Guild Wars 2

I’m bloody tired of people yelling at me to put my pet away. Whether its a matter of the pet (typically already on heel or dead) “pulling aggro” in a dungeon, to its “presence causing the event to scale up” to it’s death “counting as a dead NPC in the event, toward failing the event”, I am bloody kitten tired of the calls to put the pet away.

And oh, I love the reaction that mesmers receive from the same crowd, as if asking players to omit half or more of their DPS is a smart request.

I say “Bah!” to this idiotic crowd.

To the uninitiated:
A rangers pet is used for several things:

• Extra DPS.
• Aggro management (Read: Tanks, snares, knockbacks, etc).
• Reviving players/NPCs.

A rangers pet can:

• be put away outside of combat.
• Must be out for combat. – It comes out when combat is started, and cannot be put away during combat.

Yelling at rangers to put their pet away is tantamount to asking them to not play. I find it both ignorant and offensive.

I’m not sure what A-Net can do to educate players, cause thus far these players can be very vocal, and when told ‘Rangers can’t put their pets away’ have occasionaly responded ’Don’t bring your ranger’ – This last attitude is entirely contrary to one of the founding principles of GW2, being that all professions are welcome and none are required.

The pending work on dynamic scaling will help, I’m sure, but there will always be loud idiots who come up with bad conclusions when things go badly. Some events still scale badly, everyone just needs to deal (and anyhow, I love a challenge. Clearing the meta event in Wayfarer hills right now is the wrong sort of challenge – the final shaman may die before you run back to him. Opening Balthazar is the right sort of challenge – A massive zerg of players meets with a massive zerg of foes, and must defend the effectively tissue-paper NPCs against death and demise.)

I am a ranger. I run with a pet. Don’t like it? Tough. Pets are part of who rangers are and what rangers do. I am more than capable of soloing champions, ankittenough as nails against the most difficult legendaries in the game. I can handle aggro enough for 2 or three players. If you are ignorant enough to think that a pet dying or a shattered illusion counts as a dead NPC against some event, that’s your problem.

Don’t bring me grief for playing a game.

//Yamagawa

Xsorus.2507:

I’ve basically come to the conclusion that if its not fixed by the end of the month, I’m gone..

I will not play a game that you can’t see the enemy till you’re 2 feet away.

Multiple times I’ve engaged people only to have it turn out to be a group or more… and i’m solo….

I should not be having my bloody fights culled.

But here we are, despite telling them it didn’t work during the last test, they chose to go through with it.

So that’s it, if its not gone next patch, I am.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Seriously, war is war, and WvW is war. Expect to be surprised by superior numbers. Expect the enemy to be hiding inside that ‘undefended’ keep.

Expect that solo Mesmer to not be alone.

Expect to die running solo in WvW.

If that’s a problem for you, that’s your problem, not mine.

I relished the fighting tonight. At one point, I spotted a thief that had been waiting to gank our next yak. Out of view of him is small ball of ten or so allies, who also could not see him. I saw the rough outcome on the wall right them. I charge him, he goes into stealth, and moments later he and his buddy (who was already in stealth) are finishing me off. The 10 friendlies out of view of the thieves (and vice versa) see my down/dead symbols on the map and march around the slope, much to the dismay of the dual thieves. I got to put the finish on both thieves, thanks to my allies quick response + res.

Yes, I was surprised by someone I didn’t see. Didn’t alter the outcome any – a glass cannon thief can still kill me one-v-one, and a mini Zerg can kill 2 meager glass cannons caught off guard and with their key skills already on recharge.

Yeah, I got killed. Big deal. I stopped a yak gank by dual thieves, and all I had to do was die. All the same, I was solo. I expected to be killed going in.
//Portable Corpse

Attitude, son. All it takes is attitude, and you have plenty of the wrong kind.

People on JQ may get bored of waiting in queue… I’m hoping that upcoming changes to WvW change some of this – pugs have way too much interest in EB and not enough for the borderlands. Eb has Stonemist, and the borderlands had (past tense) orbs.

