Guild Wars 2

Neko.9021:

Yeah, it’s viable.

Do it quick before ANet nerfs it again!

Until a thief spots you. Then… not so much.

oZii.2864:

The ele builds didn’t really change much its the celestial ammy and might stacking. They still play the same and I am willing to bet the other classes still do it better. Ele won’t get in the meta just because it can might stack and sustain with celestial ammy not if it’s the standard builds people are running. There are classes that still do it better for the roles available.

Im not saying it’s not in a better place it is but the core is still there. So sure you can might stack up to 25 run around and do better as in better then before. When it comes to top meta I don’t think it will cut it because it can’t break in just because it can stack might well now. Thief will still be top damage and isn’t that all that might is really? So why take a might stacking ele? There is no reason to.

They didn’t fix the real problem with ele’s: we are still too squishy. Our builds still revolve around cantrips, we still have the same mandatory traits, and we’re still hyper-vulnerable to getting focused.

As long as those things are true, there won’t be a role someone else cannot fill better. They can optimize themselves for the role, while we’re stuck having to compensate for our utter lack of defense.

edit – Also, I think the only reason life feels better is because players are settling into the patch. We were so awful for so long people were just facerolling us down. Now, because of minor buffs, it takes a few spare brain cells to kill us. Just give players time to start putting a minimum effort into killing us, and I’m sure things will go back to the way they were before the patch.

Lordrosicky.5813:

butch.8136:

^ Maybe the early excitement everyone had in combination with the influx of newbies. :p

Yeh pretty much.

Some posters in this thread are seemingly of the view that changing your mind when you learn more is a bad thing. This is the attitude of anet unfortunetly and its why we got no new game mode yet because they don’t admit their errors in judgement. Being stubborn isnt a good thing and people in this thread should learn that

Unless you happen to change your mind in direct conjunction with what wins the argument. That is a little suspect.

Nick.6972:

Are they still trying to make GW2 an eSport or have they abandoned this idea?

The very first thing you need to be an e-sport is something resembling balance. Forget about replacing the leaderboards, supporting spectators, and everything else.

Given the rate at which Anet iterates on balance, we’re still about seven years out from enough balance for an e-sport.

Fashion Mage.3712:

So what would you consider to be the approximate numbers of healing for a dedicated healer?

It depends on who and how many people are focusing the target (for example, guardians, mesmers, and warriors don’t exactly apply poison frequently). It also depends on how effective your combined allied condition removal is.

For sPvP, whatever the highest potential burst of the other team is. I’m not exactly sure what that translates to, but I know it is a lot more than what we are currently able to do.

Fashion Mage.3712:

zilcho.7624:

One word: poison.

Also… the numbers get big over time. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s all about Healing Per Second. Our HPS is a long ways off from what is needed for a dedicated healer.

Condition cleansing? It’s true that they’re quite weak to poison providing it isn’t cleansed, but if anything this only shows how powerful their healing is.

Those healing numbers should all happen within like 10 seconds. I’m fairly certain that the sustained healing of this is also very high (I’d need to calculate it to be entirely sure of course). Either way, 30000 burst healing is no joke.

I never said it was trivial, I just said it’s a long ways off from dedicated healing.

As for poison, there are thousands of sources for it. You couldn’t possibly keep it off anyone who is being focused.

Fashion Mage.3712:

soistheman.7208:

Don’t think so, however new trait + full monk rune = 20% outgoing heal which makes it much better than before.

Um, no? Aquatic Benevolence gives 25% extra healing to allies, and Rune of the Monk gives 10% extra healing to allies. This adds up to a total of 35% extra healing.
With 1400 healing power, Aquatic Benevolence, and Rune of the Monk’s bonus (and applied on allies of course):
- Geyser heals about 4700hp
- Water Blast heals for 1k every blast
- Healing Rain (assuming 45% boon duration) gives about 17 seconds of regeneration in total, which heals for about 7300hp (!) in total.
- Bursted water fields heal for 2160hp
- Healing Ripple (trait) heals for about 3650hp
- Evasive Arcana’s cleansing wave heals for about 1800 (in pvp, double that in any other mode),
- Soothing Mist heals for about 2000hp every 10 seconds.
- Sigil of Water heals for about 700 on each activation.

In total, assuming sigil of water procs twice, Soothing Mist procs once, Evasive Arcana procs once, you land four water blasts, and there are three water fields bursted by you (via arcane brilliance, arcane wave, and earth staff #2), that all adds up to 31450 healing. Now I don’t know about what you guys think, but that’s not exactly a small amount of healing. Take into account that this is all AoE, and the numbers go into the 100000’s.

