The only thing this incident shows is how dirt poor we all are and how we are better off getting an income from “playing the auction house” than we are from actually playing the game and getting loot.
Time invested in play gives far too poor a return compared to other mmo’s.
Activities in the game world add gold to the pool of available currency, the trading post only removes it (10% per item sold, plus 5% for every item listed for sale). Further, as more people become involved in the trading post competition raises buy prices and lowers selling prices, leading to less profit per person.
The consequences of a majority of players abandoning in-game activities for the trading post “easy money” – less currency in circulation, higher buy prices for items, less profits for sellers. Eventually players start running out of money and either have to resume normal activities or quit the game because they can’t sell the stuff they bought months ago and can’t afford to buy new stuff to sell.
You could control the market for permanent hair style change contracts… all you need to do is find one.
No one is denied anything. Only cultural armor is locked to a specific race, and there are five races, you get five character slots. Anyone can create a character of each race and wear cultural armor.
I liked the Vigil’s heavy armor style, created a norn warrior. Long before she even met the Order reps, she was wearing Vigil armor.
Create a new character (or log in with one that hasn’t chosen an Order).
Join the Order with the armor you want.
Buy the armor.
Use a level 80 transmute crystal to place the armor skin on 0-level “white” armor. It becomes account bound.
Transfer to your intended character and transmute again onto appropriate level/stats armor.
If you have a character already in that Order, skip steps 1 and 2. You can’t do this with cultural armor (skin is “locked” by race) but any character can wear any Order’s armor skins.
Silk drops too much, mainly from salvaging, and other materials don’t drop enough. Anet can easily fix this but all the did was to require 300 per Damask to solve the problem, that is a band-aid..not a fix.
It is better for Anet to keep refining their drop code until it works right not the one extreme or the other you propose.
How do they stop players from salvaging too much? And why just silk, mithril and whatever the equivalent in leather is also salvaged a lot, driving down prices compared to lower tier mats that are not as plentiful. Should they nerf salvage to 0-2 pieces like ectos? It’s the same in effect as changing the recipes, just on the other side.
Should they stop people from salvaging more than X high level items? Congratulations, now ectos triple in price overnight. And what about people who salvage for their own use? Sorry, you salvaged too much now you have to buy mats from the TP, and by the way, prices are rising because the supply is going down.
There is no simple and easy solution, or someone would have done it instead.
(edited by tolunart.2095)
What are our schools teaching kids these days
Yeah, i wonder. Looking at some posts i guess it is “if you work for something, your reward should be even more work, and if you disagree you are lazy”. Apparently there are people that forget that playing games should be fun.
Play single player games instead.
You can load up Skyrim, open the command console, and give your character levels, change attributes, fill his pockets with gold, spawn any item in the game, kill any enemy, etc.
You can become an immortal god of destruction and inflict your wrath on all who cross your path. You can have fun.
This is an MMO. You have to share the game world with thousands of other players. If someone is willing to work harder than you to obtain something, or is willing to pay someone more fake money to obtain it for them, they will get the item before you do. If someone gets lucky and a valuable item drops for them, great. The RNG is fair and unbiased, there are no “special” accounts that have a better or worse chance of getting something than other players have, just people who are willing to go out into the game world and spend more time trying to get it.
You can play a character from level 1 to max, do the dailies and keep an eye out for world boss events, do dynamic events when you come across them, and explore the map filling in hearts. By the time you get to max level you can gear up your character in exotics and buy some ascended gear with laurels. Then your character can do 99.9% of the content in the game without a problem.
If you want to tackle the hardest content in the game, or buy the rarest skins, or craft ascended armor and weapons, you have to be willing to put a little more effort into it. That is how the game was designed, it’s not an accident and it’s not a mistake. Set a goal and work towards it, or just wander around and have fun.
Me, I prefer having fun.
File a bug report.
There is no hamster wheel… this makes for very confused hamsters.
