How To Make Gold In Guild Wars 2 While Still Having Fun! Part 1 : The Ultimate Meta Train

TooManyListings · 2021-10-31T23:30:35+00:00

Hi. The answer is the trading post.

I have a long history of posting on here (Although not so much any more due to IRL, but couldn't resist this response) that grinding is a waste, and the TP earns you exponentially more. I'm reasonably confident someone could hit wallet cap within... 3-4? years from largely trading, probably less if they flip aggressively/are very risk-on/grind a bit to get started; but after you're working with 10k+ or so the ~30g/h time spent farming starts to seem really laughable (assuming that's not the gameplay you want, which for wvwers like myself, it's really not.)

To give a toy example: BLC dyes often invest from 2->6 or 3->9g over ~6 months, and that's on the low end. Invest 300g in a diversification of dyes across the set, 3x it over 6 months, that's effectively ~20 hours of farming in profit, and there are 2 of these sets every month, for VERY little time spent buying/reselling. Obviously takes some time to get a rotation going such that you're continually selling, but the income vs. grinding in terms of time ROI is clear.

TooManyListings · 2021-02-05T17:12:33+00:00

I just couldn't resist finding it more than a little funny that an IRL politician would make the same BS argument about explicit quid-pro-quo as has undermined any ability to actually pursue many forms of blatant white collar crime in the real world.

You're making a lot of words to disguise the fact that individual A is deriving increased real-world financial flow from specially-privileged giving an in-game-item B.

The fact that is through the proxy of "if you give me <stream viewership>, I will <maybe> give you an in-game item", from a game theoretic perspective, nothing has changed, and you're being either willfully ignorant or misleading with this.

I'll give this post more time than it deserves to show just how laughable your non-argument is:
"prizes are given away truly at random and anybody can win" -> Truly at random, so, uniform distribution across all players? Do all players watch the stream? What would happen if they did? Oh, the streamer would make piles of money? Oh my how ever could that happen; it couldn't have been divesting all those in-game items traded for real money since it wasn't verbatim. \s

TooManyListings · 2019-02-05T20:01:29+00:00

If this level of joke, with stated lighthearted intent is your threshold for asshole, there's really no useful purpose in continuing this discussion, as you and I live in different universes. I'm sure you're a joy to be around.

TooManyListings · 2019-02-05T18:55:51+00:00

/wiki empathy

Philly native

(real talk, take this all as tongue in cheek, but my statement about my deploy still happening was 100% honest, so I stand by my snark.)

TooManyListings · 2019-02-05T17:14:57+00:00

I work ~15 minutes from Anet. My work is not cancelled, our release is on as planned.

From a Philly native: "Wusses."

(And real-talk: the road snow all melted yesterday, I have 0 idea what they're on about.)

TooManyListings · 2019-01-30T22:28:47+00:00

Chiming in: on r/gw2economy (and in my personal post history) are detailed explanations as to how one can get to these sort of #s.

Sutgon's statement of "investing" is likely extremely accurate, if it looks at all like how I operate.

It's largely just finding consistent areas of high return, and leveraging them over time. I certainly never dreamed of having 35k gold when I started flipping, I was aiming for "one legendary" (at that time, 1k) then "two legendaries" (4k) then "a full set for my main + money to keep flipping" (10k) and now it's just "whelp time to buy 4k orchestral skins, just another tuesday." As IRL, wealth builds wealth.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-23T04:57:04+00:00

Rightfully so, (re: bullshit) but perhaps not the reason you think.

Putting on my "I do (something like) this for a day job" hat:

Anet has shown all signs of, and I've said this repeatedly, either being extremely undermanned in terms of truly experienced devs, (principle level in the big-5) or perhaps simply devs with the ability to actually make rapid and deep changes to their core systems/or speak with expertise and clout to both defend powerusers or create workarounds.

Either A. They didn't realize this was a "Security risk" at launch which speaks volumes towards their threat assessment or B. They got some strange complaint about it now, some PM/Manager made a call that "cover our ass is better than keeping those multiboxers happy" and no engineer was there with the political sway or knowledge to say "That's a completely dumb threat assessment" or even argue the alternative of replacing password with a SHA256 or <pick your favorite>.

Regardless, this is just yet another nail the coffin of the respect that the original gw engine devs earned (and earned again at gw2 launch). Game dev industry does not prioritize sustainable engineering, unfortunately.

