Improvement suggestions for PoF Trade Contracts

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

@Wanze.8410 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Wanze.8410 said:

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:That is still overly grindy, in my opinion. It is similar to the old 40 fractal farm, just encouraging a large player base to do the same thing over and over and over and over. Even with 9x characters, one of each class, you're looking at 4 days of ultra obnoxious grind to get a single 3000 trade contract trinket.

It's real simple, just make legendary bounties always render +25 trade contracts. Give the PoF content some reason to end game play. Hell, they could even add more types of ascended trinkets for this purpose or other items that are actually worth working towards.

That costs 1 gold per attempt. Unless you're so rich you bleed gold, this isn't a viable method.

just sell the tradeable loot to cover your costs

It doesn't come close.

At 5 contracts per run, 8500 contracts needed for a full ascended set, it comes to 1700 gold to acquire that many contracts.

[Wanze.8410]

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Wanze.8410 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Wanze.8410 said:

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:That is still overly grindy, in my opinion. It is similar to the old 40 fractal farm, just encouraging a large player base to do the same thing over and over and over and over. Even with 9x characters, one of each class, you're looking at 4 days of ultra obnoxious grind to get a single 3000 trade contract trinket.

It's real simple, just make legendary bounties always render +25 trade contracts. Give the PoF content some reason to end game play. Hell, they could even add more types of ascended trinkets for this purpose or other items that are actually worth working towards.

That costs 1 gold per attempt. Unless you're so rich you bleed gold, this isn't a viable method.

just sell the tradeable loot to cover your costs

It doesn't come close.

At 5 contracts per run, 8500 contracts needed for a full ascended set, it comes to 1700 gold to acquire that many contracts.

I was responding to OP, who was talking about a 3000 contract harrier trinket taking 4 days to farm:

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:you're looking at 4 days of ultra obnoxious grind to get a single 3000 trade contract trinket.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

Yeah so come to find out it does let you equip double mist trinkets. Apparently it is only the "unique" trinkets that can not be double equipped.

[ReaverKane.7598]

The problem isn't the rate of acquirement for trade contracts. The problem is the ridiculous price tag on every single PoF item that was added post-release.Whoever team came up with those numbers, must have had a faulty calculator.Just looking at GW2 Efficiency on Laurels, 50% of the people there (which i find a very representative sample give past experiences) have around 100 laurels. With the top players having around 3000 laurels. And yet it costs ~80 Laurels just for trinkets and armor recipes, not even the actual armor!!So basically half the players in the game can barely afford to get themselves a full ascended set of recipes.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

Are the high pve prices for asc possibly on purpose to give players an incentive to go pvp/wvw for far less expensive asc? I have wondered that.

[Biff.5312]

Biff, I'm quite sure it took you longer than a few hours to accumulate 660 Elonian Trade Contracts. If what you say is true and it only took you "3 hours to gain 660 Trade Contracts" then you were for some reason finding +25 Trade Contracts upon every nearly every event/bounty completion that you were doing in those 3 hours. If this is the case, I'd like to ask Arenanet why my drop rates are so wildly nerfed.

I looked again a couple of days after reading this and I was up another couple hundred. I don't know what to tell you.

[Svarty.8019]

While I appreciate that people care, Arenanet don't revisit systems after implementations. They've never done it yet on anything other than skills and they make a massive deal about having to do THAT.

[fixit.7189]

The trade contract drop rates are so abysmal, I can get a trinket in HoT LW map in a day or two while it takes me two plus weeks of constant bounty farming just to afford one. I just hope they plan to buff PoF rewards a bit just like they did to HoT when that expansion had awful rewards on release.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

That or at least cut the price of the ascended trinkets in half. I mean, I already got what I needed through other means in the game at this point so this isn't even a complaint on my part anymore. It's just pointing out to Arenanet that those trinkets are really ridiculously overpriced and that isn't helping draw players into PoF content for after story/map completion play. Honestly there should be a lot more available to purchase with Trade Contracts as well. Things that matter, some kind of end-game content.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Wanze.8410 said:

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:Oh and one last thing, then I'll leave it alone:

Remember that there is a biiiiig difference between Gold Sink for the game's cash propagation purpose and just flat out Time Sink vs. the players that you aren't even making money on. All Time Sink does is drive players away from a game activity or the game in general. Think about that one, really think about it.

others might argue that daily gated time sinks make players log in every day and spend time in the gameTime sinks that are in unreasonable range just make players flat out give up on the goal, and don't attempt them at all. Most players i know don't even bother to farm trade contracts for PoF stat trinkets, because they consider this way to be so ridiculously unreasonable that there's no point even trying. Especially since there are other sources that are far more balanced and reasonable.

[Cenith.1354]

@"Biff.5312" said:

Biff, I'm quite sure it took you longer than a few hours to accumulate 660 Elonian Trade Contracts. If what you say is true and it only took you "3 hours to gain 660 Trade Contracts" then you were for some reason finding +25 Trade Contracts upon every nearly every event/bounty completion that you were doing in those 3 hours. If this is the case, I'd like to ask Arenanet why my drop rates are so wildly nerfed.

