Your opinion on XTH?

The skill required is wiki-like.
It's not first-place-in-mATs-like no, but still - it's a skill.

And sure there is risk involved. I remember my guildy getting max 30 points - if he was REALLY lucky. If you want money and you don't plan on putting some skill into it - you're better off just buying the money.


RMT IS against the rules.


It possibly changes WHO is able to obtain said items, but not how many people can. And since we are dealing with luxury - that's not an issue.
The point of luxury items is that certain people just can't obtain them. And that's also being achieved with the higher prices.
Even more so.


All the money he obtains won't make up for his lack of skill.
I don't have a problem with that.
Or is anyone actually suggesting that minis matter in PvE?


Both are content that the users paid for.



And have fun on your vacation!

It is amazing. All you XTH haters. In my opinion you all are shooting in your own leg. What kind of incentive would players with 3 CE edtitions have to buy a new account if not for predictions? As long as people are buying accounts to participate in XTH the gw sales are still high enough. That helps to keep up support for GW1 and probably cover some of the finances for GW2. This is not the issue of the GW economy it is the issue of Anet and NCsoft business model.... I am really happy that there are people with 45 accounts cause that makes the live of GW1 longer and all you care is that someone has more money to buy e-peen items.... Imagine what will happen to gw1 if not all those accounts bought for XTH....

2nd account: 6 hero discordway
3rd account: 9 hero discordway

Having characters with important abusable (easy vq, farming, whatever) quests open that you can join with your main.

Mules (it is cheaper to buy account than 4 slots).

Even without XTH, Zaishen challenge faction is one easy key a day per account.

Event finale AFK farm.

HvH sync abuse.

Self running.

...

Sorry, but that argument isn't really valid. Risk denotes that a chance is being taken, the chance of losing something is undertaken in the hopes of achieving something greater. While your guildy may not be good at it, he is not risking anything by making predictions.

Again, this argument doesn't hold up. After 10 seconds on Google, it is fairly clear that the average price of GW gold is $7(US) for 100k. Guild Wars accounts, bought solely for the purpose of predictions, (Prophecies only) can be found for around $10(US) each. Therefore, it would take your guildy ~6 months to make his money back, after which he is doing better than had he simply bought gold.

($10/$7 = 1.429*100 = 142.9 (he needs ~143k in order to make his $10 back). 143k/24k(per month) = 5.9583 months.

Of course, most people will actually make their money back much faster.

That being said, I really enjoy the XTH. I have 5 accounts (3 bought for Zkeys) and the free money really does add up. I don't like the inflation that it is causing in game, and I have lost some money because of it. But my net gain is still higher with the added zkeys. And hey, who DOESN'T like free money?

Ok so for me...I have 9 accounts...ive only bought 3 and only 2 were bought for zkeys only. The rest I got from friends for storage and stuff and I don't Mind getting100-200 zkeys a month

As for xth and rmt....rmt requires no skill...$7=100k

For xth you have to pick teams every month...and you can either get lots of zkeys or little zkeys....it still allows money but you have to do it every month...so it's not directly rmt but it's bordering it

Non-regulated (i.e. non-XTH, where ANet don't get the profit) RMT still is, yes.

so the risk is instead of winning big, you win small? ouch, what a bummer...i hate winning small.

Incredible, people can QQ about something that is for free?

Heh, that's a pretty cool trick. "Real Money Trading" also appears if you put in some other incorrect acronyms of XTH, like Xunlai Trading Hut.

It would be even cooler if it happened when you googled what XTH actually stands for: Xunlai Tournament House. But it doesn't. Oh well.

Still, I like your strategy: put in a fake XTH acronym, google it, and use the search results as as argument.

So, I just googled Xunlai Tickling House. OMG everyone! XTH is a secret foot fetish ring!

"As long as people are buying accounts to participate in XTH the gw sales are still high enough. That helps to keep up support for GW1 and probably cover some of the finances for GW2."

