to you that you must function at “peak level efficiency.” If that’s what’s important to you then you need good gear. If, on the other hand you don’t care about “functioning at peak level efficiency,” then having high stat gear is not essential to you.

Either is a choice, either is a luxury, neither is a necessity.

Cosmetic gear, however, is not. Therefore it’s a “luxury.” Not having a Legendary isn’t preventing you from anything.

Oh? Then tell me how I can get my greatsword to leave a night sky trail without getting a legendary weapon? Don’t tell me that I have to value being able to do a high level fractal more than being able to stream stars behind my sword.

The people who are “playing the TP” to make a profit actually provide a lot of value to the economy.

No they don’t. All they’re doing is buying things at the lowest possible price and selling them for the highest. They are therefor encouraging those two states. If their participation was removed entirely then the price would stabilize to the price the item deserves to be based on supply and demand.

They keep it moving, and moving smoothly.

There’s no advantage to having the market “moving.”

Do you think pharmacies are evil bad places out to rip you off? They’re making a profit by purchasing from the manufacturer (or usually, a wholesaler who does the same thing as they do who purchases from a manufacturer) holding on to medicine until someone who needs it comes down to buy it when they add some evil margin on to the product to make you pay more? Are they exploiting you too?

That has nothing to do with this discussion. TP players are not “buying at wholesale, holding on to things until they are needed, and then selling at a slight markup for their efforts.” Market players are buying at one retail price, waiting until supply falls relative to demand, and then selling it back to retail at a mark-up. There is no benefit to the consumer for them having been involved at all.

“Looking pretty with a sword” is not gameplay. No content/gameplay is denied from them. Which is why pretty swords are classified as luxury items.

Again, you are pushing your own personal preferences when you value function over appearance. Not all players agree with you that being capable of performing in dungeons is more important to them than looking good. Not all players value dungeon running, you know.

1. Who ads the value to mats ? Crafters
2. So who is the target group for purchasing materials ? Crafters
3. Is crafting viable ? In global point of view NO. 90% crafted items are not profitable
4. people will soon realise that the crafting is not profitable
5. The target group for purchasing mats will dissapear
6. The market with mats will collapse

Not really. The problem with this is that 1. most “crafters” in this game are not true crafter types, they are standard adventurers that are burning through crafting either to level up their character or max the skills needed for their legendary. They may not value the process, but they do need the components as they go. And 2. crafting mats are used for more than strict crafting, mostly in Mystic Forge recipes for high end gear, which uses massive stacks of them. This is why some high end crafting mats sell for exponentially more than other mats in the same tier, because stacks of 250 of them are vital to highly desirable Forge recipes.

If they were to remove the character XP from leveling crafting then the price of T1-5 mats would plummet overnight to vendor trash levels. If they were to greatly reduce the cost of mystic forge recipes, from 2-3 stacks of T6 components to maybe 10-15 of each or something, then the price of T6 materials would plummet overnight to, if not vendor levels, at least a fraction of their current cost.

1.This is not a stock market game, and the simple point that someone might be playing the market because its the most fun they have in it is absurd.

/Second. If people want to play a stock market game, then that’s fine, there are other games for that, but I do not want this game to be considered a stock market game, because their play griefs the rest of us. It is anathema to the sort of “players helping players” philosophy that the rest of the game is designed around.

I’d like to see you do some dungeons without any armor, because apparently that isn’t a “necessity.”

You don’t have to run that dungeon. You can park your character in LA all day, they won’t die of hunger or exposure. If you want the luxury of visiting high level dungeons you might need high end gear, but that’s your choice.

The point is, nothing in this game is not a luxury. It’s a game, it’s all luxury. Everything in it exists not for survival, but to enable your fun. Maybe doing high level dungeons is how you have fun, and if so, having a full set of orange gear might make that easier. Maybe firing unicorns at zombies is how you have fun, and if so, you need a Dreamer for that. In either case they are just tools for enabling you having fun.

You need armor and equipment because it gives you stats, which allow you to do content in-game. Cosmetic items do not give additional stats, and hence it is a luxury.

That’s only if you believe that running high end content is the only way to enjoy this game. Some people value their character’s appearance more than they do their character’s stats.

But you didn’t answer the question. Why shouldn’t there be extremely expensive items in the game? What logic do you follow that leads you to the conclusion that a particular item is “overpriced?”

Why should there be extremely expensive items? Who benefits from that? All that a high price does is put an item out of reach of a lot of players. Why is that a good thing? You can make item A more expensive than item B to encourage people to go for item B instead, but beyond a certain point the price discrepancy becomes more punitive than it ever needs to be.

