Myth of Ragnarok has finished exploring Tyria - including the world versus world maps - without dying!
This journey was an absurd amount of fun. The game felt much more alive with megaservers. I feel genuinely connected to my character. We've been through a struggle together, and endured. It definitely kept me motivated to play GW2 during this lull between Living Story seasons.
Orr, surprisingly, wasn't as big of a challenge as I'd expected.
Straits of Devastation was straightforward. (Can puns kill?) The only hiccup was the Lightfoot Passage vista. I saw player after player fall to their deaths on the vista, and psyched myself out. I had to swap to another warrior to practice the jumps before continuing on my hardcore character.
Malchor's Leap was once my least-favorite zone. Apparently, Orr isn't so bad without risen. We owned the temples, which made completing the skill challenges trivial. Champions were instantly killed by roving hordes of players. Even the chicken events were instantly completed. Megaservers may lead to the extinction of the risen. I'm fine with that.
But what to do next?
I love this character. Playing without the trading post has breathed new life into the game. I'm enjoying the challenge of completing content without dying. I like that my character is deliberately undergeared (self-found equipment only) since it gives me a sense of progression. And I don't want to abandon the character at the end of a jumping puzzle somewhere.
So I've decided to find new challenges to tackle.
Next up:
Full exotics without dying or relying on vendors / the trading post. I'll gear up via the new world boss schedule and maybe a champion train or two (ewww). The yellow weapons I loot will get thrown into the mystic forge in the hopes of getting some shiny level 80 exotics.
Achievement hunting: I'm going to get some more experience by finishing progessing my slayer and weapon master achievements.
Once I'm fully-geared, I'll go back and finish the personal story - including Arah! - without dying.
...
EDIT: Or... I'll die to underwater combat. Le Sigh.
I hit 80 with around 80% of the world complete, but was having too much fun, and so completed a few more zones. This put me at 93% world completion. This just leaves the three zones of Orr: Straights of Devastation, Malchor's Leap, and Cursed Shore.
Her story so far...
Each trip through Plains of Ashford starts an extended conversation of whether the charr or the humans are to blame for the destruction of the zone. Originally the land belonged to the charr. But when the gods brought humans to Tyria, they drove the charr from the land. Until the charr took it back. Which the charr nuked with the searing. So we have plenty to argue over.
Knock knock, now let me into the Crystal Desert.
I dreaded this vista (by Sorrow's Embrace in Dredgehaunt Cliffs) from the moment this challenge began. On my first character, I died to it oh so many times. There was swearing. Vows to never return. Developer hatred. Shame. This time? Straight to the top without issue. My friends say they made the tower easier... I think I'm just that awesome.
This heart - in Fireheart Rise - is undoubtedly the single worst quest in all of Guild Wars 2. You're supposed to help escort the ghosts of loggers back to their bodies. Or defend charr children from a witch. Nope. The heart and event are both bugged. Except for one solitary logger. Every couple minutes a quest mob spawns, which can be killed for credit. Spent about a half hour sitting there to get the zone done, whispering everyone I saw to camp the spawn with me. Whoo.
Timberline Falls. I enjoyed returning to this tower. Nothing like krait with pull, immobilize, and knockback to send adrenaline through my system.
A foreshadowing of what awaits me in Orr. I also learned a valuable lesson. Don't step on the fish heads by Tequatl. They insta-downed me, leading to terrified screams and the hope I could res before the head respawned.
After hitting 80, I decided to give a couple world bosses a try. Jormag was fun... right up until players started getting downed / dying. I decided to hide in the back.
I'm halfway there! My new warrior just hit 50% map completion in GW2.
Her story so far..
I decided to finish the cities first. While exploring Divinity's Reach I ran into a naked dance party at the city entrance. Human cities, huh?
I'm really enjoying the journey so far. Because of megaservers, there are players everywhere I go, which really makes the world feel alive. I was surprised to see that even Lion's Arch had players hanging out / exploring.
Leveling (yet another) warrior, I'm surprised at the number of things I discover about the class. Just after hitting level 30, I noticed strange brown bubbles around my character. Apparently they're an effect from equipping Signet of Rage. The effect is so small on my asura that I never noticed it, and I never cared about the charr enough to look closely. Another reminder of why I'm rerolling.