Not sure what the purpose of this thread is. The schedule of items for the sale was completed weeks, if not months, ago and will not change based on forum posts. I suppose they may take these requests under advisement for the next sale.
Why are these threads always posted by people with incredibly lucky friends? The kind who can hold out both hands and a valuable exotic will fall out of the sky into one hand, and a precursor into the other?
I know it’s impossible to lie on the internet, but neither situation fits with my observations of the game, so it’s becoming harder and harder to accept these anecdotes as being realistic.
On the other hand, it offers a fix for those who complain about the lack of decent loot – find out what server these posters play on, then guest there and follow them around for a day. At least 1500g worth of loot is guaranteed to every player who is not that person.
I might suggest that it’s taking a long time because they have to compile and close your duplicate tickets. It might be helpful if you closed out all but the most recent and only updated that one.
Shouldn’t he update the oldest (lowest #) ticket instead? It should be the first ticket acted upon and the first in line to be looked at.
I stand corrected… time to call it a night (yawn).
Use transmutation stones or crystals.
magic find only increase the chance for an item to drop.
for example , let say the chance for a Dusk to drop from a mob is 1%.
if your total magic find is 150%, the new chance for a Dusk to drop from the same mob is 1.5×1 = 1.5%
if your total magic find is 300%, the new chance for a Dusk to drop from the same mob is 3.0×1= 3%
yup small increase in total magic find is pretty insignificant but hey, every little thing counts when it comes to RNG….
MF bonus is added to the chance, account MF starts at 0% and your formula would mean that you never get loot: x% x 0 = 0
100% bonus doubles the chance (1% becomes 2% etc), 200% triples and 300% quadruples the chance of a particular class of loot (rares vs. masterwork) if not the actual item (precursors are a subset of exotics, don’t know if MF affects which exotic you get or just the chance of getting an exotic of some sort instead of a rare).
Having high MF does not mean you’re suddenly drowning in rares and exotics, but it will have a difference over time. If they handed out exotics like beads at Mardi Gras then the economy would crash.
Banned "Circumventing idle-time Restrictions"
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: tolunart.2095
I found that if I left my ranger pet in combat I wouldn’t log out. I admit I did this quite frequently when tabbing out of the game, then grabbing the loot when I came back.
Pretty much the definition of “botting” or unattended game play – tabbing out of the game to do other things while your character remains active, then coming back to collect the loot.
At least you admitted doing it, most cheaters are not so honest. Something to keep in mind for your next MMO.
That would be extremely time-sensitive information, requiring someone to pretty much camp at the TP for the sole purpose of allowing other people to make money. Who would do that, and why?
Even if someone did this, once more than a handful of flippers concentrate on a single item they compete with each other to the point where no one will make a profit. The only way this would be of benefit is if you were one of the first two or three people to see the info. This brings us to the first question, why would anyone go through so much trouble when he could just act on the info himself?
The only reason I can see for such a site to exist is for someone who ended up with a bank full of “duds” he wants to get rid of. Make enough people believe the items he has for sale are undervalued, hidden gems and make a profit off of other people’s foolishness.
Daily reset is based on GMT which doesn’t involve US-only Daylight Savings time. So for those of us in the US, timed events shift forward in the Spring then back in the Fall.
Any possibilities that this could be changed in the near future?
Nope.
You are the reason I would get fired from a Tech/Customer Support job. I can’t imagine having to put up with this kind of attitude every day.
I know they have definitely already discussed this matter, but whether they feel it is a threatening aspect to the game is another story. That’s an answer I don’t have. It still doesn’t change the fact it’s a form of exploiting, though. Exploiting comes in many different forms, some of which are not innately game breaking initially. I did something very similar to this in GW1, actually. In my case they patched it before the rest of the players caught on because the rewards were much greater.
It’s not an exploit. Exploiting would be if you found a way to get 10 keys at once from the PS award when you should only get one. And it doesn’t harm the game at all, they would quickly take action if it had a significant impact on key sales.