NCSoft has already put up all the money needed to cover the cost of GW2. The extra money that ANet gets from the XTH accounts needs to be put into GW1 to make more content. ANet needs to learn its user base better if they truly want to earn maximum profit.

They could just as well add it to the ingame store - for every $20 you pay you automatically receive a random amount of Tournament Reward Points (50-150). That would surely get them even more money... but that's against their business model.

Now only people completely blind don't see they're already doing that with the XTH!!

Simply because Free is wrong, especially here.
It's giving meaningful rewards which normally take significant effort = it greatly reduces the value of rewards for those who really earn them.

It really sucks to have such a bs system ruin the value of rewards for all kinds of pvp, from RA to the winners of monthly ATs prizes... all hurt by the bazillions of FREE RPS given away to undeserving people.

A mother bakes a cake for her five boys. She gives four fifths of the cake to one boy, and divides the remainder of the cake among the other four boys. The other four children ask, "Why are we getting so much less?" The mother replies, "Because he is the favorite son."

Convince me that you wouldn't QQ if you were one of the four children getting less cake.

Here, the favorite son is the one that is spending lots of money buying accounts from ANet. Other players that would prefer to not spend hundreds of dollars on accounts are upset.

Why is it hard to see that an inequitable distribution of free stuff is going to make people upset? If you don't support selling zkeys to players through the in-game store, you shouldn't support XTH. Simple.

I don't see how anyone could get upset because someone else has more money than them in a game... Lighten up people.

Inequitable distribution of free stuff?

Joe Palooka QQer has just as much right to run out and purchase multiple copies of GW as anyone else. Because they choose not to do so they whine about how unfair it is.

And Earth your absolutely right about those QQing because others have more money. Unless you started this game 4 years ago you'll always have less money than the powertraders and those that have farmed for years. Get use to it.

That's not a game that I care to play, thanks. Changing the rules to a "pay for stuff" system three years into a game's run is ridiculous. Full disclosure up front so I can opt out is fine. Bait-and-switch is a crime.

Doesn't bother me when other players have more money than me. It does bother me when those players didn't have to invest time and effort to get it.

Substitute: "players buying dozens of accounts to play XTH" for "bot networks". This is the same problem.

Perhaps you should read the EULA and Terms of Service that you agreed to. It explictly states Anet can change the game anyway they choose. Even the box says "game experience may change during online play".

No you said it yourself your not willing to spend more money like others have. And they are investing time and effort. Just purchasing 10 copies of GW gets you nothing. You still have to actually accumulate the wealth. Is it quicker? Sure. A choice they made that you wouldn't.

XTH and bots are so totally different I'm surprised that you would even try to compare them. XTH doesn't hack or steal accounts, XTH isn't dumping massive amounts of gold into the economy from gold sellers. XTH according to Anet wasn't created as a way to sell games. Until you or someone else has a smoking gun that proves otherwise it's just another conspiracy theory.

Man, you XTH defenders always come back to the EULA. Two points:

1) A contract such as the EULA can't supercede existing law. You can't draw up a contract that makes a bait-and-switch legal. Now, I wouldn't have standing here because I would have difficulty proving material harm. That's what gets them off the hook, not the EULA.
2) I'm not even debating the legality of the XTH. What I'm arguing is that XTH will have long-run effects that are unhealthy for the game. Further, you can observe the beginnings of those effects right now.

OK, so XTH isn't equivalent to buying stuff directly from ANet. It's equivalent to paying ANet a bunch of money to multiply your drop rate by a massive factor. Explain how this is different in overall effect?

Of course XTH doesn't hack or steal accounts. It does dump massive amounts of in-game cash into the economy. All that denominating the in-game cash in zkeys instead of gold does is change the way prices rescale.

For that matter: dupers had to invest time to dupe items, and they didn't hack or steal accounts. So duping isn't OK, but XTH is? Alternately, it would be OK to buy a license from ANet to dupe?

