Guild Wars 2

Mistakes happen and they can make it to print. Rather than firing the NPC perhaps Arenanet should hire a lore editor in chief. You know, for the economy.

If this were intentional, I would expect some kind of indication in the text, such as our character saying:
“That’s not what I learned in school….”
or Zinn saying:
“Some will dispute my account of history, but they are bookahs!”

If it is intentional, then it falls flat. The fight to defeat Abbadon was a major world event. If we consider Tyria as a realistic world then there would be countless histories written about the fight and it’s effect on the world. As an analog; Zinn saying it was Dhuum is like Howard Zinn claiming Abraham Lincoln was the commanding general during the American Revolution and the first president of the Untied States. Both Zinns would have easy access to the correct information.

edit: My analog would be more accurate if Howard Zinn were replaced with Leonard Susskind. Don’t think it affects my argument too much.

Please, please, please make sure that Wintersday xp counts towards Tyrian masteries.

There is a pronounced progression treadmill flavor to unlocking guild buffs. Worse it seems to have been built from 2 Fibanacci curves with the workload to unlock going uphill on one and the rewards for unlocking going downhill on the other. The limit of one active buff strikes me as petty.

The scribing station offers the most convenient access to a player’s personal storage. There is no need to zone back and forth from the GH and a city.

Guild leaders need a way to communicate what materials are needed for the next planned upgrade. The message of the day is not enough, our guild’s mod is already full of other necessary information. If I may make a suggestion:
A check box or some other way for GLs to select an upgrade at the relevant NPC that when selected puts an aura/border/indicator around the material in the Treasurer tab. That buff would disappear when the material load for the chosen upgrade is met.

You would have to ask the Mistward armor committee.

Thick leather was specifically mentioned and is the market most often described in the forums as being ‘broken’. I wouldn’t invest any angst in the rapid increase in the price of thick leather.

That being said, insider trading is something every game development company has to protect itself and the player base from. I remember a post by John Smith intimating that he actually ran a sting operation to trap players who were suspected of trading on insider information.

edit: 6 million sections would be 24,000 stacks. Consider how many players would need to be involved just to store that many stacks.

Stitch.1794:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

That’s where I have mine parked and I’ve noticed that also. At that jp it will average one silver doubloons per week per char. It’s not an efficient way to gain gold unless they are mules that won’t be going anywhere anyway, so they might as well open a chest to get the gear from the chest and the occasional doubloon.

I had a character parked there for months, reserving my Revenant’s name. Typically, though, I do a key farm every couple of weeks using a birthday scroll, then leave the key farm character at the JP until I reroll him.

You are my new hero Stitch. My key runner now has something to do all week.

I think the fall in price after HoT release had less to do with the value of gold and more to do with returning players selling their inventory.

Gaviston, read the blog post from John Smith, the link is in my previous post. A post like that, while called for, will lead to speculation. If you look more closely at the GW2tp timeline that you posted a link for, it is clear the increase in the price of thick leather follows that post.

100% agree with you Belpha. Something like you describe would help ground our characters within the world. Personally, I would love to be the ‘mayor’/ patron of my home instances, something akin to the progression mechanics of guild halls.

After HoT was released, I started doing a map completion on my necromancer and have been getting keys.

I couldn’t remember when John Smith’s blog post was released. Thick leather was one of the materials players most expected to see a change made to. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns-economy/

While I don’t WvW often, I completely understand why most players here are upset and feel lied to. Arenanet, you told us that quickloot would work in WvW and how it would work.
This just strikes me as more of the same design by committee, market by committee, “What’s in the box?!?!” reveal strategy.

They do have a unique icon. To me, it looks like the 3 stacks of coins of a normal merchant sitting on a platter. There is one for each region and the relocate among the region’s zones.

Some of the ingredients are likely going to be ‘trophies’ from completing content. I think the Scribe recipe list is going to take a while to discover.

I feel the same way about NPC fishermen.

Wanze.8410:

Yes.

I think we should keep this thread on the front page until Wanze clarifies their statement. Would hate for anyone to think Wanze has a sense of humor.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Only one tiny complaint.

……Jumps off from high spot in Tyria. Hits Glide…..

Other than that, it’s great.

HoT has made me unrealistically confident of my ability to survive falling damage.

Item Suggestion: Emergency Puddle! Summons a puddle of water. Activates if character would take lethal falling damage. 60 minute cool down.