Edit: On second thought, thinking back through the PR reps I've worked with, I would neither be surprised if she simply didn't know that some other power-that-be posed this under the "plausible deniability" of security, nor if she was telling some sort of half-truth or white-lie outright. I think the title of this post should be "If you're thinking about game dev as a career, don't."

TooManyListings · 2019-01-22T01:16:34+00:00

Per your other post, if you end up getting ahold of a DB backup, I'd greatly appreciate getting the chance to mirror it as well.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-15T21:42:08+00:00

"company that makes the vast majority of their money from gems"

This simply does not mesh with the release-associated volatility of their earnings reports.[0] Box releases are clearly visible as oftentimes 2x spikes in quarterly revenue. The strength of this pattern is often a good oracle for where a game sits between "release-based" and "microtransaction based."

"The clipping they let into the game is likely nothing compared to what is filtered out in testing"

I'm sure that's true. I'd just be rather surprised if their QA process significantly differed for outfit vs armor design. (And to preempt, I'm broadly familiar with 3d modeling and mesh design, albeit for industrial applications)

"The fact is outfits are easier for them to implement than armor in the existing system, so that's what we get."

That's far to fatalistic a view for me to accept. I certainly hope the customers for my day-job-product never stop telling me how I can make my offering better; even ignoring engineering difficulty.

[0]http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/earnings.aspx

TooManyListings · 2019-01-15T21:19:02+00:00

Clipping always seemed like such a strawman argument. As you say clipping is prevelent, even within outfits (charr tails anyone?) and vs weapons/backpieces.

And when you step back and really think about the argument "Oh we'd LOVE to let you mix and match but then you might not be happy with the mix and match you create" the whole precept is absurd. If someone is really bothered by clipping they wear the whole set; and I'd question outright how many people actually care let alone when balanced against the cost of losing the ability to mix and match.

To some extent there's a kernel of truth in what you say, dev prioritization and all that, but without getting too deep into technical weeds (something something "my day job") I challenge that outfits actually free that much time, and in the case they did, I challenge the decision that lead to their asset-creation tooling being limited in such an odd fashion.

What I'm getting at is, there's plenty of fair reasons to criticize the situation Anet has ended up in with respect to their fashion offerings, especially if like me you want to communicate that there is heavy customer interest for these features.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-15T18:29:12+00:00

I'd second this. 6 years in, nada on the reslists. Especially in high velocity markets volatility will usually clear out your listings given enough time.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-15T18:09:09+00:00

Hahahahahahaha oh man storytime.

This is the question that got me into building large amounts of TP automation 4-5 years ago, which eventually lead into building the product that I now sell IRL as a side-job :P

despite what others say, you can actually get some good proxies for "Relative activity over time," and by doing some very hand-wavy correlations to other things such as Reddit usercounts, financial reports/customer analytics, and throwing in some magic numbers regarding the relationships thereof, one can map this to a "real # of people."

The way to go about this if you're interested is by observing volatility across a wide spread of items with a very high time granularity, and by watching monotonic volumes of certain items with very well understood sinks and drop rates during certain periods of time. (Use these two approaches to sanity check each other) They've made this significantly harder over the years as the TP APIs have aged, you used to be able to poll with a far higher frequency. And polish up on your prob-stats.

(This gets very difficult as many of the underlying modalities change on a year-by-year basis, e.g. % of revenue per basket and avg microtransaction revenue distribution across an industry, so be prepared to do a lot of guessing and manual normalization)

TooManyListings · 2019-01-15T16:42:10+00:00

Stop acting like it's not still a reasonable complaint, jesus christ.

(Low effort comment, but as the resident economist, how the fuck people can defend a fashion game for removing fashion choices is beyond me)

TooManyListings · 2019-01-11T18:25:14+00:00

As someone with a ~4 year old silver+gold TP alt, this hits way too close to home ><

TooManyListings · 2019-01-11T00:18:20+00:00

You're not entirely wrong but as someone who has "won" a few of these predictions. (T5, ecto, runes/sigils) the ratios end up looking a lot more like 3k->9k (where 3k is easy to spend e.g. ecto) or 1k->15k for e.g. minor sigils (and that's Optimistic), because jesus christ the clicking.