Gendarran Fields was the most boring map I completed. Since so many players are hanging out in Vigil Keep, most of the zone feels completely deserted. Felt like pre-megaserver leveling.
Fort Vandal in Kessex Hills was a close call. Since the end of Living Story Season 1 suggested this area is about to become important, I wanted to explore the fort and hop over the walls. I reconsidered when I noticed the large numbers of level 80 champion poisoners on the walls. Apparently they're pretty tough.
I went rooftop hopping in Ebonhawke instead. Just beneath this screenshot are two players engaging in either sappy-romance RP about returning from war... or some about-to-get-steamy ERP. Either way, it was awkward when they looked up to see my character perched like this.
Finishing Lornar's Pass gave me 52% map completion at level 47. I'm being much more adventurous than my last character, who hit level 80 with only 61% of the map explored (no deaths). I think this new challenge is really encouraging me to take more risks exploring the world.
Definitely looking forward to what the other half of the world has to explore!
Just about two years ago, I started leveling Clawswitz to 80 without dying or crafting. You can read his origins tale, or the update.
I didn't blog about it, but shortly after coming back to GW2 I finished leveling Clawswitz. I didn't write anything because immediately after Clawswitz hit 80, I felt unsatisfied with the character. Normally, I'd start setting him up with a fashionable outfit. But Clawswitz felt clunky. Charr look hideous in virtually every piece of armor; except the cultural gear, which is a bit too spiked for me. Unable to find the right look, I just abandoned him at the end of a jumping puzzle.
With the roll-out of megaservers, I decided to level another warrior to 80 without dying.
No experience bonus buffs (Birthday, Killstreak,...)
No Tomes of Knowledge
No dungeons
Any tough fight I run from must be admitted to
Challenge ends when I'm at 100% world completion, including WvW
While the new challenge greatly restricts access to gear, I decided to allow purchases from karma vendors. This pushes me into a risk-reward situation for getting new pieces of gear, which I enjoy. It also pushes me to unlock more skins for the wardrobe.
Progress so far:
My first character died while doing Eternal Battlegrounds at 23. I was trying to meet up with a group taking the enemy keep, and ran into two thieves instead. Never had a chance.
The second character died at level 2, this time in borderlands. I was outfought by a 80 warrior.
Attempt #3 is still alive, now at level 32.
I've already had two terrifying near-death experiences on the character, of course.
The first was at the spider-themed skill challenge in WvW. I decided to keep fighting with 1/20th of my hp left, and got downed. I couldn't rally off the spider-adds, since they were behind the challenge. Fortunately, I pulled off a vengeance-rally.
The second was at the Darkhoof Heights skill point. I was under-leveled, and decided to attack the boss that guards the point. I wasn't paying attention, and barely made it out.
The boards enable me to track when a player transfers off of a server: players that disappear from the boards - but have enough points to appear on them - have likely jumped ship. (Or, alternatively, been banned: I'm not sure what happens with the boards then.)
I was able to track players on 23 EU servers for one month [February 20th to March 23rd]. In that month, I observed 1456 players that likely transferred servers. That makes a 0.2% chance that a top 1000 player server transfers on any given day - or - a 6.6% chance that a top 1000 player changes servers over the course of a month.
Caveat: some of my data collection was corrupted - from both my ISP (TimeWarner <glare>) and the ArenaNet website (the website got angst-y partway through my data collection). So I'm missing some servers. Take the resulting numbers with salt.
Transfers are highly clustered: on most days on most servers, at most one player out of the top 1000 transfers (65% of all server-days look like this). However, on some servers, on some days, large clusters of players leave the server (record observed: 57 of the top 1000 players left Underworld on March 20th).
Transfers also differ by day: on March 7th, ArenaNet announced a reduction in the cost of server transfers starting on March 18th. This resulted in a considerable rise in the number of transfers. Before March 18th, an average of 1.9 top 1000 players transferred per server each day. After March 19, that number jumped to 4.7.