That being said, I can’t say with 100% certainty that they’ve reached the “dedicated healer” level yet, but along with the more “monky” guardians (staff, Healing Breeze, consecrations, Tome of Courage, etc), water elementalists can get pretty kitten close to that level.

One word: poison.

Also… the numbers get big over time. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s all about Healing Per Second. Our HPS is a long ways off from what is needed for a dedicated healer.

silvermember.8941:

then you are playing the wrong build for survival. fresh air is terrible for anything other than burst.

I never said I played Fresh Air for survival. I’m playing it for burst. But overall, ele’s still get blown apart ten times faster than all our DPS peers.

darkkinder.7926:

I’m PvE player and play sometimes WvW, but never tried PvP (so, I don’t know how it works).

What you guys think what I should know before I start playing?

Just do whatever you want. There is no viable PvP build for ele’s. There is not a single role we can fill that someone else cannot do drastically better. Because of that, there is no “best” build or “right” way to play.

So you are going to lose a lot, you are going to die a lot, and you are going to get frustrated a lot. The only way to deal with it is to try and have fun, and forget about trying to be successful.

If you are competitive and need to win in order to have fun, then my only advice is… do not play an elementalist.

Fresh Air is still our most viable PvP build, I think. But you need to play it differently now, with the crit damage nerfs.

So far, I’ve had the most success with 0/30/0/10/30 combined with Vigor stacking. With the new 30 point Arcana trait, you can really keep Vigor up. Between dodge and blind, you can 1v1 pretty well.

All that said, ele is still garbage tier. You’ll still get blown apart. And this patch failed to fix us. We might be just a tiny bit better, but it is negligible.

Divinity.8041:

How small is it? When I hotjoin or tpvp, I literally see the same people all the time. This is at different time periods too. Is it that small?

Do we stand a chance of actually having a good pvp community?

Well there are two possibilities: the community is tiny or matchmaking is awful. One of those two things is true. If there really are thousands of players queuing at any given time, getting just one repeated player is a very rare event.

So either there aren’t thousands of players, or matchmaking is astonishingly broken.

(My guess would be the latter, actually. I have no doubt Anet’s engineers are skilled and could implement a good matchamking system with enough time and resources. But I get the feeling Anet is struggling, understaffed, and scrambling to hold things together.)

Archaon.6245:

“Matchmaking Never Worked”

fixed title for you.

Well, I think it does work during peak hours. A lot of games have their matchmaking unfairly criticized. Which is why I waited a week to post this. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just getting unlucky and I wanted to make sure my impressions were accurate.

I’m still just going by memory, though. I am ready to withdraw my concerns if the actual data contradicts me. (I strongly doubt that it does, however.)

mini.6018:

Yes it is not proof .People can say in chat whatever they want to say as long it’s not inflamatory or offensive in wich case should be reported for that reason only and still get an infraction for using the inadequate report option.Gw2 chat is not being monitored as “in court under pledge” material.

You are conflating two very different questions. Can chat alone provide valid grounds for a report? Yes. Is chat alone sufficient to suspend a player for going AFK? Probably not.

I would be shocked if Anet considered this an abuse of the reporting system. It would be Orwellian in the extreme.

NevirSayDie.6235:

OP, are you using the same build in peak hours and non-peak hours?

I don’t mean to make light of your post, but the answer is yes. I do swap classes every once in a while, but it never seems to change the pattern I’m experiencing.

Right now, the best predictor of my future performance is the first five games I play. My win percentage for a sequence of games seems tightly correlated with the percentage over the first five games in the sequence.

edit – I’m going to start keeping track of this stuff, so I can go on more than just memory. I know Anet has all this data already, but it would be nice to see the real numbers myself.

Mochann.5298:

This isn’t true in my experience. I’ve run hundreds of pug runs and I have never been criticised for staying in the stack because that’s what everyone wanted.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten tons of flak for getting off the stack.

I think you’re not reading me correctly. If there is a special mechanic that demands stacking, then I am not saying it’s ok to break out of the stack.

What I am saying is that if stacking is only meant to position the boss, then by all means break out if you do not have aggro. There is no reason to get yourself killed; you won’t change anything by taking a step back.

