Guild Wars 2

If it was a single party, why would it take them an entire half hour?

The fact that it happened to all three weapons is also not very notable, given that the connection between them is obvious.

NoOneShotU.3479:

I like one persons suggestion to remove the ability to see the depth of the market. Then prices would move toward their real value.

I know its a strategy but I can’t stand people who put sell orders for 100 items at 25% less just to try to force people to sell cheaper or sell to a buy order.

I don’t see how restricting access to information would improve the functioning of a market system.

Sure, there’s plenty of botters out there, and accounts are being hacked, and indeed there were significant exploits that have since been fixed. However, these factors come nowhere near demonstrating that an economy involving hundreds of thousands of players is genuinely being manipulated by such factions.

The biggest factor that gets neglected in these kinds of conspiracy theories is that in order for this kind of thing to happen there would need to be collusion on a massive scale, and to suggest that such collusion is going on behind everyone else’s backs is ridiculous.

For example, “gold sellers” are not a single, massive organisation that’s out to get your money – it’s many individual factions that compete against one another. The same goes for individual players who enjoy playing the market, and have made significant amounts of wealth doing so – they’re not working together, and this is not a case of “the Man keeping you down”.

I have to agree with John Smith when (in this thread) he says this:

John Smith.4610:

I would also be curious to know what evidence you see of market manipulation.

Considering that monitoring market activity is part of his job, I would hope that if there was any real indication of serious market manipulation, John Smith would know about it.

If you have good evidence that this kind of thing is going on, then I would very much like to see it, as, I think, would John Smith and many other people who view the forum. Otherwise, I suggest you take your conspiracy theories to a more appropriate setting, such as here.

Yeah, cover your assertions with more assertions instead of actually backing them up.

If you want to be convincing, you need evidence. Without it, you won’t get far except with people who have already convinced themselves of your conspiracy theory.

The prices for Dusk and Dawn have stayed pretty much the same for over two weeks now. I see little reason to expect a price rise unless it is accompanied by increases in the material costs (likely in sync with economy-wide inflation), but if that is the case you can keep up with it by stockpiling items instead of gold.

Those numbers are simply wrong. First of all, the evidence I’ve seen suggests the chance of a precursor is closer to 0.1% than 0.01%. Secondly, you get exotics ~20% of the time when forging rares; selling those exotics also plays a role in offsetting the costs.

All in all, something like 300g is a much more realistic figure for the average cost to forge a precursor.

In an achievement-based system, how would you get multiple legendaries on one account? Or would this be in parallel with the current system?

It’s not RNG that people are bothered by, it’s the amount of variance involved.

Any kind of waiving of the selling fee would simply be asking for people to exploit it. For example, people might temporarily mail their gold away to trusted friends.

Still I guess there are alternatives. One could allow selling to buy orders and taking the listing fee out of the proceeds; I don’t have a problem with this, but often you’ll make significantly less doing this than you would putting up a sell order.

One option for sell orders would be to charge the listing fee on sale as well as on taking the item down, but I’m not convinced that this would be a good idea.

Sure they can, though to be honest I’m not convinced that it’s a good thing for ArenaNet to take such an active role.

Dynamic markets are simply more fun; besides, people artificially inflating the price creates opportunities for other people to profit as well.

Speculation and manipulation are not the same thing. Without further evidence (in particular, evidence that this is the work of a single party), you can’t really justify your claim that this is actually manipulation.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

I wonder… Can we actually see what is sold? I mean, can we see the difference between an item being pulled from the TP by the seller and an item being sold to another player? In both cases items are removed from the TP…

I’d say that it’s generally a safe bet that price jumps on GW2Spidy correspond to items being sold. There’s two main reasons:
1) For the price to go up from an item being taken down, it would have had to have been the cheapest sell order.
2) The listing fee discourages taking items down in order to put them back up again.

Agemnon.4608:

Maybe not skill per se but persistence. There is a .1% chance using rares (too low I think, maybe .5-1% is good), meaning that an average of 1/1000 tries will yield one. Also, keep in mind that some cultures are very luck oriented and actually enjoy gambling, and this is one of the Eastern/Western divides.

It’s not really a cultural divide; casinos are pretty much a universal phenomenon. Hell, even rats can exhibit those kinds of behaviours.

