looking for a ban

I actually aplaud rarity in GW. The eternal blade is something that i can look forward to farming, or beating UW. The only thing different about the weapon is the actual skin itself. People ebay and power trade to get those goddy numbers of ecto and armbraces, now should they rule the market? no.

It makes all the work worth it if you end up finding one due to its high price. I dont agree that every weapon should be made to the casual player, hardcore players need a weapon to work toward as well. Walking down Kamadan with Obsidian armor, Eternal Blade, Torment Shield doesnt make me more powerfull than the person who wears 15k, Colossal Scim, and an Aegis.

Again i aplaud Anet for allowing rarity in the game again. When the ele sword was first introduced it was a beautiful thing. Now ele swords are basically crap because they can be random drops in GWEN. Please dont ruin the rarity and value of this!

not trying to get into RL money things here...but $200 bucks to some is nothing. I blew 150-200 bucks every other saturday night playing cards or going out and getting bombed before i got married and had kids. keep the real world dollars out of it. Yes people can and will invest insane amounts of RL money to succeed in a virtual world.

My biggest beef is that no data was shared about the dupe and none or very little of the duped items where taken out of the game. I know Undead gun has a ton of Armbraces from a screenshot he posted after trading a mini for xxx armbraces....did he lose them? I think not.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10186091 is the thread...there are several other High End traders that traded items for duped Armbraces as well its rather plain to see who did and didn't if you read the thread.

Are they wrong for trading the items? no not really...most people would have as well. BUT Anet should have removed them and the people that got screwed should have just got screwed...instead of screwing everyone else...

At one time UndeadGun stated he had over 130+ armbraces from a quick trade then later states that he made more from "semi" rare items. I have nothing against UndeadGun in general just using him as an example. That thread is filled with people that took advantage of the dupe and became mega rich and nothing was done to fix the problem by Anet.

Again I have nothing against UndeadGun or any of the others...just really bugs the crap out of me that Anet let this happen.

Why do I have the feeling some (if not all) of these people will retract their bids??? lol Anyway, pretty sure some of the people who duped are still running around unbanned. Anet isn't perfect you know.

Eye of the North gave me just a single PvE skill that made it easily possible for me to solo FoW in h/m. In the span of the last month or so, between that and chasing my legendary guardian title (only need 3 in elona now) I have about 200 ecto saved up. In a month. Granted I've had a few good drops in that time that netted me some good paydays, but again, one month.

200 Ecto... in FoW? Oh do tell, would you? What is this magical, money-making skill of yours?

Spell Convert Dust [E] 5 Energy 1/4 Activation 0 Recharge

Target pile of dust is turned into an ecto. At which point your team goes OMGWTF Reported.

Ursan blessing :P

The guy said FoW, so he was making fun of him. /fail

convert the loot from fow to ectos.... think before posting

Guys if you are familiar with duping, the dupers never leak their best duplication exploit. That means there is usually more then 1 way of doing it. Anet isn't as almighty and all knowing as some of the fanboy's on the various forums like to proclaim.

The only way they fix exploits is when someone snitches on them directly to anet.

You have to be out your mind to think there aren't players in-game at any given moment attempting to, or actually duping items.

LoL. Skill trainer for the win. I echo it too.

Actually, read the post again, I said between fow and getting legendary guardian (doing all missions on all continents in hard mode) i saved it up. I never said i was getting ecto drops in fow. The only skill I used was:

Skill - Sell your crap
Description - Sell your crap to players, make profit.
Energy - Lots of coffee

The truth is not matter if they get the gold by ebay,dumping,playing the game.

The truth there is always people complaining.

There are only few blades on the game even without out ebay you still wont be able to afford those blade.

Ain't the fundamental problem with the overall economy of Guild Wars that players get to much money but not enough to spent them on?

In a way we desired this because GW players didnt want(at least I think so?) money sinks and time sinks?

but on the other hand, after getting skills it seems that there are to little to spend it on.

How about this:



-Arenanet adds 10 Legendary weapons. These are max stats, each with incredible awesome UNIQE and rare skins. But they drop.... SO RARE! In 6 months only 3 of the weapons will be in the hands of a player. thats how rare the weapons with the uniqe skins are! They are uniqe, desireable and cool in the fact that they have skins!

it could be done with uniqe armor aswell...


What I mean is - prices for these incredible rare items would go through the roof. but how should it be? should it just be a random drop(s) anywhere in the world? otherwise people would farm some areas for months and burn out and go cry on the forums about how much GW sucks and how much it turned into WoW and bla bla bla?

Then what if it would a possibility online after completing hard mode? would that get more people off their chairs and off their ill-just-play-with-heroes-by-myself-in-normal-mode! if people got forced into wanting to complete hardcore mode they would group with other people again.

in other words: the normal content would be used, people would group and flock through the entire game in hard mode. more acitivity, more reward, more stuff to do, and the best thing is that the rewards are not stat breaking, are rare and will have an(positive?) impact on the economy aswell as the fact that the way to get these rare weapons/armors would be to use skills and not time invested!???

would that be a logical solution to help the economy? people want stuff to buy. people got to much money during the end game. they need these fashion items to desire!?

