56 replies to this topic

[Specialz]

Ardeni, on 17 October 2012 - 04:25 PM, said:

There is no reason to extend the luck element to the game, though. I can't see the reasons why a recipe for the pre-cursor that would require a lot materials couldn't be something that controls the amount of both pre-cursors and legendaries. The fact is that eventually a lot of people will have the legendaries whether there is a luck element or not. I bet that dozens of pre-cursors are created every day and eventually it will lead to legendaries being something that is hard to achieve, but not that uncommon (after a couple of years perhaps).

This happens in every game, though. Items that are rare and very desirable in launch get more and more common as the time passes. It is unavoidable unless the developers set a specific limit on the amount of those items (such as there can never be more than 1000 of them) or that they are impossible to create after a certain time limit, which leads to a fixed amount of the items as well.

To me the LUCK act like a gate around the legendary. All of the other mats just requires lots of time. So with RNG it becomes a question of "Do I want to actively go after legendary and waste a lot of money attempting the precursor? or Do I want to blow 300g on a precursor? That automatically cuts the amount of people that will have legendaries in the near future by a significant amount (what I mean is RNG act like a mental ro* to the majority of players), which helps to solidify their place as indeed legendary (admittedly arenanet could have use a different name than legendary since a lot of people seem to take the literal definition of the word "legendary").

With a recipe EVERYBODY will be able to make it which just makes legendary no more special than exotic , the essence of legendary is to limit the amount of people that have it, to make the owner standout (whether good or bad those are irrelevant). The other problem with having a set recipe, well it destroys the purpose of mystic forge which act as a item sink. As a result of the very random nature of the mystic forge, well it helps to reduce the rate money comes into the system  (ofc this is only secondary).  

Going back to my main point, having RNG reduces the rate of legendary weapons being introduced in the system which inturn helps solidify their presence as legendary.

Edited by Specialz, 17 October 2012 - 04:47 PM.

[Lastchime]

Then, in a year when they introduce "artifacts" we get our legendary precursors for 20G a pop.

[Opollo]

Ardeni, on 17 October 2012 - 02:22 PM, said:

There are many definitions for a casual player. Yours is very different to mine.

There really isn't "different" definitions of what a casual player is.

It's people making up their own definition of what "casual" means.

Most of the people getting legendary weapons now...I am 99.9% sure would not fall under "casual".

[Specialz]

Lastchime, on 17 October 2012 - 05:16 PM, said:

Then, in a year when they introduce "artifacts" we get our legendary precursors for 20G a pop.

doubt it, obsidian armor even after 7 years is still rare as a rare.

[Gilles VI]

Specialz, on 17 October 2012 - 06:57 PM, said:

doubt it, obsidian armor even after 7 years is still rare as a rare.

What are these "artifacts"?

[Ardeni]

Specialz, on 17 October 2012 - 04:45 PM, said:

To me the LUCK act like a gate around the legendary. All of the other mats just requires lots of time. So with RNG it becomes a question of "Do I want to actively go after legendary and waste a lot of money attempting the precursor? or Do I want to blow 300g on a precursor? That automatically cuts the amount of people that will have legendaries in the near future by a significant amount (what I mean is RNG act like a mental ro* to the majority of players), which helps to solidify their place as indeed legendary (admittedly arenanet could have use a different name than legendary since a lot of people seem to take the literal definition of the word "legendary").

With a recipe EVERYBODY will be able to make it which just makes legendary no more special than exotic , the essence of legendary is to limit the amount of people that have it, to make the owner standout (whether good or bad those are irrelevant). The other problem with having a set recipe, well it destroys the purpose of mystic forge which act as a item sink. As a result of the very random nature of the mystic forge, well it helps to reduce the rate money comes into the system  (ofc this is only secondary).  

Going back to my main point, having RNG reduces the rate of legendary weapons being introduced in the system which inturn helps solidify their presence as legendary.

