Astralporing.1957

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > Just because we haven't been given a plan doesn't mean that Anet doesn't have one. I am basing my assessment not on what they say, but on what they do. After observing the whole 8 years of game development i am most certain, that even if they have a vision for the game now, it would be a _very_ recent thing. They certainly didn't have one in the past. The whole history of this game is a history of constant changes in game direction, often made without much forethough. I mean, the first case happened after merely 3 months since launch, and was caused by a panic reaction. And it didn;t get any better since then.

> @"lokh.2695" said: > We can count ourselves lucky if there is a plan beyond the next three months. By plan I mean an actual direction and an idea of what will and what will not be inplemented by said time, not the PR-speak that are """""roadmaps""""". Frankly, i'd be happy if they had any sort of plan like that for just the more immediate future. So far, they haven't got one. They might have had some _release_ plans, but they never seemed to have any idea about the design direction the game should go in, or any longterm vision for the game. It's always as if they picked ideas by using darts. Or magic 8-balls. So, yeah, looking at the situation we're now, hearing they have any sort of vision for the next _week_ would be a great news.

It's based not on the exchange rate, but on the difference between droprates of old vs new.

I like mostly semi-casual play. That means, while i am okay with some level of difficulty, i am not okay with: - having to train god knows how long in order to be able to kill a single boss (and in my case it really means _long_) - having to repeat the training as soon as there are some changes to the group roster - even after that training, and putting my effort into it, failing the encounter just because _someone else_ made a mistake - and finally, wasting more time on the organizational aspect of this content than on running the content itself ah yes, there's also the point that i included in my sig: i don't like the cases where it's the content that decides who i can (and cannot) group with. Notice, btw, that those are for the most part points on which any constructive discussion is pretty much impossible. What i consider to be issues, most raiders consider to be the very core of the "raiding experience". There's next to no space for any form of compromise to be had on those points in a single difficulty mode. Those differences can only be resolved by the way of having more than one version of the content.

> @"Psientist.6437" said: > > The question should read "Why is the market wealth and market activity produced from 20000 frivolous 1 gold items and 2 frivolous 10000K gold items acceptable but 1 frivolous 20000K gold item isn't?" Yes, that's the mistake you are making. Assuming those numbers would be equivalent.

> @"Psientist.6437" said: > Why is the market wealth and market activity produced from 20000 frivolous 1K items and 2 frivolous 10000K items acceptable but 1 frivolous 20000K item isn't? I have already told you. You would also know the answer if you were to do the research on your own, instead of (still) basing your opinions on pure theory with no support in reality. Hint: the answer is connected to the mistake you made in your question.

> @"Psientist.6437" said: > You are missing the point I am making about fundamental rules of commerce and how they apply to building a virtual economy that produces wealth redistribution. > The wealth attracted by exclusivity can not be recreated. The market will have a carrying capacity for every item price tier for different reasons. We can always add new wealth with exclusivity. No grocer stocks their shelves with just one item. They maximize their ability to provide variety. I think you are severely overestimating the impact of the exclusivity of having the item cost above the trading limit. I sincerely doubt that adjusting accessibility of those items so they would drop to say, 5-9k range would remove enough potential buyers it would matter. I am also quite certain, that doing that would add more buyers than you would lose (enough to not only offset the initial loss, but to actually increase the overall impact of trading said item on the whole market) > Exclusive items will be powerful despite their population, super efficient at reducing gold to gem rates, and likely to produce a wide enough range of materials and value added BLTP work to coherently fight General Price Shape Inflation. What argument do you have against this? So far I see: > > Big Spenders maybe don't exist, if they do there isn't enough of them to bother with and perhaps their tastes aren't legitimate. I've exhausted my patience and want to avoid another time out. That's not my argument. My argument was that there was not enough people interested in those items at this value to have a significant impact on the market. Sure, the items may individually cost a lot, but they are traded very rarely, which means the overall worth of that market is very tiny. This is not assumption, this is a result of me looking at the trading sites those trades take place. The person that assumes things without trying to verify them first is you, not me. I also made a guess that it is very likely that decreasing the price would _increase_ the overall worth of that market, because, while the individual price would go down, the number of trades would go up to a degree that would easily cover the loss (and more). And while it was a guess, it was also based on me observing the markets for similar, but slightly cheaper infusions that are currently traded atbelow TP cap. Again, something you could have done. It doesn't matter how fine and reasonably-sounding a theory is - if it cannot survive a meeting with reality, it isn't worth much. Your theory as it is now _doesn't_ seem to match reality. If you disagree, do the research and find some actual proof it works as you think it does.