Gokil.2543:

As I said, I’m not being hostile. Logically, your explanation does not make sense. If he is forced to play with lower-skilled players, there will be 5 lower skilled players on the other team, and 4 on his team. Considering he is higher skill than them, he should be able to win more than 50% of the matches. I don’t understand why that is so hard to get. It’s the typical ‘ELO hell’ remark that people just don’t seem to want to let go of.

You’re oversimplifying things. Give me any player in the world, however good, and you can easily make them lose 50+% of the time using compositions of middle-tier players.

You see this in other sports, like basketball. There are players who absolutely dwarf the contributions of average players, and even the contributions of great players. I’m talking about transcendent stars like Lebron James and Kevin Durant. Yet these sorts of players can and do have seasons with records far below 50%.

The reason is that even all-time great players don’t raise win probability by anything close to 50%. (It’s because of how normal distributions work: they aren’t linear. They drop off exponentially as you get away from the mean. Sure, you might have a one in a million player. But they do not play a million times better than average. You would need a linear distribution for that.)

Gokil.2543:

This is just statistics. Judging by the fact OP claims to have played numerous matches before coming to his conclusion of performing worse during off-peak than during peak, statistics has a value in this discussion, since coincidences get smoothed out the larger your sample size of matches.

You’re getting the statistics very wrong. There are three viable theories: my peak-hour win distribution is accurate, my off-peak distribution is accurate, or neither distribution is accurate. Without any further information, it is impossible to know which theory is the most likely. Yet you opt, by default, for the most insulting one.

That aside, you are not even disagreeing with me. Obviously, I feel that matchmaking is working during peak hours and being unfair during off-peak hours. You think the opposite is true. Either way, we are both saying matchmaking is getting things wrong.

Wintel.4873:

ArenaNet already said that one of their long-term goals is letting players use the same gear for PvE or PvP….but I have no idea how they will do this.

In PvE you have to spend actual gold or time/effort into getting skins, runes, sigils, etc. But in PvP you have unlimited access to all that stuff, so if you wanted to completely revamp your gear you’d just hop into PvP, grab some skins/etc and then hop back out into the normal world. It would be ridiculous.

Well this is true of lower tier PvP gear. I wouldn’t say grinding to r30 is as easy as hopping in for a few PvP matches. It’s that higher tier gear I think the OP has in mind.

Gokil.2543:

Repeated players are very common, and I honestly don’t see too much of an issue with them.

It depends on the rating/matchmaking system, but generally having repeated players is very bad. You need randomness to smooth advantages and disadvantages out.

With random samples, you don’t have to worry about team comp, inaccurate ratings, or anything else. You are as likely to benefit from those factors as you are to suffer from them.

But if things aren’t random, suddenly that assumption doesn’t work. I don’t know how GW2 does it’s matchmaking, though. Repeated players may not break the assumption of randomness.

Justin ODell.9517:

@zilcho.7624: Are you taking into consideration the rating reset that happened about a month ago?

1) Your MMR reset to a higher level than it was before. This should settle quickly because your deviation and volatility were also reset.

2) Playing during off-peak hours, especially while your deviation/volatility were high, could caused your MMR to settle in either higher or lower than it should be.

Of course, this is just speculation. I will keep an eye on your account and see if I learn more.

I think it might just be the player population. I get so many repeat players on my team, I’ve started recognizing players’ names. Having a player placed on my team three consecutive games is not uncommon.

Although, I thought the population was large enough – even during off-peak hours – for repetition to still be rare.

(Obviously, all of these repeated players are having the same issue I am. I would be the repeated player from their perspective.)

Mochann.5298:

If you move away from the stack as zilcho suggests, you face the ire of the group if anything goes wrong. If you do not beat the boss and the group wipes, you will be blamed for breaking the stack. At best, a kind group will just smile and say, “Let’s try that again.” In many PUG groups, you’ll find some that go, “Kitten this I don’t have all night.” and they rage quit. Worst case scenario, someone will kick you for being “incompetent.”

So break away from the stack at your own risk.

I was only talking in general. It is true that, most of the time, the corner stacking is only meant to position the boss. As long as you don’t pull aggro, you are not changing a thing by breaking out of the stack. Obviously, if the fight has a special mechanic forcing you to stack, you need to stack.

As for the ire of the group, it cuts both ways. If you can’t stay alive in the stack, don’t break out, and die then you face their wrath when the group wipes at 5%. When you die, you’re (in theory) cutting out 20% of your group’s damage.

kirito.4138:

I asked siri and google-now.

Their answer is because you are getting carried during prime time. When off-peak hours start there are not many people left to carry you =]

That or not enough people your level during offpeak hours and you get paired with higher end players.

