Guild Wars 2

slamfunction.7462:

They do have interns, game tester, and any combination of lesser peons to do the actual blogging. Like 15 min conversation at the water cooler in the morning:

I have never been there but i cant imagine the water cooler being a popular hang out at a game company on a november morning in the state of washington.

Niyu.1350:

But … But … what about those of us who have been playing (off and on albeit) since launch and live around you … I want to come play test!

You put in an application for future testing on players with your relation to the game and they will contact you, if they have any need.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P7B8CXV

Flying Mounts and Guild Capes, probably.

Maybe a Bunny Ear or two.

Harper.4173:

Wanze.8410:

DiscipleofLaw.3796:

I like dungeons. They’re fun, they really encourage teamwork, and I’m a collector so I enjoy buying all the gear with dungeon tokens. I’ve noticed that, lately, there are no experienced 80s doing dungeons anymore, and so I always get stuck with low level characters with <500 achievement points who don’t know what they’re doing, and the margin of error is so huge that it becomes a never-ending wipe-fest. I’d like to see more attention given to dungeons, please!

I think what you just said just underlines why Anets decision was right and basically contradicts itself anyways.

You might think of it as teamwork-based content and it even might be on the smallest scale but it doesnt really promote teamwork between veterans and new players.
If they kept dungeon rewards as they were, new players would have a hard time finding a group of veterans that would teach them how to do dungeons.

I dont think that is a state of mind that Anet wants to promote in its player base, old and new alike.

Why should you get handsomely rewarded, when you refuse to mentor newer players?
WvW or PvE Commanders during Map Meta events or the harder boss battles have to coordinate a whole map, which often is full of new players or players new to the content. If they wipe, they also dont get any loot or reward or considerably less but they try anyways to teach everybody on the map and organize events.

You refuse to teach 1 or 2 new players in a game mode that isnt even time sensitive, like the new meta events and complain that you arent handsomely rewarded for it?

I guess the general mindset of dungeon runners simply refusing to play with new players and mentoring them played a big part in Anets decision to nerf rewards and stop developing for it.

And rightly so.

Because mentoring players isn’t my job as a veteran player.
I’m not supposed to be the game’s tutorial system just because I managed to learn how to play it and how to do things.
Some people enjoy teaching and it provides a good experience to them – some don’t.
Some just want to get their stuff done without having to stop, type, explain, convince and so on.

Dungeons did promote teamwork – a veteran party could to amazing things with synergy and competence. This is one of the reasons that dungeons were considered “too easy” and “too farmable”.

Honestly – organizing open world PvE is not something for everyone. Why should some be punished because others enjoy doing something that is hard and unrewarding?
If they want to organize open world PvE – that’s great – but what’s that got to do with me?

What you choose to do in game and how you as a player choose to spend your time is your choice – you make it sound like the developers are entitled to punish players for not wanting to play a certain way – which is frankly absurd.

Each finds enjoyment in his or her own way – I personally enjoy making gold and if I can do that with no words exchanged in chat it’s all the better.

I guess the general mindset of dungeon runners simply refusing to play with new players and mentoring them played a big part in Anets decision to nerf rewards and stop developing for it.
And rightly so.

I have nothing against new players – I dislike playing with bad players and players that don’t listen. Unfortunately most new players are like that.
I think there were also other – bigger – reasons for the dungeon reward nerf – the “meta zerk” mindset had been with the game a good 2+ years before this change came.

They didn’t do it to “correct the community” – they did it because of the game going F2P most likely.
They also did it to make absolutely sure there’s very little (or none) alternative to their new FOTM and Raids.

I am not saying the way you used to play this game is wrong, everybody is entitled to his opinion and you can play the game the way you want.
I also agree that dungeons are a great tool to promote teamplay, for example to those skilled players that break speed records or find the most synergetic group compositions after balance updates for example.

Personally, I played over 9k hours since launch, i got my dungeon master title during the first 6 months, did plenty of cof1 farming before i started trading and anet restructured dungeon rewards but since then, i didnt run much dungeons. Occasionally i would farm a couple of pathes, if I needed tokens for a legendary or something else, when the new aetherpath came out or i just filled in, if a guild party was looking for a 5th.
But as i am pretty active on the forums and look into the LFG tool form time to time, I look at dungeons as a not very inviting content for new players.
And i have the feeling that Anet had the same opinion.
I dont want to blame you or anybody else for it, it was just the way it was.
I think initially dungeons were meant for players like the ones you described but soon after launch, you had most players only farming 1 path. Its hard to justify developing and maintaining game content of which less than 3% are being actively played. So they reworked dungeon rewards because they want to promote players playing a variety of game content. But the relatively high rewards now meant that veteran players put too much emphasis on time, which kinda created this kind of dungeon community that didnt seem very inviting to me as a casual dungeon runner and i think for new players as well.
Anet is always very vocal about how proud they are to have a great game community in general, some new features in HoT are a directing result of that train of thought.
It seems they care a great deal about veteran players mentoring new players, so they promote those players that are willing to do that.
IF you choose that i not your cup of tea, thats fine also.
If you want to break speed records or want to find the best party synergy, you can still do so, they didnt disable that content.

