275 replies to this topic

[Norn Osprey]

Rhubarb Pie, on 22 November 2012 - 01:42 AM, said:

Paying for travel and repairing armor sucks.

I hope people don't reply to this with ways around these charges like the travel to Lion's Arch through the mists trick

Free - Travel to Lion's Arch through the Mists
Free - Travel to/from EbonHawke - Divinity's Reach
Free - Travel to/from Ft. Trinity - Lion's Arch (Whispers enclave)
Free - Travel to/from Lion's Arch - racial capitols

From these areas, you can then save a couple silver to the waypoint nearest your destination.

Unless you play a lot in W v W, you shouldn't be dying often enough to worry about repair costs.

[Johny Bravo]

I don't mind the waypoint charges or the armor repairs as I think those are reasonable expectations.  What would be nice is to allow travel to and from 1 major WP, we can call it an outpost, in each area to be free.  This would serve 2 purposes, the first is you could freely join your party to participate in a dungeon.  The second is that in a large event where you might get 1-shotted from a champion you can either go to the closest waypoint for a fee or to the zone "outpost" for free.  This would both retain some of the free map travel we all enjoyed in GW while incorporating the convenient local waypoints for a charge that was introduced in GW2.

As for armor repairs it would be cool if you could take out a daily/weekly/monthly armor repair contract for a fee.  I think this would take a bite out of the people who get annoyed when you go through 20s of repairs in a dungeon.  Maybe this could be a guild upgrade

[draxynnic]

Incorrect. The third guy has $64 of your money. The second guy's bank has $16 of your money, while your bank has $20 of your money. That's where the money is, and it comes to a total of $100.

Now, the bank does have an obligation (or, if you prefer, a debt) to you of $100, but in this simple system, if you walked up to the bank tomorrow and asked for it all out at once, they wouldn't be able to give it to you without borrowing the $80 shortfall from someone else. The debts and obligations may total quite a bit more than the actual money, but there is a cap on the amount of money in the economy. If you know the right people to ask, you can probably find out just how many $US (or whatever currency you choose) are in the economy at any one time. In practice, under normal conditions banks have a large enough reserve that they're unlikely to need to, but in situations where a lot of debts have been defaulted on or lots of people come looking to withdraw their money, if it's happening to other banks as well so they can't loan money out, then the bank gets in trouble.

This is why banks needed bailouts in the GFC, and this is why people lost their savings when the banks closed their doors during the Great Depression. Being a bank is not a license to create money, regardless of whether you regard money as a real thing or an abstract representation of a promise. The purpose of a bank is to allow people who need money to access the savings of others, and for people who have money to have a reasonably safe and liquid if low-return place to invest it.

When it comes to the populations of cities... they're a representative sample. While the GW2 cities are certainly more realistic than GW1 cities were, do you really think what we see is actually an accurate representation of the populations of each area? If someone was to count up all the citizens of Divinity's Reach, you'd come to maybe a few hundred... but if you asked Ree or Jeff what the population of Divinity's Reach was, they'd probably give you an answer in the thousands.Thing is, neither the servers nor our computers would be able to handle that many people (think of the culling you get from big events, and imagine what there'd be with a few hundred NPCs in a busy marketplace... not just on the map somewhere, but in the area of your screen).

Additionally, lore-wise, there aren't actually as many heroes as there are PCs. While canonically every personal storyline happens, lorewise they can only happen once... so there is a total of 15 heroes. Total. Three of each race. From the viewpoint of your personal story, unless they happen to be one of the people you do Arah with, the PCs you meet are not the great hero that's going to/has already destroyed Zhaitan (even if they are from their perspective)... they're standing in for the hundreds of not thousands of Seraph/Valiant/charr/Pact soldiers that lorewise would be taking part in those events beside you.

If you took what you see literally and run the numbers for how many players per server compared to how many NPCs, you'd probably come to a figure where every second person who isn't an enemy mob has killed Zhaitan or is destined to kill Zhaitan. That doesn't sound very realistic now, does it?

[Life_Infusion]

I hate the repair costs and travel costs. They're managable at lower levels but at higher levels they match or exceed the silver you get from DEs/hearts.

The repair costs dissuade people from WvW because you WILL die a LOT more than PvEing (unless you are REALLY bad at PvE...).

[Dasryn]

Norn Osprey, on 29 November 2012 - 06:11 PM, said:

Unless you play a lot in W v W, you shouldn't be dying often enough to worry about repair costs.

wait, you have to pay for repair costs in WvW?!

oh man. . . this is not good news.

