GW2 is not a Pay-to-Win game, yet.
It is only Pay-to-Save-Time-and-Effort.
Buy gems with a few bucks, trade gems for gold and buy all the exotics you need. The rate gems to gold is very good and you will get a load of gold for your gems. Exotics are cheap.
BINGO. Top gear with no effort. What else can you ask more?
Everyone likes to play Sims and decorate houses. It will be implemented very soon with brand new furniture available at BLTC costing very affordable prices in gems.
A normal event looks like a revolution to the ones with no historical background.
First there is no game economy in GW2. That word is thrown around like it is the neatest thing since chocolate milk. It is sexy to type “Economy”.
To have an economy there must be regulation, right now there is none. There must be finite resources, and regulation of those resources. Things must wear away, including all those nifty special items, this gives crafters a reason for being in the first place.
Money must have value in game, not out of game. Selling gold in a gemshop is simply wrong. Mechanics must be in place to prevent farming and grinding, Two things GW2 has failed at.
Right now there is a glorified trading post by the most extreme definition. Gold sellers post on the forums to try and raise or lower the price of materials, you see this every couple of days. RNG has no place in this game other than the want of the developers.
Want to see a working “economy”? Make things wear out, Everything, thats right. make resources finite, the game already has recycling to a large degree, why not take advantage of it. Mechanics can be put in place to at least make resources appear valuable or spawn in special ways. Things i have solutions for, why dont the developers, why not in the first place?
Make gold account bound and put proper mechanics in place to prevent guild gold distribution abuse. Like gold sellers bringing in a player to get gold by trying to bypass the bind to account rule, though i am sure they would have thought of that. Laugh.
Make mats for big ticket items bind to account. Change the drop mechanics, this needs to be changed anyway, RNG and DR need to go.
There are plenty of ways to make a semi working economy, leaps and bounds better than what there is now, but the gem shop would suffer because of these built in mechanics if they were to be changed.
Everything revolves around the gemshop. Thats why things are so kittened up (typed kitten on purpose).
We all understand the need for Anet to make money but really, what kind of people RNG a gemshop when customers use real money, not ingame gold. That issue by itself is too funny, just saying.
Graill,
I admire your patience.
Most of the people that post here stating the BLTC works properly dont have the faintest idea about economics. They just learned the “supply and demand” sentence and use it without knowing what is behind that model.
The sad thing is that they will not learn from you either..:(
You have my vote to be hired and run the BLTC.
Merry Christmas,
Red
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
Anyway, in my opinion, Legendary Weapons (BoA) should be acquired using a Percursor got from a long and hard quest line (BoA) and using tokens got from game achievements (like the 100% world exploration, as an example) and not from game materials traded via TP.
I can accept the BoA status of Legendary Weapons to be account wide. After all, it was the person behind the account that got it..:)
Selling gems to players that need that amount of gold to buy a Legendary Weapon is very good business…I doubt that Legendary Weapons trade via TP will be banned.
Gems are produced at will by them, it is an infinite resource.
The players gem acquisition make the rate gem-gold to fluctuate around a base rate completely controled by them.I don’t think I ever said that Gems were a finite resource. And note that I used the world “supply-and-demand algorithm”.
The market seems based on supply and demand because of the fluctuations but if you look at the rate change over time since the game launched you will realize that the market is completely controled, both by an artificial gem-gold rate and by loot drop reduction nerf that pushes the players towards buying gems to get gold.
All I am seeing in the graph is gem prices going higher and higher, with very little deflation. This is natural, because the Gems have a much higher perishing rate and lower supply than Gold. You literally cannot exchange Gems for anything without some Gems disappearing. This is not true for Gold, as you can exchange Gold for items through mail. Not to mention that the fee on Gem-to-Gold exchange is much higher than the TP fee on Gold.
And Gems have a naturally lower supply than Gold. Every single player brings in Gold, whereas only some bring in Gems.
Also, the picture you posted shows a “ninja drop nerf” at November 15th. Note that the November 15th patch was when they made Plinx much less frequent, thus obviously people are going to get less drops, since their farming was made less efficient. Also notable that the Gems started climbing in prices at that point. Prior to that, they had been reasonable stable.
