Guild Wars 2

The other thing people dislike is the “pure” (or close, anyway) capitalism of the Trading Post. Many don’t even realize that they dislike it. It is like the difference between people who earn money trading stocks, and those who earn money creating a product. It is very easy to understand creating a product: use items + skill to create something, and sell for less than it cost to make. Your profit comes from the skill you used to make the product, and people are willing to pay you for your time or skill. Stocks, though, are much trickier: you’re basically making money by moving money around. Certainly it’s also a skill, but there is no product, and the rules are murky and reward behaviors that many people in this world consider selfish. People aren’t rewarding you: you are taking their money, and they simply don’t understand the system enough to stop you.

What really makes pure capitalism a killer, though, is knowing how successful others have been. Since the Trading Post is a game of player vs. player, it comes down to winners and losers, and the vast majority of people lose and a tiny fraction win – big. And when the vast majority start realizing that there are people with tens of thousands of gold in-game just a few months in, while they have tens of gold, it makes it feel even less rewarding. Everyone wants to win, but seeing others “win” thousands of gold in the same time you make dozens makes your dozens feel even less valuable – because you could have had thousands.

For the most part, the majority of the forum complaints and frustrations seem to ultimately come from two meta design decisions in GW2: degressive random chance, and pure capitalism.

By saying “degressive” random chance, I am making a distinction between the more Eastern-style MMOs that rely heavily on cost-intensive random chance to acquire some of the most sought after things in the game, and “progressive” random chance that more Western-style MMOs tend to use where random chance is mitigated over time. For example: a progressive random chance would be something like running a dungeon with a boss that has a loot table that includes an item you want, but regardless of whether or not you receive the item, you get tokens that enable you to purchase that item (or one similar) after you’ve gotten enough. So it’s like random chance, but you still have progression. You still feel like eventually you will get the item, even if your luck is bad. And importantly, you certainly never lose ground – running the dungeon just costs you time, but you still get enough of whatever so that you feel your time wasn’t wasted. By contrast, “degressive” random chance is exactly that: you are just as close to receiving the item on your first try as your 1000th try, except “tries” cost you something – gold, time, whatever – and they don’t give you enough to make you feel compensated. So, after 1000 tries you are further behind where you were when you first started, and you still have just as much chance to get the item as before.

What really makes this style of random chance a killer, though, is a low drop rate. In a certain Western MMO, thanks to a much smaller variety of gear stat configurations, you might have about a 1 in 10 or even 1 in 5 chance of getting an item you can use from a boss in a dungeon. You have to add loot rolls into the equation, but generally you might get a useful item every 5 or 10 dungeon runs (or at least, this is how I felt like it worked). In GW2, most sources of rewards have extremely low drop rates – something like the 1% range – which are orders of magnitude different. This ends up making hard items harder to obtain, which is great for keeping them truly “rare” – but it also ends up feeling less rewarding.

The cash shop chests are degressive random chance. They also have an extremely low drop rate for all the “good” items, and most of the “bad” items are low-to-zero value – meaning, there is no sense of “progress” or even a small reward worth receiving. People used to the other style of “progressive” random chance are having a very hard time with this model.

I was going to make my own thread but I’ll just bump this one:

This is absolutely the best event so far! The dev team clearly learned from their mistakes and Wintersday is all the better for it. I am absolutely loving it so far! Please, Anet, keep it coming!

Also interesting to note: so far most responses have been non-responses (typical forum complaining about something unrelated) or “I wouldn’t spend any.” Some extremely low numbers have been thrown out as well.

There’s obviously nothing scientific about a forum poll but I hope we hear from more who have purchased gold and what rates they thought were fair.

Couple things:

100 gems for 10 gold = $10 for 80g = 12.5 cents per gold

100 gems for 30 gold = $10 for 240g = ~4.2 cents per gold

To expand earlier examples:
Currently, 100 gems is 1.5g = $10 for 12g = 83 cents per gold
100 gems for 2.5g = $10 for 20g = 50 cents per gold
100 gems for 5g = $10 for 40g = 25 cents per gold
100 gems for 12.5g = $10 for 100g = 10 cents per gold

I know it’s hard since there’s about a jillion different ways of looking at things, but the standard I’ve been using is “cents per gold.” I think it helps to compare apples to apples, and it’s hard to know how “100 gems for 30 gold” compares to “10 cents per one gold.”