My impression from your posts is that you’re saying “The items I find but don’t want often aren’t very valuable and that’s bad, but the items I want are very expensive and I don’t like that.” But that’s what we should expect in any remotely functioning economy. If the items you have are things you don’t want, odds are that other players of the game share a lot of the same basic preferences as you, so they don’t want them either. If no one wants those items, they won’t have much value because there’s no demand for them. Likewise, the items you want are likely the same items that other people want because there’s a lot of preference overlap between players. Due to this, these items are very valuable because demand for them is high.

Sure, and if the difference in value between the stuff I’ve got, but don’t want, and the stuff I want, but don’t got, was only a relatively small margin, then sure, fair enough. But if I were to sell everything that I’ve got, and still only have 1/10th or less of what it would cost to get what I want, then I believe that something is wrong there, either the value of what I’ve been getting is too low, and thus the floor need to be raised, or the cost of the things I want are too high, and thus the ceiling should be lowered.

These items are pure luxury items because perfect substitutes for them (in everything except for appearance) exist at very low costs. Infinite Light (which costs about 900g to make) is functionally identical to an Explorer’s Pearl Sabre (3.3g) with a Superior Sigil of Luck (1.4g). The only difference between the two is their appearance.

That may be important if all you’re going for it being able to run dungeons, but what if your goal is instead to have a sword made of glowing golden runes? Can the Pearl Saber do that as well?

I thumbed up your post just for this part.

Unfortunately, while I more or less endorse what you’re saying wholeheartedly from an ethical standpoint of economics, human nature just won’t allow it. We are, as a general rule, greedy, selfish and power-hungry; we want to be rare, to stand out from the crowd, to be superior to other people. We can’t help it; it’s built into our very genetics.

As a result, we scheme and plot to raise ourselves up, and once we’ve made it, we do our darndest to prevent anyone else except those we favour (our “tribe”) from reaching the same position.

Maybe so, but unlike the real world, Tyria doesn’t have an invisible and uncaring deity, it has active developers, and they should not be supporting this type of behavior. They should use any tools they have available to reward players who just want what they want, rather than wanting other people to have less. They should make economics of exclusion harder to succeed at, not easier.

Why not? What is wrong with luxury items having a high cost?

This is a game. There is not a single item in this game that is a “necessity,” therefore ALL items are “luxuries.” There is no reason why “luxuries” should need to have an extremely high cost. Now, some things can cost more than others, certainly, but none need to cost as much more as some currently do in the marketplace, and conversely there are plenty of things that are probably going for too cheap, such as many crafted goods that sell well below the cost of their ingredients. There are many items currently selling for a 90%+ loss.

Also, the criteria for being able to afford those items should not be how good you are at playing the markets, it should be how well you play the actual game. Gameplay should be rewarded, not market-play.

I would feel far better about rocket-high prices of some items on the TP if I knew that the only people who could afford them were people who had been playing high level, high skill gameplay since day one, rather than people who had either exploited game benefits just enough not to get caught up in a dragnet for it, or that had leveraged the marketplace to turn some money into more money, and then more money into even more money, and so on until they had way more money than standard gameplay could produce.

And now we get to the real reason people complain about the economy. They’re not complaining about the economy, or how much profits can come from crafting, no. What they’re really complaining about is their lack of legendaries.

Can’t it be both? I don’t know, I’m not “on track” for a legendary, even setting aside the high cost resources needed to make one, I am also nowhere near the WvW requirements for it, but even so, I can look at items going for hundreds of gold on the TP and say “that just doesn’t make any kitten sense.”

If the rare items suddenly became easy to come by everyone would have one. Stop and think about that for a moment. The item that you’ve been hoping for and pining for (that in both the cases of legendaries and lodestone crafted items offer no stat advantages) would suddenly be everywhere.

Excellent! What kind of absolute kitten takes a look at the bow in his hand that shoots rainbows and unicorns, looks at another guy nearby with the same bow, and says to himself “aw, well now I’m no longer happy with my bow that shoots *kitten rainbows and kitten unicorns out of it,”* Anyone who wants a legendary because they want to show off how much money they have is a complete kitten, kitten them and the kitten imaginary horse they didn’t ride in on because GW2 doesn’t have mounts in it.

This would be the ideal market, in which people buy the things that they wants so that they look how they want to look, not how they can afford to look.

And why is it such a surprise that players who take the time to invest (as opposed to spending or even saving gold) have more money? Do you think this shouldn’t be? That if I handle my money wisely, don’t go buying every dumb set of armor my heart desires, take the time to examine a market, take advantage of opportunities I spot… that I should have no more money than you, who (most likely) does nothing but spend?

