Guild Wars 2

I would think that the demand for such an item would be so small that it’s not worth the effort to maintain the BLTC database and consistently release two types of the same tool.

Just treat it as a price increase, which Anet is totally willing to do and a lot of customers are willing to spend now.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

Compared to other games the price for weapon or armor skins in the gemshop are insanely too high. What amazes me is they are also only one-time use! They should at least work like Achievement skins.

IMO it is too expensive for both the workaholic and the kid or basement dweller. Skins in other games cost $1.90 whereas skins in GW2 cost approx. $10.

I ask you not to comment here about “Anet has to make money somehow”, because they would definitely get way more sales if the skins were cheaper. Gold to gem conversion is about 1g = 10 gems. It is safe to say that the price conversion for gems will not go down since farms have been established.

Soon it could be 1g = 1 gem. Amazing right? Glad I obtained 16 character slots through gem conversion before this happened.

1.) Unlike other games in it’s genre, GW2 is not subscription based. The alternative is to act like WoW where you are charged for several cosmetics while also paying a monthly fee. No one wants that.

2.) They will not be one-time use because Anet makes a lot of money on transmutation sales

3.) 1 gem to 1g will not happen. The higher the exchange rate from gold to gems, the more people who will resort to selling gems rather than consuming them. This keeps the price in check.

aeneq.1760:

Blizzard is blowing smoke, the reason they removed it was the crazy super inflation that they never managed to get under control, in comparison GW2 is a poster boy of a healthy economic system.

When I stopped D3 after playing for 4 months, I was amazed at the lack of gold sinks. The only gold sink they had was the gem creation, and the gold sink from that was unbelievably tiny.

Redenaz.8631:

Zerole.7306:

I think the TP is pretty vital to the game, and it would require a major re-work of the economy if it was severely altered (or removed).

That said, I think the biggest thing to hurt Diablo 3 is that it wasn’t very good.

Zing!

So, is the problem the trading post, or wealth disparity, whether caused by the trading post, farming, or whatever else?

(Of course, wealth disparity is going to happen either way.)

I personally do not view massive wealth generated by the TP as a massive problem, but that’s my own biased opinion. And blaming this on the TP, which is more of a vehicle is unfair to the regular users of the TP.

It’s like blaming stock exchanges for assisting in insider trading schemes. Yeah, you can commit insider trading by buying/short selling stocks and accumulating huge gains, but is that the fault of the stock exchange? No, it’s a vehicle, as is the TP in GW2.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Delryn.7235:

To me the TP is the #1 problem with this game (almost tied with WP).

Right now this game has a lot of really obvious problems and flaws, however removing the TP from the game would almost completely fix most of the major flaws the game has.

It’d solve the issue of empty maps, people would swarm back to maps to get wood, ores, bloods, fangs etc. This would mean people would also be playing the game more.

It would suddenly make almost all loot valuable, even blues and greens since you wouldn’t be able to just buy them for scrap change. More importantly you wouldn’t be able to just buy the exotic or rares at will, making those higher tier armors even more valuable.

Chests, champ drops, moldy bags, etc would all become very valuable again.

Getting a legendary would actually be the sign of dedication and hard work (with a bit of luck) instead of the sign of someone willing to spend a lot of money.

Runes and Sigils would be extremely rare and valuable. Major runes/sigils would be a big part of people’s builds since finding a complete set of the very rare Superior would be a true feat.

The list goes on and on and on, sadly though I have absolutely no hopes or expectations of this ever happening in GW2.

So… yeah.

Either they remove the TP and fix 75% of the game’s major flaws, or they work like mad men to produce an insane amount of new items, armors, weapons to keep the game rewarding and interesting, or the game dies.

Without the TP there wouldn’t be any players left in the game, nothing that even closely resembles this fantasy world you have constructed for yourself.

^ this must be stressed. The TP is like a glorified barter system. Let’s say I like to farm lodestones to sell but I hate gathering plants. But Zudet hates farming but like to gather plants. We are a perfect match and our transaction takes place on the TP.

The TP brings buyers and sellers together so that we can quickly achieve our goals.

If there were no TP, we’d all have to gather everything ourselves. You may want to spin it as “playing the game”, but I would say it would force us to do things we don’t want in order to reach our goals. At least with the TP we have the option of doing it ourselves or buying.

