Guild Wars Economy: Who's to Blame?

I blame Anet and the gold farming companies.

armor is the only thing that has a constant value, thye means to get the 75-1000k for decent armor is a different thing

Uh .. I believe there have been like 10 perfect crystallines in 19 months with 3 million copies sold. I think that puts them squarely in the ALWAYS category. Agreed, you do seem to be both pompous and sadly misinformed.

Gold crystallines only come from ONE place it is safe to say we won't have people farming 5 thousand in a few minutes ... since there is only a chance for ONE in that time frame. If Anet were to make a green crystalline you would get a front row seat to the death of a game. People need to think big picture but are often too focused on what they desire in the short term.

You missed my point: the skin, and where it drops, is entirely out of player control. The devs can change things, so saying "always" assumes "no changes will be made to it" and that's a fairly large assumption when ANET has spend a lot of time and effort making the high-end items affordable.

I'm always curious as to where the tiny number of perfect crystallines comes from. There are people farming UW pretty much constantly: duoing, soloing, and going in teams. Whichever country has favor, you can bet tehre are dozens of people (and sometimes hundreds) in the UW at any given time. As far as I know, ANET has never come out and SAID "There are xx Crystalline swords with 15>50 inherent on players, xx crystalline swords with 15% stance on characters, and xx with 15% while enchanted. Of these, xx are req 8, xx are req 9, and xx are req 10 or higher."

And until I see ANET publish official figures on that, I'm disinclined to believe numbers that are by necessity made up. Quite frankly, we (the players) do NOT have access to the data. Who knows how many 15>50 crystallines are out there with req 8? I don't. and you don't, so please stop throwing out numbers that you can't validate.

the thing that fcked up economy are green items and gold items which are too often dropping (the most stupid thing in the game are green items imo)
If u want perfect items in pve u should work for it and not buy them for 5 k each ... the point of pve is that u must work hard to get weapons with perfect mods and not to get them after u sell 1-3 ectos.

the economy at the begining of the game was the economy i liked, even staff upgrades could be sold fo 20-30 k if not more. there were korean bots to farm for us .

there r pvp chars to play with perfect items and max armors. whats the point of so many perfect weapons in pve if u cant confront the other players outside the towns (the 2nd most stupid thing in gw)

The one and only place that a gold Crystalline sword can drop is in the Hall of Heroes, after defeating 2 opposing teams a Chest spawns on the center altar that you have to keep control of in order to win. This Chest is the only place left in the game where a gold Crystalline,Dwarven Axe, Serpent Axe, "Swamp Club" skinned war hammer(ok these come from the end uber chest in Hell's Precipice as well but still), Ascalon skinned war hammer can ever drop.

Leprekan referred to the number of perfect Crystallines based on information from this or GWOline's sites.

I've been playing for 18+ months myself, I remember a time when unlocked chests dropped these items as well, and yet in all this time only that many perfects have been accounted for.

Blame goes to nobody but us, GW economy was built to be controlled by the players. For some reason this statement "A player driven economy" is stuck in my mind, just cant remember where I saw it, dont care to look either xD

There is just one thing that needs to click, then people can be free: all weapons and armour (of each type) in GW are the same in terms of max stats. The only thing for the most part you might be spending hours of farming/whatever on is just to get a different skin. Ask yourself how really important that is.... how often do you spend looking at your character's weapons anyway? Probably not all that much, more time spent looking at skills bar/party bar/other things like enemies.

Once that fundamental fact has clicked, you'll realise how trivial and pointless the rest of the economic stuff really is. You can pick up collector items/greens for a fraction of the cost, time and effort and they work exactly the same as the l33t 1000k item which has identical stats, just a different skin. You're stressing out over vanity.