Pre March 18
Post March 18
Gold
1.1
1.4
Silver
2.0
9.2
Bronze
2.4
4.8
But while these transfers were designed to encourage players to move to lower-tiered servers, they had something of a bandwagon effect. After the update, very few top 1000 players left gold-tier servers. Most of the movement came from the Silver / Bronze tiers.
Thoughts
I'm actually surprised at just how common server transfers are. Post-March 18, nearly 10 of the top 1000 players in Silver tier on every server changed servers each day. That is a remarkable change in the population of each server.
I'm also not surprised that most transfers originate on Silver / Bronze servers. WvW match-ups on these servers can be frustrating, and it makes sense that players would seek a stronger world environment.
Here, I've plotted the achievement points of the top 1000 players on each server. The servers are organized by the average achievement point score of these players (highest top left to lowest bottom right), and colored by their WvW season 1 tier (gold / silver / bronze).
There are vast differences between servers.
As a snapshot, the leaderboards are interesting. But tracked over time, they contain much more information. For this, I collected data from the leaderboards during the Edge of the Mists update. This gives three measures of server activity: (1) transfers, (2) inactive players, and (3) points gained among the active players.
Server Transfers: Jumping Ship
Server transfers show up on the leaderboards in two ways. A player could appear on one server, and later on another. So I can track accounts that move between servers.
Other players disappeared from the leaderboards. So, for example, if a player on Eredon Terrace had over 4217 points at the start of the Edge of the Mists update, they should appear on that server's top 1000 list unless they transferred off the server.
Overall, 1.6% of players listed on the leaderboards transferred servers. Given the small number of transfers from each server (and the reasonable expectation that some of the 'large' moves are due to guilds) it is hard to make a general pattern from the server transfer data, but I'll look at it again in future updates.
However, of the transfers I observed, 84% are to servers with higher average achievement point scores than the starting server.
Inactive Players
Overall, 17% of players on the server top 1000 didn't earn any achievement points during the Edge of the Mists update, and therefore likely didn't play GW2 during the update. Here are the percent of inactive players by server:
Inactive players are more common in lower-tiered servers, with the Bronze tier averaging over 23% of players inactive, compared to an average 12% for the gold servers.
Points Gained by Server
During the two-week update, active players on the leaderboards gained an average of 170 points, around 12 points per day. Pretty impressive, considering that the daily requires only 5 points. (The average top 1000 player earned about one-third of the total possible points to be earned from living story / daily content.)
Across all servers, players with more achievement points earned more points than those with fewer points (rich get richer faster).
Several Thoughts
By now, it is clear that there are large differences in server populations and activity. It is simply a myth that there are 'pve servers' that just happen to do poorly in WvW. Players tend to transfer to higher-tiered servers. Those servers have fewer inactive players. And the players on higher tiered servers tend to be more active.
Time to think about a server transfer myself...
Sidenote: the results presented here don't change under more complicated statistical models (which I ran, but excluded from the presentation because this is a long post already). Though, I did have to run a nonparametric model due to the interesting structure underlying the data.
Ranger was chosen in this thread, where the developers asked players to list 3 professions (in order of priority) they would like to see discussed first. But isn't choosing a profession based on posting in a thread open for 24 hours on the forum problematic? Particularly active forum users would be likely to overwhelm the thread. And its reasonable to expect that posters would be biased toward their own class, instead of looking out for game balance as a whole.
So how reasonable was the thread as a method of getting feedback?
The results:
Ranger was the most mentioned profession, followed by elementalist and then necromancer to round out the top three. Rangers are particularly weak in GW2's pve, and one playstyle (bearbow) is consistently viewed with scorn.
Breaking down the votes by order of priority indicates that not only was ranger the overall top choice, it was most frequently listed as priority #1 by voters. Most of the ordering between professions remains the same.
But are these votes contaminated by bias?
Prior Posting Activity
One objection to this poll might be that not only are forums generally unrepresentative of player opinions, but frequent forum posters might be likely to overwhelm any thread. Hardcore and casual players might be expected to disagree on which professions need the most attention.
While generally valid objections, they don't apply particularly well to this poll.
For nearly 20% of voters, voting in this thread was their first post on the forums. For others, posting is a pretty frequent activity. Voters had an average 205 posts before the thread (with a maximum of over 4600 posts!).