Also, I’ve said this many times before but it’s worth repeating: black market trades are pointless to compare because they will ALWAYS be lower than Anet’s services. Always and forever. They do not pay hardly any time or effort for their gold, therefore it is basically free, therefore they are running on pure profit. If Anet’s prices were 5 cents per gold, black market would be 1. If Anet’s was 1 cent per gold, black market would be 1 cent per 4 gold. That is a hole with no bottom.

Bluesavanah.8562:

I find the whole concept so hard to understand. The most likely candidates to convert gems to gold are casual players with limited time. But past getting an exotic armor set and weapons why would they do it more than once ? So realistically there’s never going to be a supply big enough to drive the prices down.

I am also curious if this is true. Also, casual players seem the least likely to actually buy a lot of gold. I’m pretty sure than >90% (or more) of gold sales come from hardcore players who are dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars/euros into the system. I mean, if you’re 85% of the way toward a legendary and you can drop another 50 to make it, why not? But if you’re 5% of the way and it would take another 600, why would you?

That’s a good point; certainly, they currently believe 100g to be “a lot.”

I would have been shocked on release that gems would hit 2g / 100 less than 4 months into the game (especially having started around 25s), but they have. That’s an 8-fold increase in price. Are you really sure the price won’t quadruple again in, say, another 6 months? Especially with new events every month?

Certainly there is a “what is it worth” issue at play here as well: a few people are already asking what there is to spend gold on -other- than gems, since the main gold sinks are currently finite, especially if you’re not going for a legendary (or other skin-only improvement). But I still think it’s Anet’s business to make gems worth spending, and so they shall.

An interesting side bar is taking the meta-perspective of gold earning in-game: people complained for months that the sinks were tuned too tightly, and so now they’ve been loosened up a bit: to the consequence that gem prices are skyrocketing. It’s all one big web, isn’t it? (And John Smith is the spider…)

Mousethecat.1835:

The only dye acquiring method that doesn’t involve RNG, is buying them individually off the TP. So that’s really the only reliable way to get them.

Agreed. Random chance generally does not favor the player.

OP: The best answer is to buy gold with your gems.

Rising Dusk: That’s 20 cents / 1 gold, which isn’t too far off from my 25 cent suggestion (80g for 20 bucks). I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit that at some point down the line. (The trick, of course, is: how much will 100g be worth to you at that point? By the time gold costs that little, it may be possible to farm 20g / hour, just like some claim they can make 5-6 gold / hour now.)

For reference, 50 cents per gold = 40 gold per 20 euro/dollars. 85 cents = 23.5 gold per 20.

Some time ago this question was asked and the going rate at the time was about 6 silver. That was calculated using a few mystic forge recipes that people used that required skill points and were generally profitable.

I don’t think it will ever really get much higher than this. If you’ve beat 6 silver / point, consider yourself lucky. As soon as someone else finds out about your trick, it will plummet.

At some point it seems like gold will get cheap enough that it will break some sort of barrier: many people who have resisted buying gold will finally find the price too irresistible to pass up. Then again, a few people have said they will never pay into the game – how many do they represent? Additionally, there is the issue that there will always be cool things to get with gems – it’s Anet’s business model, after all – and if 100 gems costs 3.5g, do you think more people will buy a holiday outfit that costs 700 gems for about 9 €/$, or ~24g? What about all the low-gem priced consumables? Some will always still go for the gold cost, which means there will always be upward pressure on gem prices (especially as new content continues to make gold easier to obtain, and more and more gold is created by players). There’s also the factor that you cannot “buy in” to the gem market in real money for less than 10 €/$, which some have said is a high price point for them.

I’m curious about all this because I’d like to see if we can predict the plateau: at what point are gold prices low enough that enough people are putting real money into the system that it will help stabilize the prices? Or will it “naturally” stabilize at certain points based on the amount of money / hour that the playerbase takes in, like before and after the Halloween event? Maybe I’m just vastly under-estimating the amount of real money already being put into the system: it has to be huge, or else gem prices would have gone up much more quickly long ago – but on the other hand, more people are clearly using gold to buy even more gems these days, and the real money transactions are not keeping up as the price rises higher and faster.

