Curse

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 23, 2007, 07:44 PM // 19:44

Disclaimer: This isnt a thread demanding the revert of the droping system. Also, everyone in these forums love this game and care for it and its sucess, dispite being in favour or opposing the changes. Its the fact they care that make people overreact, both sides of the discussion do this. Even though, players only have the right to play the game, and not the right to direct the developers and legal owners of the game, the moment they (A.net) shared their "baby" with us, it also became our "baby", not our "son" perhaps, but a "nephew" or a "cousin".

Additional this thread tries to leave subjective arguments behind and focus on numbers, even though, numbers can also be manipulated.

Last note, I am biased in what concerns the changes in farming, to the old system.
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Ive started playing this game about 10 months ago, a couple months after the release of Factions. I always had a interest in MMORPG, but the monthly subscription fee always was a concern, not much the value of it per se, but the fact that I would probably felt compelled to play it all the time because I was paying it, regardless of being playing it or not.

I played some during the 1st few months, but professional schedule prevented me from playing too much and after a few month I stop playing it at all.

When I returned a few months later, I decided it was time I went hardcore and starting to accumulate whealth, to finaly give that necromancer of mine a decent armour.

I started to work on a monk and on a warrior. The monk was tyria born (since I was noob I had sold the -50 grim cesta i got with my necro) and the warrior was a cantha native.

Ofcourse, the warrior went faster. When I was finaly ready to farm with both of them, the AoE nerf came along , and the monk lost alot of its utility, also due to spirit bond nerf.

I was unconcerned, though, cause my warrior could do easly a vermin farm and that was quite decent.

After a couple months, nigthfall arrived, and my farm got an incredible boost, since ordering henchies allowed to farm green items a lot easier.

After that i started considering equiping my PvE characters so they could do PvP, because killing the enemy with a longsword and an obsidian armor is even funnier. And ofcourse, you have more time to develop feelings for ur pve
character than to that poor pvp slot that keeps getting deleted.

So enough of talk and let gets to some facts.

Reasoning behind Anet decision:

1) Boting was inflating prices, so casual players were unable to buy basic stuff;

2) Soloing was much more profitable that party play;

3) Making the game easier to casual players, removing some mechanics that were introduced to preventing boting;

4) Give expert players new challanges and goals to obtain.

I must agree that the update accomplished the 2 last points, even If I find AoE dispersal actually make the game easier.

I dont seem to be quite in agreement with #1 and#2 reason.

Why?

Im going to talk about 3 farm spots, the vermin farm in representation of easy areas farms (could be trolls or gryphons or gates of tyria, but I am more acquainted with the vermin one) and the UW/FOW since they are common to all 3 chapters and possess some of the most valuable drops, wich include the Glob of ectoplasm and its sidekick obsidian shard. Ecto is very popular as a hard currency, and both the ecto and the shard are necessary to one of the highest end and most expensive item an hardcore player may acquire.
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The vermin run.

Time: ~8 minutes.
Difficulty: easy.
Setup: cheap.
Profit: 10k/hour (before update). Occasional celestial gold weapon.

So, any player casual or not can do this run. Its easy, dont take much time, isnt that far in factions storyline, the skills required arent that hard to obtain, pretty much every profession in the game can do it. (Note: I use a W/Mo, with the traditional triple chop, using a wings axe thats easly farmable and its dropped by the same guy that has triple chop).

Basic stuff:

Max armor- costs 1.5k*5= 7.5k or 1K*5=5k +insignias.

So a casual player can farm during a hour and get is max armor. Assuming the same casual player will play normal mode and not Hardmode, that means we would have to play something like 5 hours or more (assuming is making 2k per hour of pve party play, thats being generous). Additional missions or exploring areas all necessit more than 8 minutes to complete (ok a few missions can be faster). Most prophecies missions, speciall late ones take around 1 hour.

So I would say, its easier to the casual or non-casual player to get its max armour by farming vermins, and he can get a little closer to get it in days that he cant spend more than 10 minutes playing.

Crafting a max weapon- 5k or 10k for energy one
1/2 hour to 1 hour farming vermins. 2.5 hours to 5 hours regular party play.

Major vigor rune- 5k
1/2 hour farming, 2.5 hours playing regular pve.