> @"Aeon.4583" said: > Ok, but will there be punish system for false advertising too? > It is not everyday thing, but it still happens. > Player joins party with T4 daily + Rec description, but this party already did two T4s. Player leave, because he\she looking for full T4 run. > Why this should be punished? > In the end player who leave party in half way throught T4 daily, possibly been victim to false advertising, and leaving group half way it's just a means to complete missing T4s. Player makes an LFG looking for experienced players. Not everyone agrees that player is experienced enough. Argument ensues, some players leave. Now support needs to decide who to punish, and to what degree. I'm pretty sure they would so much like to see those kinds of cases [/sarcasm]

> @"DaFishBob.6518" said: > Well actually there was a time the home instance Kournan Supply Cache only gave 1 inscribed shard and a common unidentified gear. And there was a good reason why it was changed.

> @"Ayrilana.1396" said: > I bought it and found it to be worth it as those extra prismaticite saves me from needing to do an additional 1-2 DRM each day. I can easily make back the gold spent in under a week by using the time I would have spent doing those 1-2 extra DRM runs to farm gold instead. Hey, you could make the gold spent even faster if you skipped on _all_ DRMs and farmed instead. No need to thank me.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > > @"Zok.4956" said: > > > @"Delita Silverburg.8632" said: > > > The truth is, Anet starts working on some great content, then at the first sign of dislike from the player base, they give up and do something completely different. > > > > Yes, this is a common pattern that can be seen over the years with a lot of things in GW2. > Actually, I'm pretty sure that Anet has the internal metrics and knows what content players are actually playing. It may not be a "dislike" of content, but rather content that is preferred or more rewarding. Yes, they do have such metrics. The history has shown however, that they are capable of making the most rudimentary mistakes when _interpreting_ said metrics. Like it happened in the infamous Twilight Armor Forward Up path case (and, later Twilight Assault one). Basically, the metrics can show them the trends, but there's nothing in there telling them the _reasons_ behind those trends.

> @"radda.8920" said: > they didn't make anyone happy with this update. They didn't try to make HM content and yet even the casuals find this new chapter completely bad So? Do you really think that with this amount of resources they would have been able to do even one good raid wing? > The problem with arena isn't that they try to keep everyone happy,but they don't make an effort to create innovative and interesting things. It's actually (as always) way more complicated. - they try to make everyone happy - they seem to not quite understand what would make players happy - they _constantly_ try to create new and innovative (or sometimes just new) approaches to old problems - since they experiment, they often get it wrong - they don't have resources to make new types of content while keeping old and working content up to par, so they end up constantly abandoning old stuff - they don't have the resources to satisfy all the target groups they try to reach - (and, finally) they just don't have any unified vision for the game

DRMs need a different name as well. After all, everyone knows that DRMs in games are nothing good. (but sure, they should fix the LFG being for squads)

> @"Delita Silverburg.8632" said: > 5. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga. They might have realized this simply doesn't work. Strikes, for the most part, were drawing the very same crowd that was raiding earlier, and i doubt they eased into raiding enough of players that wouldn't have raided otherwise for it to matter. > @"radda.8920" said: > And why arena could not satisfy several types of players, the raiders AND the casuals players? Because they didn't have enough resources for that, and trying just made everyone unsatisfied.

> @"Firebeard.1746" said: > I'm sure there's people trying to control the MC prices, but I've seen them fall by almost 50s only to go up 80+ later after the LA announcement. I think I've seen then drop below 1g at one point just before the LA announcement. From what i see since the beginning of 2019 the lowest they dropped was 1g13s at buy order (somewhere around May 2019). The last time when they were below 1g was at q4 2017 (there was a massive price drop at the very end of september 2017, after which the price started to slowly recover. Don't remember what exactly happened then, though - possibly some source of MCs got introduced). The previous time they spiked to 1g90s was in June 2020, and it lasted maybe two weeks tops. I don't remember when Armory was announced. Notice though, that, apart from the two spikes (one in June 2020, another right now), both the supply and demand seem to be extremely stable and had been so for years.

