Thanks ArenaNet for addressing this issue (although we don’t know how yet).
Since it’s an issue that’s close to my heart, I thought I’d give my two cents.
I’m a long-time MMO player who has done the whole “spending every hour of the day sat at my computer playing MMOs” thing. I’ve been through a number of big “grinds” in my time.
I played GW1 for ~6 months leading up to GW2 and was introduced to Anet’s “unforgiving” style of gameplay. At the last pull in a hard mode mission and make a small mistake? Sorry, you’re done. Start again from scratch.
I can accept “difficult” – that’s fine. I didn’t rage for a single second when learning the Mad King’s Clock Tower jumping puzzle, because I knew it was on me to get the job done.
I can also accept “expensive”. Some people complain about the cultural T3 prices… it doesn’t bother me. In fact, they could be 3x the price and I’d still be fine with it.
Why? Because it would be a level playing field, due to static prices and there would be only one way to get it – buy it from the vendor. No players winning the lottery. No feelings of disdain or “injustice” after you farmed for hundreds of hours and someone else got it from a random mob. None of that.
The real problem is that there is no fixed goal and only one realistic way of reaching that unfixed goal: go loot farming in Orr. (Some people apparently play the Trading Post and earn lots that way, but their methods are unknown to me and 99.9% of the playerbase.)
So you can log in one day thinking “only another week of farming until I can buy my precurs— oh, it’s gone up by 40 gold”. What now? Your only option is to farm so much that you’ll overtake the rising prices. But loot DR that even gets in the way of that.
I won’t bother to propose solutions, since I’m sure ArenaNet wouldn’t use them, but I will say this: whatever “fix” they come up with, I hope it a) keeps the legendary EXTREMELY difficult and time-consuming to get, but b) makes it more of a ‘static’ goal – one that doesn’t fluctuate every single day (usually getting further away).
By the way, I find it hilarious that some people view this as a “nerf” to legendaries and an insult to people who already got them.
If you talk to people and read up, you’ll quickly discover that almost everyone who already has a legendary got their precursor while the prices were still reasonable, and thus they got their legendaries in “easy mode” comparatively speaking. (Because let’s be honest – the precursor cost alone accounts for at least 50% of the “grind”, if not more.)
Anyway if you did not as a fellow collector I’d be happy to send you one in game mail.