Edit: just to cut off at the pass, anyone who's thinking of comparing Fords to Ferraris, that kind of comparison doesn't work. They're completely different cars in terms of performance ("stats" if you will) etc. as well

I remember when people would buy yule caps, knowing they are festive, just to hold them in their inventory. They payed good money too.

this is exactly why i laugh at everyone who charges 100k plus ectos for anything at all no matter how rare or cool skinned. whats the point, in my opinion you cant buy anything better stats than 1.5k armour or collecters weapons, yes there are different skins but imo most 1.5 / 15k is better than fow armour anyway and the expensive weapons are pretty ugly in most cases.

there is absolutely nothing worth gaining mass wealth for in this game, i should know after giving away over a million in gold and god knows how many ectos during my gw time i still have a large amount of gold as i have nothing to aspire to so the gold piles up

wrong.

notice how Anet is bringing prices down so super farmer/bot feels the pain?

a mod trader is just around the corner...............orrrrr......maybe a big drop rate increase to do to mods what it did to superior absorb/sigels/etc.

the day of the casual person playing a game instead of looking at a few rich *elite* people who can grind 10/12/more hours a day is coming.

i would not spend 10 hours a day for 19 months unless i was getting a real life living wage out of it.

If this were true, then we'd be seeing price inflation. Fact is, there has been a serious price deflation for the last several months. Probably close to a year now, since the introduction of green items.

While agree with you that there need to be more gold sinks, the relative lack of them doesn't seem to have hurt the economy. I'm not sure why, but I'd hazard a guess that it's due to people leaving the game and / or customizing items. Not that there has been an exodus away from GW, but rather that there is a natural tendency for hardcore gamers (the people who tend to amass serious cash) to tire of the game and either take a break, or move on.

The economy in GW is neither good nor bad, it just is. When I was commodities broker, I learned that you should just become neutral to prices, and pay more attention to their movement. So when I saw prices start to drop, I sold all my valuable stuff (except a few things I wanted to keep and customized), and bought some of it back when the prices stabilized.

So when you see short-term inflation (oft caused by new-item craze), buy; when you see short-term deflation, sell. The trick is spotting the trend.

I think the economy is OK. At any given time, half of the complaint posts are about inflation, and half of them are about deflation.

The trend for most things is towards deflation - each new expansion probably increases the supply of green swords more than the demand for green swords, for example. But the rate at which you earn gold is higher in the newer areas, balancing things out.

I really disagree strongly with this. It was a SERIOUS problem in Prophecies that there was no reward for questing. It makes no sense for questing to be less profitable per hour than farming. Adding equipment requisitions and such helped alleviate this problem a little bit - but not enough.

In any case, if there is too much cash in the economy (and I don't think there is), the solution is to reduce drops, not quest rewards.

I didn't miss your point. Your point is just a pfa (pull from air) to enhance a debate. No offense but it is as valid as saying what if Anet makes ectos drop from every low level monster in presearing.

Gold crystallines are only from winning in hoh. I don't see Anet mucking with it anymore than they already have. There are considerably more gold crystallines in circulation now than there used to be since Anet in their infinite wisdom (note heavy use of sarcasm) made hoh a 3 way with a much shorter time limit. You will actually find people "farming hoh" now.

You are welcome to believe what you want but that won't change how many req8 15>50s there are. Something you might try is searching the high end forum on guru ... this is where most of them wind up.

As builds changed, skills added or altered, what equipment (stat wise) value will change because it will drive demand (or the reverse).

Having weapons affordable is a very good thing. I have nothing against a high value market for rare "skins" as long as I can get the boring mundame thing or make it for the stats I would like.

Nightfall introduced the inscription system. When they did, my definition of "perfect" changed from perfect mods, gold to Req 8/9 gold. max damage.. and no worried about the other stats, I can change them.

that is too funny...saying that Anet won't make an error that will cause a rare skin to drop somewhere else is so much BS...anyone remember the ecto fiasco when the servers were rolled back...also fella i seriously doubt that all traders or HoHers or whoever gets the godly items your are talking about trade at Guru...I mean come on do you really think that everyone that plays the game actually comes here to sell there junk??? Get a clue! I played the dammed game for 3 months before I even heard of guildwarsguru.com and I KNOW that i sold crap to merchants that some people would consider "godly". So as far as you saying only 19 or how ever many Perfect Crystalines have dropped in the entire life time of GW is just plain ridiculous...please excuse my spelling and or grammar errors...and excuse my "tone" that type of stuff just pisses me off..

It seems to me that there are two main lines of complaint:

1. Prices are too high, and getting higher
2. Prices are too low, and getting lower

Is that an apt summary?

