Why inscriptions are the worst thing that happened to GW.

There's a severe selection effect at work. The players that remain tend to do so because they like the way the system works at present. But there has been a very large amount of change over the six years of the game's run, and an awful lot of other players have come and gone.

It doesn't logically follow that those players that came and went were "dissatisfied" or even "dissatisfied with a specific aspect of the game", but we can safely conclude that all of those players found something that they liked better, and it's probable that the "something" was another game.

I couldnt disagree with the OP more. I play a game for the content, not to trade. I say make the skins rare, not the stats.

People seem to keep staring themselves blind at the trading part. My main argument was never that not having inscriptions would give a better market, to be fairly honest, I couldn't care less about a weapons market, I just proposed it as an extra argument why inscriptions were a bad thing. Stop taking it up and pretending that's the only thing I'm wanting. You guys keep saying "oh, so you only want to make money out of this" whilst I have stated multiple times that my main problems are that it was never intended for every weapon to be perfect by default and that it takes away the entire thrill of getting a gold drop. That's one of the most fun parts of this entire game: getting a gold drop and thinking "omg, if I id this it could be a good weapon". Nowadays, whenever I get one I id it, I don't even look at the stats, cause they don't matter anyway and it goes straight to the merch. Gone thrill, gone fun.

If anyone has anything else constructive to say besides "the OP is a greedy bastard that only wants to make money" without even reading what I'm actually saying here, go ahead. If you guys are gonna keep bitching about it, I'm done with it. I was hoping for a healthy discussion with the pro's and cons but all I got was "you only want to make more money" and a few people that agreed with me. Gg, you proved me right. I thought I'd be able to start a healthy discussion, but thought to myself "they're gonna derail it anyway and keep selective reading the things they want to read" but then I thought "meh, I'll give it a chance, maybe I'll be happily surprised." well, I'm not.. You proved my initial thought correct.

You may complain and argue, but they won't be fooled anyways.
Even if you bring that 'thrill' argument, where does that 'thrill' comes from?
Something that doesn't happen often?
That can be said with rarest skins that drop under the inscribed system.
So it goes back to the cash, and the 'thrill' of getting something that has a higher monetary value.

And if you keep insisting that inscriptions make weapons perfect, you will never get even close to saying something believable.

Inscriptions don't increase drop rates.
Inscriptions don't make items drop req9. (Actually, req7 and req 8 items are even more rare under this system)
Inscriptions don't make items have max damage.
Inscriptions are not even guaranteed to exist in items, items may drop without inscription slot at all, even when they have other upgrades. More than once I got gold drops in Nightfall that didn't have the inscription slot, so I just identified them and sold them to the merchant for the 300..500gold they are worth.
Inscriptions don't really make skins worth less. What decreases their value is the saturation of the market, originated by overfarming, the increased rare drops in HM and the lack of a decent sink for the existing weapons (like a worthwhile customization or forced customization).

So you are not getting any convincing. You may fool yourself, but you are not fooling others.

You are not talking about the inscribed drops there, you are talking about the outmoded drops.
Whenever you get a gold drop in Factions and Prophecies, over 99.999...% of the time, for over 99.999% of the players, it will always be merchant fodder. Something you identify for the points, or sell cheap to people going for Wisdom.

Those that played Nightfall first and got the other campaigns later notice it the most.
He'll I've spent over 40% of my entire play time time in Factions, and during 5 years I only got 5 maxed gold weapons in the old system, and only 2 of those had decent properties I liked, and now they are all in the hands of heroes, because I already got better things for my characters. Things that I can freely mod.
Having a little 'thrill' so separate in time doesn't compensate that.

With a low character level cap, and determinate maximums in all equipment, and a heavily Balance-oriented PvP, you can't have a diablo-esque drop system.

If you want something like that, you'll have to wait for GW2 and the WvW.

In GW1, you'll have to add completely random PvE-only properties that can't be modded and are stuck to the weapon, and that become disabled in PvP, not affecting it at all. Something that I seriously doubt that will ever happen.

Go ahead and laugh, but it's still a nice surprise to get a gold to drop at all. I do merch blue/purple, I save golds in Xunlai and sell them as unids. I don't do it that way because they're all worthless, but because (and I hope this is a shock to you) the mods on them are usually terrible. I lose money by IDing golds; and I'm not talking about imperfect base stats, I mean mods that should just not be used at all.

