Am I missing something about Research Notes?

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

This is a slight rant, but I do actually intend it as a genuine question.

 

I've recently tried to get my head around Research Notes, and as far as I can tell, I hate them.  They're one of the grindiest, least intuitive, and most expensive aspects of the game, and they seem to be required in huge quantities for pretty much all of the long term EoD rewards (Cores, Legendaries, Specialisation Weapons...).  Moreover, while  I normally don't mind grind, in other areas the thing that is being grinded is at least theoretically fun.  As in, while I know farming Chak Gerent over and over is boring, fighting the Chak Gerent itself isn't.  With Research Notes, this looks from the outset to be just an overwhelmingly unpleasant experience.  Spend time (out of game) figuring out (hopefully) the most cost-effective way to get them, spend time buying and crafting thousands of the same item, then spend more time deconstructing thousands of that item, with the added stress factor that if you're wrong in your research you could be out hundreds of gold.

 

Where I'm confused, however, is that I don't understand why this isn't being talked about much.  This seems to me at least as big an issue as the Dragon's End meta, but searching the forums there only seem to be a handful of threads, mainly discussing either specific item costs (Zhaitan set) or tips and tricks to get them.

 

On the other side, given the Zhaitan set costs, and also the fact that cheap items seem to be being patched into not working, ANet seem to think these are working as intended.

 

So, again, am I missing something?  I feel like if the community aren't making noise, and ANet are also happy, then hating them this much means I'm probably misunderstanding them?

[Einsof.1457]

if its not fun dont do it, or do just a couple a day. 

[mungozen.2379]

39 minutes ago, CrashTestAuto.9108 said:

So, again, am I missing something?  I feel like if the community aren't making noise, and ANet are also happy, then hating them this much means I'm probably misunderstanding them?

What's to make noise about?  Having to convert thousands of items to Research Notes probably seemed like a big waste of time for a number of players who, rather than complained about it, just decided to not bother.  Similar to Fishing or DE Meta Anet has wasted development time into trash tier content that is both a grind/time sink and unrewarding.

[Taclism.2406]

I feel like you only scratched the surface of the problem, but theres many points to your question

1) Why isnt the community making noise : Because while its a bad and convoluted system, you can ignore it for the most part. Unless you try to get a legendary gen3, need ritualist gear or are the completionist type, you have 0 reason to do notes, and you can buy most of what notes are used for. 

2) What you're missing : Devs are basically trying to bend the game to shoehorn notes. My main problem is that it messes a lot with the game economy.
On release, you could craft it with T1, 2 copper per note crafting bread, with infinite supplies from the merch.
Then they banned T1s (fair enough), then many, many "exceptions" to the point it makes no sense anymore. Nerfed pots, coffee, anything that seems to displease devs and what they think a research note should cost (seemingly about 1silver) instead of leting the market adjust itself.
This impacted a lot the cost of T2/T5 mats on top of an already high demand for gear mats - given the return of many players. 

Now, after a few months, many of the people who stockpiled notes while it was cheaper and "sold it back" with draconic jade for profits, they release new, absurdly high, notes req to renew the need for notes.

3) Anet seems happy : Well yeah, the gold / gem ratio is as high as it was on Winterdays, you know they're making $$$

How to fix the problem : Just make the merch sell research notes 1silver each instead of asking us to destroy items / waste time / mess with other mats value

Edited May 29, 2022 by Taclism.2406

[Forgotten Legend.9281]

really, my biggest complaint about research kits is that they lack "consume all" and "consume stack" options. Otherwise, i'm one of the longtime players that still has a couple hundred ascended pieces of gear that i can salvage. However, it would be more convenient to not have to craft so much in order to gain research notes.

[Khisanth.2948]

Research Notes are pointless extra hoops to jump through to spend gold but "most expensive" is an exaggeration. It's around 4g  each for the elite spec weapon collection items. A t6 core requires around the same.

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

1 hour ago, Einsof.1457 said:

if its not fun dont do it, or do just a couple a day. 

 

34 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

Having to convert thousands of items to Research Notes probably seemed like a big waste of time for a number of players who, rather than complained about it, just decided to not bother. 

 

25 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

 Because while its a bad and convoluted system, you can ignore it for the most part. 

Okay, so this is where I was confused.  I likely will also wind up deciding this isn't fun, so not doing it.  But that means that pretty much all of the medium/long EoD rewards are just not going to be an option.  I don't understand why this isn't being viewed as a major problem by both the community and ANet?  If the overwhelming response to an Expansion's worth of rewards has been "This isn't fun, so I won't do it", how isn't this ringing alarm bells (among the people who care enough to post on the forum)?