Devata.6589:

I notice the gem-prices sky rocketed after the patch. It’s now about 10 gems for 1 gold. Officially they should change with the economies so when you see a patch that puts a lot of gold into the game you can expect the prices to go up and go down after the patch (then again, they never seem to get down again). However the last patch is not so much of a money grind so how come gem prices almost doubled again. Has it been done artificially in stead of the economy?

Gem price sky-rocketed due to the change in gathering tools. Nothing sinister or complex here.

Also doesn’t help that pretty much every mesmer in game will purchase the Kasmeer staff

Delryn.7235:

It would suddenly make almost all loot valuable, even blues and greens since you wouldn’t be able to just buy them for scrap change. More importantly you wouldn’t be able to just buy the exotic or rares at will, making those higher tier armors even more valuable.

How can we talk about ‘valuable’ here when there would be no TP? How exactly can we establish the value of a blue/green? You can’t. So all this talk about ‘valuable’ is pointless because you no longer have a currency to value it.

cesmode.4257:

This game would not implode overnight if arenanet removed the TP. All that would happen would be people earning their gear and crafting materials through PLAYING the game, rather than funneling real $$ into the game to purchase these items. You would also see an increase in trade chat transactions.

Thats about it. And if you seriously think that removing an AH from an MMO is self destructing, then the developer has failed. The game should not be revolving around economics. They are important, but not at the core. Gameplay, combat, bosses and FUN are the core of the game. Not dollars and cents. If you are willing to have a complex AH and economy at the expense of gameplay, youre doing it wrong.

And no, to reply to someone..GW2 is not necessarily about gear drops. Its about farming and grinding for crafting materials. You can get these by playing the game as well, instead of using the TP.

We do it your way, they would have to massively overhaul the crafting and reward systems. They’d have to remake item acquisition and drop tables. All for what?

I see absolutely no purpose or justification for removing the TP, merely because people are jealous that they do not have the time, fortitude, patience or capability to watch markets and take advantage of the TP.

The work involved for doing this is mind boggling intensive and that you’d be doing more damage to the game. All just to appease a ‘vocal minority’

Yeah, no.

Diablo 3 is not an MMO. GW2 is.

MMO’s need gold sinks, and there’s no better goldsink in game than the TP.

Yeah, you’ll only be off 400G.

But if you post that legendary and get immediately undercut, that’s a +200g fee that could be wasted.

You may want to wait a month before you commit though.

Lodestones could rise a lot with the new precursor scavenger hunt (but so will dyes, but not as much IMO).

Precursor prices will drop a bit

Protoavis.9107:

It’s about money, the whole soulbound item status boils down to money, soulbound items don’t benefit the player in any way, they benefit anet by making players grind for things on alt this means they “play more” which means they are logging in more, logging in more and more likely to buy gems or generate gold inflating the gem to gold value which encourages others to buy gems to sell.

Anyone who has ever played MMOs knows that the soulbound mechanic is in place to prevent item deflation.

If you don’t want to dedicate the time and effort for a legendary, then you don’t deserve one.

If you want an item that is more about the ‘story’, ‘destination’, or some other intangible wishy-washy emo feeling, then you can pick another weapon.

If you haven’t constructed the weapon specific gifts yet, I highly suggest you sell off those components (precursor, lodestones)

linuxotaku.4731:

Vol.5241:

lol I’m not gonna buy up any item. I’m merely gonna list an item for an exuberant price.

So if I list a Potato at 3000g, it’ll cost me 450G in fees :P

Then 6 months from now, when young Jimmy asks, “Dad, why is a potato more expensive than a legendary?”

The answer will be:
“It’s just a troll, son. A rich troll that mocks us all!”

How could you get the math wrong here?? For one, it’d only cost you 150g to list. If it sells, you’ll pay another 300g … but you’d get the balance, 2550g. (Unless you mean you’d list 3 at 3k gold?)

If you really want to show off waste, you’d have to list for more than 10k gold. :-)

(ISTR that there were some legendaries listed around that price just after legendaries were first crafted. I wonder if any sold.)

I usually follow 15%, but since it would never sell, yeah it wouldn’t apply here.