I think it’s likely that people don’t get into the precursor gamble so much because there is only one notable type of “win”, with very low chances of ever happening. If there were many more minor victories – e.g. items worth 10g with a 5% chance of coming out – people might find it more enjoyable (or at least addictive), because they would at least have some experience of “winning”.

Agemnon.4608:

I know you are using 10 million as an extreme example, but even with RNG and true randomness at far less than 10 million you are still guaranteed a precursor. A .1% chance is an infinitesimal chance, but it’s still a chance. Just remember not to blow all your gold on the gamble, as rares could be crafted. Although you might be better off simply selling the gathered mats and just saving for it outright.

Well, technically it’s possible to throw ten million in without a precursor, but given that the chance is something like 1 in a googol, for practical purposes it’s pretty much guaranteed.

Anatolian Turk.4057:

There is only handful of people controlling the economy in gw2 and they are the ones who are selling legendary precursors on the TP for 300g-500g. Most of them are either botters, exploiters, hackers etc. Come on we all know that.

I don’t “know” that. As far as I can tell, you’re just making it up.

What does “0 odds, you have no odds, I have no odds” even mean?

No, 4/654 (4 Dusks out of 654 exotics produced) is about 0.006 or 0.6%. Your math is off.

Rare->Legendary would be 4 Dusks out of 3318 combines, or ~0.12%

Most commonly Mithril Ingots.

You can still type a number in by pressing Enter after you type it in; one of the reasons it was changed is that it previously couldn’t handle numbers greater than 999.

Although the 999 change is important to me, there were clearly some mistakes/bugs in the UI design choices made for this new system.

Recently.1043:

I’m pretty sure the chance to get an exotic from 4 lvl 80 rares is NOT 20%

Its somewhere between 12-15% chance. My sample size is high enough that i’m fairly confident in this (i recorded every attempt i made for this, and for crafting clovers using 1 clover recipe as well)

How high is that sample size?

The 20% figure is well supported by someone who got ~600 exotics from ~3000 combines earlier in the thread; it’s also in line with many other types of item forging (e.g. sigils), which also tend to have ~20% rates.

Yes, if you want to be more reasonable you’d be looking at a range of probabilities, but I don’t get how you can end up with a confidence interval that doesn’t include the actual sampled rate of ~0.6%.

Also, when you use data with rares and not exotics but you estimate the “conversion from exotic Greatswords to Dusk”, you’re also assuming that using exotic greatswords will have the same distribution of exotics that you would get from using rares.

If you introduce a fixed recipe, what does making them account bound achieve?

There’s still a pretty good chance the gold will appear within a day or so. I’ve had that happen to me.

I’ve bought 243,407 and sold 42,266.

Next time you want to make a point, make it from the start instead of making up numbers about odds and claiming things like

Echo.7634:

Literally 1 in 10 attempts would net you one.

Still, if 300g+ is not reasonable, then it’s not just precursors you should complain about, but everything that goes into a legendary; as you have said, plenty of other components are very expensive, and it makes sense for the precursor to be the most expensive component.

If ArenaNet chooses to introduce an alternative method for getting precursors, that’s okay, but I don’t see why making them account bound would help with that.

I do think it’s better to throw rares into the forge than exotics right now, and even with the 15% tax it’s probably better to sell the exotics you get than to throw them back in. For many types of rare it’s also better to make them yourself than to buy them; current material prices are pretty reasonable.

However, I’m not sure about mixed types, given that some precursors are worth much less, e.g. Venom at 15g. After all, the cost to make a rare greatsword yourself is only 15s or so. I guess if you can get the rares at a much lower price – perhaps 10s or lower – it would be a good idea to go for mixed types.

If you’re talking about the Godskull exploit, I think what people used was 2 level 65 weapons and 2 level 80 weapons, not 4 level 68 weapons.

If you have good evidence that the chance was 1 in 10 by using 4 rares, I’d like to see it; that number is, frankly, laughable.

Besides that, the 30g figure is also flawed; before the fix Dusks had already hit 60g, and they even hit ~100g before the exploit was fixed.

Moreover, if one were to believe your hypothesis that the price is always a precise reflection of the odds (I don’t), you would also have to consider the price of the items you put in. The cost for 4 exotics is currently ~4g, while 2×65 and 2×80 rares would’ve been ~50s. If you combine an 8x higher combine cost with 10x higher odds, you get 80x higher price, and so the “correct math” would be more like this:
60g originally at 1/10 odds with 50s cost per attempt.
4800g currently at 1/100 odds with 4g cost per attempt.
I don’t see precursors at 4800g, do you?