I looked again a couple of days after reading this and I was up another couple hundred. I don't know what to tell you.

i dont think you grasp how many Trade contracts are needed like op's post says a few hundred is nothing wile farming for 8k of them

[Wakthor Thorwak.2819]

wait people actully buy those rings :open_mouth:

[Cenith.1354]

this is the best farm ive found so far to aquire large amounts of TC. Though its not really done so finding squad/team can be hard

[Voltekka.2375]

While i agree with you, about TC being hard to get considering the cost of the rings/accessories, I find it always easier to buy mist talismans etc from fractals. If memory serves, all stats are available.

[Pifil.5193]

Personally, I think that the price of ascended items with PoF stats obtained either using trade contracts or Elegies is far too high and a thinly veiled attempt to shoehorn in long term (but poor) goals into the expansion but I don't think it's necessary to necro this post expecially as the new LW episode has provided a much faster alternative.

You can buy a selectable stat ring and accessory using Difluorite and Volatile Magic rather than with Trade Contracts in a similar fashion to the LW3 episodes.

Yes, they're unique so you can only equip one of each but hopefully the next LW episode will provide a way to get the other ring, accessory and amulet. Maybe a backpack too but the one you get from the banner collection shouldn't be that hard to get.

I certainly would rather wait a couple of more months than waste that time grinding out thousands of trade contracts for ascended accessories and kicking myself for doing that when they add far more easily obtained accessories through the next LW episode.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

@Wakthor Thorwak.2819 said:wait people actully buy those rings :open_mouth:

Well that's my point, they don't. It's too impractical.

@"Pifil.5193" This game is 6 years old. No one wants to grind around and/or wait a year to be able to achieve 2 asc "unique" rings of the same stat line, when they can go play ranked pvp/wvw/fractals for a week, and get a full set of trinkets, whatever the hell stats they want. Why even program in something that has such a ludicrous pricing behind it that no one will set the goal to obtain it? It's just wasted programming time man.

[Pifil.5193]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

@Wakthor Thorwak.2819 said:wait people actully buy those rings :open_mouth:

Well that's my point, they don't. It's too impractical.

@"Pifil.5193" This game is 6 years old. No one wants to grind around and/or wait a year to be able to achieve 2 asc "unique" rings of the same stat line, when they can go play ranked pvp/wvw/fractals for a week, and get whatever the hell they want. Why even program in something that has such a ludicrous pricing behind it that no one will set the goal to obtain it? It's just wasted programming man.

I agree with you fully, dragging it out over several months is stupid (as is the whole "Unique" item idea), but this kind of long winded grind and time gating seems to be their main idea for open world PvE rewards: a long term grind that could be quickly bypassed in other modes.

I'm a primarily open world PvE player but I know I'm planning on getting a set of Mist trinkets (probably through PvP or WvW) because you can reset the stats on those quite cheaply and if they follow the same pattern in the future then next expansion I'll be able to reset them to get the new stats I want on day one.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

You probably think I am exaggerating when I say this, but I am not: "Considering starting from the ground up, with no saved mats before hand other than gold, I can and do build legendary weapons much faster, than I can obtain asc trinkets with PoF Trade Contracts." <- That is messed up and in no way makes any sense. Any devs reading this who don't believe me, go look up my history of creating and selling legendary weapons.

Cut the prices of the asc trinkets in PoF already.

[Azertah.5804]

@"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:You probably think I am exaggerating when I say this, but I am not: "Considering starting from the ground up, with no saved mats before hand other than gold, I can and do build legendary weapons much faster, than I can obtain asc trinkets with PoF Trade Contracts." <- That is messed up and in no way makes any sense. Any devs reading this who don't believe me, go look up my history of creating and selling legendary weapons.

Cut the prices of the asc trinkets in PoF already.

As someone who has actually went there and got two harrier trinkets for my druid, the price isn't actually that bad. While just randomly playing around in PoF will get you near nowhere with contracts, farming Treasure hunting kits is likely one of the fastest way to get them. I had to use about 300 to get to the 3k contracts needed for Elonian Transit Pass. Using all 300 of them took about 5 hours.

Recently I've also found that farming for the PoF music boxes gives you a stable income of Trade contracts, going by GW2 efficiency during last 8 days I've went from 0 to 5k, so averaging at about 625 contracts for day. The farm itself takes about 2.5h so getting to or 4.5k to get the both trinkets for full set would take ~18 hours of ingame time or about 7 days as the farm is time gated. (I've also spent a decent number of contracts bying bounty hunter recipes that gw2 effiency doesn't take into account, so daily contract income is even higher)

[Biff.5312]

@Cenith.1354 said:

@"Biff.5312" said:

Biff, I'm quite sure it took you longer than a few hours to accumulate 660 Elonian Trade Contracts. If what you say is true and it only took you "3 hours to gain 660 Trade Contracts" then you were for some reason finding +25 Trade Contracts upon every nearly every event/bounty completion that you were doing in those 3 hours. If this is the case, I'd like to ask Arenanet why my drop rates are so wildly nerfed.

I looked again a couple of days after reading this and I was up another couple hundred. I don't know what to tell you.

i dont think you grasp how many Trade contracts are needed like op's post says a few hundred is nothing wile farming for 8k of them

I can see that it's less accessible than the LS3 stuff, but he actually was talking about 4500 contracts. I have about 3700 at the moment without making the slightest effort to accumulate them. I think the problem most people have is that they are in such a rush to get everything. If you MUST have these items NOW, then sure it would be frustrating. I just don't see why anyone must.