//Yamagawa

Heh. Much better than before. Oh, I’ll admit that there are some trade offs, but they are minor compared to some of the big Zerg v Zerg slugfests we would see frequently, where all you see is a commander icon, down/dead symbols, a handful of combo fields and the odd ally or foe.

Any chance that PvE might see the same low quality models? I am finding that I can run up to a merchant in PvE and need to actually wait for the merchant to render before conducting my transaction. Oh, I may not need to wait, but I like to see the merchant that I am feeding. Also, large scale PvE zergs now have that same ‘follow the commander icon and throw out random attacks’ feel to them that pre-fix WvW zergs had. (That, or I hit my largest PvE player Zerg ever… Hard to say as I only saw a handful of models’ but the 7 commander icons was novel…)

//Yamagawa

I’d say either Ele (great AoE, plus spammamble weakness, plus snares, plus boons for attunement changes, blast finishers in combo fields, and evasive arcana, near perma group swiftness, etc,etc)
Or guardian (don’t play one, but I know they get reflect walls and plenty-o-boons)

I think guardians may run a bit weaker on dps than ele’s. mesmers have some good boon options but are more single-target fighters and have stealth. Rangers are weak boon-wise. I can’t as yet speak for necro, engineer or thief, other than to say that built right, necros can be Very tanky. Shout warriors I believe build around boons & banners, but I’ve not looked up the build.
//Yamagawa

So… Game starts at 0 money for everyone….

How do you NOT expect inflation for the first 1-2 years?

So people find a way to get top-demanded items…and use it.
How could you NOT expect them to do otherwise?
How could A-Net justify punishing them? ‘They uh… Found something worth making in the forge and uh… Made them in quantity —Permaban!’ Get real.

Admit it, if you knew about the early game precursor recipes, you’d still have several in inventory, and be rich… And be wondering why the heck everyone hates you for having found a way to wealth so early.

Sheesh. Drop the jealousy please.

@Noerknhar – watch: in 2-3 years the existing legendaries will be so commonplace as to be boring. Precursors will sell for just a couple times more than any other exotic item. Patience will bring them to you cheaply.

I keep hearing how legendaries are supposed to show a players accomplishments in the game and not the market… Does anyone have an anet quote for this, or is it just popular hype?

I think honestly that there are 4 camps….

Camp 1) happy with how things are.
Camp 2) unhappy with how things are, demanding that it be fixed but giving no input as to how.
Camp 3) unhappy with how things are, outraged at market manipulation, asking that things be fixed by <insert market manipulation policy here>.
Camp 4) unaware of any conflict and drama, marginal users of the trading post and/or generally uninterested in ‘shiny legendaries’.

Camp 2 is vocal but not sharp enough to realize how to fix the problem.
Camp 3 is vocal, and proudly wears their ability to not think rationally on their sleeves, by demanding solutions far worse than the perceived problem.

Want to fix it? That’s simple: Anet needs to do nothing. Anything more is the same market manipulation that camps 2&3 are crying foul about – except it would be actual manipulation, not simply perceived or assumed. Instead, you need to work in the market. Make yourself rich any way you can. It takes research and work. But when you contribute the marketplace, you broaden the base of the market and you make the will of the individual less able to manipulate things. Yes! No longer will a single player be able to buy up all the spicy veggie chili, relisting it at a gold/ea (and if you get angry at the thought of someone doing that – think on it. Kudos to anyone who laughs at the ludicrousness of the image)

End of the day: this is a game. Get upset over flat tires, higher taxes, or lost jobs. Getting upset over a game is silly.

Sleepless?
Hum…. An all-Nighter might be interesting. Thanks for the advice. :P

@Electricblues: Seriously, if you are having problems with enemy zergs as a smaller group, you’ve done something wrong – I can bump the relevant thread in our strat forum, if you like.

As for zergs & culling, I figure some 60% of the problem will be solved in the Monday update, and be able to see enemies just as quickly as ‘closest next foe’ keys can target them. The rest… Is up to us to adapt and A-net to complete their culling work. Oh, the culling work will make things harder for small groups, yes. But zergs are eg to cope with. Trick is in convincing our own allies to cooperate in the solution.
//Portable Corpse [OH]
Jade Quary

@SoS
Been a real fun last week, what with blackouts to bring peeps in and swing scores wildly, leaving us neck and neck as late as Thursday. As close as scores were I fully expect you will be bringing your best game to us in the coming new week.