Remember the karma weapons? Buying a weapon for something like 10 karma when other comparable weapons cost 1500 karma is an exploit, it was clearly a mistake and not intended. Being able to get a key or three after playing the game for an hour is not.
(edited by tolunart.2095)
Penguin, as far as value is concerned – they really shouldn’t have made the skins tradable if everything else in the LA boxes aren’t collectively…Particularly when the rest of the skins in the store or any other vendor cannot be exchanged in the same way. If they were account bound like many of the things in this game, “value and prestige” would be a nonissue since nothing is exchanging hands with other players. Those skins are only worth something because Arena has ALLOWED them to be worth something as a means of getting people to buy and use gems on the TP and gemstore. In a way it’s smart, but in another it’s completely pigeon-holing your customers by withholding content from them at a steep price just to get a taste for it. Short term money makers are very poor business practices with serious potential ramifications for the upfront gains seen.
The weapon skins were originally untradeable and give out through several different means, including direct purchase. The buyable skins were a flop and the RNG skins were rarer than Legendaries. There were numerous complaints – and through more than just forum posts and reddit, I’m sure – so they eventually came to the current method. This was not something that was done on a whim, they put a lot of thought and experimented with different methods before they settled on this.
No method is going to please everyone, but this makes them accessible to the average player – with time and dedication invested in obtaining them – while still keeping them rare enough to satisfy the people who care about showing off their wealth and dedication to a crowd of people who don’t give a kitten about their wealth and dedication.
You’re right, but that’s a form of exploiting technically and that is not how they designed people to obtain the keys. I expect to further their sales that eventually that form of farming will be demolished to prevent Lions Arch keys from being free.. Most likely by incorporating it later into the story if I had to take a guess. That certainly wasn’t there as an optional path to getting keys. Not saying people are wrong for doing it because I fully understand why they are, but I am saying that Arena definitely did not see people farming keys as an issue until that method popped up.
What? They give out keys at several points in the PS, the first being at the end of the first “chapter” at the recommended level 10 instance. It’s been this way since the beginning of the game, and if they saw it as a problem they would simply remove the keys from the rewards. It’s not a random chance, they specifically give out the keys at these points in the PS. If they didn’t want people to get them that way they wouldn’t give them out.
When I buy $25 worth of lottery tickets, I should be guaranteed to win at least $25 from them. Anything less just isn’t fair.
I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or just naive. Since there are people who actually believe that, I’ll treat it like it’s legit for the sake of argument.
Sarcasm. I don’t buy lottery tickets or random stuff box keys. You can get keys for free in game by “farming” the Personal Story. Create a human character, choose the middle class origin, and you can run through the first part of the PS and get a key in about half an hour or less. I got several tickets, three more tickets’ worth of scraps, and various other valuable items just by doing this when I had some time to kill.
You don’t need to spend money on this game, it’s great if you can afford to, but not required. They are going to keep introducing things that will make money as long as they keep selling, regardless of individual complaints on the forums.
If you are going to change the quote, please take my name off it, those are no longer my words.
Nobody is expecting them to make it so that TP trading would be exactly equal to standard PvE gameplay in terms of gold reward, but neither do I believe it’s unreasonable to expect that the reward difference be more in the 2:1 or 5:1 range than the current 100:1+ range.
Finding the path of least resistance is to be expected, but when the path of least resistance is so far superior to any other option, developers typically consider that an exploit and plug it up. So far they’ve been taking their sweet time when it comes to the TP.
I generally ignore your babble, but since you responded to me… the way the TP works is not an exploit. It was set up to work this way and is working as intended. While every other activity in the game creates objects (gear, tokens, gold) out of nothing, the TP removes some things from the game and shuffles existing objects among players. The more activity, the more gold is removed from the game. The redistribution of what is left is entirely up to the players to manage, not the devs.
There is nothing to be done here, and JS popped in very early in this thread and said this. No matter how much people complain, that is not going to change.