I think this was intended to be a “self-correcting” sort of model, where the ideal is a few stable plateaus, like the weeks preceding the Halloween announcement, or the week preceding the Karka event. At those times, money coming in was roughly equal to gold being spent, and some stability was gained. Since then, gold has been spent much more quickly, and there is no stability anymore, which I imagine actually drives many people out of the market, thus weakening gold further. I’m just wondering where or if this will all stop.

Gem prices continue to rise and in the very long term, I don’t see a reason why they will ever go back down. I think they will level off at some point, but it does not seem as though we’re close to that point yet. In order for gem prices to come down, lots of people will need to spend gems to buy gold, which means: other than the (probably) small fraction of players who are hoarding gems as an investment, lots of people will need to buy gems with real money. When 1g cost 2-3 euros/dollars, many people scoffed. Well, these days 1g costs about 85 cents. My question to you is: how low would gem prices need to go in order for you to buy gold? 50 cents per gold? 25 cents? Some of you already have bought gold, I’m sure: what prices did you pay?

(And of course I am only talking about transactions through Anet; please leave black market gold prices out of this discussion. Also, for reference: when 1 gold costs about 50 cents, I believe that means 100 gems will cost about 3.5g. 25 cents would mean 100 gems would be about 7g.)

I saw this attitude a lot in WoW. Each time Blizzard’s marketing group offered deals on the game, a few current players would get in a huge huff and say “why aren’t you rewarding the people already playing the game?”

The answer is really two-fold. First, the part that several people have said already: it’s an incentive to get more people into the game. It’s there to help make the game you already play more popular and therefore better. Hating on promos only hurts yourself. New blood is necessary to keep the game going and make it better.

Second, and more importantly: you already have a bonus. You’ve gotten to play the game for nearly 4 months. You’ve had early access to all the best stuff, had access to low TP prices and gem prices, gotten to see exclusive events… Your reward is: the game. You’ve probably put hundreds of hours into the game that anyone else starting now can never match. That is your reward. If someone could trade a crappy hat for 4 months of game time, they’d do it. But since they can’t, they get a crappy hat.

The entire attitude comes from an incredibly self-focused perspective that has to try pretty hard to ignore all the wonderful benefits that they personally receive thanks to promos like this, and focuses only on a made-up perception of unfairness that couldn’t possibly be further from the truth.

Here’s the good news: your keys won’t be wasted either way.

I will die laughing if coal is a possible BL chest reward. I can see the forums flaming up now…

Hooray for learning from past mistakes! I’m also looking forward much more to this event thanks to the non-1-time-only nature of it.

The thing I like about him is that he’s one of only about 4 characters who actually remembers who I am once he meets me. Many other characters in my “personal” story seem to have short term memory loss, or they wander off into the blue after a certain point. At least he sticks around and knows who I am, even if he doesn’t remember what we’ve done to get to where we are.

The main thing I disliked was having him come out of left field and suddenly take over. It would have been far more effective if he had been around since mission 1 – maybe just in the background – and maybe some NPCs could have mentioned him or even told me something about him before I was introduced to him as my new leader. I don’t really even care that my “personal” story is all about him: I just wish I knew who this guy was that my “personal” story was about.

Ditto on food supply: no issues whatsoever. In fact, he seemed quite tame, especially compared to normal champions in other story missions. For what it’s worth I was also 80 and had exotic armor/weapon, but I’ve been that through most of the 3rd Act and the “starving” mouth was still easy in comparison.

No effect on your story at all.

Never even heard of the dragons. Is there somewhere you can go to find out more about what you’re talking about?

So: what about the people who exploited the overflow system and got multiple chest rewards? I assume they are all perma-banned, right?

Oh, they’re not?

Ah.

“do not panic if you do not immediately receive it”

The best idea I’ve seen in this thread is the idea that there would be recipes for precursors that use other precursors. If you could somehow get Dusk from the trident precursor (or whatever) that would definitely help even the prices out.

Of course, then you’d just have 300g precursors for everything, so maybe that wouldn’t help as much.

OP: I think the solution for casuals was always intended to be real money purchases of gems.