Olba,
Really?..:)
How do you explain this:
“The area I highlighted in my posted image shows clearly that they introduced an artificial constant raise in gems value against gold (see the nice constant positive gradient!).
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7231/bltc17dec2012.jpg
On top of that artificial trade constant gem value raise they put the normal gamer trades and the graph appears with many spikes as normal.
The only problem is that last Friday they delayed the Wintersday event and everyone was expecting the new gem store items and almost nobody bought or traded gems until the patch went live on Saturday.
This curious gamers behaviour revealed the ninja gem versus gold constant value raise introduced by them, as the in-game graph shows.
I think there are not any more doubts about the market manipulation..:)RedBaron.6058125643213 Change in loot parameters or a bug? [Merged]"
I notice the price of 1-gold is consistently falling. I, for one, wouldn’t mind in the slightest if this feature was completely removed. (Buying gems w/ gold is 100% ok w/ me, but not the other way around).
The exchange between gems and gold is purely based on the players. That is:
- The gems you can buy are gems someone else bought with RL money
- The exchange rates are determined by a supply-and-demand algorithm
If you could not sell Gems for Gold, that would mean that ANet would have to create extra gems whenever someone buys them with Gold. Not really a bad idea, except that then the price would be fully dictated by ANet, without any input from the playerbase.
In fact, the gems-to-gold exchange allows for the gems to not be truly perishable. That is, not all gems are exchanged for items in the Gem Store. This is good, because if Gems were a truly perishable currency, then their price would be even higher.
Of course, to maintain the Gem-to-Gold exchange and to keep it from being exploited by traders, there’s a pretty heavy tax on the Gem-to-Gold conversion. Sadly, that also means that the price of Gems has very little deflation.
As long as Anet can keep themselves from selling “power” in the Gem Store, it’s all good. That’s the most common pitfall of an F2P MMORPG: they sell items that give significant advantage that you can only get with cash.
Olba,
I know you mean well but you are completely wrong.
Gems are produced at will by them, it is an infinite resource.
The players gem acquisition make the rate gem-gold to fluctuate around a base rate completely controled by them.
The market seems based on supply and demand because of the fluctuations but if you look at the rate change over time since the game launched you will realize that the market is completely controled, both by an artificial gem-gold rate and by loot drop reduction nerf that pushes the players towards buying gems to get gold.
Thanks and best regards,
Red
P.S. – This post illustrates better the whole scheme: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/78038-gold-wars-2-portrait-of-a-campaign/
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
These are the only Legendaries that matter…
Was this thread made so that they could lock that one without backlash?
Yep, glad to see I’m not the only one to see it.
I’m very disapointed about it as well. It tells volume.
It would have been better to sticky this theread than to lock it:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Change-in-loot-parameters-or-a-bug-Merged/
Warrior.
They are the most powerful.
We’ve seen reports from players questioning the randomness of the drop mechanisms in GW2 and in particular asking if it’s been changed recently. This is not the case and we don’t think that the randomness mechanism is misbehaving, but we’re running some data to be sure there isn’t anything unexpected going on. So far nothing shows anything suspicious but we’ll keep gathering data and analyzing it. We’ve also created a thread where players can share with us their concrete data about any perceived strange drop behavior they encounter:
Thanks for your understanding and help!
Stephane Lo Presti,
Now that I have thought through about your official answer to this loot issue and fully realized all the implications, I must say I feel deeply offended by you. Not by you personally or as a human being but by you as an official representative of your company.
Having the nerve to, after all the huge and detailed feedback in this thread, write what you have wrote really speaks volumes for your company respect towards your costumers.
Do you really think that your answer is satisfactory? Do you really think we deserve that kind of disrespectful treatment?
You seem not having the faintest idea with whom are you talking about. You seem to think that we are all a bunch of adolescents, hooked by a game, spending our valueless time playing it. But in my books even adolescents deserve respect.
You and your company need to realize with whom you are dealing with.
