The GW market, analysis

There is no gross imbalance..every high must be succeeded by a low..this is the way of the market.

The devs will take no part in the economy because there is nothing wrong with it. Bots are a nuisance but they can be tolerated, spammers pose no real threat to anyone..the mega rich are quite happy selling things to each other (over n over).

I will just sit back and enjoy my millions
I worked hard for them and could care less about bots.

my question to ANET or whoever thinks they know is.

Are there set amounts of any particular item in game or are the numbers infinite with only a predesignated randomly generated number that items drop in a given time frame?

Its like the comic book industry. Perfect example. The comic industry publishes how many issues of a comic they print. Say there are 10,000 copies of Ultimate SpiderMan #1 first printing. Cover price is $2.99. Right then the collectors know that they should buy a few copies because it will go up in value right away due to the low print run. Hence why 2nd, 3rd, 4th printings are normally still cover price after 6 years, when the first printing is $200.00. Rare variant covers are worth twice to 3 times as much due to low print runs of 20-100 (or 100-1000)

If there are 1 million Perfect Sephis Axes and people are "willing" to buy them for 1mil gwgold. Thats a ripoff. If there are only 10,000 Perfect Sephis Axes then 1mil is slightly reasonable considering the player base. There may not only be technically 50,000 people who play GW constantly. IF theres 1mil Perfect Sephis Axes then anything over 10k each is rediculously insane and some people are making a ton of gold for items that arent worth any more than a 10k collectors axe that is in an unlimited supply. Then these people sell the gwgold on ebay or save some gold and buy things they would really like to have for themselves OR buy more items at low prices then sell to make a mediocre profit from it.

I could go on but i gotta run.

As someone else stated

"Those who say it's people who cause the inflation hit it right on the nose. More specifically, it's people with lack of information on prices. The problem is that without an in-game system to see this information (say, an auction house), this information will always be out-of-date and not nearly as accurate since it does not reflect the entire game's player base. This is the fundamental flaw in the game"

i will agree that some of it comes from the selling done online like at our very own "ventari's sell" here. Didn't read the 2nd and 3rd pages so it may haf been said. But seing as we just hit wat.. 100k guru members? plenty ppl look at the trading section, thats why sellers will "bump" their forum everyday. in fact, almost too many ppl use it. Sellers who start a forum/auction for their items will submit in their own post to make it look like its worth more, via another login name. But gwguru is tryna fix that, or alrdy did. But one very rich guy has no time to wait and bids "x" amount of plats on sumtin, it can very well make others think its worth more, when they see more than one ppl offer like so.

I hate using 'real world' examples, but I think this applies...

think about this:

In GW, gold/platinum is in unlimited supply. That is an undeniable fact. This means that everyone that has an account can at the exact same time, go out into a zone and start killing things and make money. That money came essentially out of nowhere.

It wasn't printed in a limited quantity at a controlled mint. This gold/plat just became generated on the spot. In the real world, only so much is made, and this is to make sure the dollar, or the euro, or the yen, whatever retains a certain value. In GW, the amount of money out there is directly controlled by the amount of people acquiring, or effectively 'making' it.

The more people that are out there 'making' money, the more the value of that money actually decreases. If there ends up being more money than there are things to buy with that money, something needs to happen to bring the ratio back up, and allow for the money to be able to purchase things once again.

This 'balancing' can happen one of three ways: 1) More 'things' need to be introduced, and by that I mean 'things' that are worth buying; 2) The money needs to be dumped or destroyed (or in GW terms, gold sinks, or see #1); or 3) How much the 'things' that exist are worth needs to increase, so that more money can flow

Each time a new game is released, #1 and #2 happens, and you can see a general decrease in prices overall. These things are good. More skins and greens are considered #1, while new armors would be #2. After a while, though, supply of the new items becomes greater than the demand, causing the prices to drop. People also settle in to the gold sinks they're going to participate in, aka new armors, and so gold sinks become less and less.

While these things are happening, gold/plat continues to pour in at an ever-increasing rate. #3 happens again. Now the very few items left that aren't in tremendous supply, and thus are actually wanted, must balance with the overwhelming supply of gold/plat. Prices skyrocket once again.