You’re combining two distinct positions here, one right, one wrong. Yes, players who SAVE money, who spend less than they could, and retain their money, should end up with more than player who waste theirs. Of course. However, players that “invest” money should not make more money than players who just save it up. You should not be able to make money from money. You should not be able to buy things and then sell them at a higher price than you purchased them at to end up with more money than you started with.

People keep thinking in terms of “lets make this more profitable”, without realizing what would happen IMMEDIATELY after. If it starts making money, everyone will start doing it which would create the same cycle: supply goes up, demand goes down, profits go down.

Yeah, difficulty needs to be a part of profitability. It’s like, you can run CoF Path 1 in a given amount of time and get a given amount of gold. You should be able to take the same time to craft items and sell them for the same gold, but only IF it requires the same amount of skill and effort, not just clicking a few buttons in LA.

That’s why I suggested some sort of special resource that could not be purchased and that would require player participation to acquire. If high end crafted gear required this resource, but players wouldn’t seek out this resource unless they wanted to craft (the activities to earn it would not be great sources of XP/loot), then only people who cared about being crafters would be able to make the optimal gear, and the stuff they produced with it would be profitable enough to justify their efforts, but not so profitable that people would feel compelled to abandon other pursuits.

Even though the prices on the TP turned out to be on par with the material cost, it’s still better to possess the profession, as you’re not relying on other people to make the gear you want.

Yeah, but in practical terms most gear you can make, you can buy on the TP for less than the material costs. It’d be nice if that wasn’t the case though. Anyways, I’m not saying that crafting should be the most profitable thing, just that it should be profitable. If your goal is maximum profits, clever farming or dungeon runs should still be the most profitable methods, but a more complex crafting system should be reasonably profitable.

The ideal balance is that the crafting takes enough time and effort that while anyone can do it, most people wouldn’t want to bother, and so the crafters can make the items, sell them, and turn a profit, while the dungeoneers can do that, make money, and use it to buy crafted gear from others.

The problem with the current system is that all the difficulties and costs of crafting you can get as a side effect of leveling. If you get to 60 without crafting then you’ll have almost all the resources you’d need to master two crafts, enough cash to buy the rest, and doing so will not only produce a ton of random junk, but also level you the rest of the way to 80. There need to be tasks you need to complete to craft “useful” stuff that have nothing to do with the leveling path (but this is only if you want to profit from crafting, you should still be able to master the skills themselves using the existing methods).

Making money with crafting is a WoW thing. You know the main reason you make money with crafting in that game? Scarcity. Because each server has a separate economy. They make money because since there’s a smaller pool of players who can make the item, they can charge more. Scarcity allows them to profit.

I find it ironic that there are people in this thread saying it’s a bad economy because there isn’t enough scarcity, while a few posts up there are people claiming the economy is bad because there’s too much scarcity. I guess we only want scarcity when it benefits us?

I don’t think that holds up. Are there less crafters per server in WoW? Sure. But there are equally less customers. It should balance out. I think the problem with most crafting in GW as a profitable business venture is that most sub-80 gear is so replaceable. I mean, you tend to outlevel stuff so quickly that while you need to produce about 2-3 full sets of gear at every five levels in order to advance your crafting, most players only need to buy a new full set of gear every 10-15 levels as they go, less if they get lucky drops. I frequently hit 80 using characters that are running around with a few pieces of level 65 gear. And even if all you want is “the look,” crafted style tiers tend to last for 15+ levels, so unless you’re going for the level 80 stuff, you can just get one copy of the cheapest stuff and Transmute it up.

Since you aren’t compelled to buy new gear every five levels, and yet so much gear is on the market, the supply far outstrips demand, and would do so even if instead of 50K crafters serving 500K customers you had only 500 crafters serving 5K customers.

The way for them to add value to the crafting markets would be to add items that 1. Are highly useful and desirable, like gear that offers Rare-quality stats at Master-quality costs, or consumables that are awesome, and 2. make them offer ZERO crafting XP. It’s the crafting XP that throws the entire system, because it has people churning out stacks of things that they don’t personally need, which they then dump on the market. For an item to have any significant profit potential, it needs to offer no XP, so that people only make as many as they think they can sell, not stacks and stacks that they’re willing to sell at a loss.

I also think that they’d have to make crafting involve skill. There should be some account-bound items, not RNG-based but effort based, that are needed to craft “valuable” items. I’m not sure what the skill would need to be, but the basic idea would be that it wouldn’t be effortless to be a “professional” crafter. You could, as a mostly combat character, make decent gear to keep yourself equipped, but you could not craft the stuff that would tend to turn a profit. To make those, you would need to do something special, like maybe running certain non-combat events (like where you feed party goers or whatever) that would give a special resource. Since only people that go out of their way to accumulate this resource would have it, only they could produce “valuable” level gear.

