Changing the strategy? To nerf or not to nerf.. that is the question.

Well as im sure most of you know, Guild Wars nerfs one area after another to prevent the subtle decline in prices of weapons. I mean, makes sense. Right? If everything is cheap, then no weapon will be worth anything. Its genius and they know what they are doing. Wait... whats that? They just released an area with overpowered weapons and gold and purple drops at every chest? Well... i wonder what they were thinking. That is exactly what went through my mind when i went to the new areas last night. What the hell are they doing? Can anyone explain to me why they would nerf nerf nerf and then give us the biggest rare item area ever? Doesnt make sense...

Agreed. I worked my @$$ off in game to earn money to pay top platinum for the items i wanted. Seems as if Monty Freaking Hall is running the show now. Now every draknar's rushed preteen ascalonian has access to all the stuff the rest of us have worked for. The greens and chests GOT TO FREAKING GO. They have obviously caved to much whining.

umm it makes perfect sense. if just about everyone has access to gold and purple weapons then no one needs to buy them fro traders

therefore the prices will fall through the floor and be where they should have been all this time.

no more 100k for a perfect item.

ever hear of supply and demand? the marker will be flooded with perfect weapons and items therefore the prices will come way down in line with the supply side.

in fact most people will not have to buy anything at all.

perfect in my opinion.

I like a little balance but nooo, the above is not perfect imho. Time will tell, but when that happens the desire to farm, trade or search for anything is gone. What would anyone do in PvE at that point? I do think Anet would fix it before we got to that.

So let me try and summarize... you are upset because a week ago you paid through the nose for an "UBER GODLY GOLD MAX DMG" weapon that now people can find easily in Sorrow's Furnace. Nevermind the FACT that the "uber" weapon you paid for is only marginally more effective than the weapons you can get from collectors. Nevermind also that ANet has been saying for weeks that item acquisition would become much easier after the update. Sorry, I can't feel sorry for you.

The only people who are really upset about this are the farmers who made a killing selling to people who wanted the over priced stuff. I for one think it's outstanding.

the goal of PvE is not to farm my friend it is for people who like to PvE and want to finish the game.

as anet has stated over and over they want to make the game so you do not have to farm constantly to get good items. this is the solution and a great one at that.

seriously think about it. the point of this game is not to see how much you can sell an item for it is to unlock items useful to your character.

if you want a grind or millions of gold WoW might eb a better game for you

Perhaps thats what they want, PvE players to have easy access to items that are of the same quality as the ones freely available to PvP only characters.
Perhaps the reason why loot drops was nerf in the first place was not due to farming, but due to 'Bots'. With the new Key system inplace, it actually reduces the effectiveness of 'bots' so there is no reason not to increase the drops.
Perhaps it will stop the scammers and cut throats from trying to con players out of hard earned plat.
There are plenty of ways to spend and earn gold, spamming towns in not the be all and end all.
Personally I have only ever sold one item to a player, and then it was for 100gp, mainly I give away what i don't need or recycle with salvage kits. Its a game not Wall street.
I play a game, personally I'm not interested in being a GW millionaire as in means absolutely NOTHING.

I found a place where i can farm about 8 ecto/shard drops in about 25-30 mins. Wont post it cause anet may nerf it. Only the henchies and I know it, so ask them dont ask me . After i get a few thousand i may tell though, or maybe im BS'ing this from the start, yeah thats it. never mind this post.

well considering ecto/shards do not drop in the same spot i am pretty sure you are BS'ing

Since you summarized something that I didnt even begin to say anything you said, let ME try to correct you. First of all, i didnt buy an 0037 weapon last week. I dont usually every buy weapons. I have a pretty good weapon for every class in my inventory and thats that. Matter of fact i was thinking about buying a new bow soon, just to mix things up. I will probably benefit from the falling prices.

In response to the things your all not getting though:
1. I didnt say this new area's ridiculous drops were bad. I just said that it was contradictory to everything they have done in the past.
2. If you think prices are going to drop on a gold 5/1 life stealing bow, your right. They are. Problem is the new green items are going to be 100k and be better than your now 40k 5/1 life stealing bow. It solves one problem and makes another. Now your weapon is only good if you get a green one (which is going to be way harder than getting a gold one)
3. Supply and demand has very little to do with this argument. Im going to clear this up RIGHT NOW. Im not saying Sarrows furnace is bad, im saying its CONTRADICTORY. There you go. Understand now? It doesnt make sense that they made this area.

