Time Gated Ascension Armor Crafting, Why?

[Jalad Lantana.3027]

What purpose does making crafting various pieces for Ascended armor time gated serve?

 

[Mungrul.9358]

It ensures you log in every day. Nothing more complicated than that.

ArenaNet need to keep you engaged so they can increase the likelihood you'll buy stuff through the gem store.

[Fueki.4753]

At the start of the game, some people complained that maxing out in full exotics was too quick.

Maybe Arenanet took these people too seriously and because of them artificially prolonged the time to get full ascended sets.

The only other idea I have is that Arenanet simply did it on a whim without an actual reason, like they made bare feet into skin instead of a toggle on a whim without an actual or acceptable reason.

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by Fueki.4753

[Rasimir.6239]

Aside from making you log in, it also helps keep the economy going. You can bypass the daily ascended crafting by buying the intermediate materials (e.g. deldrimor steel ingots, spiritwood planks) on the trading post. This way people that like to craft/do daily tasks can sell their extra daily crafting results, which again creates a market for ores, logs etc. that are used to promote the timegated materials to the tradeable ones. It entices people to participate in the trading economy and keeps up the demand for mid-level basic resources while making it hard for individuals or small groups to control the market.

Edited September 29, 2021 by Rasimir.6239

[Geoff Fey.1035]

Ascended crafting (Armours, Weapons) was added about a year after the initial release. By that point there were lots of people with sizeable amounts of materials and liquid gold (Dungeons were very lucrative back in the day) so if they didn't time-gate it it would have been even easier for those people to flip their stockpiles into Ascended immediately rather than working through it day-by-day which was ANet's preference.

It's also to prevent people from just paying for everything with a credit card. If they didn't time-gate, you could just buy everything ($ --> Gems --> Gold) via the TP and skip everything.

It probably also had something to do with the in-game economy. They flipped around a few recipes before/after that really messed with things (increasing the logs/leather needed to upgrade to planks/squares) trying to sort out the TP. I know they used to have an economist  but I don't know if he's still kicking around. Based on how the Mystic Coins got so out of whack and the fact that Flax to this day (from HoT release 2015) is still worthwhile to alt-farm I would go out on a limb and guess maybe he isn't with them anymore.

[mythical.6315]

The time gate was added to allow crafters to make a profit or at least that was the reason they gave when they introduced ascended crafting. This remained true for quite some time until they added those items as rewards all across the game. 

[Danikat.8537]

All of the above I think.

 

Early on, when exotic was the top tier a lot of people complained that it was too quick and easy to get to level 80 and get full exotic equipment and then there was nothing to aim for. (At the time there were no elite specs, no masteries, no collections and a lot less content in the game overall.) Ascended was added in response to that so it was designed to be a long-term goal, somewhere between exotic and legendary, and one way of doing that was to make crafting time-gated.

 

Making it specifically a once per day activity gives players an incentive to log in and do that even on days they're not intending to actually play, and that helps activity (particularly since once they've logged in they may stick around for other reasons) and gives them more chances to see and buy gem store items.

 

It also adds an extra benefit to crafting, even for people who aren't planning to make ascended armour themselves because now there's an item they can craft which is likely to be profitable to sell because it's availability is limited.

[Gibson.4036]

Some people have absurd amounts of time to play, yet they want to stay engaged to an MMO for years. There is no content creation team that can keep up with that. Time gating draws out the time it takes to get all the stuff and say, 'Okay, I'm out until the next expansion.' It keeps them coming around.

This is the problem at the root of every MMORPG.

[kharmin.7683]

Yeah, wait until 18 hours after the release of the next expansion for all of the "there's nothing to do" threads because people power through the content.  🙄

[Gibson.4036]

14 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Yeah, wait until 18 hours after the release of the next expansion for all of the "there's nothing to do" threads because people power through the content.  🙄

QFT

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

1 hour ago, Geoff Fey.1035 said:

Ascended crafting (Armours, Weapons) was added about a year after the initial release. By that point there were lots of people with sizeable amounts of materials and liquid gold (Dungeons were very lucrative back in the day) so if they didn't time-gate it it would have been even easier for those people to flip their stockpiles into Ascended immediately rather than working through it day-by-day which was ANet's preference.

It's also to prevent people from just paying for everything with a credit card. If they didn't time-gate, you could just buy everything ($ --> Gems --> Gold) via the TP and skip everything.

It probably also had something to do with the in-game economy. They flipped around a few recipes before/after that really messed with things (increasing the logs/leather needed to upgrade to planks/squares) trying to sort out the TP. I know they used to have an economist  but I don't know if he's still kicking around. Based on how the Mystic Coins got so out of whack and the fact that Flax to this day (from HoT release 2015) is still worthwhile to alt-farm I would go out on a limb and guess maybe he isn't with them anymore.