I find it ironic that there are people in this thread saying it’s a bad economy because there isn’t enough scarcity, while a few posts up there are people claiming the economy is bad because there’s too much scarcity. I guess we only want scarcity when it benefits us?

Both are true, just in different areas. Plenty of items are way too common. Anything that sells at or near vendor costs, or anything crafted that costs more to make than the going sale price, is way too common in the economy. On the other hand, there are plenty of things that are way too rare, like certain high end runes and sigils, precursors, etc. Anything that sells for, say, ten times the vendor price is probably not common enough. Anything that sells for over 50 times the vendor price is just ridiculous. People that luck out on RNG and get one of these things can make a fortune, people that don’t luck out and need to buy one stand to lose a fortune. It shouldn’t be that random, it should balance out to more of a balanced exchange.

Point is you should be rewarded for getting accustomed to the values and demand of items, and for how much time you are willing to invest in selling that item.

Playing the markets should not be a rewarding experience. The markets should be there so that you can get good value for the items you acquire while playing the game, and so that you can get access to items you weren’t lucky enough to find directly. It should not be there for people to spend much of their time at, and should not reward those behaviors, as doing so effectively punishes everyone else, the vast majority of players. In an ideal economy, the items that most people get often would sell for as high as possible, while the items that most people rarely get would cost as little as possible to acquire (though of course one would expect the latter to still cost more than the former, the prices should be closer than in the current economy).

You should never be able to make more in a given hour sitting in Lion’s Arch and buying and selling items at the TP than you can make spending that same time running a dungeon or running open world events. Playing the game should be the most financially rewarding method in the game, not playing the markets. If you want to play the markets, try an online game called “eTrade” and leave the prices of goods in Tyria alone.

If vendors offered more gold for your items, that would only raise inflation, as everyone would have more gold.

Across the board, everyone would have more gold, so once the prices stabilize again, it’ll be the same as it is now, just with bigger numbers.

Maybe, but not that bad. There probably would be a level of inflation overall, but it would be one that would benefit the average player more than the market player, since it would give them a higher floor on the goods they were trying to sell, while the goods that most players want to buy (such as Precursors and gold+ gear) would not be significantly effected. It would essentially be like raising the minimum wage, yes, that means that people already making high salaries might make slightly more than they currently do, but the biggest relative impact would be felt at the bottom.

I just dropped four Flame Legion Books (those green accessories that you get from CoF) into the mystic forge, and got NOTHING in return. Where do you go to get compensation for this sort of thing?

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

Would it be at all possible to have some sort of visual “DR indicator” in play? It’d be nice to know if DR was in effect, as opposed to just getting randomly bad RNG pulls.

The reason I like Kessex is that it’s always going on. When you’re running an event in this game, it’s great, but when you’re looking around for events, and not finding one that’s active, it’s a real pain. I like events that are easy to tell when they’re active.

If they ever get around to expanding the perception of events on the maps, so you can tell what events are active anywhere in the zone and go to them, then I would send a lot more time moving around to hit them, but with the very tight perception of events currently in the game, I like to stick to ones that I know will be up.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if, elsewhere, there were locations that provided well designed, close knit facilities for players to use. There’s Lions Arch, if you enjoy the 15 minute load in, culling lag for npc’s, landscape render, and 30 minutes of running across the main marketplace to get to all your bits and pieces. Same goes for any major city. WvW is just designed better. Everything is within a reasonable distance of each other. More convenient. More time to get back to playing. Hmm, idea: Bank Wars 2?

I actually prefer Rata Sum. It’s architecture is ideal for efficient business, and where I park any character that isn’t doing anything at all. The bank, guild bank, and TP are all within one Leap move from each other, next to a straight merchant for dumping blues, then the crafting stations are only a short jog away on the same level (it can be a thirty second job if you have to hop between two crafting stations in different “wings,” but that’s it), and the city center is so bunched up that the waypoints are all instant-travel (no load screens), so hopping between the LA gate’s WP and the bank’s WP is easy.

The problem is that if I’m, say, in Orr, or Frostgorge, or anywhere else out in the world, it’s costly and/or time consuming to get there. I could WP there, but that could cost upwards of several silver and I’m super cheap. I can PvP-to-Lion’s Arch and then gate there, but that’s three long loading screens and a one way trip, if I want back I’d have to run back or WP back. Instead, I can just load into the borderland, do my business, and leave, and the next time I log in, I’m back where I started, ready to continue my journey.

If WPs were free (or even half their current costs) I’d never use the WvW maps to do business.

Go to Ebonhawke.

