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Originally Posted by reetkever
And perhaps this is the problem with the game. A-Net wants too much cash out of the economy, while not lowering the prices.
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Nothing wrong pulling cash out; indeed, failure to do so leads to rampant inflation in the long run. However, maintaining balance in even a simplified economy such as this one isn't an exact science. You're fallaciously assuming that ANet controls prices for things. They've deliberately chosen to permit the market to determine costs, and even introduced traders to cut down on the transaction costs associated with certain common items. They don't control prices. In fact, the game released without rare materials or rune traders. In the first couple of months, if you wanted a Superior Rune of Swordsmanship you had to find somebody with one and agree on a price.
(It's worth noting that the initial coding for these traders was an epic failure; margins were so high that players largely bypassed them entirely and continued to trade directly with one another. The trader apparently interpreted this as inflationary and continually raised prices on items with any demand. An ugly inflationary spiral ensued that ended with Monk Superior runes for 55 farming costing 60-80k and ectos at 35k from the trader before ANet finally decided to scrap that batch of code and reset the traders to charging 100 gold for everything. Apparently programming a market economy's harder than it looks.
The trader reset fiasco then led to huge lines of people trying and failing to buy items at the trader that would instantly sell for vastly more on the open market. But eventually it all worked out for the most part.)
What we have here in our GW gold is a currency here that is pegged up to a point. In-game cash converts directly to certain necessities (armor, skills, Sigils to change guild halls) for which demand tends to diminish as time passes. The flow of new players at this point is such that most current players have far less of a need for those basic necessities than they did two years ago shortly after release.
ANet also introduced a long list of changes early in the game which eliminated PvP-oriented players'
need for gold, although many of those players continued heavily with PvE at least through factions due to the myriad of benefits PvE players enjoyed.
The upshot is that the flow of cash out of the game into those basics is greatly reduced since the early days of the game. Presumably ANet looked at their statistics, saw that an ever-growing amount of cash was accumulating in player storages, saw the writing on the wall and decided to do something about it (in the form of the new gold sinks) before upsetting things happened in the economy.
Now, loot scaling took a LOT of the supply of cash out of the economy. At the same time, inertia compelled them to leave the existing gold sinks in the game, creating massive deflationary pressures that were just as destabilizing as the inflation they sought to avoid. Maybe these changes were totally necessary to balance hard mode drop rates, and maybe they weren't.
Again, apparently balancing an economy is harder than it looks. But then again, didn't they include enough alphas to be able to extrapolate statistically the consequences of their actions and then compensate? If not, why not? In-game economies make and break games...
A comment on the vanity weapons story: the reason the hardcore vanity weapons still sell for big money is because they are totally unaffected by loot scaling. Loot scaling redefined the vanity market rather significantly; lots of stuff that was worth 100k + XXX ectos lost 99%+ of value due to massive increases in supply. The things that still command the big bucks cannot be farmed. Either they're legacy req 7/8 weapons, they drop exclusively in the Hall of Heroes and are consequently unaffected by loot scaling, or the drop rate is so ludicrously low (ele sword) that prices have come down but not collapsed, as supply still has not caught up with demand.