The Turtle being locked behind a difficult meta set the forum on fire and got patched and multiple updates from ANet.  This feels at least as big an issue to me.

Also, disappointing that it sounds like I'm not actually missing something and this is as tedious as I understood it to be 😞 

2 minutes ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

Research Notes are pointless extra hoops to jump through to spend gold but "most expensive" is an exaggeration. It's around 4g  each for the elite spec weapon collection items. A t6 core requires around the same.

Oh really?  That's good.  I'm struggling to intuit the cost of things with the craft -> notes -> currency bought with notes.  Was mainly basing that off the legendaries discussions I'd read.

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by CrashTestAuto.9108

[Khisanth.2948]

5 minutes ago, CrashTestAuto.9108 said:

Oh really?  That's good.  I'm struggling to intuit the cost of things with the craft -> notes -> currency bought with notes.  Was mainly basing that off the legendaries discussions I'd read.

The problem there is that you can make anything expensive if you slap a 10000x multiplier on it.

[Gorem.8104]

The thing is, at launch people got so many of these things because at launch more stuff was available and cheaper that could be used that progressively was stealth nerfed or nerfed. They kept actually making the system worse till we got to where we are today, with them wanting us to get 10k for a skin we suddenly need a lot of em. Could get by quite easily before with just a few so it was mostly ignorable. It wasn't really talked about before because most people were ignoring it. 

Maybe that just says something about how boring the entire system is and how its just a gold sink that didn't need to exist. 

[AgentMoore.9453]

I think the only thing you're missing in your assessment is the additional joy that some items can be researched but will yield 0 notes, meaning you've spent money on a research kit, destroyed an item, and gotten the glorious gift of nothing in return. So not only are you playing a guessing game with what's most cost-effective to craft/break down, you're also playing 'will it give notes?' most of the time which is absolutely silly. If it can be researched, it should give notes.

The other point I often see in conversations about this awful system is that the process of chain-crafting a bunch of things and smashing them to pieces is time spent not doing events, exploring maps, meeting/interacting with other players, or progressing your account. Much like the goofery of the way they've done fishing, you're either working on gathering research notes, or you're playing GW2. The two feel isolated as implemented. Some have suggested this could be remedied with a passive gain of notes in the form of a Jade Bot upgrade, since at least then you could engage with the rest of the game instead of grinding your way toward accelerated burnout.

Other than that, you've got it all figured out. It's an over-complicated, inefficient system which is heavily intertwined with EoD's offerings and not fun. If you're not seeing enough noise about it, it's because most of the noise being made is people looking at it and muttering 'well, to heck with that' right before they go back to some other area of the game (or another game entirely).

Will people engage with this system in the long term? Will people skip that content? Will ArenaNet implement sufficient changes to make it better? It'll be very interesting to see what data we have 6 months from now with regard to the Zhaitan variants and other things that are heavily reliant on research notes.

[Hotride.2187]

I've never seen an item in my inventory that could be salvaged by the research kits, this is the extent of my exposure to the research system. I checked the price for the 250 uses kit, lol'ed that the game gave me a 1 silver waste-inventory-space item "for free" and deleted the kits from all my chars that had them.

On the bright side armor insignias have gone up in price (from like 10 silver to like 40 silver), I assume due to research notes salvage.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Jukhy.2431]

11 hours ago, Forgotten Legend.9281 said:

really, my biggest complaint about research kits is that they lack "consume all" and "consume stack" options.

From the May 24th game update notes: "Research Kits now have a Research Stack option in their right-click menu."

[Astralporing.1957]

11 hours ago, CrashTestAuto.9108 said:

But that means that pretty much all of the medium/long EoD rewards are just not going to be an option.  I don't understand why this isn't being viewed as a major problem by both the community and ANet?

I don't know about Anet, but for most people i know of they don't care because they gave up on EoD in general, due to it being lackluster on most fronts. As such, research notes are just one more stone on a big pile of reasons to be disappointed.

 

 

[Zok.4956]

15 hours ago, CrashTestAuto.9108 said:

I don't understand why this isn't being viewed as a major problem by both the community and ANet?  If the overwhelming response to an Expansion's worth of rewards has been "This isn't fun, so I won't do it", how isn't this ringing alarm bells (among the people who care enough to post on the forum)?

Anet is very quiet about research notes and the only changes they made to the research note system beside the "consume/use all" option is is to make it more expensive. I think Anet moved away from EoD to other content and a lot of players did too.

The research note system is bad and unfun. But it can be ignored in general because it is not esssential for the game. So, players ignore it. Like a lot of other content of EoD is ignored. But only when players can not ignore it anymore, because they want an item that requires a ridiciulos high amount of research notes, the discussion starts. That's why, for example, research notes are disussed in threads about the Zhaitan skins for the Aurene legy.