Ebon is also good, though it’s not at all conveniently located, it’s only natural travel point is to Divinity, meaning it’s a two-step to anywhere else.

Umm… How is getting rid of the bank making it so a player never has to leave WvW per your quote from 27 days ago:

“As far as being able to play just in WvW and never have to leave if they don’t want to, that most definitely is our goal, and I think we’ve done a fairly good job at that so far.”

Please just put banks on all BLs. I shouldn’t have to log out and then get back in queue to use the bank. Removing them is in direct opposition to your alleged goal

I think the problem he was mentioning was players like me, who don’t actually play WvW very often, but who, after a session running my Necro through the Harathi Hinterlands event chain, logs into the home borderland, visits the bank to offload stuff I want to pass to other characters, and then logs out on that character without taking a single swing at an opposing character. I find the WvW Borderlands banks, crafting stations, and trainers to be an essential part of playing the PvE game.

I’ve done maybe half the Jump Puzzles in the game, maybe more than half, I know I’m missing at least a few. My favorite jump puzzle is probably the one at Morgan’s Spiral, it’s simple, but feels pretty epic jumping from rock to vine getting higher and higher, it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. I also love the Chaos Crystal one that you keep shifting forms, and the pirate one was cool too.

I really appreciate the simple ones, like there’s this one in Ascalon somewhere that’s just a single building, mostly stock components, only about 30ft high or so, yet you have to circle around it a specific way, and there’s a chest and achievement at the top. There’s no indication that it’s a jump puzzle, I didn’t know, but I just looked at it and thought, “I could climb that kitten,” and so I did, and there was a chest and achievement for my efforts.

I don’t particularly like the ones that force timing, and I hate the ones with difficult enemies, because anything you can’t solo is pretty much a dead end at this point in the game, and I REALLY hate the ones with tons and tons of tricky jumps (quantity over quality) that if you mess one up then you have to restart the whole thing, but I really like the ones that are about a reasonable amount of cleverly placed jumps.

Any idiot can string a whole bunch of tiny objects in a row and force you to jump 5ft, 10ft, 7ft, 9ft, 6ft, etc. ad nauseum until you get to the end, but the fun ones are where you get to a dead end, and then you have to look around and go “well maybe if I jump to that thing, then I can get up that, and . . . oh, ok, that’s where you go!”

And there should definitely be safetynets, so that when you get past a particularly difficult portion, if you screw it up, you don’t have to redo that portion again and can move straight on to the next part. Spekk’s lab did this quite well, letting you teleport back to each checkpoint as you passed, instead of the system used in the Clocktower, Snow Globe, or Southsun Cove ones, where if you missed one jump near the end you had to redo the entire thing.

For those defending thieves, mind posting what build(s) you run for dungeons?

I play a support Thief. I run DD/SB, with stealth heal, Roll for Ini, Shadow Refuge, Thieves’ Guild, and the last utility varies but is usually poison or Shadow Signet. I have my traits 20/0/0/30/20, arranged to provide plenty of dodging, and plenty of buffs, debuffs, and damage provided by Steal. I wear mostly Reyna and Shiro armor. I’m certainly no tank, but I’m not terribly squishy either, in most situations I don’t die any more than any other player in the group, and I more often die in a sacrificial manner to make an objective easier than because I screwed something up and slowed everyone down.

In dungeons I tend to use SB for damage most of the time, applying poison fields as necessary and throwing Cluster Bombs, but the primary benefit to having an SB Thief around is that we are combo masters. I love nothing more than to team with Rangers, Guardians, and Mesmers. If they drop a field, I’ll combo it several times in seconds with Cluster Bomb. You can get some crazy healing from a Ranger well and a SB Thief.

If anyone drops, I Refuge and heal. If there’s an out of the way objective (like in CM path 1), I Refuge and run to take it so others don’t have to. If there’s a spot to stand (like in the Underground Fractal), I Refuge and stand on it. I’m fairly good with timing and jumping elements as well, when necessary. The point isn’t to have the best build, you can have the best build and be a lead weight to your team, the point is to know how to use your tools, know how to play the dungeon (or be willing and able to learn), and adapt to changing situations well.

I play a Thief and I’m not anti-social. In some cases other people in the group know better than I do and I take their orders without complaint, in others nobody knows what going on so I take more of a leadership role, but any Thief that thinks he can just do the whole thing on his own is an idiot, so there’s no point to making an kitten of yourself.

Most dungeons it’s worth having a Thief for Shadow Refuge alone. There are any number of difficult situations that one ability can get you through.

And please tell me where would WvW players get T6 mats?