HoT is awesome. Like you, I was also reluctant. From my perspective Tyria was becoming less and less of a genuine world and more of a place to do business or play dress up. The new maps….they are alive, inhabited by believable characters, they are 3D explorable puzzles (gliding down into a cliff-face cave!).

The story is pretty good as well, some predictable moments, but some really good ones as well. I nearly watered Mordremoth and the transition from our team calling us boss to calling us commander was well done. The voice direction is spot on.

Night fury is the first skin I am going towards….

I could go on but will close with this. I played GW1 for 4-5 years and GW2 since launch without ever spending real world money in the cash shop. Yesterday I bought gems.

edit: Couldn’t close up there. I was going to use the gems to expand my bank to hold the new scribe materials. Thank you for starting to make room in crafting collections instead. That is just plain classy.

Gathered =/= free

The price of most of the materials will certainly go down or can be gathered over time. That is my plan. Only thing I don’t ‘like’ is the rarity of the exotic tonic. I would love to see a MF recipe to convert rare tonics into the exotic tonics and I am sure people who have loads of rare tonics would love to sell them to me at a higher price.

I have to start by saying Night Fury is gorgeous. This is the first prestige skin I am considering working towards. Whoever designed it should be treated.

Hopefully, the exotic bat wing tonic does get added to the NPC festival vendor for next year’s Halloween event.

An MF recipe using the rare tonics could generate more currency activity and obviously make them worth something to those who do not plan on crafting Night Fury.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Seth Chadwick.5317:

Another fun fact that I feel is relevant to this “discussion”: the Arenanet guild chose and captured the Lost Precipice Guild Hall.

shhh! Seth what are you doing!

Sands like he is trying to influence the outcome of the wager. #TeamLostPrecipice

Spartacus.3192:

Thanathos.2063:

Again: You can buy each recipe for a single laurel if you want another copy.

Where is the npc i can buy from pls?

thx

Laurel vendor under the “Achievement Rewards” tab. You don’t need to be on the character that earned the Rune.

Thanathos.2063:

Again: You can buy each recipe for a single laurel if you want another copy.

Thank you. I was hoping it was something like this, just couldn’t find the right NPC.

Yes please!

There was a message that popped up when I unlocked my druid runes about being able to purchase them somewhere….
But there were too many things happening on screen to catch the complete message. Could have been referring to the TP. If so, then hurrumph!

Elite specialization weapons are unequipped when logging onto characters with elite specialization trait equipped.

Op, I apologize for being snarky, I was tired after spending all day playing and could not restrain myself. You are entitled to your opinion and have the right to share your opinion.

However, your argument is irrelevant and the ‘data’ you use to support it is grossly exaggerated.

Map completion includes completing all hearts, vistas, pois, and hero points. Obviously, the time it takes to complete hero points is the only number relevant to a discussion of farming hero points. Rather than using 18 hours (a very short time for map completion), I would suggest 2-4 hours to collect all hero points in Tyria. If your main character or any of your existing alts already have any hero points from Tyria that number will be lower. I don’t know how long it will take to collect 20 hero points in HoT, but let’s assume another 2-4 hours.

Starting with a brand new character it would take between 4-8 hours to collect enough hero points to unlock every trait line. Those numbers are only for PvE.

edit: In your opening post you also state we can easily assume doubling the time for map completion. However, characters can not do map completion twice.

You are absolutely correct….
If we work for real world money rather than play GW2 we will have more real world money.
If we farm gold ingame rather than farm hero points we will have more gold than hero points.

Indeed…

If xp boosters don’t work on mastery tracks, I guess I will be able to overcome my OCD hoarding and free some bank space. If xp boosters are made less useful, hopefully their drop schedule is changed. With all the xp tomes and writs available, xp boosters will become mostly useless.

I have been trying to track down information about the exclusion of xp consumables but am having trouble locating anything. Will the exclusion only apply to consumables that grant xp directly such as writs of xp or also include xp earning buffs such as killstreak consumable?

Yamialexa.5103, Yargesh.4965 thank you for looking up the info. If the Pact Commandeer Mastery doesn’t require any xp earned, should be an easy one to level.

Serophous.9085:

Daroon.1736:

The big bomb will come when HOT actually launches and players see just how much time/effort and money is involved in creating a precursor – the QQ’ing will be Biblical.

“What do you MEAN I have to go to the Queen and dance for her?! Anet! Stop making me GRIND!”

If that is Arenanets definition of grind, the next collection we will need to do is console or fight Logan.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

The question is: Does HoT autoloot work if you’re down or dead? Because those are the situations where you usually get loot that you can’t pick up.