I have made 15k research notes right at the start when they were cheap. Because I wanted to be done with that crap, to have more than enough if there ever would be something that requires them. I did know that the Aurene legys were very expensive but it was beyond my imagination that each skin for an Aurene weapon would require 10k research notes.

 

[Mara.6782]

If only we could salvage non crafted weapons, armor and trinkets. 

[Haretic.2047]

4 hours ago, Mara.6782 said:

If only we could salvage non crafted weapons, armor and trinkets. 

This, please!

[LaGranse.8652]

Make legendary armor/weapons and salvage all the useless ascended armor/weapon drops you get.

Several hundred notes per item for something that had 0 value.

 

Other method I used at start of EoD getting research notes to make money crafting T10 jade cores was crafting and salvaging mithril jewelry. Probably more people that figured it out and not as good anymore though.

[Zok.4956]

21 hours ago, Mara.6782 said:

If only we could salvage non crafted weapons, armor and trinkets. 

You can change the stats of ascended weapons and armor in the mystic forge. The mystic forge creates a new item that can be salvaged like a crafted one. For this you need to put 5 Ectos, an Anthology, the ascended weapon/armor and an exotic inscription (for weapons) or insignia (for armor) in the mystic forge. 

 

Edited May 31, 2022 by Zok.4956

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

Research notes is an excellent system for eliminating old, worthless items from the economy. However, their changes after EoD launch eliminating a bunch of the really good stuff, as well as the crazy prices of new items that require notes, undoes this.

[Tiamat.8254]

I think the biggest problem is knowing if an item can be converted to research notes. It's mostly suck it and see. 

[Ashen.2907]

Research notes seem to be intended as a time sink as well as a crafting mats sink. It encourages you to spend time and mats to craft so that you have something to break down. Essentially busy-work intended to also use up some portion of the glut of crafting materials on the market. If this drives prices on the TP up then the taxes on the higher prices will serve as a gold sink as well.

[Hotride.2187]

So I remembered about the new weapon collections while doing eod map mastery achievements. The bldesworn pistol doesn't look bad for a pistol (and most pistols look bad) so I decided... sure why not. One of the items apparently requires research notes. So I go. Sure np, let me go on my cooking character and just waste all the cooking stuff that I've been slowly hoarding (I stopped making ascended food since I never use it).

And woah.... just woah. Every 2nd item I craft can't be salvaged. I of course understand the intent, but you might as well just sell the notes for gold from some vendor. What is the point in having to try 10 recipes  so you can salvage from only 1 (and learn that by trial and error)...

Its like someone went "hey I know how we can make players interact with crafting more". Then, 5 hours or so after release, players started doing what they always do - find the cheapest option and go ham. Then that same person went "noooooooooo... not like this.... 😕 " and killed the entire thing over a few weeks. But didn't declare it a dead horse and so there is the result...

Edited June 19, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

1 hour ago, Hotride.2187 said:

So I remembered about the new weapon collections while doing eod map mastery achievements. The bldesworn pistol doesn't look bad for a pistol (and most pistols look bad) so I decided... sure why not. One of the items apparently requires research notes. So I go. Sure np, let me go on my cooking character and just waste all the cooking stuff that I've been slowly hoarding (I stopped making ascended food since I never use it).

And woah.... just woah. Every 2nd item I craft can't be salvaged. I of course understand the intent, but you might as well just sell the notes for gold from some vendor. What is the point in having to try 10 recipes  so you can salvage from only 1 (and learn that by trial and error)...

Its like someone went "hey I know how we can make players interact with crafting more". Then, 5 hours or so after release, players started doing what they always do - find the cheapest option and go ham. Then that same person went "noooooooooo... not like this.... 😕 " and killed the entire thing over a few weeks. But didn't declare it a dead horse and so there is the result...

There's always the Wiki to help guide one:  https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Research_Note

[Strider Pj.2193]

29 minutes ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

There's always the Wiki to help guide one:  https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Research_Note

I mean..  That should just pop up in game automatically every time I interact with something I don’t understand or know.  And the game should inherently know that I don’t know it so it will just pop up.  /s (because someone would think I was serious…)

[Sobx.1758]

I don't get how this is supposed to be a "time sink" in any way. This is a gold sink and it aims at impacting some low-value items so they're worth more than their default sell-to-merchant price. Other than that, it takes 10-20 minutes to get thousands of these notes. It really is rather easy to stock up on them. Less so if you choose to go for the absolute minimum price by crafting/salvaging gear one-by-one, at which point you're basically choosing to put more effort to save... 2-3 gold per 10k notes.

Edited June 19, 2022 by Sobx.1758