Curiously, however, prior posting activity doesn't change the results. Both first-time and prior posters overwhelmingly agree on their preference order, favoring rangers, elementalists and necromancers. (Though mesmers do a little less well among first-time posters).
Profession(al) Bias
Another way to look at the votes is to examine what other forums voters are active on. Players might be expected to be biased toward voting for their own profession, which could be reflected by their posting in profession-specific subforums.
Here, I took a look at the past 50 forum posts of each voter (excluding first-time posters), and recorded whether they'd posted in one of the profession-specific subforums. I compared this against their listed vote preferences.
In general, the votes are only slightly biased toward forums voters are active in. For example, 30% of those who ranked elementalist as priority #2 had posted in the elementalist subforums, compared to only 15% of all voters. But this pattern doesn't hold generally. Those who picked engineer, mesmer, thief or warrior were no more likely to be active in those professions' subforums. So, in general, forum posting activity is at best weakly related to vote choice.
The exception - as ever - is rangers. While only 5% of voters had posted in the ranger forums previously, 45% of those who listed ranger as their top pick had posted in those forums. Among top choices, ranger is the only profession that shows such a strong pattern. However, even excluding these voters, ranger would still be the top pick.
Thoughts
Clearly, a 24-hour poll isn't the best way to generate clear feedback on which profession requires the most attention. In this case, however, the ranger profession is so overwhelmingly in need of attention that the effect of these (otherwise valid) concerns is overwhelmed.
Fingers crossed for some pretty excellent fixes.
Disclaimer: I have a ranger at 80, but I only use it to loot jumping puzzle chests since returning to GW2.
We're back with a blast. After over a year without MMOs, I decided to take a quick check at what was new in GW2.
... and quickly wandered into another data-driven gaming argument.
In the Origins of Madness update, ArenaNet introduced two world raid bosses: The Twisted Marionette and a three headed Great Jungle Wurm. While the encounters have difficult mechanics, they're part of the open world - you simply cannot choose the other players you'll fight alongside. Since each boss has mechanics that make it possible for a single player to cause the whole server to fail the encounter, players have taken to complaining about the mechanics of both fights on the forums (shocker!).
I'm particularly interested in the Marionette because of this comment, made by Josh Foreman (Environment Design for ANet), in responding to complaints about the fight's difficulty:
if after a week the Marionette is still only being beaten 1 out of 10 times, then I would say we may have tuned it a bit too difficult.
That was 14 days ago. A week after he made that comment, I started tracking the success of the Marionette event via the GW2 API. The Events section of the api tracks the status of each event on every server, noting its outcome (success/fail). This gives me six days of data on Marionette kill attempts. Since the Marionette fight occurs once every two hours, that is data on just over 70 Marionette attempts.
The overall Marionette success rate for the past week is 6.6%.
on North American servers the success rate is 6.1%.
on European servers the success rate is 7.0%.
Server Population
One issue with the Marionette is that the fight takes a large number of players to be successful. The fight is divided into five lanes, which are periodically divided further, into five platforms. Most guides for the fight mention 20-25 players per lane (100-125 players for a successful attempt), though a coordinated group could get by with less. So active, well-populated, coordinated servers should do better on this boss.
There are vast differences between servers. The top EU server (Desolation) succeeds on 63% of its attempts, and the top NA server isn't far behind (Blackgate - 59%). On the other hand, I have never observed a successful Marionette attempt on half of all servers (25 of 51 servers).
As might be expected, servers with a higher WvW rank are much more successful at the Marionette. While top 5 WvW servers average a greater than 20% success rate, all other servers have a less than 5% sucess rate at the event.
Prime Time
In addition to vast differences between servers, it matters what time the event is being attempted. NA primetime (starting at 7 EST) has a much higher success rate than afternoons (students getting off school?).
With this in mind, I have two caveats:
GuildWars 2 has an overflow system, where if too many players are in a zone, an overflow server is created for any additional players that arrive (or several overflows, if need be). I don't have any information about what happens on these servers (or how many there are).
It could be that the GW2:Events API is not accurate. Completely unsuccessful servers are pretty shocking, so much so that I doubt the source. Then again, I do the Marionette at least once per day, and the outcome of each of those attempts is accurate, when I check against the data.
