Diamonds, Rubies, or Ectos? The Supplemental Currency Quandary

supplemental currency, like it or not, is a part of the game due to item rarity and the abundance of gold and ectos that players have accumulated over the past two and a half years.

i realise the new favor system is only a couple of days old but at the rate people are maxing titles, i dont see perma-favor going away anytime soon.

with 24/7 favor, ecto and shard prices are due to take a nose dive but just how far of a nose dive is anyones guess.

once this begins to happen, high-end traders are bound to liquidate their stacks and stacks of ectos in favor of a different form of supplemental currency. my guess is its either going to be diamonds or rubies seeing as those are the most valuable items via the rare mats trader atm.

if anet wants to rid the economy of supplemental currency, why continue to introduce items in the game with finite numbers. rarity is good and all but couldnt they continue to add more of these rare items into the game instead of limiting their numbers.

the most valuable item that is currently attainable as a drop in the game is the ghostly hero minipet. its a hoh only drop and its approximate value is 550 - 750 ectos.

items that anet introduces into the game in limited numbers [ie. asian minis] have been know to sell for obscene amounts of money [ie. 1500e + 50-100 armbraces] if someones lucky enough to find a seller.

with all of this wealth in the game, eliminating all forms of supplemental currency is virtually impossible so why doesnt anet continue to add more of the limited items to the game in order to drop prices?

anet implemented loot scaling and the inscription system which effectively deflated the economy for most items.

unfortunately, anet went and created a super duper high-end market by giving away very sought after minipets in limited numbers.

by introducing more of the limited minis, the super super rich folk with thousands and thousands of ectos will be able to collect everything they want and be done with it leaving some room for more moderate collectors to pursue these items and offering some hope for casual players to get them as well.

none... howabout having the amount of gold you can carry increased?

ectos @ 4.9k atm. I think diamonds will replace ectos sooner or later with the expansion coming up (and of course assuming diamonds are used for something people want like armor). Personally rather have the goddamn gold cap increased rather than wasting my gold buying ectos that drop in price in order to pay for high end shit.

LOL....I'll take cheap ecto's and shards anyday but your right, they should increase the amount you can carry.

Use Monastery Credits. Value of 100 each.

No, you would rather use something that devalues?

I think increasing gold that you can carry would help alot. I would really like some cheap ectos

using monastery credits as supplemental currency would limit item purchases to 275k. to give you a point of reference, tormented weapons sell for around 350-400k. not to mention that credits arent available in abundance through traders or any other means other then doing quests.

Use lockpicks, they are very stable.

Yeah, lockpicks are damn stable at 1250g.

I've never understood why people still insist on using something with an ever changing value as currency. Use something that doesn't change, like Lockpicks.

What about people owning outposts? I thought that was the ultimate counter-argument about the lockpick currency.

How about just stop pricing your things for 100k + 50 *insert supplemental currency*?

That's a really whacked out idea that's never been tried in GW history...

using lockpicks would be fine if there wasnt a portion of the player base that could afford much more then the max of ~2.3 million that lockpicks would represent.

thats why im simply advocating that anet add a little more frequency in the rare drops that they control.

that way no matter what supp currency is used prices for all of the really really high-end items would decrease in price a bit.

i just dont understand why anet would create a super high-end market that only a handful of players can participate in?

EDIT: Sorry, you beat me to it

LockPicks limit the trade to 2,287,500gold. Thats fine for most things but it doesnt cover the super high end items that the OP is referring to.

Don't blame Anet, blame the elitist players who drive the "super high-end market".

They didn't, the players did.

Seriously, the only reason anything goes for over 100k is because there are people who are willing to pay that much.

its just human nature to want items, whether theyre in a virtual world or the real world, that are harder to obtain thats why i cant blame players for driving up prices on the rarer items available in the game.

what i dont understand is why anet limits the items so that prices go through the roof. thus, limiting the super high-end market to a handful of people.

i think either in RL or in game there is no such thing is "fair", those who has the handful items are either paid real money for it or won as a contest. so lets see, if u think anet should hand out more limited item, then why u didnt born in Asian? simple as that.
however, i do hate those who paid real money for the limited item, i think they really /fail in both RL and GW....-_-

don't blame anet? THEY FRIGGING gave out obscenely valued minipets and ONLY TO ASIA. TALK ABOUT SUPER HIGH-END

They are only obscenely valued because people are willing to pay that. Lord knows why, none of them are that great compared to my mini-Gwen that I got the old fashioned way.

