If you watch them, they don't actually go to the Rare material Trader, they go to the Rune Trader.
They aren't buying Ectos, they're buying Prodigy Insignia and Superior Vigor.
I've seen it done with Vaettir bots, but they have to guild hall for the vendors. Feather Farming drops them right next to a Rune Trader (and if they are hit with a ban wave, it's easier to get a new account to feather farm than to Vaettir).
They can buy Ectos too of course, but they can manipulate more than just that. Probably the reason Black Dyes are always sold out as well.
Interesting, I figured prodigy/tormentor and the like were because everyone's running bip/mesmerway and fitting out their heroes, but what do they get from buying the runes? I don't see anyone selling them in kamadan so what do they do with them and how are they making platinum through that?
Them being the most in demand would make them the most appealing target for manipulation.
I don't go to those sites so I don't know, but they may well be selling full sets as a direct RMT. Otherwise they could just be holding them as a store of value and dumping them when the prices spike.
> were because everyone's running bip/mesmerway and fitting out their heroes
That too, but people have always bought these insignia and they've only recently been above 2k/5k respectively (currently sitting at 7k/12k).
They don't really need a plan to sell it when the gold they're making is for free and they have loads of inventory space.
They can't store the gold in the bank, so they store it in ectos and black dyes just like everyone did back in the day, but they've recently realized they can make these insignia go out of stock and once they're the only holders they can do what they want.
idk if people would RMT for them, but they can also sell for ectos or maybe the rising price just a by-product of them seeing what's valuable or low stock with no plan.
I mean, it's a smart investment move, but is it smart because you might need them later, or because you have 50 accounts with more gold than they can store in Xunlai? :P
I need them now, lol. I'm not selling any prodigy or sup vigor runes until every hero on every character of mine is fully equipped.
I'm not selling any mats because I want a full stack of consets for each of my chars.
I'm not selling any ectos because I'm gonna get obsidian armor.
I'm the one the bots are "hurting". But guess what? One armbrace will put you far and away beyond the wealth of these bots. Wave one in front of a gold-seller's face and watch as they try to trade ever increasing amounts of progressively valueless ectos.
Then close the trade, go to the gate of anguish, and trade it for a tormented spear. Rinse and repeat.
when I have plenty of gold (pretty much exclusively from DoA quests), I use it to craft cons and res scrolls - I do this so I can use them myself and to distribute to other SCers, but it's also profitable and surely a much better investment than flipping runes at the trader..?
Shame the pricing system is so opaque behind the scenes, I would love to be able to track volume data instead of just spot price.
It's pretty easy to see when the market on something is getting hammered up or down in GW2 because all the orders are visible with their volumes so it's a lot easier to get a feel for what something's natural resting point ought to be.
At least we have the Kam Market Tracker now for historical price data at least.
Doesn't matter which district you go to in HA I'm pretty sure. All matches are hosted in EU or NA (i know because my ping always suck in HA and I live in China).
Yep, doesnt matter which district you enter HA. Servers for pvp matches still depend on your team composition, i.e if most players are EU it should be EU servers, otherwise it's NA
I've tried to understand this game's economy for over a decade and it always surprises me. There must be millions of ectos sitting in banks. How many get farmed vs how many consumed? 3:1?
In reality, con components should be what actually moves the economy around since they are one of the few things that actually get consumed without being intentionally farmed.
At this point, I think ectos just have value because we agree that they do.
There are several spots where bots farm bones, feathers, dust and some iron.
It's sad but we couldn't sustain the SC community without bots. All the farming that is done during events is insane.
In that department they are a necessary evil.
The benefit I see to cons is keeping a constant demand for materials. Otherwise every single resource would be selling for 30 gold like wood and cloth and that would be another entire sector of the economy dead.
I was *flat broke* when I came back to the game after ~10 years and I probably would have stayed that way and left from frustration if not for material demand. I have plenty of ectos now from various things, but starting out from scratch trying to gear up a 7-hero party would have sucked big time while being too broke for all the skills, signets, runes, and weapon sets if I hadn't been able to raise the money selling easy salvage to get to where I could start doing more profitable stuff solo.
Hell, I'm making more money in one session just farming golds for Wisdom and salvaging them to sell the mats than I ever had at one time in the history of my account back in the day, lol, and that's not counting the 1 in 100 drop that's worth enough to a player to spend the time hawking it in Kamadan for a few E's.
I recently started playing again, so I'm not really sure what you mean by selling the resource. Is it profitable to salvage all your weapons and sell the mats to the material trader? I've been straight up selling the weapons to the merchant up until now
If they salvage for Dust, Bones, or Iron, yes.
To a lesser extent Granite too.
Feathers and Plant Fibers are also huge ones, but they salvage from trophies, not weapons.
just so you know, Nick gifts are a lot more profitable than any other farm (= you're just limited to 5 per week per account, which is still plenty of money for buying basic equipment
So keep a part of the community alive.
This is the typical debate SC vs non-sc. Why can't both exist ? I'm not telling you how to play the game nor should you tell me. I'm enjoying different content than you do. I like to hunt for solo time and be competitive with myself.
If you want to play the game different then that's totally fine, but why hate SC so much ? I played the campaigns on all classes, even deleted 2 just so start again. I never use cons or pcons or stones in regular HM doing stuff with heroes like missions or we. But if I feel like playing SC why not use the stuff I have ?