This is the vicious circle we are left with. Knowing this, what would you say is causing all of it? Unlimited supply of gold? Not really, because we technically have an unlimited supply of money IRL, it's just regulated. In-game, it's not regulated except by the people who 'make' it. The people who 'make' the most, are definately the Bot Farmers.

Keep in mind that when I say 'make', I'm talking about generated gold. Gold that comes from the random code of the game, not other players. This is the crux of the problem of increasing prices. This is inflation caused by Bot Farmers. If you deny that, you deny my argument, and I would love to know where I'm going wrong. (I'm sure it's not 100%, I realize that, but I feel this is, to the best of my knowledge, how things are)

EDIT: Also, even if you don't eBay your wealth, chances are, you have traded with someone that has. Which means if you trade (or powertrade), you're making most of your money because of these Bot Farmers. Not your fault, not what I'm saying. Just saying that they are the original source of most of the wealth in GW. That is my bold statement for the evening.

You can't have it both ways. You cannot say that bots cause inflation if there is precisely no evidence of inflation. I never posed any answer to the "why are prices so low" question; I'm well aware that it's because of the increased drop rates, among other things. All I said was that it is absolutely insane to continue to argue how - theoretically - bots drive prices up, when the prices are quite obviously NOT up. If you spent a little less time trying to come up with insults (which mostly fall flat on their face, due to your complete lack of writing ability...) and a little more time actually reading my post, you would have understood that.

Here is some "evidence" for you to consider:

1. Bannings. Why do you think A-Net is so adamant about banning bots? For superficial reasons? I believe it is because they know the damage that bots are doing to the economy, by driving up prices.

2. Rare Gold Weapons. Yes, the proliferation of green items has really hit the value of many gold items out there, which more than offsets the damage caused by bots. But look at the items for which there is no parallel - namely Crystalline swords, Dwarven axes, and the nerfed items such as the 55HP HoD axe. A few months ago, relatively "perfect" versions of these items were selling for less than a couple of million gold. Now, they are reaching in excess of 3, maybe 4 million gold.

Why? Because, with the increasing amount of gold in the economy, there are many more players that have stockpiled huge amounts of wealth (i.e. not just Akhilleus ) that can bid on these items.

The fallacy related to inflation is that people tend to focus on the big events that have caused prices to fall, such as increased Superior Absorption drops/nerfs, which were specifically and directly targeted by A-Net.

I agree with you, especially on this post. However, I think that it is more in effect when a chapter is first introduced. As we have seen in factions and prophecies, farmers are going to be an undeniable fact of the game. Prices will be high at first (good example is urgoz longbow,) but then they will come down over time due to people wanting to make money off of the high prices. It will eventually lead to the mudflation we have now.

the bots farm faction which they can turn into amber/jade which can be sold...
don't say they don't have any influence

Ebayers are a small minority. The affect they have on the economy is small. Intelligent players will learn to make money. I've played GW for 11 months...15 if you count the months prior to me taking over this current account. In that time spam I've easily attained over 5mil from just playing the game. Doing UW, FoW, elite missions, farming, chestrunning, running, missions etc... I believe us players who have stuck around GW since near the beginning have a larger impact of the economy then ebayers simply because there are more of us. Over time players will develop a large amount of gold legit.

My .02.

Gold Sellers for $$$ do it far more then botting / farming.

(Note: Anet has stated multiple time they have nothing with farming. It's farming (bot/human) for $ is what they try and shut down).

FFXI suffers the same problem, too many people buying gold using it ingame which directly affect the skyrocketing auction house prices.

The skill vs grind built in gw doesn't stop this, it allows the non-skilled gold buyers to get there butt kicked by the honest and skillfull player.

BOTS effect costs of things greatly. For instance, say some random guy goes and buys 10,000,000G. Hes got more gold than anyone could imagine, and he doesnt care how he spends it. He buys the ectos and shards for 5 sets of FOW armor from the trader. then goes and gets the FOW armor. Prices for ecto goes up due to high demand. Imagine a bunch of people doing this every day.