If you want to be convincing on an issue like this one, you need to provide evidence.

Cerise, your figure of being 10 times more likely to come out is unevidenced, as is your idea that the chance of getting a precursor with level 80 rares is lower than it was.

The price being 30g had to do with quite a lot of different factors; to suggest that it was 10x lower simply because the forge was 10 times more likely to spit one out is ridiculous.

Archer.6485:

Baseless? Really? You watch the market. Many things have affected it already. A single patch or discovery can make a difference. You know as well as I do that there will be more changes. You alone came up with three things that affected the price of precursors already. Four if we count the karma and godskull exploits separatly.

A single patch or discovery can just as easily bring the prices down as up. None of this demonstrates the reasonableness of your suggestion that prices of precursors will continue to rise beyond the ability of most people to earn gold.

Archer.6485:

I rely on ingame economy but only to the point I want to. With precursors I’m obligated to. Pretty much any other item for the legendary I could potentially farm out on my own. Lodestones and t6 mats would take me the longest but at least with every item gained I would be one step closer and no one could take that progress away from me. With precursors I can’t do that because the MF is designed to eat your money not reward you.

There’s a big difference between eating money and eating items; don’t confuse the two.

Archer.6485:

You make good arguments but the one about fixed recipies being too inconvenient is really weak. Here’s one simple idea. You remove the precursors as random chance but for every use of 4 same type of rare/exotic weapon you get a corresponding number on a stacking buff. When you have the right number of stacks you get a guaranteed precursor. The method of obtaining precursors would remain exactly the same (throwing weapons into the forge) it would just take out the randomness. I’m sure Anet could think of a much more elegant design though.

The “same type” requirement is somewhat weird and unintuitive here – would you have 10 different buffs if you were doing 10 different weapon types? Nonetheless, while it doesn’t matter to me, I do agree that you could probably come up with a system that modifies the odds to give you an eventual guarantee of some kind. It would be less elegant than the current system, though.

While I agree with the general idea, I’m not particularly convinced of your numbers (if I was, I’d probably be investing in precursor production right now).

The 20% chance of an exotic is indeed well established, and it means that you get 1 random exotic for every 16 rares you invest in (as compared to 1 random exotic for 4 exotics). This would indeed suggest that it’s better to sell an exotic if you can make more than 4 rares for the price you sell it for, but that’s dependent on the assumption that the distribution for exotics coming out doesn’t depend on whether you put rares or exotics in. Linsey’s statement in the stickied thread casts significant doubt on this.

I do still agree that it’s very likely better to put rares in than exotics, but 1% chance to hit a precursor (conditional on getting an exotic) is not the figure I would use. The best sample I’ve seen is someone who did 3318 combines, with 654 exotics, 4 Dusks, and 0 Dawns (see here), which is a 0.6% chance.

Current prices would mean ~15s per rare, so ~2.4g per random exotic you make; the EV of a random exotic with a 0.6% chance of a Dusk would be closer to 3.7g. As such, while I do still agree that the net expected profit would likely be above 20%, the risk premium is not enough to justify it unless you’re exceedingly rich to begin with. If I had (or was controlling a guild with) upwards of 10,000 gold, then precursors would be something to consider.

Archer.6485:

Right now T5 fine crafting mats have droped in price and I think mithril and elder wood have as well. Halloween is obviously to blame but still, by your reasoning, someone will sooner or later have to buy these mats up, get precursors and post them on the TP with lower prices, in order to balance the cheaper mats. So I should expect cheaper Dusks anytime now right? I sure hope that not everyone has lost interest in the really unreliable MF. Especially now that all the videos have shown just how bad the drop rate can be.

While T5 fine materials have indeed fallen in price, elder wood has increased in price, and mithril has gone up and down.

Moreover, as I said myself, the price relationship between the materials and the precursors is not direct and strict the way it is with fixed-recipe items. However, there is a relationship – there is pretty much no way precursors would hit, say, 800g with the materials at their current prices. With the current prices of precursors, I’m not at all convinced that it’s profitable to make them, but if they were at 800g I would definitely invest in some forging, especially if I could pool resources with other players to reduce the risk of the investment.

Archer.6485:

A fixed price could solve all these problems. The MF wouldn’t be used but who cares since according to you the economy can so easily balance itself out.

