Guild Wars 2

laokoko.7403:

But in GW2, the difference is it’s more profitable to play the TP than the other aspect of the game. There is only 1000 other mmorpg out there, I would say it is one of the few similar to Diablo(before they cancel the auction house), you are much better sitting infront of the TP and neglecting the other part of the game if you want to be rich.

I still don’t understand why that’s a problem. As long as you don’t need to be rich to play the game, who cares? If you don’t have fun messing with the TP, play the parts of the game that are fun, and forget about being virtually rich.

I do think there could be a lot more diverse and “cool” items for players to earn by playing instead of buy with gold.

Starfall.6813:

While this thread has meandered a long way from the OP, I just want to say that I really agree with both these posts. The game HAS gotten too reliant on the TP. I don’t really care how it impacts things on the high end market, and I don’t care about how free the market is or whatever. But just playing through the game, it is very difficult to keep a character effective without relying on the TP to get gear. Because there is just no way to guarantee that you will get the gear you need before you outlevel what you have.

That isn’t my experience at all – for my first character between crafting, karma vendors, and drops I bought very little gear (mostly weapons) from the TP until I was close to level 80 and wanted to step up my game. There’s nothing wrong with having to buy some gear from the TP because you want something particular for your build. Lower level gear is ridiculously affordable. I bought a lot of gear for my alts however because it was cheaper and more convenient than the other ways I could have outfitted them.

If you’ve set yourself a challenge to “iron man” the game (which I have done before just to keep things interesting) that’s fine, but balancing the game so that there is little incentive for players to trade because it’s easy for everyone to be self sufficient will make the game unfun for a lot of folks.

There are a lot of features in this game that make it possible to not use the TP. One character can have every crafting skill. You can get nice gear with karma, laurels, and dungeon tokens. I bought some of my gear from the cultural and Order vendors for the skins, but the stats on them aren’t bad for the level. You can get some really cool looking things through Mystic Forge crafting, and some of them are pretty easy to make. The only reason you’re forced to go to the TP is for rare items, items you need for a specific build, or crafting materials you don’t want to spend the time harvesting.

Wanze.8410:

I oppose this idea because even though i agree that it would halt speculative trading, i still fail to see a good reason to restrict it in the first place. People will soon run out of storage space and would have to vendor or delete items and i cant see that benefiting the overall experience of the game, especially for new players.

Beside the economical impact, i think it would be hard technically to implement.
They would have to expand the collectible tab by 100% to be able to accommodate an unbound and an account bound version of each crafting mat.

And if you ever make a mistake and buy the wrong thing or too many of the right thing, you’re stuck with it. You can’t even repost it for a loss.

I would have to rethink how I placed buy orders too. I’m not a speculator, but sometimes I’ll put buy orders out for a couple of different bits of gear when I really only want one of those options. Whichever one comes in first is the one I keep and if I get multiples, I just sell the others and try to cover most of the 15% tax.

Making purchased items account bound would put a serious damper on how much stuff I buy. I also wouldn’t be able to pick up good deals for my husband’s characters when I came across them. I’d probably hoard a lot of things that dropped instead of selling them because I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in the supply being there at a later date.

I don’t see it improving my game experience – quite the opposite – and as far as I can tell the only reason for implementing it is because some folks have a bug up their nose about traders and their filthy lucre. And if ANet did decide to implement it, we’d have to listen about all the accusations that they did it to sell bank and bag slots.

zilcho.7624:

And the thread got moved. For some reason, I don’t think the moderator even bothered reading my first post. If they did, I would have hoped they would clarify why the disagree with my decision.

This is where it belongs because it is about the TP and how it impacts the game. This isn’t the economics forum, it is the Black Lion Trading Co forum. You really do want it here if you’re serious about being “interested in how it changes the game itself, in general. How it effects [sic] players who choose to have a minimal exposure to the economy.” because this is where the players that have thought a lot about the TP and its impacts on the game hang out and where you have the best chance of having an interesting discussion about your topic.

Besides you might catch John Smith’s eye and he might point out some aspects of the design you hadn’t considered or drop some data on us.

JK Arrow.7102:

I am hesitant though to suggest something like 50 lodestones as the point is to change the focus from hard to gather mats like lodestones that are more easily purchased on the TP to something where the materials needed are not the money gate but the other components become the time/effort gate. A recipe like this greatly benefits players who spend a lot of time doing the core gameplay by allowing them to acquire desirable skins without the need for money alone. It also prevents players from focusing purely on the TP to acquire the luxury goods.

I could be way off in my reasoning but I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

After reading a lot of the discussion here I’m leaning toward this sort of thing as a solution too. Not necessarily replacing existing recipes, but adding more recipes for cool things that are weighted toward slow steady progress rather than hoping for lucky drops or grinding out gold to buy those drops from other players. Things that require skill points/karma/laurels to create so that the price of obtaining the item doesn’t change all that much with the market. The items wouldn’t be particularly rare, but I don’t care as long as they look cool. Ambrosia isn’t hard to make, but it’s a fun little focus skin for the right character.

