Quote:
|
Originally Posted by LicensedLuny
Well, could you argue the super rich benefited? Seems like "value" of gold these days has gone up (can buy more/better stuff for the same money.)
|
Depends on the market you're playing in.
Necessities (runes, basic weapons): Gold goes further because it's harder to get than it used to be, relative to these necessities.
Mid-range (rare skin q9 inscribable-type stuff, a few green weapons, gold/green 2nd year minis, bone dragon, kuuna): Here your gold goes a little further due to increased supply of most of this stuff. EotN slashed the rarity of a lot of the rare skins (I took a 200 ecto bath on my customized q9 Runic, thanks ever so much ANet), which led to substantial price declines on a few items.
High-range (q8 15^50/+5 inherent rare skins, Tormented, mini Mallyx, etc.): Here your money goes just about as far as it did before; the dupe did cut Tormented prices some. But basically you're paying the same price for this sort of stuff, because supply isn't rising faster than demand (and with the q8s it isn't rising period).
Ultra-high-range (q7 15^50s, the odd super-rare q8 [Crystalline, a few others], unconditional weapons, the extremely rare minipets): Here your money goes nowhere near as far as it did. This results from the fact that supplies are so low that sellers can basically charge whatever the wealthiest people in the economy are capable of paying. The capacity of the wealthiest players has gone up dramatically in the last six months. Back in April, if you'd found a Kanaxai for sale it would have gone for, oh, 1500-2500 ecto. Good luck finding one for a fifth of that price, if one ever hits the market.
There's a lot of reasons for the increase in capacity. The armbrace dupe is the most popular explanation (and there's truth to the explanation). Another explanation is that during the last six months it became very possible to make a LOT of money in a very short period of time in certain places. This had the net effect of turning a fair number of players with 2-3 million gold into players with 10-15 million gold.
Basically, it's not as though the "shiny" stuff is gone. The problem is that there's nowhere near enough of it to support a market these days. Too many of the wealthiest players have left for greener pastures; a lot of hyper-valuable stuff lies dormant on accounts as a result. Also, the set of items that can legitimately be called "shiny" has contracted with time. GW:EN added little hyper-rare stuff that's desirable, and reduced the rarity of a lot of items.
The problem with all of this is that the payoffs from hanging out in trade districts have become sufficiently low that markets for a lot of the rarest stuff simply don't exist in-game anymore. It isn't worth a player's time to purchase items and spend time advertising it in the market, as the low profits mean that (skilled) farming is generally more profitable.
Thus, what little you see of the "shiny" stuff typically shows up in the high-end forum. However, that merchandise is generally drowned out by the findings of the farmers running around GW:EN, who are trying to farm and sell those items before they become oversupplied and the prices collapse.
Upshot is that it looks like nothing good is ever for sale, and the REALLY good stuff is totally out of the reach of most players. All this is somewhat true, but is also an oversimplification of the actual dynamics.
Some were people I knew. Wish I could've had some of their stuff before they quit/got banned. Then again I'd have less space then I do now