But as a game company, I think it makes more sense to reward those players that play the game the way they intended it and to those that are willing to promote teamwork and teach gameplay to the masses.
While you say you are getting punished for the way you play the game, I think they are just not rewarding you anymore as handsomely as before for the way you play the game because they are not satisfied with the general conduct of and feedback for that game content.

Raedwulf.3712:

Shots missed. As did yours, Skyline. The examples I gave are simple, stupid bugs that should have been picked up in QC and never released in the first place. And should take no time whatsoever to fix. They’ve released how many patches in the last 3 weeks? And did you miss the bit where I said “I’m an IT professional”? I’m an analyst/programmer. I’d be ashamed of myself if stuff like this got out into a live environment. Anet, apparently, aren’t.

And no, I’m not personally blaming John Smith. But he was quick to respond to a sucking-up-to-Anet thread. Responses to more critical comments are… rare, shall I say? Anet’s communication with its players has never been very good when there’s negative stuff around.

I can just imagine the kind of feedback people like you would give on the forums, if John and Colin would be streaming how they are playing guild wars 2 for 2 hours per day and 8 hours per weekend and then spend the rest of their work day blogging about it, while the things at the office go kittens up because nobody is doing their job.

Blude.6812:

Wanze.8410:

They are too busy fixing the game.

LOL—fixing the game is easier than getting a precursor?

For me at least, this statement isnt true. I forged more pres than i fixed bugs.

For both of them I would wager that its the same, at least, if they dont get any help.

I dont think that Colin would have the neccessary skills and knowledge to be able to fix a bug within a day at the office, if he was presented with the challenge to fix a bug for an item for the new collections and he is only allowed to use his dev computer for it.
He probably wouldnt even be able, if he was allowed to visit (not command to his desk) other devs that are more familiar with that matter and ask them advice.
And I dont mean that in a negative way, its just a wild assumption anyways and I dont expect him to be able to do it.

John would probably only do the job he is supposed to and paid for for eight hours, take the salary he earned that day, buy gems, convert them into gold, buy a precursor and go home after congratulating Colin for a very decent 2nd place, while he only came in 2nd to last.

TL/DR: A precursor costs 100 bucks, fixing a bug considerably more.

ekarat.1085:

SkyShroud.2865:

Khisanth.2948:

The home node can give 5 regular on one strike and it sometimes gives a charged quartz as well.

One strike, you mean hitting it 3 times? Maybe I shouldn’t use the word strike, ermm…

And yea, it sometimes give a charge quartz but that will not ease the demand for quartz crystal. The crystal will continue to climb in price because there is a lot of demands for it. Not just guild hall, you need it for celestial as well but of course, Guild Hall is the primary demand now and since is Guild Hall we are talking about here, it will need a lot of charge quartz.

Now charge quartz worth about 2.5g, won’t be surprise to see it worth 10g eventually.

Where can I sell charged quartz for 2.5g each? That’s far better than making grow lamps, which is my current best option that I’ve found.

Grow maps actually gave more than 2.5g profit per charged quartz before HoT launched with prices close to 35g. But also Halloween launched the same day and added a charged quartz faucet with t&t bags, so the prices for grow lamps went down a bit. Just wait a couple of days and prices should be back where they were pre hot.
Unless visibility to this thread encourages more players to double check their mat storage for charged quartz and make some coin.

Paulytnz.7619:

That must be some great lunch and snacks as you mentioned it twice. I am thinking something with omnoms in them right!?

Anywho, to whoever gets to take this mission on good luck to you and I hope it’s something cool that will be added to the game soon for us all to see and play around with.

Will there be vegan lunch and snack options?

I am allergic to omnomberries also.

slamfunction.7462:

No explanation needed, and you have to remember that an MMO is a business. What better hype and fantastic media exposure could there be to a public display of playing the game and demonstrating how a feature works?

In addition, no, this isn’t something that needs to be done 24/7. Play casual: 2hrs a night, 8 hours over the weekend. I’d love to see the two of them square off and see who could complete their build, without the TP!

There already is enough media exposure from other twitch streamers, that test those features and also provide guides and walkthroughs on youtube.

And why restrict their usage of the tp? What is that supposed to prove?
They always said that the tp is an integral and important part of the world they created and develop and they encourage everybody to use it. If some players dont want to use the tp, thats ok as well because its not really neccessary to play any content. Its just a big feature of the game that gives everybody the chance to offer to buy and sell items for ANY price they wish.

Rauderi.8706:

Agreed the challenge is a bit silly, Wanze. I’m amused by it, though.

Having testers is fine, but it’s not good policy for a person in position of management to remove himself from the actual conditions he’s supposed to manage. So, not saying JS should be gunning world completion, but he should be both crafting and acquiring precursors, along with obtaining tester feedback.

I’unno, maybe he does! I don’t want to accuse and say he doesn’t. Maybe he’s personally happy with the process. Maybe he started something he can’t take back without a lot of flak, or his advisory/development role doesn’t permit changes he’d like to make. Maybe he doesn’t like it, but any immediate solution would make the markets less stable, so he can’t recommend it.
Lots of maybes, so I certainly cut him lots of slack, even if the requirements for crafting and such look like bad decisions on the player side. Still much respect.

He doesnt play on his John Smith account but a personal one on Augury Rock, he mentioned that a while back. He also said he has 2 tequatl weapons, so at least he put some personal effort in there, not sure how much he plays atm during his free time.