Don’t let me down.

//Portable Corpse [OH] of Jade Quarry

JQ – We’ve managed to hold our tier 1 WvW spot virtually since the start (we’d dropped to tier 2 only once early on, but most JQers seem to have short memories on the point). While we have had our strong guilds supporting us, I’ll be honest, it’s been the might and skill of our ‘disorganized pugs’ that have helped us stand out, and now we’re seeing an influx of guids that I can only expect will bring us above 2nd place.

Outside WvW we do strong, it’s not unusual to see most temples open at any point on a weekend, and even Balthazar spends a fair amount of time open.

We’ve BEEN doing blackouts to aid transfers, and been doing quite well at it to get people over, but with the recent bump in server caps, that may be a non-issue for a transfer over.

You are right when you say that WvW is not the entirety of the game, but it speaks some to what our players are made of. We’ve held on in tier 1 – we’ve got endurance. We’ve generally bin in 2nd spot – We don’t back down from challenges (the same challenges that have had the other Tier one servers drop off after a few weeks or a month). We’ve done this largely on our WvW pugs – Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had our WvW guilds all along, but they’ve lacked for manpower to field the single guild 40 man zergs that other servers have run with. Our individual players are generally self aware enough to know what to do in WvW to hold us in T1, and will gladly rally on competent commanders.

Me? I’m content to occasionally slay some invaders, and topple that evil Balth temple priest when the opportunity offers. And fractals, can’t forget the fractals (one of the few real challenges I’ve found in game)

//Portable Corpse
— Head Chef of JQs ‘Feed the Zerg!’ program.

Spoken like a true man who has yet to craft a stack or two of greatswords in one sitting.

There are costs besides gold in crafting. People are going to seek a market suited to what they can invest. People with a few silver to spare will stick to stuff they can afford mats for. People with hundreds of gold won’t bother wasting time on the stuff that will require literarily thousands of steps to get their gold to market, instead they will look for high value-high margin items, letting the low value stuff go uncrafted… And letting people with less to invest make money on it.

More information removes inefficiencies from the market, it doesn’t wreck it.
It lets it burn ‘hotter’. More of the in-demand mats will fill faster. A buy later or sell later offer will fill faster in this more efficient economy.
The people selling mats get more money for their mats, requiring higher prices for the final goods, but since the mat suppliers got paid more, they can afford the higher prices.

Yes, niches would be destroyed by making all the full pricing deali public.

But niches would also be created. Find them, and you find profit.

//Yamagawa
Do not fear change that brings the unknown of endless possibility. Embrace it, that you may ride it to great heights.

Triple word score!

Yes, the market in general would benefit from free detailed analysis tools.
Yes, the individuals doing all the work would suffer.

What anet could do is publish a data file with full detail, but updated at regular intervals (every 30 min or so) – no server overload, as there’s no point spamming requests for updates, and no point in sending billions of individual requests, since the file already has the full detail.

I seem to recall the spidy public API was swamped with requests, crashing the service on several occasions. I’m sure A-Net is taking notes on the experience…
//Yamagawa

The box version is a suit of armor in one item. They take one inventory slot, they buy/sell as a unit, and oh yes, they stack.

I am considering these for guild storage, but the lack of level info on the level 35/50 stuff is a problem.
//Yamagawa

Blueshield.6291:

Assuming that ANet specifically tuned material rates and crafting recipes in a way such that it’s more or less not possible to turn a profit through crafting (i.e., virtually every item crafted through normal professions is sold at or only slightly above cost)…

Yes… Go on believing that easy lie… Oh, time for me to turn over my TP inventory of another easy large profit….

More on topic – I see the dye recipes as serving one of two roles:
Role a: a way to keep the basement price for some materials from dropping below certain values. This then doubles as sinks for those items – there are then no infinite quantities back logged in the TP. This is a long view role, which I don’t see entering use for at least a year
Role b: a temporary place holder for the recipe, currently set to be unprofitable by any measure, for future adjustment into use as a sink of mats and faucet of dye.