Theoretically, I would expect auto-loot to limit the effects of being down or defeated since the loot from kills would immediately go into inventory. If a foe that you got enough kill credit damage on dies after you have been downed or defeated, then I don’t know.

If Commander Pact auto-loot doesn’t work in WvW, what would be the reasoning?

Mastermind: 19
Conqueror: 16
Socialiser: 11
Achiever: 11
Seeker: 9
Survivor: 6
Daredevil: 4

and I have a brain to hex, which is a relief

No one ‘knew’ what Unique meant until players tested and confirmed the gear term by buying duplicates and trying to equip both. Before that everyone was guessing with some of those guesses being accurate. The term ‘unique’ only applies to trinkets because they have unique lore based names. If that is the only reason then I agree, there should be a clear definition of the term at the point of sale. Text describing the trinkets as unique lore-based artifacts of which only one can be equipped per character could actually reinforce the lore reasoning.

Offering players the opportunity to learn from their ‘mistakes’ is fun when it happens during combat encounters, JPs, and exploring. NPC vendor encounters……?

Thank you for entering the conversation.

John Smith.4610:

Reposting Izzy’s and my reponses from before:
John Smith:
This is interesting, but I would point out some things to look into if you try this again. As Izzy said, we make a lot of balance changes so you have to keep major changes from balance changes in mind. Running weights on the goods is something you should do, unfortunately the weighting can be slightly arbitrary and that drastically changes the results, so you end up with results entirely hinged on a series of variables that don’t necessarily have a scientific backing. Lastly, be very careful of putting variables in a model that feed into each other, that will cause the model to over-represent changes in a single set. Arguably you could fix this by proper weighting, but this gets really tricky when there’s a lot of variables mixing together. Oh, actually lastly, don’t use precursors, really don’t use anything that doesn’t trade at a reasonable velocity or anything that’s too much of a luxury.

Overall though, I think this is a great effort given the resources you have to work with and a really interesting read.

If we had access to this balancing data and usage data, I am sure we would only use it for the greater good. I am using the royal we, my opinions of what others would use it for has no scientific backing.
Your two ‘lastlies’ seem connected; precursors are made from T5-T6 materials, rare and exotic weapons. A lot of the currency activity information generated by precursors is also present in and could be captured from the information generated by those materials and weapons. However if the velocity of Precursors is low enough, their sale shouldn’t generate too much noise. That noise may be worth it since the price of precursors includes a fee for service in the form of a risk aversion premium. Hmmm…maybe with proper weights even that service good be measured in T5-T6, rare and exotic weapons. All things considered, the argument for or against including precursors could only last until HoT goes live.
Are you willing to answer a question that would help Dennis?

“Anything that’s [not] too much a luxury” or stuff that propagates currency activity at relative velocities:

Would you include ascended insignias and ascended crafting materials? These items would also capture information about the market value of services such as collecting account bound ascended materials, earning laurels, and leveling crafting disciplines.

1) Including gems is a grey area; gems are the equivalent of Euros if the Eurozone only produced products that could be sold in the US and Euros could only be spent on those products or converted back into US dollars. I think making an index with and without is the best option. If you are looking for the market wide affect of currency activity, an index without gems will still capture currency effects as it re-enters the marketplace. I am mulling over a better way to capture the effects of it leaving and returning.
5) You are trying to reproduce real world processes and a lot of people are trying to reproduce real world results. A CPI is meant to capture what participants in an economy regularly spend currency on and Tyrians regularly spend gold on gem-shop exclusive items and prestige goods. Stick your your guns about including prestige goods. If real world humans were able to stop buying everything when they turned 18 (lvl 80) but still earned income, the BLS of any rationale country would still collect data on what adults were buying.

9?) The best usable process advice you got was from Ensign concerning price smoothing. Mine was good as well but not really usable since you can never get genuine buying data, your weights will have to be arbitrary. Perhaps players would be willing to collect their purchasing habits for you? Anyway, apply some price smoothing.

Thank you for efforts.

edit:
Price smoothing is extremely important in a marketplace where currency activity is heavily influenced by the demand for non-essential products. Without non-essential products there is no genuine individual demand frequency, only individual demand period. A player can fulfill all their demand anywhere on the history of price points.

Serious.7083:

Psientist.6437:

Lol Wanze….I was nowhere near serious.

He was nowhere near me…

Snowflakes, at least the T1 tiny snowflake, from wintersday gathering tools and home instance.