You really want to stick with this theory? You don’t even have any reason to offer it, other than the fact it’s sarcastic and insulting to me.

Ignoring that it’s wrong, for quite a few reasons, it would still not even show that matchmaking is working. Your theory still says matchmaking is broken, you’re just saying it is broken in my favor.

Either I’m getting beaten down during off-peak hours or propped up during peak hours. There’s no version of this where matchmaking is working.

Wintel.4873:

Hi there, recently I decided to take a break from from Engi and return to my Ele for some pve/dungeons. I play Staff 30/30/0/10/0…soz I know 30/20/10/10/0 is better, but I die way too often to comfortably stay within 600 range of my targets. Full exotic zerker + scholar runes, some ascended stuff like rings/amulet/trinket.

I admit that I’ve basically got almost no PvE experience outside of dungeon story/exp modes, so I’m having a bit of trouble in groups which decide to simply RUN PAST everything and corner-zerg bosses.

The first issue is running past mobs. I see Warriors and Guardians doing it with ease, hardly losing any health and fantastic mobility, but as I try to stay close to them my health simply runs out. If I eat even 1 CC/cripple I’m dead. ~11k health is basically 1-2 hits from any elite mob, what am I supposed to do??

Second issue is corner-zerging bosses. Again, my health simply vanishes to standard boss/AoE attacks. I summon FGS and go butter-nuts with that crazy awesome damage, next thing I know I’m downed and being a burden on the group.

People may say “well dodge”, except that the heavy classes barely seem to even NEED to dodge and I don’t have infinite stamina, it’s just a matter of time before I get hit and insta-killed.

What to do

It is possible to stay alive in a good group with a Warrior or Guardian. Basically, you can’t get aggro from anything for even a split second or you’ll go down. I have had adds one-shot me before, that is how squishy we are.

Staying alive means having a Warrior or Guardian to grab the boss in the first place. But even that isn’t enough. If you are doing your job, you will do a ton of damage. If your “tank” cannot keep up, you will get aggro however careful you are.

Getting downed is part of life for an Ele in pug’s. There is very little you can do to stop it. Most of the would-be tanks in pug’s take their role too literally, and build actual tanks. They do great at surviving, but their damage is so bad they won’t hold the boss for more than a couple seconds.

edit – About the corner-zerg thing, it is ok for you to run out if you do not have aggro. The point of everyone stacking is to make sure the boss gets into the corner. Once that is accomplished, you are free to back off if you do not have aggro.

Mochann.5298:

Ele has far mobility than warr. It’s called Fiery Great Sword. No class can beat an Ele in a race because of FGS. You can disengage with this very easily.

Maybe if you mean a literal race, where neither player is allowed to touch the other. Otherwise, ele’s are not the most mobile profession by any stretch of the imagination.

You realize FGS 3 doesn’t break you out of Stun or Immobilize, right? If it did, ele’s would probably take FGS over the elemental. But it doesn’t, and everyone takes the elemental. (Cause it’s nice to do some damage as we are condition-spammed and CC-locked to death.)

jimmyimo.2089:

TL;DR – Their first impression was horrible and therefore this game is hopeless for the rest of its’ life; it will never get better because there will never be enough players.

That’s not true at all. I agree that, as far as PvP goes, the launch was a miserable failure. But GW2 has a solid foundation. None of the problems are beyond repair.

They could bring all the hardcore PvP crowd back with an intelligent, exciting change. Basing their ratings system on Win Probability Added would be my dream.

If they made a change like that, and build on it with some massive balance fixes, they would be in a great spot. (And when I say “massive”, I mean 4-5 times more than what they are doing in the next patch. This game needs to wipe everything clean and start from scratch.)

I’ve waited a week to post this, just to make sure I wasn’t simply having bad luck. Every single day, I lose 70-100% of the games I play during off-peak hours. During peak hours, my winrate seems to be about 50%.

At one point, my win-loss record was something like 70-70. Now, about 60 games later, I am 20 games under .500. The only thing that changed was a week spent playing during off-peak hours – something I had not been doing before.

I don’t have the time to walk everyone through Intro to Statistics, but trust me: I am not the problem. Unless you want to argue that my skill doubles or triples when the clock hits 8PM, my off-peak winrates are too many standard deviations from my peak rates. And both rates are too many standard deviations from my mean. Meaning it’s the system, not me.

edit – Obviously my numbers are approximate. I don’t keep a detailed record of my daily win distributions. But the .500 to 20 games under .500 is accurate.