From all the posts I read here I can surely affirm that in this thread have posted people with twice your age, with family and huge responsabilities, with professional careers that would pale the careers of all your staff put together and with effective and executive power in their everyday businesses that most of you can not even dream of.
Yet, all of them, even if their anger showed through some of the posts in this thread, reported/complained/tried to get an honest answer from you and your company.
And what we all got? Your official answer.
I can only think that you and your company think that because we play a fantasy computer game, investing hundreds or thousands of hours/dollars/euros in apparently silly activities, we must be no-lifers and brainless human beings.
Just for your information, we play your game because we CAN and we WANT. We spend money in your gem store because we HAVE it in such a sufficient amount that we can buy pixels. In today´s world TIME is the most valuable asset. And yet, many of us manage to do all their important real world tasks and responsabilities and save some precious hours to spend in your game.
When we invest our precious time playing this game we want to have pleasure and fun doing it. Most of us are real life high achievers and that is amply demonstrated in this game.
We do not want to be lied at and we do not want to be funneled towards activities we do not like, just because someone within your company thinks itself sufficiently inteligent to steer us towards his/her greedy objectives.
We want to have pleasure doing whatever we feel like it and we deserve your attention, support and respect.
If all you have for us is your official answer then I must say is not good enough. Actually, short from being good enough, it is outrageously disrespectful because it just wants to buy more time from us and even tries to, once again, divert our attention away from this thread to other thread, pretending to be “working” on this issue.
Stephane Lo Presti,
I do not know if this post will be deleted or if I will receive a warning for it. All I know is that this is exactly what I feel and think.
Actually, just for the record, all you and your company achieved by “actively” policing and merging and deleting threads at will in these forums is that day by day more and more unsatisfied costumers are posting all around the internet in other forums their complains and frustrations about this game. You can silence us here but you can not silence us everywhere else.
And believe me that all of this is hurting your player base and your potential new costumers.
We complain because we CARE. We come here to inform you and your company and vent our frustrations about the shortfalls of this game because we LOVE it.
Its a pitty that such a wonderful game, full of potential, declines rapidly to be buried under the dust of MMORPG/MMO´s history.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I wish you and your company can make our Christmas Merry and give us a Happy New Year playing this game.
Best regards,
Red
I’ve seen “prove it” written by the people who have all the evidence, so many times here.
They can easily change the loot rates back, then say “write your loot rates down and tell us what you get”. It’s like going to trial with unscrupulous opposing counsel.
Exactly like Galileo Galilei…
I love my engineer like a father loves his very sick and weak firstborn son…
Actually, I found myself thinking a lot of times if the chest gambling as it is now is not considered illegal gambling under most of western countries laws. To carry out this type of activity (exchanging real money for a complete random prize with very low reward probability) requires special licensing.
Legendary should be Bound on Acquire (account wide).
I agree that it was a nice gesture from ArenaNet.
Please just keep up the good work and fix the rest..:)
Painting of Galileo Galilei desperatly grabbing the only exotic he got after playing many hours…
70 Mb patch…lets see if its not the end of the world…
“and yet it moves”
(Eppur si muove)
by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in 1633 after being forced to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun.
Legendary wallets are mighty!
But intelligent players playing the market for 3 months can easily get more than 2200 gold.
We’ve seen reports from players questioning the randomness of the drop mechanisms in GW2 and in particular asking if it’s been changed recently. This is not the case and we don’t think that the randomness mechanism is misbehaving, but we’re running some data to be sure there isn’t anything unexpected going on. So far nothing shows anything suspicious but we’ll keep gathering data and analyzing it. We’ve also created a thread where players can share with us their concrete data about any perceived strange drop behavior they encounter:
Thanks for your understanding and help!
Stephane Lo Presti,
Thank you for the reply. Anyway I think this subject is being treated in a very casual way and only after 1 month, 1210 posts and 40575 views we got some feedback. I would at least have apologized for the long silence about this subject.