You really don't convince me about the RNG making the legendaries any more or less epic than they are. I simply can't see why blowing 300g to RNG wouldn't "automatically cut" just as many people off from trying to get the item as blowing a fixed amount of 600g to an npc. Even with the RNG, you are farming gold, which can be used for various things. People can decide to use their gold on the legendary weapon or then for something else with or without a recipe for the pre-cursors. Eventually the pre-cursor price will most likely plateau and farming the gold will be possible for anyone who has time in any case.

In case you have some reasoning behind your main point, I'd be glad to hear it, since so far you really haven't explained why RNG reduces the rate of legendaries being introduced to the system more effectively than insane material requirements on the recipe. I am not asking for insane requirements. The process doesn't need to be harder than now and heck, the RNG doesn't even have to be removed since some people want to use it. All I want is another option which doesn't require gambling.

Opollo, on 17 October 2012 - 06:33 PM, said:

There really isn't "different" definitions of what a casual player is.

It's people making up their own definition of what "casual" means.

Which one of these two is wrong?

1) Casual player = a player who plays the game little here and there, not using too many hours to play the game due to whatever irl reasons or just due to wanting to do other things as well.

2) Casual player = a player who plays the game a lot, but who plays casually not caring much about what he does while just having fun.

Or perhaps you would enlighten me with the one and only definition for "casual player"?

[Lastchime]

Gilles VI, on 17 October 2012 - 07:04 PM, said:

What are these "artifacts"?

Nothing, pure tongue in cheek speculation, call it waffle tier or pink items or whatever crops up next when expansions hit.

[Gilles VI]

Lastchime, on 17 October 2012 - 07:20 PM, said:

Nothing, pure tongue in cheek speculation, call it waffle tier or pink items or whatever crops up next when expansions hit.

Oh ok

[Specialz]

Lastchime, on 17 October 2012 - 07:20 PM, said:

Nothing, pure tongue in cheek speculation, call it waffle tier or pink items or whatever crops up next when expansions hit.

They will always be new legendary, unlike WoW what makes them legendary are NOT the stats is the skin. So unless they decide to make it super ez having new legendaries makes no difference except for a much bigger selection

Edited by Specialz, 17 October 2012 - 08:56 PM.

[Lastchime]

Specialz, on 17 October 2012 - 08:53 PM, said:

They will always be new legendary, unlike WoW what makes them legendary are NOT the stats is the skin. So unless they decide to make it super ez having new legendaries makes no difference except for a much bigger selection

  Yeah was thinking along the lines of the "greens" in gw1 that were introduced with the first expansion, Sorrow's Furnace about 4 months after the release of prophecies.

  Where they weren't necessarily better, they just had different stat prioritization and skins.

[Specialz]

Ardeni, on 17 October 2012 - 07:06 PM, said:

You really don't convince me about the RNG making the legendaries any more or less epic than they are. I simply can't see why blowing 300g to RNG wouldn't "automatically cut" just as many people off from trying to get the item as blowing a fixed amount of 600g to an npc.

I am not really trying to you convince, one of the things I learned a long time ago is that when ppl make up their minds, it nearly impossible to change it. If you agree with me cool, if you don't thats cool either.

Think about it like this, personally one of the reason I dont gamble in real life is because I know there is a possibility for me to blow my money and not get anything in return. Now, the fact that it is RNG will make people question whether they want to dump a bunch of money into the MF or want to spend 300g. In most cases those 2 things present a wall for a significant amount of players.

As of right now not a lot of ppl have 300g lying around to spend squarely on the precursor AND at the same time not a lot of players are willing to risking gamble on the MF get a precursor in other to avoid playing 300g, those 2 things significantly remove the potential amount of players that will have a legendary thereby keeping some legendary status.

If you have a set recipe it become a matter of time for everybody to have it. With RNG involve a lot of players will question whether they want to piss away a lot of money on the precursor and still have nothing to show for.