Cap signet or skill after hitting the skill price cap-1k
So a player that starts a new character and wants to buy a few skills to make its build more efficient or have more options, or simply want to buy cap signets for its survivour title or skill hunter title, will get money to one of those skill in around 4 minutes. 1 hour of vermin farming grants 10 skills, compared to the 2 a hour of pve would grant.

Now lets see the most expensive basic items:

Bloodstained insignia- ~10k.
Why its so expensive? Every Olias/Master of Whispers want one. The chance of getting one is slim due to the fact they share their drops locations with dozens other less usefull/wanted insignias.
1 hour farming. 5 hours playing pve.

Superior Vigor rune- ~32K.
Some consider this a luxury item. But why is it so expensive? Cause every single character in the game can and wants to use one. Ive 1000 hours of log time, about 600 doing pve, farming or not, and I only have collected one. I know lots of people that never found one. Maybe Hardmode gold items drop will make this one drop price, but casual players arent supposed to play hardmode, so it might still be unattainable for them.

3 hours farming. 15 hours playing pve.
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As can be seen, the casual player and the hardcore one will obtain the basic items a lot faster, farming even such a fast and easy spot, than playing the party aspect of the game. Some might say, a farming build takes time to achieve, some items need to be crafted, but chances are once a player complete one or two chapters with one character, he will have almost everything he need to do such easy farms, and that someone gave him a hint or 2 on how to make some money.
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Now lets enter the realm of the hardcore players and their luxury items.

UW quick smite farm.
Setup:average to expensive.
time required:15-30 minutes build depending.
difficulty:average, but prone to lag instant deads.
Profits: ~1ecto per run. 1.5k profit (after 1k fee). 3ectos/hour 4.5k/hour.

Even if a player dont have much time to play he can easly do a quick UW run.

UW aataxe/smite farm.
Setup: expensive.
time required:30 minutes -1 hour.
difficulty: tricky due to nigtmares pop-ups and high aataxe damage.
Profits:~5 ectos/hour. 2.5k/hour.

Fow beach
Setup: average to expensive
time required:~45 minutes (for melee professions, not experienced with caster ones).
difficulty: average to hard/frustrating
Profit:~5 shards/hour. 5k/hour (after fee). Good chests, albeit somewhat rare.

15k basic armor- 5*15k or 4*15 (sometimes helm can be ignored)=75k or 65k + materials+dyes+runes=100-175k.

A hardcore player could get one of these armours by spending around 10-20 hours vermin farming. A player only pveing would take 50-100 hours getting one of these, a bit less if was doing hard areas like fow/uw/elite missions/elite areas and selling some rare skin items for amounts that Anet consider too high.

15k obsidian armor- Probably the most expensive set a gw player could get his hands on. With prices going up to 2millions or more if all materials were bought. This along titles are one of the few reasons pve players keep playing.
In addition is the only reason PvP players play PvE, so they can kill the human controlled charactes with style.

Doing the UW/Fow solo runs, a player could expect to amass enough for a obsidian armor in something like 50-75 hours.

Rare weapon skin- around 100k+2ectos to 100k+20 ectos or more.

This depends alot on the skin wanted and the mods needed, but a hardcore player could achieve his ultimate weapon with as litle effort as <30 hours farming.
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So after working those numbers, I find it very hard that Anet actually made it easier for human players to acquire his basic equipment or even its advanced equipment.

Maybe for players that never farmed, gettin ubber equipment while pursuing other objectives like titles, will become easier, but in my opinion those players were never much interested in the 1st place to acquire those luxury items as obsidian armors or very rare skins, while the farmers that were interested in rare skins and high-end armors, werent that much interested in titles.

Additionaly, PvP players migth as well stop PvEing at all, as obtaining the eye-candy items might become harder (or not, time will tell) and have no impact in the game, both PvE and PvP.

An additional concern, is that static prices are same, and since the only changes to normal mode made obtaining gold harder, since no solo farming, and even 5 man farming of tombs/SF/Fow got a bit affect by it, crafting weapons (and weapons for heroes) and armor can in theory became harder and more grinding, hardly what the casual player wish.