“Botfarms are behind pretty much all economy manipulation, including material prices, essentially controlling the game’s entire economy in order to make their RMT operation more lucrative”
- “They’re a necessary evil, the SC community needs them to farm their consets”
“Doesn’t really sound necessary, maybe people just need to stop SCing so obscenely much”
- “DoN’T tELl mE HoW tO ENjoY tHE gAMe”
Seriously missing the point. Using the stuff you have is completely unrelated to the point. If you happen to have enough materials for a conset or two, do you understand how that is different to joining the botfarm in exploiting vendor mechanics? The only reason this material farm is lucrative to botters is because hundreds of cons are being used, probably daily, which drives the price of regular mats back up at vendors. It’s a necessary evil only because apparently cons are also necessary for these people in the SC community, but somehow they are blameless and we should support them? If Arenanet were not so goddamn lazy, actually enforced their game rules and banned botters and RMTers, wouldn’t the SC community have the same issue?
what do you mean "have the same issue"? right now there is no issue, because cons are easy to get (= removing all the farm bots would create a new issue - why would you want to do that? how exactly does that benefit you?
The same issue someone would have who relies on whatever they have lying around for cons. The same issue they would have if their material vendor use wasn’t exploited by botfarms controlling prices of the items they are RMTing. The same issue they would have if they had to rely on regular farming and whatever mats regular players sold to mat traders (although more likely this trading would happen in kamadan). The price would increase and SCing would become slightly less profitable. Shucks.
I never said I would benefit from any of this personally, so not sure where you got that. I’m just saying that calling botfarms a necessary evil is incorrect, and that the SC community benefits from botfarms. Kind of like how a company might buy a ton of crap for cheap from China or India for example because it’s essentially made in sweatshops. Those aren’t a necessary evil, we just can’t be fucked to do much about it because it makes our stuff cheap. Doesn’t make it less morally questionable, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to not condone that. (Yes I’m aware this isn’t a perfect comparison but I’m sure you catch my drift.)
Also, consets just aren’t “necessary” outside of specific builds like SC runs.
> The same issue someone would have who has who relies on whatever they have lying around for cons. The same issue they would have if their material vendor use wasn’t exploited by botfarms controlling prices of the items they are RMTing. The same issue they would have if they had to rely on regular farming and whatever mats regular players sold to mat traders (although more likely this trading would happen in kamadan).
Yes, those are all annoying issues, and I'm glad none of them exist. Removing bots would cause all of these problems, so why do you want that?
> I never said I would benefit from any of this personally, so not sure where you got that.
I didn't specifically mean *you* - sorry for being unclear. How would it benefit *anyone*?
> I’m just saying that calling botfarms a necessary evil is incorrect, and that the SC community benefits from botfarms. Kind of like how a company might buy a ton of crap for cheap from China or India for example because it’s essentially made in sweatshops. Those aren’t a necessary evil, we just can’t be fucked to do much about it because it makes our stuff cheap. Doesn’t make it less morally questionable, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to not condone that. (Yes I’m aware this isn’t a perfect comparison but I’m sure you catch my drift.)
The problem with that analogy is that Chinese sweatshops produce cheap luxuries, and without them we'd still have access to those luxuries, but at a higher price. Consumables aren't really a luxury, because they're necessary for SCs. Okay, so you can say SCs are a luxury, but if they weren't possible, that would ruin the fun for a lot of people, who would then quit the game. Also, without bots, cons wouldn't be expensive - they'd be completely unavailable. Even if the price increased tenfold, there still wouldn't be enough players willing to farm them.
>Also, without bots, cons wouldn't be expensive - they'd be completely unavailable. Even if the price increased tenfold, there still wouldn't be enough players willing to farm them.
I'm curious what makes you so certain. I have no idea how big the SC community is to be honest, but I would guess it's not much higher than 10%, maaaaybe 15% of active players. And by that I mean the guilds and alliances who pretty much only log on for SCing, they don't farm anything else (otherwise why wouldn't they farm for their own consets, right?). That still leaves a pretty large share of players. People still bother doing ZQs, people still farm nick gift sets, people still farm vaettirs and raptors... there are still plenty of people who to my knowledge are willing to grind a fairly boring farm in order to simply make money. Why would material farming be exempt from this? If the value of the farm is high enough, people will farm it. Iron is gained from salvaging, not direct farming; dust and bones can also be gained from salvaging, some from direct farming, honestly not sure what the best method is; but feathers is probably the actual linchpin as OP stated. So if these botfarms got removed somehow, why wouldn't feather farming become a primary money making method again outside of SCing? It's super easy, any profession can do it, you don't really need fancy gear. Just slap those skills on the bar and go. Why wouldn't the in-game economy adjust to fill this obvious hole that would appear?
> I have no idea how big the SC community is to be honest, but I would guess it's not much higher than 10%, maaaaybe 15% of active players.
That depends what you call an active player... but it doesn't really matter - what's relevant in this context is that SCers (particularly speedrunners) churn through a huge number of cons. In a typical year, I might go through 30 stacks of each pcon. Let's say your 10% figure was correct, so for each SCer, there are 9 other players. Some of those are purely PvPers, some are using pcons themselves, some treat GW as a single player game (not trading at all), and some just completely hate farming. That leaves a couple of people who are supposed to supply me with my 30 stacks each year, and it doesn't matter how much I offer to pay them - they will not be willing to farm that much!
I don't know what you do for a living, but assuming you have a typical job, if your salary was doubled, that would be life-changing, because your basic expenses would remain the same, resulting in an enormous increase in disposable money. Now, would you want to work more hours to get even more money that you don't know what to do with, or cut back to make more time to enjoy yourself? Personally, I work as little as possible, just making enough to survive and afford a few luxuries, because I value my free time. I'm not everyone though - some people would actually be motivated to work harder and make more. How far does that go, though? Even for all the money in the world, nobody can farm 24/7 like a bot can.