[Noob On Steroid]

I understand the fact that people don't like the repair cost in WvW. I'd rather see WvW deaths be the same as environmental deaths (in that they cause no armor damage). IN PvE, it doesn't bother me that much. I die maybe once or twice in a dungeon, but I rarely die in the open world at all.

The travel costs are an annoyance. They stop you from playing effectively because at least I want to travel cheap. Instead of porting to the desired waypoint straight away, I port to PvP, then LA, then closest capital, then waypoint. Takes a lot of (loading) time, so I def wouldn't mind seeing paid travel vanish from Tyria.

[raspberry jam]

draxynnic, on 29 November 2012 - 10:55 PM, said:

Incorrect. The third guy has $64 of your money. The second guy's bank has $16 of your money, while your bank has $20 of your money. That's where the money is, and it comes to a total of $100.

Now, the bank does have an obligation (or, if you prefer, a debt) to you of $100, but in this simple system, if you walked up to the bank tomorrow and asked for it all out at once, they wouldn't be able to give it to you without borrowing the $80 shortfall from someone else. The debts and obligations may total quite a bit more than the actual money, but there is a cap on the amount of money in the economy. If you know the right people to ask, you can probably find out just how many $US (or whatever currency you choose) are in the economy at any one time. In practice, under normal conditions banks have a large enough reserve that they're unlikely to need to, but in situations where a lot of debts have been defaulted on or lots of people come looking to withdraw their money, if it's happening to other banks as well so they can't loan money out, then the bank gets in trouble.

This is why banks needed bailouts in the GFC, and this is why people lost their savings when the banks closed their doors during the Great Depression. Being a bank is not a license to create money, regardless of whether you regard money as a real thing or an abstract representation of a promise. The purpose of a bank is to allow people who need money to access the savings of others, and for people who have money to have a reasonably safe and liquid if low-return place to invest it.

When it comes to the populations of cities... they're a representative sample. While the GW2 cities are certainly more realistic than GW1 cities were, do you really think what we see is actually an accurate representation of the populations of each area? If someone was to count up all the citizens of Divinity's Reach, you'd come to maybe a few hundred... but if you asked Ree or Jeff what the population of Divinity's Reach was, they'd probably give you an answer in the thousands.Thing is, neither the servers nor our computers would be able to handle that many people (think of the culling you get from big events, and imagine what there'd be with a few hundred NPCs in a busy marketplace... not just on the map somewhere, but in the area of your screen).

Additionally, lore-wise, there aren't actually as many heroes as there are PCs. While canonically every personal storyline happens, lorewise they can only happen once... so there is a total of 15 heroes. Total. Three of each race. From the viewpoint of your personal story, unless they happen to be one of the people you do Arah with, the PCs you meet are not the great hero that's going to/has already destroyed Zhaitan (even if they are from their perspective)... they're standing in for the hundreds of not thousands of Seraph/Valiant/charr/Pact soldiers that lorewise would be taking part in those events beside you.

If you took what you see literally and run the numbers for how many players per server compared to how many NPCs, you'd probably come to a figure where every second person who isn't an enemy mob has killed Zhaitan or is destined to kill Zhaitan. That doesn't sound very realistic now, does it?

No. Look, this is the thing that makes people freak out, so don't worry about it, but you are actually wrong. You (or rather, the bank, but ya) have $100. The next guy (his bank) have $80. He has $16 of the currency, the physical representation of money, that you earned, but that doesn't mean anything because money is not tangible. That the bank cannot give you a $100 note if you'd go there and demand $100 right then and there doesn't mean that the money isn't yours (that is handled through another mechanism). The bank cannot pay you because banks are not allowed to create currency. They are allowed to create money by raising debts, as long as a certain amount of currency is held in reserve.

Consider where money gets its worth from. Remember the example of you buying a can of Coke? You pick up a Coke, incur a debt, and then use the $1 note to pay with. The $1 represents money because you can use it for paying off debts. The belief that the merchant can use the money for something else (such as buying more Coke cans from the distributor of such) is the one thing that makes him accept such a meaningless thing as a piece of paper as payment for the beverage (of course the belief is ensured because the $1 is legal tender, which means that it cannot be refused as payment for debts).

Of course there is a cap on the amount of money. That's what the reserve rate is for. If you always are required to have X% currency in reserve, there is automatically a cap regardless of how many loans there are, because the amount of currency is limited. Do the math, you'll see that it's true.