Anyway, to be honest, I value much more my personal experience and the experience of hundreds of players reporting the same problem after playing thousands and thousands of hours (all together) than some generic statement. If, like you say, no changes have been made to the loot tables then something is really wrong with this game. Sorry, but I do not believe in poltergeists.
Thank you and best regards,
Red
So, now, you can get a Legendary weapon for being a legendary player or having a legendary wallet.
lol, really? You’re gonna bring up Lengendaries saying people can just pay RL money to buy them? Twilight is up for 9500G, so yeah, sure you could buy Twilight with RL money…if you had a spare $8000 USD lying around.
Do your math before you try state people can pay to win because IMO, paying $8000 for a legendary isn’t paying to win, it’s just paying.
[Calculations based on current Gem -> Gold average (100Gems -> 1.5Gold) using the $50USD = 4000Gems purchase option.]
Calsifer,
Sorry but your reasoning is wrong. You used an extreme example trying to depreciate my statement.
If you check BLTC now you will see Legendary weapons available for much less and others with offers going from 450 gold to 2100 gold. With time it will be possible to buy Legendary for much less real money because gems will trade for even more gold.
Ah, and with time Legendary will have better stats than anything else, as stated in the game future plans.
In my opinion, Legendary weapons should be bound on acquire and a sign of player commitment and prowess. I believe that Legendary crafting should only require in-game achievements instead of mats easily bought through TP. The percursor should be a reward of a very hard quest line and all the other items to craft Legendary should be earned through in-game achievements.
The whole idea of selling Legendary weapons at TP just kills all the sense of achievement.
If you have enough money, you just buy it. And believe me that many players are prepared to pay a lot of money (even thousands of dollars/euros) to have a top item (it happened a lot of times in a lot of other MMO’s, through eBay and other methods).
In the end, money is relative. 8.000 dollars can be a lot for you and me but nothing to other people. Right now, Legendary are just skins but in the future they will have the best stats around.
Best regards,
Red
Their plan is simple…squeeze our wallets during Christmas and then in January return with repentance and promises, new plans for a great and promising future. Then, next Christmas, if the player base is still significant they will apply the wallet squeeze again. Rinse and repeat.
Who want to bet that we will have a new letter from Studio Design Director Chris Whiteside in the next 3 weeks, promising a new brighter future?
I don’t think its a “pay to win” system at all. Legendaries are not AT ALL stronger then exotics for one, they are pretty much just “skins” that you can either earn or spend a bloody fortune (how many diamonds will you have to buy to make enough GOLD to buy a legendary from the store?) to acquire.
There is absolutely NOTHING in the store that will give someone an advantage in combat, maybe an experience, magic find, karma, swiftness boost among a couple others but nothing that will make one overall more powerful then another person of the same level.
Simply look at your gear stats and see if they work toward your play style. Maybe try looking for power and precision weapons and armor to boost your damage or something.I personally thoroughly enjoy this game and plan on playing this for a very long time, it IS an even playing field and has many enjoyable features and NO SUBSCRIPTION FEE! Just enjoy the game!
Helloooo?!?!?
If you buy BL keys to open BL chests you can get Armor Boosters and Strenght Boosters (-5% incoming damage / 5% outgoing damage) plus Speed Boosters (15% speed) and Rejuvenation Boosters (+ Health regen).
People run fractals desperatly to get items that give this type of increased stats and you say that gem store is almost purely cosmetic?
Class Name: Priest
Class Type: DPS/Buffer
Weapons of choice: Christmas event Bell/Sacred Book/Holy Cross (2 handed)
Armor: Chasubles, Copes, Stoles, Dalmatics and Tunicles, Mitres.
General gist/ miscellaneous: Buffs himself and players aorund him by praying, slashes foes with Bell, Sacred Book or Holly Cross. Levitation skill to do all the new Super Mario puzzles easily. Choir Maestro skill to beat all the new Guitar Hero instances.
When I saw Legendary weapons being sold at TP I just laughed. The cash cow mentality had reached new heights!
So, now, you can get a Legendary weapon for being a legendary player or having a legendary wallet.