Also some problems in Hard mode have already been detected. While the gold item drops more in quantity, the quality is still the same, and since the areas got harder, Hardmode only seem to only have scalled the drops accordingly to the challenge, so in the end things seems just the same.

Of more worry though, is the fact that the days of "GLF Monk 7/8" and w8 for 30 minutes before a monk arrive, and then drops after 10 minutes, might be back, as heroes become a weakness in a team. The only way they move is by ordering them to, players have to body block to protect the monks, keep giving flag orders so they stay back.
Hero monk ai, also seems to not know how divine favour bonus work, refusing to heal players that have degen effects with non-direct healing skills, even refusing to use holy veil although having 5 energy to remove phantom pain after combat, probably waiting to use Gole+SoR to counter the degen.

Also the heroes bunch together and dont flee of AoE paths.

While the hardmode is still shining new, probably there wont be many problem forming a party on the early outposts, but as the new titles lose their shine, and people start moving to the high-end pve areas, wich still are the same after all, the problems heroes solved might as well return.

Illuminator · Apr 23, 2007, 07:54 PM // 19:54

Good, well thougth post.
I don't agree with you but you have some good points on the inflation and such. I, for one, loved the first solofarming nerf, the one with all loot scales and "invisble henchmen, because i remember in my noob time when i tried to get a good sword and guess what Victo's blade (or is it sword?) was priced to about 100k+10e, and that was a big disappointment.
So I think that they should undo the buff to the solofarming that rare items and such has a drop rate that isnt affected by scaling if you solo.

My 42 cents.

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 23, 2007, 08:12 PM // 20:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Illuminator

remember in my noob time when i tried to get a good sword and guess what Victo's blade (or is it sword?) was priced to about 100k+10e, and that was a big disappointment.

I got it the hardway, by doing dozens of tombs runs till i got it, wearing half of my pieces of armours with 45 armor rating, although at the time the price of it was like 10k.

But you must also see it that noone was solo farming it, and when the sword was introduced, how many were available?

Additional people farm other things than just money, and has more items get farmed and common, the prices will drop. Also if it was 25k+1ecto, and if you had to play 100 hours to get that kind of money, would it make any diference?

A weapon like dwaynas grace started in nigthfall at 100k+, now a player can buy it for 25k or less.

If someone wants the shiny and new, no matter how much or less plats are available, someone will always have more money than and grab it.

Sir Kilgore · Apr 23, 2007, 08:35 PM // 20:35

According to some of the quotes from ANet folks, they want to curtail the influx of new gold into the economy. New gold essentially consists of money drops from critters and sales of items to merchants.

In theory this will encourage players to trade/sell more items with each other. The farmer will want to make more money than he can get from the merchant and will therefore sell to another player since he can't make as much gold from what monsters drop.

As someone who farms at least several hours a week I can point out the flaw in this thinking. Most gold items are only worth 200-300 gps at the merchants. Many of these aren't maxxed out and/or have poor mods on them. Let's face it, essentially no one wants to buy a gold 14-21 dmg sword with a +1 swordsmanship (18%) and +5 vs. physical damage - but items on par with that drop a lot. That means they are worth next to nothing on the open player market - probably even less than merchants offer. I, for one, simply will not spend any of my playing time spamming sell messages about an item in order to maybe make a few gold pieces more than the merchant will give me. It's far better in the long run to sell to the merchant and keep moving.

Even if you do get a nice valuable drop it can take quite some time to find a buyer. And the only ones who can typically afford such an item are other farmers or people who've purchased GW gold from the internet. This will never change no matter what you do to the economy. If I can't get at least 5 to 10K for an item, it's not worth even a single WTS message, let alone the potentially long time it may take to sell. If it gets to the point where I can only get 2 to 10 times what the merchant offers on rare items then I won't bother to ever advertise anything to other players -- it's just not worth the time and hassle.

So what happens is I sell the item to the merchant at a pitiful price, collect my small amount of "new gold" and move on. This makes me more able to participate in the social economy, but does not allow the so-called casual player to be any more likely to do so.

In order for more player to player transactions to take place a couple things have to be present for me.

1) Generally significantly more income from a player sale than from a merchant sale.
2) A quick and easy way to put an item up for sale and collect the money (without continual spamming).

Unless/until that happens most of my rare drops will still be merchant food unless they have great mods or are maxxed with low reqs and highly desired at the time.