You are indeed correct that a million people killing the same dragon as I killed sounds not reasonable. How would that make a point that the merchant is a good simulation? That just makes it worse lol. Also you didn't even address the fact that even though there are definitely richer individuals than any PC in the game world, none of them ever goes to the TP. Even if you consider the PCs as stand-ins, that just means that the TP is a good simulation, not that the merchant is. The cut between the "real" economy and the never-changing, money-spawning garbage disposer is too sharp no matter how you tilt things.

[draxynnic]

I'm quite familiar with the concept of limiting sums of geometric series. In fact, without doing any maths at all I'd estimate the limit to be 500.

However, while money is an abstract that only has value because we collectively agree it does, a bank loaning out money is not creating it. It comes out of the money they're keeping for other people, and the interest they pay to the people that have accounts is the reward for being allowed to use their money for loans. It's why fixed-term deposits get better interest - because the bank gets the advantage of those deposits being more secure from the bank's perspective (they know when it's going to come due, and don't have to worry about all the money in fixed-term deposits being removed at once). Under normal conditions, the difference is pretty abstract because if a bank gets hit with a lot of withdrawals, it can borrow from another bank (or the nation's reserve bank) in order to cover for it. But when lots of banks get hit at once, you get market crashes.

When it comes to the merchant - my point is that what we see in-game is an abstraction of what is actually there. There are a lot of things in the game that clearly aren't what actually happens lorewise in Tyria - monsters (that lack teleportation, stealth, being launched from a Bone Ship, or some other excuse) spawning from midair next to the character, and so on. Lorewise, the adventurers that play the TP represent a tiny portion of the economy - they influence the top-quality items that are also a tiny portion of the economy that are generally only able to be afforded by the rich, but they have about as much effect as rich collectors who go to auctions and pay thousands or millions of dollars for historically significant sports memorabilia have on the market for general sports supplies. It's not a perfect analogy because those collectors are still likely to be net purchasers in the general sports supplies market rather than net sellers, but when you buy a cheap baseball bat at the discount warehouse outlet, the price you're paying probably hasn't been significantly inflated by the purchases of rich collectors and professional players who are exclusively buying higher-quality goods. Similar for adventurers selling low-quality second-hand weapons.

Yes, it would be more "realistic" for it to be a floating market. Unlike the higher end, though, such a market would need to represent that there are NPCs that are buying and selling such weapons... and the end result is that the prices are probably not going to be much lower (which I presume is your goal) then they are now, and thus floating that market is representing more effort than its worth. My gut feeling is that the vendors are already offering the minimum they think adventurers are likely to accept as it is - a lot of people already salvage whites by default even with the prices as they are, and said prices are only about twice that for scrap items.

So if you prefer, you can think of it as the sell value of whites having been set to rock-bottom and left there.

Additionally, from a 'purpose of gold sinks' viewpoint... is reducing the sell value of whites really going to reduce the gap between rich and poor? I suspect not - my feeling is that the richer you are, the smaller the proportion of your income that comes from whites to begin with.

[omar316]

ChristianSky, on 22 November 2012 - 03:02 AM, said:

I'm not a hardcore player, but I can still say this; You can't blame Arena Net for everything. You just have to better manage your money. I'm one of those that have ''money managing skills'' that you call of. Every quest, hearts, story, WvW that I do and get money from, 75% goes to the bank, directly. While the rest is ''pocket money''. We aren't ruining the economy. We don't have to re-make the society of consumption that we are in real life. Save your money. It's that simple. Spend it wisely.

Repair costs are understandable. I've never seen a movie, or read a book, that mentioned armour being repaired for free or that ''magically never broke'', if you understand what I mean.

As to the waypoints, they are gold sinks, as you have mentioned. They are there to make you spend more so the trading post doesn't become inflated. That ruins the economy.

You're talking as if the ones who saved money in this game are all ''rich'' people, while sometimes true, it's a simple trick. Don't spend your money on things that don't matter to you. If you don't like waypoints, walk. I've never seen a taxi driver driving people for free.

I am here to play a game. Not to try and get a 2nd life.

[ChristianSky]

omar316, on 01 December 2012 - 01:46 AM, said:

I am here to play a game. Not to try and get a 2nd life.

This isn't The Sims, it's called common sense. If you can't manage your own money, why are you complaining? If you can't manage it, you are the problem, not Anet. It isn't quantum physics either.