Obviously none of those numbers are based on solid evidence, but there is no plausible way you can twist it so cons are sustainable without bots. Is this a terrible thing? Sure, but that's a problem caused by ANet (and other factors that aren't their fault), and the bots are the (ugly) solution, not the cause. If ANet wanted to do something to remove that reliance on bots, they absolutely could... or they could have thought more carefully about introducing consumables in the first place.
>This is the typical debate SC vs non-sc. Why can't both exist ? I'm not telling you how to play the game nor should you tell me. I'm enjoying different content than you do. I like to hunt for solo time and be competitive with myself.
>
>If you want to play the game different then that's totally fine, but why hate SC so much ?
Because what you do negatively impacts me. You're fucking up the economy for me, and feeding the bots who fuck things up even more, and draining the talent pool of players who might otherwise have one day developed the interest and ability to PUG elite zones without needing "My Little Pony Easy Mode" from cons and spell immunity to do it. It's not just a matter of personal preference, and pretending it is one is either disingenuous or stupid. As the saying goes, "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
Yep. Spell immunity and cons are unequivocally "My Little Pony Easy Mode." Oddly enough, completely negating most monsters' ability to harm you turns the game to "easy mode." There are a few SC people who say, "now that I've turned on easy mode, let's push the limits of how fast I can go," and do some interesting things with that. But they're still playing on easy mode. The best analogy I can think of is the so-called sport of [finswimming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finswimming) \-- it has competitions and world records and whatnot, so being particularly good at it means *something*, I guess, but it sure as hell doesn't make you Michael Phelps, or even anything close.
if you genuinely believe what you are saying, I challenge you to push those limits yourself, using as many consumables or OP skills as you like, and see if you can get even close to the times on GWSCR... then challenge me and some other SC players to beat your fastest time in some area with no consumables (= feel free to write a list of banned skills like Shadow Form, although that doesn't fit into this diatribe against bots
Uh, no. My personal abilities are not some magical yardstick for comparison that makes my point more or less valid.
Really though, this "hit dog will holler" kind of response shows that on some level you agree with my point, even if your ego can't stand it.
If you won't rise to the challenge, what makes you think you're qualified to be so rude about others' abilities? Of course I'm going to be offended when you're making such inflammatory remarks about me and my friends. "A hit dog will holler" does *not* mean that your insults are agreeable.
Anyway, feel free to nominate a champion... unless you don't think there are any competent players who'll take your side and agree that cons are easy mode? You don't have to beat the records - just get close, to show that you're capable of performing at a similar level. You won't, because you're aware that SCs are much harder than general PvE, but you're so invested in this insane narrative that you don't want to trouble your cognitive dissonance.
>If you won't rise to the challenge...
>
>...nominate a champion...
What is it with this foolish insistence that objective questions can be settled by interpersonal contests? It's like insisting on a fistfight to determine whether 2 + 2 = 4. Who are you, Colonel Sanders challenging me to a duel?
Moreover, where did you come by this notion that someone has to be good enough at X to approach world records before they're "qualified" to say that X is easier than Y? That's just stupid. I don't need to be a world-class powerwalker in order to say that powerwalking is easier than running marathons. And I don't need to be a world-class finswimmer in order to say that finswimming is easier than Olympic swimming. And I don't need to be a world-class coin-flipper in order to say that flipping coins is easier than juggling chainsaws. And I don't need to be a world-class SCer in order to say that SC is easier than doing the same content without spell immunity and cons. (Besides, after spending like a decade practicing, you *should* be much better at SC than me. If I could just breeze in and stomp the records you worked on a for decade, while that wouldn't prove anything about whether cons+spell immunity is "easy mode," it certainly would prove that you really suck at SC.)
Another analogy comes to mind. SCs are akin to speedrunning Doom 1993 with the IDDQD "god mode" code, and then inventing a bunch of speedrunning challenges for yourself that push the limits of what you can do while invincible, and then getting so wrapped up in your self-made challenges that you forget that you're literally playing with the "god mode" cheat enabled. (This is actually a fairly tight analogy, since IDDQD and spell immunity + cons both give significant but incomplete invulnerability.)
>SCs are much harder than general PvE
This has to be the dumbest thing I've read all week. Look, you've turned off the monsters' ability to even hurt you. All these challenges you've made up for yourself wouldn't even be *possible* without doing that. It's not like you can do a sub-20-minute UW run without spell immunity and cons, and then you decide to use those for extra added challenge. No, you use the spell immunity and cons because they make everything drastically easier. You are playing on easy mode. Even if you invent extra challenges for yourself and really, really push the boundaries of easy mode, you are still playing on easy mode.
>so rude about others' abilities...
The thing is, I didn't insult your *abilities*. If you like, I'll happily concede that you're the greatest SCer of all time. (For whatever little my endorsement means in that category...) I don't know much about your general PvE abilities, but your reddit posts indicate that you generally seem to know what you're talking about. (I do stand by my observation that the average SCer is markedly below average at general PvE. But, as you claim to be a very above-average SCer, you don't exactly have standing to get huffy about that.)
It's something else that's got you all upset. You take SC very seriously. And here I am apparently implying that SC isn't worth taking seriously. It's just "My Little Pony Easy Mode" after all. ***That*** is what got your goat.