You casn get them on the TP. What’s the going TP rate for Badges? If that bothers you then you can argue that T6 materials should be easier to get through WvW activities, I won’t argue against you, but don’t argue that things should be harder for other players just because you find other things harder for yourself argue to make the things you find annoying better.

Legendaries are about mastering aspects of the game, WvW is an aspect of the game. If anything they shouldn’t give out so many badges in the jump puzzles… except maybe EB puzzle cuz it gets nuts in there.

I wish people would stop saying this. Legendaries are “about” having weapons that have fancy glowy effects and look cool, they are not “about” mastering every aspect of the game. That’s just elitist BS. All the first batch of Legendary owners “mastered” was having a lot of friends to send them money and power them through difficult content.

We have to run dungeons in PvE. Your point? We WvW players also have to do more PvE to get a legendary. Is getting 500 badges that hard? 1 month of WvW should get it for you.

Yes, getting 500 badges is that hard. I’ve been doing far more WvW than I care to in the effort to get World Completion and to get the 50 kills per month for most monthlies, and I’ve racked up several hundred kills, but I’m still only at well less than 100 badges. It would take me years to earn 500 badges purely through combat, and I definitely wouldn’t care to try. Even farming the jump puzzles is more hassle than it should be.

There will be no waiting between tries on this one.

Music to my ears. I loooooove jumping puzzles where I can take my time, figure things out, and jump when I’m ready, I haaaaate the ones where the game forces me to move at its pace, and kills me if I fall behind.

Talking about dungeons, those should be so kitten hard that you can really be proud of yourself if you finished one of them, every single time.

No, that’s silly. Dungeons are such an integral part of endgame that no players should be excluded from them because they are not “hardcore”. If the developers want to have ONE path out of the three that is their vanity project, and just punishes players relentlessly for not divining the exact tactics the developers intended to be able to survive the dungeon, then that’s fine, but at bare minimum one of the dungeon paths should be relatively straightforward so that players that have no interest in a “hardcore” challenge and just want to get dungeon tokens for fancy gear can do so without the frustration of wiping several times in the same encounter.

Boons vs Defiant
Pretty much why every group want guardians or suports, boons >>>>>>> conditions such as weakness or cripple or vulnerability. Defiant is a nice mechanic and promote smart use of crowd control but the effect it takes on conditions pretty much puts classes such as necromancers in disavantage and promotes stacking direct damage classes + suport classes in almost every dungeon ever, and imo makes no sense with how much handcap it puts in conditions, while boons, which are effects that can last more than conditions since they are not affected by defiant, really shine with protection and regen effects,. This would be the first thing that I would review if you are trying a dungeon system revamp. Not nerfing boons but reducing the tow defiant is taking on conditions, which would be a nice way to also promote meele targets on the boss and more variable builds in setup in the dungeon play.

/second. As a player that loves the idea of condition damage, it REALLY needs help. They absolutely have to figure out something, even just a temorary patch on the issue until they think of something better, that A. provides a worthwhile benefit to players applying additional stacks after 25 bleeds or more than thirty seconds of poison/burn have already been applied. The answer I love is for stacks of bleed/poison/burn added after reaching these levels would instead deal a fraction of their total damage as direct damage, such that a 10dps 10s bleed would deal maybe 30-50 direct damage instead. And B. They need to deal damage to objects better, maybe treat Condition stat as if it were Power stat when dealing with an object immune to conditions.

Res rushing meant that players didn’t need to be coordinating with each other or have character/class mastery – they could just throw themselves at content until they eventually completed it, incurring armor repair costs and having a negative experience as a result.

Just an FYI, having to put in a little repair costs at the end of a dungeon does kind of suck, but it usually only accounts for less than 10% of my rewards for the run, so it doesn’t really bother me. What does bother me is when a given encounter causes my party to wipe several times in a row, perhaps even preventing us from completing the dungeon entirely. That is a “negative gameplay experience.” So until you fix the situations that cause party wipes on a fairly regular basis, “fixing” rez-rushing doesn’t help anyone outside the ANet offices, so don’t pretend that it was for our sakes that you did it.

Oh, and also, speaking as a Refuge Thief who never minds rezzing a downed player, even I know what a huge waste of time it is to rez a completely defeated player in most cases. All you’re like to do is get both of you killed when the boss turns his attention your way.

Even in Fractals, which have always have the “rez-rush controls” in place, rezzing defeated players is a fairly rare thing, only done in certain encounters where the game doesn’t punish you for it and having that player up is more valuable than having a hole in the team. If you want players to rez defeated players during dungeons then you need to figure out a way to make it easier to accomplish, like making it as fast as rezzing a downed player. Also no more enemies that stack AoE DoTs on downed players.

The issue with the dragon chests should only effect people who park characters at dragons and don’t play them anywhere else. Is this what you are doing?