IMO anybody paying hundreds if not thousands of ecto for a 'rare' mini-pet that does nothing but add some measure of vanity to your toon. Bah!!. It's even worse if they paid real money for gold in-game to buy ecto. For the price of one Kanaxai, I could fully oufit everyone one of my toons with FoW armor and still have a few hundred left over.

Anet and players selling ridiculously high-end items are both at fault. Anet only had net cafe promos in Japan or Taiwan. Us players constantly look for new things to farm and then drive the price up to 100K+150. Eventually, there will be less and less things to farm. Ectos will be out of the picture in a while,maybe ~3 months. Rubies, Sapphires, and Diamonds will be done with a while after GW:EN is released. Along with GW:EN, it is in Anet's best interest to introduce a new rare material worth ~10K to accommodate countless new high-end items coming out with GW:EN. In the long run, it won't matter what we use as supplemental currency because players will farm it until it's worth almost nothing.

The problem is importing the though 'I can get it, you don't, farm for ours and pay me for it, because you NEED it' from other games.

Such things were never meant to be in GW. That's why the 100k trade limit is there.
There are games with drops less than 0.0001 for some items, but in GW, the most rare items have drops of about 0.1% of the times the creature is killed.

Since rare items are not as rare as in other games, they need something to be rare to hoard wealth in the form of items. They need to hoard stuff to use them as currency for higher end stuff,, and all thet more expensive stuff to use as currency for even more expensive stuff... it's like building Babel tower.
The higher you get, the higher you want to get.

I just can't think why would anyone need more than the 1000k the xunlai storage can have. Yet some people still need to hoard gold and keep it, without ever using most of it.

Plain senseless.

They should give some storage for customized items or the already suggested and well-supported armor system 3.0 so they spent all that gold in armors or something, instead of hoarding it.

Why not use Lockpicks? I heard some people already use Lockpicks.

Lockpicks weren't very popular at first, because you'd need less Ecto's for the same amount of Lockpicks, and alot of people already had stacks of Ecto's to use...

But when ecto's become worthless, Lockpicks might be a good solution. The price is fixed, so you don't have to fear a price change, some people already use this, and if you're sick of them, you can use them on chests.

Also, the price is calculate-friendly.

Say it with me: Crafting materials. Are. Not. Super. Currency.

And yet where is your viable solution which can adapt to the current state of the economy? Ecto was doing pretty well..although I'm not sure if all of those ecto hoards people have will allow a "lock-pick" ish change.

I'll say it again, since my question got unanswered: I thought people don't like lockpicks because of the fact that people who own outposts get a discount on them. Now, is this true, that this makes it unfair, or is it not a big deal???

imho, not a big deal. It's is even good because people with outposts are best ones to supply huge quantities of keys required for trading. Simply because they will loose less gold on gold->lockpick transformation, making them ideal pioneers for trade.

Once everyone will have stack of lockpicks to use as currency, inital pirchase price wont matter that much because you will no longer be converting lockpicks from and to gold.

its just that to trade 100k with lockpicks instead of gold (80 locks), you currently loose 20k if you dont have those 80 locks already sitting in inventory. (or if you are on side that receives locks, you will loose 20k if you converth them back to gold)

that makes every 100k traded in locks sink aditional 40k. UNless people start keeping stacks of locks for trades, this will be main barrier.

My solution; only buy stuff that sells for less than 100k. You don't need any "solution" in order to buy that stuff.

That would never work, for one the first sellers wouldn't do it, why should they or would they sell an item for less than 100k when it was previously worth 100 ecto? If you propose to scale the value of ALL items down by say 50% to cut down on huge sums of money being traded then those that already have 1000k+ecto in storage would have such huge amounts of money under the new system that they would use it to outbid people with less money than them and prices would rise again. Since item values are so established it would be practically impossible to change them and so trading with less then 100k on high end items is unlikely at best. Unless you mean just choose not to buy things over 100k which is the buyers choice and I won't comment on that. But i'll tell you i'd like to buy a nice Mursaat Hammer sometime soon and people saying I shouldn't use ectos I should use diamonds/rubies/lockpicks isn't gonna make me change unless the seller asks specifically for a gold replacement that isn't ecto.