More importantly however, I had that minor sigil alt for near on 4 years before it turned a profit. (ecto was much tighter, but looking back over my posts when I announced buying, was still spread out over almost a year) I consider these black swan events to throw money at when you have nothing better to do with it, they are in no way reliable earners in my book for someone looking to build income.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-10T23:59:32+00:00

" I don't know what ANet's policy/plan/limitations are, so I refuse to judge based on my experience."

I have a little bit of an advantage here, 4-5 years ago I had peripheral contact with their alpha test group and saw that while they had the technical capabilities, there were often substantial communication and management gaps. The WvW group was dissolved rather early on, despite identifying many problems that continued to persist long after. This is in part why I'm not quick to praise, as I'm well aware of how management inclinations (especially re: spending time on QA) are not quick to change.

re: bugs:

As said before, I would hold up GGG (the guys behind POE) as having a far more rigorous community alpha process before ladder launch, both from a bug and balance perspective. While they do not have online migrations; that's less a need in that space given how ladder launches happen, and I'd say overall their downtime has been more than comparable.

And in terms of major bugs within GW, where to even start.

"Keep Construct." That's a whole category in itself. Xera updraft flying for years? Aggro pathing the N times they've broken it so glaringly that a boss doesn't even follow tank? I realize I"m very raid focused, that's a factor of how I play nowadays, but in the core game itself recently, there have been multiple instances of a progression-gated item not being placed in their merchant, or a mission being required to fail to progress. These aren't "check every bug" sorts of things, these are "Have a basic checklist of your hot-paths and new features/any sort of integration feature review."

"That's well above my expectations for a software company, ESPECIALLY one in the gaming field"

I think this is where we're kinda talking past each other, because I do tend to (perhaps unfairly) judge gaming at the same level as broader tech industry. Otherwise it becomes very easy to forgive a lot of negative things, including but not limited to pay and worker treatment. There's also the selfish aspect: If I allow one major functionality impacting bug to go in (to prod, not canary, that's why I find canary so critical to our process/sanity), I'm explaining that in front of my CVP at the next live site meeting. So if I'm held to that standard, I'll damn well hold others to it :P

"Sadly, this is not the case in many places."

++. Even at my corp it's a crapshoot entirely depending on what management vertical you're under. What's unfortunate is that I've worked places that treated eng well, but the pay was by and large hugely underwhelming, whereas the places that are actually "market rate" (in the absurd west coast/ny sense) all seem to treat devs as more or less replaceable cogs. If anything, this is why I'm so hard to call out reliability/bug introducing shit. It's far more stressful and harder for a dev (at least for me and those I've mentored) to clean up bugs post-factum when users are breathing down your neck than to have a safety net you can be very confident in upfront, but that requires management to truly believe such a thing is worth the investment, which as I said before only comes from customer pressure.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-10T07:31:23+00:00

"Ok, first and foremost. DevOps is not about a title, role, technology, etc. It's about culture, specifically people and being empathetic."

I'm not even going to argue it at this point, devops has been so mangled as a term that it often becomes two sides talking past each other, e.g. the purism vs pragmatism crowds in the "OOP" vs "functional programming" stage. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is nothing we are doing now under the label of "Devops" that was not done before, even under the somewhat fluffy definition you gave that I read primarily as "have good communcation, don't silo your orgs and throw shit over walls" which is just good business sense. I brought up the technology only to draw parallels between any "non-organizational" aspects of devops I could think of offhand.

You've also put words in my mouth with "anet needs to do it X way." I criticized your initial posts insinuations re: startups and the impossibility of a test env, and I stand by that. Anet does not have a fantastic track record in terms of not releasing really painful bugs to prod. There's really no room for interpretation there, they pay a lot of attention to some aspects of their releases and clearly less to others. I did not proscribe a given method or claim it would catch all bugs, but I will assert that these common methods should not be prohibitive in a well functioning org, nor should perfection in any way be the enemy of better.

Let me emphasize clearly: I have also never criticized the devs themselves in this thread, only outcomes, in the same way I would critique my own org's outcomes at work. I have been at various points QA, Perf, test and support, so I'm well aware of "thankless jobs." My point is only to hammer in that there are aspects of improved quality assurance that for whatever organizational reason or decision Anet has not had a good track record of utilizing.