I think it more of a question is why is there this much gold in the economy. Loot scaling was suppose to cause deflation in the guildwar economy. Honestly were there 50 mil gold sells this time last year?
I think this only prove that Loot Scaling didn't fix anything, probably made the ecomony stagnite making it nearly impossible for people to move though the economic ranks.

Problem is, that wouldn't be a money sink, just another way for millions of gold to change hands between players.

End result: someone still has millions of gold.

These Legendary weapons and armors would have to be crafted by an NPC to truly remove gold out of Guild Wars. But then, desire for them could cause a rise in ebaying gold, and in more inflation...

Bottom line: As long as there are rare items, there will always be greed. It's not necessarily bad, but it will exist.

I suck at math but does it not have something to do with:

1)all the things you use money for in GW are one time investments(after buying skills, you dont need to buy them again)

2)its easy to get the best weapon.

3)after people continue to play after all skills/armor/weps are bought, to do hardcore or collect titles they just get more and more money but does not have anything to use them on.

then in the other side of the spectrum you got new characters who need a good source of flow of money from loot to be able to pay for all the skills, armor, weps and so on, the first time through.


it seems to me that the problem is in the lack of things to use money on in the end. but none of us want weapons and items with decay, or rent paying on guild houses or having your character to devour food and drinks or else they will lose health points or something like that(in other words = money sinks, used in MMOs to stabilise the economy)!

WoW uses it. alot. it cost money to transport. it cost money to repair weapons, which is destroyed after a while of use aswell as dying. alot of stuff in the game where you constantly need to have money money money.

Loot scaling, among other things, did cause deflation in the economy. It didn't and couldn't affect rich players - it didn't take gold out of rich players' storage, and since when did they farm to get rich?

Their money came from farmers one way or another. It's just like the Kellogs executive men in grey suits don't farm grains but still gain from it.

Well, according to the OP, that amount of ectos and armbraces is worth 10.5 million gold, roughly.

A set of FoW was worth 1-2 million a few years ago, but people farmed that up within a week, so say some. I realize that things have slowed down a lot nowadays, but I don't find it completely unreasonable that someone sat on stacks upon stacks of ectos, black dyes, etc, and just kept farming away buying armbraces as he went. Perfectly possible to do so, given the length of time this game has been out.

I don't like this idea either (I'm not picking on you, just being honest).

In Guild Wars, you can have all the money in the world, and you'll only have a slight advantage (Re 7 weapons, other discontinues items, etc).

Nickle and diming people with breakable weapons, paying to map, etc, will always hurt the poor more than the rich anyway.

As long as people spend millions of gold on skins, it doesn't hurt anyone.

Update: Current offer is 100k+1250e+panda+dedicated Ghostly+Vizu+Gold Mini Pig+100 armbraces.

Gold Minipig is the deal maker

If Kellogg's starts making less money, do the executives become significantly poorer?

I suppose I should say that loot scaling didn't have a big impact on rich players - they're still richer than other players and will still have money one way or another.

Only if it's undedicated.

Bingo!

Most those bids are fake. A lot of people in High End bid, but they don't have the cash to back it up.

Money is easy to make in GW. Everything depends on who you know, and what you know.

There is also little groups of trade "buddies" that artifically inflate the price of their friends items with fake bids. One of the main reason guildies can not bid on each others items in High End.

Welcome to the trade world.

how do they expect that all to fit onto one trade bar o.O

unless they plan on doing 2 seperate trades, but i sure as shit wouldnt do that myself.

mannnn i wish i had one of them weps lol

Dude im going to have to agree that the eternal blade is ridiculously overpriced. Im positive that 1500e plus xx braces is somewhat possible, but when you go in to three digits i really don't get how one person can get that many armbraces. there are what 365 days in a year? so even if you had no job and played gw ALL day you couldn't possibly get 16 gemsets every three or four days. Maybe it is possible with no job lol...

Ebaying doesn't even seem viable since all those armbraces cost 100k+40e or so each. That would be hundreds spent on the money required to get the ectos and armbraces if not more.

Every game I have been involved with that uses money has always had the same problem.
You start with not enough money then you end up with too much, so the developer edits the game to limit the cash available to players.
So far so good.
Problem is they limit it based on their perception as to how rich some people are.
Now in any game there will be players who just have a knack for making money, sometimes by exploiting weaknesses in the game or taking advantage of other players ignorance.
Other times its just the hours they play and their skill in that area, whatever the reason when you limit the ability for players to gain in game money globally you screw up the rest of us talentless casual players.


I don't really see what the game writers can do about it, their options are limited.
1 Leave the economy alone and if some players gain almost unlimited wealth so what.
The rich players may get bored and go away or they may buy up items to increase prices and become wealthier still.

2 Make it harder and harder to find an easy way to gain wealth.
This affects most people but does little to curb the rich players that are already rich, just slows down the rise of the neuvo rich.

3 the hard one in fact is there another option, since taking away players money isnt really an option.
Crashing the ecto market probably did some damage and beginning again with GW 2 with hopefully a better system might prevent it happening again.