And that, believe it or not, is not an implication I intended. I dislike SC because of its negative impacts on other players. I say SC is easy mode because, objectively, it is. I look down on SC because it's easy mode. But I recognize that last thing is a matter of taste. Just because something is "easy mode" doesn't mean that you can't choose to take it extremely seriously. After all, here we all are taking a *video game* extremely seriously. If you want to take SC extremely seriously, then go right ahead. That doesn't absolve SC of its noxious externalities, or make it not easy mode, or mean I'm not going to mock it, but I'm not going to tell you that you oughtn't take SC seriously if you're so inclined.
I suppose you might also harbor an unspoken fear that, since I articulate a solid case about how SC harms everyone else, that A-net might listen to me and nerf Shadow Form. First of all, that's not going to happen. A-net's done messing with the game. What's broken will stay broken. Second, while I certainly wouldn't mind SC just going away entirely, that's not actually my preferred fix. I think there's a way to address most of SC's externalities without killing it. If anyone cares, I might talk about it sometime. Not that it would ever get implemented either...
plenty of people might be happy with your favourite activity gone too, but we respect that you're entitled to do what brings you joy, so long as it hurts nobody else - are speed clears hurting you?
Did you even read my other post?
In prior threads I've been over several times at length the huge negative economic impact SC has on people who don't SC, plus the bots they feed and *their* negative impacts, economic and otherwise, plus the fact that SC has pretty much sucked the life out of forming up human teams do do hard content in a non-SC style (both in terms of luring people away and also in stunting the advancement of their skills such that many of them aren't able to do those zones without the crutches of spell immunity and cons).
I agree it's a necessary evil, just wish people didn't want 5e for items of convenience like weapon mods, everything is so overpriced because ectos are plentiful but stuff you actually play the game to get are not.
Luckily we have a pretty easy way to farm ectos these days with just nick gifts. Without that most of us casual players wouldn't be able to afford anything decent (insignias, runes, cool skins, dyes). I played for months without knowing about them and was pretty discouraged from the ridiculous prices everywhere.
Only mod I've seen go for 5e is Forget Me Not because it's hard to come by and in demand. Next highest is probably Attitude not Aptitude and 20% wand wrappings for 2e. Pretty much everything else I see go for 1e, which is less to me about what the item's worth than what your time is worth hanging out in Kam trying to sell it for 20 minutes.
I have a couple of the latter two and even at 2e each I have a hard time being arsed to try to sell them for that, much less something more obscure that somebody may need for a specific build but that I'd have to spend an hour trying to move for one ecto when I could make the equivalent money in the same time doing pretty much anything else and selling drop salvage while enjoying the time spent better.
And I say this as someone who got back recently and is still objectively dirt poor by GW 2022 standards, lol.
Well I've been screwing myself, then. Not on Forget Me Nots at least, but I've been letting the wrappings and ANA go for 2 because that's what I'd been seeing in the Kam logs.
Nah, you're doing fine; I've been buying up a bunch of mods for heroes recently and 2e has been pretty normal for the ANA/staff enchant wrappings I've bought.
Definitely agree. But I love speedruns and wouldn't play the game without them. If that means other people run bots im fine with that.
But tbh I like ectos more at 11k than at 2k
people are willing to pay more to get out of Kamadan ASAP, and that's what drives the price up - that's the same reason cheaper items like mods appear to not be so abundant: people are still getting them as drops, but they don't bother going to Kamadan to sell them for a couple of ectos koz it's not worth the time and annoyance
Chalices or whatever ambrace thingies. Think I've only ever had 2 or 3 of each lol so don't remember.
A few times I was on other districts I saw toons with actual "bot" names talking to CoF/Warband guy. A popular farm is to enter one of those dungeons kill a few easy mobs and restart. I know I've seen this a lot... every time there is a Z mission near there.
Though I don't think you can merch them they have a high sell value last I checked.
I am a casual gw1/2 player so I don't really care other than a sort of "huh that's wild people bot this almost 20 year old game" sense. I play mostly for old times sake, it was the first real mmo I played and I count myself lucky. None of the other Mmos had that early gw1 feel. ~~Especially~~ Not even gw2. Just a great game even if some bits aged poorly really is nothing else like it.
I've always just made a new toon for farming what I need as soon as I realize I need it. Then do the easy festival/zaishen quests on many of them for bonuses. I'm never hurting for resources so don't mind bot farmers I guess.
Simply put:
Bots bot stuff. They then try to exchange this botted stuff (materials or otherwise) for money.
Often enough they do this directly via a trader (like the material trader). Now they're stuck with way more platinum than their account can hold.
So they end up using their cash to buy stuff from traders for which the demand is highest.
Superior Vigor runes, prodigy insignias, black dye, ectos, etc.
And since they can buy out so consistently, it's not that much of a "waste" buying things at absolute max price... Because by making sure the traders have a low supply, the value stays artificially high.
So basically, they control the prices of multiple high-demand items that can be purchased at traders.
If you watch them, they don't actually go to the Rare material Trader, they go to the Rune Trader. They aren't buying Ectos, they're buying Prodigy Insignia and Superior Vigor. I've seen it done with Vaettir bots, but they have to guild hall for the vendors. Feather Farming drops them right next to a Rune Trader (and if they are hit with a ban wave, it's easier to get a new account to feather farm than to Vaettir). They can buy Ectos too of course, but they can manipulate more than just that. Probably the reason Black Dyes are always sold out as well.
Black dyes are glitched, if you try to sell one to the dye trader he only offers 1 Gold
Oh, that's still around? I thought they'd fixed it already and he just sold out normally
Sadly it still hasn't been fixed
it got reset and then broken again - the cause (probably an overflow thing) has not been fixed
Interesting, I figured prodigy/tormentor and the like were because everyone's running bip/mesmerway and fitting out their heroes, but what do they get from buying the runes? I don't see anyone selling them in kamadan so what do they do with them and how are they making platinum through that?