Dunno which, don’t care which, the role for craftable dyes is for tomorrow.
//Yamagawa
— Crafting VVisard (self proclaimed)

(Psst – did we remember to mention the pie? Don’t forget the pie!)
//Portable Corpse
Head Chef of Portable Corpse Ltd, primary sponsor of Jade Quarry’s ‘Feed the Zerg!’ Program.

Joiry.2504:

2 – I don’t doubt there’s a few crafting recipes than can make a bit of profit. But do these actually exist across all crafting disciplines? (no, I don’t need to know the specific ones or recipes) And are they really profit makers? There are some crafted weapons and armors that players are trying to sell at what appears to be a profit over the cost of materials…but the looted versions undercut them all the time. And is it really healthy that nearly all the recipes are basically worthless, other than to level with?

Yes, all disciplines have profitable recipes.
Yes, they are profit makers. Yes, they really do sell despite others available on the market. (I make ~10g/day and jump disciplines at intervals, allowing backlogs I created to sell)

And eh…. Last I looked it was like levels 125-300 for the worst offender had nothing profitable – but its been getting better with time – I expect much if the surplus was created when people were discovering how the initial crafting system worked, and then a few specific surplus items were created when people used them to (unprofitably) level their crafting. Give it some time, and keep eyes open for the mats people still dump on the market after crafting them for levels.
//Yamagawa
– Crafting VVizzard (self proclaimed)

TBH, I am quite impressed with the economy in the game. It’s diverse, interconnected, and has many things that single players (even poor players) can influence.

I’ve even had fun playing with the market. Not playing the market – playing with the market. Bump the price of something up by a few thousand percent, and the market reacts in hours and you have more than 10fold supply within a day (this had cost me about 50s to action – buying all available supply for something and listing one for a gold). Double the price for a mat and the volume of sales to diectly to (my) buy offers more than triples.

It’s been fun & educational, and I hope to see it continue much as it is now, in the years to come.

//Yamagawa
(Though, a total gold sales figure would be nice to have for bragging rights…)

Jade quarry is the same, last I was past him.

Do you have any extra language support enabled?

Seriously: OS version and whether you have asian font support installed – I’ve seen games misbehave in XP with that support enabled.

I’d try myself, but I have window 7 and don’t know where it has gone with Asian fonts.

The symbol you get, btw, resembles Unicode 0104
//Yamagawa

Meh, counter siege generally can kill trebs. Haven’t dealt with that one, but I’ve seen treb duels with trebs within the spawn areas. Can’t take them out melee… But then that is true of most well placed trebs.
//Yamagawa

Do you have a lot stuff waiting for pickup in the trading post?

A typical go of picking up stuff after a day of hectic sales usually nets me:
1g (tap pick up again)
3g (tap pick up again)
50s (tap pick up again)
2g(full inv – craft, sell, tap pick up again)
10g (tap pick up again)
4g (everything collected from pick up pane)

Gold queues for pickup just like any purchase, but unlike purchases, you are presented with a grand total for it. This can mislead when you have many items waiting for pickup, as the gold will queue behind it.
//Yamagawa

Belmont.4682:

Jolene.7316:

The pulsating sound is the fmod audio subsystem telling the user it is out of memory:

“When the FMOD mixer thread does an allocation and it fails, it is almost impossible to recover from this gracefully (because of the threaded nature of the system, there is no function to return an error from), and sounds would start to drop out. Because we think this is fatal, and leads to subtle or not so subtle audio bugs – the mixer now emits a pulsating sine wave noise to tell you it is out of memory.”

http://www.fmod.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15120

or http://preview.tinyurl.com/fmodbug

Bumping with the quote that seems to contain critical info regarding the root cause of this issue. Hope Anet take a look

Shiny! Want to clinch it as a solid data point for the devs? Get an audio recording of the pulsing sine wave, or specs on it (pitch, rate of pulse, etc). Until then, its just an enticingly similar description of the game audio after the sound glitches.