[Robsy128]

Honestly? I've played on and off over the weekend and I can afford repair costs as well as waypoint expenses quite easily. In fact, I make about 3-4 gold in a play session which lasts me 2-3 hours. In that time, I repair my armour once, maybe twice, and use 20 waypoints (roughly). I don't see the problem.

[Sandpit]

Bully for you

And congratulations on completely missing the point.

Waypoint costs dscourage cooperative player interaction
Waypoint costs encourage a play style that is less fun
Waypoint costs are a gold tax on normal game play
Waypoint costs are really bad game design and fly in the face of ANet's much touted manifesto of fun.

Time to ditch this abomination.

[dd790]

Sandpit, on 04 December 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

[1]Waypoint costs dscourage cooperative player interaction
[2]Waypoint costs encourage a play style that is less fun
[3]Waypoint costs are a gold tax on normal game play
[4]Waypoint costs are really bad game design and fly in the face of ANet's much touted manifesto of fun.

1 - How? If waypointing to play with a friend isn't worth the couple of silver then maybe you need better friends who are worth paying a couple of silver to play with

2 - What playstyle do they encourage and please define how it is "less fun" without using subjective views.

3 - Yes, and... Gold sinks are normal in MMO's, they help to keep inflation rates lower than they otherwise would be. (If inflation is in check or not is a whole other debate)

4 - As a game design mechanic they are a gold sink, which are needed mechanics in one form or another. Which part of the manifesto do WP violate? If GW2 comes close to meeting it's manifesto is very debatable, but on the topic of WP, I don't see the violation

Edited by dd790, 05 December 2012 - 12:23 AM.

[Sandpit]

Then read this thread again from the start, this time pay attention to points of view other than your own. No point in me repeating what is already written if you won't read it.

[DuskWolf]

dd790, on 05 December 2012 - 12:22 AM, said:

1 - How? If waypointing to play with a friend isn't worth the couple of silver then maybe you need better friends who are worth paying a couple of silver to play with

2 - What playstyle do they encourage and please define how it is "less fun" without using subjective views.

3 - Yes, and... Gold sinks are normal in MMO's, they help to keep inflation rates lower than they otherwise would be. (If inflation is in check or not is a whole other debate)

4 - As a game design mechanic they are a gold sink, which are needed mechanics in one form or another. Which part of the manifesto do WP violate? If GW2 comes close to meeting it's manifesto is very debatable, but on the topic of WP, I don't see the violation

I'm just tired of the BS now. Anyone else? Just tired of it.

1. Because if you were to waypoint as much as you wanted to, it'd bite into your cash supply. Keep in mind the utterly ridiculous prices of things like racial and order armour, and then re-evaluate your position. The fact of the matter is is that with the exponentially escalating costs of waypoints, they discourage travel more and more with each level you gain. And then there's that whole 'contested waypoints make travel impossible' bombshell too, but that's a topic for another time...

2. They encourage an isolationist mindset. The old 'massively single-player online game' scenario. The kind of thing that WoW had a problem with. If a waypoint was free, then a friend who was across the world might say 'Sure, I'll be right there!' if you were to ask them to run an event with you. But with waypoints costing as much as they do, they'd rather make an excuse and continue playing in the zone they're in. This is how it encourages a less fun, more isolationist playstyle. It segregates players by zone.

3. There are well designed gold sinks and then there are taxes. This is the latter. A gold sink stays static throughout the game, and often will give you something in exchange for your money. It'll give you a fun ride, or a new item. Now, if gold sinks came in the form of armour skins which you could buy with gold rather than just on the gem shop, then that's a valid gold sink. Transmutation stones purchasble with gold from vendors is also a valid gold sink. Putting a tax on something that people should be able to use in an uninhibited way is just bad game design. And it needs to be uninhibited considering how slow normal movement is.

4. He didn't say that waypoints violate the manifesto. Reading comprehension is helpful. He said that waypoint taxes did. ArenaNet spoke of creating a game for the player, where fun is paramount. Having taxes on things which inhibit your ability to do things is ridiculous and unfun. If they charged a gold tax for switching zones, would that be fun? What about a gold tax for every line spoken in map chat? The waypoint tax is ridiculous and does fly in the face of fun. It's something you should be able to use uninhibitedly, this ties into the above. And this is the kind of old MMO trick that GW2 was supposed to move away from.