He also once mentioned that part of his job is to play other mmos to research different game economy models. Wether this is done in the office or at home, i dont know.

Rauderi.8706:

Wanze.8410:

I don’t think the Game Director and Game Economist should be spend long hours of game-testing long term goals.

Actually, they should. The former ought to be familiar with all aspects of the game in design. Perhaps not so much in the greatest detail, but knowing the player-side experience is vital.
The latter needs to be in the trenches as well, to identify things a spreadsheet is going to miss, and to know the feel of economic impact. Simultaneously answering “is it stable?” and “is it fun?”

To be more tongue-in-cheek about it, I have to wonder if JS considers the “mundane” route fun. Grinding materials, events, and fractals for ‘long term goals’.
Or if he uses insider trading info to make money. :P

I agree that both need to know these things, i just disagree that sending them on a long term journey in game is the best way to get this information.
I am pretty sure both of them have a way bigger salary than the game testers (Which is probably outsourced in beta anyways), so it would make more economic sense to let the testers do the testing and report back to them rather than doing the testing themselves.
If game testing shouldnt be up to the expected standards, they would rather train the testers than having John and Colin do the testing and hire other employees with big salaries to take over their regular duties and responsibilities, while the game director is dancing with queen jenna and the game economist is chopping wood.

They never said that all rewards that they are taking from dungeons will be transfered to fractals, they said that fractals will get more new rewards.

And fractals got alot of new reward structures implement. Plenty of it is account bound because players didnt like the fact that many rng rewards could be traded and bought from people with alot of money or gold.
They wanted that exclusive and rare rewards will be rewarded to those that complete difficult content, so they can showcase their accomplishment to other players without me standing next to them, looking just the same and earning it on the tp.

Thats what Anet delivered.

When Anet announced that rewards were moved from dungeons to fractals, the dungeon and fractal players defined rewards in gold or valuable mats (ascended gear) and Anet defined valuable rewards as exclusive rewards that take a long time to acquire and where you can see your progress towards it, for example the collections for the legendary backpack.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Anet didn’t nerf dungeon loot because vets weren’t teaching new players. They wanted those dungeon runners to transfer to raids. This was just one of a number of things they have done to cajole players into HoT.

It was mostly vets in the first place, that asked for a paid expansion. Now they got new instanced group content and dont want to pay for it?

They are too busy fixing the game.

I dont think the Game Director and Game Economist should be spend long hours of game-testing long term goals.

The precursor journeys are meant to be long term goals and an alternative route to a precursor that better illustrates your progress towards it.

They were never meant to be saving you alot of time or gold in order to get one.

So i wonder what this kind of project is supposed to prove.

darkaheart.4265:

make this feature available. we can already change the stats of ascended armor and we all know some of this ascended back items are not cheap to make.

Just make a cheap one then and transmute the expensive skin from the one with the stats you dont want anymore.

Swift.1930:

One reason I brought this topic up was because as soon as I reached ascended crafting and had myself kitted out, I had no choice but to become bored of ascended crafting – I have no use for it anymore. I can’t use it to help others, and I can’t use it for myself (unless I’m desperate to kit out two of my other characters, who I don’t even use that much), even though it was quite a lengthy/expensive leveling process.

Of course you can use it to help your guildies.
I am sure there are guildies that would like to send you the wood, ore, leather or cloth to craft some ascended mats because they already crafted their daily one. They save a couple of gold, if you donate your daily cooldown.
If they arent able to craft ascended gear for themselves yet because they havent leveled their crafting profession yet, you could donate mats for leveling, if you wish to make a contribution, or help mentoring them, if they struggle to find the most effective way of leveling their crafts.
Helping out others isnt limited because Anet doesnt provide a UI or other mechanics for it.

Paffus Piffus.9430:

Just realised I overlooked a pretty huge thing, I’m 100 weaponsmithing and need 400 to make this. With the extreme price of lower grade crafting mats at the moment it makes it a lot more of a mission lol

Well, if you havent taken it down already in order to craft twilight, you sold it, as prices are back to 1.3-1.5k gold.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

There was a thread posted by someone interested in economic matters (Wanze) several months back where he discussed the drop in supply and the possible effect on prices. Supply back in May was over 2 million and is now about 70k. Since then the guild halls have increased demand for Quartz while the sources are the same. This additional demand should further decrease supply and increase prices, even if people do take up active farming of these nodes.

I am actually surprised that they didnt really add any new supply faucets for it with HoT (except t&t bags with halloween, wintersday gifts will also drop charged quartz) but added new demand. Considering how much attnetion quartz got on the forums in the last couple of months on the forums, im sure Anet is quite aware of the situation but has its reasons why they keep supply scarce.
The only valid reason i could find is that they want to add more value to DR loot, so it doesnt get abandoned by the player base.
I am not sure about how reaching Magguma works for new players but i would guess they have to get through dry top and SW in order to get there and there isnt a portal going up.
So i think its a novel idea to put some incentive for veterans to go back there and mingle with the new players.
Passion Flowers also didnt get any new faucets even though added demand for infused trinkets was foreseeable.
I am selling PF for 90s now and there are three daily nodes per account in SSC.
Its good gold for a 10 minutes farming per day.
IF you harvest the 3 blooming passifloras and the quartz nodes in DT once per day, you should end up with at least 2g worth of mats and it only takes 15 min tops.