I't sll supply and demand. To people who say it doesn't matter if 15k armor has the same stats as 1.5k: Who cares? Why? Because it's all about "bragging rights" and our nature to want to "look" and "feel" better the others. It's our natural instinct to want better items, or just simply better stuff.

And with the people that can afford those items, they'll pay for it. 100k+XXecto's isn't much if you have millions. What else do you spend it on? Why not something that can make you look better?

In terms of rarity of an item, it'll be one dam dull game because if every item were to be acquired easily, EVERYONE would have ALMOST the same skins used and there is no more originality. There is also no more of that feeling that you've achieved something. It's like having someone thats played for 1 month having the exact same items as someone who has played ever since the game came out. There NEEDS to be items varying in terms of rarity to PROMOTE gaming.

And, last, they're all the same stats, right? If you can't afford the skin, buy a differnt one, still same stats eh? You want something, work for it. Farming, buying from eBay, who cares. All that requires time, farming especially, and buying from eBay means you spent your real life money, into something that has no value besides ingame.

Really, if you want to blame someone for the ecnomony, blame everyone, because everyone plays a small part of a whole. Everyone does something that affects the economy. Ectos for example, before the aggro nerf, they went down to as low as 5.5k from vendor, but now since 55 is harder, and it's harder to farm, meaning there's less people doing it, prices go up. Everyone is to blame. Blame ANet for making that nerf happen. Blame the person that came up with the idea to farm in the first place. Blame everyone else for copying that person. Blame that person that finds a rare item and sells it high. Blame the person that buys it, which sets an example to others that find that item. Blame everyone, makes the world a nicer place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

Veblen explained it in 1899.

To the OP:

The economy hasn't crashed, just yours has.
99% of the other players economy is just fine.

Until people understand that Guild Wars isn't about what you own, and more about how you use what you own, this topic will always end up the same.

So, in answer to your query...

You're to blame for the economy that never had a place in Guild Wars to begin with. So, to fix it, lower your prices so that you will stop complaining about how much your crystaline sword you've been sitting on has dropped in value, rather than complain as to why no one is buying it for your outrageous price.

As far as you know, I own a dozen 15^50 req. 7 crystaline swords, and if I don't, who really cares? Oh yeah, the other 1% of the economical minority (that's you).

More like:
Guild Wars Economy: Who's to Thank?

To add to the Req 8 15>50 Crystalline debate going on here. I have seen for sale since virtually the beginning of Guild Wars only 5. I am sure there are more but I cannot see there being that many more. A while back I was given the figure by a well known trader of around 20-30 I think it was. Leprekaun (sp) gave a figure which I am sure is close to the mark. There is no way to be 100% sure of how many there are as people dont always post on guru, or never told many people etc. People should stop attacking him as I am certain there are not hundreds of Req 8 15>50 Crystalline Swords.

The Guild Wars economy is the best it has ever been in terms of items and materials being cheap. I remember when a Req 13 Gold 14>50 +30Hp Spartha could sell for 300k or ectos were 17k ish each. The people saying gold is hard to make or every rich person who spends 2 million ebays or whatever sadly must fail at life. Gold is not hard to make in Guild Wars if you use your brain which it seems so many are lacking in this game. I have just started playing World Of Warcraft and even though joining it waaay into its existence I have started making a rediculous amount of gold for what level I am and I am confident I should be very rich in WoW too with little effort.

There aren't many people that can afford 1,750 ectos for an item. The ones that don't start out here wind up here by the buyers that LIVE in every damn trade town. A trader oops and allowing monsters to drop an item that is set to only drop in one place is completely different. I will leave it at you win since there is no talking to some people.

I doubt there are hundreds either, but the truth is, there may be and without the figures from the actual character files, nobody knows. There may well be people who have 3 of them and never visit the forums. As far as "most of them" ending up on the high-end sell forums, I don't see how that could happen when there are 3 million copies of GW sold and just over 110k registered users on Guru as of this post. Seems that that leaves a few MILLION players who don't visit this forum...

