The death of farming

I'm not sure why anyone is celebrating the reversal of the farming update. What did you not pay attention in government and economics class? this was a GOOD thing for us farmers, a good thing.
<snip> It was a good thing for traders, not farmers - big difference. Farmers (and I mean real farmers) enjoy making builds, killing things and getting loot. Traders, (which I gather from your last post you are one) enjoy having the loot obtained.

I'm still not sure I'm happy with the update. Its a step closer to where we were and thats a good thing, but I still don't think its good enough... 2 sets of fissure armour later I've still never sold items to other players, and quite frankly, I'd rather gouge my own eyes out than do so. This update helps ecto farmers, doa farmers and green farmers but not the humble mob farmer .

I guess my way of farming is dead and I'll have to go back to just playing normally with the rest of the population .

I'm not sure why anyone is celebrating the reversal of the farming update. What did you not pay attention in government and economics class? this was a GOOD thing for us farmers, a good thing. Did you not pay attention to the ecto prices recently? Do you know what they could have been? How many people in this thread began converting their gold to ecto at some point? How many ecto did you have? You know when 9K was a good price? Ok 33% gain on that price and it would have kept rising because demand would have remained constant and supply would have shrunk because of the nerfed drop rate.20K ecto easily. That's over a 100% return on the initial investment of 9K. Remember those triple green drop weekends? Yeah you know the ones that sent prices plummeting? All those 15K greens could have been sold for double easily inside of two weeks. In a month? 50K for the desirables. It is simple supply and demand. If you have 30 people wanting to buy an item from you at 10K and you supply them easily with that item for 10K. Now all the sudden you can only get 20 of that item at a time and it's in short supply in other places too. those same thirty people start trying to outbid each other in an attempt to get that item. Just because drops got lessened didn't make people suddenly stop wanting FoW armor or Elemental swords. It just gave us carte blanche to charge whatever we felt like really. If Anet did in fact reverse the update based on the whining on forums then we just shot ourselves in the foot. We could have had millions more and since gold drops got decreased too our millions could have had the buying power of billions once prices restabilized. Go Team! This just makes me sad. thats the logic behind what ignited the great depression. If you did pay attention in economics you'll remember that their is 2 types of demand, elastic and inelastic. Inelastic demand is armor as an item, everyone needs it so it can cost as much as needed, luxury armor is elastic and demand for it will decrease as price increases due to opportunity cost associated with it's purchase. Therefore the highest sustainable price point ecto can go is just below it's peak wherein it's price is outbalanced to the consumer by what would have to be sacrificed in order to purchase it (be it time spent gathering or what else could have been purchased). It's all measured on a scale of an items inherit value, those with a better value/cost ratio will be what is purchased more. Now consider that ecto prices could be speculated to increase in price by 8x in the short term (since there is 1/8th as much ecto) , further consider that the average player does NOT have more than 30k gold (as stated by Anet), what happens to ecto? it reaches an unsustainable price and will slowly decline from that peak until the increased supply from decreased purshasing reaches a point where it creates a price again sustainable (would probably take longer than any of us have), than it would increase back to it's unsustainable price and stabilize there since the supply side has unnatural restrictions on it. ecto becomes an extreme luxury item for the small population of the super rich which would allow for a small section of the farming industry to supply it without negating it's own profit margin in which it would produce more than the supply wanted and loose around 90% of its profitability, but trends would be so established that the price would re-stabilize ecto as a super luxury long before any outside factors could influence it.

I want a Maserati, but I don't have that money so instead of walking everywhere I bought a Dodge. Problem is though, it's possible to earn enough in the real world to buy a Maserati, in the update (which i do realize is now only sort of still there) the only way to by my maserati is to win the lottery and get a super nice drop that everyone wants (although the odds of winning the drop lottery are quite a bit more friendly than the odds of winning the real lottery)

One last example: A "real" farmer doesn't make anymore money just because wheat goes extinct, he might make a bunch of it up front selling the last wheat he does have, but than what does he do? In real life he finds a new job or retires on his wheat money... as far as I know chapter 4 is not called Guildwars Florida.