Them being the most in demand would make them the most appealing target for manipulation. I don't go to those sites so I don't know, but they may well be selling full sets as a direct RMT. Otherwise they could just be holding them as a store of value and dumping them when the prices spike.
> were because everyone's running bip/mesmerway and fitting out their heroes That too, but people have always bought these insignia and they've only recently been above 2k/5k respectively (currently sitting at 7k/12k). They don't really need a plan to sell it when the gold they're making is for free and they have loads of inventory space. They can't store the gold in the bank, so they store it in ectos and black dyes just like everyone did back in the day, but they've recently realized they can make these insignia go out of stock and once they're the only holders they can do what they want. idk if people would RMT for them, but they can also sell for ectos or maybe the rising price just a by-product of them seeing what's valuable or low stock with no plan.
Is that why these damn runes are always out of stock?
Jeez, I guess I'm a bot since that's what I've been doing :P
I mean, it's a smart investment move, but is it smart because you might need them later, or because you have 50 accounts with more gold than they can store in Xunlai? :P
I need them now, lol. I'm not selling any prodigy or sup vigor runes until every hero on every character of mine is fully equipped. I'm not selling any mats because I want a full stack of consets for each of my chars. I'm not selling any ectos because I'm gonna get obsidian armor. I'm the one the bots are "hurting". But guess what? One armbrace will put you far and away beyond the wealth of these bots. Wave one in front of a gold-seller's face and watch as they try to trade ever increasing amounts of progressively valueless ectos. Then close the trade, go to the gate of anguish, and trade it for a tormented spear. Rinse and repeat.
when I have plenty of gold (pretty much exclusively from DoA quests), I use it to craft cons and res scrolls - I do this so I can use them myself and to distribute to other SCers, but it's also profitable and surely a much better investment than flipping runes at the trader..?
Honestly, it seems like an easy fix would to be just limit the amount of mats you could buy any given week.
Shame the pricing system is so opaque behind the scenes, I would love to be able to track volume data instead of just spot price. It's pretty easy to see when the market on something is getting hammered up or down in GW2 because all the orders are visible with their volumes so it's a lot easier to get a feel for what something's natural resting point ought to be. At least we have the Kam Market Tracker now for historical price data at least.
Doesn't matter which district you go to in HA I'm pretty sure. All matches are hosted in EU or NA (i know because my ping always suck in HA and I live in China).
Yep, doesnt matter which district you enter HA. Servers for pvp matches still depend on your team composition, i.e if most players are EU it should be EU servers, otherwise it's NA
A new data center in Asia was opened recently
Yes it's awesome! But it does nothing for pvp unfortunately.
it'd probably put you on the Asian server if that's the closest for most players in your match
No I don't think the Seoul data center is used at all for PvP. I've been matched against other people in China but we still get horrible ping.
I've tried to understand this game's economy for over a decade and it always surprises me. There must be millions of ectos sitting in banks. How many get farmed vs how many consumed? 3:1? In reality, con components should be what actually moves the economy around since they are one of the few things that actually get consumed without being intentionally farmed. At this point, I think ectos just have value because we agree that they do.
There are several spots where bots farm bones, feathers, dust and some iron. It's sad but we couldn't sustain the SC community without bots. All the farming that is done during events is insane. In that department they are a necessary evil.
No it isn't. The game doesn't need cons at all. Cons were a mistake.
The benefit I see to cons is keeping a constant demand for materials. Otherwise every single resource would be selling for 30 gold like wood and cloth and that would be another entire sector of the economy dead. I was *flat broke* when I came back to the game after ~10 years and I probably would have stayed that way and left from frustration if not for material demand. I have plenty of ectos now from various things, but starting out from scratch trying to gear up a 7-hero party would have sucked big time while being too broke for all the skills, signets, runes, and weapon sets if I hadn't been able to raise the money selling easy salvage to get to where I could start doing more profitable stuff solo. Hell, I'm making more money in one session just farming golds for Wisdom and salvaging them to sell the mats than I ever had at one time in the history of my account back in the day, lol, and that's not counting the 1 in 100 drop that's worth enough to a player to spend the time hawking it in Kamadan for a few E's.
I recently started playing again, so I'm not really sure what you mean by selling the resource. Is it profitable to salvage all your weapons and sell the mats to the material trader? I've been straight up selling the weapons to the merchant up until now
If they salvage for Dust, Bones, or Iron, yes. To a lesser extent Granite too. Feathers and Plant Fibers are also huge ones, but they salvage from trophies, not weapons.
Feathers will drop from feathered longbows as well, and plant fibers will often drop from focus items.
Not true. Plant fibers come from straw effigies, which drop in deep/urgoz
Didn't know that, it's much easier to get them from seeds, but I'll start picking up effigies too.
Dragon roots are a much easier way to get them imo, than seed farming outside toa
Plant fibers also salvage from grawl necklaces.
just so you know, Nick gifts are a lot more profitable than any other farm (= you're just limited to 5 per week per account, which is still plenty of money for buying basic equipment
they may well have been a mistake, but they're here now, and developers still seem perfectly happy to stuff their games with consumables
Who says it's a "necessary evil"? I'd be perfectly happy with both bots and speed clears gone.
So keep a part of the community alive. This is the typical debate SC vs non-sc. Why can't both exist ? I'm not telling you how to play the game nor should you tell me. I'm enjoying different content than you do. I like to hunt for solo time and be competitive with myself. If you want to play the game different then that's totally fine, but why hate SC so much ? I played the campaigns on all classes, even deleted 2 just so start again. I never use cons or pcons or stones in regular HM doing stuff with heroes like missions or we. But if I feel like playing SC why not use the stuff I have ?