Well, from the previous new content you can expect for January and February more Super Mario jumping puzzles, maybe a Guitar Hero instance with karaoke, useless event drops in PvE, more ugly weapon skins and more useless miniatures.
I play this game for 3 months now, have been part of hundreds of parties and the dialogue in party chat never went beyond “Hi..”.
This game is based on solo tasks or group zerg tasks that do not need any coordination at all…when you get a party you just spam your attacks and kill the strong mobs you are not able to kill solo.
As per the need to belong to a guild, well I never felt that need because there are no guild tasks/objectives/perks to achieve. Pretty interesting stuff for a game that calls itself “Guild Wars 2”.
The loot drop tables have not yet been restored to pre-15th November values, that is for sure (I check everyday for at least 4 hours).
They slightly increased the yellow/green/blue/white drop rate but exotics still got the heavy nerf bat. They are testing in the background to see when we stop complaining without having to go back to pre-15th November loot drop tables.
The gem shop needs to keep pumping…no matter what.
Hello all,
This is not a negative post. Just my personal opinion.
Interesting:
1. LA Christmas decoration;
2. Tixx´s Infinirarium;
3. Toy miniatures crafted from Infinirarium drops.
Boring:
1. Super Mario jumping puzzle;
2. Guitar Hero music contest;
3. Snowball fights.
Good looking:
1. Gem store Christmas outfits.
Ugly:
1. Most of the Christmas weapon skins.
Badly designed:
1. Christmas present boxes spawning ultra strong mobs;
2. Rewards from Christmas present boxes.
I do not intend to start a bashing thread, I am just reporting my personal opinion.
Thanks and best regards,
Red
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
I will not spend 1 cent in the gem shop until they get their act together and use their resources to solve the game bugs, broken skils and traits and unbalances instead of creating Super Mario and Guitar Hero content.
If GW2 continues to be used as a platform to introduce meaningless event content without solving the game real issues, then there is no second chance.
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
The area I highlighted in my posted image shows clearly that they introduced an artificial constant raise in gems value against gold (see the nice constant positive gradient!).
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7231/bltc17dec2012.jpg
On top of that artificial trade constant gem value raise they put the normal gamer trades and the graph appears with many spikes as normal.
The only problem is that last Friday they delayed the Wintersday event and everyone was expecting the new gem store items and almost nobody bought or traded gems until the patch went live on Saturday.
This curious gamers behaviour revealed the ninja gem versus gold constant value raise introduced by them, as the in-game graph shows.
I think there are not any more doubts about the market manipulation..:)
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
Well, this loot drop nerf is really getting annoying, specially because we have no official answer about our questions.
Anyway, I find the gems value graph in-game a little bit odd.
Can you explain me this:
[img]http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7231/bltc17dec2012.jpg[/img]
It seems to me that the market is a bit too much “regulated”, what do you think?
From my experience, on the 15th December they increased slightly the drop rate of trash, mats, whites, blues, greens and yellows but completely shut down the exotic drops.
Before 15th November, fully MF gear, MF guild buff and food would give me 2 or 3 exotics every 3 hours at Orr. Now, I dont get an exotic for weeks.
They are tampering with the loot drop tables, trying to cool down our outcry but maintaining a tight grip over the drops so everyone buys gems to trade for gold.
They said the newly created Live Response Team reads the forums to identify issues and solve them (under 3. in the following post):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Introduction-to-the-Live-Response-Team-and-the-Bug-Fixing-Process
I wonder why we have no reply…
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
Gems gold value is skyrocketing…I guess Christmas means serious business whatever you sell…
Now that the gems gold value is very high, can we have the loot drop tables reverted to pre-15th November values?
Gold is so devaluated now compared to gems that I think we can get open world drops un-nerfed.
You get plenty of Black Lion Keys by completing zones or doing the personal story. If there would be even more ways to get them the chest rewards wouldn’t be special anymore. I like it this way, it makes leveling alts more fun aswell.
Plenty of keys?
Chest rewards special?!
You must be playing some other game…
The sadest aspect of this tragedy is that most of us is willing to buy gems for GOOD stuff from the gem shop. If they were not so lazy and actually offered something nice we would give them the $$ they want.