Happy? Good. My tolerance is getting paper thin for this sort of thing. I swear, you just want to bend over and beg for poor treatment, you do. People like you. It just bothers me deeply that there are consumers who'll take poor treatment and believe that any hardship they encounter because of a product supplier is their own fault, and that they should attack anyone who has valid complaints about such.

It's BS. It's completely BS. You should have more pride.

[Trei]

DuskWolf, on 05 December 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

...Putting a tax on something that people should be able to use in an uninhibited way is just bad game design. And it needs to be uninhibited considering how slow normal movement is....

It would not be any more different than if I express my sentiments as such:

- killing mobs is a chore and made worse by needing to acquire gear to kill mobs and everything should be one-shotted by me and I should be able to customise my own gear out of all possible models and combinations from level 1 *gasp* the existence of mobs that can kill me is inhibiting my fun!  
Mobs I can't kill are bad game design!
Gear I can't get at level 1 are bad game design!

Cuz that would have been my own personal opinion, ergo - my own personal problem.

Guess what...? *hint* *hint* *nudge* *wink*...

Edited by Trei, 05 December 2012 - 02:41 AM.

[Humfly]

RedStar, on 26 November 2012 - 04:54 PM, said:

I'm sorry to say, but there is no freaking way that even 4 silver (if you want to waste your cash traveling from one corner to the other and don't want to waste time by going to LA) can take a hit on your wallet...If you travel to "help" your friends, you are bound to do a few DEs and at level 80 that's 1+ silver per event + drops...I don't see how you can lose money by helping your friends.

One corner to the other and back is 6 silver and you were already somewhere doing DE's or whatever and getting drops. You spent 6 silver to do it somewhere else for a time - so of course you lost money. Helping your friend might be help with a single skill challenge or with a vista or being there to res when he falls out of a jumping puzzle - no income from those activities and you would be loosing money even if transport was free.

Waypoint charges are a horrid and hated gold sink, the thrifty avoid them where possible which is detrimental to fun, social interaction, and their effectivness as gold sinks.

Repair cost on the other hand I can live with and would be happy to see them increased offering more reward for playing the game better and more balance between offensive and defensive builds. In WvW where player deaths are inherent and actually desirable repair costs should be reduced if not eliminated.

If Anet remove waypoint costs I would take it as an indication the devs are getting a clue which sadly the appear to lack in so many areas of the game.

[dd790]

DuskWolf, on 05 December 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

-snip-
Happy? Good. My tolerance is getting paper thin for this sort of thing. I swear, you just want to bend over and beg for poor treatment, you do. People like you. It just bothers me deeply that there are consumers who'll take poor treatment and believe that any hardship they encounter because of a product supplier is their own fault, and that they should attack anyone who has valid complaints about such.

It's BS. It's completely BS. You should have more pride.

The problem I have with posts like this are they are personal subjective appeals not objective analysis. I am against and speak out against cases of true poor treatment by the game, RNG cash shop, single time events not feasible in some time zones etc. However I do not consider paying a tiny sum of ingame money for travel to be 'poor treatment'.

I addressed the 'valid complaints' with 'valid reasoning', you're the one who started attacking me for having an opinion different to your own. I do have pride in my posting, that is why I post objectively rather than subjectively and try to avoid personal attacks.

1 - Waypoint "as much as you wanted to", how much is that? I waypoint around paying little attention to the cost and my money is increasing. The cost of a WP is still only a couple of silver at level 80, yes if you WP around and don't actually do anything in the places you waypoint to then your money will go down, but killing a few mobs, doing a couple events, merching a few drops very quickly pays for that couple of silver.

What does the price of racial and order armour have to do with WP costs? Contested waypoints are a mechanic to try and make the world feel more alive, something the community asked for (though maybe not in this exact form).

2 - Again, maybe you need to look at your friends rather than Anet's game. Playing with them for a few minutes should get you a couple silver depending on the zone, and I would of thought playing with friends was worth a couple of non-existent virtual coins just for the fun of playing with them, even if you make a small loss of 1-2s, is the time with friends not worth that loss?