Lastchime, on 17 October 2012 - 09:02 PM, said:

  Yeah was thinking along the lines of the "greens" in gw1 that were introduced with the first expansion, Sorrow's Furnace about 4 months after the release of prophecies.

  Where they weren't necessarily better, they just had different stat prioritization and skins.

I suspect they might be better looking legendaries down the line, so maybe something similar will happen. But it wont be because of stats, as we all know.

[Little Bear]

In the words of Penn & Teller - "Luck is probability taken personally. It is the excitement of bad math."

[n00854180t]

I find the idea that anyone thinks throwing thousands of weapons into the Mystic Forge is "hard" fairly laughable. Tedious, annoying, poorly designed? Sure. Hard? Not even a little.

Also, I'm not sure why people think that the precursors themselves have to be "legendary" (by which people seem to mean, extremely irritating and unfun to acquire) despite the immense grind required for the rest of the components. The precursors being slightly less retarded to acquire wouldn't affect the rest of the legendary grind required *at all*.

Edited by n00854180t, 17 October 2012 - 11:38 PM.

[Ardeni]

Specialz, on 17 October 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

Think about it like this, personally one of the reason I dont gamble in real life is because I know there is a possibility for me to blow my money and not get anything in return. Now, the fact that it is RNG will make people question whether they want to dump a bunch of money into the MF or want to spend 300g. In most cases those 2 things present a wall for a significant amount of players.

As of right now not a lot of ppl have 300g lying around to spend squarely on the precursor AND at the same time not a lot of players are willing to risking gamble on the MF get a precursor in other to avoid playing 300g, those 2 things significantly remove the potential amount of players that will have a legendary thereby keeping some legendary status.

If you have a set recipe it become a matter of time for everybody to have it. With RNG involve a lot of players will question whether they want to piss away a lot of money on the precursor and still have nothing to show for.

I guess that we just have to agree that we disagree. Surely not a lot of people have 300g now, but as I said before, even with the RNG there will be more and more pre-cursors around every day. There are dozens of each pre-cursor in the TP even now (at least when I last checked). If GW2 follows the common MMO trend where the amount of players doesn't increase indefinitely, these weapons will still be more and more common. In my opinion a higher price than the current ~300g which would guarentee the weapon for you would be just as (if nor more) effective with reducing the amount of pre-cursors made. I don't mind farming for something that I want but I certainly mind farming for an unknown period of time to get an unknown amount of gold.

n00854180t, on 17 October 2012 - 11:35 PM, said:

I find the idea that anyone thinks throwing thousands of weapons into the Mystic Forge is "hard" fairly laughable. Tedious, annoying, poorly designed? Sure. Hard? Not even a little.

Also, I'm not sure why people think that the precursors themselves have to be "legendary" (by which people seem to mean, extremely irritating and unfun to acquire) despite the immense grind required for the rest of the components. The precursors being slightly less retarded to acquire wouldn't affect the rest of the legendary grind required *at all*.

I agree with you. It is not hard to throw the exotics to the forge, but then again farming in Orr for karma and gold isn't hard either. Most of the things that you need for the legendary are not hard to get but rather time consuming to get. The problem with the pre-cursors, for me, is that you don't know how much you need to farm. You could get it on 1st attempt or then on 5000th attempt. It is not fair, not reasonable and not needed.

I do agree that the pre-cursors wouldn't have to be legendary themselves. In fact I don't really think that they should be harder to acquire than other components of the legendary weapon, but at the moment it seems that the pre-cursors are, on average, the most time consuming part of a legendary weapon to get. This is at least for some of us. Obviously since it is the only 100% tradeable part of the legendaries, there are people who will just buy it using the gems=>gold transfer, which makes it the easiest part of the legendary hunt for them.

Edit: deleted a line that I accidentially repeated.

Edited by Ardeni, 19 October 2012 - 06:13 AM.