Why does the threads always attract the ignorant and dumb..?

The trade system can't change, the current system has been in place too long now. Yes, ecto might be replaced, but only by another rare material.

Using lockpicks won't work, they don't hold enough market value. Using credits is just dumb.

If you don't like the current system, don't use it, it really is that simple.

Last thing, calling people with money "elitest" is plain moronic. That statement is old and very worn out.

Did you even read what I said?

Nowhere did I mention lowering prices. I simply said to only buy things that are currently sold for under 100k. Frankly, I've never wanted any of the stuff that sells for over 100k, I find most of the "uber" skins to be appalling.

Oh and yes, I do have enough money to buy things over 100k. I just choose to stick to what is actually useful/reasonably priced.

Choice of currency is always path-dependent. The way it ends up working out in a game is actually quite similar to the way it ends up working for international transactions - people pick a currency for trades that is abundant and reasonably stable (since currency instability can be hard on profit margins; one can insure against swings in value when the transaction is legal, but not when the transaction violates laws).

Obviously, a lot of us strongly suspect that the bottom is going to come out on ecto values fairly soon due to the dynamics of underlying demand for their consumption (or the lack thereof). It may be that they actually hold their value despite the comparative lack of demand for them (remember SoJs in Diablo 2?), or it may not. Hard to say. The existence of the in-game traders definitely increases the likelihood of a crash (unlike RL markets, there isn't a way to turn the traders off to stop a panic).

I'd bet that the overall impact on the supply of ectos from the temporary state of perma-favor will be pretty limited, however. Most of the supply of ectos came from the botters that had accounts across multiple servers, and were down there all the time anyway.

As for the replacement ideas - the value of lockpicks aren't sufficient to cover high-end trades. Anything else that is to replace the ecto has to drop in sufficient quantities to be usable. Unless diamonds pop out all over the place in GW:EN and have sufficient in-game utility to keep their value up despite the supply, I don't see them taking over as the currency of choice.

Yeah I've never bought anything over 100k and frankly imo nothing I have seen is worth more. *shrug* Most of it is just for show and status... and even that is getting discredited since chances are you paid for it instead of got it on your own.

But I heard lockpicks were being used more frequently.. I'm sure in GW2 they will address the situation though.

Lots of ignorance towards wealth and rich people. Too much to quote so cant be bothered.

If you want to secure your wealth buy multiple dirt cheap prophecies accounts and max it out with gold, that should be roughly 1.4 million per account.

Once done you could set aside 10 million or so in pure gold.

IMO a small price to pay to safeguard your wealth.

Edit: Not sure how stable superior vigors are and what they are worth. Might be a nice idea if stable to buy a load up. Black dye could be a good investment for gwen as 40 new armour sets means black dye price rise.

They don't hold enough value if you want to purchase a single item for 2.3 million gold or more. What percentage of the playerbase is that and what percentage of trades is that? Lockpicks should work fine for most people.

In the rare case that you want something you can't cover with lockpicks, buy the higher currency item from your seller (ectos, rubies, diamonds) with lockpicks in an initial trade and then use the item he just sold you for the next trade.

Nah, it's a big price. Just buy 5 stacks of lockpicks and you can hold more wealth than than another account can in gold. Plus you dont have the hassle of transferring between them.

Except that you have the time cost hassle of selling all those lockpicks. Ever sell off a stack of ectos? It takes a while, unless you bought the stack for a song or you're willing to take a loss. The problem with lockpicks is similar, except that each individual item conveys considerably less value, which is likely to lead to longer sell times.

If you were in a pinch, you can recover more from your ectos @ the rare mat trader than you can from merching lockpicks. I've had to trader a stack of ectos a couple of times in order to take advantage of opportunities where players severely underpriced large quantities of certain commodities.

Good point, the conversion back would be a lot harder if you need the gold fast. I guess both have advantages and disadvantages.