Toroxus.9256:

Pandemoniac.4739:

I’m not sure that “flippers raise prices” is an incontrovertible fact, but regardless, higher prices mean you can sell the stuff you find for more gold, so why is that a bad thing?

For the same reason higher prices were so bad in Guild Wars 1: Inflation.

Sooo can we make equating a price increase with inflation a corollary to Godwin’s Law for this forum?

Flippers don’t increase the gold supply.

Toroxus.9256:

Well, I never said to remove Flippers, notice in my post it wasn’t my wish. But from my point of view, flippers damage the economy by raising prices.

I’m not sure that “flippers raise prices” is an incontrovertible fact, but regardless, higher prices mean you can sell the stuff you find for more gold, so why is that a bad thing?

I bought mine on sale, but it was a long time ago. I remember it being more expensive when it wasn’t on sale than 700 gems though. The toy frying pan that comes with it is a blast, and not too shabby at costume brawl.

There was a good discussion of this idea in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Guilds-as-Third-party-Trading-Channel/1584371 including some input from JS. In short, encouraging trading outside of the TP does have negative impacts on the game and isn’t as simple as allowing players to trade the way they prefer.

Naevius.3185:

Games don’t use much bandwidth, but the real issue is increased and variable latency. If they start prioritizing traffic, you may experience random delays in packets getting to game servers. And good luck if you play while some priority Netflix traffic runs.

We actually changed providers because of this. The cable company had theoretically faster speeds, but it was shared bandwidth and we were at the end of a line that also carried cable TV traffic. I live in Texas, and there is no way any gamer is going to get bandwidth when football is on. We switched to a slower but dedicated line and it is so much better.

What concerns me most though is not the pricing but the fact that providers could block certain types of traffic. Have your internet through Verizon and want to watch NetFlix instead of their VOD? Sorry, no can do. Oh you want to send encrypted data? Sorry, you have to have an enterprise level plan you can’t afford as an individual.

There isn’t enough competition in the US market right now for this to work by consumers voting with their wallets. I have a choice of A or B if I want high speed internet and there is only so much leverage I have by ping ponging back and forth between them.

Actually it’s not all bad, because as part of the decision the court affirmed the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband Internet in principle. The ruling just said because the FCC had classified Internet providers differently from phone service providers that it couldn’t do so in this particular case. That means they can rewrite the regulations and it could satisfy the court.

Also, Comcast supports the FCC’s Open Internet rules and has said they’ll stick to them for at least the next 6 years… It was Verizon that challenged them in court.

Wanze.8410:

Pandemoniac.4739:

Zaxares.5419:

Yeah, if I were to speculate on cooking mats, I’d go for the ones at or near vendor prices and that match a theme.

Cinnamon Sticks seem like a prime candidate to me.

Chocolate bars and sticks of butter have recovered from the great cookie ingredient deluge, but cinnamon has been in the dumps ever since the karma ingredients were removed. It’s just too common with not a lot of use.

I am not sure how profficient you are at cooking but cinnamon is only used in 2 lvl 400 recipes.

Don’t forget pumpkin pie spice – still it seems to me like something that will eventually get corrected and it’s dirt cheap.

Zaxares.5419:

Yeah, if I were to speculate on cooking mats, I’d go for the ones at or near vendor prices and that match a theme.

Cinnamon Sticks seem like a prime candidate to me.

Chocolate bars and sticks of butter have recovered from the great cookie ingredient deluge, but cinnamon has been in the dumps ever since the karma ingredients were removed. It’s just too common with not a lot of use.

Vol.7601:

I guess what everyone can learn about this is that no matter what you are investing in, do your research before blindly rushing in and pressing buttons!

It’s also very possible that speculators figured that others could fall into this trap and would take advantage of the incorrect share purchase. Nefarious, but smart!

Now just wait a second… are you saying that I have to do work and understand how the TP operates to make money as a trader? That’s not what all those folks on the forums and all those guides on the Intertubes told me!

On a more serious note, marketers, realtors and other salespeople do similar things to misrepresent how desirable whatever they’re selling is and there is always enough people that fall for it to make it worthwhile. I could predict the drop in real life gold simply by watching the exponential growth of the advertising trying to convince me to invest in it. No one is trying to hard sell me on the commodities being used in metamaterial research though… how strange

It used to be that neither Sunrise nor Twilight counted, but it appears to have been a bug that was fixed: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Thanks-for-the-legendary-achievement-fix/first#post1974854

morrolan.9608:

Pandemoniac.4739:

That’s because a free market does actually work.

Thats fine except the TP isn’t a free market.

Eh, close enough considering how much of the economy is abstracted to work inside of a game. It’s not really realistic that much of the population’s income comes from killing other beings and robbing them of whatever they have in their pockets, but it works for the purposes of the game.