3 - Another way of putting this is there are chronic gold sinks and acute gold sinks, a chronic gold sink is a passive small gold sink that takes a small amount of gold but is always there, and acute gold sink is one that takes a more occasional larger sum of gold. WP cost is very low so it doesn't inhibit travel, it takes a small amount of silver each time it is used, but is used by nearly every player in the game. As a gold sink it must remove a massive amount of currency from circulation, while having minimal effect on individual players, personally that sounds like a good, well designed gold sink

4 - The only way that WP costs could directly inhibit your fun is if your fun is directly linked to the quantity of ingame currency you have. Personally I don't measure fun in copper, silver or gold. If you WP to play with friends, you spend 30 minutes with them trying to do a jumping puzzle or a minidungeon, you get unlucky with drops and make a net loss of 2 silver for that half an hour of play, have you then lost out on fun? You have lost 2 silver but I would hope that half an hour of playing with friends, chatting, playing, laughing was worth 2 silver.

Trei, makes a good point carrying on your "What if... that's not fun" argument.

[Robsy128]

DuskWolf, on 05 December 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

I'm just tired of the BS now. Anyone else? Just tired of it.

1. Because if you were to waypoint as much as you wanted to, it'd bite into your cash supply. Keep in mind the utterly ridiculous prices of things like racial and order armour, and then re-evaluate your position. The fact of the matter is is that with the exponentially escalating costs of waypoints, they discourage travel more and more with each level you gain. And then there's that whole 'contested waypoints make travel impossible' bombshell too, but that's a topic for another time...

2. They encourage an isolationist mindset. The old 'massively single-player online game' scenario. The kind of thing that WoW had a problem with. If a waypoint was free, then a friend who was across the world might say 'Sure, I'll be right there!' if you were to ask them to run an event with you. But with waypoints costing as much as they do, they'd rather make an excuse and continue playing in the zone they're in. This is how it encourages a less fun, more isolationist playstyle. It segregates players by zone.

3. There are well designed gold sinks and then there are taxes. This is the latter. A gold sink stays static throughout the game, and often will give you something in exchange for your money. It'll give you a fun ride, or a new item. Now, if gold sinks came in the form of armour skins which you could buy with gold rather than just on the gem shop, then that's a valid gold sink. Transmutation stones purchasble with gold from vendors is also a valid gold sink. Putting a tax on something that people should be able to use in an uninhibited way is just bad game design. And it needs to be uninhibited considering how slow normal movement is.

4. He didn't say that waypoints violate the manifesto. Reading comprehension is helpful. He said that waypoint taxes did. ArenaNet spoke of creating a game for the player, where fun is paramount. Having taxes on things which inhibit your ability to do things is ridiculous and unfun. If they charged a gold tax for switching zones, would that be fun? What about a gold tax for every line spoken in map chat? The waypoint tax is ridiculous and does fly in the face of fun. It's something you should be able to use uninhibitedly, this ties into the above. And this is the kind of old MMO trick that GW2 was supposed to move away from.

Happy? Good. My tolerance is getting paper thin for this sort of thing. I swear, you just want to bend over and beg for poor treatment, you do. People like you. It just bothers me deeply that there are consumers who'll take poor treatment and believe that any hardship they encounter because of a product supplier is their own fault, and that they should attack anyone who has valid complaints about such.

It's BS. It's completely BS. You should have more pride.

You need to manage your gold better

1.You waypoint and then you play the game. You do not waypoint to one location, then immediately to another, then immediately to another. Dynamic events give you at least 1 silver. Sell the junk all of the mobs give you and you have enough to waypoint at least twice.

2. You have friends who don't know how to manage their gold either. I've been playing with my friends all weekend and for a couple of hours in the week. We've never had a problem with waypoint costs. Even our guild members joined in on the fun. Did they complain about the waypoint cost? No.

3. Manage your gold.Taxes are in the trading post. Gold sinks are there in the world as you regularly play the game. Since waypoints are everywhere in the world, they are classified as a gold sink.

4. At what point did they say 'there won't be waypoint travel costs' in the manifesto? Seriously, stop holding  onto it like Christians hold the Holy Bible. There is no hidden message there, and waypoint travel costs do not violate the manifesto. In fact, I remember reading a blog post about the waypoint costs before the manifesto video was released.

I swear, people just come onto these forums to moan about stuff without even playing the game. That, or they lack any knowledge of how to manage their gold in-game. Do you see the message here? I've made it bold so that it's easier to see

Edited by Robsy128, 05 December 2012 - 01:42 PM.

[RedStar]

Humfly, on 05 December 2012 - 07:11 AM, said:

One corner to the other and back is 6 silver and you were already somewhere doing DE's or whatever and getting drops. You spent 6 silver to do it somewhere else for a time - so of course you lost money. Helping your friend might be help with a single skill challenge or with a vista or being there to res when he falls out of a jumping puzzle - no income from those activities and you would be loosing money even if transport was free.