DiscipleofLaw.3796:

I like dungeons. They’re fun, they really encourage teamwork, and I’m a collector so I enjoy buying all the gear with dungeon tokens. I’ve noticed that, lately, there are no experienced 80s doing dungeons anymore, and so I always get stuck with low level characters with <500 achievement points who don’t know what they’re doing, and the margin of error is so huge that it becomes a never-ending wipe-fest. I’d like to see more attention given to dungeons, please!

I think what you just said just underlines why Anets decision was right and basically contradicts itself anyways.

You might think of it as teamwork-based content and it even might be on the smallest scale but it doesnt really promote teamwork between veterans and new players.
If they kept dungeon rewards as they were, new players would have a hard time finding a group of veterans that would teach them how to do dungeons.

I dont think that is a state of mind that Anet wants to promote in its player base, old and new alike.

Why should you get handsomely rewarded, when you refuse to mentor newer players?
WvW or PvE Commanders during Map Meta events or the harder boss battles have to coordinate a whole map, which often is full of new players or players new to the content. If they wipe, they also dont get any loot or reward or considerably less but they try anyways to teach everybody on the map and organize events.

You refuse to teach 1 or 2 new players in a game mode that isnt even time sensitive, like the new meta events and complain that you arent handsomely rewarded for it?

I guess the general mindset of dungeon runners simply refusing to play with new players and mentoring them played a big part in Anets decision to nerf rewards and stop developing for it.

And rightly so.

Selkirk.4218:

why so defensive my friend? who knows…you publicly brag about making 500g in one day trading flax. one imagines you either sit on huge stacks of gold for the sake of it or you are doing something with it. but this risks derailing thread.

and no one is envious of you..why would i want to play an mmo like an excel spreadsheet? the discussion is solely about the very real nerfing of loot for players (the ones playing the game…doing events/hearts etc..).

I am not defensive about anything, I am just wondering on what base you claim that i break the ToS.
If you arent envious, i wonder why you bring my wealth up for discussion as i get the same rewards from Anet like everybody else. The profits i make on the trading post are given to me by other players.
And i dont need excel sheets to make a profit, a decent knowledge of the game is quite enough.
If i go farming, i farm 30-50g hour because i know what to farm, where to find it and how to best turn my account bound rewards for that hour into gold.

DrAntagonist.8623:

Wanze.8410:

DrAntagonist.8623:

Wanze.8410:

As you only got 9 boosts out of 10 chests, i would submit a support ticket.

Unless you managed to mess up accurately displaying the loot table of 30 items but went to the forums to complain nonetheless.
In that case, you deserve those drops.

Oh man you’re so right, because I didn’t capture a useless booster I’m a horrible human being, however could I forget a useless booster? Why that useless booster would’ve given me at least ten fold the key price. I’m not sure if I did get one or not, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just a booster.

If you expected to pay a price for a box and then sell the ingredients of that box for a higher price than the initial purchase price to other players who can buy the same box for the same price, then i hope the missing booster was an intelligence booster, as it would mean the 185g might not have been spent in vain after all.

You’re right the only two things you could open boxes for are ingredients to sell and boosters, you’re completely correct.

Thanks for stating the obvious.

Sparks The Rescue.5043:

Wanze.8410:

Chaba.5410:

Wait, how do you not have gold for gear if you had previously gotten a lot of gold from dungeons?

I applaud Anet for nerfing dungeon rewards and spreading gold faucets across the player base instead of giving it to a fair few speedrunners who thought their earnings were just remotely justified for the effort or skill dungeon runs required.

Right now the player base is using up alot of basic mats, which means regular farming offers alot of profit.

Green wood logs and copper ore go nearly for 2s, soft wood logs and iron ore for 4s, low level herb patches yield between 5-20 silver on average.
Harvesting the 3 blooming passifloras in SSC yields 2g once per day.
Quartz from DR, 10s per crystal.
Nevermind the average yields from new nodes in HoT.

Dungeon rewards?
Ghostly Spineguards (rare back item) vom AC 20-50g on tp now
Fiber Splice from CoE, 15-25g
Just to name a few dungeon specific rewards which have seen a significant price spice since HoT.

First off, it’s not some “take from the rich, give to the poor” econ principle. Second, Anet didn’t nerf dungeon rewards because of inflation. Everyone had access to dungeons, it’s not an upper-class privilege. They nerfed dungeons as a disincentive for players so they will be more likely to play raids and newer HoT content… Which doesn’t make any sense to me since they had bolstered since Aetherblade that the dungeon community was too small and they found most of their player base in other areas of the game…. (aka, no more dungeon content, which was fine, but then the disincentive?….. Come on.)

And, lastly, they didn’t “spread” the gold to other areas of the game. Rewards are kitten across the board with anything. They put kitten rewards behind a convoluted wall for FoTMs, nerfed dungeon rewards, didn’t release raids, and left us with 4 new maps to “gl&hf mining.”

I never said that Anet nerfed dungeon rewards because of inflation because i dont think inflation was a problem in GW2 in the first place.

And they did spread direct gold faucets to other content, its just not as easily target farmable by players as it was the case in dungeons.
But for the average player who plays a variety of content, gold faucets got buffed in small amounts.