The biggest problem with this game’s PvP has nothing to do with balance or a lack of support or anything else. All of those things are issues, but they don’t even matter because GW2 misses the mark on the fundamentals.

If you want your game to have interesting, competitive PvP then you need healthy, sophisticated rating and matchmaking systems. If you’re missing one, you are in trouble. If you are missing both, you are doomed before you even start.

Matchmaking does not work. End of story. Maybe it does fine at peak hours, when there is an excess of players. But 12AM-8PM, the queues are literally unplayable. I must lose 90% of my games during off-peak hours. But sure enough, at 8PM I start winning 50% of the time.

As for the rating system, I would talk about it… but it doesn’t exist. We have a leaderboard just begging for abuse because of matchmaking. On my server/region, I lose 90% of the time during off-peak hours. But on the other side of that coin, in the right server/region, you can win 90% of the time during off-peak hours.

Even if matchmaking worked, the leaderboard is still not a real rating system. This game should have a honest, open ELO system. Either implement it via hidden ratings and visible leagues. Or go the WoW route and expose the ELO system to players. Either way, if you want to have competitive PvP you need real ratings.

Fix both those issues, and then we can talk about this game’s other problems.

PvE gear needs to come from PvE. If you are going to require buying mats for the gear, the needed gold and/or mats should be obtained from running fractals and nothing more.

It is just bizarre making players farm gold for this stuff. Interacting with the economy is entirely optional until you want your Ascended gear. Then it suddenly becomes your main focus, whether you like it or not.

BlackBeard.2873:

If guardian loses vigor, and renewing stamina is not nerfed, ele running 0/0/20/20/30 and shaman’s amulet could become an alternative to guardian for mid-bunker or just a roaming side-bunker, especially if sigil of intelligence stays a FIVE s ICD.

Ele bunker has:
- aoe stab every 10-12s
- 2 cond clear every 10-12 s
- 2 water fields that can be blasted with spammable blast finisher (earth 2 and earth dodge-roll)
-spammable weakness on entire opponent team (glyph of ele power)
- condi-wipe and big heal every 18 s (ether renewal – doesn’t block like shelter, but 1/2 the cd too)
- more cc than guardian (static field, earth 4, water 4)
- Great decap potential with tornado
- Much better mobility than guardian (burning retreat + turnaround tricks)

It will play differently than guardian (not being just a clone), with some strengths/weaknesses, but I feel they can be close in effectiveness.

Here is why this will never happen: Elementalists are made of glass now. You cannot possibly bunker with 14k health. Not with conditions, as a group, ticking in the thousands and pets hitting for 4k and thieves hitting you for 7k. In early GW2, you could actually outheal the damage. This is no longer the case.

Bunker ele belongs to a different meta, one that is long gone.

Absolutely none of the dailies are even showing up for me. I’ve tried multiple dailies, and none of them work. I can’t even find them under the achievement tab.

Am I missing something? Do the dailies end before Wintersday does?

NevirSayDie.6235:

Are you aware of any games that have used a system like this? If so, has it worked well for them?

This system has been applied to a few major sports. (ESPN has recently bought into the stat, so you’ll start hearing about it more and more.)

As for a game, there is no example that I am aware of. Which is why there’s a huge opportunity here. The first game to do it is going to attract a huge chunk of the e-sports community. Adopting WPA is equivalent to discovering fire, as far as player rating is concerned. Whoever does it first is going to get a lot of deserved attention.

About the rest of your post, game state really captures more of your concerns than you think. Of course, a utterly exhaustive state would do better than a simple one. The point is that right now, games already use a WPA system. It’s just a blunt, dumb version of one. If a player wins, they get a WPA of 100%. If they lose, they get 0%.

The simple state I mentioned is already far and away more accurate than the current system, even if it isn’t perfect.

The forum keeps eating my edits, so I’ll have to add this in a second post. First, a brief correction: it’s “Win Probability Added”. The word “percentage” was a thoughtless mistake, and I can’t edit the post.

Now for the real point of this second post. Another reason GW2 would do well to try WPA is the hype it would build. Obviously, you don’t want to market it in mathematical terms. But it’s easy to sell the idea that “our game spots good players better than anyone else”.

If you want to attract e-sports players en masse, a better rating system is a great way to do it. These sorts of players want to be the best, and – more importantly – they want everyone else to admit it. A WPA-based system gets right to the heart of that. No one can disagree with a player’s rating if it is based on WPA. You can’t luck your way into or out of a good rating.