I have no idea how many people I speak for, if any, but that's how things are for me.

P A L P H R A M O N D · Apr 23, 2007, 08:48 PM // 20:48

Lots of good points, but the thing that I don't understand is why ppl assume that the farming nerf (if you can call it that, HM is rumored to be pretty lucrative) is going to help players by lowering prices. There are people with alot of money saved up, there are bots and people buying that gold online. These people won't be hurt by the farming nerf like the rest of us, and thus the market for high-end sellers is still going to be there. Very rare-skinned weapons are always going to be expensive, and the rich people aren't going to simply disappear now because of the nerf. Also, this makes alot of armor (which won't fluctuate in price) more expensive. I remember my necro's 15k Luxon, after all the jadeite and monstrous fangs, cost almost 300k. That is very unattainable if you take away a source of income (it took me awhile to save that much). I don't mind the nerf too much, at this point I have most of the armor and weapons I have, but still, the reasoning that nerfing the droprate will lower prices still doesn't make sense, since all the economic models that people cite to prove it will happen . . . don't take into account that you can become a millionare outside of the game in as much time as it takes to run your credit card for gold.

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 23, 2007, 09:17 PM // 21:17

Actually even if they wiped out and started fresh (imagine that for a public relations nightmare

), it wouldnt matter. Its a matter of scale.

It would be like they increased/decrease the value of putting the ball on the net in basketball, to make scores higher/lower.

If to get 100k it takes 10 hours now, and will take 100 hours to take 10k after, those 10k are as valuable as the 100k were before.

Since the static prices of crafters/traders are the same, they only created inflation.

More, since some players already have big stashes . So they just made those people richer, even if their items and materials droped in absolute price, they wont in relative.

The only plausible idea about this, is that this some kind of market study for GW2, to see what are the level of grind people find acceptable.

But this isnt the proper game to do that, cause grind here is different of character power/evolution, so while people might find ok to spend 100 hours more to obtain something that will make them kill monster X with a few less swigs, they will reach saturation point for grind a lot faster, for some graphyc and style/uniqueness.

Sir Kilgore · Apr 23, 2007, 09:41 PM // 21:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gaia_Hunter

Actually even if they wiped out and started fresh (imagine that for a public relations nightmare

), it wouldnt matter. Its a matter of scale.

It would be like they increased/decrease the value of putting the ball on the net in basketball, to make scores higher/lower.

If to get 100k it takes 10 hours now, and will take 100 hours to take 10k after, those 10k are as valuable as the 100k were before.

Since the static prices of crafters/traders are the same, they only created inflation.

You are only partially correct here. Since the non-farming portion of the community theoretically would accumulate hard currency at the same rate as the farming community per hour of play, then although the value of the individual gold piece rises (deflation, not inflation), the disparity in wealth between farmers and non-farmers becomes smaller. That is apparently what they were striving for.

However, farmers tend to try to do things in the most efficient manner to maximize profits, while the non-farmers tend to spend a lot of non-playing online time getting groups together, socializing, etc. This means even with the exact same drop rate of everything, the farmer will still gain gold at a much faster pace than the non-farmer. With rare item drop rates not being reduced as gold is, the farmer will gather wealth at a significantly faster pace than the non-farmer - particularly in HM.

Socialism is no more likely to succeed long term in this endeavor than it has through human history, but the allure of the idea seems too strong to resist for some.

Sir Kilgore · Apr 23, 2007, 09:42 PM // 21:42

grrr lag induced double post

savage vapor 33 · Apr 23, 2007, 10:09 PM // 22:09

Very nice post. Great read, and great info. I don't agree with everything, but it gave me another outlook.

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 23, 2007, 10:20 PM // 22:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sir Kilgore

You are only partially correct here. Since the non-farming portion of the community theoretically would accumulate hard currency at the same rate as the farming community per hour of play, then although the value of the individual gold piece rises (deflation, not inflation), the disparity in wealth between farmers and non-farmers becomes smaller. That is apparently what they were striving for.

But I m wrong because I introduced a fallacy for the sake of argument.

I said that 100k before would be the same value as 10K after, but getting 10k now will be slower than 100k before (maybe not 100k, but u get the point).

