So What's The Big Issue Here?
Every game has some currencies or feature that keeps counting up if the player does something and most often these are required for something. Unfortunately, in Guild Wars 2 there's a currency or something like that called luck. This luck can be increased by an item called "essence of luck". The higher your luck is the higher your account magic find becomes. However, there's a cap. Once you reach this cap you don't need to get any luck anymore aside from the recipes you need them for, rendering luck rather useless at some point.
It's bad if some currency becomes useless in a game. From a good game design point of view, you want to try to have every currency and everything you get useful at least somewhat. Even if it has a bad exchange rate. Any exchange is better than no exchange.
Guild Wars 2's Luck
Luck or Essences of Luck is the item that is rewarded by salvaging gear but is also given by certain achievements. What it does is it increases said account luck. Once you reach a certain amount that starts with 100 and caps at 30000 luck it increases the required amount of luck and increases your account magic find by one percent. The account magic find increases your chance on a rarer item pool. However the cap through this method is at 300% magic find from account luck. Essences of Luck drop dependent on rarity and you require 429550 luck to reach this cap.
- Fine - 10
- Masterwork - 50
- Rare - 100
- Exotic - 200
- Legendary - 200
After the Cap
But what happens once you reach this cap? Nothing. No really, literally nothing happens. Your account luck will continue to increase with no known effect. Aside from being able to use luck for crafting recipes, it's useless. Though how often do you use luck for a recipe and how much do you get? It stands in no correlation.
What Now?
The question is what to do now with either the essence of luck or the overflow of account luck. I've read suggestions to make it convert into karma, though that doesn't make much sense to me since karma is something you build up by helping and not by accumulating luck, right? I might be wrong with this thought though. Another thing you could do is letting the account luck increase your chance for rarer items. If you get an item that's rarer your account luck is consumed just for you to build it up again. Another way could be to raise the cap and at the same time change the formula to go much higher.
However, this might get solved. In the end, the way it has been designed and programmed currently makes this item almost useless. I guess it doesn't matter too much though since you get luck from literally every single item you salvage.
The Future
I guess at this point we should just wait and see if ArenaNet has any great plans to add some kind of sink for essences of luck. Despite this, I can only suggest every developer make sure to think about this when adding a new currency.
"Is my currency still worth it if everyone bought everything that can be bought?"