It is also the perfect stat to show spectators. You can put a large “Win Probability” stat on the screen, telling you how the game is going. NBC and ESPN have both realized this, and they are already experimenting with it on their in-game tickers. It’s a simple, compact stat that every spectator both wants and understands.

Currently, as I understand it, player ratings are based on wins and losses. If and when a ladder system is implemented, I am sure wins and losses will continue to be the sole input to the rating.

My concern is that this does not work for solo queues. Team games are never won or lost by single players. If you are rating teams, it is fine to look no further than wins and losses. If you are rating players, it is a major problem. The problem gets compounded by GW2’s small population. Players are repeatedly paired with each other, one game after another – something that should rarely happen.

There is a stat that can solve all these problems and more. It is called Win Percentage Added (WPA). What WPA measures is the contribution of a player to his or her team’s chances of winning.

This is a stat an MMO could implement very easily. The memory requirements are trivial for a server, and the computation itself is constant time. But as easy at it is to calculate, it adds a world of sophistication to a rating-based system.

Lopez.7369:

I saw Helseth complain on his stream that all the random banter during Ready Up is unfunny and cringe-worthy. What do you guys think? Should the developers focus on the announcements instead of attempts at humor?

Do I think they were funny? No. Do I think they were fun? Yes. And I think that was the goal. They weren’t auditioning for an HBO special. They were just trying to keep a potentially dull discussion lively.

Also, who is Helseth and why should I care about this person’s opinion? There are two threads on this forum mentioning this person. I had never heard of Helseth before today.

These are good buffs, don’t get me wrong. But they are not nearly enough. Which is why I’m sure there will be more buffs when they release a full preview.

We weren’t a few minor tweaks away from viability. We were a couple major buffs away. I mean, pets and clones hit us for 2-4k. Let alone what actual players do to us.

Rolling back all the Dec. 10 nerfs should be a starting point. That, combined with these buffs and other professions’ nerfs, would probably cover it.

Don’t forget the cooldown reduction on Armor of Earth. It got cut to 70 seconds.

And the thread got moved. For some reason, I don’t think the moderator even bothered reading my first post. If they did, I would have hoped they would clarify why the disagree with my decision.

Although things did get utterly derailed, so I guess moving it makes sense.

Fenrir.3609:

(i) So?

(ii) That’s nice.

Why are you talking about farming in reference to being a zero sum game, I can’t remember saying it was.

You haven’t actually addressed my answer to you really. I pointed out you can make a great deal of gold without resorting to “playing the TP”. Which is true.

The point of (i) is that, even using your own estimates, 10G/d is still the upper bound for most players.

As for (ii), you never said farming was zero-sum. You said the TP is zero-sum. Except that farmed mats can be sold on the TP. This makes the TP itself a positive-sum game.

About your last point, it’s not true at all for many players. It might be true if you have 3+ hours a day for farming. Otherwise, your argument doesn’t hold together.

Fenrir.3609:

With a crappy 53% account magic find toon I can pull in 5-10g on average per hour from champ farming.

Let’s assume 10g a day though. In three months you have 900 gold. That is if you don’t get lucky and get a pre during your farm.

Those people playing the TP take on more risk and are involved in a zero sum game.

So no, I don’t see an issue with it in all fairness. The issue arises when you get people who don’t want to farm, who don’t want to be “efficient”, who don’t want to actively engage in in the TP and at the same time expect to be able to get the elite/endgame items within a short time frame.

(i) One hour a day is a day played for many players. And that hours is usually not spent farming mats from trash mobs.

(ii) I am admittedly not an economist. I am an engineer with a degree in mathematics, familiar with game theory, however. And you need to stop calling the TP a zero-sum game.

A game can only be zero-sum in a closed system. When a player farms a mat and sells it, that is a positive-sum game. As far as the math is concerned, that mat was conjured out of thin air. Nothing was taken from the system to produce it.

In fact, I think this is what makes MMO economies so crazy. They adopt zero-sum economics, when they aren’t even close to being zero-sum themselves.

Fenrir.3609:

I didn’t say it to end any discussion, not sure why you would think as such really.

I merely pointed out that you can make (a lot) of gold via non TP routes.

I also didn’t cite any figures for inflation, optimal or otherwise.

Except you can’t make a lot of gold without the TP. You might achieve 10G a day, if you play an exceptional number of hours and are efficient.