Also, perhaps I should mention something unpleasant…
The tone may be a symptom and not a cause. Knowing precisely what the symptom is does not spontaneously generate a fix – the pulsing tone from fmod is from a memory allocation error. Given that my game generally crashes 4 times in 5 right after the tone starts, it’s likely that the sound is just the first visible symptom of another bug. Memory allocation bugs can be difficult to isolate.

//Yamagawa

Noticing today that there’s a decided lack of overflow servers. So how does my pug of 2 Yaks, 1 Henge, one Crystal Desert and I on Jade Quarry make it into Fractals without an overflow server?
//Yamagawa

I think this may have hit a case of ‘unintended consequences’.
Apologies, the speculation gets hip deep here, just working on observations (right or wrong) in game, and making assumptions (good or bad) from there.

Problem (correct me if I am wrong): it takes 1-3 seconds to load a player model into the GPU for rendering (observed as a delay in restoring character model when leaving forms). With a large Zerg of players approaching, that may give players a minute or more before they see the full Zerg render.
Solution (as implemented): split the queue into 2, one for friendly, one for enemy.
Result (speculated): the smaller queue size may be smaller than a Zerg, with the result that as the Zerg moves, the game continually discards nearby players to load closer players. If you push the enemy so you are surrounded by them, the queue is already in disarray from friendlies, and now the enemy thrashes the load further. If you retreat to friendliest, it’s the friendliest that thrash the load – either way, the load is thrashed.

Suggestions for a real solution:

• Always render the first n name tags within x distance. Then if models do not render, the players at least can see tags.
• As the queue depth to load models gets deeper, fall back to low quality models that load faster. When the queue clears, reload low quality models with high quality models. (Heck, red & green cubes would be superior to invisible)
• when a player model changes (lich form, bear form, etc) or disappears (stealth), do not discard the original model from memory (there appears to be a load delay to get it back)
• weight the queue sort order:
  # of friendlies loaded (friendlies in queue get lower scores for more that are already visible)
  # of foes loaded (foes in queue get lower scores for more…)
  Distance to player (foes get a favorable bias for this)
  Push to top of the queue anything that stands to get a drop from the player (read: is attacking or has attacked).
  Push to bottom dead players, (but always render nearest, regardless of Zerg size – whether to promote a res or not hide a spy)

• There is also overhead in loading models, so respect already loaded models.
  Discard models priority:
  Do not discard models from memory just because invisibility is applied, or models are replaced (lich/bear form)
  Discard models only as memory is needed for new models, not as the models are made unneeded.
  When in a high population area, and a dicision needs to be made whether to discard a loaded model in favor of an unloaded model: if the two models scornsimilar for weight, keep the loaded model. (Do not discard and load unless the out of memory model is of significantly more interest)

Summary, the problem is less that there is a limited number of players that can be rendered, its that rendering new players has a time cost. Build your player model handling around respecting that cost.

//Yamagawa

Searching for anything with bottle in the name will fail.

Right clicking an item and choosing ‘buy more on TP’ has worked for me in these instances, but if you don’t have a handy one to use for buy more…

Dunno… I’ve had problems previewing daggers/axes/horns/etc because they are previewed sheathed, underneath my armor. If a change was made, may have been to make them more visible.

The sound bug is a nuisance, yes (I just turn the game sound down). The ‘crash 4 out of 5 times within 30 seconds of encountering the sound bug’ is rather another matter, especially when WvW has a queue going. Granted, I’ve not run into the bug for a while (been out of WvW, but had it happen last week in a Temple of Balth run), but if its still happening, I’m discouraged from doing anything zergish.

Observed 3x now:
If an NPC dies and is ressed, the warmaster will:
1) Finish current action.
2) Path to where the NPC was when it died (even though it is now alive and fighting)
3) Path to where he was when aggro was first gained.
4) The End. Pull big foe over to reset via failure.

