[GW2] Crafting Update - January

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.

This is particularly unfortunate, given news that the precursor scavenger hunt would not be in the Jan/Feb/March update.

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.

[GW2] Crafting Update

Its been a month since I wrote about hitting GW2's legendary wall.

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.

Still a bit beyond my price range / interest.

Crafting
I've also continued to track the cost of following crafting guides, broken down by fine materials and the other gathered components.

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.

[GW2] Precursor Cost

I've hit "a Legendary wall".

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).

[GW2] Precursor Gambling

I feel for this guy.

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.

Using mystic forge gambling to obtain precursors is a controversial mechanic (at best). The forums drama has been fairly intense. Fortunately, Arena Net heard the complaints and has some (unfortunately vague) plans to make obtaining a precursor both fun and legendary.
UPDATE [11/15]: So far, they haven't provided an alternative path to get a precursor, just 'slightly increased the drop rate'.  Booo.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

Both Shadowmourne and the Fangs of the Father questlines were fun, and helped add to the status of the item forged. Shadowmourne's components: reforged weapon of the biggest evil in the world, hardened with the pure blood of an old god, drenched in the souls of the enemy, and decorated with fragments of the throne of evil.

Randomly throwing weapons at a genie just can't compete with that. (And the player-invented lore behind legendaries is a reflection of that.)

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.

It isn't fun from moment to moment. Its preparing to have fun.



* 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.