I just realized too that highly valued items don’t show up on the bltc homepage – only those with highest buy order.

You make things too easy, ppl whine.

You make things too hard, ppl whine.

You make things at moderate difficulty, ppl whine cause it’s boring

To be fair, they tried the same thing last Winterday.

For all we know it could go back and forth.

Essence Snow.3194:

Vol.5241:

Why in the world would you expect Anet to not only change the system from soulbound to accountbound, but also make it cheaper? Where is the logic in that?

Who said anything about making the infinite tools cheaper?

Cheaper or making them the same price at 800g – it’s a bad business decision.

The only logical move would be to increase the price. I’m actually surprised they only raised it a modest 200 gems.

PvP legendary codes here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1qha6v/chat_codes_the_nightmares_within/

Malediktus.9250:

Hopefully this precursor hunt will take more effort than grinding out 700 gold

I could see the value of the precursor dropping down by 20-30%, so a 800 dusk (sorry I don’t know prices now) could go down 560-640g.

I could definitely see there being a time-grind for the precursor (but no time-gates).

John Smith is very adament about not shocking markets, and with such a lucrative market in terms of precursors, I could see them being very careful with it. We could have some new items being introduced that would take awhile to grind out since they have low drop rates (think lodestones)

Yup, another monocle in there. It’ll be a different design but since it’s so small, you won’t notice many differences. A monocle is a monocle.

SELL SELL SELL SELL

edit: nevermind, completely missed the ball. The next LS update will be the new fractals.

Ursan.7846:

Ahahahahahahahaha.

I can’t wait until the disappointment and tears which will undoubtedly happen when people discover that the precursor hunt is going to be RIDICULOUSLY grindy.

It will be. And there will be many tears shed.

But it will no doubt bring in many players who will now think they can get a legendary, and they will commit to it. And then they will pay for their t6/lodes and other materials at largely marked-up prices

lol I’m not gonna buy up any item. I’m merely gonna list an item for an exuberant price.

So if I list a Potato at 3000g, it’ll cost me 450G in fees :P

Then 6 months from now, when young Jimmy asks, “Dad, why is a potato more expensive than a legendary?”

The answer will be:
“It’s just a troll, son. A rich troll that mocks us all!”

So I’m not in game, does anyone know what those codes show? Are they books?

I wonder what the Legend books are. I doubt it’ll be a separate alternative legendary recipe – maybe it’ll give some background lore to the weapon?

that_shaman “There’s more legendary stuff! Ill update this post soon.”

keep an eye out

isendel.5049:

The fact is that if you buy 1 tool only, every time you switch character you’ll have to go to a bank, drop your tool, log in the next character, go to the bank, withdraw the tool and repeat for each character. Not much of a convenience item..

I think that this was his point..

But wouldn’t you have done the same thing with soulbound tools? You would have bought spares anyway. Unless you like to kill off alts frequently..

Courtesy of that_shaman @ reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1qh40g/data_mining_upcoming_features_from_the_nightmares/

Scroll to the bottom.

Sell your precursors!!! Buy your T6, lodes and globs! Get your map completion and badges!
Everybody panic!!

I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at.

Why would you still want to buy multiple tools? That defeats the purpose of account bound.

TooBz.3065:

Vol.5241:

I’m seeing a lot of complaints that they increased the price to $1000 – I don’t understand these people, as if they deserve everything free and/or cheap (but mainly free)

It’s obviously the trade-off from switching from soulbound to accountbound. Of course you’re going to have to be paying more. Anet would be losing a lot more money if they didn’t do that. And the fact that they priced it at 1000g, which at this quantity can’t be bought directly from the store smacks genius.

It’s a little bit of classic market segmentation, all businesses do this as much as they possibly can.

First you get everyone who is willing to buy unlimited tools per character at $10 a pop, apply a little pressure with the limited time offer to push people on the fence.

Next you switch to get the people who are willing to spend $12.50 for one that they can pass around to different toons.

They probably also figure that for some people, this will result in people buying 2-3 because moving it from toon to toon is a pain in the kitten.

Edit; This is not a complaint. Merely an explanation of what they are doing. It’s all about the amount of value you derive from the good and maximizing revenue while satisfying as many people as possible.