I think someone is misremembering how difficult it was to scrape together 100g at launch. Yeah the legendary weapons were priced lower, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were more obtainable for casual players. By the time someone like myself could accumulate enough gold for last week’s price, a more industrious player accumulated 10x as much, and the price went up. Some folks might have been able to take advantage of the volatility when the market was still trying to figure out what such rare things were worth, but overall legendaries were still really expensive.

That’s just the reality of the market. The folks that want something enough to shift their time and energy away from other pursuits will always be able to pay more.

I’m also opposed. You shouldn’t need credentials to express your opinion and have it heard on a forum created to collect player feedback. Also AP aren’t the only metric that you would need. If someone posts about the gem store, we’d need to see their purchase history. If someone posts about sPvP we’d need their rank and potentially their win loss record by class type depending on what they were posting about. See the problem?

It might be something to do with the sigil. If you search for masterwork staves and sort by minimum sale offer, they’re almost all “Of Force” and “Of the Night”.

Maybe some folks have an angle they’re working with the forge or salvaging.

Edit: the link didn’t work right, so I took it out

Astraea.6075:

The TP in GW2 makes this form of trading more efficient than in the original game, and therefore more lucrative in terms of time vs reward, but I’ve yet to see a concrete proposal for TP regulations that meet the following criteria:

- has minimal to no impact on how the majority of the playerbase is able to interact with the TP.
- does not overly restrict the supply of goods available on the TP.
- cannot be easily circumvented or alternatively, has a low enough cost associated with it, that it is generally not worth the effort to circumvent it.

That’s because a free market does actually work. Other than some limited short term volatility as demand or supply is changing, it really is the most accurate way to determine what the real worth of something is to the general population at a particular point in time. Changing the price of something to other than it’s true worth has historically been a really bad idea.

Regardless, it isn’t the traders that are making the price of things go up. Regulate the TP all you want, there will still be folks in the Queensdale champ train and speed running dungeons generating gold faster than other players who don’t want to play that way. Nothing you do to the TP is going to prevent them from being able to pay more than the next player to get what they want when the supply is limited.

The only way to “fix” that reality is to have a parallel track for the folks that don’t want to play the money game. The TP is competitive, and it has to be to work correctly. Earning laurels or karma to buy items from an NPC vendor is not competitive and I think if there were more options along those lines the folks that don’t want to worry about how much gold per hour they’re making would be better served.

zacsux.2098:

While you may have access to outside applications outside of the game, others however, do not. This is simply an idea to make all these features in an all-in-one in-game. This is a way to rid of the outside applications and strengthen the GW2 community all in one blow.

There are so many free and capable collaborative document systems that there is no reason to take a game company and insist they develop productivity software.

zacsux.2098:

What is the Hero’s Journal?

The Hero’s Journal would be an in-game document system that would allow the player to record and save text documents to help the player progress. There could be MANY uses for this system, here are a few examples that I have come up with:
• Note Taking
• Self-made guides
• Character oriented short story (for those literature junkies)
• Game Strategies
• Guild Member data sheets (For those organized Guild Leaders)
• Profession Build storage (since we don’t have this already)
• Keep track of daily character tasks (Making Charged Quartz and Bolts of Damask, etc.)

While I appreciate the thought that went into your suggestion, there are so many better ways to do this that have the added advantage of not requiring me to boot up the game to see my notes.

• I have a very handy and inexpensive notebook on my desk that not only let’s me take notes, but also sketch diagrams, and doodle with my variously colored pens.
• I have Microsoft’s OneNote which is crazy good at collecting and organizing digital notes. My husband keeps his up on his second monitor to track his builds, which characters have done which tasks/achievements, et. al.
• I have an android tablet that has a pretty good note taking app on it also, but usually I just keep the forums or wiki up on it.
• There are tons of places online to share fan fiction and other community generated content, including a whole sub-forum right here.

I don’t see a real advantage to having a notebook application in game. If I’m going to write a story, or manage my guild roster, or keep track of my builds, I’m not going to want to sit around in game and do that. I’m going to log out and use a fully featured document system that can do things like check my spelling and grammar, embed images, add tags, search and replace, tables, equations, etc.

However, your Hero’s Journal idea might be interesting as part of a web service outside the game, where some information from the game was populated from your account like your characters’ builds, achievements, a portrait showing their outfit, etc. and you could add things like guides and stories to your profile and choose whether to make different areas public/friends only/private. I think it would be a very cool extension of the community.

Fiontar.4695:

Ideally, an hour of play would provide roughly the same amount of gold equivalent, no matter what content you decide to tackle.

I think the failure of the economy, for individual players, in GW2 is that there are farming locations and routines that are so much more profitable for time spent that materialistically driven players become a slave to those repetitive grinds.