“I tend to run past a lot of stuff recently since for the time I have to play, and for what I want to accomplish in that time, fighting monsters and getting items worth 10-40c takes up a lot of it with minimal gain”
This is the thing that kills me, and I completely agree with you: it sucks when you don’t have much time to play, but you feel like if you just play the way you want, you’re “wasting time” because every hour played that isn’t getting more gold means you’re falling behind. And thanks to the global nature of prices, you’re absolutely competing with every other hardcore player out there, casual or no. Your choices are: play more, pay more, or grind when you have the time. It’s frustrating.

I started this game assuming I would buy gems with gold to round out my bank and character slots. If you’re a casual player, this is effectively impossible. Gem prices continue to rise at a rate that I cannot keep up with: every time I can finally afford a new character slot, gems cost 150% of what they did. My choices become: pay real money, or don’t ever get the basic stuff that you’d need in order to experience more of the game. Apparently I’m too casual to participate.

People complain whichever way the wind is blowing.

People complained that they didn’t get much money playing the game: so Anet made dungeons more profitable. Thanks to the completely interconnected global economy, that made gems and TP prices rise – so people complain about that.

What people really want is high income and lower prices… but then they’d complain that the game was too easy and nothing was unique anymore because everyone had everything.

It’s really an unsolvable problem.

The answer to “can I make money crafting with X skill” is no.

More specifically: it’s possible, but it requires so much time and effort playing the trading post that most will recommend simply farming as it is much easier and likely more profitable (and there is no risk, as opposed to playing the TP).

Dogblaster and V are right: the OP forgot about the demand for these weapons. Just about any guardian (and maybe some warriors) would love Juggernaut, while thieves and rangers might rather have a different legendary than Dreamer. That’s why it’s cheap: no one cares.

In the end, there will never be parity with all weapons, and that’s fine, too. You just need to go for what you’re comfortable with grinding out, if you choose to grind yourself a legendary.

You’re right: it’s kinda crappy. And the fact that gem prices in gold will only go up means that the price for these requirements will only go up.

However, the price for most legendaries has only gone up. The precursors went from a pittance early on to hundreds of gold for some, for example. Other mats are rising. The later you start, the further you have to go: period. The people who rushed and got theirs early didn’t have to do as much, and that is their advantage.

In the end, it’s probably better that the cash shop is involved because at least you know the items will always be available – unlike drops, which can be changed at any time.

This will probably happen one day (also see: Star Wars), but in the meantime the box price is actually a very small but specific barrier to entry. It keeps the game slightly more free of bots, spammers, and extremely negative community members. It slightly discourages people from doing something horrible just for fun, because they at least have to pay to do it. It also ensures that very young people don’t have easy access to the game. It’s a limiter, and it homogenizes the player base slightly. I’m not saying any of this is good or bad, but it is what it is.

For those posting that the revenue lost from making the game truly FtP would impact Anet, I sincerely doubt this. I guarantee the box price gives them nearly nothing compared to what the gem shop brings in. People are spending thousands in the gem shop. That -is- their entire revenue model. Box sales are just icing.

I don’t really understand what you’re saying, Wobels, but I assure you my example takes the gap between buying and selling gems into consideration.

Sorry, my example wasn’t clear enough, and I messed up one of my numbers. Makes me wish I could edit posts:

Let’s say I have 100k gems that sell for 1.15g /100 (normally that would make me 1150g). I can buy gems for (let’s say) 1.5g /100. I buy 400k gems for 6k gold, and drive the sell price up to 1.45g. Then I sell all 500k gems for 7250g. Total profit: 100g.

I lost .05g on selling the 400k, but I made .3g on selling the 100k. I make enough from the uptick on the smaller amount that it more than covers a slight loss on the larger amount.

Plus, once the market crashes, I could buy back all 100k gems I started with for (let’s say) 1.2g, and still come out ahead by 50g. That means I started and ended with 100k gems and I made 50g out of thin air. All this is done with zero effort or risk, and all it takes is a massive amount of capital.

Certainly this is all hypothetical, but I tried to make the numbers similar to what happened. In the end, if you’re looking at that graph with the two lines and one line goes past another, someone is making money.

whiran.1473:

What I don’t get is how that leads you to market manipulation. To what end? Explain the underlying logic you have that makes the leap from an accurate observation to a belief that there is gem purchasing speculation of some sort.

