Do Laurel Merchants need to have their laurel prices adjusted?

[Luthan.5236]

No change needed. If at all ... then there would be a need for an increase. With them not really adding more laurels stuff and when you slowly store up a ton that stuff seems so cheap. But as others said: The new system still gives you laurels. There also are some at the astral acclaim vendor. Do not forget those. In the other thread about comparing the old vs. new system it was already explained that you can get a lot of astral acclaim. Would be possible to buy all the laurels (I think 150 per this season) and still having a ton of acclaim for other stuff.

[willow.8209]

9 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Log in rewards have always been too valuable and people like me with mulitple accounts made a killing because of it. I'm glad they changed it, to be honest, because it's better for the game.

If you paid a fair price for each of those accounts, I don't see the difference to people who log in for the reward thinking they will play later (some do play later--I have irregularly logged in for the reward during times I wasn't able to play, or had followed friends to another game). A paid account is a paid account.

If you didn't pay a fair price for all of them, I can see that would be a problem. Best as I can work out, this seems to be an issue with how they marketed the game in the past and is not an ongoing issue?

[willow.8209]

anyway, I feel sad about the login rewards (bouncy chest), and I bought the game partly because of that. I feel it helps me be less behind. I would have preferred that they handle it by restricting how many accounts can be at a specific IP address (I know some people would circumvent this, but some would not) or something like that.

However, that's not part of my reasonable accommodations request, which is about the available number of login tasks. There should be a lot more choices much like before. I've often had more than one I couldn't complete so I do not expect 1 extra to solve this issue. 

[Vayne.8563]

3 hours ago, willow.8209 said:

If you paid a fair price for each of those accounts, I don't see the difference to people who log in for the reward thinking they will play later (some do play later--I have irregularly logged in for the reward during times I wasn't able to play, or had followed friends to another game). A paid account is a paid account.

If you didn't pay a fair price for all of them, I can see that would be a problem. Best as I can work out, this seems to be an issue with how they marketed the game in the past and is not an ongoing issue?

2 answers to this question. A lot of those accounts that got log in rewards were free accounts. That is to say, they paid nothing for them, because they were core accounts, the old Guild Wars 2 before HOT, which still get log in rewards, but have no access to expansion content. Those accounts came from Amazon Prime, from Humble Bundle, from other promotions, and there were tons of them. They gave people the ability to get tons of log in reward accounts for free.

I paid for and even play my 18 accounts, so i'm not the problem, but there are people with a hundred accounts that do nothing more than log in every day. Let's say they bought POF/HOT on sale when it was just $15. For $15 they get a continual log in reward every day, that includes mystic coins, which can be mailed to their main account, and also laurels which can buy T6, T4 and T3 mats which can be mailed their main account.

I currently have all 19 core legendary weapons. I have 15 of the 16 HoT legendary weapons (I can't bring myself to make Flames of War) and I have 9 of the Aurene legendary weapons plus a bunch of the upgrades. I have two legendary back pieces and I have full legendary armor, mostly from raids, but some from WvW and PvP.  All of that requires mats, mystic clovers, mystic coins.  I'm in full legendary right now as far as you can be, incluing sigils and runes, but I didn't spend money except for the accounts I'm talking about, to get that. It's not like buying gems where I had to keep buying them. Those log in rewards were worth really money. I didn't have to play those accounts and many people with multiple accounts don't. There are people with 100 accounts, that semi-automate their log in, get their reward and never play the account at all.

Those people were making bank, and some of those accounts were free. My accounts all have upgrades, at least PoF and HoT, but 8 have EOD. Only two have soto. The rewards are less for logging in, but more for playing. And I've been playing them to get those rewards. What I do is fine and has always been fine most likely since most of those accounts have gem store items on them. At least copper fed salvomatic, unlimited gathering tools, bank space, character slot bag expansion and other odds and ends.  I play those accounts. Most people with as many accounts as me didn't. 555

[Sobx.1758]

19 hours ago, Manifest.8417 said:

Given the changes to the daily login rewards, of course

19 hours ago, Manifest.8417 said:

Depending on how they are spent, and considering the need for the other items as well

So... did you make any actual numbers check on that to have a valid frame of reference for the proposal you're coming up with or are you just... blindly guessing?

Edited September 14, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[Gotejjeken.1267]

13 hours ago, Luthan.5236 said:

No change needed. If at all ... then there would be a need for an increase. 

This is true, as I have ~700 sitting around at the moment and I'm sure a lot of other longtime players do as well.  If not an increase, then more useful things to do with them, or ways to convert them to something else should be in order.  

[Solvar.7953]

Note that what gets you the most value/laurel is not even - gw2efficiency has a table on that (https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/laurels) - based on that, some things are terrible to spend laurels on, but that is true for many aspects of the game - some things are terrible buys, so that being the case for some things with laurels isn't any exception.

I'm not sure that laurels need an overall price adjustment - based on other sites, buying laurels with AA (and then presumably buying the best bags with those laurels) is still one of the better ways to convert AA into gold.

 

[Luthan.5236]

I have about 2k. But I used the additional ones from the old chest from old dailies. Even trying to slowly buy some of the old recipes every now and then. For completion. (Which is not really needed since you do not craft such ascended stuff anymore. There are better sources.)

From the normal vendor in Lion's Arch and other hubs ... there is also only a limited stuff of interesting things. The minis and some other stuff ... can be interesting. But for the ascended trinkets you have better options. Mainly it can get costly and interesting if you really want to use the vendor for ascended trinkets regularly. A new player with only core/free account that does not play fractals often + does not have access to living world maybe. Bit if you do not need the trinkets ... the laurels sooner or later start to gather up. Then it's saving them for later use. (In hopes of ArenaNet adding more stuff.)