Wow, I swear I was going to make the exact same post. Thanks for saving me the trouble of typing!


The people who fret so much and so needlessly about the gold in the game amuse me.


I've started calling them Rockefellz0rz

what about the people who want fow armor. they have to be millionaires.

1. You can still farm, you can still make money farming, you just have to be smart about it, as for the MASSIVE increase in drops, i was pissed at first too, because i have a character full of stuff i farmed for, i got my fissure armor from it and half the materials for someone elses fissure armor too, but now that crap i have is worthless for the most part, and i will merch it all most likely.

2. Green items will not be worth 100k ever, because they drop from boss all the time, you can farm the bosses and there are many groups doing so, they are common.

3. I think it is the FUNNIEST THING EVER!!!!!!!! when i think about all the jackasses who paid for items/gold on ebay, only to buy items with it that we are all getting now with zero effort, HAHA YOU MORONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then you obviously have no idea why ANet did what they did - they were not trying to make gold items "uber" rare and cost 100+K gold to buy. They did what they did to deal with bots - players runing automated programs which had their character chest farm or farm starting monsters in a region.

Everything they have been working on.. the area nerfs, the chest nerfs, etc has been designed to hinder botter's. Plain and simple.

Now that they have effectively hindered chest botters for the moment, they can increase the drop rates of purple & gold - back to around the levl where they had originally had/wanted the drop rates to be. At least until the botters work out the new chest randomization code and start farming the chest's again... But till that point, we can all enjoy drops the way they were meant to be - with nice and good drops for everyone.. not just the botters, farmer's, etc.

Since green items are dropping like flies right now for most people, I really don't see it happening. The market will be flooded by green items.. which should hopefully prevent stupidly high prices. Who knows.. I expect all the rip-off merchants to ead to Ascalon to try and pawn the green items off to n00b's there...

Yes, green items are harder because of where they are - but there are enough players able to get to and farm and play in the SF area's... that green items should be plentiful.. as for the pricing of them... *shrugs* we'll see.

I refer you back to point 1 - Sorrow's Furnace isn't contridictory at all to what ANet has wanted from the start. They never wanted "gold" items to be uber rediculiously "rare" and over-priced. Why do you think they put the 100K cap on what a character can carry? They did that to ner the stupidly high prices... because they have never wanted an "elite" aspect in the game where only certain players have access to items.. Sure getting gold items is supposed to be a tad trickier than getting white.. but ANet had wanted it so everyone.. be they casual or serious player has the ability to get everything in the game if they wanted them..

Blame the botters for forcing ANet to do what they did, but SF isn't contridictory to ANet's purpose and wants, it's more of a settting things back towards the way they have always wanted things to be.

I see what you mean - it is a bit contradictory, but here's the deal (And sorry if it sounds a bit Fanboi-ish)

Pre-update, the gaming experience seemed to be focused mainly on money and the aquisition of. There was no incentive for people who wanted to play beyond Thunderhead Keep. Just a few mission, an Elite skill or 2 to cap, and not much else. Meanwhile, these players were farming out high-level areas such as the high Shiverpeaks, UW and FoW, and selling any "Uber-rare" finds at LA. The story and the missions became arbitrary. People just seemed to want to go for the farming, not for the end-game.

With this focus on accumulating money & going for the "Ub3r rare" items, the economy has suffered, bots developed and plat sold on Ebay for real money. Going into LA became unbearable cos of traders spamming their "Ub3r Godly", charging 100k+

I don't think this was the game that Anet wanted people to play.

Post-update, with the sudden influx of golds, the introduction of Greens (and also ensuring that the Greens do drop in the same spots), this pretty much nerfs the greedy traders. The key system nerfs the bots, the price reductions eliminate any excuse for players to consider buying Ebay gold, and some of the new quests are only obtainable once Hells Precipice is completed, giving the player a new incentive to complete the game instead of hanging around LA spamming "WTS" all the time.

Yeah great, except some ppl dont have the time to spend days on end farming and acquiring cash to buy that top plat item, now do they?

This gives everyone a reasonable chance at acquiring very good items for a reasonable expenditure, I snagged a nice sup absorp yesterday which gives my char and all my future char's enough gold to get them into nice armor and weapons. I'm sure you object to that but thats too bad, this game isnt only for people who spend days farming.

one word : faction.