Further Questions
So what does this mean for events like the Marionette?
Feedback based on a particular server (or time) isn't really representative of the experience of the event as a whole. Someone trying the event at 7 or 9 pm EST on Blackgate is virtually guaranteed a successful run. But there are 25 servers that I've never seen succeed at the event.
On the other hand, vast differences between servers (and times) suggests that the fight isn't balanced across the wide range of situations GW2 players are likely to encounter. Hopefully, future events will be open to a wider range of the community, instead of being limited / exclusive content.
Time willing, I'll take another look at the Marionette sometime this week, and see if I can break this apart even more.
Time for another monthly update on the cost of legendary items in GW2. (First post here, update here).
Prices have steadily risen since my last look at the end of December. From December 29 to Jan 29th the average cost of crafting a legendary has risen by 170 gold, or just over 5.5 gold per day.
Breaking down legendary weapons by type, I was surprised to find that the ranged weapons (Dreamer, Kudzu, and Predator) have risen in cost faster than the other legendaries, averaging a 240g increase over the past month. Visually, here is the rise in cost of each legendary weapon, excluding vendor materials:
Breaking down legendary weapons by their components, its still clear that - for most legendaries - the precursor is the predominant cost.
Looking across all legendary items, the relatively steady prices across the end of December were driven by a decline in the cost of most components offsetting a rise in the cost of Globs of Ectoplasm. Since then, while the price of globs has fallen, the cost of all other components has steadily risen, leading to an overall surge in prices each week.
Happy hunting!
If you have any other questions, leave a note in the comments / send an email, I'll see what I can find.
Since then, I've continued to track the materials* cost of crafting a legendary weapon using price data from GW2spidy. As I noted in an earlier post, the cost of crafting a legendary rose by an average 9 gold per day in November. In December, while some legendaries rose in cost (Sunrise / Twilight cost another 200g), for others, the price held steady (Quip continues to cost around 600g to craft).
Breaking cost down by component, the difference seems to be the cost of precursors.
For each legendary, the components required to make the gifts have either stabilized or dropped in price (potentially due to ANet increasing the drop rates on many fine crafting materials). However, the precursor weapons have continued to rise in price, continuing to push legendary weapon costs higher.
Using GW2wiz's guides, the price of leveling professions decreased during the first two weeks of December, and then increased over the last two, ending the month at the same cost it started. Most of the change comes from the cost of fine crafting materials.
Of course, I probably shouldn't be using GW2wiz.
I put this into an update on the last post - but just to be clear - ErrantQuest's crafting guides are slightly less expensive to follow. Redditor Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide that searches for the cheapest way to level the profession (again, much cheaper than the outdated guides).
*I'm omitting the vendor cost of a legendary, some 120g in materials.
EDIT: Update 1/2 - instead of using GW2wiz, take a look at ErrantQuest for crafting guides. Much cheaper. For cooking, Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide (always chooses the cheapest route).
One of my favorite features in GW2 is the ability to level a new alt entirely via crafting. Since each crafting discipline gives around 10 levels of experience, it is possible to level a character to 80 by advancing through each crafting profession. Leveling a new alt takes hours, not days.
In the early days of the game, this was fairly inexpensive. Alternating between crafting, story quests, and hunting down skill points, I was able to level 4 alts to level 80 for about a gold per crafting discipline. Recently, I've become interested in leveling another character via crafting, but wondered how crafting costs have changed since the early weeks.
To track the cost of crafting, I used crafting shopping lists from GW2 wiz and price data from GW2 spidy.
Here is the cost of each crafting discipline over the past few weeks:
Armorsmith, leatherworking, and tailoring have all dramatically increased in price over the past few weeks (and are much more expensive than I'd remembered!). Breaking down each craft by materials cost, the culprit appears to be the fine (blue-quality) crafting materials:
While gatherable components (metal, leather, cloth) have held steady in cost, fine materials (scales, totems, blood,...) have risen at an alarming rate.
The rise in crafting costs is distributed fairly evenly across all tiers of materials, though Tier 5 goods have increased in price more rapidly than Tiers 1-4.