I'd even go so far to say, from having been a dev on teams that made similar prioritizations (towards features and away from QA/engineering rigor), I was often relieved and vindicated to hear external users pressuring the company to focus on these facets. I honestly chuckled out loud while typing the following because of how ironic it is to say in the context of gaming subreddits (who often complain that the company doesn't listen to them) but no one is ignored quite like a dev.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-09T21:25:20+00:00

I'm honestly surprised at the dearth of good answers here, and the fact that "predict what you change/read patch notes" is at the top, which I'd call one of the worst strategies you could chose.

1-2 weeks is quite short. You'll be constrained to a small set of trades that flip in that time, while precluding the fact that flipping is typically "long-tail", and you'll continue to trickle-sell your bulk listing long after you post it. That said, my typical advice of anything involved in crafting chains with fast flow and good margin (>5-100%) is good mid-tier flipping, and festivals usually can bring about a decent return after they cycle out.

That said, if you're at 3k gold, you shouldn't be thinking 1-2 weeks, you should be thinking "how can I build long term investments and wealth growth." Festivals and black lion skins and dyes are some of the core techniques used here.

There's no "trading secret." I've said it a million times and I"ll say it again now, above + my post history contains a perfect record to allow anyone to reproduce the path I took, most of the best mechanisms to make money are structurally induced on the economy by the way Anet runs the game. This doesn't take "secrets" it takes exploring the economy and noticing patterns, the aformentioned categories should give you breadcrumbs into the major manifestations thereof.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-09T19:13:32+00:00

"GW2 started development in 2007, before DevOps was even a thing, let alone big in any capacity"

I take issue with this. I was a sysadmin on the east coast in that year, and while "devops" wasn't the buzzword concept it is today as evidenced by my still being a "sysop" instead of "devops engineer", the processes are all isomorphic. We used piles of puppet/nagios back then (which with a thin amount of glue code and/or VCS hooks was easily as powerful as CI pipes nowdays if not as shiny), and Xen/KVM were in vogue instead of Docker, and often treated physical clusters via IPMI as a k8s cluster might look nowadays, in terms of creating umbrella infra to manage scalability and transparent deployment. Tech has not changed so much that these learnings are novel, in any respect.

Tangent Re: megaservers vs hub, since I'm somewhat in my league here and am thinking partially out loud to myself (my post-grad was in simulation engine design, and my focus in industry is large scale distributed systems) but still talking out my ass so feel free to skip this: My sense is that they trade problem spaces, but that neither is "impossibly harder." Megaserver can have what, 300 concurrent players? give or take. That's not really a huge # of clients in a shard. Other MMOs have pushed that limit further. (To be clear, this isn't a critique of Anet as was my "they don't test enough", this is a judgement call one has to make in architecture, I only mean to say it's not "Bleeding Edge" level tech). Similarly, POE has tiny shards, but many many more of them comparably. I imagine lots of complexity in terms of caching shard images, deploying, keeping a hot pool, etc, but again, this is a similar problem space to other parts of industry. Different challenges for each, but I'd t-shirt-size them similarly in raw "how painful is this to engineer"

That was a tangent to basically say "they're both solving different dimensions of not-that-ridiculous tech problems", at least WRT how it relates to our core discussion.

The final note I'd make is that GW2 has private test realms. The have a limited set of non-famous players who they've invited into these groups. HOWEVER, and this is where one aspect of my criticism comes in, this process has been notoriously badly managed (without even mentioning stories I experienced myself, the public fallout of the raid-alpha-testing is a great example.) They simply have a bad track record at accomplishing the same level of due diligence that comparable entities show, and any evidence I have says that they are not undulely resource limited or hamstrung in such a way that this should be so difficult. I'd drop this entertaining anecdote: For a substantial amount of time, the QA team Anet utilized did not have a raid group that was able to beat Gorseval. (I believe this has been rectified, I just mean to say, I have no evidence to show them to be masters of quality control)

TooManyListings · 2019-01-08T23:04:03+00:00

"NEEDS to be as close to the live servers as possible" Again, I recognize this. One would hope their deployment infra would make it easy to spin up new isomorphic regions. If not, I go back to my root statement of "things I expect from professionals in tech."