In fact, In my years of playing I've never gotten a really nice weapon or off-hand (skin, low req. max stats, inscr., good mods) to drop, let alone one I'd ever want on a character. So, unless you're saying (magically?) by having no inscriptions, suddenly every drop will have much better stats and come with mods that are desirable, and rare skins would drop more, I don't see where the fun part comes in for most people. Obviously, you're not most people, Bright, so I can see why you'd want to be less bored...

And please, "healthy discussion"? From the moment you entered the title of the thread, this started as little more than a spiteful reaction to something that was said in another thread. I don't believe for a minute you wanted a healthy discussion, you wanted validation. Pretty questionable move to take it to the level that you have, and the way you have used this thread to do little more than rant, and now you blame others for the reaction you're getting.

This simply doesn't apply to me, and I'm sure my situation is more universal than yours. Before inscriptions, if I got a gold drop, I knew that it would almost always be useless to me, regardless of skin. I ran with perfect collectors and greens, and using any gold would be giving up power for looks (which I just don't do). I simply never got a max gold weapon to drop in Prophecies or Factions. So, when inscriptions came out, golds actually became exciting again for me, because I could use them without hurting myself. I started using weapons that I picked up myself, and that is way more fun for me than the positively tiny chance of getting something perfect and uninscribable.

You're approaching this from the perspective of someone who actually used to get max golds, presumably because you simply got a lot of gold drops. I didn't. I never got really excited about golds, because all the golds I got were trash compared to the cheap stuff I was using. The vast majority of the rare weapon drops in Prophecies and Factions are utterly unusable. Inscriptions opened up rare weapons and skins for the masses, and the rarest of the rare are still ridiculously expensive. There is plenty in the top end for you to play around with, and there is plenty of selection for most players to choose from.

That's the problem right there. As long as you can get perfect greens and blue collector's items fairly readily, there's not a ton of demand for "perfect weapons". Most savvy players are really aware of this and that's what most of their heroes and toons are running around with.

I think weapon mods are fairly overrated anyway. Throwing a "worthless" green wand on a hero instead of a "perfect" one really isn't going to change the ultimate outcome in any significant way.

This was actually what I was trying to achieve, a reaction like this..

To respond to it: yes 99% of the stuff you get in factions/proph is/was garbage and would go straight to the merch. But same goes for things that drop in NF, the only difference is that the 1% that isn't absolute garbage could at least yield you a couple plats in factions of proph, which to casual player would be a good thing (tbh I merch anything that doesn't go for over 50k cause I don't bother to do the effort) and a poor, new player could be very happy with it, whilst the stuff you get in NF would only be not merched cause it would be slapped on a hero, because selling it would be impossible.

Actually, no, this thread wasn't because of a spiteful reaction said in another thread. I made this thread because I mentioned my hatred towards inscriptions (now I come to think of it, I don't think I actually own an inscribable weapon at all, it's all either green, collectors, weaponsmith or uninscr stuff from Fact/Proph) in another thread, namely the "nice drop" thread, and someone asked me why I hated them so much. I made this thread because I didn't want to derail that other thread with a reaction to his question which was entirely besides the point there.

I'm not blaming others for their reactions, in fact I don't care a lot what you think about inscriptions, I was honestly interested in people's opinions, but all they did was pretend I was some rich powertrader that was being spiteful because I didn't make enough money. Go ahead and count the posts that actually answered my points, and then go ahead and count the ones that say "QQ, OP doesn't make enough money /endthread".

In all the years I've played, over 10 characters, I got about 2 panels worth of drops that I really liked, and even those are inscribable. I can't even remember getting a good non-inscribable drop. So, I have absolutely no sympathy with the feelings expressed by the OP, if for no other reason that he'd rather see me never happy at all.

Even more radical: if it were my way, all the money that we got would be bounties for pest control or similar, and all we'd get as drops would be rare materials. Every item would then be crafted somewhere, possibly somewhere quite hard to get to.

I do not want vendor trash to even exist. I don't want to play a glorified slot machine of a game. And I'm damn glad GW2 seems to be still going in that direction.