Also, that dont changes the fact that if I need to get lets say a 20/20 off hand from a crafter, he still will take 5k+materials.

And getting those +5 energy weapons at 10k would be funny, but ammoon oasis comes for the rescue with its 2k +5 energy axe.

Simply adding inscriptions to all chapter weapons, would do more to drop prices, as any req9/req 10 (heck even req13) could be perfect. (yes some farmers would scream rage, but that would accomplish more by bringing the weapons for the non-farming community)

And, lastly some people are loners, and others distrust people they dont know and the skill of play they possess.

There are some people, guildies mostly, that I trust and playing with them is pleasure, the type of group that could do tombs or other hard area after losing a player as important as the solo monk (ok we usually TS it, so uts easier to coordinate)

But after spending an afternon trying to do Boreas seabed with human pugs, and out of desperation doing it with henchies (heroes didnt exist at the time) and achievieng masters, I lost most of the confidence I had in human players (Ok im not exempt of guilt, I should/could have worked harder to make it work with humans, but some people dislike criticism, I dont love it either after all, and being a teacher is something that isnt in my genes).

And lastly, just because we play the same game, it doesnt mean that all those people share common goals or beliefs, and while I like to clear fow/uw with a party, Its hard to organise it and make it going.

Sir Kilgore · Apr 23, 2007, 10:46 PM // 22:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gaia_Hunter

But I m wrong because I introduced a fallacy for the sake of argument.

The bottom line is that we agree that ultimately this will not likely have the effect that is apparently desired.

Those who desire wealth and/or rare items will still find much more efficient ways of gaining "new gold" compared to strictly playing the campaigns or striving for titles. That means that they will have the means to trade/purchase items with each other that the famous "casual player" will (still) never be able to afford.

The casual player will still have his money sucked away at the current rate by skills, armor, and the few other fixed price items, so he's not going to gain any ground.

FoxBat · Apr 23, 2007, 10:49 PM // 22:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by P A L P H R A M O N D

There are people with alot of money saved up,

They might dictate the cost of pandas, but not common 10k rares. Most people don't save, they won't be able to afford the 10k rares, the rares will drop in price until they can.

Also keep in mind the really rich can only store 1 million gold, the rest they store in ectos. Which are going to be dropping in price with these changes as well. (though there is a lower limit with less junk drops to fund farmers' entry fee).

[/QUOTE]there are bots and people buying that gold online.[/QUOTE]

In theory the bots are making less money per time, so they have to raise the price of gold as its worth more, ebayers then get less gold on average. (or rather, gold adjusted to deflation)

Gaia I agree with you that even after deflation adjustments, junk farming money still won't go as far on the market as it used to. That's the point, so everyone's else's money from just questing is worth something again.

I also don't see why 15k armor needs to be easy to afford.

Parson Brown · Apr 24, 2007, 12:33 AM // 00:33

Nice numbers from the OP, but the "setup" for one run is the same as any other. In fact, my "farming setups" tend to be cheaper than my regular PvE setups, ie. 1.5 Shing Jea energy armor and that quest reward high-energy staff for my ranger's UW trap setup vs. her 15k, gold/green bow collection for PvE.

Remember, there's no advantage to expensive things!

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 24, 2007, 01:21 AM // 01:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by FoxBat

They might dictate the cost of pandas, but not common 10k rares. Most people don't save, they won't be able to afford the 10k rares, the rares will drop in price until they can.

Also keep in mind the really rich can only store 1 million gold, the rest they store in ectos. Which are going to be dropping in price with these changes as well. (though there is a lower limit with less junk drops to fund farmers' entry fee).

Quote:

there are bots and people buying that gold online.

In theory the bots are making less money per time, so they have to raise the price of gold as its worth more, ebayers then get less gold on average. (or rather, gold adjusted to deflation)

Gaia I agree with you that even after deflation adjustments, junk farming money still won't go as far on the market as it used to. That's the point, so everyone's else's money from just questing is worth something again.

I also don't see why 15k armor needs to be easy to afford.

Edit: This crap i wrote here was to big and made few sense. Its late so let me rephrase it.

There are 2 types of farmers. The ones that like to be traders and the ones that farm for their own profit.