For the curious, over the past week, here are the average prices of leveling each crafting discipline:
Like many other players, I've hit the point where I'm interested in obtaining a legendary. Even my alts have exotic gear and ideal runes. What is left for the Tyrian with everything? A pistol that shoots fireworks.
Problem is, the cost of obtaining a legendary is rising faster than most players can obtain gold.
I tracked the cost of 6 legendary weapons over the past month, using price data from gw2spidy:
While I've been watching the price, the cost of obtaining a legendary has nearly doubled. Quip has risen from 300 gold (Nov 1) to over 600 gold (Dec 2). The legendary greatswords (Twilight and Sunrise) have risen in cost by over 400 gold over the same time period.* On average, the price of crafting a legendary has increased by 9 gold every day.
Even worse... with the Lost Shores patch, many of the items necessary to craft a legendary are also used to make Ascended gear (to gain agony resist in Fractals of the Mist). This has further increased the demand for those items... and therefore the price of a legendary. For example, the cost of obtaining Twilight has risen 19 gold per day since the Lost Shores patch, compared to 6.5 gold/day pre patch.
before after bifrost 4.38 13.94 bolt 3.30 16.08 quip 8.35 10.17 rogdort 9.89 9.58 sunrise 3.08 18.51 twilight 6.48 18.99
In other words, with ascended gear driving up the demand for crafting materials, I need to make even more per day just to not lose progress.
What to do?
Purchasing items (instead of saving gold) is one way to reduce the problem of rampant inflation. (Its the gaming equivalent of hoarding goods.) But how much do I need to spend each day to make progress toward a legendary (instead of falling relatively behind)?
To check this, I simulated the results of perfectly predicting future prices and planning spending accordingly.
At 2 gold / day, I was an average of 272 days from each kind of legendary at the start of the month. At the end of a month of farming, I was 295 days from a legendary. At 3 gold / day, I only made 6 days of progress toward a legendary over the whole month.
Due to price inflation, players need to earn and spend at least 5 gold per day to make a month of progress after a month of farming.
Sad times indeed
The irony of this is that ascended gear was meant to "bridge the gap" between exotics and legendary items, providing intermediate-term progression goals for players dedicated to GW2. Instead, its setting those players further back on long-term goals.
ArenaNet has promised changes to the process of making a legendary. Hopefully, they do more than just change the way precursors are obtained, and overhaul the entire system.
*And this rise is despite the drop in precursor cost around Nov 18 from the Lost Shores final event (with its chance to give a precursor from the final chest).
On its own, a random number generator is not fair, moral, or kind. It is just random.
Which is probably why RNG makes for such terrible gameplay.
Much of GW2's endgame* focuses on the hunt for cosmetic improvements - legendary items with no stat bonus, but unique skins / animations. To keep these items rare, the precursor weapons to legendary items are low-chance results from mystic forge gambling.
But before the system is thrown into the dustbin of poor implementation, I wanted to take a moment and examine one reason why using RNG to gate progression is a terrible idea: the distribution of cost.
Luck and Cost
Some players get a precursor on their attempt... while others throw thousands of items into the forge with no result. I want to visualize that difference.
From the last post, I have a reasonable expectation that four rare items have a 20% chance of returning an exotic. I'm going to guess that this exotic has either a 1%, 1.3%, 2% or 4% chance of being a precursor. And I'll check three different ways of getting precursors:
Plan 1: crafting rares, selling all exotic outcomes until a precursor is found
Plan 2: crafting rares, reforging all non-precursor exotics
Plan 3: crafting exotics, reforging all non-precursor exotics
Under these conditions, here is the estimated (average) cost of mystic forge gambling (in gold), using greatswords as a baseline, broken down the the chance for an exotic to be the precursor.**
1% 1.3% 2% 4% Plan 1: 210.83 150.80 101.67 51.83 Plan 2: 278.88 210.91 141.47 71.36 Plan 3: 693.11 524.63 346.16 174.87
These averages are (generally) reasonable. Under these assumptions, even at a 1% chance, a precursor is around a 200g investment, making it expensive, but attainable.
There are two things to note.