Hey Robert, if I take one of my several characters, and just leave them parked outside of a given dungeon, and all I do with that character is play that dungeon, will I hit DR? (assuming that I also play other characters in other areas most of the time and only run the dungeon on that character every few days).

Likewise, if I park another character in a single area and run the local events with them, and that’s all that I do with that character, but I do plenty of things with other characters and don’t spend more than a cycle or two on that one character, then does that activate DR on that character?

I would travel around more from location to location, but waypoint costs, especially at levels above, say, 30 or so, make that prohibitively expensive.

They probably should just make the swear filter mandatory, but either way you’re an idiot if you think the existence of the swear filter gives you the right to ignore the rules that clearly state “no swearing.” Just because the game mechanics allow you to do something does not give you license to do it if the developers tell you not to. There are plenty of cases where this very simple logic applies.

You can “bot,” for example, but you will get banned for it. You can make a clever name that implies something naughty while bypassing the word filters, but you will get banned for it. And yes, you can swear, but don’t expect not to get banned for it. Take some responsibility for your own life choices.

Plus what happens if you didn’t craft from level one, or you are behind, but the mats match your level instead of what is required. It wouldn’t work, at least you know which areas to for certain materials. If your lvl 80 and you start crafting you go to starter areas, if they scaled then you would get top tier mats.

I didn’t say that they should replace the low level mats entirely, just that they should replace them some of the time, so that if you harvest every metal node in a starter zone, instead of getting ~40 copper ore, or for that matter 40 mithril+ ore, you’d get something like 25-30 copper ore and 10-25 mithril+ ore too. You would still be able to get a decent amount of the low level mats, and there’s already tons of the stuff in the marketplace. If it lead to any sort of shortage then they could always adjust the drop rates or the crafting costs to compensate, as they’ve already done in the past. Currently they aren’t even worth harvesting in most cases.

(and how to fix it)

You guys recently changed the way dynamic leveling worked, in a bid to get players to play low level areas with high level characters. It might work, but I’ll tell you way it probably won’t, unique rewards. By this I mean two things that can be found in level 80-ish zones and nowhere else, high end resources and T6 materials.

Finding level 80 green weapons while fighting in the Wayfarer foothills is a nice perk, but the best harvesting nodes I’m likely to find are copper veins, blueberry bushes, and aspen trees. Fighting in Orr, on the other hand, I’ll find truffles, omnom berries, ori, mithril, etc. If the goal is to get high level characters into the lower level zones, there needs to be some method of delivering these resources to players traveling these zones. Maybe make it so that a level 80 in Wayfarer Foothills has a decent chance that instead of finding copper nodes he’ll find mithril ones, and an off chance of finding an Ori node (very rare). Maybe half the blueberry bushes are instead omnoms, and half the Aspens are Cypress, with a rare few being Ancient. At the bare minimum make it so that a single clump of ori or ancient wood can be found as a reasonably common “bonus” drop when harvesting low level nodes. So from a rich copper node you might find 10 coppers, 2 t6 gemstones, 2-3 mithril, and 1-2 ori.

The second issue is to make it so that drops contain a decent chance of containing t6 crafting materials, such as Ancient Bone, as well as a decent chance of t4-5 rare materials, like cores and lodestones. This may already be in the system somewhere, but I don’t recall pulling a lot of high-end crafting mats from lower-level zones in the past.

I think these chances would be necessary to convince players that low level zones can be rewarding enough to spend time in using higher level characters.

I should correct then and say, that forced redistribution doesn’t change the disparities of wealth in the society, simply changes those holding the wealth. To be fair though, in almost every occasion it goes rogue in a few years and those people end up poor or dead anyway.

Plans in the real world tend to fail due to cynical self-interest (ie the few people that spearhead the redistribution tend to take more than their fair share of the profits), but that doesn’t mean that it can’t theoretically succeed, in cases where the people managing the change actually do have altruistic intentions. If the top 5% hold 50% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% hold less than 5% of the wealth, then it is at least technically feasible to construct systems in which the majority of that top 50% of the wealth is recollected, such that the top 5% holds only maybe 10-20% of the wealth, and then spread out to the bottom 50%, so that they would now hold between them more like 30-40% of the total wealth.

In a game world this is far easier to achieve, since the rich cannot shelter their money in Southsun Cove, and since the people in charge of making such changes (namely you) have no personal stake in who is rich within the economy, but rather to the community as a whole. It’d be like if a real world economic overhaul were being played out in a completely closed economic system, undertaken by a cadre of economists who had taken an ironclad vow of poverty.