I don’t know how you could possibly make all types of play all yield the same gold rewards. I spent a whole lot of time collecting ingredients to discover cooking recipes, with no thought whatsoever to how that time spent was impacting my income. Should I have made the same amount of gold that someone who was trying to make gold would have made? Doesn’t seem fair that I could fart around and someone else could work at it and we’d end up with the same rewards. I know you were probably thinking dungeon runs versus WvW or whatever, but hey, crafting and exploring is content too.

A lot of players like mindless farming. I can’t stand it, but there will always be the player that is very goal oriented, willing to withstand a lot of tedium to achieve that goal, and derives a lot of satisfaction out of playing that way. A hardcore farmer will find the most efficient way to farm. You can put in DR, you can nerf the farming spots, you can add Champion mobs, and they will always find new spots and new ways to achieve their goals.

The only way you can balance the scales is to have a parallel track where the value of the goals aren’t market driven. There are some things like that already in the game, but there isn’t enough variety in my opinion.

Maestria of Strat.2974:

What you say is true. However, one aspect that is missing from this is the standard of living (quality of life?). Having rare, unique items, only affordable to a minority is not a society/game people want to be in, except to the ultra rich.

If everyone could afford them, they wouldn’t be rare. I’m perfectly content to allow the hardcore their legendaries and other such things I will never have the patience to farm for or the desire to pay that much real money to get.

Maestria of Strat.2974:

So, what we need is value created. Say provide more options for players. For example, have more variety in weapons, say non-legendaries, with lower crafting requirements. We have those, just provide more. Increase the richness of the system.

I do agree that it would be good for there to be more things in game that have a fixed price in different currencies (gold, karma, laurels, dungeon tokens, etc.) I think we have enough materials and gear to keep the TP engine humming along. What we need are more options for the folks with less time to play to choose to work toward.

I’m thinking of more things like the pirate cultural weapons at the end of Sharkmaw or the Ebonhawk weapons. Items with a particular flavor that wouldn’t necessarily outshine the harder to acquire items, but would still be cool.

The mystic forge items seemed like something for me to go for at first, and then I looked at the required materials for many of those recipes and it was daunting for someone like me that has a really low tolerance for farming. I’d love to see some more recipes halfway between Ambrosia and Lidless Eye that have very few (or none at all!) of the randomly dropped rare materials that I would most likely have to buy off the TP.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

ixiduffixi.6384:

Yes because the map completion achievement is a server wide reward, not a personal one. It’s something that requires the help and cooperation of a large group of players for something they may or may not benefit from.

Are you trying to talk about WvW? If so, you can’t compare playing WvW competitively with willingly helping a single player cap a POI. All you have to do is play WvW as it’s meant to be played, and everyone benefits, including the player who wants Map Completion.

I think the WvW maps should be part of map completion, and that getting folks to poke their heads in and see what this WvW business is all about is a good thing, but forcing them to not just participate but to be successful at it is counter to encouraging more folks to get involved in WvW.

What would be the harm in moving the POIs for map completion outside of the keeps so that players don’t have to wait for their color to come around? What about those players that are stuck in a cycle where their server is always out matched or that play outside of prime time on their server? Those players would still experience the map and get exposed to WvW but they wouldn’t be as frustrated.

tolunart.2095:

For example, if mithril greatsword blades and hilts are selling for 25% more than the cost of the mithril ore used to make them, then buy as much ore as you can afford and craft components, then sell the components to make money. If you make them into swords and try to sell the swords, the cost of the inscriptions will push your expenses too high and you will lose money.

I’ve had luck crafting insignia, inscription, and other parts instead of finished product. I think some folks buy the parts to have their guild mates craft specific items for them.

Personally, I think having WvWvW maps as part of map completion is a good idea. The problem is that your server has to be winning or have drawn a particular color for folks to get the map completion, and that’s a bad idea. Would it be so terrible if the the POIs were accessible regardless of who owns the keeps in a particular area? It would still be dangerous to get close to an owned keep.

I think using an individual achievement like map completion to try to incentivize a server wide goal like WvW dominance isn’t a great mechanic. I think encouraging typically PvE folks to come in and look around and see the entire game is a good thing, but requiring them to participate in conquering the maps or to wait for months depending on the server they’re on is setting the bar a little too high.

There might be some merit to putting the really high end stuff like the legendaries into an auction type interface instead of the commodities interface. I know that D3 had a different interface for selling/buying gems because it made sense. Maybe the inverse would make sense in GW2 where there are a few items that aren’t treated like commodities.

On the other hand, auctions have their own problems especially in a cross server market as large as the one in GW2. If folks think it’s hard to get their buy order filled because of folks over-bidding by one copper the second they put one in, I shudder to think of the auction sniping angst we would see. The folks that have the time to sit and constantly monitor their bids will still have an advantage over the folks that don’t.

