Anasate.5408

Sounds good, but without going into further detail, the NPC is basically free advertising for the feature. Removing it completely would cause side effects which I think would be unhealthy for the game.

What you're describing is also a bug, albeit of a different nature. Anet doesn't allow players other than the owner to use permanent contract NPC functions, but they're still interactable. Can't have it both ways. There are 2 options: 1. make them uninteractable (optionally invisible), which would make most sense since they're permanent contract NPCs, so there's potential for abuse; 2. make them usable by everyone, which sounds nice on paper, but it introduces potentially harmful side effects.

Your posts are as lazy as always. Flawed implementations are bugs, whether they're intentional or not. If an aspect of the implementation goes against the spirit of the feature, it's a bug. The feature is described in-game as: Anywhere. Reusable. It makes no mention of any restrictions. It's a bug.

First of all, don't you dare move this post from the bugs section. This is a bug. No sane developer would impose a limitation such as this unless it's a placeholder for a proper implementation. Having this limitation for several years is absolutely ridiculous and shameful. You may only have one rentable contract NPC out at a time is an error message players get when they try to use permanent NPC contracts with an NPC already spawned. This makes no sense. It's a permanent contract. If players want to use it 1000 times in a row without changing maps, they should be able to, with a short cooldown to prevent server strain. Here's a crazy idea: decouple the contract types to let players have one of each spawned; despawn the old permanent contract NPC and spawn a new one when player uses the permanent contract again! Duh.

Then you do it, make sure to include all systems that have symmetrical rewards. Oh wait, sPvP has no ring.

I beg to differ and I've proven a numerical comparison can be performed. If you want to make an objection to the methodology, be my guest, otherwise don't deny what has been shown without any proof. Yep, I can accept that as a solution. I can also accept as a solution raising the bar for raid legendary ring. If Anet implements a weekly LI bonus for full raid clears that brings it on par with the WvW curve, that would also make the systems mutually fair.

No, you're shifting the context. If you don't want to contribute it's fine, but take your agenda elsewhere. I'm here to discuss a properly defined paradigm, not play volleyball with baseless assertions.

I can't, I don't play sPvP. I'm doing the best I can with the information that's available to me. Doesn't mean they're immutable.

As if you're entitled to an answer when you're not even on topic.

The rewards are analogous, which begs comparison of the acquisition systems. I never said the game modes are equal.

Well, no. It seems we're in agreement. But yes, I would like good design, which requires players to stand together and demand it from those who can provide it.

If you had bothered to read and assimilate my previous posts, you wouldn't be asking that question because you would've already had the answer. In the interest of fairness. I am however asking you a question which you are avoiding - is it a good design?

But is it a good design?

If you insist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy This is a side effect of the current system which is affecting WvW fans. It should not be on the other players to make up for it, and Anet is wrong for doubling down on the flaw by skewing the reward system to incentivize otherwise unmotivated players to play longer hours per week in WvW. The fact that some players already acquired the reward doesn't mean the acquisition method can't or shouldn't be changed. I got a Heart of the Khan-Ur years ago when it was worth 20k gold. Then the drop rate was increased. If I had kept it, I would've lost roughly 18k worth of value on it because of inflation, but I wouldn't have been entitled to cry about it. A flawed system should be changed, and if Anet wants to be fair about it, they can reimburse the claim ticket difference to players who already got the ring. Already accounted for dailies in my OP. I did not account for OSR because it's very difficult to quantify, as it is highly situational. If you can come up with a sensible statistical analysis which can account for the large total play time requirement discrepancy between the WvW ring acquisition method and the Raiding ring acquisition method, I would gladly revise the comparison. If you can't, the point is moot. As Kant puts it in his "Critique of Pure Reason" - "For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied." If it's optional then it is an option, and the option should be on par with other existing counterparts for it to be a fair option. That's why we should make no assumption about prior experience or achievements of a player within the compared game modes. That is a very good point. However, how do you rationalize this? Can you use effort as a coefficient for decreasing the required time, something like effective_time=base_time*(1/game_mode_effort_constant)? Also, and this is tangential to the subject but it's an interesting thought - if you start doing that, wouldn't you lose justification for capping currencies? None of that matters anyway because it's not Anet's philosophy to compute reward acquisition time as a function of effort. If it was, its effects would've be present within the reward acquisition systems. In WvW you'd have substantial claim ticket OSR rewards and smaller rewards for the AFK track (to preserve the expected weekly income), and in raiding LI rewards would scale with the encounter difficulty. Not necessarily. WvW has merit, so it should have its own exclusive shiny reward for people who manage to excel at it, but the acquisition method should be symmetrical with the acquisition method of other game modes' exclusive shinies. It's the same 3-4 people over and over again. A vocal group to be sure, but hardly a majority. Do you have an argument in there somewhere or are you just typing words in an order that seems right to you? Yes, 6 hours for FC is a very sensible number which I got from my experience as a not terribly experienced raider. As Cyninja.2954 kindly pointed out, this is what my weekly clears look like. And yes, after doing the achievements you can just do the easy bosses. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reiterate the fact that raid rewards are linear, which means the total hour investment doesn't go up no matter how many weekly resets it takes you. Even assuming you don't have guilds that can do full clears in that time, the difficulty among encounters is not homogenous, so if you only do the easy encounters, the total hour investment actually goes down, as opposed to WvW where taking the easy route makes the total hour investment go up. I didn't make this argument in my OP because it's very difficult to quantify, but since some people insist on bringing occult optimizations to the discussion table, there you go.

Fair is never subjective. "1=1" is a fair assessment of the value of a unit. "1~=0.9" is unfair even though the truth state of the statement is maintained. I'm looking at it from the only angle that allows for direct comparison. Please elaborate. That's what we're here for.