Customizing Weapons ?

I'm not sure why players can not remove the customizations from weapons? I have several green items that I would customize for the extra 20% but I don't because it's resale value is nil when I do.
What is the stragity behind not letting a player remove the customization?
Maybe offer 2 forms of customization
20g to customize, 20%, non-removable
1p to customize, 20%, 1p to remove

think one of the ways to keep the market from being flooded.. the gw econ is crazy though- all you need is a little hustle skill to become rich pretty quickly

Nah, I like the idea of permanent customization

Simple. if you want to use the weapon customise. If you want to re sell then dont. Its just 20% which is allot for pvp but not much in pve if you see what im saying.

simple.

it is a gold sink taking a weapons value out of the economy.

And besides, what would be the point of customization if you could undo it? if it were possible to de-customize anything we might aswell have every single item have the extra 20% right from the start! the 10 gold doesn't realy affect anything balance or goldsink-like there, it's just symbolic

I like the idea of customizing, but I just wish the weapon was customized for your entire account and not just one char. It's not like you can still try and sell it to another player, but it allow for a little more flexibility with your various chars.

I only customize collector's weapon, which is not much value to the market anyway, but they are as good as some gold/green weapons.

Yea, but... 10g isn't much of a Gold sink.

I completely and utterly fail to see the point of customization. It serves the opposite purpose that people think it does. By removing a (usually high end) item from the market, the value of similar, but uncustomized items GOES UP. Simple supply and demand.

ArenaNet has said repeatedly that they are trying to lower the cost of high end items so more people can obtain them.

it gives u +20% damage? and i didnt know this?

top weapon which cost 250k gold clean

add 2 top max price mods . total amount of gold value taken out of CIRCULATION is a bit more than the 10 gold.

if other vanity items go up and are customized (or not) more gold is tied up in a single object.

And that helps Monks, Necros, Elementalists, and Mesmers how?

Well Said QFT

Ummm, no. That would ONLY be true if you paid your money to an NPC! You almost certainly paid your money to another player.

The money is STILL in circulation.

The only thing that decreases is the item-count in the market (and 10g)

Would help my 55 monk a little..... since they do move slow..

The goldsink is the fact that you can no longer resell the item, if you bought the item for x amount that amount is no longer recoverable by you, if it was a find then the weapon will not come on the market so to speak.

The 10gp is irrelevant in this, its the resale value of the item that makes it a gold sink.

And your point is? No, really. I have heard this arguement before and it simply makes no sense. We all agree that the 10g is negligible. So why NOT give every weapon a 20% damage bonus. That would change.....nothing.

I can't believe people are arguing about this. Customization is BAD for the game because:

1) One less (high-end) item in circulation, RAISING the cost of remaining items of same type.

2) NOT a gold sink. Only 10g is removed, original item cost is still in circulation.

3) Only serves Warriors and Rangers (and soon Asasains)



Suggestions for improvement:

1) Allow items to be re-customized at significant cost. This eliminates the item-sink and creates a good gold-sink.

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.

3) Provide a different bonus for caster items. Essentially give casters a reason to customize.

without customization, the market would be flooded with secondhand 15^50 fellblades and dragonswords and everything, and they wouldnt be anything special anymore
i customize all weapons that i use except my HoD swords or monk weapons because otherwise, i might as well use a random white customized weapon, because it will do more damage than any uncustomized green weapon.

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 think the choice to customise weapons is great, but it should remain a choice rather being forced into a neccessity to keep up with the game. 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...?

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.

it could have been removed or modified at any time from months before release to yesterday but it is not only still here it is unchanged.

i will go by the very carefully considered opinion of a large group of developers over an opinion of i dont want this.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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!

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...

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.

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.

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

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.