• Southern invasion reinforcements reportedly to stop pathing forward once one of the reinforcement members dies. I’ve seen this behavior myself, where after the death of an NPC the patrol stops moving forward by itself (it can be pulled forward with aggro, but I believe that only useful for killing the NPCs).
• Confirmed myself – I’ve seen reinforcement members die and the invasion continue forward (conflicting info – argh) however, the NPC was down for at most 3 seconds before being ressed by the player zerg.
• Speculation: NPC group members follow the NPC group leader. The NPC group leader follows his path, blocking on aggro. The NPC leader discontinues following the path once something happens that causes him to path to a dead NPC to res it – thus if the downed NPC is ressurrected promptly, the reinforcements continue.
  —
  Advice:
  1) Eles should favor water magic and simple raw nuking for the southern reinforcements event.
  2) Other professions favor AoE condition removal and healing where they can (Rangers Healing Spring is near-perfect, as is using arcane blast in any water field)
  – The mobs here generate healthy amounts of condition based AoE degen, so clearing the conditions and healing lost health are both important steps toward keeping things alive.
  3) Have members who don’t have PBAoE heals equipped work to maintain a perimeter (eg: Have these peeps pull the enemy AoE damage to points other than on top of the NPCs you need alive).
  4) Promptly res any dead NPCs.
  5) Cross your fingers.
  6) Remember, when the NPCs are aggroed, they may be pulled forward. Before they resume their path forward, they WILL trek backwards to the point where they first received the aggro – Do not dispair that all is lost when they trek backwards, they will do this. (Moving Patrol De-Aggro process step 4 applies here. Wrong game version, but still helpful: http://www.guildwiki.org/Guide_to_Aggro#Long_Distance_Pull ) Despair only once the NPCs stand stationary, entirely out of aggro, have fully healed, and do not resume moving forward.

//Yamagawa

So… let me see if I have this straight…

People see market prices changing. Therefore the conclusion is ‘Hey, someone’s manipulating the market, we must fix it by… ‘insert a market manipulation technique to “fix” prices’.

Greeeeeaaaaaaat idea, that – ‘Correcting’ a perceived flaw in the market by introducing the very thing you are claiming to want eliminated.

Prices shift as supply and demand shift. Some of the supply changes may be explained by bot bans (tier 6 dust fits here). Some of the demand changes can be seen as people speculating in the market – buying it cheap to relist at a higher price. (I’ve seen that happen with candy-corn, more of it happen with the Mystic Forge conduits, and some other items). None of these is wrong – Speculating takes assets and risk. The speculators for mystic forge conduits got burned when prices dropped from 20 gold/ea, to the current price near 13g (a loss of a third of the investments – I shed no tears for monies lost by the speculators. Nor do I rage at people who made money selling their conduits at those 20g prices)

—

Darx: Every market transaction has speculation and risk. Even the ‘Sell Now’ or ‘Buy Now’ options involve risk. For a ‘Sell Now’, I risk not getting money I could have got for selling it at a higher price. For a ‘Buy Now’, I risk paying more for the item than I might otherwise need to pay. But in either case, I get what I want (the product or money) immediately. Look up ‘opportunity cost’.

No, seriously: look it up.

Opportunity cost is an important concept to understand, and applies to your observation about the dyes being purchased and re-listed. One person speculated ’I’ll get what I want by selling at 3.5g’ Another speculated ‘I can make more money, lets re-list these at a higher price’ The second person is ok with both the risk and opportunity cost the first was unwilling to pay.

If you want to eliminate speculation and risk, you’ll need to eliminate the marketplace. The two are not separable from it.

//Yamagawa

Brief (and wasted) inflation there.

And the rate is correct. The 0.6% or whichever makes the assumption that you are evaluating the rare->Legendary transmutes (Step A * Step B), I evaluate only Exotic->Legendary in my calculation.

Data!
: 3318 combines, with 654 exotics, 4 Dusks, and 0 Dawns (see here), which is a 0.6% chance.

Er wait… what’s with the 3318 combines producing only 654 exotics…. oh, @#%^!
That’s working from rares up to precursors, and no actual levels are mentioned. This inserts extra unknown variables into the data! Booo! (Don’t mind me, data is Serious Business to me, and while that represents an impressive pile of data, but with the variables all it can do is give a crude guideline — were all the items level 80?)