If you don’t like the current distribution of items and gold, the best remedy is education. The more people understand how the TP works, the more efficiently they can use it and the less potential wealth exists for each knowledgeable individual to extract from the TP.
If there are 100 players “playing” the TP, each can make a significant amount of money from it. If there are 1000 players doing the same thing, the amount of money available to each goes down considerably. At 10,000 players the rewards are constant but small and at 100,000 players the rewards will probably be less than spending the same amount of time running the champion train.
(edited by tolunart.2095)
When I buy $25 worth of lottery tickets, I should be guaranteed to win at least $25 from them. Anything less just isn’t fair.
I don’t grind for gold, which is why I’ve made less in 18 months than some flippers make in a single month, ankitten owhere near being able to afford many of the things I want. I don’t wish that I grind more, I don’t wish I flipped more, I do wish that the activities I enjoy provided more balanced rewards relative to both other activities.
And I think thats your main issue. You want the same reward for less effort.
MMOs in general dont work like that.Its a game, with many different activities, he wants equal reward for doing the activities he enjoys in a game.
This request is simply impossible to fulfill. The game is based on a variety of different activities. Thousands of players are much better than a dozen devs at figuring out the paths of least resistance, so there will always be some activity that is a little easier or a little more rewarding than other activities.
The fairest thing they can do is give different rewards for different activities, which is where things like Legendaries come into play – in the beginning, and for the first year of the game, a Legendary was exactly the same, stat-wise, as a craftable exotic weapon, but took 1000x more effort and/or money to create. The value of the Legendary came from its unique appearance, not its stats. Twilight and Dusk were the same weapon with different skins.
If they balanced all exotics to be of equal value to Legendaries, either exotics would be much much rarer and harder to obtain, or Legendaries would be much more common and less special.
The game is not designed so that everything and everyone is equal, and it is not possible to make it so.
regarding all those 1c offers… I have no idea why they haven’t removed those :P probably because of the first reason I suggested.
“one reason could be of difficulty – like, it isn’t easy to query the TP server for a particular account’s listings and offers (at least for many thousands of accounts at a time)
another could be because they don’t need to, so why bother”
These two reasons. The current TP setup means that buy orders below vendor price are impossible to create/sell to (excepting the occasional bug) so there is no need to remove existing ones. And also the amount of work that would go into removing them just to satisfy the OCD crowd who “don’t like” seeing them is disproportionate to the nearly nonexistent benefits of doing so.
Announcements are made when they are ready to announce, not because one, a dozen, or a hundred people demand it.
As I said above, there have been clear timetables announced. However, the reality of software development means that things don’t always work out as planned. They are still working on the things that were announced, and players still complain because they want it now, not when it’s ready. And if they get it before it’s ready, they still complain.
This will not calm any of the greedy and entitled players who make selfish demands and throw tantrums on the forums when they don’t get what they want.
There have been announcements from the devs about general plans for the next six months or so. When their plans were delayed because of various issues, people complained because they didn’t rush things out to fit the timetable.
When they rush things out to fit the timetable, people complain because the content was rushed and is unfinished or bugged.
The bottom line is that people with complaints come to the forums to complain. This is not going to stop no matter what the devs say or how often they say it.
What is “transparency” and why would it calm anyone?
Im pretty that some transparency from the dev’s would make certain people calm down. (including me :P )
Past experience says otherwise. In many cases, only absolute compliance to the posters’ demands will calm them. This absolute compliance, however, will anger those who disagree with the posters, prompting more complaints.
Also, many of these demands are beyond most devs’ authority to promise, and they are not allowed to discuss certain things that are in development. Comments like “we can’t do that” or “that is in development and will be here this summer” just cause more arguments, because people don’t like being told they can’t have something, or they want it now, not in five months. And if they can’t solve certain issues or the plans change? It’s nothing less than a betrayal of the posters’ trust and a personal insult…
Announcements are made when they are ready to announce, not because one, a dozen, or a hundred people demand it.