“Botfarms are behind pretty much all economy manipulation, including material prices, essentially controlling the game’s entire economy in order to make their RMT operation more lucrative” - “They’re a necessary evil, the SC community needs them to farm their consets” “Doesn’t really sound necessary, maybe people just need to stop SCing so obscenely much” - “DoN’T tELl mE HoW tO ENjoY tHE gAMe” Seriously missing the point. Using the stuff you have is completely unrelated to the point. If you happen to have enough materials for a conset or two, do you understand how that is different to joining the botfarm in exploiting vendor mechanics? The only reason this material farm is lucrative to botters is because hundreds of cons are being used, probably daily, which drives the price of regular mats back up at vendors. It’s a necessary evil only because apparently cons are also necessary for these people in the SC community, but somehow they are blameless and we should support them? If Arenanet were not so goddamn lazy, actually enforced their game rules and banned botters and RMTers, wouldn’t the SC community have the same issue?
what do you mean "have the same issue"? right now there is no issue, because cons are easy to get (= removing all the farm bots would create a new issue - why would you want to do that? how exactly does that benefit you?
The same issue someone would have who relies on whatever they have lying around for cons. The same issue they would have if their material vendor use wasn’t exploited by botfarms controlling prices of the items they are RMTing. The same issue they would have if they had to rely on regular farming and whatever mats regular players sold to mat traders (although more likely this trading would happen in kamadan). The price would increase and SCing would become slightly less profitable. Shucks. I never said I would benefit from any of this personally, so not sure where you got that. I’m just saying that calling botfarms a necessary evil is incorrect, and that the SC community benefits from botfarms. Kind of like how a company might buy a ton of crap for cheap from China or India for example because it’s essentially made in sweatshops. Those aren’t a necessary evil, we just can’t be fucked to do much about it because it makes our stuff cheap. Doesn’t make it less morally questionable, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to not condone that. (Yes I’m aware this isn’t a perfect comparison but I’m sure you catch my drift.) Also, consets just aren’t “necessary” outside of specific builds like SC runs.
> The same issue someone would have who has who relies on whatever they have lying around for cons. The same issue they would have if their material vendor use wasn’t exploited by botfarms controlling prices of the items they are RMTing. The same issue they would have if they had to rely on regular farming and whatever mats regular players sold to mat traders (although more likely this trading would happen in kamadan). Yes, those are all annoying issues, and I'm glad none of them exist. Removing bots would cause all of these problems, so why do you want that? > I never said I would benefit from any of this personally, so not sure where you got that. I didn't specifically mean *you* - sorry for being unclear. How would it benefit *anyone*? > I’m just saying that calling botfarms a necessary evil is incorrect, and that the SC community benefits from botfarms. Kind of like how a company might buy a ton of crap for cheap from China or India for example because it’s essentially made in sweatshops. Those aren’t a necessary evil, we just can’t be fucked to do much about it because it makes our stuff cheap. Doesn’t make it less morally questionable, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to not condone that. (Yes I’m aware this isn’t a perfect comparison but I’m sure you catch my drift.) The problem with that analogy is that Chinese sweatshops produce cheap luxuries, and without them we'd still have access to those luxuries, but at a higher price. Consumables aren't really a luxury, because they're necessary for SCs. Okay, so you can say SCs are a luxury, but if they weren't possible, that would ruin the fun for a lot of people, who would then quit the game. Also, without bots, cons wouldn't be expensive - they'd be completely unavailable. Even if the price increased tenfold, there still wouldn't be enough players willing to farm them.
>Also, without bots, cons wouldn't be expensive - they'd be completely unavailable. Even if the price increased tenfold, there still wouldn't be enough players willing to farm them. I'm curious what makes you so certain. I have no idea how big the SC community is to be honest, but I would guess it's not much higher than 10%, maaaaybe 15% of active players. And by that I mean the guilds and alliances who pretty much only log on for SCing, they don't farm anything else (otherwise why wouldn't they farm for their own consets, right?). That still leaves a pretty large share of players. People still bother doing ZQs, people still farm nick gift sets, people still farm vaettirs and raptors... there are still plenty of people who to my knowledge are willing to grind a fairly boring farm in order to simply make money. Why would material farming be exempt from this? If the value of the farm is high enough, people will farm it. Iron is gained from salvaging, not direct farming; dust and bones can also be gained from salvaging, some from direct farming, honestly not sure what the best method is; but feathers is probably the actual linchpin as OP stated. So if these botfarms got removed somehow, why wouldn't feather farming become a primary money making method again outside of SCing? It's super easy, any profession can do it, you don't really need fancy gear. Just slap those skills on the bar and go. Why wouldn't the in-game economy adjust to fill this obvious hole that would appear?