If you could lay out how you connected the dots and could postulate as to the desired results of any speculator I would appreciate that.

The thing is, you have to remember that if someone is actually strong enough to manipulate the market, they are not playing the same game you are. Let’s try an example.

Say I already have 100,000 gems. I’d like to sell them for gold. But why sell them for (let’s say) only 1g15s per 100, when I can make the market better? So I buy 500,000 gems with the >5000g I have liquid. BAM: the market jumps up to (let’s say) 1g50s per 100. Then I dump all 500,000 gems for a tidy profit.

This is the type of game some players are playing. Welcome to capitalism.

Also ectos have doubled in price in the last few weeks for the same reason.

Certainly possible, but I don’t think the Halloween event spiked quite as fast or dropped quite as hard. Plus, it wasn’t until we knew more about the event. But you’re right, it’s possible this is the same thing but just happening faster (due to more communication) and harder (due to more people having some gold to throw around).

The announcement linked specifically says currency exchanges are unaffected. Also, I would think something like that would freeze prices, not jump them all over.

calankh: I assumed that is a sort of “halo” bounce, where people are quickly taking advantage of the volatile market. Gem prices dip like mad = people buy gems. This makes prices go up, and then others take advantage of that. Still curious to me.

To explain: the price of gems in gold rose about 25% over the course of two hours, and then about an hour later it crashed 30% in about half an hour. Now it’s back to the level it was before. It seems like one or a bunch of people bought a TON of gems, and then one or a bunch of people sold even more gems for gold. Any ideas as to what happened?

Sounds like a bug due to the fact that the TP is acting so flakey. I wouldn’t expect it to work again.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Did someone just play the market and win, or what?

“I just dumped another 80g on keys today”

Stop! Stop doing it!

Seriously: you’ve created an entire thread about how much this is a terrible idea and why there are so many things wrong with it and yet you vote “status quo” with your wallet another 100 times. The only way these chests will change is if people do not buy them. Coming to the forums and complaining – and then buying 100 more – just completely shot your arguments in the foot.

So, my personal takeaway from the whole thing:
1) Yes, we have vertical progression, and it’s here to stay
2) All your other ideas are interesting and Coming Soon™

Personally, I really did enjoy the fact that the day I hit level 80 I was able to make myself a weapon that had the same power-level of a legendary. That was really, really cool. I am sad that this is going away. Like many others, I honestly thought this was not the case due to the marketing for this game and I am surprised.

I really like some of the other ideas for more horizontal progression, like personal houses and wardrobes. I honestly was surprised when the game came out that those weren’t a part of it. I wish they had decided to go this route instead, and I’m disappointed that they didn’t.

Otherwise, my main concerns are the sheer volume of absolute game-stopping bugs and the lack of implementation of some of the basic promises made from the beginning, like guesting, and a real personal story area that changes. It seems like nearly every complaint that was raised was answered with Coming Soon™, which I am not sure I believe anymore. I know they prioritized getting more end-game content out there for those hungry for it, but they spent 3 months releasing stuff that was devoured in a week. That model is not sustainable – even Blizzard admits this. And while that was going on, very basic bugs and promises have not been fixed. I don’t know what their priority list looks like, but I am willing to bet things like “player housing” are far, far down the list. And the truth is, they will never get to them because there will always be something coming up that is more important. By the time they finally have enough time to fix all the little things… it will be too late and no one will be playing anymore.

Or, just use the gw2guru link I posted above. Question + answer all in one thread.

Guildwars2guru has a good summary of all the official responses for those looking for a list:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/76101-2012-11-26-reddit-ama-discussion-thread/

Serious question: why do mainstream companies like Anet use Reddit to answer questions like this, when Reddit is most famous for being a site that people use to post creepy pictures of underage girls? Also: it’s a horrible site for organizing any kind of information. It seems like the sketchy nature and poor structure of the site would be a terrible match.

…said the man named Bvhjdbvkjf.

Sorry, OP: most of us have no idea why the name filter gets tripped from time to time. There may be something in another language or some weird combo like “lsd” that triggers it, but the world may never know.

Said this in another thread: Like many predicted back when the game started, there’s really no reason the price of gems in gold will ever really decrease on a wide level. There are dips from time to time (after spikes, usually) but there’s no reason when gold can be created infinitely that gem prices won’t also continue to rise infinitely.