What makes you think that I believe that XTH was created to sell games? It doesn't have to have been. XTH may have been created to drive interest in PvP, but ANet discovered that it had the beneficial side effect of selling games. So they refuse to remove it despite observable harm to the game.

The truth you hear may not be the truth you think you hear!

There's a distint difference, the money was going directly to the RMT, now the moneys going directly to anet. Its sure its not as simple as that tho

I guess anet's making these decisions to test stuff for gw2 and what better to see how far you can push things with a player base with a game thats gone past its high point. It may not be selling in game gold via the store, but damn its nearly as close to be.

Excellent, so whenever you or anyone has an issue with anything with this game read the above paragraph and be quiet?

XTH is a good idea generally, but u just get to much for it...
something like 20k / month /account should be maximum

correct. to uninstall GW, go to control panel, add/remove program, select guild wars, and press the uninstall button.

Don't be surprised when it will become reality - Zaishen Key price will only go down every month, and it may even drop that low.

If nothing will be done, Zaishen Keys price and value of drops from the chest will drop so pathetically low that the extra free wealth everyone will get for free per account every month will be marginal. The economy will continue to balance itself so that what's common and free will have little value. ZKeys will be worth less and less, gains from having 20+ accounts won't make people rich anymore...
...And who will lose the most?
Ofcourse the PvP players!

Compare this to farming:
PvP players play fair game and get rewards at a relatively fair rate, best get the most, all require work, almost nothing is for free. They 'farm' the Zaishen Keys in a fair way, producing very limited amounts of them, as it requires winning, and not everyone can win.

And then an extremelly lame abuse 'farming' method comes, allowing everyone completely clueless about PvP to get the same rewards PvP players get for active play and victories. This 'farm' requires NO skill, just a few clicks and guaranteed win, and it's multiplied by the number of accounts owned ($$ spent). So more and more people get more and more accounts into this, like farmers flocking to a new farming spot, and drain it dry until the value of drops gets so low that farming becomes a waste of time. Farming spot drained dry and dead, time to move to a next one...
oh wait, there's no next one, oops.
And PvP players will continue to get the same rewards, now turned worthless...

... This has to be stopped before it's too late!

Remove XTH entirely, it's the best solution. Or completely rework it's prizes, change them to something not tradeable/transferable in any way - no benefits for one account from having 20 others; and completely different (not a substitute) from what active PvP play gives - PvP rewards should remain worthwhile. (exception - a pretty good XTH reward could be free unlocks at Priest of Balthazar, PvP players shouldn't qq about those and they at least may bring some fresh blood to PvP)


And lots of people here should be informed that more accounts sold for XTH abuse won't make our game better - don't expect Anet to devote more resources to the Live Team and better updates because of that. But the flood of Free ZKeys ruining our economy and killing value of rewards for active PvP play definately makes our game much worse.

There are plenty of solutions other than simply removing XTH:

1) Lower the rewards dramatically, such that the time investment for picks is commensurate with the rate of in-game wealth generation

2) Generate a series of quests that must be completed each month to get XTH rewards on any given account, thus bringing the time investment per account back in line

3) Provide a different reward than TRPs, and create a redemption system for those rewards

4) Increase (dramatically) the rate at which zkeys can be earned through PvP.

All of those are potential solutions to the problem. They all revolve around the same principle: make picking the winners of mATs provide the same basic reward per unit of time invested as players' more efficient means of in-game wealth generation.

XTH is like legally duping zkeys. You buy a license from ANet, and they let you dupe a (relatively) fixed number of zkeys per the amount you invested in the license.

@ moriz: The next time you have a complaint about customer service in any area of your life, I will be laughing at you.

Increase (dramatically) the rate at which zkeys can be earned through PvP.

O yes that would totally fix the problem. Make every good pvp player richer and dump even more zkeys into the zkey economy so the price drops even more dramatically.