Guardian.5142:

Its the fact that the people in this game are allowed to avoid all playable content, sit in Div reach or Ebon and exploit the market at every turn, causing prices for everything to be inflated and moving the goalposts ever away from the casual gamers…

I think your perception of the effect that flippers have on a market is incorrect. They don’t inflate prices – the competition among the traders brings prices in line with what the item is really worth. High prices are actually good for the folks that generate the supply – players get more gold for the stuff they find when prices are high. The folks that really drive prices out of the reach of casuals are the hard core gold farmers. The more gold they generate, the less gold is worth, and the more gold it takes to represent the true value of something. The trader doesn’t make money unless someone buys what they’re selling. If no one had thousands of gold to spend on a legendary, they wouldn’t cost that much.

The problem is that while item X is worth say 10 hours of play for the hardcore farmers, that value in gold might represent 100 hours of play for someone more casual. That is going to happen in every game where there is a mix of hardcore and casual players. I think the real problem is that there aren’t many medium term goals (in terms of gear) for the casual players to work toward. Either it’s really easy to get something or it takes a prohibitive amount of time.

There is cultural armor of course, but that’s not to everyone’s taste. There’s the dungeon armor that you can get with tokens. There’s ascended accessories with Laurels. There’s karma armor, but the highest tier stuff is gated behind the temple events, and I was really disappointed that the skins were all the same.

Flissy.4093:

I’m not criticising the group I mentioned, simply stating that MMOs have never been catered to such players, and as a genre known for such deep character progression and development, methods should never be easily attainable by those with extremely limited time.

That’s a ridiculous overgeneralization of what an MMO is – MMOs were born as subscription games, and they needed time sinks as well as gold sinks for their business model to work. It has nothing to do with deep character progression – the single player games like Skyrim et. al. are know for that.

There’s absolutely no reason why a particular MMO shouldn’t fill a niche and be built for folks with less time to play. There is already a wide selection of MMOs that don’t cater to the more casual player, why would you begrudge those of us with careers and families the chance to play an MMO?

Devata.6589:

It’s for sure a design trade-off or better a design choice but if you go for the ‘easy’ solution then it gets close to quick and dirty imo.

I’m probably getting a little pedantic, but just because it is a popular design doesn’t mean it’s an easy solution.

I think what it comes down to is that your vision for the perfect MMO is different from the developer’s vision and when you talk about something in theory, your vision doesn’t have to get compromised by conflicting requirements.

Maybe ANet would have liked to have a continuous world, but it was more important to be able to patch the game on the fly so that they didn’t need scheduled maintenance day. Maybe putting you into combat when you take falling damage wasn’t their first choice, but separating falling damage from other types of damage was time consuming and added a bunch of risky code so someone decided that the value added wasn’t worth the effort.

It’s not really fair to criticise the quality of the design without understanding more about why the developers made the decisions they made. From my perspective and compared to other games I pre-ordered and played at launch, the underlying architecture of GW2 is solid.

As someone who has been involved as a developer on some very complex systems (although not games), I know that as an end user of other developer’s software that I only see the tip of the iceberg. Something that might be easy if it was designed the way I would have designed it, could be incredibly difficult in someone else’s design. That doesn’t make my design better in all aspects though – it just means we had different requirements or different priorities.

Devata.6589:

Another example can be the instanced based maps. Once again, it takes way a lot from the game. No walking into a new zone, something that tents to really stick to your memory. No a loading screen and then being thrown in a new instance. Suddenly you party members get black in the party screen and it simply does make the world not feel like a really big open world. Because it isn’t.
Now some people say.. well I love the fact that you don’t need to get into a que before getting into a game but that they have overflows and you need instanced maps for that.

This is also not an example of “quick and dirty”. This is a technical design trade-off. I modded a game called Dungeon Siege and one of the really cool things Gas Powered Games did is come up with a way of defining their maps so that there were no loading screens. It was super cool – until you wanted to teleport somewhere. It was unbelievably complicated to get that working correctly. It was also really hard to transition the lighting of different areas in a smooth way.

Just because you would have preferred a different design decision be made, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the design decision that was made. It’s really hard as an end user to really understand all of the trade-offs that caused a particular decision to be made because sometimes you have to have a deep understanding of how all the other systems impacted by that decision work. It’s not always obvious by looking at the surface of things.

Devata.6589:

Something that almost always come with the quick-and-dirty method is that fixing bugs or changing thinks will be much harder. That might partly explains why many bugs take so long to solve and when solving you suddenly see some new strange bugs come in.

An example of this mechanism can be shown using SAB. When SAB was released one of the developers (don’t have a link) told something about the development. One of the thinks was that they had to use a lot of ‘tricks’ to make it work. For example when falling you get into combat (bad design imo) and so slow down. If designed very good you should easily be able to turn this of. However apparently it’s really embedded deep in the code because when they made SAB they could not turn it off in stead they had to implement a speed-boost to you when you got into combat from falling. (People noticed that.)

I think you’re confusing “quick and dirty” with evolving requirements. SAB was a new thing that probably wasn’t in the original design requirements. So, yeah there’s some kludgy stuff that you have to do to bend an existing architecture to handle something new that you didn’t anticipate, but that doesn’t mean the design was bad.