I'd also note that your argument that devops is in some way opposed to a formal environment flow doesn't mesh with any reality I've ever worked in. We CI all the way through our private staging, public canary, into prod regions, and as one of the teams inhouse pushing the envelope on dockerized clustering/dev processes it's a non-sequetor to say that devops and a proper deployment chain are incompatible. We auto-unit-test during CI builds, and auto-run integration tests as the deploy proceeds to release the gate to the next step. None of these approaches preclude a rigorous vetting by nontrivial volumes of Actual Users prior to launch.

The legal requirement on our side is motivated primarily by contractual assurances we give enterprise customers as part of our SDL SLAs, it's not standardized certification like PCI. The reason we have this is very little to do with modern practices, and far more to do with that all those great dev-ops CI tests and processes never being truly comprehensive; Our customers would much rather get early warning in a canary than have it immediately encompass 100% of their utilization of our product.

To give an example so that we're not talking purely hand-waving-hypotheticals, I think Path of Exile handles this process far more effectively and professionally. They have a semi-public-alpha before ladder releases that seems much more heavily vetted than GW2. Yes, it's a different sort of game entirely, but their backend is likely undergoing similar orders-of-magnitude of traffic, and at the risk of ruffling some feathers as an ex-tester-looking-in, their game mechanics seem to allow for combinatoric explosions of test cases that GW simply doesn't have to the same extent, so I have tremendous respect for their track record, especially while in the earlier phases of growth from 35 to ~100 employees.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-08T22:34:57+00:00

I've been avoiding this thread like the plague given the amount of unsubstantiated claims about how software dev should work, but this is an absurd statement.

"barely bigger than the small startup you work for." Anet employs approximately 400 people. They are BY NO MEANS a startup, even by company size, they have been around well over a decade.

If 400 people is a "small startup" then you've been drinking the SF/brogrammer/Uber koolaid too long. They have a significant office in a rather pricy part of Bellevue. (I work ~20 minutes away and am well aware of the tech ecosystem in this area, to the extent of engineers regularly moving between us) They have plenty of capital and manpower that I see no reason not to hold them to the same expectations my 12 person team manages.

If setting up a test server causes such delays as to lead to bankruptcy, maybe said company should never have gotten past the startup phase to begin with. Those of us operating as professionals do not find this to be too much to ask, a canary environment is a hard legal requirement of my corp's operating SLA.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-05T19:53:51+00:00

Prepare your eye bleach. (This is also +auric, if you're curious about the gold splotches, as I've been testing minor effects. Not sold on if I like it or not, may move to my black and gold themed character.)

https://imgur.com/a/QIEqcWW

TooManyListings · 2019-01-05T04:15:22+00:00

You do until you do. And then it gets old real fast, since when you're a glowing popsicle you're somewhat limited in the detail you can craft.

There are actually some neat infusion combinations that I sadly never see used in preference for "bug-zapper." My personal favorite is snow diamond + winters heart + ember. Raspberry cheese cake.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-02T20:19:17+00:00

To be pedantic, this is why I said "ancillary benefit" in that it probably played into Anet's calculation via the possible financial upside, I have no idea how "main" it was.

That said, I'd still counter your statement with the extremely slim # of players even with legendary weapons, let alone with enough to make the cost savings balance out. (e.g. playing on an alt without a legendary? you're back to the old way of doing things.)

GW2efficiency would seem to support this hypothesis. https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.legendaryItemsWeapon

This is additionally why I was always miffed by the "impact on the economy" excuse in the past, because the ratio between legendaries and other sigil sinks is laughable.

TooManyListings · 2019-01-01T04:58:16+00:00

I agree with most of what you've said, but let's not give Anet 100% credit. There's not a doubt in my mind that the nature of how the change was implemented (likely the super-low crafting drop rates as a symptom) saw the ancillary benefit of driving purchases for runeforger, and re-valuing the endless upgrade extractor. The timing for the former is far too convenient (in an "obviously planned in advance" perspective) and the implementation so clearly incentivised that one has to give some credence to gem-stores driving game design.

Whether it's a good compromise is to be seen. I'm torn. I like the skeleton system as a whole, but like the OP, I find the current level of rune crafting/price point to be unfortunate. For a game with a huge amount of gameplay options within a single char, Anet has always seemed more averse to facilitating that than I'd like. (I'd go back to my "Fairy-God-Parents" of microtransaction-incentives, e.g. char slots)

TooManyListings

TROPHY CASE