Wrong, very wrong. Again, you're looking at this from the perspective of a player who, frankly, sounds like they can get anything they want easily. I don't think you have any basis to say you understand what a "casual" player wants or appreciates. The key thing is that only a small portion of the golds that drop in Prophecies on Factions are usable in any way, by anyone, but almost all of the golds that drop in NF and EotN are at least usable by everyone. They are functional, they have the potential to be modded to perfection quite easily, and so every gold drop can be used. If that just means it's thrown on a hero, so what? It's still a weapon that the player can use, and it probably looks a lot cooler than the collector's stuff that their heroes would otherwise be using. Again, I actually look at inscribable stuff and save them for modding for my own characters, because that's actually possible with inscribable gear. It isn't with Prophecies characters.

The notion that casual players should be happier to get a non-inscribable gold drop because of the slight chance that they can sell it for a few platinum, than to get an inscribable drop that they can almost certainly use or mod into usefulness, shows a profound lack of understanding for how the average player plays the game.

The thrill is still there when you get a gold to drop, but only in dungeon end chests and elite area end chests/hoh end chest, etc.

I'm okay with not getting excited over world drops, because I still use world drops even if they're not the uberleet skins that are worth money. They had a Q9 and it's a skin I like and was able to customize it to my liking. I happen to like the dolyak prod staff I have, it's not a rare or valuable skin, but I like it. With your lame proposed change, it'd just mean I probably wouldn't be able to get it, even though it's not a valuable skin, because nobody would farm it.

I think that's part of OP's motivations, he wants only the super rich to have perfect golds. He wants most normal people to use greens and collector blues, since to get a perfect gold you'll need to be rich enough to buy them off the "improved (IE more expensive)" weapon's market, or quit your job and move back into your parent's basement to have the time to farm chests over and over.

Non inscribable would be a real mess when it comes to crafted, bonus mission pack, or tormented/oppressors stuff, come to think of it. They'd need to make the lists way longer to cover for everyone's tastes in inherent mods.

Yeah I'm going to stick with inscriptions on this one, as I use a lot of oppressors, tormented, a destroyer, a few instances of BMP skins, and even a deldrimor or two, and that crafted raven staff I mentioned before, hell my main character uses a green. I also work 40 hours a week.

I'll stick with inscriptions, I think they were a good move, not a bad.

I actually never proposed a change, since this is in Riverside. I never said we had to go back to the old system, I just stated that I hate the current system..

Also, the thing on Dungeons is wrong, because there is no thrill in id'ing the gold, there is a thrill in opening the chest. That's not the same thing...

Sky, you make a lot of sense, and I understand your point of view. Yes, everything is usable, but this goes at the expense of actually having rare weapons. There is nothing wrong with having rare weapons (dungeon chests don't count, because there is plenty, but then again plenty of those retarded "rare skins". There is just also a lot of demand, they are NOT by any means rare). I miss having rare weapons with rare stats, it would give a nice hunt for a nice weapon. It's not of any concern to casual players, because they don't care about rare weapons, they just want useful weapons, which are all available, but apparently that's unfair for some reason...

So you admit you only made this thread to qq!

_______________________________________________

I see most people are benefiting from inscriptions and thats the way it is designed to make weapons you receive have a potential to being of use for you or your heroes.

Theres also the issue that I haven't seen mentioned yet...people that used to use non-inscriptable weapons with terrible stats only because of the skin. With the old system some people who loved a skin but couldn't afford good stats on it would play with an inferior stat-wise weapon. This was most noticable in pve pugs. Now players no longer have to decide between a good stats bad skin and a bad stats good skin.

I kind of said that from the start. But don't worry, I already know you can't read.

I do have to admit that not having inscriptions would be a pain in the ass with the Tormented/Oppressor's/Destroyer etc weapons, but the mods being available would only result in a small ache in your index finger from scrolling down the entire list.. A list that would be insanely long indeed. I never said the old system didn't have any flaws. It most certainly did, and a lot of them got resolved by the inscriptions, but a lot of the (in my opinion) benefits of the uniscribable system got killed with them too. I never said that inscriptions are necessarily a bad thing for the entire community, because they most certainly benefit a lot of people in certain ways, but not having them would not disable these people from having the stats they wanted on weapons. The skins just wouldn't be the ones they liked most likely.