Best I get with this data is approximates (see assumptions):
Conversion from green to rare: 18.39-21.10%
Conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dusk: 0.7414-6.356%
Conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dawn: under 1.821%

All these use 95% confidence, and the Dawn estimate is made using a pessimistic form of the Rule of Succession (Laplace was a hopeless optimist about the sun rising tomorrow).

Assumption 1: All items are (at best) level 80. They may have been lower level, meaning that actual outputs may be higher for level 80 inputs.
Assumption 2: The drop rates have not changed since the data was made (A-Net has made very public that drop rates in other areas of the game have changed. It would be foolish to assume that no such adjustments were made here – It would also be foolish to assume that A-Net would announce changes to the mystic forge drop rates, to do so would cause controversy to no good purpose).
Assumption 3: The drop rates are not influenced by bugs in the mystic forge output (‘no drop’, and ’shouldn’t create a precursor, but did anyway’ scenarios).

Gamblers: Use at own risk. The 6%+ end of the drop rate seems optimistic, but the data set is small. I’d encourage using the low end of the error margins for avoiding drastic disappointment that you are sure to get at the high end.

//Yamagawa

Starlink.6248:

Need a fix for this Horrible design.

Grow up.

A two year old can say ‘broken. Fix this.’ I even have fond memories of a kid saying this to a perfectly working toy… It just wasn’t working how he wanted it to work.

An adult can give a rational description: ‘this market is flawed, prices keep going up.’ And can even give suggestions: ‘how about you xyzzy’

Even there, many of you are failing: when a poorly placed xyzzy is used, nothing happens.

The economy in this game, in the trading post, is a free economy. Not a command-control economy. This is a NEW economy, starting from a baseline of 0.

Prices will inflate.
Elite items (those with an extremely low supply but high demand) will inflate at a compounded rate. To assume otherwise is childish.

Price controls exist. These include:
The merchant: no item value will drop below what the merchant will pay.
Crafting: no item value will rise substantially over the cost of materials.
Material promotion:: extreme surpluses of crafting materials can be converted to higher tier materials – this places a fixed relationship between like goods of different tiers, which will use surplus supply of low tier goods to fill demand for higher tier goods.
The mystic forge : the mystic forge randomly rewards rare items for some recipes, turning it into a gold/item sink for people seeking these rare items. This both elevates the price of goods obtained primarily through this random process, to not less than 1/r (the inverse of the drop rate), but also elevates the prices of the goods thrown into the forge to create them.

The precursors are from that final price control. Removing the price control would affect the price of level 80 exotics, in a way that I think would be BAD for the economy – nobody would be converting exotics into legendary precursors, and everyone else would buy a few for their characters and have done. It would tank the price of exotics, and consequently remove the ability to profit from crafting same, and consequently the the tier 6 mat prices (woot, ectos @ 2 bronze/ea, orichalcum ore @ 7 bronze), making it pointless to farm these difficult materials for profit. Like it or not, precursors are a major driver of the economy, in many ways. Removing them to ‘fix’ one problem will only create dozens more.

The legendaries are (for those who remember) are not unlike the oppressor weapons in gw1 : bloody hard to obtain at first, but before long everyone had one. Don’t give me any back talk about ‘all you had to do was complete the storyline for a free one’, the battle for lions arch has been nerfed, making it far easier than it had been at release, and until you completed that battle, you could farm all the war supplies you wanted, but you couldn’t turn them in for a weapon. And that original fight was very very hard (I have fond memories of the boss wave).

Still, the parallel exists:
You can farm the ingredients for the precursor. You can throw them into the forge. You won’t know if its profitable until you learn what the drop rates are. You can buy/sell any weapons you want/get. And most importantly: the prices will tank in time.

Want them to tank faster? Show us how the supply works. Show us, if you will, how you beat the battle for LA, so that we too know what it takes to make a weapon. Show us exactly how many exotics are used for each legendary.

The high prices are ( and continue to be) a failure in the player base to figure this out. A-net isn’t going to do our work for us, and many of the controls they do have will actually make the problem far far worse, not better. If you think you have a better fix, speak up, but please don’t just say ‘Broken, fix now!’ like a petulant 3-year old with a toy that doesn’t do what they expect.