The trading post in GW2 operates the same way. buy, list, pay taxes, etc., but with the added benefit that your competitor can’t declare war and blow you up for undercutting him.
Genius! Make it so… Okay, TP is fixed now.
I read your statements again and you didnt suggest much. You only suggested to rework rewards in general, make them more bound to achievements and less dependable on gold. I dont even disagree with you there but didnt Anet already implement this in so many ways?
Just from the last 2 patches you got the Halo, Horns, Backpack and the Mask that are not obtainable on the TP.
Ascended Gear isnt obtainable on the TP (and Legendaries shouldnt be either).
The game is largely focused on casual players, and having most items obtainable with a single currency supports this. There are many items that cannot be bought with gold – dungeon armors, gear for fractals, many LS rewards, WvW gear… These items are presented as rewards to dedicated players and are largely out of reach of casual players. If those activities were more popular then they would develop more rewards for them, but the majority of players are focused on making gold so the devs concentrate on that.
Ascended gear represents a reversal of their treatment of Legendaries, it’s pretty obvious they realized that allowing precursors/legendaries to be sold directly on the TP was a mistake because these items are not intended for casual players. Those items that are intended for casuals should be obtainable with gold, because gold can be obtained through nearly every activity in the game.
And more importantly, time-poor but cash-rich casual players can buy gems with real world money and convert those gems to gold to buy the items they want or need to play the game the way they want to play. If new items cannot be obtained this way or if rampant inflation raises prices much faster than the conversion rate can support, it harms the experiences of these casual players, and losing that income hurts the game as a whole.
Anet devs knew what they were doing when they set up the TP, and they did it this way for a purpose. Though the implementation was not perfect, they take steps to correct mistakes (such as the Legendary/Ascended thing) and making money through the TP is far more fair and easily available than in real life markets. The proposed solutions are not in any way “fair” for everyone, they alter the balance of the economy to favor those who play like the poster making the proposal and generally harm the game for everyone over time.
You can debate the fairness of the proposals all you want, as has already been pointed out, those arguing against the current system have no evidence to support their position, and JS – the person with more knowledge of the subject and more data about the game than any player – has already said that these proposals will only harm the game and so there is absolutely no chance that these arguments will lead to any real changes.
(edited by tolunart.2095)
Why is it that these are the only options? You can either have nothing to buy or you must buy nearly all from a source. You can’t have both for some reason…
Anet is not a nonprofit corporation. They have limited resources, if it takes them six months to design three sets of armor, is it more desirable to make a few bucks off the work and reinvest it to continue developing content, or give it away for free?
They already introduced two free sets of armor via rewards chests that you get just for playing the game. And with it you also get bonus gold and gems, in one rewards chest I got enough gold and gems to pay for most of a set of armor by itself. If you really want a set of armor from the gem shop it’s not that hard to save up for it.
A while back players were complaining that there wasn’t enough armor/weapon skins in the gem store. “We want to spend gems! Give us something to buy!” People were upset that the only armor skins were the boring one-per-weight-class skins like the Krytan armor and such. So Anet put their artists to work designing armor skins for the gem shop.
So people can complain they need to get gems to buy armor skins.
The TP is multi-server, and there are thousands upon thousands of users online at any given moment. If even two people are looking at Spidy at the same time and say “hey, I can make a profit selling Gold-Plated Hairbrushes” then they will compete with each other for sales and suddenly there are dozens more for sale than people want to buy and the profit disappears.
Multiply that by a hundred players a day all selling the same thing, and any item that stands out as an easy money maker becomes oversupplied quickly and the potential for profit disappears.
That’s the tricky part of playing the TP, and why it’s harder to make money at it than people think. The more people involved in a particular segment of the market, the less money each person makes, until there are so many people competing with each other that no one makes any money. Success on the TP involves figuring out what will sell before everyone else does.