No. Because having inscriptions never mattered. You could always get collector weapons with perfect mods. I have 40/40 sets on all my PvE caster characters from collector weapons.

Having inscriptions just makes rare-skinned perfect weapons inexpensive. Common-skinned perfect weapons have always been inexpensive. 5 Dessicated Hydra Claws gets you a perfect focus weapon. 5 Whatever Monster Talons gets you a perfect caster wand.

It just takes any challenge/prestige out of possessing anything cool, and enables even the sorriest player to get a perfect Colossal Scimitar or Elemental Sword or whatever the hip skin is today. But, I suppose whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate. Inscribable items are basically just a huge reward creep to make every player feel like they're really awesome at the game.

QFT. Inscriptions were a retarded idea to begin with but what added insult to injury was releasing the rare tyria/faction skins as insc. Then in Eotn they made rare skinned insc equipment common drops. silly anet

We absolutely care about our looks, from armor to gear. Quite the contrary, we aren't obsessed with getting perfect stats, and would probably settle for imperfect to get the nicer skin, if the choice were presented. Unfortunately, people like you, if there were no inscrs, would be merching them.

A "sorry" player can land any drop in the game, they're random. And I think over-farming of elite areas is the bigger deal. Maybe Bright would not be merching so much if it wasn't possible to rinse/repeat elite areas and farm so quickly?

I agree with the OP. The prestige of having a perfect weapon that isn't from a collector simply doesn't exist in this game. I would like it to. Just about any kind of functional weapon is available through collectors and greens (so it is all accessible). It would be nice if you could show off that perfect Fiery Dragon Sword once more. But now anyone can have a perfect FDS. Everyone should be able to have a perfect wep, just not a perfect FDS.

We have so many people playing and so many farming, that the weapons market has pretty much bottomed out. You can have anything you want weapon-wise because there are so many people selling it.

Why should the only skins that have value be the skins that drop 1 in 1000 times? You could make it just as rare to drop a perfect FDS. This would also encourage people using imperfect weapons just because they have rare skins (kind of like how people use imperfect crystalline swords atm).

I think that the combination of a decent skin with decent functionality should be what drives the market. Right now it's all about the rarest skins, and only the rarest skins.

No, because people that play the game get gold drops naturally, and can use those gold drops now because their inscriptable. Farming isn't challenging its grind. Prestige is code for e-peen. Reward creep has been given the stamp of approval, check the reward creep thread. The hip skin today would be for example eternal blade...and those are still quite expensive to buy and hard to farm for a casual player because they come from the end chest of underworld.

The odds of getting a perfect drop without ever being at least decent at the game are very slim. The odds of being able to get 30k through missions/quests without ever getting a basic knowledge of the game are good. You can get many great skinned perfect weapons for 15k-30k.

Drops aren't as "random" as you think they are. Crystalline swords primarily come from HoH chests. How many people "randomly" stumble upon that chest and get that drop? Pretty much zero. Or even getting an emerald blade/edge from the Bogroot Chest takes some level of competence in the game. Buying a perfect Elemental Sword (one of the most sought after skins in the pre-eotn nightfall era) takes the ability to sit through playing 4 hours of PvE to get the necessary amount of gold.

I'm not sure I made it clear enough, but I will try again: anyone, it does not matter who you are, has the same chance to get a weapon to drop as anyone else. Obviously, the more you farm, the more likely you'll get a drop. Whether or not there are inscr. weapons in the game does not affect this basic fact.

Furthermore, this thread is not about elite content or the exclusive skins therein, and you don't need to play any of it. It could take all of 5 minutes to land a mini polar bear and you're set for life (ok, all but few of us). Some lucky enough to get a promotional miniature never had to do a thing. Hundreds of ecto will buy almost anything without having to play a minute of prestigious, difficult content. Following that, those 4 hours playing for that Ele sword actually sounds like it's not even worth it. Why do you think so many people power trade?

They're still ugly as hell.

But an Eternal Blade is NOT by any means RARE. You don't grasp the concept. They're common as dirt. A lot of people just want them and thus they are rather expensive. Basic supply-demand says hi..

The only bad thing about inscriptions are the "Measure for Measure" Highly salvageable fakes :P Getting them once in while just like today Gold Diamond Aegis I needed diamonds had this driscription so tada expert salvage kit got 3 iron ignot out of it.