Other than that, all I ask is don't penalize those who HAVE worked their butts off for something, then just hand it out valuables to everyone for the simple cost of an outing with henchies. But then again, I no longer consider Greens as valuable. They are even less valuable than collector's items, many of which CAN be modded. I'll pay 500g for a green... tops. Anyone who pays more for one is just too lazy to trudge out to get one of their own. The most desirable stuff will always be gold, green is nothing but ferrari engines in AMC pacer bodies. It'll perform, but so will a 2 dollaho.

One word: PvE.

You play PvP obviously, I dont, most of my friends who play the game do not engage in PvP either and half of them dont even know it exists or how to get into it. Everything is a compromise, you feel 'cheated' but I feel they've adressed an issue for new and/or less frequent players nicely.

What I would suggest is placing level limits on items for PvP for instance, this should apply as well to something like Droknar armors so that lv8's can no longer use them in the lower level arena's. That I would be all for, not to take away the chance of gaining good/great items for people who like the game but dont have the time to work their way to 100K.

What about them indeed? If they are "fretting" "needlessly" about getting it, I would call them Rockeffellzorz. If they are just playing the game and having fun getting FoW armour for themselves, I wouldn't say anything.

It's the very concept of "working your butt off" that I don't understand.. Working? Working is for making real money. If you're not having fun earning money in this game through simply playing it, then maybe it's time to ask yourself what you're up to, people....

Anet has been trying to control the ingame economy and to date it's been nerfing which causes much headache / hassle and backlash. They try a tweak here and tweak there, but it has not taken affect. So what Anet has down is the flood route. Flood the game with items, drops, gold, gold item (has increased), and now a method to reliable get green. That way by saturating the market everything goes down in price. Another way to think of it is this, the found a way to make everyone in game know the equivalent of "collectors" as common knowledge.

IT IS PERFECT, finally these idiots who have been soloing uw and get whatever they want start to complain because there stuff isnt worth much anymore, ive played 800 hours in this game i have a few 15k armor sets but i rarely have more than 20k on me, idiots like 60% of you who complain are pissed at your countless rares from uw are worthless and youve only put about 200 hours into this game. Finally after all the time ive put in to this game im getting some seriously nice stuff and im enjoying guild wars again

I was going to go back and edit my original post in this thread, but then thought better of it, since its best there for context. I simply fear my post was misinterpreted to a degree.

I think no, its not a perfect circumstance to have it such that no one has the need to buy anything. I was commenting on that in particular, and I still fell very strongly that that's the wrong direction. No one would have anything to do. Might as well have made the game simply a PvP with everything unlocked from the start with the ability to modify your builds as you saw fit, because that's all that would be left to do. Flooding the market is no solution. Game would end fast. That wasnt the intent (I must insert imho, since I do not work for Anet of course) with this update, and its also not what has happened.

The nerfs were attempts to simply lessen a bit the stranglehold certain solo builds had on the economy and the flow of rares. Same goes for the various tweakings of farming areas and drop rates. The update maintains the same philosophy: get some uber items into the hands of any build (the green items) while allowing most any player to also have increased odds to find decent things (chests). Same time do not wreck the economy (green items cannot be modded to fit what you need/want exactly and chest farming only brings farming to more play styles - still requires you to search for the mods and max item you seek - or buy them). Materials are unaffected and ectos are still under the ultimate control of the merchants, only theoretically slightly harder to solo/farm.

I dont see where the game is changed greatly unless you were a complete solo-er and player of that resultant market. In that event, some of your bottom line has been removed and shared through the implementation of chests - but there will always be a market for the high end things.

The value of the common rares, such as short bows, long swords, and all the other not so hot stuff, at leats in somepeople's opinions, will drop, as chest seem to spit them out mostly. Allowing average joe and joeina to get their good gold/green/purple weapons without spending insane cash and getting them into the hard core of pve and pvp effectively. This is a decrease in grind, hey look what everyone wanted.