There is a point in every software’s design when you have to make the decision to either making it really flexible and extensible, or just get it done. I’m terrible at software design because I can’t stop abstracting my object hierarchy until I have a class named “Universe” at the root, and then start thinking about whether that’s really a singleton or not…

In my development world, quick and dirty means churning. You tried to get something fixed really quickly, but it didn’t work and 16 iterations later you would have been better off taking longer and just doing it right in the first place. I don’t see that happening in GW2. Almost all of the changes have been really thoughtful in my opinion, with plenty of consideration given to how changes impact other parts of a really complex piece of software.

Just look at the revamp of the magic find system. They took MF off off of gear, figured out how to fairly adjust the existing gear, and added in a system for boosting your account wide magic find that turned previously worthless items into something of value. I was impressed that such a major change was possible in the time frame they did it in – to me that speaks to a really well thought out architecture.

There’s a Ranger PVE Guide from the official ANet YouTube channel that might be helpful.

Guardian.5142:

Pandemoniac.4739:

Commodity exchanges have standardized lots – there are no unique and special items as you would find in an auction. Every Carrion Short Bow on the TP is exactly the same as every other Carrion Short Bow, so only the price matters when deciding which one to buy.
(snip)

OK, I get that, but then wouldn’t WoW’s auction house be really a commodity market. And I think Aions, SWTORs… They all work because you break out individual sales as objects and stackable items have “price per unit”, so there’s a common ground in uneven stacks. GW2 TP just combines all of one type of item into a long thread of items set at reducing prices for greater supply and increasing prices for greater demand…. right?

Well those other games have more variability in items than GW2 – you can add enchantments to items in WoW, SWTOR has some items with augment slots that can be empty or filled with different levels and types of augments, etc. I didn’t play enough Aion to be that familiar with the item system, but I expect there is a similar issue. There’s too much variability to not treat each listing as a unique item listed by a particular seller. The items in GW2 are well defined enough that you can easily enumerate all possible variations of an item. For example, there’s a limited number of runes and there’s a fixed number of slots on weapons and armor that they can be put into.

The design of the trading system also impacts it – WoW’s auction house has auctions, where folks compete to be the highest bidder on a particular item. Even if I have exactly the same item I want to sell as the one being bid on, I can’t look at the high bidder and say “I’ll take that price” and sell my item to him or her. In a market, all sellers and all buyers of a commodity are directly competing against all other sellers and buyers for that commodity, which makes the pricing more efficient than competition limited to a particular sale of a particular item.

It’s the difference between selling a rare coin in a certain condition at auction, and selling a futures contract to deliver 12,000 lbs of grade AA butter on May 15, 2015 on a commodities market. Lots of folks could sell that butter contract, but there aren’t many folks that would have that particular coin in that particular condition.

I have a feeling I’m not explaining it very well – maybe someone else can help.

Guardian.5142:

Thank you for your answer. Can you clarify the difference between a commodity exchange and an auction house?

Commodity exchanges have standardized lots – there are no unique and special items as you would find in an auction. Every Carrion Short Bow on the TP is exactly the same as every other Carrion Short Bow, so only the price matters when deciding which one to buy.

In the Diablo 3 auction house, for example, every item of the same type, rarity, and level can have different stats, which makes it a lot more difficult to arrive at a price consensus. That’s why allowing time limited bidding makes the most sense in games with those kind of item systems. It’s a way to gather information on the value of an item that can’t be directly compared to an item that has sold before.

mtpelion.4562:

The Charr starting area seems to be your best bet for Chili Peppers. I used to make a swing there every day.

Yep – I’d do the Charr area for chili peppers and the Asura area for vanilla. As a cooking fanatic I really miss the days when dyes were dropping at too high a rate from the herb nodes too

JK Arrow.7102:

And I’m not necessarily advocating for increased drop rates on everything. What I’m looking for is rearranging those drops to some sort of organization. If it means that more of a certain item drops because more people are doing the required event/boss/dungeon etc. to make it drop then so be it. But that is different than changing the drop percentage.

So you’re saying that you would like to be able to do more focused farming by having certain mob types or certain areas be more likely to drop particular items than they are now? I did see a post by a dev somewhere indicating that they recognized it was difficult to farm cloth and leather, so there may be changes coming.

My experience trying to scrounge up some chili peppers was that while chili peppers only seemed to drop from harvests in certain areas, it didn’t seem like the chance that they would drop was high enough compared to the stuff you could get in any area. I’d agree that there may be some tweaking that could be done to the loot tables.

I’d like to have some of the rarer underwater weapons, because I really like the underwater portions in Frostgorge, but even exclusively farming underwater mobs didn’t seem to drop a significantly greater number of underwater weapons to throw in the forge. It wasn’t a statistically significant sample of course, but it does seem like something is off. I know, I know, random is random, but it seems like a little less random would be more satisfying.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This thread has gotten very off topic, probably because the truth is not very fun to talk about.