The economy is doign fine right now. Materials are cheap, anyone can get a good max weapon for minumal investment. The rare skins are vanity items, not unbalancing but nice to have, so give people with a lot of money something to spend it on. At all levels, from bvery rich to very poor, gold is still valuable and there are things to buy. I think that ANET has done a good job of controlling inflation and keeping basic utility items reasonbly priced, while still leaving value in rare skinned weapons and armor.

The programmers are to blame. Supply goes up infinitely, and demand never changes, except for new items. If they did the economy like they did alliance faction (percent degrade over time), the economy in GW wouldn't completely suck.

I agree with this statement.

Nothings wrong with the economy, stick to PvP or go PvE and actually find out what the economy is like, shard.

I tend to disagree with the statement here even though you went on to make some good points. Econ 101 is basically a semester of macroeconomics and a semester of microeconomics in your freshman year. The dynamics of GW economy is not really covered in any of those two courses even though the basics hold true , But this stuff is a little more complex than your supply demand curve and the GDP/GNP of GW.

I do believe the psychology of the players have more to do with the economy than the economic laws and principles in a online environment.

You have the haves and the have nots who have totally different play styles

Haves could be:
Adventurers ---who just want to beat every Challenge in the game, the type of guy who does FoW/UW Elite mission quests every night and after 3 or 4 months has a huge stack of loot he hasn't been paying any attention to because he was just having fun the gold was not the object for him just a side effect.
Farmers -- These guys just want a hustle, they got one of every profession ready to go, for the next big thing, UW monk he's there, Shiro'kin run he's there, troll cave, latest solo boss build no probelm the fun for this guy is the Items and the loot.
Superfarmer/Exploiter --- This guy can smell an exploit a mile away, he's the guy still in UW solo farming or that monk running in and out of DoA solo who always seem to have the gem you need when you pm him. He has an unwritten pact with Anet he wont post his build if they leave him alone. The fun for this guy is hidden knowlege.
Merchanter/Wheeler Dealer---Buys low sells high knows every price in the game or has it at his fingertips. His fun is to methodically get more wealth than everyone else.

Have nots could be:

Explorer---not a GMC type , but they may be very causal player and spend a day hiking out to some area taking screen shots. The fun for them is to marvel at the detail and beauty of the game.
Socializer -- The fun for him is seeing who’s on and hanging with guildies just being helpful
Newbie—Just doesn’t know what is going on yet and handicapped financially
People who just follow storyline--- you have those who just want to finish the game, but that will not generate any loot for them.

I just throw those out there to show that, people are all playing and having fun so GW is not broken,but, ultamitely some peoples behavior is gonna net them more gold than others. There is a segment of the population who insist that the economy is broken., but its all in their head. The true problem here is not economic, but social psychological. The number one issue being class envy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_envy

I don't think there is anything wrong with the economy tbh. Of course, crystallines/dwarven are going to be cheaper as the game has been around longer so there are more in circulation. They're still very expensive though so I don't see a problem.

With collectors/greens, its fairly easy for all players to get max items in pve. So you are paying strictly for looks. And lets face it Looks = Fashion.

Things from tyria/cantha will be dropping in price like mad now because Elonian fashion is in, but elonian stuff will drop for chap 4. face it, accept it, and don't be too upset that your elemental sword isn't going to be quite so uber later on.

When all is said and done, the economy is driven by buyers. If the buyers don't like what you're selling it won't sell. If they can get it cheaper somewhere else it won't sell either.

During the double gold chest weekend, I got my req 9 dead sword. Surprisingly enough I wasn't the only one and the 100k + 40ecto price tag from guru baseline, dropped to around 100k + 20e. That to me sounds like a working economy.

You don't seem to get just how rare gold crystallines are. I made it to rank10 with NEVER seeing one crystalline come out of that damn chest much less a perfect one. I am not the only one with that experience from hoh. As to how they wind up here ... I repeat there are full time buyers in every trade town. A limited number of people that can actually afford 1,750 ectos means you have to advertise where they might see it .. hence here. Sure there will of course be a few and I mean FEW as in single digits that never passed through guru but the bulk did. Then again you are the person that didn't even know where they came from but you are still debating their value and numbers.

Its all supply and demand... Heres a good example:

The first night the snowball fights came out, I sold a pack of 10 cc shards for 50k... Why, you ask? ...Because they were 'new' and no one had access to them yet. Now your lucky to get 200g per shard...

