Curse

Soul Shaker · Jan 26, 2006, 01:23 AM // 01:23

I think the customisation is supposed to be balancing the weapon to your character's exact fighting style. So, as part of the game it just wouldn't make sense. Like, the grind down the sword a little to balance it. To get it back to normal would mean adding the metal back?

See what i mean?

Carinae · Jan 26, 2006, 01:24 AM // 01:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Talon one

without customization, the market would be flooded with secondhand 15^50 fellblades and dragonswords and everything, and they wouldnt be anything special anymore

BINGO! That is exactly the goal Anet has stated repeatedly. They WANT these items to be obtainable by the casual player. No grind.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evil Hypnotist

Customisation is only 10g, its nothing, but the permanent 20% damage bonus would be worth A LOT if it was a removable mod.

It would be worth 10g, or whatever price Anet put on the crafter.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evil Hypnotist

... Everyone would have 20% extra damage all the time making all the monsters easier to kill. Farming is easier, etc and Anet would have to increase the levels of the monsters to compensate and maintain the balance of the economy.

Put the pipe down. Every Warrior/Ranger/farmer ALREADY HAS a permanent 20% damage bonus. It costs 10g. The game is balanced taking that 20% bonus into account. It would change nothing in the Balance department.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evil Hypnotist

If removing customisation was allowed, then the cost of that should reflect how much of a benefit it is i.e. how much a continuous 20% damage mod would be worth if it existed...?

That's true. That's where the real gold sink should be, but it's not. 20% damage for 10g??? That's a good deal, it should probably cost A LOT more by your reasoning.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Loviatar

i disagree with you for the simple reason that even if you (or i) dont see the benefit to the game in this the people who spent years developing it carefully looked at this and said to each other with agreement that it would benefit the game.

ArenaNET is not infallible. Look at all the bug fixes and skill rebalances. Customization is partially responsible for item rarity and high costs, it need to be readdressed.

Diablo™ · Jan 26, 2006, 01:26 AM // 01:26

Problem is, increasing the amount of high-end gold items will not automatically reduce the price of the item, players will continue to reap every cent they can get out of an item no matter how common or rare they are.

Carinae · Jan 26, 2006, 01:40 AM // 01:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diablo™

Problem is, increasing the amount of high-end gold items will not automatically reduce the price of the item, players will continue to reap every cent they can get out of an item no matter how common or rare they are.

Sure it will. It's called competition. You can't really jack up the price of an item if it's not as rare. The guy next to you will undercut you.

Case-in-point: Sorrow's Greens

Whiplashr · Jan 26, 2006, 02:00 AM // 02:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evil Hypnotist

Customisation is only 10g, its nothing, but the permanent 20% damage bonus would be worth A LOT if it was a removable mod. You sacrifice the ability to sell on your weapon for that increased damage. If you could remove the customisation then everyone would do it before selling on a weapon, and then the buyer would customise it. Everyone would have 20% extra damage all the time making all the monsters easier to kill. Farming is easier, etc and Anet would have to increase the levels of the monsters to compensate and maintain the balance of the economy.

I'm someone who has been for being able to remove customizations. But then I read what you wrote above, and it really put things into perspective more for me. An interesting way of looking at it I had not considered. Thanks for posting.

Tyrent Frath · Jan 26, 2006, 02:09 AM // 02:09

...question...

why do people pay 100k+ for their perfect 15%^50 sword, then refuse to customize when it's the sword they will use. honestly a person with a plain max dmg sword customized is doing more damage than you!

Diablo™ · Jan 26, 2006, 02:17 AM // 02:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carinae Dragonblood

Case-in-point: Sorrow's Greens

Good point, although I have yet to see such competition for myself, the same items that I sought after always seems to be at an apparently "locked" price. I've only heard of how certain green items used to cost more...

sellers seems to have developed a few strategies to prevent these competitions.. such as price checking, and moving to a different district to prevent direct competitions, so they dont have to lower prices. I think this is especially true when a seller would scout how much an item is being sold at before putting up their own price... usually at an equivalent value( Ie. if someone is selling a gold axe for 20k, most likely the next person will sell at the same price.).

But in the long run, I guess your theory would be true. Although slowly, but if no one destroys their gold items, they would eventually accumulate to an amount that direct sales competition would be inevitable. On the otherhand, if gold items are so perpetual, its hard to imagine anyone would even want to pay for a gold item...

Dredogol · Jan 26, 2006, 02:45 AM // 02:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carinae Dragonblood

2) Allow customized items to be tradable and equipable. Essentially make the damage bonus have a requirement for one player only. Other people can use it, but don't get that bonus.

Hmm, I see a few flaws with this one.

I say, if you really want to get rid of this debate, make the customized item do this:
1) Already adds Atk+ Bonus...so nothing wrong there...
2) Restrict Dying of an item until you have "customized" it.
2a) Once you've dyed it, it technially IS customized
3) Charge a fairly HIGH price to customize (lets say 1-2k?)
4) Once customized, adds +Atk, Unlocks Dye ability, ADDS your NAME to it.

5) Customized items can be traded
6) Customized item cannot be used by other players

7) Non-player items can be UN-customized back to Defult settings (high price = 5k? Because it's harder to UNDO something once you've done it to an item, like real life).
...err, for Option 7, all players will have this option. Besides, do you really want to give a Black or White Dyed bow to a person freely? Without charging him the Dye price???
Also, if it's been customized, it usually DOES have your name it it anyways.