That is by no means what I am saying. The health of the economy depends on all of the factors involved – gold sources and sinks as well as item sources and sinks – and the Mystic Forge plays an important role in this.

Archer.6485:

If you need the item sink, just make the cost whatever the average amount of items thrown to obtain it was. The amount of items sunk will remain exactly the same.

That would work to an extent, but a recipe consisting of several thousand rare items would be highly inconvenient to implement and use.

Archer.6485:

You simply cannot guarantee what’s going to happen to the market in six months time. I have no reason to trust it and there is no reason why I should have to rely on ingame economy to obtain my precursor.

Quite a lot of what you do in this game relies on the ingame economy. I don’t see why precursors should be any different.

As for my “guarantee”, you can feel free not to trust me, but when all you have to offer is baseless conjecture I feel obliged to argue against you.

You should be more careful about how you use the term “inflation”, because some of the ways you’re using the term are contradictory. In general, it’s economy-wide price increases, although you can also use it to refer to narrower groups (so yes, it does make some sense to say “precursor inflation”, though I wouldn’t use the term myself). However, if the term “item inflation” means anything, it’s an increase in the prices of items, and not the opposite.

It is true that the overall amount of currency in GW2 will continue to increase, and I agree that inflation is to be expected. However, as you seem to understand, the fact that various materials and items are also being “printed” along with currency is also a balancing factor against inflation.

Precursors are also part of this, because ultimately they are still produced from those materials. The fact that their production is probabilistic means that they are more loosely tied to material prices, but ultimately their prices are still linked – they cannot rise significantly above the cost of the materials for several thousand rares without the supply surging upward to drive down the price again, and/or the demand for the materials surging upwards and causing the material prices to increase.

If you’re especially concerned and you want a guarantee that you will eventually be able to afford a precursor, stockpiling mithril, elder wood, and T5 materials will achieve this. I’m not saying that it’s a good idea, but if you want a guarantee then that will get you one.

I’d say that a better way to hedge against inflation would be gems; the tax is significant, but they’re a safe bet. Personally, I’m happier trading other items on a day-to-day basis, but if you don’t do this it’s better to buy gems than to just let your gold sit idle.

Archer.6485:

Precursors have been inflating since they first showed up on the TP, even before the godskull fix.

It’s quite misleading to refer to this as “precursor inflation” when this misses very many of the factors involved.

Prices on precursors were exceedingly low initially, and there are a number of reasons that this was the case. First and foremost, there was essentially no information on their costs of production, which made valuation very difficult. Secondly, several exploits, including the 21 Karma weapons and the Godskulls, allowed some initial precursors to be produced much more cheaply than they were supposed to have been. Thirdly, there was very little demand initially, since players hadn’t set their sights on legendaries yet and/or didn’t have the resources.

These early phenomena in the precursor market are terrible indicators of long-term trends, and were mostly caused by short-term imbalances in the market. You’re going to have to do much better than that if you want to convincingly show that precursor prices will continue to increase at a significant rate.

If inflation is your concern, then you can hedge against it by stashing items instead of gold.

I also don’t see much evidence to indicate that the rate of inflation is especially large, either.

Yes, because they were underpriced. Some still are.

In my case, I often make more than 999 Mithril Ingots at once.

Clearly you’d be allowing both sell and buy orders, and not just one or the other.

As for selling below vendor price, while there is generally little reason to do it, I see even less reason to stop people from doing it. After all, someone might want to do it for items that will pretty much never sell at vendor+1c, but they might not want to go to a vendor to sell it for whatever reason.

As for people who do it without really thinking about it, they might end up better off as well – having an item sell below vendor price is better than leaving it up to never sell at all.

That’s not a very good use of the word “infinite”.

More importantly, though, competition between people wanting to profit off such items would result in lots of buy orders at vendor-1c, so there wouldn’t even be that much income to be had.

I don’t really see why you think that it would be detrimental.

It’s not an infinite source of income, because it’s limited by the amount of stuff that gets sold. There are plenty of ways to make money on the TP, and frankly this wouldn’t even be a very good one if it was available.

Why should it bother ArenaNet that some people may make a profit? Besides, it does benefit the game, because 15% of the sale price goes into a gold sink, and gold going into gold sinks is generally good for the game. Besides that, it would pretty quickly become the case that most items have buy orders at 1c below vendor, so the profits would typically be negligible.