Is that so?

More like the death of your penis size. I do not even have a Wamoh, I am sure there are a lot others like me.

I do not even care if Anet adds a quest that can be done in 5 minutes which gives a crystaline sword as a reward, a quest that is only available for a limited time. It is totally worthless to me.

Good thing your opinion is worth exactly squat to Anet. I do not find it amusing to spend 100K on a staff + perfect mods each time I have to rerole to something.

It is very obvious that all the losers complaining about the so called economy are just people who wants a free WoW; players who find the game "boring" or have "nothing to do" because "things are too easy to get". You like to spend a lot of time getting a worthless item? Go play WoW.

I love being judged by people that don't even know me. I am not the type to run around ctrl clicking my weapon sets. Like it or not there has to be items that people strive for .. even if you do not. If you really did not care I doubt your post would have ever been made.

You are perfectly correct, though this is perfectly explained by "economic laws and principles." As I stated above, one of the bedrock principles of a market economy (of which Guild Wars is, at least in part, given the ability to trade goods and services at mutually agreed upon prices) is that things only have that value which members of the market ascribe to them.

It seems that the biggest complaint people have about the "economy" is actually the complaint that other GW players value certain in-game items (rare skins, greens, or the quasi-mythic Crystallines) in a way that the complainant doesn't particularly like. Our complainants don't like the fact that some people buy and sell Crystallines for 100K + ectos, or whatever. Great, don't buy/sell at that price. Feel free to argue why its a bad price.

However, ultimately, different people have different value systems. And while we generally talk about "value systems" when thinking about more abstract notions (politics, religion, ideology, etc.), the same theory applies here, too. As long as there is a heterogenous population on the GW servers, you will, inevitably, encounter persons who are executing a transaction the terms of which you disagree with. Yet, as long as that transaction is not one banned by the Terms of Service (e.g. selling in-game currency for "real-world" currency), the system is functioning the way that ANet intends.

Thus, the economy is, by definition, not "broken" and know blame need be assessed. QED.




That being said, if you believe that the fundamental economic structures of Guild Wars are inappropriate, faulty, flawed, or just generally could be changed or improved, then of course you can assign blame. However, again, the blame should not lie with the player community generally. Rather, the blame is with the programmers, developers, producers, owners, and the "makers" of the game, as they and they alone have control over the underlying mechanisms.

One day, some Ph.D candidate is going to win tenure and Guru better damn well be in the footnotes somewhere!


[EDIT to correct a problem with the quote]

as one of the oldest power traders. I think the market is just doing fine right now. Me and many traders i know still making enough for what we wanna buy. Sure it is not big number we used to make back in the old days anymore. But we are still doing pretty well. We can pretty much buy w/e we want any time anywhere. The market right now is good for both casualisty and hardcores imao.

Bold mine, that's exactly it. There has to be some kind of reward for playing a game, and for some people that ultra rare item is the reward. Striving for months and months, or even years considering the rarity, and finally obtaining the item would be a huge success for those that play that way. Heck, even for those that don't, just getting it as a random ultra lucky drop would make your month!

The only crystaline I've seen was the Longsword in Pre Searing. There's a lot of items like that for me, since I hate farming in general. But, gotta respect what others take value in.

As for the economy, I think it's in a state of mild flux since the Inscriptions hit, but that's far from a bad thing. Besides, lower cost goods are easier to sell since more people can buy them.

What about 15^50 Crystalline Swords with req 11 or better the prices are always outrageous. I think to have some really expensive stuff is good. It increases the challenge. The game could monitor it by having certain items limited by the number of total accounts. i.e. 1 Crystalline sword for each 200,000 accounts period. It could then even track the number that get customized (therefor out of circulation) and add 1 or 2 for every 10 customized. Thus rarity could be controled and the prices for those items would be interesting to watch. If the population as a whole got richer the prices would actually go up. Supply of ectos per person vs. supply of Crystalline swords per person.

I'm to blame. Shoot me.

DUH you didn't give your address.

QFT.

Crystalline Sword = Tulips in Holland (those who don't understand my analogy should google it for some interesting history).