John Smith left many a year ago (April 2017).  Chris Cleary took over the position, but he left long ago (December 2019), as well. 

If there is a new Economist/Analytics person, the studio hasn't announced who it is.  (It might be Tyler Bearce [Commerce] or Jeremy Brown [Data Analytics]; it is hard to tell.)

[Kalocin.5982]

A lot of it has been answered already so I will say an easy way to mitigate it in the future is to craft the daily stuff even when you're already done a set. By the time you're ready for the next one you'll have enough daily stuff already saved up. The mithril one is probably the easiest to do since you tend to passively get a ton of it

[Jalad Lantana.3027]

22 hours ago, mythical.6315 said:

The time gate was added to allow crafters to make a profit or at least that was the reason they gave when they introduced ascended crafting. This remained true for quite some time until they added those items as rewards all across the game. 

That makes the most sense to me, however, the gating  would seem to put a hard ceiling on how many items they can sell in a given time period if their stock runs out, but maybe that is intentional as a governor.

I don't mind the gating, it is not excessive, I was just curious.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Jalad Lantana.3027
added comment

[Danikat.8537]

15 hours ago, Kalocin.5982 said:

A lot of it has been answered already so I will say an easy way to mitigate it in the future is to craft the daily stuff even when you're already done a set. By the time you're ready for the next one you'll have enough daily stuff already saved up. The mithril one is probably the easiest to do since you tend to passively get a ton of it

I do that as well. Not every day, but if I'm crafting something else or refining materials to free up some space I'll make whichever of the time-gated ones I have enough materials for, so I've got them ready for whenever I need them.

[Bollocks.4078]

On 9/29/2021 at 9:05 AM, Geoff Fey.1035 said:

It's also to prevent people from just paying for everything with a credit card. If they didn't time-gate, you could just buy everything ($ --> Gems --> Gold) via the TP and skip everything.

 

How so?  Anyone can still just buy the time gated ascended mats.  I would think the time gating is more likely to encourage buying as it's the only way to get around the time gating if you didn't pre-craft the time gated items.  Using $ or Gems isn't necessarily required if you have enough gold already.

[mythical.6315]

28 minutes ago, Bollocks.4078 said:

 

How so?  Anyone can still just buy the time gated ascended mats.  I would think the time gating is more likely to encourage buying as it's the only way to get around the time gating if you didn't pre-craft the time gated items.  Using $ or Gems isn't necessarily required if you have enough gold already.

 

I found their comment odd because the livestream that introduced ascended crafting specifically stated that that the refined components would be tradeable.

 

About 20:40 into the video

 

[Solvar.7953]

I suspect the initial time gating may have to been to stabilize prices - if everyone could make as many lumps of mihtrilium as they wanted (for example), the price of mithril would probably have skyrocketed as everyone wants to be the first to make ascended weapons.  Limiting it to 1/day/accounts puts an upper limit on that demand - I'm sure some players bought a bunch of deldrimor ingots of the TP to be first, and some others were happy to sell those for high prices.  But that still put an upper limit of 50 mithril ingots/day/player.

After some time, they probably could have removed that time gating with minimal impact to the economy, but they have decided not to.

 

[Firebeard.1746]

On 9/29/2021 at 6:25 AM, Jalad Lantana.3027 said:

What purpose does making crafting various pieces for Ascended armor time gated serve?

 

If you don't want to do that, you can climb the fractal ladder (though starting with an ascended set helps). You'll get ascended weapons and armor regularly once you do t4 dailies. Ascended armor is very earnable if you hate crafting, raiding and/or strikes are alternative sources for earning it directly. Ranked PVP and WvW also have purchasable ascended armor that is a precursor for legendary armor.

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

So you can earn some gold. These mats are tradeable on tp. If you're in a hurry you can buy them.
And later on once you had your ascended needs met you can still craft the day-locked components and sell'em for profit.

[Bollocks.4078]

I think it was probably more to preserve the value of the T7 mats.  Any spike in the price of the T2, T3, T4 and T5 mats would have been temporary.  But without the time gating the price of the price of T7 mats would have ended up probably only slightly higher than the cost of the mats to make it.

[ugrakarma.9416]

Compare profit of non time gated stuff with the time-gated stuff and u will understand.

Quartz crystal crafted stuff for example, have average 1g to 5g profit.

Anyway, if u want wait, its took near 30 days to craft 6 pieaces of ascendend armor. 

Edited October 1, 2021 by ugrakarma.9416