The Condor

It's all about efficiency.  Players will always find the quickest, easiest, and most effective way to make money.  We'll spend time looking for exploits in a dungeon to make future runs easier.  We'll avoid difficult or long events in favor of quicker and easier ones.  This won't change, it's human nature.  You can't force people to play your way.  You can't make people accept your opinions.  Besides, players are clever, if there's a way around it, players will find it.

This need for efficiency isn't a bad thing either, it's just what happens when you're goal oriented.  There's nothing wrong with exploring the world and meandering around, I enjoy it too, but most people won't stand for that.  I had stopped doing world bosses until the new patch dropped because it wasn't worth it.  Now I can pop in, make some money, then go back to what I was doing (exploring, leveling, meandering).

For those who want difficult PvE, well there's Southsun Cove.  The reason it's empty isn't because there's so little content, it's because it's not efficient enough.  It's far more difficult for the same crappy rewards, who wants to do that?  If the loot there improved, we'd just see more zergs doing the common events or killing the karka champ, and it would be just as easy as the world boss events.

Generally, I find the people complaining about how easy the content is are the ones only doing the easy content.  There's plenty of difficult PvE content that hardly anyone does, I know because I've done it.  I've soloed and duo-ed champs and group events; they're out there, look for them.  Instead of running CoF, do CoE.

Honestly, I like the changes they've made, now I feel like I'm being rewarded for actually playing the game.  For a while it seemed like the people who played the AH were the ones with all the money, being rewarded for not really playing the game.  Now I feel like that's starting to change.  I think the real solution here is to make all the content in the game more rewarding, then I wouldn't care about missing the dragon while I'm escorting a merchant.

I never went for farming rare drops in GW 1, I generally stick to guaranteed methods of money-making.  I'm not a gambler, I try to avoid the RNG as much as possible.  Probably because I'm incredibly unlucky.

But for those who enjoy farming and having a rare skin, it's a shame it's not in the game.  I'm surprised it wasn't put into the game in the first place.  It would also be cool to see those rare skins make a comeback, like farming the icy dragon sword in the shiverpeaks closest to where the ice cave was.  Or farm the storm bow somewhere in WvW (I guess, it's in the mists at least).

There's several issues with how ectos work right now.  It doesn't matter that ectos are used mostly for cosmetic items, because they're still used for non-cosmetic items and have gone up in price to the point that crafting exotics isn't the best course of action.

My first lvl 80 is in crafted exotics, but none of them since then.  It's easier to run dungeons for gear or save up jugs of karma for karma gear.  Especially now that I can get exotic karma jewelry.  I just always thought that crafting would be the easiest way to get max stat gear as opposed to dungeon gear, and that's not the case for me at least.

The problem I see is that the in-game economy is too overbearing on the rest of the game.  The people who play the Auction House have more money than people just playing the game.  We're all worried about the cost of items and how we can obtain them.  I want to get rewards by just playing the game.  Dungeon and Karma gear reward you for playing the game, no need for the AC there.

I think A-net sees this problem too, that's why they added laurels.  It'll be even better when they improve the dailies.  What I'm saying is we don't need ectos to get most of what's needed in the game, at least not now.  Hopefully it'll keep improving as the game goes on, or have separate crafting requirements for your gear needs (exotics) and cosmetics (legendaries).

Pies and other consumables are always helpful, use them until you're 80.  Once you hit 80 and get your exotic gear (or rare I guess) it gets easy, otherwise don't sweat it.

Personally, I always recommend warriors  put 20 into the last stat tree and get the trait where you always rally when you kill in vengeance.  Saved me a lot of times, even in dungeons.

I'd be willing to spend 5 laurels on one box if it dropped lvl 80 exotics guaranteed.  Because you're still gambling about the stats.  So that would be worth it. Hell, it would be worth it if 10 laurels guaranteed a lvl 80 exotic.

Because as of right now, jugs of liquid karma are better for getting exotics.  It takes 10 jugs without a karma booster to have enough to get one piece of karma gear.  And you get to choose the stats, it's a limited selection, but some choice is better than none or RNG.  Or run AC all paths and that's enough for boots or gloves.

Karma and dungeons is how I geared most of my guys.  I got 4 lvl 80's in full exotics and 2 more coming up with exotic armor all ready for them.  Only crafted the jewelry except for on my first, now I can get that with karma too.

Right now, I'm just trying to avoid RNG as much as I can, I have terrible luck.