A person with 50 accounts picking every single one of them right still gets less zkeys than the winners of gvg. Most people dont have 50 accounts and I guarantee that all of them dont pick them all exactly right to earn the 80 maximum keys.

The same thing happened with ecto when UW farming first started with perma sins. Ecto prices went down about 4x the amount they were worth. However, the XTH in terms of predictions has been around close to a year (give or take some time), and the price of zkeys went up when the title came and have only dropped 1k in price with all the new accounts you guys have been bitching about. Your not losing that much money on high priced items, and even if you could afford them you not hurting on ways to make money in the first place. XTH is helping way more people than it is hurting so stop QQing its not going away.

When I do a mission in GW I observe no harm to the game.
When I run someone to Sanctum Cay for some gold I observe no harm to the game.
When I do a dungeon with my guild mates I observe no harm to the game.
When I sit in Kamadan or LA and sell things I don't need I observe no harm to the game.
When I get on Guru and find a sword for sell for 1-5k just like it was a year ago before XTH rewards started I observe no harm to the game.
When I watch the Monthly GVG tournament and see Straight Outta Kamadan finally win a gold cape I observe no harm to the game. (oh btw congrats Mitch and KMD).
When I see PVPer's selling zkeys for 2k or less before XTH predictions began and now selling them for 4-5k I observe no harm to the game.
When I see players buying armor and weapons to fill their hall of monuments I observe no harm to the game.

I keep hearing about this massive influx of gold but I've yet to see that proven.
I keep hearing about PVPer's being harmed by XTH predictions yet I can't for the life of me see how it affects whether or not that player or guild wins or loses.
I keep reading posts from people with all their objections to XTH yet those same people are making their own XTH predictions.

Go figure.

Yes, the price would crash instantly. However, if the price takes a 90% nosedive, but you're making 10 times as many zkeys in the mAT, it's a wash. The big losers here are the guy getting keys from XTH, and the guys that invested in the Zaishen title prior to the buff.

All of the proposed solutions have distributional consequences, and those consequences all vary from simply removing XTH. The developer picks from the available options depending on what distributional consequences they prefer, and the relative labor cost associated with implementing the solution.

Wrong. If you flawlessed the predictions, you get 250 TRPs. The winners of the mAT get 4500 each. Under this condition, 18 accounts will match the GvG mAT winners.

First, you're bad at history. Ecto values went down about 30% and rebounded to the previous price when the permasins were nerfed.

Second, limited high end items go for 150%-400% of what they went for when XTH was introduced. I keep telling you, they're the canary in the coalmine. The prices on these items are bound to increase first because the supply does not increase. The prices on anything that the zchest does not drop will surely follow in time.

@ michman: The second point here is your proof. Last time that these prices went crazy? During the dupe. Lol at your argument about zkey prices going up after XTH's introduction. Perhaps the introduction of an emote and a title had something to do with that?

Observant people: you clearly underestimate the devastating power that is in the XTH. Do you even know how many players still got no clue what it is? I'm really surprised but I keep meeting active and fairly wealthy players who got no clue what it is.

Last year the % of players who knew and used it was far smaller, so tiny it didn't cause any visible problem - amounts of free zkeys were much smaller than what PvP players generated through simply playing the game. But now it's going only one way - more and more players get more and more accounts into the system and every month is a giant flood wave that ruins the zkey value.

It will be only worse... if not fixed.

good, since i got plenty of laughs out of you. you are a very good at giving everyone good laughs over your ludicrous claims.

This thing about people spending money to get in game money being no skill would make much more sense if the drops weren't random.

You do something 1000 times. All crap drops. Someone goes with a team and get it done because of the team and get a great drop the first time he does it.

But yes, that guy has skill because he got a random drop while the other just buy it with zkeys.

Gogo random for skill.

