The Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Economy

[Karizee]

The Guild Wars 2: Heart of
Thorns Economy

by John Smith on October 12, 2015





Hello, everyone, I’m here to briefly speak on the economic changes coming in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™. We’ve announced a lot of new content and systems, and most of them affect the balance of the game in one way or another. The game is about to change a great deal, and that means the economy is going to be impacted.


Instability Is Coming…Again

I want to be up front: scarcity is important. For most materials in the game, we’ve reached a nice equilibrium, and the change of systems is really going to throw a wrench into that. Expect instability after launch in multiple major markets. We’ve made a lot of large changes, and we have a lot of new systems all interacting with our players for the first time. We spent a lot of time modeling and using our past experience to create the new economic changes, so we plan to be in a good place after the dust settles. Instead of promising that everything will quickly and automatically return to equilibrium at a state we think is healthy, I want to promise that we’re paying very close attention and will be looking out for any behavior that we think needs to be addressed. There are too many changes happening all at once to be absolutely sure everything will work perfectly, but a lot of our current major issues are being addressed. Furthermore, we’ll watch very closely and make rapid adjustments to bring everything back to the stable state we’re looking for. Let’s touch briefly on some of the major changes.


Precursor and Legendary Journeys

I’m sure Game Designer Linsey Murdock has interesting information about how precursors and legendary journeys will work along with the lore and quests, but I’m here to talk about the economics—primarily, the amount of materials it takes to make a precursor. Anyone who has crafted enough rare items to understand the pattern of precursor creation has a good idea of the quantity of materials involved. In our new system, the number is no longer variable, but it’s still immense. Precursor crafting maintains the scarcity of a large quantity of important items in the economy, and we made efforts to partially preserve that relationship.


Salvaging Changes

Despite keeping a heavy sink of materials in the new endgame weapon journeys, the changes were nowhere close to balancing the current numbers . To help get us closer to where we want to be, we’ll simultaneously roll out changes to the salvaging of some materials. Some of these changes will reduce output to help us maintain scarcity, and some will rebalance heavily input materials with more rare materials to help even out some of the variation of scarcity we currently have.


Dungeon Rewards

Over the last couple of years, dungeons have been a major part of the game’s economy; between unique armor and liquid rewards, they’re often farmed. In the expansion, we’ll move away from this paradigm. As the game progressed, we shifted focus from dungeons to fractals and raids, and we firmly believe that fractals and raids are the content that we want to continue to support. As a part of that process, we’ll shift some rewards away from dungeons and into other pieces of content. While dungeons will remain cool experiences that’ll reward players with unique items, their liquid rewards will be reduced and other content will become more rewarding. The shift in rewards is a direct representation of our focus on raids and fractals and our commitment to make them the best they can be.

The major concern that we’re sure to face is the specific intent of dungeons as a gold-generating activity. To that effect, let’s talk about map rewards.


Map Rewards

Map rewards are specific, tangible rewards you receive from playing on a map. They allow players to balance overpriced items as well as seek specific materials for their personal goals without constant uncertainty. Map rewards are pretty great but are a constant enemy of scarcity. Map-reward materials can no longer be overpriced for any extended period of time because players now have the power to push the supply when needed. This shifts the power from the supplier of a rare good to the buyer, because the buyer now has the option to refrain from buying and still achieve goals, which is what we wanted.


Market Changes

We still have some broken markets; the expansion will address the rebalancing of some resources to help correct some of those markets. Keep an eye out upon the expansion release for the rebalance. The combination of our changes and our new systems is sure to make everything go a little wild, but it should not be completely unpredictable from a player perspective. There will be a lot of opportunity for fun and profit for the extremely savvy.


https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/t...horns-economy/

[zito]

Pretty much confirms dungeons are dead to anet and we probably won't see any advancements for them.

Rip

[carnifex2005]

Yeah, they're on life support but that being said, people will still need to do them for your legendaries, which are going to be pretty important driver of the economy for HoT. That being said, I'm guessing they'll just be nerfing how much gold rewards are done per dungeon path and leave the bags and chests alone.