Instead of a small percentage of the player base being responsible for the mayority of gold generation, they made sure that the mayority of the player base is now responsible for gold generation in smaller amounts per player compared to past dungeon runners.

Yeah dunno.

I bought some anyways, in case they become accounht bound after they fix it.

The recipes for the exotic jewels are bought from the master jeweler beside the crafting station for karma, when you crafted the jewels, the exotic trinkets should be craftable via discovery.

Make sure that you talk to him with a character that has jeweling profession active.
When i tried talking to him with a char that didnt have jeweler active, i didnt get the option to buy anything from him, so i think its bugged.

If you are looking for ascended recipes, there are none because Anet didnt raise jeweling to 500 yet, the trinkets have to earned via achievements and collections and then can be bought from the laurel vendor, i think.

As you only got 9 boosts out of 10 chests, i would submit a support ticket.

Unless you managed to mess up accurately displaying the loot table of 30 items but went to the forums to complain nonetheless.
In that case, you deserve those drops.

Red Mistress Denna.9804:

Sobin.5947:

While they’re giving people free scribe mats, i’d like free flax/linseed oil and some empty kegs. They KNEW the supply would be low, i demand compensation!

Hey Sobin,

First, you can get some free linseed from completing an achievement in the Torn from the Sky story mission. There are also 2 flax farms (one in Tangled Depths, The Great Tree, and the other in Verdant Brink north of the Jaka Itzel WP)

Second, did you play ArcheAge recently on Kyrios?

If you have to complete achievements or farm mats, its not free stuff but a reward.

I think timegates are a good way to slow down the wealth gap between players who play alot and players who play casually.

Might be helpful to provide a screenshot of what you are talking about.

Ohoni.6057:

You really need to read back through your own comments, you seem to be forgetful. You claimed that a viable solution to high pigment prices was to make my own using potatoes and nutmeg. I pointed out that while this is theoretically possible, at current market prices it would cost twice as much to do this as to just buy unidentified dye at sell prices, not even counting the karma costs. For it to be a viable alternative, it would need to be cheaper, not more expensive.

Its still the same opportunity cost to farm ingredients for unidentified brown dyes now as before HoT release as the karma costs are static and the drop rates for potatoes are the same. If its cheaper to straight up buy brown dyes, they are undervalued at the tp atm and you have no ground to complain.

Either brown dyes and pigment costs too much on the tp, then you should produce it yourself or its cheaper on the tp compared to opportunity costs for crafting it.
In that case, your cry out for Anet to subsidize brown dyes or pigment wont go down very well with the potato farmers union of tyria.

It just seems that potatoes are currently traded for a higher value than the unidentified brown dyes, so just go and farm potatoes, make our own dyes or sell the potatoes to people who want to use it for something else than dyes and buy dyes or pigment from your profits.

Gibon.1705:

What I believe is BS is that its GUILD profession and yet only 1 person uses it. So either your guild helps that single person and then cost is quite fair but what if said person stops playing/anything and your guild is left without scribe OR you level it alone which is way too expensive.
I’d like to see scribe being leveled as guild profession meaning that EVERYONE in guild could use scribe reciepes this guild has unlocked, and no matter who crafts it makes progress for whole guild.

Very good suggestion imho.

I forged and sold 8 dusks since HoT release, none to a buy order, for an average listing of 1135g.
Most of the time, during the first days of the week, traffic is slower than the weekend, so i would wait at least until the end of the week before you consider relisting.

I am not sure, if the Dusk Collection was bugged and if so,if they fixed it yet.

If you dont need them directly for celestial gear, you can buy sheets of (charged) ambrite on the tp and quite cheaper than what you would pay to charge with bought quartz.

Valiant.5078:

Ohoni.6057:

No, it is not. It is a net-zero exchange. Yes, they are sending gold to the player, but they are acquiring items in return. They have gone from liquid wealth to material wealth, but the total wealth remains constant on both sides. The wealthier player is still just as wealthy, and the poorer player is just as poor, he just has more gold and less pigments.

Actual wealth exchange would involve the wealthier player losing gold and gaining NOTHING in exchange for it, and/or the poorer player gaining gold or materials while expending nothing in exchange. So long as the gold is exchanged for useful goods or services, wealth has not shifted in the slightest.

I disagree. I mentioned that people are buying the item at a premium. They are spending, lets say, 50% more on that item’s actual cost down the line. While the sellers, in reverse, are earning 50% more. People who are buying it are losing wealth. They get absolutely nothing in exchange for that 50% of lost money, other than the fact that they get their crafting up earlier than everyone else.

This is a total valid way of using that extra 50% lost.

There will always be people willing to pay double, triple, or more, of an item’s price, if they can achieve something before anyone else can.

They also destroy the item shortly after they acquire it, so their material wealth is gone while the seller still has the gold.

Ohoni.6057:

At this point, i am just discussing semantics and responded to you claiming that i said something which i didnt.

What about your suggestion that I use potatoes as an economical alternative?

What about it?

Are you talking about the tuber or the currency officially called copper?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

So, what you are saying is, while the mob is immune to CC effects, we should use CC skills on them?