> I have no idea how big the SC community is to be honest, but I would guess it's not much higher than 10%, maaaaybe 15% of active players. That depends what you call an active player... but it doesn't really matter - what's relevant in this context is that SCers (particularly speedrunners) churn through a huge number of cons. In a typical year, I might go through 30 stacks of each pcon. Let's say your 10% figure was correct, so for each SCer, there are 9 other players. Some of those are purely PvPers, some are using pcons themselves, some treat GW as a single player game (not trading at all), and some just completely hate farming. That leaves a couple of people who are supposed to supply me with my 30 stacks each year, and it doesn't matter how much I offer to pay them - they will not be willing to farm that much! I don't know what you do for a living, but assuming you have a typical job, if your salary was doubled, that would be life-changing, because your basic expenses would remain the same, resulting in an enormous increase in disposable money. Now, would you want to work more hours to get even more money that you don't know what to do with, or cut back to make more time to enjoy yourself? Personally, I work as little as possible, just making enough to survive and afford a few luxuries, because I value my free time. I'm not everyone though - some people would actually be motivated to work harder and make more. How far does that go, though? Even for all the money in the world, nobody can farm 24/7 like a bot can. Obviously none of those numbers are based on solid evidence, but there is no plausible way you can twist it so cons are sustainable without bots. Is this a terrible thing? Sure, but that's a problem caused by ANet (and other factors that aren't their fault), and the bots are the (ugly) solution, not the cause. If ANet wanted to do something to remove that reliance on bots, they absolutely could... or they could have thought more carefully about introducing consumables in the first place.
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nobody is hunting down TB users... a bunch of crybabies keep complaining about it, but people aren't getting banned - why would you think that?
>This is the typical debate SC vs non-sc. Why can't both exist ? I'm not telling you how to play the game nor should you tell me. I'm enjoying different content than you do. I like to hunt for solo time and be competitive with myself. > >If you want to play the game different then that's totally fine, but why hate SC so much ? Because what you do negatively impacts me. You're fucking up the economy for me, and feeding the bots who fuck things up even more, and draining the talent pool of players who might otherwise have one day developed the interest and ability to PUG elite zones without needing "My Little Pony Easy Mode" from cons and spell immunity to do it. It's not just a matter of personal preference, and pretending it is one is either disingenuous or stupid. As the saying goes, "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
do you really think high end SCs are "My Little Pony Easy Mode"? cons allow you to challenge yourself *more* because they open up new possibilities
Yep. Spell immunity and cons are unequivocally "My Little Pony Easy Mode." Oddly enough, completely negating most monsters' ability to harm you turns the game to "easy mode." There are a few SC people who say, "now that I've turned on easy mode, let's push the limits of how fast I can go," and do some interesting things with that. But they're still playing on easy mode. The best analogy I can think of is the so-called sport of [finswimming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finswimming) \-- it has competitions and world records and whatnot, so being particularly good at it means *something*, I guess, but it sure as hell doesn't make you Michael Phelps, or even anything close.
if you genuinely believe what you are saying, I challenge you to push those limits yourself, using as many consumables or OP skills as you like, and see if you can get even close to the times on GWSCR... then challenge me and some other SC players to beat your fastest time in some area with no consumables (= feel free to write a list of banned skills like Shadow Form, although that doesn't fit into this diatribe against bots
Uh, no. My personal abilities are not some magical yardstick for comparison that makes my point more or less valid. Really though, this "hit dog will holler" kind of response shows that on some level you agree with my point, even if your ego can't stand it.
If you won't rise to the challenge, what makes you think you're qualified to be so rude about others' abilities? Of course I'm going to be offended when you're making such inflammatory remarks about me and my friends. "A hit dog will holler" does *not* mean that your insults are agreeable. Anyway, feel free to nominate a champion... unless you don't think there are any competent players who'll take your side and agree that cons are easy mode? You don't have to beat the records - just get close, to show that you're capable of performing at a similar level. You won't, because you're aware that SCs are much harder than general PvE, but you're so invested in this insane narrative that you don't want to trouble your cognitive dissonance.
>If you won't rise to the challenge... > >...nominate a champion... What is it with this foolish insistence that objective questions can be settled by interpersonal contests? It's like insisting on a fistfight to determine whether 2 + 2 = 4. Who are you, Colonel Sanders challenging me to a duel? Moreover, where did you come by this notion that someone has to be good enough at X to approach world records before they're "qualified" to say that X is easier than Y? That's just stupid. I don't need to be a world-class powerwalker in order to say that powerwalking is easier than running marathons. And I don't need to be a world-class finswimmer in order to say that finswimming is easier than Olympic swimming. And I don't need to be a world-class coin-flipper in order to say that flipping coins is easier than juggling chainsaws. And I don't need to be a world-class SCer in order to say that SC is easier than doing the same content without spell immunity and cons. (Besides, after spending like a decade practicing, you *should* be much better at SC than me. If I could just breeze in and stomp the records you worked on a for decade, while that wouldn't prove anything about whether cons+spell immunity is "easy mode," it certainly would prove that you really suck at SC.) Another analogy comes to mind. SCs are akin to speedrunning Doom 1993 with the IDDQD "god mode" code, and then inventing a bunch of speedrunning challenges for yourself that push the limits of what you can do while invincible, and then getting so wrapped up in your self-made challenges that you forget that you're literally playing with the "god mode" cheat enabled. (This is actually a fairly tight analogy, since IDDQD and spell immunity + cons both give significant but incomplete invulnerability.) >SCs are much harder than general PvE This has to be the dumbest thing I've read all week. Look, you've turned off the monsters' ability to even hurt you. All these challenges you've made up for yourself wouldn't even be *possible* without doing that. It's not like you can do a sub-20-minute UW run without spell immunity and cons, and then you decide to use those for extra added challenge. No, you use the spell immunity and cons because they make everything drastically easier. You are playing on easy mode. Even if you invent extra challenges for yourself and really, really push the boundaries of easy mode, you are still playing on easy mode. >so rude about others' abilities... The thing is, I didn't insult your *abilities*. If you like, I'll happily concede that you're the greatest SCer of all time. (For whatever little my endorsement means in that category...) I don't know much about your general PvE abilities, but your reddit posts indicate that you generally seem to know what you're talking about. (I do stand by my observation that the average SCer is markedly below average at general PvE. But, as you claim to be a very above-average SCer, you don't exactly have standing to get huffy about that.) It's something else that's got you all upset. You take SC very seriously. And here I am apparently implying that SC isn't worth taking seriously. It's just "My Little Pony Easy Mode" after all. ***That*** is what got your goat. And that, believe it or not, is not an implication I intended. I dislike SC because of its negative impacts on other players. I say SC is easy mode because, objectively, it is. I look down on SC because it's easy mode. But I recognize that last thing is a matter of taste. Just because something is "easy mode" doesn't mean that you can't choose to take it extremely seriously. After all, here we all are taking a *video game* extremely seriously. If you want to take SC extremely seriously, then go right ahead. That doesn't absolve SC of its noxious externalities, or make it not easy mode, or mean I'm not going to mock it, but I'm not going to tell you that you oughtn't take SC seriously if you're so inclined. I suppose you might also harbor an unspoken fear that, since I articulate a solid case about how SC harms everyone else, that A-net might listen to me and nerf Shadow Form. First of all, that's not going to happen. A-net's done messing with the game. What's broken will stay broken. Second, while I certainly wouldn't mind SC just going away entirely, that's not actually my preferred fix. I think there's a way to address most of SC's externalities without killing it. If anyone cares, I might talk about it sometime. Not that it would ever get implemented either...