Candy corn, market is flooded from Home instance nodes.

The silk scraps have rocketed in value because of the Guild Hall crafting recipes that have been put out.

First: cooties!

Second…are being serious about T1 snowflakes, Serious?

Lol Wanze….I was nowhere near serious.

That new Legendary Axe looks very Watchwork Sprockety…

and obviously raven parts

SRoode.7318:

Psientist.6437:

SRoode.7318:

Let’s just change “John Smiths” word “seller” to “long time player”, and “buyer” to “new player”.

Still seem fair?

Sounds even more fair. Most players, especially gathers, want a buyer’s market.

Not at all. What this does is pressure Gem purchases on both the old and the new.

Pressure is a strong word. I would use something like “makes gem to gold conversions an attractive option by maintaining the value of gold and maintaining a steady supply of materials.”

Behellagh.1468:

Psientist.6437:

Dawdler.8521:

I get most parts and it may not be as nefarious as it sounds (Anet want to nerf leather drops? Yeah, they can keep their kittening leather). However…

Map rewards are specific, tangible rewards you receive from playing on a map. They allow players to balance overpriced items as well as seek specific materials for their personal goals without constant uncertainty. Map rewards are pretty great but are a constant enemy of scarcity. Map-reward materials can no longer be overpriced for any extended period of time because players now have the power to push the supply when needed. This shifts the power from the supplier of a rare good to the buyer, because the buyer now has the option to refrain from buying and still achieve goals, which is what we wanted.

Can someone post an English translation please? :/

He is trying to walk a tight rope. John Smith et al wants scarcity but also wants players to have access to items without turning to the TP. Map rewards will reward players with specific and predictable rare rewards; that limits scarcity (drives down the price by increasing the supply) but also means players won’t have to turn to the TP for those rare items.

edit: lol I think between all the replies we covered it

No. The TP is a necessary evil to control the money supply. What JS wants to do is liberate supply from the few who are willing to do a particular type of content (Giant Eyes, some T6 mats) and making a killing on the TP because of it by introducing another reward system that a player can obtain these extremely rare/costly mats on their own without the onerous grind for the mat or the grind to raise the gold to buy them.

I am not sure what your ‘No’ responds to….
Is it to the obvious connection between the parts I bold-typed?

Halvorn.9831:

Aretak.3826:

Anet has always prioritised ‘the economy’ too much, to the extent it destroys how players interact with the game. Most gameplay is so horribly unrewarding compared to effort put in, and those with the most money are TP manipulators that rarely even touch actual content. It creates a huge barrier between players, things they might need and rewards they’ve earned.

One of the best comments around the topic.

There once was a game, let’s call it “Devil 3” for a second. It was sold a gazillion times because players liked its predecessor, but somehow it never really was really fun to play. Then the dev company decided for a brave step: instead of forcing players to farm for in game money (or even spend real money) to buy overpriced items they did not receive as loot drops because of crappy drop rates for “economy reasons”, they complete removed that auction house, more or less removed trading as a whole and then increased the loot drops so that you finally had a chance to receive the items yourself. And Bang, suddenly the game started to become fun again.

Personally, in my future gaming life, I am quite sure I will forgo games with an “economy” or someone specially taking care of it. It seems to be a safe sign for an unrewarding, un-heroesqe gaming experience.

“Devil 3” also destroyed the value of its in game currency with sloppy currency controls. I am a conspicuous gather (the opposite of a conspicuous consumer) and have mixed feelings about this business of being a hero. However, a game developer that monetizes its in-game economy and then employs zero or ridiculously feeble monetary policy is NOT the equivalent of a game developer that monetizes its in-game economy and employs sound monetary policy.

Linfang.1087:

So does this effect the usefulness of the copper and silver salvagmatics?

Unlikely. The ‘usefulness’ of salvagematics is determined by measuring against other salvage kits. That won’t change. If the drop rate of salvageable gear is reduced it will take longer (measured in hours not salvages) for a salvagematic to pay for itself.

SRoode.7318:

Let’s just change “John Smiths” word “seller” to “long time player”, and “buyer” to “new player”.

Still seem fair?

Sounds even more fair. Most players, especially gathers, want a buyer’s market.

Dawdler.8521:

I get most parts and it may not be as nefarious as it sounds (Anet want to nerf leather drops? Yeah, they can keep their kittening leather). However…

Map rewards are specific, tangible rewards you receive from playing on a map. They allow players to balance overpriced items as well as seek specific materials for their personal goals without constant uncertainty. Map rewards are pretty great but are a constant enemy of scarcity. Map-reward materials can no longer be overpriced for any extended period of time because players now have the power to push the supply when needed. This shifts the power from the supplier of a rare good to the buyer, because the buyer now has the option to refrain from buying and still achieve goals, which is what we wanted.