Sounds like using CC at any time is a good idea. =)

When the break bar is broken, you should focus on dps, rather than cc

Ohoni.6057:

I just pointed out that there was a big influx of dyes registered with HoT Launch because in your OP you suggested that Anet should have done exactly that:

And I’ll repeat, because you apparently missed it the first and second time, that I did not say they should increase the supply of dyes as a solution, I said that they should increase the supply of brown pigments. You listed a quote from my first post, but there is a much more specific one right after, “, like giving every new scribe a “gift of pigment,” 500 account bound brown pigments to use for that purpose.”

Increasing the supply of dyes would potentially be a solution, but it is an extremely inefficient solution, with more side effects and less bang for the buck. If they wanted to just dump random dyes into the market as a solution then they would have had to dump ten to a hundred times as many dye bottles as they would brown pigments to result in an equivalent impact, and in the process they would have completely demolished the prices on most dyes.

Did the (unintended but likely not unanticipated) increase in dye availability help to blunt the Scribing issue? Maybe a tiny bit, but not nearly enough to matter, or care about.

It doesnt matter if the solution is a good one or not in your opinion because we havent agreed that there is a problem.

At this point, i am just discussing semantics and responded to you claiming that i said something which i didnt.

I still disagree with everything you brought to the table, the problem and the suggested solution.

Your main problem is that you dislike the concept of a live and changing marketplace and Anet stated many times that its an integral part of how they want their living world to be.

Ohoni.6057:

@Ohoni. . . do you realize that Wanze is like THE economics dude for GW2 Forums? Look him up.

Well, he certainly claims to be, but then he was talking about how dye prices tanked after HoT launched and how that was them “solving this,”

I never said they “solved this” because in my opinion the wasnt a problem to be solved in the first place.

I just pointed out that there was a big influx of dyes registered with HoT Launch because in your OP you suggested that Anet should have done exactly that:

“Knowing that scribes would need hundreds of brown pigment to level their craft, and that brown dye would be in short supply, they could have created a temporary faucet for those materials.”

I also wouldnt be surprised that pigment not going into the material storage for the first couple of days wasnt an oversight but intended, in order to have the player base list it on the tp first before they moved to depositing it into their storage.

This might be helpful:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback/first#post3383470

lynspottery.6529:

I am trying to do my crafting and wanted the Minstrel’s Orichalcum Imbued Inscription. But all my searches show that this particular item’s recipe is BEHIND a mastery gate.

Why? This is a crafting recipe…I don’t mind learning it using materials or even the mystic forge, but why does it have to be gated behind a mastery?

Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Its so only players who have purchased HoT will have access to it.

Tigaseye.2047:

Copestetic.5174:

Would you consider playing HoT, “braindead farming”?

I’ve made probably about 200g just from playing HoT since launch. I’ve taken two characters through the expansion and working on a third. Across all three, I have about 3 stacks of Silk, tons of Elder Wood, about a stack of Ancient Wood, bookoo’s of leather mats, I know for a fact, 3 stacks of Flax, nearly 200 Ectos, etc…etc… and this isn’t figured into the amount of gold I mentioned I’ve made, this stuff’s just sitting in my character’s inventories/bank.

My point being, getting the mats required for Ascended gear seems to be pretty easy. Work on HoT achievements, level them Masteries, run a few of your characters through for the Crystilline Ore, pick-up all the Flax to sell ( still at around 6-7s each ) and sell what you don’t need.

Don’t know, doesn’t seem too hard to me.

Not my experience, at all.

I’ve made virtually nothing from playing the new maps, on two chars, aside from a small pile of flax seeds which should sell for a few gold.

Admittedly, I haven’t played them constantly and repeatedly, for days, as I haven’t been enjoying them very much, other than visually, outside the initial exploration phase.

But, I have played them enough to know that they are not very rewarding.

Maybe they are if you are constantly being taxied to new maps, to do events, but just playing the map(s) you’re given and/or offered gets you nowhere fast.

I guess youre skipping harvest nodes and if you get any mats, you deposit them instead of selling them.

Majic.4801:

Chaba.5410:

Wait, how do you not have gold for gear if you had previously gotten a lot of gold from dungeons?

My guess: gambling it away betting on the Cattlepult.

Watch out, those cows are rigged!

You better start gambling because I have it from unreliable authority that FLying Cow Tokens will be needed to craft the new legendary shortbow, which shoots farting cows instead of unicorns.

Chaba.5410:

Wait, how do you not have gold for gear if you had previously gotten a lot of gold from dungeons?

^^
This.

I applaud Anet for nerfing dungeon rewards and spreading gold faucets across the player base instead of giving it to a fair few speedrunners who thought their earnings were just remotely justified for the effort or skill dungeon runs required.

Right now the player base is using up alot of basic mats, which means regular farming offers alot of profit.

Green wood logs and copper ore go nearly for 2s, soft wood logs and iron ore for 4s, low level herb patches yield between 5-20 silver on average.
Harvesting the 3 blooming passifloras in SSC yields 2g once per day.
Quartz from DR, 10s per crystal.
Nevermind the average yields from new nodes in HoT.

Dungeon rewards?
Ghostly Spineguards (rare back item) vom AC 20-50g on tp now
Fiber Splice from CoE, 15-25g
Just to name a few dungeon specific rewards which have seen a significant price spice since HoT.

You are asking if unintended game design is still exploitable?