Or the crafting bags mentioned in the gw2efficiency link. For own use or for selling to convert to gold (silver).

[Essence Snow.3194]

Some items yes, some no. Tbf some items in most exchanges could use some adjustments.

[Astralporing.1957]

11 hours ago, willow.8209 said:

If you didn't pay a fair price for all of them, I can see that would be a problem. Best as I can work out, this seems to be an issue with how they marketed the game in the past and is not an ongoing issue?

It's actually an issue with a couple mistakes they have made long ago when going f2p. The Heroic Edition code was not originally a game version - originally it was just a code for some added goodies that was separate from normal purchase. When they were consolidating old game versions however, this code has been mistakenly marked in such a way, that using it turned the f2p core version into a Heroic Edition paid one. This has been found out quite fast, when they sent out some codes to players (as part of some promotion whose details i no longer remember). Some of those players added those codes not to their main account, but to f2p alt one and found out they now had a paid version instead - and Anet's response then was "oops. Well, good for you, we're not going to roll that back".

Now, that was the first mistake. The second one came when someone apparently forgot about this issue, and started giving out heroic edition codes to different businesses (like Alienware, or Nvidia) for use in their promotions as part of game marketing, thinking that they are what they were supposed to be - just a code that adds a few goodies to the account, nothing more. The third mistake was not Anet's - it was a result of one such promotion being done badly, and allowing participants to get unrestricted amounts of those codes, instead of only one per person.

This resulted in a group of players with many, many alt "paid" accounts noone has actually paid for.

[Danikat.8537]

The Heroic Edition including the core game wasn't a mistake. Here's the press release for when it was first announced: https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/news/arenanet-offers-free-trial-of-guild-wars-2-and-releases-new-heroic-edition/

"The Seattle-area studio has also released the Guild Wars 2 Heroic Edition, which includes the base game with the Heroic Pack, which is loaded with useful digital items for new players."

If anything it might have been an oversight that you could apply a Heroic Edition code to an existing account to get the items. Although that would be kind of pointless because none of them are exclusive (the armor sets and boosters are in the gem store and you can craft or buy an 18-slot bag) and it cost $49.99 when it was first released. I think they released it partially so they could generate press around a 'new version' of the game and because back in 2013 a lot of people would assume starting an MMO a year after it came out would put you a year behind everyone else and you'd be facing a lot of grind to catch up. Of course that's never been the case with GW2 (and is rarely the case with any MMO these days) but offering new players a fancy armour set and some boosters might have helped reassure them they wouldn't be starting at a disadvantage.

There was a mistake 2 years later where people who had bought the core game before the Heroic Edition existed and did the HoT beta tests found that after the beta they got mailed the Heroic Edition items. That was apparently because at some point in the intervening 2 years they'd discontinued the original core game and so the 'basic' SKU was now the Heroic Edition one. But that won't have affected any free accounts because you had to pre-purchase HoT to get into those betas. (There were closed betas early on where Anet randomly selected players from those subscribed to the newsletter or who got a Portal to the Heart of Maguuma as a random drop, but that was before free accounts existed.)

I don't think including it in promotions was a mistake either. From 2013 - 2015 it was only available in limited numbers (one of the top prizes since it was a copy of the whole game at the time). After they released HoT and made the base game free it started to be more widely available in promotions, because it was basically the same content as a free account got, so Anet weren't really losing anything but people who won also weren't just getting something they could have gotten free anyway.

I suspect you're thinking of the Kung-fu Tea promotion (the first tie-in with a non-gaming company), which was a complete mess but was always supposed to include free copies of the Heroic Edition, which were supposed to give full access to the base game. The problem is it was supposed to be restricted to 1 per customer and to people in North America (possibly only the parts of North America where the tea company had shops) but it was run through their app, which was created to give occasional freebies to regular buyers of novelty tea. It was not set up to handle the kind of traffic it got from millions of GW2 players and was never region restricted. (The charitable interpretation is they never expected anyone outside the USA to try to download the app.)

A combination of bad app design and traffic overwhelming the app meant that to claim the free items you pretty much had to spam the button until a confirmation email came through, but that lead to some people getting multiple successes and the discovery that if you did it quickly enough you could get any number of codes led to people setting up systems designed to do exactly that, which lead to even more traffic. Many of those codes ended up on reselling sites and some people just used them to set up dozens of alt accounts for themselves to farm login rewards. The problem was eventually fixed; the promotion was shut down for a week or so and when it restarted the app was correctly restricted to North America and the promotion to 1 per customer, and Anet cancelled a lot of the codes that had been given out to stop people selling or using them, but any which had already been used stayed active. (I think there was too much risk of banning legit accounts if they tried to shut them down.)

In spite of that the heroic edition has been included in other promotions since then, but only with companies who are prepared for the kind of traffic they'll get by giving away free copies of an MMO. (Usually companies like Alienware who limit how many codes are available, or Amazon who restrict it to Prime members. There's a full list here.)

[Lucy.3728]

On 9/14/2023 at 5:45 AM, Manifest.8417 said:

Given the changes to the daily login rewards, of course

When I see what the scoundrel wants for an accessory, I laugh three times and go to buy it where it is cheaper.

The new system has nothing to do with that.

Edited September 15, 2023 by Lucy.3728

[Rauderi.8706]

To answer question: Nah. 

To springboard into actual need: AA rewards need to be re-evaluated. 40AA for a single Tier 5 bag? When laurels cost 10? Nonono. Those bags should be around 8 each.