Something Beyond Platinum

I've stopped playing Guild Wars and something I've noticed is the heavy reliance on items being used as a second currency.

One reason for losing interest in Guild Wars was having to use other items to buy things with on top of the 100k and I rarely had the time to spend a decent time in game (UW/FoW) to get what was needed so I would end up having to play the unpredictable economy of ectos.

Would it not make life easier if something beyond platinum was introduced or the cap on money increased per character?

Money cap is likely a data storage issue. Gotta cut corners whenever you can when you don't charge a monthly fee...

But removing the cap would fix that problem.

That's not likely at all. I'd assume ANet uses a 32bit Int to store money. They cant use a 16bit (not enough room for the existing cap), and there's no reason to use anything in between those since it would require their own custom data type. Plus 32 bits is absolutely trivial compared to the amount they must need to transmit for even something like a character move, or to store for your character name.

So if that is the case, a 32bit int can contain values in the range -2,147,483,647 to 2,147,483,647, if you need negatives, or (as would be the case with money) if you don't, values in the range 0 to 4,294,967,295. The current cap of 1,000,000 is very very far under that range.

Cutting a corner here on data storage makes absolutely no sense. The cap is almost certainly in place for balance reasons.

No. The cap is to limit market so it do not goes 'tower of babel'.

@_@ i'd have to get that much money first before i can argue about turning my plats into bonds XD

It's not really needed because most players don't reach the cap, I myself usually have in the storage between 50-150k at any time(not including the diamonds I'm saving just incase they rise for GW:EN).

QFT. The cap is most likly in place for market and trade control. Would be nice if it was raised, but Anet might have some "game economic" logic behind the present level that we don't know about.

Not being a collector of high end items, I'm okay with the current system.

Wow. Cutting corners.

[Internal discussion at Anet]
Boss: Can we afford to use a BigInt (8 bytes per BigInt, unsigned for 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615) to store how much cash a character slot has?
DBguy: Making the player_cash field a BigInt (8 bytes per BigInt, unsigned for 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615) is something we can't afford. Using 1MB for each 131,000 characters slots could kill the DB.
Boss: Well... then make it a regular int (4 bytes), cap it to 1000, then add another int (another 4 bytes yay) for something we are going to call platinums. Oh, and also reduce stacks to 250 items each, we can save one MB or two and our DB will be happy.
DBguy: Done.

I would hope the behind-the-scenes way it works is that it just stores how much gold you have, and the platinum/gold division is computed from that. As in, 55p + 140g (displayed in your inventory) is stored as a single int, 55140 (stored in your character's database entry).

And if that's the case, as I said above a regular old unsigined int data type (longs aren't even required) is enough to increase the gold storage by more then 1000x.

I said the cap is probably there "for balance", but I meant something more like what Mithran said.

So wait, you want some reliable risk-proof way of storing a lot of gold value?

Uh, no.

The more money you have in the game the more inflation you have and the more _everything_ that is player traded costs. The reason that dyes, runes and loot are so cheap now is that loot scale curbed inflation.

Do you really want superior runes to sell for 75k/ea again? How about celestial sigils for 50k/ea?

That sounds terrible to me.

Blame Anet for not having some items drop enough that you'd need to pay more than 100K for it.

Or, stop ignoring the real cause; greedy players. The only reason anything goes for over 100k is because someone is willing to pay that much.

I remember way back when I played runescape (yes yes.. I know.. it was only for two months though) that people were selling things for 4-6million gold. I never want to see anything like that in guild wars.

Yes, and yes. I made millions on ettin farming those runes I remember selling sup vig for 95k each!

Carrying 30-50 in my bag per day of course

I had no life back in seventh grade summer

edit:
I also got sup abs more often, I made so much on those too. Those were around 80k when I started ettin farming.

If you've stopped playing, why do you care?

you dont pay attention to higher end items much do you....

Loki just pwned this thread, lol.

/notsigned btw

Yes this would work. Until another item is chosen as a supplementary currency to bypass this limit, then the market continues in whatever direction it was going in anyway.

Oh wait, that happened shortly after release. And some items do have their price above 100k. So if that is the reason that ANET wanted to limit the gold traded, it hasn't worked.

Actually has it ever worked ?

If the cap is removed without any other changes I see two things happening:

1 - The ecto price crashes hard as the rich players liquidate their stacks. I'm thinking it would hit the price floor within a few hours of the change. But once everyone has finished selling off their ecto (and once it hits the floor I'd expect a lot of people to merch it because the merchant is quicker) it should climb again, just not back to where it once was.

2 - Prices may increase because with less ecto going through the trader there is less gold sinking going on. But this requires the rich players to be buying the ecto from the trader, not from other players. I doubt this increase will be much percentage wise, especially as a lot of the rich players just had their in-game worth slashed.

3 - Lots of whining from the rich players.

Loki, I may not play the game but I still have an interest in it. The point of these forums is to make your opinions and ideas heard, and the fact I created some sort of discussion is the point.

I would also like to point out if no cash limit was introduced then the only things to suffer in price drop would be materials and supplies. This would mean that they then become there primary reason they are in this game. Yeah there would be intial complaints but I would think it would sort itself out quickly. Weapon prices may change only because people would have to give them a whole cash value, although I wouldn't expect much, if any, change.

I accept that this would cost Anet more money though.