Senario.2038:

Wanze.8410:

Senario.2038:

Good question, considering they nerfed nearly every single way to generate gold in the game even silverwastes chest farm I find it highly likely they want you to spend real money on gold. Lets be honest, I assume most players in GW2 are smarter than your mobile game players. We will NOT spend money on buying GOLD of all things.

Give us a good game and good content and you won’t need to worry about people paying gems for stuff. I was considering buying a Watchwork pickaxe and maybe the other gathering items but considering how much I need gold that is going on the backburner.

Rewards for nearly every piece of content, especially new content, needs to be way higher. As much as I love Dragon Stand I have not earned rewards anywhere close to what I’d want out of spending 2 hours of my time in a well organized map that sometimes fails. You should be getting LOADS of loot for doing a big meta event like that since it lasts so long.

Not to mention Fractals where keys often cost more than the loot you get out of the boxes. And if you wanted the legendary backpack you would need to spend gold you don’t generate on an RNG salvage that cannot be salvaging rings which you get from fractals. You have to actually salvage your ascended armor or weapons, and most of us don’t have spares just lying around. Even if we did have spares, it is more likely than not that they would be better used as different stats for your character you can switch in on rather than salvaging.

You could probably fix the ascended salvaging problem by decreasing the cost to 25 silver per use and making rings sometimes drop balls of dark matter. You would still be gated by salvaging but it would be affordable and a way to get rid of your trash rings you get from fractals. (Not that you get a lot anymore, they should fix that too).

You can exchange stabilizing matrixes for 2 keys, once you got the first fractal mastery, no need to pay 20s for one.

Yeah I did that, with matricies at about 30 ish silver right now I got an average of….
10 silver per box (shocker) meaning 20 silver for 2 keys. I salvaged 1 ascended ring today for 5 matrixes. 10 keys, average of 10 silver and some mats that add up to less than 5 silver on average. I say average because one of the boxes I opened had an item worth 15 silver.

So math:
1 gold -> 10 keys -> 10 silver per key. 1 gold. I earned zero money.

5 matrixes at 30 silver. 150 silver. I would have actually earned more money selling the matrixes than I would have opening the boxes. But I opened the boxes.

Either way it is either a 50 silver at most (before TP taxes and listing fee) for profit compared to no profit. Matrixes are likely to not always be 30 silver either, that seems a bit generous considering 1 gold got me 5 today.

There is some serious problems with the rewards across the board in this game post HoT. And again, balls of dark matter are stupid and shut out any chance for a player who is average to get the legendary backpiece even over time.

Edit: yes this is a small sample size but multiple people have already confirmed with much larger sample sizes that opening the boxes is something that is not worth it. I just did it because I knew I’d break even.

Last week i opened 2000 encryptions and the vendor value i got out of those boxes was close to 20s, not 10s.
Small sample sizes usually yield less vendor value on average as the possibility of getting items worth 1 or 5g isnt as big.
The more you open, the more likely you are to get to the average vendor value.

During early days of HoT, John Smith replied to claims that the average output of keys seemed to be 12.6s.
He acknowledged that is lower than designed and he will look into it, so i guess thats covered.
I am pretty sure the low averages are due to reports from small sample sizes and the output on a macroeconomic scale across the player base is actually higher.

John Smith.4610:

Couple of replies:
1. Ensign is, as usual, pretty dead on.
2. 12.6 Silver from key output is off from my understanding of that design, so I’m going to look into that.
3. A market like this isn’t going to crash, it could grow unhealthier over time, but that’s why we iterate.

Like always, you are asking Anet to micromanage the economy, which simply isnt possible and utopic.

There are obviously players who are fine with paying 15s for brown pigment or 50s for resonating slivers.
If you think the prices are too high, put in a lower buy order and wait until it fills or use your playing time to get those ingredients by yourself.

People are asking for changes to reward systems and to the game in general all the time.

And without change, there wont be change. Stable prices make for a dull game.

This is an adventure game and people like to chase good rewards. If all prices and rewards would be stable, there is nothing new to discover.
But an everchanging landscape of material prices makes sure that the most valuable ressources change every week and encourage you to play different content. I dont know why you want to change that .

The fact that you got zero positive replies to your suggestion of handing out free rewards that other players work for should give you some food for thought.

I said everything that needs to be said on this topic.
Fell free to bump it on your own or see it slipping down the pages for lack of common support.

Even though its obviously wrongly implemented, i dont see how changing it afterwards will be a good idea.

I think both upgrade components dont highlight in their tooltip that they are used to craft a specific stat combo but the stat boost they give as upgrade components are clearly visible.

If they should change the stats on them, what happens to all those that have already been slotted?

People who did so, will have to re slot and get the short end of the stick.

Colin mentioned in his 2015 outlook blog that raids, new legendaries and enhanced squad UI will ship mid-november, so i guess they will come next week rather than this one.

Ohoni.6057:

Good money for anyone who caught on to that trend early, but sucks for everyone else. I am highly doubting your qualifications to give financial advice if you don’t recognize that.

I mentioned that (especially pigment) the day HoT released.
If you havent taken my advice back then, its not my vault.

Wanze.8410:

And example is pigment, which is used for coloring guild hall upgrades. They drop from harvesting plant nodes and can also be salvaged from identified dyes. Right now, plenty of players harvest plant nodes, get pigment and dont know what to do with it.
But nearly no guild has a guild hall, trained scribes and is already producing guild upgrades, there is simply no demand.