There’s a guy over on the BLTC subforum with 23 unlimited gathering tools. I’m very curious what Anet will do with that, but I’m 85% sure they will not refund him, which would be somewhat amusing.

Essence Snow.3194:

Yep milking it…….1000 gems now is definitely not worth it, since we can buy full sets of tools for next several years for all toons for less. There’s paying for convenience and there’s being gouged for convenience. This is on par with the pet rock.

Why in the world would you expect Anet to not only change the system from soulbound to accountbound, but also make it cheaper? Where is the logic in that?

I’m seeing a lot of complaints that they increased the price to $1000 – I don’t understand these people, as if they deserve everything free and/or cheap (but mainly free)

It’s obviously the trade-off from switching from soulbound to accountbound. Of course you’re going to have to be paying more. Anet would be losing a lot more money if they didn’t do that. And the fact that they priced it at 1000g, which at this quantity can’t be bought directly from the store smacks genius.

Now that one massive complaint since the release of the game has been recitfied, what next shall we complain about?

Ursan.7846:

I blame manipulation by Chauncey trying to be fancier than he really is.

He never deserved 1st anyways, stop kidding yourself.

Romek.4201:

when trade between 2 legit accounts he just could send it with mail – for free

Well there is an auto-ban system for gold trading in mail, but I agree there are cheaper and more sleuthy ways of circumventing it – just trade gold in a private guild bank.

yarINvincible.1243:

An update!
There are no more Monocoles [light armor] in the black lion key.
What should I do if I want to sell it? the last price was for 250g, should I raise it or keep it 250g? And I raise it, by how much?

Hold it!

The risk of it dropping down significantly is pretty low, and the price could go up higher. Do not sell unless you are desperate for gold.

I’m pretty sure there are others with the monocle in stock. Let them assume the risk of posting first, as I’m sure you will get undercut quickly if you made the 1st move.

It’s an incentive to get people back to playing GW2.

What’s the issue here?

Just cause you are an active player, do you expect you deserve these free incentives?

They don’t manually remove or add items to the TP. That’s just shady.

What they will do is influence the game enough so that the players themselves will remove/add items to the TP when they see fit.

If I ever quit this game permanently, I’d totally overprice something to maintain my legacy in this game :P

Something like a 1500G Potato or Rucksack.

Sigh..

I bought three of these the day they were discontinued. I actually bought them at around 85g, which was the peak of the price during that time. The price remained steady for a few months and I eventually sold them at a loss to fund my Meteor/Eternity.

I would have made a total profit of 210G

-__________-

juno.1840:

Vol.5241:

Essence Snow.3194:

… snip …

You do know that a very small portion of the game population are active traders, and even a very smaller portion actually make a ton of gold? If everyone were a sensibile trader there would be no profit.

You may think being a trader is all gold and roses but you can lose as much as you gain.

Again, it is not a concern because it’s an isolated, limited case and it’s not harmful to the game.

Without data it is impossible to say exactly what portion of the GW2 population are active traders. So it’s a bit presumptuous to call it an “isolated, limited case… not harmful to the game.”

Although I do love your “if everyone were a sensible trader” statement — the game needs bad traders to fuel any profits lol.

Of course we need the hard data but it’s easy to look at the type of style of play and infer from that.

This is an MMO, not a trading simulation. I very much doubt over 10% of the playerbase finds it interesting and worthwhile enough to keep spreadsheets of prices/formulas/forecasts/trends. Not to mention spend hours upon hours sitting infront of the TP conducting transactions.

I believe bad traders don’t fuel profits, at least they would contribute very little as a whole. Traders profit off of market inefficiencies and the laziness of players, not because they made poor decisions and underestimated the value of an item. They take advantage of people who want gold now rather than waiting and selling it at a higher price. They take advantage of people who would prefer to sell to buy orders than list. (And by taking advantage, I don’t mean that as a negative thing)

BTW by traders I’m talking about power traders who make a ton of gold off buying/selling bulk orders, often making a few copper/silver in profit per item. Speculators are an entirely different group.

I love this game, invested well over +3K hours, +12k AP, made thousands of gold and 5 legendaries.