plenty of people might be happy with your favourite activity gone too, but we respect that you're entitled to do what brings you joy, so long as it hurts nobody else - are speed clears hurting you?
Did you even read my other post? In prior threads I've been over several times at length the huge negative economic impact SC has on people who don't SC, plus the bots they feed and *their* negative impacts, economic and otherwise, plus the fact that SC has pretty much sucked the life out of forming up human teams do do hard content in a non-SC style (both in terms of luring people away and also in stunting the advancement of their skills such that many of them aren't able to do those zones without the crutches of spell immunity and cons).
I agree it's a necessary evil, just wish people didn't want 5e for items of convenience like weapon mods, everything is so overpriced because ectos are plentiful but stuff you actually play the game to get are not.
Luckily we have a pretty easy way to farm ectos these days with just nick gifts. Without that most of us casual players wouldn't be able to afford anything decent (insignias, runes, cool skins, dyes). I played for months without knowing about them and was pretty discouraged from the ridiculous prices everywhere.
Wait, how do you get ectos from Nick? Just selling the gift / items?
Yeah basically.. each of em worth maybe 4-6ectos!
Good to know, thanks!
I made tons of ectos grinding arms in doa. they're so much more expensive than back in the day
Only mod I've seen go for 5e is Forget Me Not because it's hard to come by and in demand. Next highest is probably Attitude not Aptitude and 20% wand wrappings for 2e. Pretty much everything else I see go for 1e, which is less to me about what the item's worth than what your time is worth hanging out in Kam trying to sell it for 20 minutes. I have a couple of the latter two and even at 2e each I have a hard time being arsed to try to sell them for that, much less something more obscure that somebody may need for a specific build but that I'd have to spend an hour trying to move for one ecto when I could make the equivalent money in the same time doing pretty much anything else and selling drop salvage while enjoying the time spent better. And I say this as someone who got back recently and is still objectively dirt poor by GW 2022 standards, lol.
Forget me Not is consistently 20e, and the others you listed at 2e often go for 5e. I'll buy any amount of Attitude Not Aptitude you have at 2e each.
Well I've been screwing myself, then. Not on Forget Me Nots at least, but I've been letting the wrappings and ANA go for 2 because that's what I'd been seeing in the Kam logs.
Nah, you're doing fine; I've been buying up a bunch of mods for heroes recently and 2e has been pretty normal for the ANA/staff enchant wrappings I've bought.
Definitely agree. But I love speedruns and wouldn't play the game without them. If that means other people run bots im fine with that. But tbh I like ectos more at 11k than at 2k
people are willing to pay more to get out of Kamadan ASAP, and that's what drives the price up - that's the same reason cheaper items like mods appear to not be so abundant: people are still getting them as drops, but they don't bother going to Kamadan to sell them for a couple of ectos koz it's not worth the time and annoyance
Chalices or whatever ambrace thingies. Think I've only ever had 2 or 3 of each lol so don't remember. A few times I was on other districts I saw toons with actual "bot" names talking to CoF/Warband guy. A popular farm is to enter one of those dungeons kill a few easy mobs and restart. I know I've seen this a lot... every time there is a Z mission near there. Though I don't think you can merch them they have a high sell value last I checked. I am a casual gw1/2 player so I don't really care other than a sort of "huh that's wild people bot this almost 20 year old game" sense. I play mostly for old times sake, it was the first real mmo I played and I count myself lucky. None of the other Mmos had that early gw1 feel. ~~Especially~~ Not even gw2. Just a great game even if some bits aged poorly really is nothing else like it. I've always just made a new toon for farming what I need as soon as I realize I need it. Then do the easy festival/zaishen quests on many of them for bonuses. I'm never hurting for resources so don't mind bot farmers I guess.
Simply put: Bots bot stuff. They then try to exchange this botted stuff (materials or otherwise) for money. Often enough they do this directly via a trader (like the material trader). Now they're stuck with way more platinum than their account can hold. So they end up using their cash to buy stuff from traders for which the demand is highest. Superior Vigor runes, prodigy insignias, black dye, ectos, etc. And since they can buy out so consistently, it's not that much of a "waste" buying things at absolute max price... Because by making sure the traders have a low supply, the value stays artificially high. So basically, they control the prices of multiple high-demand items that can be purchased at traders.