Crafting exotics to obtain a precursor is three times as expensive as crafting rares. This doesn't necessarily mean that using exotics to obtain precursors is a bad idea. They might have 3x the chance of yielding precursors - its just that nobody has the data to find out. Fortunately, in terms of puzzling out why luck is a bad way to gate progression, this doesn't matter, so I'll focus on plan 1 & 2 from this point on.
Given the current price of precursors... either the precursors are much rarer than I've assumed, or using the mystic forge may be profitable even at current prices.***
Luck and Extreme Outcomes
Average cost isn't the issue. Its the distribution of cost that is the problem.
And that is where luck hurts players.
Here, I've simulated the results of 5000 players using plan 1 to obtain a precursor from the mystic forge, varying the chance that an exotic is a precursor. I've plotted how much the luckiest 10% of players pay for a precursor by gambling, the unluckiest 10%, and two measures of the average player (mean and median).
As precursors become harder to obtain (moving to the left), the average cost of creating a precursor for the unluckiest 10% of players grows exponentially. For example, if an exotic has a 1% chance to be a precursor from the mystic forge, the unluckiest 10% spend an average of just over 800 gold to get a precursor, compared to around 200g for the average player.
And that is the problem with RNG: extreme outcomes.
Extremes are great if you're lucky, but horrible for the person throwing gold away.
A simple fix would be to institute a progressively increasing drop chance once a threshold has been exceeded. Great way to fix the discouraging luck issue.
Legendary design
There are better ways to design legendary journeys.
The problem with RNG is that players don't earn the item. Which cheapens it. And it cheapens the journey. Because there is no journey, just a slot machine. Imagine Arthur winning Excalibur at a casino. Not epic.
* Stuff-to-do at 80.
** The choice of greatswords here doesn't shape the cost much - while the TP cost of precursors varies wildly, most weapons have approximately the same crafting cost. I'm also assuming that exotics are sold to market in Plan 1 for 1g.
*** Of course, if they're rarer, then some of the cheaper precursors are tremendous losses.
As it turns out, the mystic forge is actually the genie Zommoros. Strange new lifeform? Time for the asura to get investigating.*
The mystic forge serves three purposes:
Crafting via recipes. Placing specific combinations of items into the forge will yield a guaranteed result. This includes mystic weapons, some of the coolest exoticskins in-game, and legendaries. Unfortunately, Zommoros doesn't list recipes for the forge. They have to be discovered / looked-up on third-party websites (the wiki).
Upgrades of materials. Common, fine, and rare crafting materials can be promoted into a smaller number of higher tier materials [source].
Gambling. Placing four items into the mystic forge (of the same quality) will give one higher-level item, with chance to improve its rarity.
Fortunately, developer posts have noted that the mystic forge isn't affected by either diminishing returns or magic find. This makes examining these mechanics considerably easier.
I fed 2400 weapons into Zommoros to test out gambling, he gave me the data here.
Level Up!
Placing four items into the mystic forge will yield a higher-level item. How many levels higher?
On average**, the resulting items were 7 levels higher than the input items.
The forge seems to use average item level for determining upgrades. Four same-level (even identical items) had the same average level upgrade as four items of various levels, but the same average item level.
The pattern is the same regardless of input item rarity or level (usual stats-nerds tests applied).
Quality Nice.
Both comments on reddit and the GW2 wiki list a roughly 20% chance of upgrading rarity using the mystic forge. Sounds testable.
While four greens have an approximately 20% chance of yielding yellows, four blues have a 33% chance of yielding a green. (Usual stat nerd tests applied.) While they're included in the plot, since there are no yellow weapons below level 30, green weapons below level 20 have no observed chance of becoming yellow-quality weapons. I therefore excluded them from this analysis.
Take the increased chance of upgrades from blues with a grain of salt. While it is exceptionally unlikely I observed this difference from chance alone, most sources list the 20% upgrade rate as gospel.
Note: the drop-off in level 70+ greens is simply because I didn't record much data there. (Its expensive!)
*Now 100% more ethical. Sorry Malomedies.
**Well, I should say, on median. I - very rarely - obtained dramatically higher level items (up to 50 levels higher than the inputs). I'm guessing these are bugs. The items have no vendor value, and are soulbound on acquire. It looks like the item level of the result was just miscoded. Therefore, I excluded these from the analysis. More data required =D.