[n00854180t]

Ardeni, on 18 October 2012 - 04:10 AM, said:

I agree with you. It is not hard to throw the exotics to the forge, but then again farming in Orr for karma and gold isn't hard either. Most of the things that you need for the legendary are not hard to get but rather time consuming to get. The problem with the pre-cursors, for me, is that you don't know how much you need to farm. You could get it on 1st attempt or then on 5000th attempt. It is not fair, not reasonable and not needed.

I do agree that the pre-cursors wouldn't have to be legendary themselves. In fact I don't really think that they should be harder to acquire than other components of the legendary weapon, but at the moment it seems that the pre-cursors are, on average, the most time consuming part of a legendary weapon to get. This is at least for some of us. Obviously since it is the only 100% tradeable part of the legendaries, there are people who will just buy it using the gems=>gold transfer, which makes it the easiest part of the legendary hunt for them.

Yeah that's exactly my problem with it. If you are even remotely unlucky with the forge, you might end up spending hundreds or thousands of times more than someone that got lucky. And every time you attempt it and don't come out with anything, you're suddenly set back to square one, potential months of grinding wasted, as well as requiring you to go back and start grinding for another couple of months solely to *attempt* it again, and you could easily come up with nothing to show for that either.

I think the idea of an intermediary item you could collect a bunch of in order to reliably craft the precursors would be fine. It'd still be possible to "hit the jackpot", but people that don't wouldn't be getting completely screwed over and have to constantly restart at zero progress.

The constantly moving goal-post nature of it all is terribly designed and the opposite of fun.

[Specialz]

Ardeni, on 18 October 2012 - 04:10 AM, said:

I guess that we just have to agree that we disagree. Surely not a lot of people have 300g now, but as I said before, even with the RNG there will be more and more pre-cursors around every day. There are dozens of each pre-cursor in the TP even now (at least when I last checked). If GW2 follows the common MMO trend where the amount of players doesn't increase indefinitely, these weapons will still be more and more common. In my opinion a higher price than the current ~300g which would guarentee the weapon for you would be just as (if nor more) effective with reducing the amount of pre-cursors made. I don't mind farming for something that I want but I certainly mind farming for an unknown period of time to get an unknown amount of gold. I guess that we should just agree that we disagree at this point.

First thing you need to know is MMO generally are not really fair by virtue of being shared by multiple players. The are some people that have all the time in the world to farm all day long, so fairness isn't something I personally expect for an MMO. Guild wars 2 is fairly fair (say that 3 times) in the respect that you can achieve parity in stats with "random no lifer X" fairly quickly to the point well it is downright insignificant time (compared to WoW).

If you set price that is too low legendaries become nothing more than overpriced exotics, if you set the price too high the TP version will adjust to match the price of the NPCs. The way I see legendaries, they are meant to be something that not everyone can achieve, if you are not motivated to get legendaries by dealing with the Random aspect of it then don't work on the legendary.  There is a reason why they have multiple mystic forge weapons recipe, if you can't deal with RNG you probably shouldn't go for it.

TL;DR if you cant deal with RNG then maybe you should consider working instead for one of those other mystic forge weapons. Work within your means. Don't go for a Lamborghini, if a Lexus is closer to your budget.

Edited by Specialz, 18 October 2012 - 06:02 PM.

[n00854180t]

Are we really going to fall back on the same tired straw man argument people keep parading out in threads about this (the whole "You shouldn't get a precursor for no effort" garbage)? I mean, really? No one is even arguing that, I'm not sure why the Straw Man Brigade has to constantly show up and trot out their favorite pet straw man argument all the damned time.

Edit: Not to mention that if people claiming "You shouldn't get a precursor for no effort" *truly* thought that, they'd be just as keen to fix the current Mystic Forge system, since it allows a small amount of players to do precisely that: get a precursor on their first try for no effort, while everyone else may expend *thousands* of combines without getting anything.

Honestly at this point I think the Straw Man Brigade must consist solely of people that cheated themselves precursors with the Godskull exploit, or got one on their first try and just want to make sure no one else can ever acquire one so they can feel like special little snowflakes.