The rarer rares such as the fellblade, magmus shield, ghostly shield/staff, and others of this sort, will stay at a relatively stable somewhat high price. These are your top of the line (so to say) weapons. Not everyone will have them, and as the difficulty of UW has been increased, and fow is still hard for many pugs (if they fix the book that is), the items will not be too flooded into the economy and will remain the rares. I also assume that in SF, deep where few groups have reached new things may also be found now or in the near future, heck I saw a wierd red square shield (smaller than tower) in my party so who knows. So for all those who want something to work for (beyond FoW armour and the currently "dead" crafter of SF, as stated by frog) you have the, once again thanks to solo farming cookie nerfing, rare weapons (where are the staffs and wands that look cool? ) to collect and sell and have a jolly good time.

The only people this hurts are those who, for some odd reason, wish to have millions in a game... to you I say wtf?

Yay! well said. This isn't grind wars its guild wars... get a L20 char, unlock what you want/need, and go do PvP. That's this game.

Or for the PvE side, go through and beat every mission and bonus and do all the quests. Create new characters to do this once that's done and through.

Even once through is a long time. I've spent over a hundred hours. That's a LOT of time for any game, even rpgs.

Your all right. It sounds like fun. I mean.. having a game where you dont have to grind is fun.. Im so tired of people talking about how great it is when games remove some of the 'Grind'. Thats not beneficial at all. When i buy a game i plan on spending 50 dollars on hours and hours worth of a game. If i get a Uber weapon right away, i wont appreciate it as much. I want to work for things. And by work i mean progress. I noticied someone commented on how "work" should be done at work and not in a game.. but im going to go ahead and correct that persons point first of all.

If there is a game where you do not have to "work", i dont want to play it. I play an rpg for hours and hours of working towards something. Fissure armor, a perfect weapon, whatev. Thats why i play a game. So that i can work hard, it will consume my time, and i will have fun coming home from school and work and just be able to escape to something that i can control and understand completely, unlike life. Work is meant to be in video games. Grind is what makes video games fun and im so sad that none of you see it. Is it realy going to be fun when you find the best item in the game and make 10k? I dont think so. I think working towards something, the idea that your going to get something, is the most fun part of playing a game. Instant gratification has been proven to be something of little inportance to people. Instant gratification leaves nothing to be desired. Grind is what makes a game.

Now, as for everyones explination of why Anet is being contradictory..... how long? How long will it be until bots are here too? Are they going to nerf the bots? Get rid of the chests and the keys and that whole system? For real.. how long? Also.. botters. Lets talk about that. If botters are going out and getting the good items and selling them to people all the time, obviously the price was going to go down bigtime. Couldnt they have just left things the way they were in the first place if there sole objective was to give common, everyday players the ability to have the 0037 1337 weapons? I dont think that it makes any sense.. and i think you are all being rather short sighted. I mean I understand that they didnt want to reward botters, but for a long time they just punished normal players like myself. And yeah, maybe its the price i had to play to escape the botters.. but all this entire thing was was two means to the same ends. We could have let the prices fall from people farming (which there is no way they can completely nerf farming no matter what, and it will eventually make its way to sarrows furnace causing a much, much bigger problem), or they could nerf everything that came up to farmers and punish people until they invent a new way to give players who are experienced (i maintain that not everyone can do sarrows furnace.. its not easy) a way to get a ridiculous ammount of good items. Probably 4-5 every time you go there. Seems soooooooo soooo sooo soo soos osososoosdoossosososo ridiculous. It seems like they chose the harder, the more complicated, the more punishing to normal players, the more contradictory, and the more unsafe way to overpopulate the market with uber items. And i dont see how someone can argue that this way (the way where no one could get gold items thruogh normal play of the game for 3 months because of nerfs) is the right way. Thank you for your time.

I find it funny that someone named "Endowed Johnson" is crying about how his "uber loot" is no longer something that he can flaunt around anymore. I guess his Johnson just got deflated.

If there were so many bots farming out there, should not the market have been flooded with top gold items since then?

I agree with the OP, I don't like the chest/green items idea. The Sorrows Funace part is fantastic, love it. But having the prices drop like that isn't my idea of fun. I remember the best part of games like, say, Diablo 2 was to hunt for days and days for the exact things you wanted. Then you finally got it and you were so thrilled and exited and you could then hunt something new. And when you were done hunting the items you needed to make the perfect fire sorceress, you could go and look for the items for a perfect gold sorceress and so on and so on.