But no, they prefer to have a miserable gem shop and nerf the drops to make us waste our money on trash.
I do not understand why they contracted the evil lady to run the gem shop. What a waste of money!
I bet some of us posting here could run the gem shop much more efficiently, gaining much more money for the company and having the community happy.
If you really have a problem with this… Stop playing.
Nothign else will ever deliver a message. Every one of you that still plays is only telling them “we’re suckers and we’ll put up with it, as long as it’s not too long and not too thick, and you give us a kiss afterwards”.
Better than stop playing is to stop buying gems.
Stop buying gems until they answer us honestly and revert the ninja loot nerf of 15th November.
Leamas,
Fully agree with you. Well said.
Best regards,
Red
Increased our need for gold + Killed gold bot business = Gems store Jackpot!
Thanks and best regards,
Red
If I’d put on my tin foil wizard hat, I could speculate that they introduced the FotM funnel to lure people away from the open world(and keep them away with ascended farming), so the reduced loot drop rate wouldn’t be noticed by a majority of the non-forum player base.
Hummm…the FoTM funnel could really have that effect.
But I think they realize that the game has no long-term end-game content other than WvWvW (not worthy in present state due to ridiculous rewards), sPvP (dead) and getting a Legendary skin.
MMO companies seem to never realize how commited is the player community and how fast they can achieve even the hardest of challenges. After a lot of players started to advertize their new Legendary weapons, in a relatively short time after the game launch, they kind of panicked and hastly introduced the FoTM to keep the achievers entertained (achievers were the first to reach end-game and to get the Legendary skin). They were afraid about people leaving the game because of no challenges.
The achievers promptly answered the new challenge (as planned) and spent the last weeks running desperatly through FoTM to get the top notch gear. Because achievers are really the locomotive of an MMO train, all the others (us, the carriages) will dully follow. The top notch gear mirage will make the mice running the wheel.
The only problem was that by introducing vertical progression they broke one of their own Commandments, writen in stone in a covenant made with the player community.
FoTM was a desperate measure and we will see in future if it was worth the pain.
(edited by RedBaron.6058)
Yet since the the Lost Shores gem/gold trade prices have skyrocketed just as drop rates were changed this way. Consequence? Coincidence? Or rather intended?
In my opinion, it was completely deliberated.
Zero drops = Zero Gold through TP/NPC ==> Need for gold
Gems gold value increase = More gold per 100 Gems ==> Gems good to trade for gold
More gold per 100 gems = Gold Sellers lower gold price ==> Botting for gold not worth
Basically, they gold starved normal players and made the whole gold botting business very hard and almost non-profitable (much more time to bot for same gold that sell for much smaller $$ value to compete with gems).
So, they killed 2 birds with 1 stone.
Increased our need for gold + Killed gold bot business = Gems store Jackpot!
Thanks and best regards,
Red
While people keeps buying gems to trade for gold they will never change the loot tables to pre-15th November.
Christmas time is good to make a killing on the gem store front.
Maybe in January, after the gems selling goes down, they will ninja revert the loot tables.
But one thing is certain, they will never acknowledge it.
Its a pitty…this issue is bleeding the game and even if they sort it out many of the players who left will not come back because they feel they have lost content like events and so on while they have been away.
Well, they are counting with WintersDay event to bring back a lot of disappointed players.
But this whole affair is really sad…just plain disrespect for their player base.
There’s no assurance or mention of this bug being fixed in wintersday patch, so I don’t really care what they’re doing until I see some changes in-game and mass acknowledgement by players that things are back to normal.
I agree. Only after things go back to pre-15th November loot drop tables I will be back.
Back to pre-15th November? When their patch notes promised increased drop rates? It’s like having a “25% price reduction” promotion by first increasing the price by 33%.
Sadly, i can believe that it’s what it will end at.
Astralporing,
They said they would increase drops but they did not. Instead they nerfed them. So its no 25% reduction after a 33% increase.
During WintersDay time, DARKNESS is really taking over this game…
Loot has been nerfed across the board without warning.