Edited by n00854180t, 18 October 2012 - 08:44 PM.

[Specialz]

n00854180t, on 18 October 2012 - 06:55 PM, said:

snip

Whether you agree with my argument or not is irrelevant nor do I really care. But I do think the RNG should stay, as a means to cut the amount of people that can get it.

THE END.

[n00854180t]

LOL @ "the end". Yes, because your straw man argument should obviously end this conversation. As we all know, logical fallacies are the best arguments to conclude discussions because they're so objectively correct (that's sarcasm, by the way, since by definition using a logical fallacy makes you *wrong*, objectively).

No one ever claimed precursors should be obtained for zero effort. Arguing against that position (that you fabricated) is a straw man argument. And in fact, if you actually thought that, you'd be against the current Mystic Forge setup since, as I mentioned, some players get precursors for no effort, while everyone else gets screwed over.

Also, precursors != legendaries, so let's stop acting like they are. Making the legendary takes a TON of work above and beyond getting the precursor, so there's zero reason to act like the precursor should be so impossible to attain that you're sitting 2-3 legendaries worth of materials before you ever see one. Making the precursor not moronic to obtain (but still plenty rare, just not full retard, like it is now, where some players put in zero effort and get precursors, and others are throwing away hundreds and thousands of gold in the Mystic Forge with nothing to show for it) by either an intermediary item or some fixed recipe would not diminish, AT ALL, the rest of the stuff required to get a legendary. So let's just stop acting like that's even remotely true, it's disingenuous and absurd.

It's a retarded system, poorly designed and anti-fun, and no amount of spewing forth vapid straw men will change that.

Edited by n00854180t, 18 October 2012 - 09:43 PM.

[Specialz]

n00854180t, on 18 October 2012 - 09:36 PM, said:

snip

Just because you dont like me argument doesnt make it a strawman.

Also "THE END" was my about me bowing out since I dont really care either ways and not about you. But since you think it was directed at you, lets go with that.

Edited by Specialz, 18 October 2012 - 09:45 PM.

[n00854180t]

No, me not liking it doesn't make it a straw man. You making up a position that doesn't exist (i.e., the whole idea that anyone ever said precursors should be given out for nothing is false), however, does. Just because you don't understand how a straw man argument works and why it's objectively wrong doesn't mean you can't make one, or that it's any less wrong.

Edited by n00854180t, 18 October 2012 - 10:04 PM.

[Red_Falcon]

My opinion about luck is that to a degree it makes things fun, or terribly bad.
RNG is fun when you loot an Abyss Dye (my gf did just 1 hour ago, I'm so jelly), or when you kill a boss for chance to get great loot.
I feel there needs to be more luck-based chance to get awesome in dungeons.
For instance a 0.01% for a boss to drop his named exotic weapon, and perhaps a 1% for him to drop a rare version with max damage but non-max stats.

RNG in crafting isn't fun at all.
If RNG is there to avoid players creating too many things then triplicate the mat requirement rather than put RNG fails.

RNG in combat is even less fun, but luckily there is almost nothing of this in GW2 outside criticals.

[Minami Kaori]

As an extremely unlucky person in GW1 and GW2, I feel very often like I'm swimming against the current.

In GW1 for example, I had 10 characters created. Every year, I would get the lowest minis as birthday gifts. For every single character.
I was always the one who had a purple item drop from a chest, while everyone else in my party got a gold. Etc.

In GW2, here is my latest run of "luck": I salvaged 20 rare items with a master kit. I have received exactly zero ectos. What a great feeling, hm?

But that's just one of the many things that's been making me feel like ArenaNet has put a mark on my account "for teh lulz", and set my luck specifically to zero.

EDIT: I have a friend with whom I've been playing GW with for the past ~6 years now. Yesterday she had a component for a legendary weapon drop for her from a regular zombie guy, which she sold for 160 gold.
I am very happy for her since is a very good friend of mine, and a super nice girl! But after having 3 days of the most horrible luck with everything from drops to kills to the salvage debacle, I didn't feel as happy for her as I could have, had I been having a normal time in the game.