Alot of demand for materials and items didnt kick in yet because people dont have the knowledge to use those mats or items, so they are dirt cheap. That goes especially for new ones but also old ones.

Thats why I expect market prices to rise significantly until the end of the year. So dont sell your loot to the highest bid (I will buy it and make loads of profit), list it. Undercut by 1 copper, if you need the gold because you are a new player, list it for 50-100% more of its current value, if you dont have immediate need for gold.
It will most cetainly sell within a shorter timespan than you think and you will be a richer person in the future.

Ohoni.6057:

The reason why other pigment isnt as high as brown one is that there are nearly no scribes at level 125 yet, which enables them to use other pigment than brown

/sigh, yes, which is the entire point I have been making.

The way that they rolls this out, situational bottlenecks were inevitable. When a system is new, you need a surplus in supply of the low level ingredients, and as the system matures, the higher level ingredients become more important. They designed a system that would be stable a year after implementation, which is better than nothing, but a well designed system ALSO accounts for initial rush and takes steps to offset it.

It’s like if you design a theme park to run smoothly months after launch, but pay no attention to the potential for massive crowds in the early days when everything is fresh.

As I said, I think the system might be fine in the long term (although it actually still seems like it will be pretty expensive for what you get, even once things settle down a bit), but they made NO move to offset the early demand surplus and supply shortfalls. As I said, this could easily have been resolved by providing some sort of short term “brown pigment and resonating slivers faucet,” either some event that guaranteed them as rewards that runs through October and November, or a “welcome to HoT” gift basket that offers plenty of each, or a “enjoy your new guild Hall” basket, or “for this month, Guild Missions will reward 10x the slivers and a bonus pack of brown pigment,” etc. Of course these bonus rewards would be account bound, so that people couldn’t just hoard them and sell them off at a profit. The point is not to make people money, it’s to make people Scribes at a stable cost.

They should have had a system in place that acknowledges that supply today is considerably lower than it will be in six months, and that demand today is significantly lower than it will be in six months, and therefore anyone trying to level Scribing today will pay exponentially more than they will in six months, and there’s no reason why this would be a good thing for anyone, so they should have deliberately corrected for that outcome.

The dye you linked proves my point as it went from over 4s buy order before hot to 1.65s buy order shortly after.

Um, dude, it went from 4s to 1s in the first few days, before hardly anyone had a Scribe of their own (since you needed an upgraded Guild Hall which took at minimum a few days. All dyes dropped in price, most likely, as some have attributed, due to people coming back to the game, finding that their spare colors resulted in tons of unidentified dyes, and trying to cash in on that. That dip will take care of itself, and is largely irrelevant to the situation being talked about here.

But then if you follow the moving lines, after a few days, as more and more guilds got their workshops and more and more people looked into Scribing, notice how the price starts to climb, passing 4s within the first week, doubling it half a week later, and now sitting at 500% of the pre-HoT value. It’ll likely stay high for another few weeks, maybe a couple months, and then drop to a more stable place, probably still higher than pre-HoT, because there are new long term sinks, but the faucets are all short term. Good money for anyone who caught on to that trend early, but sucks for everyone else. I am highly doubting your qualifications to give financial advice if you don’t recognize that.

I just mentioned a surplus of dyes with hot because you claimed in your first post that Anet should have done that (and they did), nothing more.

I think your suggestion to give everybody a starting supply of brown pigments or resonating slivers is absolutely rediculous.

You just want to save some gold and dont care, if that means that rewards for other content (like guild missions) gets devalued.
If you want brown pigment, unidentified brown dyes are craftable with potatoes and nutmeg, which you get for karma.
Just craft those and salvage the dyes.
Potatoes arent hard to come by.

Senario.2038:

Good question, considering they nerfed nearly every single way to generate gold in the game even silverwastes chest farm I find it highly likely they want you to spend real money on gold. Lets be honest, I assume most players in GW2 are smarter than your mobile game players. We will NOT spend money on buying GOLD of all things.

Give us a good game and good content and you won’t need to worry about people paying gems for stuff. I was considering buying a Watchwork pickaxe and maybe the other gathering items but considering how much I need gold that is going on the backburner.

Rewards for nearly every piece of content, especially new content, needs to be way higher. As much as I love Dragon Stand I have not earned rewards anywhere close to what I’d want out of spending 2 hours of my time in a well organized map that sometimes fails. You should be getting LOADS of loot for doing a big meta event like that since it lasts so long.

Not to mention Fractals where keys often cost more than the loot you get out of the boxes. And if you wanted the legendary backpack you would need to spend gold you don’t generate on an RNG salvage that cannot be salvaging rings which you get from fractals. You have to actually salvage your ascended armor or weapons, and most of us don’t have spares just lying around. Even if we did have spares, it is more likely than not that they would be better used as different stats for your character you can switch in on rather than salvaging.

You could probably fix the ascended salvaging problem by decreasing the cost to 25 silver per use and making rings sometimes drop balls of dark matter. You would still be gated by salvaging but it would be affordable and a way to get rid of your trash rings you get from fractals. (Not that you get a lot anymore, they should fix that too).

You can exchange stabilizing matrixes for 2 keys, once you got the first fractal mastery, no need to pay 20s for one.