Again, If you concept of 'rare' is 'only 10/100/1000 players have it', then you may want to look at the Miniatures, not at the weapons. Weapons are meant to be used, and the drops are clearly designed so anyone can get them by themselves without having to buy them from someone else, given enough time.

GW never was meant to have a hack&slash style of drops in which each drop may be rather unique.
Having PvP characters and their easiness to get gear, while also allowing PvE characters to join PvP, changes the kind of gear PvE characters need.
Why adding so many skins, if in the end players would have to use just crafter and collector weapons if they want to have PvP-grade equipment?
That wouldn't make any sense.

Instead blaming everything on inscriptions, you could be asking for many other things that would add much more of what you ask that hijacking all the drop system and turn it into something that doesn't fit GW1 for the benefit of a 'select few'.

Want 'thrill' before you identify an item?
Ask for damage and requirement to be hidden. Or better still, ask for the skin itself to be hidden.
It is true that inscriptions make identification almost pointless, since you see most of the properties before you identify the item, so all that's left is a chance that the weapon may not be have an inscription slot, a chance that becomes smaller with the rarity of the weapon, since rare weapons tent to have more upgrades, maxed, and all slots filled much more often that common and uncommon ones.
A generic skin could be used for unidentified items, and all swords would appear as the very same "unidentified common/uncommon/rare" sword. Even uniques could be like that.
Also, PvE drops could get unique PvE properties that do not affect PvP, that would allow your desired 'rarity', without affecting PvP equipment. That could also make rare grade weapons really rare again, and unique really unique, by making common have only one PvE property, uncommon up to 2, rare up to 4, and uniques really unique properties that can't be found in other items.


Want to keep 'rare' weapons 'rare' longer?
Ask for a sink for them. Inscriptions or not, the market gets filled over time with the drops, thanks to overfarming and speedclears done in HM. A sink for the weapons that removes from the market existing weapons ensures that the new drops have a place, at least until no one else in the game wants to buy anything else, which would happen when no more players join the game. Fortunately, thanks to digital distribution systems like Steam that is probably in the far future.


Want to have a drop system in which some things are so rare that you can hardly get them unless you buy them from someone that was lucky enough to find one?
Well, you still have things like the polar bear, which may not drop for you even if you spend the entire Wintersday celebration going for it, but that's not a weapon. But there's something missing in GW1 to be able to allow that kind of weapon drops: A market system. You can argue all you want about it, but it won't change the truth: GW has no actual market system, and having to register in external sites and spamming for countless hours in an outpost does NOT qualify as one.


So, you are looking at what you think is the root of the problem, but it isn't everything you blamed on inscriptions it's not inscription's fault. It comes either from players, or from some other thing lacking in the game.

But you are not looking for alternatives, you are just complaining about partially losing a bad system that catered to your style of playing, but not of the majority of players, in favor of a proper system that is more consistent with how gear works in GW.



You say "inscriptions suck" I say "We should have inscriptions worldwide, and a weapon upgrade trader to make any needed quick changes in gear before joining PvP matches, or better still, an actual market, and PvE-only properties fixed to the weapon that do not affect PvP, and better customization that is also required for proper gameplay so new items find their way into the market and old ones get removed".

You should see GW as a whole, not just a narrow part of it that fits your view of the game.

Adding the inscription system and reducing the frequency of drops to 5% of pre-inscription norms would have resulted in more or less the same item market.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the inscription system itself. On paper it's a positive change. The problems with it lie in the way it was implemented. The drop rates on attractive weapon skins were simply too high.

There is an obvious reason for this: developer greed. The marketing department was smart enough to figure out that making previously rare skins drop everywhere would drive sales. The result? They debased previously valuable skins to sell copies of Nightfall and EotN.

The good news is that the pattern is predictable, so you can protect yourself when GW2 rolls around. The bad news is that there is absolutely no way the devs will stop doing this, given the revenue model.

I think you're reading way too much into this.

The scope of the developers has always been to make GW as accessible as possible for casual players. That is what drives sales: the idea that anybody can pick up a copy of GW and enjoy it. Even people with no previous RPG experience, or MMO experience, or even gaming experience.

I see inscriptions as simply a step in ensuring that everyone can get genuinely useful weapons.