*sigh*

Edited by Minami Kaori, 19 October 2012 - 03:22 AM.

[Ardeni]

Specialz, on 18 October 2012 - 05:59 PM, said:

First thing you need to know is MMO generally are not really fair by virtue of being shared by multiple players. The are some people that have all the time in the world to farm all day long, so fairness isn't something I personally expect for an MMO. Guild wars 2 is fairly fair (say that 3 times) in the respect that you can achieve parity in stats with "random no lifer X" fairly quickly to the point well it is downright insignificant time (compared to WoW).

If you set price that is too low legendaries become nothing more than overpriced exotics, if you set the price too high the TP version will adjust to match the price of the NPCs. The way I see legendaries, they are meant to be something that not everyone can achieve, if you are not motivated to get legendaries by dealing with the Random aspect of it then don't work on the legendary.  There is a reason why they have multiple mystic forge weapons recipe, if you can't deal with RNG you probably shouldn't go for it.

TL;DR if you cant deal with RNG then maybe you should consider working instead for one of those other mystic forge weapons. Work within your means. Don't go for a Lamborghini, if a Lexus is closer to your budget.

I won't comment on the things which I've already commented on, but I think you really missed the point of this thread. The thing is not that I don't have time or means to create the legendary weapon. Even with the current system I could estimate that I'm getting it sometime next summer and in fact I've already collected about 15% of the items/money/karma/badges/tokens needed for the weapon all by myself. The point is neither about fairness alone. It is simply about the RNG system being useless in this case, in my opinion, since I think that adding a recipe which would be hard enough would have the same effect as the RNG system.

[ArcViper]

I'm in a small guild of several not-so-casual players.  Of the 5 people or so who I have been farming with for legendaries, all of them have their precursor.  Some got lucky and looted one, some got one from gambling a little in the Mystic Forge.  One of them actually got both Dusk and Dawn from the forge and ended up with 5g profit.  One of them just made Sunrise yesterday.  Needless to say, I'm jealous of all of them.  It's incredibly annoying to know that they'll have their legendaries soon because they got on the really good side of the RNG, while I'm still looking at needing an extra 300g+ for my precursor.

What gets me is that the people who started farming and playing the TP early earned their fortunes a lot easier as well.  Then there was the godskull recipe giving out lots of precursors.  With the rising costs of precursors and the introduction of DR, it takes even longer to get your legendary than it did to begin with.  The whole system just kind of stinks tbh.  Legendaries as they are now are for the lucky.  Obviously you need to take the time to farm your karma and badges, etc. as well, but by far the biggest barrier of entry is the luck factor.  Either that or you made a fortune via TP.  Or you spend thousands of dollars buying gems.

[Screek]

I might be side tracked here but ...

1. Some players dislike chance on getting X thing, so it gets removed and then you "just" have to grind for it
2. Some players dislike the grind, so it gets reduced to allmost no grind....
3. Some players want some long therm goals to obtain.... so the grind is getting longer and the chance is brought back...
4. Repeat 1-4

Edited by Screek, 19 October 2012 - 08:26 AM.

[Ardeni]

Screek, on 19 October 2012 - 08:25 AM, said:

I might be side tracked here but ...

1. Some players dislike chance on getting X thing, so it gets removed and then you "just" have to grind for it
2. Some players dislike the grind, so it gets reduced to allmost no grind....
3. Some players want some long therm goals to obtain.... so the grind is getting longer and the chance is brought back...
4. Repeat 1-4

You're indeed side tracked. This thread is not a whine about legendaries (or anything else in the game) being too hard to obtain/achieve, but rather about the gambling being absolutely required for legendary weapon crafts. I have even said that I don't mind if the current system stays if a recipe for pre-cursors and another option for mystic clovers (why the heck do you need them for every single weapon anyways?) is introduced.