Those are my suggestions to help control this issue.

Ruvaen · Jan 26, 2006, 04:02 AM // 04:02

Weapon Customization as an Economic Tool

The basics:

< All of the gold and items in circulation in the GW economy is generated by players through the form of drops from mobs (and a very minor portion from quest rewards).
< The rate at which gold can be accumulated purely through the form of drops is relatively low.

So it's reasonable to assume that people accumulate most of their wealth through collecting item drops from mobs (or trades but the capital necessary to do this starts with mob drops). Anyhow, it needs to be understood that although weapons only have negligible fixed monetary values determined by the NPC merchants; it doesn't always make the items’ maximum value to us 25~400g. Why? Because of the various perceived values determined by prospective human buyers in the market. Meaning that if you’ve accumulated more than 100K on your account, you’ve most likely engaged in trade(s) with other players, whether it be numerous exchanges or one 100K item that was sold.

Now let’s also point out that many aspects of the game are designed specifically to remove a considerable portion of the wealth generated by human players from the economy in order to prevent devaluation of the currency. They can only tweak the rate at which gold is introduced/removed from the economy (directly with gold or indirectly through the form of items) in order to do this because they can’t simply tell us how much 1K is supposed to buy us from others in the game. So the basic methods they employ are as follows:

<The necessity of ID and salvage kits.
<Attrition rate of materials, runes and upgrades during salvaging.
<One use nature of dyes.
<Introduction of keys.
<The markup of crafting materials, dyes and runes at the trader (the "profit" the merchant makes is gold that is actually taken out of circulation).
<The necessity of consumable items along with gold in order to craft required materials/equipment (including 15K armor).
<Adjusting gold and item drop rates.
<The limited inventory and storage sizes in order to promote a high item turnover rate. Meaning encouraging the sale of "worthless" items to merchants or to be salvaged for materials.

This is good and all but they all have one thing in common--what is being removed is either a relatively small amount of gold per transaction or the destruction of "worthless" items through either using them to craft an item, selling them to the merchant or salvaging them. Items that are perceived to be high in quality are completely unaffected by these measures (except the drop rate adjustment) simply because no one in their right mind would salvage a req 7 15^50 crystal sword per se for raw materials or sell it to the merchant so this is where customization becomes a reasonable economic tool. Customization of a weapon is the only way to level the playing field if you want to use your PVE character for PVP purposes so there is a reasonable degree of incentive for people to customize higher end items since every little bit does help in GvG and tombs. When an item is customized however, it ceases to be an asset altogether and is thus removed from the economy furthering the efforts of stabilizing the real value of gold… and kudos to those of you who were able to swallow the lump in your throat and customized 100K+ weapons. So to answer the original question, in order to still fulfill its intended economic function, customization and "uncustomization" would have to come at an extremely high fixed cost which could easily be 50K per instance. But people wouldn't be happy about that and it would be unfair to those who don't have that much gold to begin with.

I'm not saying that this is the most effective method they could have employed but it does make sense to me so I just wanted to point out the reasoning that seems to be behind why the feature was implemented the way it was.

The job ANET has is actually quite complicated and difficult if you think about it. How would you go about endowing everyone with high quality items without making the currency worthless and visa versa?

To the more intelligent readers that had the misfortune of stumbling upon my post, sorry it's so incoherent.

jaibas17 · Jan 26, 2006, 10:58 PM // 22:58

think about the game logic about customizing:

you custmize the weapon so its better for YOU and only YOU to use it, as it is addapted to the way you like it, thus making it more comfortable to your hands and being able to use it better

Like the difference between market shoes and customized shoes

Valdaran Longfoot · Jan 27, 2006, 02:30 AM // 02:30

Customizing something makes it market value stay where it is at. Otherwise, everything would be worth nothing in a short while. Making something "un-customed" would inflate the market and every weapon would be no point in NOT customing something.

Ruvaen · Jan 27, 2006, 03:23 AM // 03:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Valdaran Longfoot

Customizing something makes it market value stay where it is at. Otherwise, everything would be worth nothing in a short while. Making something "un-customed" would inflate the market and every weapon would be no point in NOT customing something.

In nearly all circumstances, a customized weapon has a zero utility function for everyone except the individual that customized the weapon in the first place. Therefore the act of customizing a weapon does not make it retain its original market value but instead makes it worthless from the market perspective. Which is the reason why many people choose not to customize their items because they are not willing to absorb the asset's (weapon's) complete loss of value, rendering the effectiveness of the process to take items out of circulation questionable. Start asking around how many people have their 100K+ items customized and if they happen to own multiple pieces of high end equipment, what percentage of them are customized. For example, if I customized all of my equipment across all of my characters, my net assets would decrease by at least 500K; which makes me believe that it warrants a little thought before I press the "Customize" button.

Your last assertion assumes that there is no opportunity cost of "uncustomizing" a weapon; if the opportunity cost is high enough (50K+ like I suggested or even beyond 100K), most of the items that are customized will remain so unless it is an item of extreme value that must be traded. Even then, items that remain uncustomized will be more liquid in nature and therefore more competitive on the open market.