So, I take it Anet's screwing with the laws of supply and demand?

I mean, you know somethings up when ever since the favor update every region and every player of Guild Wars has non-stop access to the Underworld and Fissure of Woe and yet ecto prices at the trader haven't dropped a cent. In fact, they may have just now dropped to 4.9k at the trader, which I doubt will last for long considering the last time it dropped to 4.9k it went back up within a day. Are people just not selling to traders or is Anet keeping our Obsidian armor expensive?

Prices on ecto aren't going to plummet just people people can go to the FoW and UW at more convenient times. It's going to be a long, steady decline, if that.

I know it won't happen all at once, but we should have at least seen a small drop by now, don't you think?

I for one never sell ecto to the material trader NPC. It's just bad business. You can almost always find someone else who will buy them for more than what the trader will pay. And if the prices are too low in the general market, I have a storage vault that can store 250 of them with no skin off my nose. Maybe people are just hording them at the moment, hoping for a price increase. Just a thought.

I don't think Anet is doing anything with the law of supply and demand. I think the drop in price that might have come was offset by a boost in price caused by the duped Ectos that were suddenly deleted out of the game.

There is a steady supply, but no added demand... since there are no new classes.

Another thing is the favor being international, which means it is more likely people will just work for them (a good thing in my opinion).

Also, it is rumored (though not confirmed and this may sound kinda conspiracy theorist, but it makes sense) that the duping glitch had been know for a while by a small group of people. Apparently the glitch existed for months but only came to light when people started doing it with Armbraces and drawing suspicions. As such, it may be possible that the ecto price plummeted so much due to the duping of them.

I'm not sure how much truth there is too that. But it could have been another contributing factor to the ecto crash.

No, America used to have favor day and night for at least a year. It didn't drive the price of ecto down at all. Plus all the Euros were on American servers so it was the same as now. The price of ecto is down because Anet has cracked down on ebayers that was the main people buying ecto in mass from the trader driving up prices. Normal players won't pay 6.0 - 5.5k to get an ecto from trader when they can get one for 5k from another player. Also conversely, a player won't sell an ecto to the trader for 4.0k when he can get 5.0k from another player.The ecto price is frozen because no one uses the trader. Favor has nothing to do with it. Ecto is very stable now at 5k imo.

Are we sure that ANET hasn't played with the drop rate ?

Also remember that when we have the no-favor FoW/UW access weekend, ecto and shard prices spiked upawards because of the number of people who, being in the less popular regions (like Japan), were taking advantage of the weekend to go get FoW armor because it was the only time they could reliably get access.

Then there is the possibility of ectos being oversupplied due to duping.

Possible but i doubt it why would someone dupe an ecto, when they can dupe an armbrace? Ecto has been declining ever since Factions, everyone who wants fissure has it. Everyone else understands it is a total money sink and the fact that it doesn't even look that great put everyone off it.


People use to buy it because it was a symbol of status now everyone has it and no one cares.

OK, so I'm an abnormal player.

I'm not going to hang around putting up with the spam in local and trade channels (and yes, there is spam in trade channels too) wasting my time trying to buy and sell things. I'd rather be playing. I use the traders for buying and selling ALL rare materials and other tradeable stuff. I merch the rest, golds included.

So please don't say no one uses the trader. I do. And I really don't care that I'm not as rich or as l33t as the people who spend hours and hours hanging around in the outposts with their merchandise.

it also looks like there is a price floor on materials. just take a look at some of the normal materials. they've been sitting at 100 gold for a heck of a long time. superior runes have a minimum price of 200 gold. it's possible that we're just approaching the price minimum

I read the title of this topic and I lol'd.

No you are not, most people are not willing to deal with the loss of using the trader for ecto buying or selling. Maybe I should have used the word average instead of normal but it adds up to the same thing Take that huge chip off of your shoulder while you are at it.

GWEN is coming out in like 2 weeks.
Any kind of a market predictions atm is just a waste of time (heck even an analysis is pretty pointless because the subjects on it are acting completely different then normal).

Dude I had the same suspicions when the duping cheat became public last week.

Cause before that, everyone else's theory's on why Ecto's dropped have seemed weak. In fact still.

Hell, people still think there was and still is a farming code in the game.

People will believe anything, but so far the duping scheme is the only hard evidence that i can see being attributed to the ecto price drop of the past 4 months.

My guess is that people who really cared about using ecto farming as their source of income didn't let favor stop them before (they switched to Euro) so we're not seeing a big difference now.

Still, I'm surprised prices haven't dropped at least a little.

because your smart there is already a lot of ectos in the game thats less likley to get picked up than massive ammounts of armbraces, which is how the exploit got found out in the end

It's smart to duplicate items? When duplicated items have the EXACT same serial code as the original and can't be disposed of? Well, if being smart is getting your account banned, a lot of people are VERY intelligent in this regard then.

There are lots of reasons why ecto prices may not drop. Let
me guess what a few might be....

A lot more people are buying fissure armor now that ectos
are cheap.

A lot of people aren't selling them at all for the same reason.

People are selling them directly to other players rather than
the merchants.

People that have a ton of money invested in the are buying
even more from the merchant when the price dips in order
to try and keep the price up.

That you would jump to the conclusion that Anet is manipulating
the market, based on absolutely nothing is just sad.