That's what I like in games. To strive for something for a long time, get it and do it again. The chests and green items take away the thrill of collecting and searching. Of course, completing the game is something to do. But when you've done that some 5 times it's a little tedious. That's when you want to go back to your main characters and see if you can get new, powerful, good-looking items to play around with. Now everyone has access to the powerful stuff with their very first character. Now my characters with different cool items won't be special anymore. They'll have the same green staff as every character of that profession has, making them indistinctive and boring once they're done with the story of the game.

Of course, Guildwars isn't Diablo 2. But the thing that makes gamers play Diablo 2 again and again and again, is the thousands of different ways to make your character and the amount of work it takes to get to that point.

That's what I miss now that they have the chests and green items. For that reason, I'm going to look past all the green items and find my own gold weapons and upgrade them so they fit my own style, all by myself, and not by killing some easy boss in Sorrows Furnace. That way my characters will be interesting for a longer time and I'll feel so much better when I get something cool.

Over and out.

The golds were being sold, but at hugely inflated prices. How else do you think these ebay'ers get all the gold they give to people? The bot, they farm, they sell Gold weapons for way over-inflated prices to people.. and then sell the gold over ebay to players.

But then again, selling to players takes effort and a human touch. A bot would just run to a chest (or closest monsters), hit it then rinse and repeat till inventory full.. then sell to merchant and just keep on doing it. Makes money decently fast and can always sell gold's to players if the person running the bot is there and see's someone wanting a gold they have... then they sell that gold over ebay. but this is what happens with bot's getting items.. they'd just be sold to a merchant, which is why you never really saw a huge flood of them..

Why? Because it takes time to sell to players, and a bot is all about hitting the same chest/monsters/area's as much as possible as fast as possible to get as much gold as quick as possible. And yes, while they might be able to make more money selling that gold uber leet weapon to a player for 100K.. but it might take 2-3 hours to do so.. in that 2-3 hours they could have run the bot and likely made the same and maybe more gold in that time!

That's really why ANet have been trying to nerf botter's. Because most bots likely don't bother selling to players, they just merchant everything and then sell the gold (which btw is illegal to do). So to try and stop/slow-down the ebay gold seller's.. they have to nerf bots, as I'd say the vast majority of gold seller's on ebay are people/groups running bots to make money.

Because if you read the updates, they nerfed the areas "because we want to add a fun way for you to get items that is coming in the future, you shouldn't have to farm" that's not an exact quote but something like that. They never ever said things were supposed to be valuable.

Tanks for the explanations, Kamatsu.

I actually hear that gold prices on ebay went up a few bucks after sorrow's came out. Anyone know how much it was before? RIght now around 10 USA Dollars for 100k...

Why must everyone speak in superlatives?

It seems that whenever Anet makes an economy-balance change, there are half a dozen threads that pop up full of supergamers that think they're getting robbed...

I don't see how anyone is being penalized, here. Green weapons are hard to get to drop, they're nerfing them! literally! In order that not everyone and his dog can have one.

First you claim that the green weapons have killed the value of gear that you have worked hard for, next you tell us that the greens aren't worth half what a gold item is worth anyway...

Stop speaking in superlatives, and please stop contradicting yourselves. It gets confusing and sometimes I wonder if you supergamers don't just like complaining.

I saw absolutely nothing in this update that in any way cramped my gaming style.

I'm sorry, guys, but as much as you might want to criticize every aspect of every update, I think the game is being improved.

I think you misread what Anet was doing with the nerfs. They wanted to take the edge off of the advantage of the supergamers that were farming, not make item aqcuisition harder for everybody.

I can go and get myself a damn decent, PvP-viable set of weaponry and armor and with my skillset (which took me weeks to build up, but coincided nicely with my progress through the story) I can spend maybe three days working up all the resources to do it.

Or I can go farm for tons of gold, and buy something that's marginally better, with a couple more interesting stats -- but not godly -- and use that in PvP.

Anet fits both styles of gameplay pretty well... and they're striking a mighty fine balance.

Like I and dozens of people have said before, Anet is trying to strike a balance between the supergamers and the casual players. Same concept as with 15k armors -- for your veteran player you can make yourslef look godly, but you'll only be marginally better off than the casual player that stuck with the game and learned the tricks to item aquisition.

I'm not trying to say that your argument isn't valid; you should be rewarded for your hard work. The thing is, if you gain too much of an advantage, you will make it impossible for the casual player to amount to anything in PvP.

PvE? Do quests, get xp, unlock more skills? Experiment with different builds? Just because it's that damn fun?

Please, go back to WoW.