Having the ability to sell an item for less than vendor value is an option that people may want to take advantage of for plenty of reasons. Saving the time, effort, or inventory space required to visit a vendor could easily justify that 15% loss to someone – who are you to decide for someone else whether they should be able to do this?

Well, part of that 33% is accounted for by the 20% VAT, but not all of it.

I don’t think most people have been arguing for a fixed rate – that would definitely be a mistake. Account definitely wasn’t arguing for a fixed rate.

An actual gem market would, like the current system, not be threatened by gold inflation. However, I don’t really see why there’s a problem with the current system.

The benefit of “saving loading screens” is entirely a sufficient one for me to own a conduit. I have one and I don’t intend to sell it unless I have good reason to believe the price will decline sharply.

Having a Conduit means that, for one thing, my character can live in Rata Sum, where the bank, TP and crafting are closer together, without the need to go to Lion’s Arch should I ever need to use the Mystic Forge.

It’s primarily a luxury convenience, but in the long term it’s also going to be saving you money, because every bit of time saved is time you can spend earning more money.

florence.1674:

The nasty situation I see is this. The “safe” way is to just stockpile and hoard gold, to the point where you have saved enough gold to buy the precursor from the TP. This generates the problem where if everyone does that, nobody is supplying the precursor and you can very much guarantee the precursor will be very very expensive. Potentially inflating faster than you can earn gold at.

The thing is, that won’t happen because there’s always going to be people who gamble. Some people just have a gambler’s mindset; others are willing to take the risk as long as they’ve got decent odds. Richer player or guilds will be happy to gamble en masse as long as they employ solid bankroll management and know that it will prove to be profitable in the long run. Moreover, this wouldn’t be a “monopoly” either, because there is not merely a single player who would be doing this, but multiple players/guilds that would be competing against one another.

florence.1674:

The “risky” way is to gamble at the forge. However, at what point do you cut your losses and start saving to buy it outright from the TP? At that point, you need to also realize that the cost of your precursor is not just the price you pay for the precursor, but also all the gold spent wasted gambling at the forge.

That’s a terrible line of thought; you’re making the huge mistake of allowing
sunk costs to influence your decisions. The past is the past, and nothing you do now will change it.

florence.1674:

I don’t see it as a win at all. Yes I know Linsey has said that the Mystic Forge plays a huge role in cleaning up the economy. Yet no matter how I slice my bread, the situation I see today is we are artificially farming extra, crafting extra and gathering extra just to get what we want. As a result, we end up glutting the economy because we are feeding into the system that is supposed to clean it up.

MMO economies are all about “farming extra, crafting extra and gathering extra just to get what we want.” An MMO that has zero incentives to farm is also an MMO that quite a lot of players simply aren’t going to bother to play.

Yes, ArenaNet has a number of supply-side controls that definitely help to improve the economy – DR on farming clearly has a positive effect in this regard. However, the economy can’t work without also having demand for the stuff that’s being farmed, and the Mystic Forge plays a big role in this demand.

The OP gives no reason to believe that those two points are the “only” reason that precursor prices are currently relatively stable at 300-400g. Moreover, even if this was the case, so what? ArenaNet by no means has to make a ridiculous announcement like “we are happy with current prices” – it makes no sense for them to do this.

In any case, I don’t agree with the idea that those factors are the “only reason” precursors aren’t hitting 500g-600g. As long as the average cost to make a precursor is more like 300g, the price cannot remain at 500-600g for any significant period of time.

I’m happier with the new system due to the “999” fix, but if they brought back the old system with that fix included, that would be fine also.

One of the things they were fixing was the fact that the previous system couldn’t handle numbers greater than 999. I guess while they were expanding the fields to 4+ digits they went overboard with other aspects and made some poor design choices.

No, you can still type numbers in; you just have to press “Enter” after you type the number in in order for that number to stick, instead of reverting to one.

You can type in the number if you click on the number area and press Enter after you’re done typing the number in.

One thing they fixed in the current system is that now you can do more than 999 items in one go, which is a decent improvement.

That’s unusual, because I’m pretty sure that even when you sell to a buy order, the listing fee is paid directly out of your inventory, not subtracted from the sale price. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense to prevent you from selling to a buy order if you don’t have the amount on you.

I’m also pretty sure that the sales tax is 10%, not 15%.

Not yet, no. I don’t think it really matters much, though.

Yeah, there’s a 5% listing fee, and a 10% sales tax.