False. In real life, forced redistribution of wealth never happens. The only possible thing is destruction of wealth. CCCP tried, Belgium tried, France tried resulting in an iconic actor becoming Russian. It is almost impossible to steal wealth from rich people without destroying this wealth in the process.

You may ask rich people. Maybe, if you’re a respectable guy, they may give you a good job with a matching salary (I did). You might even get someone to simply give you a million dollars for a youtube video (happened some time ago). But you can’t steal it.

Well, the only problem with it in the real world is that the rich are more mobile than the poor. If you overly tax the poor, they have to take it in the chin, while if you tax the rich, they’ll just move someplace that taxes them less (or at least move their money there). Any plan to “redistribute wealth” needs to take that into account, and either be a global solution that doesn’t care where they, or their money, are, or it needs to be set up in a way that they’d want to participate (which is of course very tricky).

But since this is a game, they can’t pull their money out of Tyria and put it into Elona or whatever, and if every “Richy Rich” GW2 player decided that the game’s economic rules were too onerous and decided to quit the game entirely, then that’d be fine, the game as a whole would be better off without them.

I’d love to see some controls like “high volume trade” taxes, like if you purchase or sell more than a few stacks of goods in a certain period of time, there is an added tax, similar to Diminishing Returns when farming. Also perhaps a progressive tax on the TP, so that anything currently selling for less than a gold wouldn’t be affected at all, and things costing up to 10-20 gold wouldn’t be affected too much, but anything going for 100g or more would have a significant money sink factor to it.

a) a means to facilitate the WvW/PvE game content in the best possible way, or
b) game content itself (flipping goods, pushing markets up or down etc)

The people that play b) have an immense influence (or at least that is a very strong and common perception, not arguing either way) over the people that play a). The people that play a) often don’t WANT to play b), and feel kittened when market manipulation messes up their goals, or lengthens the time to get to said goal by X amount of time.

I would say that If the “b” side is considered by ANet to be a valid part of gameplay, then they should keep it distinct from the “a” experience. Give the market players a new form of currency that can only be spent on itself, let them play their markets all they want without in any way effecting the value of gold or goods that “PvE/WvW” players have to spend on things.

It’s essentially like forced open world PvP in its current state, where some players just want to do PvE content, and other players get off on ganking them from the shadows. ANet saw the wisdom in removing this sort of toxic behavior from their PvE maps, but not from their marketplace.

If the price is too high and no buyer going to buy it, the price will fall
If the items was sold even listing at high price, the price is reasonable, at least for some buyer(farmer)
If the price continue raising, you shall blame the buyer

The fair price is the rate people will pay when the supply is not being artificially managed. If ANet puts 50K of a given resource into the game, and roughly that many are on the TP (minus the number of people putting those resources to their intended use), then that is the only fair market value for that item. If instead the TP supply is half that or less because some people are hoarding the existing supply and releasing them at inflated prices, then that is NOT the fair price, whether people are willing to pay it or not.

Also just because certain items are rising in price, it doesn’t mean inflation is happening.

Does it really matter if what meets the official. economics definition of “inflation” is happening? I think that the only thing that matters is “can people afford the things they want, having put forth a reasonable amount of effort to achieve them.” If the only people who can afford high end goods are those who play the markets, get very lucky on a few RNGs, or farm relentlessly, then something is wrong with the supply of high end goods, or with the success rate of those money-earning tactics verses basic gameplay.

I’m not an economist. If the economists in the audience say that the problem that players are having does not equal the proper use of the word “inflation,” then fine, I fully accept that point of semantics. But the problem itself still exists, regardless of what officially codified economics term one uses to describe it.

As soon as you begin referring to luxury goods as an inflationary issue I start skimming instead of reading. Within the last hour I’ve specifically said that you’re mistaking inflation for what is not inflation. Precursor prices aren’t changing due to inflation.

There’s an important fallacy at play here that is an important distinction to make between a virtual and a real economy. It’s a game. There are no necessary goods, and by that same token there can be no explicitly defined luxury goods. Every item in the moving economy is a luxury good, it’s an entirely luxury-based economy. You can’t separate out some types of items as “not mattering” just because you decide that they shouldn’t matter. The highest priced Legendary or Precursor on the TP is no more a “luxury good” than a level 5 white sword or a lump of copper ore going for a few copper (less if there weren’t a floor).

If some items available in the marketplace are going for far more than the players believe is reasonable (determine whether that is true or not however you feel necessary but don’t just assume that it’s not true), then something is wrong with how the economy is functioning. Either wealth is too concentrated in too few hands, or the quantity of certain types of items are far too limited to approach demand. ANet has a lot of levers they can pull to balance this situation out, and so far you don’t seem to be doing so. Yet.