But I hit a wall about 3 weeks ago and just got bored. I’ve had bouts here and there where other games come out and I’d only commit about 45 minutes to GW2 for dailies.

But I really hit the wall and I can’t even log in to do my dailies.

I’m not gonna completely quit and uninstall GW2 – but my involvement with GW2 right now involves completing the LS achievements and finishing up WvW season 1 achievements. I’m afraid the next wall I’ll hit, I’ll ignore LS and probably just stop logging in. So instead of playing every day of the week for 4/5 hours a day, now I probably end up spending no more than 4 hours a week playing GW2.

The rest of my time is spent destroying noobs in BF4

Essence Snow.3194:

Yamagawa.5941:

Essence Snow.3194:

The problem with “fair” prices on limited quantity items is that they are only “fair” to certain players……ie those with highest profit potentials (tp traders + atm champ grinders). For the rest of the player base that does not participate in one of those avenues the prices maintained by those are not possible.

You can, if you so choose, buy up the overpriced goods and resell them at lower prices, if that makes you think you are making the price more ‘fair’. Better for everyone would be if you find supplies that are underpriced and order them at slightly higher prices (loot bags and salvageables are the spot, I think). Find products where the prices are over the top and supply them at slightly lower prices. Be brazen: under-cut that seller. Be bold: offer more than the highest buyer. And don’t whine: we all have the same economy to work within. Nobody gets special treatment. In that sense, the economy is fair. The BLTC doesn’t exclusively buy its widgets from me. You are perfectly free to sell your widgets to them, or to buy out my widget supply and list them at higher prices. If you want an unfair economy, then demand that ANet supply everyone with one of that item. Demand that everyone get their choice of precursor, or their choice of T6 Mats. Or demand that other players in the market be punished for the high crime of ‘buying something cheap and selling at a higher price’. Demand that you get one of the only 200 issued in game items, despite your not having done half the work of others in the game that also want it. Demand all you want, but realize that when you chose how you play, you also decide what your opportunities are. If you don’t like your available opportunities, then change how you play. Don’t whine.

Me, I’ll watch that my tiny corner of the market doesn’t go stagnant.

Traders do get special treatment as they have the only unregulated method of obtaining wealth in the game, thus it’s why the profit potential from it is leaps and bounds above everything else.

It’s a legitimate concern..not a whine there is a difference even though it might be hard for some to discern.

You do know that a very small portion of the game population are active traders, and even a very smaller portion actually make a ton of gold? If everyone were a sensibile trader there would be no profit.

You may think being a trader is all gold and roses but you can lose as much as you gain.

Again, it is not a concern because it’s an isolated, limited case and it’s not harmful to the game.

Omer.5096:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

While the manipulator may loose money, he succeeded in manipulating nonetheless, and it’s very frustrating for people who want to get their precursor at fair price.

What is a fair price? The price of the precursor is set by it’s rarity, it’s utility and it’s demand. If precursors were being sold at 500g and also at 600g, then it means that the value of the precursor is at least 600g and those who sold at 500g threw their money away.

The market of precursors is set entirely by the players. If players are willing to shell out 600g for a precursor, then that’s the fair price. If it sells at 1000g, then that’s the fair price.

It’s simply poor people complaining that a luxury item is priced such as that.

It’s like me earning 20K a year and complaining that Audi’s are too expensive and they should be priced to suit me.

Astraea.6075:

laokoko.7403:

I honestly can’t find too much reason to convert gem to gold. Since I can’t find any use of gold. That is probably one of the problem because people simply arn’t converting gem to gold.

So that keep the gem price high. So Anet probably loss out on making money from people converting gem to gold. On the other hand, if gem price is high. More people will be inclined to spend real cash instead of farming gold for cashshop item.

Keep in mind that, from a revenue perspective, ANet doesn’t care why a player is buying gems as they receive the money either way. While the gem -> gold exchange provides ANet with another reason to encourage gem buying and also serves as an gold sink for the economy, for ANet to actually profit there needs to be desirable goods and services in the gem store so that people will buy gems with either RL or in-game currency .

To an extent I think they do. (though it’s not important)

A higher gold value for gems encourages gem sellers to buy gems now to convert to gold when it’s at it’s highest peak.