Wrong Again. 8 picks x 5 keys for GvG 8 picks x 5 keys for 1v1 is 80keys or 400 TRP for flawless. 4500 TRP / 5 is 900 keys. 900keys/ 80keys is 22.5k accounts needed and flawlessed to match the GVG winner only.

3 dailys per day 30 days in a months would be 1080 keys into the economy for just the winners of the dailys.

PvPers are dumping in a ton of a lot more than XTH is.

1. When duping was going on the price of High End items were in Ectos soo Zkeys have nothing to do with it. Even now High End items are not bought in Zkeys (well they could be) they are bought in Ectos still. Sorry if your paying for Zkeys, but the XTH only caused a minor increase the majority came from the mass of Keys coming from the monthly and the dailys.

If you looking in High End buying, just about every person buying is in a PvP guild because they are the ones who can afford the items. The people buying mutliple accounts for high amounts of keys are the ones who can probably pick correctly, and it would be reasonable for me to assume that they are PvP players. People that dont follow PvP have no clue how to pick (especially in 1v1 with all the IMO "cheating" going on with them).

Giving higher rewards for PvPers would hurt the PvPers more than the PvE players because most of the PvE players unless they are power traders dont have the Zkeys to buy High End stuff anyway.

Yes, there's this thing called variance. There's also this thing called expected utility. Each farming run has a given average payoff. If I am more skilled than you and can do the run five times as fast, in the long run I make five times the amount you make given the same time investment.

People with lots of time to spend on the game are of course heavily advantaged, but that's true for anything else in life.

Dude, your math is whacked. Go read the rules. You get 250 TRPs for flawlessing either set of predictions, at least according to the link on the official wiki. You are correct that if you flawlessed both the GvG and the 1v1 that you would earn 500 TRPs, not just the 250 for flawlessing just the GvG (or 1v1) predictions.

But all that does is halve the minimum number of accounts needed to 9.

I've done the math on the influx of keys already earlier in the thread. XTH is (according to zweistein) dumping 3.5 MILLION keys into the economy each month. It just blows away the number released by PvP every month.

This is such a lol paragraph. I'll break it down:

Your first sentence is a non sequitur. Duping currencies causes the prices of other goods to rise. It's one of the easiest mathematical proofs in economics.

Your second sentence is patently false. I buy and sell stuff in and for zkeys all the time. Ectos and zkeys both spend, and are easily converted back and forth.

Your third sentence is just wrong. See above.

EDIT: Bof, the price of zkeys isn't changing because players value highly the points to title track. It's the price of everything ELSE that's changing...at least, the stuff that doesn't come out of the zchest.

As Asp said on page 5 the prices of Z-Keys are going to changes regardless. The 3.5 Million keys per month can be compared to the ecto boom of the perma sins racking in a ton more than 3.5 million ecto per month. The price only dropped 2k then came back up when everyone got what they wanted. Same thing here people are going to get tons of keys and the price is going to drop, but it will stabalize when people are getting what they want. Whether XTH was here or not price were going to go down once people started going for the title more heavily. Zkeys have been out for a year and its only dropped 1k ecto drop 2k in 1 month. The 3.5million keys isnt affecting prices in the dramatic fashion people are making it out to be.

Question: why do pvp players need zkeys for money
The point of zkeys is to open chest...and now get title pts for it...and get pve skills...why I strict pvpers need cash???

Just a question....if your not strict pvp then money should be fairly easy to come by... I have 100k all the time which is not much at all...and I do about 50/50 of pvp and pve

Point of pvp is not for money

And people that have more money also have the advantage.

The thing that is wrong is the concept of farming run. The need for farming run concept basically shows most of what is wrong in PvE.

In GW weapons and armors have max stats, so no weapon/armor is better or worse than another.

Its all about looks.

So there is no problem if all are the same rarity. The only problem in this game is if you want a certain weapon/armor skin and have to rely on "luck" and "repetition" (there goes the skill>time argument) to attain it.