Just realize that this game has an economy, and adjustments to precursors will affect that economy. Don’t be surprised if your advice gets shot down, but don’t be afraid to give it either. You may have thought of something we haven’t, and even if we have, you’re going to learn something in our replies.

//Yamagawa

Prices reflect supply & demand.

Supply: an incompletely understood process involving the mystic forge. Some people undoubtedly know more about this than is public knowledge, but are not sharing it (to keep supply low).

Demand: everyone who wants a legendary weapon.
Demand: everyone who sees the price of legendary items only going up, who want to buy legendaries only to resell them at a higher price.

All that needs to hapkitten either have a change in the supply or the demand. Knowledge on the supply side will have a greater effect than actual adjustments in the drop rate. If a-net were to reveal that 1 in 100 mythic forges with matching level 80 gear will spit out a weapon, the price of a precursor becomes pinned at ‘not less than’ the price of 100 of the exotics used, and caps somewhere not unreasonably above that price (perhaps 200% above, but not 100000% above, which is the type of scenario most people posting here would prefer to avoid).

If that knowledge becomes open, then the price speculators lose their bubble market.

If you make the items bound, you destroy the market. I don’t see a-net doing that – its taking a failure of the user-base and compounding it with an adjustment that prevents other players from recreating the successes that many users are upset with. – make no mistake, in my eye, the users have failed to stabilize the precursor market – all they need to do is find the precursor drop rate. Not hard, that. Just expensive.

To all you users out there: find the drop rate, and the bubble goes away. It really is that simple.

//Yamagawa

Oh, and the wiki has tools for gleaning real and meaningfull numbers from binomial drop rates, even if they include a no-drops scenario. By all means, stop sitting on your own thumbs and fix this problem yourselves. Or do you really need a-net to spoon feed you everything?

Anyone heavy into crafting has had to deal with rolling cogs and sporophytes for ages. Not to mention the golem rebellion and the misplaced septicalipher… Some of the idle chatter assumes that you don’t stand for hours in one spot. I’d consider a change up to a temporary holiday based dialog to be a blessing, not a curse.

Rotating the dialogs every week or so would not be bad – at least the pickup lines at the hot springs are varied sufficiently.
//Yamagawa
‘What is that?’
‘Initiate the action’
‘Target classified: hostile’
…

Great….that’s the recipes for the gifts. The questioner was asking about the weapons, not the gifts…

Saw this coming when I was considered as brawling, and (for lack of any tonic or costume) had no access to any means to leave brawling.

Doubly so when tapping ‘f’ at the cauldron would start brawling promptly, but the costume would not apply until after ‘activation’ completed, assuming one noticed an activation was in progress and waited for it to complete…

Jeez. Talk about a ton of unfounded speculation and baseless accusation.

Bots farm. Bots are good at farming, its what they do. Players farm too. Players farm better than bots. Don’t go grumbling at anti-bot code when you’ve been doing the same things as bots, that is, farming. (Is the code perfect? Doubtful – It’s a new product and the code is low visibility, it’s hard for players to objectively measure it. Should A-Net be studying it’s performance? Yes. And I’ll bet they’ve got more than one person looking at it).

I recall back during the beta days, a comment from one of t he a-net staffers to the effect of: ‘The longer a creature has existed in the game, the more xp you get for killing it’. I’d bet cold hard cash that the same applies to drops. How long do a lot of those risen mobs exist? How long do a lot of your other mobs exist?
—
My two cents:
If it hurts, don’t do that.
If you get no reward for doing that, try something else.
Lastly: Enjoy the experience. ‘Woah, I just thrashed that frog by falling onto him from a cliff’ ‘That Blood dye is simply amazing’ ‘Did you see that bull backflip when my Asura hit him with the lightning hammer?’ ‘You got 3.5 million damage HOW?!’ ‘Woah, that’s a really pretty view.’ ‘Tornado rocks!’
If your enjoyment of the game is obtained entirely from the drops you get, then you are SERIOUSLY missing out on the game.
Don’t get caught up in the numbers and mechanics. Get caught up in the story. The visuals. The effects. Be here to enjoy the game, not to critique it. Let these guide you, and you can’t go wrong.
//Yama