That is dwarfed by what is possible on the TP. Just looking at the price of Ascended gear makes this clear. If we go with the 10G/d estimate, do you really think one piece of Ascended gear is valued in months and not days? At that rate, it would take nearly a year to finish your set.

Prices are set by active users of the TP. In terms of what a speculator can manage, Ascended gear is priced reasonably.

Fenrir.3609:

Aeonblade.8709:

Just like the real world, the rich get richer and poor can go suck an egg if they ever want to get anywhere in life.

Or you can just farm champs, dungeons and world bosses and be rich. Without and exposure to financial risk and without having to compete in a zero sum game.

Unfortuately all that farming creates gold, instead of moving it around and having a tax sink like the TP. Which is why pve farming and looting is driving inflation, and not flipping.

How does that end the discussion, though? Most economists agree that 2-4% inflation is not only acceptable, but optimal. Where was it written in stone that MMO’s must have 0% inflation? More importantly, why was it written in stone?

You could limit inflation to a few percentage points without relying on anything like a TP. (It would probably be as easy as aiming for 0% with your gold sinks like repairs and reagents, and living with the clever, non-exploitative tricks players use to squeeze out gold on the fringes.)

Fenrir.3609:

“Back of the book vocab and buzz words”, what? Market making is a buzz word now? I do hope that wasn’t just a glib attempt at trying to insult me, because it certainly seemed like it.

Flippers will also being selling to one another, yes and? Oh and no, I haven’t at any point “ignored” that as it is simply a non issue.

The term “market making” wasn’t even a remote motivation for what I wrote. And no, it was not a glib insult.

Wanze.8410:

zilcho.7624:

I would gladly bet you are actually selling your assets to other flippers, without realizing it.

I raise you and admit that I even bought stuff from myself once in a while, while buying up the supply of an item to a certain price level and not realizing i still had some open listings in that range.

And if flippers are overwhelmingly selling to themselves, it amounts to speculation if the foundation is made up of speculators. The flippers at the top are making gold off of the speculators at the bottom, who themselves made gold off of market fluctuation. Speculation is transitive.

But all this is missing the point. For all I know or care, speculation is fantastically healthy for the game’s economy. My question was this: how is a speculation-driven economy good for the game? Why should speculation be a mandatory aspect of the game? Why favor that for a system where dungeon runs and minimal farming are all you need?

Wanze.8410:

I just watched (and enjoyed) that movie a couple of days ago. In the real world its also illegal to go wherever you please, collect resources or kill wildlife for a profit.
I also wouldnt “manipulate” or stimulate prices for items that i havent invested myself in before and would think that a future or general demand will be present at some point.
We are talking about a mmo and an artificial currency here, so i think the EULA does regulate what is deemed illegal or unintended gameplay.

You are equivocating. The poster claimed this method was not manipulation. My response was that it is so blatantly manipulsyive, it is outright illegal in the real-world.

Whether or not the EULA prohibits it, it is still manipulation. I only cited legality to show how flagrant the manipulation is.

Fenrir.3609:

Speculation and flipping are not the same thing. Flipping is market making, you are not speculating on a price change, you are providing a service and capturing the spread by cashing in on a time/risk premium. If anything you are hoping that the price doesn’t change in the short run.

My analysis on bubbles in relation to speculation was far from mistaken.

Tbh it seems you are using a massively generalized and massively vague coverall for “speculation”.

The act of buying goods from the TP is not meant to add gold into the economy, it is meant to act as a service/exchange and gold sink.

I don’t think you have this right at all. You keep throwing out back-of-the book vocabulary and buzzwords, but you are not offering much of a case.

You are blatantly ignoring the phenomenon that is flippers selling to each other. There is no doubt this happens. I would gladly bet you are actually selling your assets to other flippers, without realizing it. You think you are providing a service, because you have no way of knowing the difference.

This would all be well and good if the flipping eventually found a real foundation, in players who actually consume what they buy. But I think there are enough manipulators and actual speculators that there is no such foundation.

Wanze.8410:

Fenrir.3609:

For those worried about market manipultion, perhaps it goes on, can we get some concrete, non anecdotal evidence of it which cannot be attributed to anything else and which categorically proves it is bad for the average user?

Good post in general, +1 for that.

Concerning Manipulation: First of all we would have to define what market manipulation really is on the TP. For me that would be breaking the EULA in a way to gain gold, dublicating items for example.

Very often on this forum people already cry out “MANIPULATION!”, if someone buys up the majority of the supply of an item, puts in 1 million buy orders for a high value item, creates “artificial” low sell listing prices while holding to highest bid or posting on the forums or on reddit about an item they invested in, in order to create demand.