The first group and pve players that came across the odd sup vigor rune and/or good weapom/weapon mod, are the main suppliers of the market.

The second group of farmers, dont have patience to trade, will keep the good weapons for them, give the slighty worse to their heroes and merch the rest for gold.

Also this group will only sell that rare skin weapon, if its perfect, he dislike it and the market is desperate for them, so he can make easy cash with minimun time.

The bots farm for money. They will keep doing it the same. They can do it cause they arent humans and dont get frustrated.

They will farm less money, but so will everyone else, but the guys that never, ever farmed, and those were the guys that needed gold. Myself has a farmer could do, not all the money I wished instant, but could work my way, and knew that I could establish long term goals and complete them.

So for the bots is pretty much the same. They have less plats, but items will cost less plats, so its still profitable.

About, high end armors being easy. Well 50-100 hours is a very awfull long time. It takes more time than finishing the 3 chapters.

Anet also stated they want to make items more acessible, so making it harder seems a contradiction.

Gaia_Hunter · Apr 24, 2007, 01:27 AM // 01:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Parson Brown

Nice numbers from the OP, but the "setup" for one run is the same as any other. In fact, my "farming setups" tend to be cheaper than my regular PvE setups, ie. 1.5 Shing Jea energy armor and that quest reward high-energy staff for my ranger's UW trap setup vs. her 15k, gold/green bow collection for PvE.

Remember, there's no advantage to expensive things!

Depends, 55 armor rquires some runes.
Some enchantment builds require +20% enchantments, other requires +30 hp or +7armor.

Some of that stuff can cost some.

But my point was exactly it isnt that expensive, so anyone could do it if chose so, because he was finding the playing the storyline was preventing him of buy basic stuff.

countesscorpula · Apr 24, 2007, 03:11 AM // 03:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sir Kilgore

As someone who farms at least several hours a week I can point out the flaw in this thinking. Most gold items are only worth 200-300 gps at the merchants. Many of these aren't maxxed out and/or have poor mods on them. Let's face it, essentially no one wants to buy a gold 14-21 dmg sword with a +1 swordsmanship (18%) and +5 vs. physical damage - but items on par with that drop a lot. That means they are worth next to nothing on the open player market - probably even less than merchants offer. I, for one, simply will not spend any of my playing time spamming sell messages about an item in order to maybe make a few gold pieces more than the merchant will give me. It's far better in the long run to sell to the merchant and keep moving.

That pretty much hits on my thinking, so I'd be one of the ones you are speaking for. I went to clear a zone in HM. In that zone were two locked chests. If you don't have the titles, you lockpicks will be consumed 90% of the time. I DO have some level in the titles and my picks are still regularly consumed. This is what was produced from my lockpicks:

A non max staff and a spear with a less than desirable inscription.
Will anyone here pay 1.5k for either of those items? Or 3k for one of them? I doubt I'd get as much as 300g for both. That means that buying lockpicks leads to a loss of 1,200g.

(I don't actually expect any offers. These are going straight to the merch as my time is still better spent killing baddies than trying to shill this sub-par loot.)

I'm sure someone else is getting some nice drops. I've gotten a few golds too - with req 13 or +19%dmg while hexed. I simply provide this of an example of clearing an entire zone of Hard Mode and the "High Value" treasure that drops. In fact, this particular run yielded no gold itmes whatsoever. So I still stand firm on the concept that to recover the cost of keys (lockpicks) - without making a profit - quality drops from Hard Mode chests are going to have to sell for 15-20k at the least. With the scaling of drops, this makes that 15k-20k that much harder for Joe Average to come up with.

Alas Poor Yorick · Apr 24, 2007, 03:35 AM // 03:35

One thing in all this that I think Anet overlooked is that by drastically curtailing the amount of cash available to the average player, they are intentionally causing deflation.

This was in done, it seems, to counteract what they felt were the artificaly high costs of high end items - ie. investments such as ectos.

This in turn causes investments to crash - witness the sudden drop in ecto prices in which many had invested their savings.

In the end, those circumstances in the real word generally lead to a depression.

Now, we are used to hearing that in the Great Depression, no one had any money.

That is, in fact, untrue. What did, in fact, happen is that the middle class, including moderate to casual investors, lost a tremendous amount of wealth as their savings suddenly evaporated.