> @"Fangoth.4503" said: > your math is wrong i'm afraid there is 1 mastery point in every single dragon mission so 7 are coming. you can see them but not take them untill the dragon mission is released. Same goes for the point you will earn by completing story line when more is released. Don't forget to include locked mastery poin if you want to compare to locked masteries. Don't let not released content become a tarir 2.0, just chill and wait for it to be released before panicking Fair enough, I sort of assumed those missions will come with later chapters, i forgot we're now on delayed release mode. Still, my point still stands - on all the previous expansions/LS-es i have never felt the need to wait for future releases in order to max out on currently available masteries. I was always able to max out on them before the next content hit (with the only exception being the raid mastery track, but that was not due to the lack of mastery points), and at every single point since ls3 started i was always several mastery points ahead of the available mastery tracks. In IBS i am way, way behind, and so far i have been unable to catch up not even once. That's because the _nature_ of the mastery point achievements changed, there's far less easy ones, and far more grindy/timegated/costly ones. There's already way too much of those kinds of mastery achievements in IBS. We really don't need any more.

> @"Strider Pj.2193" said: > Also of note, in GW 1, ectoplasm was the Mystic Coins of that game. It was currency. > > And mystic coins will continue to be used as currency. Yes, i already mentioned that. I am also quite sure that at some point in the past i've seen Anet devs saying somewhere, that they disliked the practice of secondary currencies (like ecto and armbraces) in GW1 and that they didn't want that to repeat in GW2. > @"TheGrimm.5624" said: > But since we don't have the stats, the last time they addressed it on the formers the idea was there were still more MCs entering the market daily then exiting, meaning supply side was fine. Now, that was a few years ago I want to say since time flys as it does. That was not what they said. They said more MCs were _produced_ than were _consumed_. Not all MCs that were produced ended up on market. Not all MCs that left the market were consumed. In both case at least some of them ended up being hoarded. Basically, the demand is bigger than the supply, because not all demand is towards using MCs as crafting material. It's clear that, at least originally, they didn't count on this practice to become permanent - they thought that people would stop hoarding at some point and start selling again.

> @"TheGrimm.5624" said: > Price went up gradually since March of this year You mean, since December 2015, right? because the general trend started then, Sure, there are some ups and downs on the way, some spikes and short-term reversals after them, but those are simply slight variations to the general trend, which is nothing recent. It's something that started 5 years ago. Sure, Covid might have accelerated things a little (or maybe it was the news about Legendary Armory), but we'd have gotten to that point anyway. Notice, by the way, that while more players indeed should mean an increase in demand, it should also mean an increase in supply Especialy for MCs, that are mostly generated from login rewards. As such, it can't change a general market trend, it can only accelerate it.

> @"zealex.9410" said: > Hows the mastery economy now? Do you need all previous masteries in Ibs to max out the ibs trees? Currently, the purely mathematical situation is like this: zone, mastery points required/mastery points available Core, 49/83 HoT, 144/198 PoF, 110/130 IBS, 63/58 (although it's actually 46/58 at the moment, since the last 17 points of the newest mastery track are currently locked) At this moment though we're still 3 episodes short on IBS. The last episode supplied 6 total mastery points (4 easy ones, one locked behind the weapon collection, one behind a challenge that may be problematic for many). if the next 3 chapters all add 6 points each, and no new mastery tracks/tiers, IBS would end at 63/76. Which would put it at a margin comparable to PoF, but worse than for HoT and Core That is pure math though. It doesn't include things like how easy to get/grindy each mastery point is. In that regard, previous cases had a lot more of low hanging fruit masteries. In IBS the emphasis was shifted far more towards heavy grind/costly/heavily time consuming ones. Last chapter added more easy masteries though, so hopefully if they will keep it up, this may help. Still, in all previous cases i never really felt the need to wait for new, easy mastery points from future chapters. IBS is the first time i feel that. And it's due to this that locking mastery points after the 1000g weapon collection feels especially jarring.