I don't think that the going of the in-game market affects dev decisions. It makes no sense. It would make sense if players payed a monthly fee and existing players had to be considered. But that's not the case. They got your money. The marketing department doesn't care about you anymore.

They care about people who haven't bought GW yet. And those people will pick up a copy because they heard that GW is fun and you get everything you need without grinding, not because they heard that now axes drop in skin Whatever.

The people in this thread are not representative. They're veteran, hardcore players, with their head too deep in Kamadan and the game to see the forest anymore. They don't understand that the average GW player never even finishes all the campaigns, that GW is just another game they try for a while. Outside of a select few, the vast majority of players are completely oblivious to "the market" and rare skins.

It's neat being a fly on the wall and watching entitled and/or elite players talk about what I do and do not "deserve" in this game.

Regard of what the original intention may or may not have been, this thread really seems come off as a 'qq can't make more money from selling weapons' thing. Title certainly doesn't help.

You're in the same boat as a lot of people here with not understanding the argument presented.

No one is saying that access to "useful" weapons should be limited. Ever since the inception of the game, you could get perfect weapons for dirt cheap from collectors, and I'm pretty certain everyone on both sides of this issue is okay with that. The issue is, those weapons all had the basic skins you get when you first make a PvP-only character immediately after installing the game.

The argument being made is that skins should have more vanity involved in the game. There's hardly any expensive/elite skins anymore that drop in-game, and inscriptions have prevented skins from being expensive anymore, since even the most terribly identified weapon can be made perfect with no effort and very little money.

A result of a lack of demand and the abundance of supply. All removing the inscription system does is simply wreck the supply. Those weapons that are rare get overfarmed, a result of the SC business A.Net seem so eager to protect. Had the rate at which inscribable weapons dropped been decreased dramatically, there would be little change.

And remember that to the average player, a lot of these weapons are expensive. Even spending a mere 30k on a weapon could cut heavily into the gold reserves. A weapon skin above 100k would be a massive investment; they would have to actively save up to be able to buy them, or try their luck farming.

That's precisely the reason why it's called a "rare" or "elite" skin...

Yes, my point is that I think most of us have lost all sense of scale.

Aside from a bit of greed and egos being hurt...I'm not really seeing what the problem is here. There are still many skins that are nice that are only available uniscriptable..heck there is a whole sub-market based around them. There is even demand for the uniscribable verison of ones that do come in inscribable versions. It kinda equates to.....

Na, its rare...

"The Eternal Blade is a rare sword that is only dropped from high-end chests." - http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Eternal_Blade

How many casuals do you think have gotten an eternal blade without trading versus a Blazing Wing Wand?

If every place wasn't so over-farmed, there might be more rarity to drops, would there not? Common armor is named for accessibility, but appears as ubiquitous as the name implies. Even the rarest/most expensive ones are less prestigious than many rare weapons because there's an infinite supply to serve abundances of wealth.

30k? Try 5k. That's the absolute maximum you have to go for to get absolutely perfect items of any kind you want. Anything over that is pure lust and vanity. To each their own, not judging, de gustibus non disputandum, but I just wanted to show the difference of scale.

...
I know how much the weapon crafters charge for a max, fully modded weapon. Clearly that was not what I was referring to. I was referring to such 'vanity' items that to us, are dirt cheap, but to others, may not be so. For example, looking through Guru's sell forums I see r10 Eternal Shields going for 30k.
I thought the quote made the context of my post quite clear.

My opinion has always been that, because everyone has different tastes as to what looks "cool" and "not cool" or "boring", all skins should be available to even the most casual of players. I never really liked the concept of "prestige" items anyway. I, luckily enough, enjoy several of the more common skins (like the broadsword and the platinum wand), but I realize that several people may like echovald shields or jittes the most, and I don't see any reason why those shouldn't be available in inscribable forms. I would love to see celestial staves in inscribable forms myself. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, rather than inscriptions being bad, I really like them and think that all factions and prophesies skins should have inscribable versions.

Note that I am not saying this out of want for an inscribable factions weapon. In fact, I have made a lot of money off of selling weapons found on my chest runs in cantha, and making inscribable versions of factions skins would probably hurt my money-making methods. My opinion that inscriptions are good is based solely on the fact that I think all skins should be available to all players so that any player can choose the skin of weapon that they like most.