Theoretically an extremely wealthy player, or a cartel of players, COULD seize control of a niche portion of the market, but I think that if even if they successfully pulled it off, ANet would step in and intervene. This isn’t EVE Online, where such tactics are an accepted, even celebrated, part of the gameplay. I think if the player base became aware that some players were able to control the economy to such an extent, it would harm player trust in the TP, which would be detrimental to the game as players start to use one-to-one trading or off-site markets.
JS has already said that he monitors TP activity and is both willing and able to step in and make corrections if something goes wrong. This kind of authority and ability to change the rules of the game is not something to be taken lightly, however. And he will not step in on behalf of an individual or group with a “feeling” that something is wrong.
He has access to a lot more information than we do, and can find such things as how many precursors sell within a certain time period and who is selling/buying them. The bottom line here is that a lot of players with very little information about what goes on in the TP make great leaps to erroneous assumptions and see dirty dealings where there are none. JS has the information to make such determinations, and thus far there have not been manipulations on the scale that people think is happening.
You have done Fractals all the way up to level 44 and you decide to write a forum post about the rewards now?
More like “again,” this particular horse is dug up and re-beaten on a regular basis.
When new legendary items show up I suspect T6 mats will skyrocket to 1g+ each since there is really very little supply coming in anymore.
Which is something speculators think is coming in the next month or two, cue stockpiling and prices raising. But since it’s a known issue, one of two things (or both) is likely to happen:
1: It will quickly become profitable to farm T6 and heavy bags, sending players to currently abandoned areas for their piece of the pie.
2: The next LS release will feature a way to increase the supply of T6 mats, perhaps reopening the Queen’s Pavilion for champ farming or somesuch.
Anyway, it won’t be a problem beyond the first few weeks, when the impatient players outbid each other in the race to show off their new shinies first and those who are prepared make 1000s of gold from them.
…I don’t want to have to spend tons of money on gems just to open new bank slots…Does anyone else feel this is a problem?
Nope, not a problem.
I’ll just leave you to argue the point among yourself.
If you want to invest time in something, get a Bachelor’s Degree. Playing video games is wasting time, not investing it. If they shut down the servers tomorrow, your entire “investment” in the game is gone. If this is a concern for you, the only thing you can do about it is be more careful where you invest your resources.
under this assumption why are you not working to solve world hunger? working as say, a doctor in a western world is wasting your time when there are so many african children dying from diseases hourly.
Exactly, now get to it.
I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons:
You’ve been playing your character for over a year and have gone from level 1 to 15. You’re fighting a red dragon who breathes fire at you. Roll saving throw… 1. You’re dead.
Your new character is level 1. You’re sitting in the tavern when you overhear a group of adventurers talking about needing a new thief…
RNG is just part of the game.
If you want to invest time in something, get a Bachelor’s Degree. Playing video games is wasting time, not investing it. If they shut down the servers tomorrow, your entire “investment” in the game is gone. If this is a concern for you, the only thing you can do about it is be more careful where you invest your resources.
Gold to gems conversion rate is different from gems to gold conversion rate for exactly this purpose. You are not supposed to be able to make money by juggling gems and gold back and forth like that. You lose 15% or so with every conversion, so changing X gold to Y gems and immediately back again gives you 30% less gold.
What people have done is bought gems with gold back when the exchange rate was more favorable, say 5 gold per 100 gems, then sold the gems back for gold when the rate was much higher, making a profit even after the fees. This is not a great way to make money, however, since it means holding on to the gems for weeks or months waiting for a favorable exchange rate. Don’t do it.
You’re trying to use the splitter for a function it was never designed to perform. It’s like getting mad because you can’t drive your boat on land. It was never meant to do that in the first place.
The TS will not “unbind” soulbound items, the items split will remain bound to the character that has them when you use it. You can’t take the soulbound item out of the bank because the character that they are bound to does not exist any more. Splitting the item will not change this.
Ah! This topic again.
takes a drink
No one told me we started a drinking game. Was the word of the day “manipulation”?
And chug a beer every time JS says “no.”