[Svifnymr]

Pretty much confirms dungeons are dead to anet and we probably won't see any advancements for them.

Rip

"Dungeons? Yeah, they're deader than SAB."
-Some developer quote I just made up.


I also wonder what they're doing to salvage kits. Guess we'll just get less metal/leather/cloth, when cloth is already over priced. It's also amusing that they don't acknowledge their own failure here in pushing so much green/blue crap loot down our throats as rewards.

[carnifex2005]

"Dungeons? Yeah, they're deader than SAB."
-Some developer quote I just made up.


I also wonder what they're doing to salvage kits. Guess we'll just get less metal/leather/cloth, when cloth is already over priced. It's also amusing that they don't acknowledge their own failure here in pushing so much green/blue crap loot down our throats as rewards.

Yeah, I'm guessing there will be less being salvaged mats and if you want mats, you'll be able to farm them by doing events in the open world. I stocked up on Thick Leather sections (filled up my guild bank), so hopefully in a year I'll be able to sell that at a nice profit.

[PACOX]

"Dungeons? Yeah, they're deader than SAB."
-Some developer quote I just made up.


I also wonder what they're doing to salvage kits. Guess we'll just get less metal/leather/cloth, when cloth is already over priced. It's also amusing that they don't acknowledge their own failure here in pushing so much green/blue crap loot down our throats as rewards.

I think it means leather is going down and cloth is going up. Hopefully changing cloth requirements in ascended crafting too because it was first set that way to get rid of surplus cloth in the game. Now surplus cloth isn't a problem.

I think they are being a bit too optimistic about the impact of map rewards but I did (during the BWEs) that a number of rare/expensive mats were tied to map rewards. Big ones were lodestones and silver doubloons.

[Svifnymr]

I think it means leather is going down and cloth is going up. Hopefully changing cloth requirements in ascended crafting too because it was first set that way to get rid of surplus cloth in the game. Now surplus cloth isn't a problem.

I think they are being a bit too optimistic about the impact of map rewards but I did (during the BWEs) that a number of rare/expensive mats were tied to map rewards. Big ones were lodestones and silver doubloons.

I did notice the BWE icons near different zones, but most of these systems are a little hard to judge without actual mechanics explained.

[Kazgrel]

Shame. Would've loved to see a newer spin on dungeons given all the mechanical changes and possibilities.

Looks like the real way to kill the beserker meta is to not produce any content for it. :-/

Only thing I hope to see is the wall for acquiring ascended gear lowered a little. Namely regarding all the lower level mats. Makes crafting gear for alts and/or new players a pain in the ass when you realize the materials for the items are also used for max level max stat gear. I miss the days of having metric truckloads of low level mats piled up (soft wood, wool, cotton, etc.) and being able to use it to help friends out with gear without thinking twice. Nowadays it's like "need some more of (insert mat name here)" "Oh crap that stuff is xyz a piece, I can't afford that" "well shit".

[Gray_Matter]

And last night I sold a big wad of mats for the gems to do 3 server transfers.

[Kelimbror]

Pretty much confirms dungeons are dead to anet and we probably won't see any advancements for them.

Rip

Yep. That's all I could get from this article was their straight up statement that they are just supporting raids and fractals, ie content I will never do. I can't say I'm pleased by their bold stance.

I'll have to wait to see how material acquisition feels playing the map w/r/t farming the new legendary and other stuff before I know if they completely screwed me over or not.

[zito]

Yep. That's all I could get from this article was their straight up statement that they are just supporting raids and fractals, ie content I will never do. I can't say I'm pleased by their bold stance.

I'll have to wait to see how material acquisition feels playing the map w/r/t farming the new legendary and other stuff before I know if they completely screwed me over or not.

I feel like they should do their dungeon revamp like they promised years ago and then leave it. At least make dungeons interesting don't leave them trash.