The point is that the game uses the TP too much, not that there is anything wrong or inefficient about the TP. If you want to talk about the efficiency of the TP then make a thread to do so. The problem is that you can’t reasonably get what you want without the TP. In other games if you want to craft something you can go farm for a week or two for the items you need. To do the same thing in GW2 you either need 6 months of 8 hours a day farming, or 10 minutes on the TP.

I understand your point and I think you’re right that this can’t be fixed by putting restrictions on the TP. I think there’s another group of folks arguing a different point about the bourgeoisie taking advantage of the proletariat that’s muddying the waters a bit.

The game was designed so that every item in it is a commodity unlike some other games where gear has random attributes (not all “Swords of Doom” are created equal in those games). In that environment, it will always be more efficient to buy most materials and items. The generation of the supply is distributed across the entire playerbase, so if any one player could get everything they needed on their own, the entire economy would be over-supplied. The necessity of the TP is built into the game design and I don’t see any way that you could change that without destroying the game as it is now.

I love the lootsplosion games, but they drop a lot of loot because you have to sort through a lot of useless junk before the RNG gods smile and drop you something with a set of attributes you can really use.

My favorite system in terms of “fun” and not necessarily economic efficiency was Star Wars Galaxies. Almost every item was created by players for players from player gathered resources. Players could choose the “trader” class and once you reach a certain level you could set up a shop with robot vendors to sell your goods and accept offers from other players. There was a bazaar terminal where players that weren’t traders could sell and buy, and the traders could list their shops on their as well. It was a system that worked for the day traders, the crafters, the harvesters, and the folks that enjoyed building a business. It sort of left the folks that wanted to farm for awesome drops out in the cold though. It was a kinder, gentler EVE Online from what I gather.

So the Our Story So Far video came out a couple of days ago and I really enjoyed it. I would love to see more comprehensive recaps along the same lines as this video with a bit more detail on each chapter of the story.

Devata.6589:

The model GW1 had.. Expansion based income was that perfect ‘hybrid’ model.

In a way buying the expansion is then the same as paying a subscription but in stead of buying it for a month you pay for the content and added content ever year / year and a half. The game company can expect a pretty regular income and the player has no time above has head or game-play effected by it’s cash-shop because the design does not have to stimulate cash-sales.

The problem with expansions is that making them optional purchases splits the playerbase. An optional subscription or VIP program doesn’t.

I like expansions for multiplayer games like GW1 and Diablo, and hate them for massively multiplayer games like WoW or GW2. If an expansion comes out and adds a new zone that you can’t get to without paying but half your server population is in there playing the new content, wouldn’t that be worse than seeing someone running around with a VIP badge (or mini-pet or fancy hat or whatever they’re going to give them)?

Obtena.7952:

Guardian.5142:

It is with respect, I’d like to ask you specifically, why you believe a X day timer on all TP sell orders would be a “bad idea” in this game? The intention is to add a time factor as a top down pressure to move goods through the TP to their intended parties and to curb “player influence” at the top end of the market to avoid having to pay the “tax” to relist their item(s).

The last statement sums it up … Why would anyone interested in curbing inflationary measures, advocate AVOIDING taxes and keeping more Gold in circulation.

If the big issue here is paying the tax multiple times, then people need to be listing their goods in a range where they will get sold the first time they list. If you don’t have the patience required to do that because you are undercut, then you need to stop playing the TP and simply sell at the lowest buy order. This isn’t a TP/economy issue … it’s a player one.

Also, the tax itself is a downward pressure on prices as well as being a gold sink.

I’d rather see the listing fee come out of the profit when filling a buy order (so you don’t have to have gold on hand to sell an item) than a time limit on sell orders. I don’t like having to check my listing every play session. Managing expiring listing like I’ve had to do in auction house MMOs is something that burns me out really quickly. I’d rather make a long term gamble and be able to let it sit there than be forced to do all my pricing for the short term. Why shouldn’t I be able to place a “good until cancelled” limit order?

I don’t understand all the focus on regulation to bring prices down on the TP. Low prices hurt the farmers that are providing the supply. The vast majority of the gold I’ve made didn’t come from gold dropping – it came from selling drops.

Imbune.5497:

That’s practically suicide, I call BS on that ‘leak’. If an online game is doing poorly they go f2p, not sub/vip foolishness in addition to purchase.

City of Heroes and SWTOR both went to a hybrid model when things started going downhill. Lots of F2P games have “founders” packs that have similar types of benefits. It’s not exactly a new concept to have different tiers of players based on what they pay for the game.

Requiem.8769:

Reference here.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1utx8p/data_mining_vip_membership/

What are your thoughts on VIP Membership bonuses? Categorized into
-payment method (either subscription-based; time-based, or single-time purchase?)
-gameplay (how would this affect the gameplay?)
-sociality (how would this affect player v. player interactions?)

Thanks for sharing this – it’s really interesting.