Waypoint charges are a horrid and hated gold sink, the thrifty avoid them where possible which is detrimental to fun, social interaction, and their effectivness as gold sinks.

Huh didn't even think about JP and I did it a couple of times for guildies. But the thing is that WP cost barely bother me. If I have the patience I'll use Asura gates and whatnot to pay less, but most of them time I don't even look at the price when I use them.
So personally, WP cost isn't affecting how I play. I would have to travel from one corner of them map to the other more than a few hundreds times to go bankrupt.
And for those who barely play the game, and while they play never do dungeons, I have a hard time understanding how it can make them go bankrupt.

If you barely play the game, you normally barely have the time and desire to use WP. And by barely playing the game, the odds of logging in Fields of Ruins and going to help a guildie in the JP of Caledon Forest and then logging out is extremely low (plus you are going to get chests to cover your fees).
WP costs slightly slow down players from getting rich, but I don't see how they make someone poor (using real situations, not completely hypothetical ones).

(Once again, before I'm quoted, I'm not for WP costs, but I'm not against the current fee. I simply don't care if they stay or if the go away, as long as they aren't drastically increased).

[Achilles Tennyson]

I absolutely love these fanboys who actually want to defend the waypoint travel costs.

Odd how in GW1 waypoint travel was free, and yet  the game ran fine? Magic perhaps?

[AJS]

Achilles Tennyson, on 05 December 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

I absolutely love these fanboys who actually want to defend the waypoint travel costs.

Odd how in GW1 waypoint travel was free, and yet  the game ran fine? Magic perhaps?

Who are you to talk about fanboys?  Nothing wrong with way point travel cost and armor repair cost, they are part of the game.  Why are people still complaining about such little things?  Gold is easy to earn - so what is the problem, could it be players are lazy and want everything given to them?

[Robsy128]

Achilles Tennyson, on 05 December 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

I absolutely love these fanboys who actually want to defend the waypoint travel costs.

Odd how in GW1 waypoint travel was free, and yet  the game ran fine? Magic perhaps?

GW1 was a whole different kettle of fish.
It's like comparing Halo 4 to Halo Wars or Space Marine to Dawn of War.

[Jobuu]

if the only argument is a needed gold sink, then you add mounts, speed boosters, travel portal items (mats), or other fun things. I keep seeing NO MOUNTS!. Why not? it's better travel and adds more customization for your character. In any case, there are better ways than the current design.

AJS, on 05 December 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

Who are you to talk about fanboys?  Nothing wrong with way point travel cost and armor repair cost, they are part of the game.  Why are people still complaining about such little things?  Gold is easy to earn - so what is the problem, could it be players are lazy and want everything given to them?

gold is easy to earn if you have hours to play it in any given session. some people try to cram in 30 min here and there throughout the day which asks the question do i run to where i want to go or pay more silver than i think i can make in that short amount of time and/or log off in random areas (towns that get taken over when you log) only to login and die instantly and cost more money

[Sandpit]

AJS, on 05 December 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

Who are you to talk about fanboys?  Nothing wrong with way point travel cost and armor repair cost, they are part of the game.  Why are people still complaining about such little things?  Gold is easy to earn - so what is the problem, could it be players are lazy and want everything given to them?

They are only part of the game because some designer mad a bad decision to put it in. There is nothing about them that is relevent to the game, its design, lore or balance, it was just an arbitrary decision, it is NOT part of the game.

But argue the theory about things all you like, the wrongs and rights of them, one thing the ARE doing is affecting player behaviour. Players AVOID WP travel, so the AVOID the gold sink and they AVOID playing with people. Perhaps they are bad friends, suck at the game and can;t manage thier gold, perhaps it IS their fault, but the fact is the WP cost IS affecting player behaviour for the worst. You can't change that undesirable behaviour in a significant number of players by arguing on a forum. Only ANet can alter player behaviour by changing the game.

[Ghostwing]

The waypoint costs used to bother as a new 80, but I realized it's just another thing to adapt to and sometimes drawbacks are a good thing. Games need some tradeoffs. I hate the idea of WoW mounts because there is no trade-off; it's just an extra button to click every time I kill a monster and want to move elsewhere. At some point I wonder why not just give me perma-speed increase automatically 3 seconds outside of combat? Why make me press a hotkey to wait the 3 seconds to mount? There is absolutely no reason not to get on your mount in WoW. In GW2, I had to decide whether that waypoint is worth the cost, but at this point in my character's life those 3 silver aren't a factor anyway. Besides waypoints, I also traited my warrior in such a way that he has permasprint with warhorn and signet of rage. I had to give up other traits for that. Again, trade-off.