Generally speaking, this tends to hurt casual/new players and help hardcore/already rich players.

Many people in this thread seem to have some unique ideas about how the exchange rate works, but it’s honestly pretty transparent.

The most likely way for gem prices in gold to decrease is if a large number of players find the gem→gold ratio favorable enough that they convert gems to gold. But you cannot create gems by playing the game. So, a large number of people will need to invest a lot of real money to bring the prices down. However, you -can- always get gold by just playing the game, so there’s not really a big reason for this to happen. New players should be the most likely people to take advantage of the excellent gem→gold prices, since they need gold the most. But we just had a huge influx of new players coming on board after the free trial, and that didn’t put a dent in the prices (although the Black Friday sales made this nearly impossible).

Like others, I simply have no confidence that there will ever be a time in which the conditions for lowering the cost of gems will happen enough and on a scale large enough to make a difference. Therefore, I conclude the price of gems will only go up over time (unless Anet interferes directly).

Like many predicted back when the game started, there’s really no reason the price of gems in gold will ever really decrease on a wide level. There are dips from time to time (after spikes, usually) but there’s no reason when gold can be created infinitely that gem prices won’t also continue to rise infinitely.

The downside of this is that newer or more casual players enter a market that is impossible to use. Gold builds so slowly that by the time you can afford gems for what you want, gem prices have risen out of your reach again. It’s an infinite chase.

The plus side of this is that hardcore players are rewarded for their efforts. Making lots of gold and making it early affords a wide range of perks cheaply and more easily. Additionally, Anet makes money. If you’ll never get the amount of gems you want via in-game gold, you’re even more tempted to buy gems with real money.

I suppose the theory is that once gem prices get too high, enough people will buy gems with real money and use that to purchase gold and drive the price of gems back down. I don’t really see that happening, though, since you can always make gold in-game at a pretty slow but steady rate. Unless gold becomes more valuable (or scarce), gems will always rise in price. Either way hurts casuals and new players and favors the hardcore / already rich.

I just feel bad for those casuals who got into the game thinking, “I’ll never need to spend real money to get all the stuff I want!” It’s just not going to happen.

I don’t even know -how- they’d put bank slots on sale since you don’t purchase those through the TP.

/agreed that character slots are the only things it’d be worth buying gems to purchase at a discount, but keep in mind: the price of gems in gold has gone up about 40%. That means that anything discounted less than 40% is not actually a deal if unless you’re using gems purchased before this event (or bought with real money).

In other words, if a character slot cost only 600 gems (25% off!), 600 gems now costs about 9 gold. Before this sale, 800 gems (normal price) cost about… 9 gold.

The other thread exactly like this except with a dev response has more information. The short version is: there is inconsistency between the stones and the keys with what they consider to be the advertised % off (base price vs. discounted price). Also, if you buy gems with gold today and buy the most discounted key package, you’re still actually losing money (as compared to buying keys at any point before the Black Friday deals were announced).

migu has it right.

The price of gems in gold has gone up about 40% in the last two days. The true discount of the keys is about 30% off the previous best price. That means: unless you use real money or you use gems bought more than a few days ago, you ARE losing money to buy keys today (as opposed to buying keys at any point in the past).

You would be much better off using real money, which doesn’t change value (obviously the intent), or waiting until gem prices settle back down to purchase keys. Then again, gem prices may never go down again, so that’s always a risk, too.

Should I post this in a different forum or something?

I’ve only ever tried two dungeons: Mad King boss, which I did about half a dozen times, and most of a single fractal dungeon. I’d like to get more into them, but I don’t understand some of the ways dungeons work re: disconnects and party dynamics.

First, it seems like if the person who creates the party leaves the dungeon, the dungeon is gone for everyone. Is that right? That seemed to be the case in Mad King.

Second, if someone disconnects does that mean the group is pretty much over? We had one person disconnect immediately before the first boss in the fractal I was doing and they could not rejoin the group at all. Is that normal?

How is it supposed to work when anyone / party leader disconnects? What about when anyone / party leader has to quit? Are you supposed to be able to get someone else in to replace that person? How is that even possible (without spamming your guild chat / friends list)? I guess I’m just confused because I would have expected none of this to make any difference to anything.