However, what we forget is that the very wealthy retained much of their wealth and were still able to live very well indeed. In many cases it was because they controlled the supply of necessities which, no matter how poor a person was, people still needed to buy. True, the prices on those things dropped - but because of the lack of cash, the gulf between the poor and middle class virtually disappeared while the gulf between the very wealthy and the rest of society widened tremendously. Plus the wealthy could trade with one another for luxury items or soak up the little extra cash that was available by providing smaller luxuries to those who could barely afford them.

If Anet continues this pattern of reducing the availability of new gold while allowing a constant stream of luxury items and an artificially high cost of necessities such as armor to continue to influence the market we are going to see a similar pattern here. The average player will find their income is similar to that of the poor and lower middle class while the high end farmers will still be able to afford what they wish. This particular action by Anet will not even the playing field. And, frankly, I would not want it to. Those who put in more time and effort should be rewarded more than those who don't. But this action will quickly have the opposite effect. It will, in the end, exacerbate the gulf between the causal player and the high end luxury farmer.

Skyy High · Apr 24, 2007, 03:49 AM // 03:49

countess, sorry for your bad luck but, I have to say Hard Mode is dropping far better than that for me. I've actually been keeping a running tally, just because I noticed the drops were so much better than normal. This is after Vanquishing 5 areas in Elona, 4 of which in Istan, and is combined chest and drops:
- 11 Gold drops, including a req9 Salient sword, req9 Bladed Recurve, req9 Wooden Longbow, all with at least one good max mod on them.
- 8 Purples. Generally merchant trash, but still higher than normal
- Major Vigor and Sup Healing Runes
- 1 Elite Ranger Tome + 1 lockpick

And those are just the noteworthy drops. Gold and white/blue drops combined total a few platinum after each round, and that would be more except I'm expert salvaging anything with a chance of a rare material. Hard Mode is, to sum it up, very lucrative, and it's all the better because running with a full party is just as effective as someone soloing, which means I can blow through an area quickly with a full party and not feel like I'm being inefficient while farming.

FoxBat · Apr 24, 2007, 04:01 AM // 04:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alas Poor Yorick

In many cases it was because they controlled the supply of necessities which, no matter how poor a person was, people still needed to buy.

The only "necessities" controlled by the player market are crafting materials, mostly common ones at that. Your GW character requires no food, shelter, sanitation, etc. GW's "middle class" also did not lose their savings at all because most of them don't save at all. (Stash full of ectos != average gamers, stash full of ectos are the wealthy who are losing out with the value of ecto, since they can't store gold any other way.) Games are not real world-economies with the oddities of virtual item generation, and you can't use history as any kind of blanket justification for saying anything about them.

countesscorpula · Apr 24, 2007, 04:20 AM // 04:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skyy High

countess, sorry for your bad luck but,

, and is combined chest and drops:
- 11 Gold drops, including a req9 Salient sword, req9 Bladed Recurve, req9 Wooden Longbow, all with at least one good max mod on them.
- 8 Purples. Generally merchant trash, but still higher than normal
- Major Vigor and Sup Healing Runes
- 1 Elite Ranger Tome + 1 lockpick
.

So of 11 golds, three were remarkable, and worth spending time in LA to sell. 11 lockpicks cost 16,500g. That means that each of your three items has to sell for 5,500g. Minimum. In order to break even with the cost of purchasing the lockpicks. So, your better luck results in you charging +5k for an item and me charging +10k for an item. It's still not a small amount. Worse still, people who are already wealthy can afford to go through dozens of lockpicks, because each pick is a small percentage of their overall wealth. As you have demonstrated with your findings - larger searches will yield better drops. But the new guy doesn't have 15k to drop on lockpicks. He might have 3-5k. Which means his odds are less of pulling up a good one. SO when he does he has to charge big to make up for hte loss. But the wealthy guy can afford to undersell him, so the poor guy wont even get to make his sale. Just goes further to illustrae the point that those with cash will get more, and those without will become, err, more without.

In the current system, you need money to make money. And the means to gather those starting funds just got harder. See my post in the Dev Update thread on scaling (#322 i think). I lifted some quotes from the clutter to point out what is saddly not as obvious as I thought it was.