As i have personally already done all the above (except breaking the EULA, of course, and putting in 1 million buy orders at 1c because its just silly), i can confirm that the other stuff is going on.

However, first of all, i think that manipulation is a very negative word for it. Speculation is a good term for most of it and nearly everybody does it to some degree and scale, even the average player. For my other examples, price stimulation might be a better fit.

But in the end, it doesnt matter what you call it as i dont think that it effects the average player that much anyways, as it is nearly impossible to control the market for any item due to the velocity of the economy.

You do realize what you describe is illegal in the real world? And it is illegal precisely because it is manipulation. In fact, Wolf of Wall Street is about a man who did exactly what you are describing. (In the context of stocks, it is called a “Pump and Dump” scam.)

The EULA really isn’t the right gauge for what is and isn’t manipulation.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I don’t usually play during off-hours so I’ve never experienced this. Of course, random matches in off-hours are a gamble in any game, but maybe GW2 can become the exception to that rule.

There is no reason they must be a gamble. With 10 players, there are C(10,5) possible teams. That is 252 different combinations matchmaking can play with. Most of these are not going to be fair, but a handful will be. A couple should come extremely close to a 50% expected win percentage for each team.

Right now, at low populations, I think matchmaking is blind to which players are paired repeatedly. If you embraced the situation, you could assign temporary ratings to find the pairings that produce fair games. The idea would be: if you must rely on repeated pairings, at least be intelligent about doing it.

Matchmaking would refuse to pair players repeatedly, until it ran out of valid games. It would then fall back on the temporary ratings, producing fair matches using sets of players who recently played each other. (In other words, either 0 players are repeated pairings or all 10 are.)

Fenrir.3609:

Speculation and flipping are not the same thing.

Speculation on it’s own is not the sole cause of bubbles, nor does it always end up as a bubble and the recent financial crisis has little to do with this game given a) no one is creating CDO tranches or synthetic assets here as far as I am aware, b) no one is able to short and c) the economy is nowhere near complex enough to see the kind of clusterfk you get in a modern, real world crash.

Speculation and flipping are the same thing, since the act of buying a good from the TP does nothing to add capital to the economy. Whatever gains are realized from flipping can only come from speculation.

As for your analysis of bubbles, it’s just plain mistaken. Speculation does cause bubbles on its own. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to say failed assumptions (rational actors, for example) are themselves a cause. I guess that’s a coherent position, but it is a bizarre position very different from average human intuitions. Most people only allow existing entities to act as causes, which a failed assumption is not.

About the financial crisis, I never argued that GW2 was vulnerable to the same sort of bubble. I only said that the crisis was a speculation-driven bubble – which it was – and that this phenomenon is not new or unique – and it isn’t.

salt and pepper.4738:

ELE IS FINE. you can play s/f, s/d and d/d. If you cant you are just to bad, no offense.

the real problem is other classes are slightly to strong and to easy to play.

Well ele’s are not fine if they are not as strong as every other profession in the game. Maybe they should be nerfing everyone else down to our level. But if that isn’t an option, they must buff us up to everyone else’s level.

NevirSayDie.6235:

The only way a MM error could cause that is by putting the same people on the same teams too often, as it was pre-November. That fix has been confirmed. In your opinion, what problem could explain the streaks?

I think it’s exactly this. I get put on near-identical teams with alarming frequency. It spans multiple days of play to. I start recognizing names, it’s so bad.

Maybe the fix only works with a minimum population? Things are awful, until peak hours. The randomness is much better from about 8PM to 12PM. But the randomness disappears after that.

Matchmaking might need to be pickier during off-peak hours. It would mean longer queues, but that is preferable to a system that causes streaks.

roamzero.9486:

Personally I see ele in a weird spot. The class definitely has issues but I could easily see them reaching a tipping point where they become OP again. Hopefully they won’t make the same mistakes when they buff ele as they did with Warrior..

I understand the attitude, but as an ele I kind of hope they do. Obviously, the right attitude is to forget about the last couple months, and want to only be viable again. I think the more human attitude is that all these other classes got overbuffed when they were hurting, so why not us too? Why should we be the first time a class gets only what’s needed and no more?

I think Anet needs to be aware of that feeling. Undershooting the buffs might be even worse than no buffs at all. If ele’s are not viable after the next patch, things are going to get toxic fast. (Because of that human attitude I mentioned.)