> @"Psientist.6437" said: > > @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > So, again, how many? And how they compare to those infusions that trade at _below_ tp limit? > > (because the answer you gave me seems to suggest, you haven;t actually checked it at all, and are just responding basing on how you _think_ it should work) > > The only thing I or you can find is a price shape for exclusive infusions distorted by the trade service limit. We are talking about a price shape without the distortion. I accept that TP barony will influence the price shape. To talk about measuring effect, we would need to agree that TP barony does not dominate demand's ability to shape the price of exclusive infusions. You have stated this to be true. I agree. Are you implying I would discover the opposite? If so, why wouldn't the trade service limit be to blame? No, i was hoping you will go and check, and then find the comparable volume of trade between two similar items of different price. And i hoped this might tell you something. Because so far you are assuming numbers, but are unwilling to check whether the reality agrees with you. Hint: the example i gave in my post above, of one trade at 15 to 25k gold vs 15 trades at 3-4k gold, was _not_ purely hypothetical. Granted, my data might be flawed (if anyone with more experience on gw2 markets can pitch in it would be good), but at least i can say that i went and looked for it before i started drawing any conclusions. > > We can use market value and currency to predict that one item at 20k gold will produce roughly the same amount of economic activity as 2 items at 10k. The 20k item is twice as efficient. It requires faith to predict there will be twice as many buyers at 10k. No, it requires checking the market and seeing tendencies. There's quite a number of infusions at different price points you can compare. Sure, some might be more or less popular due to visual effects, but there's enough variety among them to draw some more general conclusions. > We can't build a demand curve from numbers pulled from our imagination. Then stop doing that. > It could happen but you are making a leap of faith. I am not. What i am doing is called research. I try to find any data first, and _then_ make conclusions based on it. > We can predict with confidence that some demand is only interested in 20k items and will evaporate as price lowers. We would need more than twice as many customers at 10k. Yes. And 4 times as many at 5k. So, the real question on which the whole argument hinges is would it be more, or less? Hint (repeat): again, the numbers i have already mentioned were not pulled out of air. > > 10 demand at 20k gets 200k > Price drops to 10k and 1 demand leaves > 11 demand needed to get back to 200k > (faith is assuming there will at least 11, not that 11 would be needed) Yes. That's why to avoid putting all your arguments on faith (i wonder if you noticed that is exactly what you do) actually going and checking the trade volumes of similar items at different price points is a far better idea. Having some actual data might tell you whether it's better to increase or decrease price to get a better market impact. But i'm not going to do your research for you. > Regardless of the size, the effect is irreplaceable. Because of the high price, even a small number of trades will have effects that span General Price Shape. Actually, it does very much depend on the average value od trades per time unit. One chak infusion trade per week, for example, has next to no impact on anything. Especially, if, as mentioned before, changing the droprate (and thus the price) might affect the end result in a better direction. > We don't need hard numbers to understand our trade situation. And who's now using faith as a basis if an argument? Hint: not me.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: > > @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > > @"Swagger.1459" said: > > > This is what we call an _optional_ material sink. Material sinks like these are necessary for the game. > > It would be far more optional if there wasn't a mastery point locked behind it. > > > > Well, there will be lots of options for mastery points. Nobody has to get that one. And the weapons are optional as well... Self imposed issue here. So far it's far less option than both HoT+LS3 and PoF+LS4 had at this point. IBS is just way, way, way more grindy. Honestly, i wouldn't expect the future LS chapters to suddenly change that.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: > > @"Jilora.9524" said: > > Like I have the gold but why would I dump 70+ gold each weapon plus the time gate to acquire the new lodestones. 50 orich ingots 10 ecto per lodestone. > > I legit bought the mark and pact black lion entire sets for less then 1000g and you get 14 tickets back like 560g back and you then think hey complete the new set for 20 AP and 12 AGs is somehow worthy of our gold. > > I know alot will do these but just another set I'll skip because you think making these new weapons expensive instead of shaft hilt 4g inscription 5 ectos or something reasonable adds to your game. Well it doesn't > > This is what we call an _optional_ material sink. Material sinks like these are necessary for the game. It would be far more optional if there wasn't a mastery point locked behind it.

I'd say that the provisioners were the most annoying part of crafting raid legendary. Even more annoying than raids themselves.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > Just how often do you think an expansion ought to be released? Every 2 years seems to be a good interval.

Considering what i see on character selection screen, currently _any_ Charr is way too tall. Perhaps in few more years they'll finally fix that bug - then we'll be able to talk about charr height again.