Let’s say, for example, Anet comes out with an insanely popular armor set. However, I don’t like it. I may not buy gems to buy that armor set, but everyone else is willing to buy it (with gems or gold). As a result, I may be inclined to take advantage of this peak by buying gems with the sole purpose of converting them.

Malediktus.9250:

Why would it be wierd? New items – new recipes. A lot of new items have been introduced since release which can be used such as quartz and ascended materials. I could totally see new weapons require 50 vision crystals or 250 deldrimor steel.

When I say that the recipes should be the same, I’m talking about the minimum items required for all legendaries, so:
-Gift of Mastery
-Gift of Fortune
-Precursor weapon

The only changes, and as expected, will be the craftable specific gifts (recipes bought from Miyani)

When I hear people talking about ‘new recipes’ I’m assuming you all are talking about a complete overhaul of the legendary craft recipes, such as the removal of map exploration, badges, T6 mats and clovers.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Another influencing factor is what the new legendary weapons take. Will there be new precursors or will they use existing ones? Will they take a crap ton of ascended mats?

I could easily see new legendary weapons taking like 100 vision crystals instead of the gift of fortune. so the “cost” of the new legendary weapons would be meaningless.

There’s absolutely no reason for Anet to make a new crafting recipe for the new legendaries. The only difference, of course, would be the precursor and some gift components.

I can see Legendary prices going down when new legendary weapons are imminent. Even then, I’m not 100% sure it’ll happen.

On one hand, the demand for old legendary weapons would go down since people will shift their focus to the new ones. But on the other, the demand for materials shared would be pushed waaaay high.

The only scenario I’m 100% sure will result in lower legendary prices is the precursor crafting scheme.
In this scenario, the materials will surely go up, but not enough to the point that it will cover the precursor cost. I could see legendary prices dropping +200g here.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Vol.5241:

John Smith mentioned this awhile back, and he said that constructing an infographic like that takes a lot of time and translation (not sure why that is so tough though)

Taking a snapshot of complex economy data and translating it into a visualization that will enlighten rather than mislead is actually way more work than it sounds like. There is a lot of expertise and thought required even for things that seem simple like whether to use a bar chart or a pie graph.

And then there’s the part where John probably has other work responsibilities that take up his time. If he really loved us though, he stop wasting all that time sleeping and interacting with his friends and family and give us some brightly colored charts to pick apart

They don’t have to make it complex, because complex economic data just isn’t appropriate for the average player. Maybe for other economists, but the average joe it’s not really all that enlightening.

I’m sure data like this can be exported to excel. Once in excel, if you have all sorts of metrics, you can quickly construct pivot tables to convey the information you want.

Some basic nice and interestings things that would be good to see:
-Average number of gold per player held at X time compared to Y time (of course inflation would play a part here)
-Total average number of gold per player spent towards TP/WP fees since account creation
-Highest priced item that has ever been sold
-Average number of gold per player per class (I bet Guardians are the richest)

Some more complex and difficult to parse data:
-Change in inflation rate since start of game (will need to come up with an index of items)
-% distribution of gold sinks in the game (TP, WP, repair, salvage, e.t.c.)
-velocity of money(gold)

Curo.2483:

I completely understand this. However one thing not considered here is that there is no cost of production for additional units. Once a skin has been created, unlimited copies of that skin can be made for no extra cost. The eliminates the dilemma described early in the video when they talk about certain items not being attractive to all of your target audience. Yes, that fact remains true, however there is no additional cost of creating more units.

I don’t think cost per unit is actually a factor here.

But while it is true that the cost is minimal, keep in mind that it takes a significant amount of time to design these items. There are limited resources (designers, artists) and in a game where skins are the best method of monetization, you need to be cranking out skins as much as possible and take advantage of the ‘newness’ factor. You want to be making as much money as possible on these items before it loses its popularity, and they do this with RNG.

It’s no different in retail when you have in-season merchandise never being on-sale for the first 5 months, then for the last month for the season it gets marked-down.

What I think Anet can do as a compromise however, is this:

Release a skin that will only be available in game for 3 months

For the first 2 months, make the skin available by RNG

For the last month, make the skin available directly

John Smith mentioned this awhile back, and he said that constructing an infographic like that takes a lot of time and translation (not sure why that is so tough though)