Can someone post an English translation please? :/

He is trying to walk a tight rope. John Smith et al wants scarcity but also wants players to have access to items without turning to the TP. Map rewards will reward players with specific and predictable rare rewards; that limits scarcity (drives down the price by increasing the supply) but also means players won’t have to turn to the TP for those rare items.

edit: lol I think between all the replies we covered it

First, thank you John Smith for being upfront; own it, don’t sugar coat it.

Sounds as though they expect a significant reduction in the demand for materials used to craft legacy precursors. If salvage rates/ faucets remained as they are now, the TP value of many mats would plummet. Hopefully, their goal is to keep TP values close to where they are now (across t5-t6). Hopefully this also means that the average player doesn’t have to work harder than they do now for Ascended gear. Conscientious objectors to the TP may not be winners.

Economic/currency activity is an important aspect of GW2.

edit:

“This shifts the power from the supplier of a rare good to the buyer, because the buyer now has the option to refrain from buying and still achieve goals, which is what we wanted.”

John Smith on map rewards

Conscientious objectors of the TP are not left out in the cold either.

Greener.6204:

Neural.1824:

If you all are so much kitten smarter than OP, maybe you could take the data that he spent a long time collecting and make something useful out of it.

I for one found in interesting.

It looks like most responders did exactly that, and as with all data sets, were able to come to different conclusions. Contradictory interpretations of the same information is normal.

No one, including the OP, has access to the most important data in determining market-wide inflation: accurate production and usage data on which to base weights. The only thing we can objectively do is talk about methodology.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Inflation is a measure of the cost of affording the necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing, transportation.

• “Food” isn’t required in this game, so inflation = 0
• Shelter isn’t available; inflation = 0.
• Clothing: unlike RL, this is bought once and lasts forever (until you upgrade). No easy way to measure inflation for it.
• Transportation: cost of using waypoints has never changed. Inflation = 0.

tl;dr “inflation” isn’t a useful tool in measuring the difference in costs for players in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
————————————————

You could, instead, look at the total cost of acquiring certain useful and not-so-useful things. For example:

• Outfitting a new L80 in full, crafted exotics.
• Unlocking dyes for a 5-character account.
• Outfitting at least one character with an AR=70 set of gear.
• Completing any BL weapon collection.
• Completing Treasure or Exotic hunter collections.

Turns out: some of those have gone down in price and some have gone up.

That is a very subjective definition of inflation, one that is completely removed from currency quantity theory. This from the US BLS website
http://www.bls.gov/dolfaq/bls_ques6.htm

I do agree with your second paragraph. The player base is varied enough to make individual indexes more relevant than an all goods index.

edit: Your definition of inflation is actually a description of an index.

The Tyrian gold marketplace is a very noisy place to look for the effects of currency quantity theory. Using arbitrary weights only increases the probability of generating noisy measures of inflation. Weights need to be based on real usage data. Have you considered using changes in buy and sell orders to make your weights more realistic. Of course, changes in buy and sell orders can’t be considered completely accurate representations of production.

On luxury goods:

Luxury goods aren’t used as part of real world indexes for many reasons, none of them relevant to Tyria. In the real world, luxury goods account for a tiny percentage of currency activity. In Tyria, that percentage is likely much higher. I wouldn’t be surprised if the production of luxury goods accounts for the majority of currency activity.

There are no goods that a Tyrian has to purchase every week. A Tyrian’s spending habits are dominated by gold price point compared to gathering price point and income; meaning every good is a noisy place to look for currency quantity theory. It is very inexpensive to remain relevant as a Tyrian hero, the cost of remaining relevant (equipped in exotic gear) approaches zero. An index that approaches zero is a terrible place to look for inflation.

Luxury goods are very relevant. Every character that I have lvled to 80 and equipped in exotics survived the experience and are now spending their time earning income to produce luxury goods.

We have to be willing to look for an objective measure of game wide inflation as well as consider which index is the best subjective measure of fair and equitable game design. Imho, that would be the index of crafting materials.

I forgot all about the scaling quests in PreSearing Ascalon. How long does it take with the daily quests?

Mordremoth’s tentacles would extend into the Mystic Forge, waking up a very drunk well armed Zommoros…..