So I’m not opposed to VIP programs in principle, but the devil is in the details. It seems like most folks who are upset are assuming that it will be a monthly subscription and you won’t be able to pay for it using gold -> gems.

SWTOR has a “premium” membership that is earned with a single payment (under $10 I think), so the Tier 1 and Tier 2 VIP images could offer a choice between two different mechanisms, or two different price points.

In my opinion, changing the business model for SWTOR saved that game from cancellation, and while I think the free to play terms are a bit harsh, I’m not seeing a lot of divisiveness among F2P, premium members, and subscribers. The free to play/premium folks seem to vastly outnumber the subscribers (my experience only – don’t know for certain) so the subscribers can’t get too snobby or they won’t have anyone to run group up with. It all seems to be working fairly well. Most of the subscriber benefits are available as individual purchases, so non-subscribers have a way to cherry pick the features most important to them without committing to a monthly fee.

If adding a VIP program means more money rolling into the game, and translates directly into more ambitious changes and additions, why all the angst? I can see how teleport to friend and the resurrection buff would be problematic in WvWvW, but who said they won’t be PVE only? Maybe instead of folks threatening to rage quit over it, we should be designing the GW2 VIP program we’d like to see if such a thing were ever to exist.

Vol.7601:

Romek.4201:

you have a source for this? cause i dont saw anything bout this

It was somewhere in this CDI thread. Up to you to go through all those pages lol

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/46#post3468648

I used these search terms in Google with good results:
site:forum-en.guildwars2.com CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal “cloth prices”

LordByron.8369:

Also you are dodging the fact, that economy is totally bad for non tp flippers.

I know that the overall economy SEEMS working, unfortunately when you take the most players and analyze their situations you ll see how today most of them:

-can t afford ANY luxury item differently from the game launch..

-Also the can t no longer afford BIS equipment.

How do you know this to be true for most players? You state it as a fact, but there is no way that you could know what the majority of players can or can’t afford or how the players with lots of gold got it.

I understand why that’s your perception if you’re basing it off of what you see on the forums, but keep in mind that the folks that are doing well in terms of gold accumulation generally aren’t going to post to the forums to brag about it and they certainly aren’t sharing their gold making “secrets” with the public.

Ensign.2189:

Sitting around shouting in town to trade, for instance, is a more satisfying ‘trading’ experience than point and click on a trading post interface;

I would disagree. It’s much more satisfying to search for deals and figure out the value of things through an interface where everything is listed than sit around in town spamming/scanning chat hoping the right person decided to log in and hang around town to trade. Some folks enjoy going to the flea market and haggling over every purchase – I prefer my “one-click” buy button on Amazon.

The unfortunate thing is that the TP and the flea market don’t coexist well unless there’s some separation in the goods being sold. A TP for commodities and a flea market for selling crafting services might work. Instead of a trade interface, it would be an interface to offer materials/gold in exchange for a crafted item. I vaguely recall WoW having some sort of interface in the trade window for enchanting/disenchanting.

There’s just no point however in direct trading in addition to the TP when the items are commodities. All it does is make it harder to know the real value of things and let the folks with a tolerance for standing around spamming chat bypass a gold sink.

My husband and I created a guild just for the shared space of the guild bank. We didn’t need to buy any influence – if you duo events you actually get decent influence – and it took us a couple weeks to get together enough to build the first bank tab. We also got lucky with some guild scrolls dropping from chests and both used the scrolls we got through leveling.

If you had friends in-game that have a guild slot open, they can help you out just by logging in and representing your guild before they go back to representing their main guild.

Essence Snow.3194:

To point out an obvious example most commonly used…legendaries. A trader hypothetically has the ability to make enough to buy in a a day or less.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Hypothetically, a non-trader does too. It only takes a few lucky drops.

Really? That’s the rebuttal? At least try to make it somewhat genuine.

It was completely genuine. The underlying assumption of your argument is that traders are somehow advantaged over non-traders. Why would I spend time rebutting anything else if the foundation of your argument is flawed?

Both traders and non-traders gamble to make a lot of money quickly. Traders gamble that their investments will go up in price enough to pay off, non-traders gamble that whatever activity they’re doing will be worth their time and effort through drops. The main difference in success rates is that the traders (in general) put a lot more thought into their gambles than the non-traders (in general).

Essence Snow.3194:

To point out an obvious example most commonly used…legendaries. A trader hypothetically has the ability to make enough to buy in a a day or less.

Hypothetically, a non-trader does too. It only takes a few lucky drops.

Vol.7601:

I’m sorry, just cause you say it doesn’t mean it’s fact. I can’t prove it but it’s common sense that the main reason people don’t play games anymore is because it’s not FUN. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking just MMOs. It’s about games in general.

I have to agree. I participated in a WoW churned player focus group where they asked 150 folks why they stopped playing and what it would take to bring them back to WoW. Not a single one of those responses said anything about the in-game economy or auction house or gold. It was all content and subscription pricing.