I don't necessarily think waypoint costs are a good idea, but I don't think it's an awful mechanic. I do think the WoW mount is an awful mechanic. I don't have a better idea for waypoints, but I don't think players should be able to just waypoint around the world willy nilly.

[draxynnic]

dd790, on 05 December 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

3 - Another way of putting this is there are chronic gold sinks and acute gold sinks, a chronic gold sink is a passive small gold sink that takes a small amount of gold but is always there, and acute gold sink is one that takes a more occasional larger sum of gold. WP cost is very low so it doesn't inhibit travel, it takes a small amount of silver each time it is used, but is used by nearly every player in the game. As a gold sink it must remove a massive amount of currency from circulation, while having minimal effect on individual players, personally that sounds like a good, well designed gold sink

I could not disagree more.

As I stated a few pages ago, the aimed result of gold sinks is not actually to control inflation. It's to keep prices spiralling out of reach of all but the richest players.

These may sound like two ways of saying the same thing, but it's really not. If somehow the availability of gold was doubled across the board so that everyone had twice as much gold, there would be some instability as prices adjust, but the only real end result in the economy is that fixed-price items are, relatively speaking, cheaper (which may have indirect knock-on effects, but that's a further discussion). What keeps prices within the reach of the poor and middle-class players is taking money out of the top of the economy, from the people who would otherwise simply just outbid everyone else on any desired item of limited availability.

Waypoint fees do not do this. Let's imagine two players, one a new 80 that earns on average a gold a day, one an established money-maker who's perfected a method for earning ten gold a day. For the new player, even a single waypoint use represents 1-3 percent of their daily income - a handful of jumps can quickly eat into their income for the day. For the established farmer, however, the proportion of their income represented by waypoint usage drops by an order of magnitude. Unless the established farmer is waypointing ten times as often as the new 80 (unlikely, since the farmer has probably planned things out so that they only waypoint if that means a net increase in income) the waypoint costs represent less of a gold sink and more of a regressive tax that hurts the poor more than the rich. As a result, it actually serves over time to increase the gap between rich and poor, concentrating the wealth in the hands of the rich and pushing prices further and further out of the reach of the newer or more casual player.

Just because something removes money from the economy doesn't mean it's a good gold sink. You can argue that there are behaviour-influencing reasons for a waypoint fee, such as encouraging people to travel by foot rather than jumping everywhere, but waypoint fees are actually the complete opposite of a good gold sink.

Good gold sinks are things that you can do without if you can't afford them, but which encourage the people who do have lots of money to spend it - things like t3 cultural armour (although it really should be exotic) and WvWvW weapon plans. Arguably, even the gold-to-gems market applies - as it generally serves to remove money from someone rich enough to afford it and transfer it to someone who's not so rich, even if it doesn't actually remove the gold from the economy.

[Arquenya]

Sandpit, on 04 December 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

Waypoint costs discourage cooperative player interaction
Waypoint costs encourage a play style that is less fun
Waypoint costs are a gold tax on normal game play
Waypoint costs are really bad game design and fly in the face of ANet's much touted manifesto of fun.

Have to agree here.

I'm not against gold sinks or repair costs but WP travel has unwanted and undesirable side-effects, like abovementioned. There's 100s of ways to implement gold sinks that don't have this impact so I hope ANet removes it.

[Jobuu]

what you need is gold sinks for rich and gold sinks for normal people. wow had this with those really expensive mounts 20k gold if i remember. this was when i had maybe 3-4k. I could survive the game but didn't have the extra luxury items. GW2 needs this in some way. Special weapon or armor effects, mini pets, etc...

[Perm Shadow Form]

AJS, on 05 December 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

Who are you to talk about fanboys?  Nothing wrong with way point travel cost and armor repair cost, they are part of the game.  Why are people still complaining about such little things?  Gold is easy to earn - so what is the problem, could it be players are lazy and want everything given to them?

Gold is easy to earn, yet you didn't answer to the given question, why can't GW2 work like GW1 with no way point cost?
I'll give you the answer.
Arena Net wants you to use their Gem Store to convert gems into gold.
GW1 wasn't so real money driven.