Torment weapons and BMP weapons are a great example of how skins should be attained - by completion of a mission/task, not in random chest drop that only promotes "farming" and "mindless repetition" to score a "lucky drop", to basically get a weapon that is just as functional as whatever else.

You want a skin, you should be able to go and complete whatever tasks are demanded for it and get it in the end. Skill = reward.

As it is, we end with a game where PvE is basically grinding for titles and abusing game mechanics to grind for weapons.

We also end with a game where going to any major town is an aesthetically assault to your eyes.

So preserving that type of game to anyone that understand that a "title" or a "rare skin" means 0 about skill is quite pointless to anyone that knows that simple truth.

Keep the XTH, make all weapons inscribable, get upgrades and inscriptions npc traders, increase drop rate, destroy the farm builds based on certain "skills" exploits, etc.

Bring the mayhem.

The EoTN gloves are fuggly in most armor/character combination, vabbi female skirts are nice but suck with primeval boots and gladiator top (damn idiot no fashion sense pvpers, I like to see good games not puck) and some of the "top" weapons out there are just as ugly.


What is left are the "exclusive" minipets, most bought with money in the first place since they came with magazines. So who cares if you can't buy a mini pet anymore because some sob can pay for 1000 accounts and pay 1 billion (actually 1750) zkeys for it?

RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO the economy - this a game about slaying mobs in PvE and beat the crap out of other human beings in PvP and then piss and dance on their "avatar" corpses.

Improvavel, while that's one vision for the game, it's not the only one. I enjoy smashing people in PvP. I hate the PvE campaigns because they are obstacles that waste my time. After all, killing the monsters is about phat loot, amirite? The story can go hang. If I wanted story, I'd go play a Bioware game.

As I've argued earlier in the thread, I would LOVE to see an accomplishments = items system. It's easier to balance, you can always add more stuff to add new challenges, it's hard to RMT in such a system and impossible to use bots to generate money for RMT.

However, we're stuck with what we've got. Given that system, I'd like to see lots of nice options for trading in my loot. I'd also like to compete for the best loot on a level playing field, where the only constraints that bind are how fast you can make loot and how much time you have to spend getting loot. I won't win that competition, since I have a lot less time than others...but I can compensate for lack of time with ability.

Burning the existing system to the ground isn't the solution. Fixing the existing system for GW2 is. One can hope the devs are listening to us.

If that were 100% true, you wouldn't see the opposition so vehemenantly whine for the removal of the XTH.

If the XTH is removed then remove the obscene amount of tournament rewards as well for PvPers, that they receive for winning the mATS. You'll see a reversal of opinion on the vast majority here, trying to protect their cash cow.

While you're at it, nix those darn Championship point farmers too.

As PvPer, you need cash to operate guild

You miss one thing.

First, if you create weapon which actually takes skill to get two things happen:

* People with required skill will get it lightning fast.
* People without required skill will never get it.

Both things separated create certain amount of whine, together .... there is mayhen.

You dont need cash if you have all npcs and generous members

People that have skill deserve it imo


// BTW when can i get those march tournament reward points ^^ ?

Pretty much the worst idea ever, just a nonstop inflation. There needs to be some type of gambling aspect to it instead of just giving away free money to everyone in the game once a month.

What's wrong with you people, You are given a no strings freebie and you still piss and moan about it!

All you have to do is signup/Login vote and be happy? If it is too much hard work having to vote then use the auto voting tool that zwei2stein provided

i have it on good authority that the majority of pvpers couldn't care less about money. the amount of gold it needs to run a pvp guild is pitiful; we could easily generate that gold by selling a few zkeys earned from daily ATs and balth factions. heck, even playing AB and selling amber/jade could generate the gold needed to run a guild.

basically, a lot of people here are pissing and moaning because they could no longer afford to buy something, because the XTH has temporarily driven up prices for those items. instead of simply accumulating more money and waiting for the prices to come down (and it will), they chose to cry about it here instead.