One thing seems certain anet displeased a whole load of players and pleased none with their actions "not that they had much choice".
Giving a present usually pleases taking one away always displeases.

If they're on a profit sharing scheme or if shares are allocated to them personally then, theoretically, they would be at a loss compared to past figures. I shouldn't have cast up an analogy because economics is never that simple.

The fact is that a rich player's wealth (be it gold, ectos or items) is always sourced from other players and most items can be traced back to a monster/chest drop. Mini-pets are an exception but the ectos and gold that pay for said pet can be traced.

You go on about duped stuff, but has ANet not gone through their logs and banned all the dupers? It isn't word of mouth, its hard evidence of unusual reconnect/trade sequences.

That amount of gold isn't unreasonable to obtain, really, if you, like, try.

edit: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...0&postcount=42

Yeah, I'm in the same boat after 2 years play. Not a high-end power seller (though my rating in auctions > 300), so I guess I can't complain

It'd be an interesting exercise to see if the GW economy even generates the amount of money in question, outside of duping and Chinese farmers.

Take all of the legitimate players in the game, collect their gross and net monthly GW income, combine it all together, and see if that is enough to generate the several thousand armbraces that have been known to exist.

Especially troubling considering the fact that Armbraces have been in the economy for only about a year.

The OP is perhaps correct to be concerned about the ever-spiraling prices in the market for super rare items. However, he has missed the mark somewhat by assuming that massive quantities of cash changing hands = duping. I'll make rather detailed arguments for and against in an effort to evaluate the competing claims of the player base.

It's called HARD WORK, STUPID

Originally, there was an upper limit on what a Kanaxai/Panda/Beetle/Ghostly/etc. would sell for. That limit was dictated by income constraints. If the wealthiest players in the game only have a few thousand ecto, the item can't possibly sell for more than that. Those items could still get sold due to the income constraint, though; no one could possibly have inferred that a Kanaxai would be worth 100 times what it was selling for then on the open market.

Enter stackable Armbraces. As the community started to accumulate them in sufficient numbers, they took on the role of supplementary currency to permit traders to get around the technical barrier of 1750 ectos/trade without involving a trustworthy 3rd party. Suddenly it becomes much more feasible to trade huge amounts of money for the minipets, and players began offering those huge amounts (by historical standards) in order to shake the minipets loose from their longtime owners (who paid far, far less).

Were those ectos/armbraces duped? No one can say for certain. There are valid arguments on both sides of the ledger. On the one hand, it's completely possible to make huge amounts of money in very short periods of time. I concur with Professor Black that you can make ridiculous amounts of money trading if you have sufficient capital to invest (in order to acquire the highest-margin items), are willing to risk it and have the connections to move your merchandise once acquired.

Even without power trading, there have been some pretty abusive farms since Hard Mode came out. People made instant fortunes on the following:
1) Colossal Scimitar farming
2) Urgoz Hard Mode (that one was good for 50-60k/hr before you all found out about it a few weeks after I got down there)
3) Elemental Sword farming, pre-nerf
4) Duncan (again, while this one was up it was 60k/hr, perhaps more)

I'm sure I'm missing some (Tome farming right after HM, for instance), but those are the most prominent super-broken farms that I can recall since HM was introduced.

If you are aware of these sorts of farms, it's only rational to take advantage of them before the devs find out about it and smack it with the nerf bat. So you'll see very dedicated players hitting these farms 8-10-12 hours per day when they are available; that comes out to something on the order of 500k/day.

It would not have been hard to have amassed a 20-50 million gold fortune in the last few months, if you played a lot more than I do and you were truly committed to having a big bankroll. 50 million translates to 142 armbraces, which probably would get you a Panda legitimately with plenty left over.

Now imagine if you were REALLY hardcore and you'd been a farming/trading nut since release. Particularly with power trading, it used to be quite possible to make huge profits very quickly (because the high-end market was poorly defined).

Upshot: I don't think that 500 armbraces is at all unrealistic for someone to have acquired.


The high-end market is DIRTY, CORRUPT and TAINTED BY DUPES

OK, so perhaps that's not a great title for this segment. A lot of folks that will tell you that most fortunes in the game are legitimate will also tell you that the above heading is also true. However, I think that the section title sums up the attitude of most of the players that rail against the present system.

Argument runs something like this: ANet may have hammered the dupers, but they didn't get rid of the dupes. Also, since duping was theoretically possible for about nine months before anyone was caught, it is extremely probably that the dupers that got caught weren't the first dupers. Essentially, the world found out about the dupe because a couple of inexperienced criminals were dumb; the presumption is that smart criminals generally find out about these things before the dumb ones do, and that therefore someone was certainly out there creating counterfeit ectos/armbraces/god only knows what else. Perhaps for months.

ANet's data logs run back about two weeks. If duping started prior to that, any data on item creation would be tainted by existing dupers. Therefore, any statement that ANet makes that indicates that the dupe problem was minimal is not credible; they may sincerely believe this to be the case and be dead wrong because the data they used to support the conclusion are bad.

Tons of armbraces were dumped on the market the day after the dupe became public at ridiculously low prices. This happened because players were afraid that they would get hit with the ban hammer for accepting (presumably) duped armbraces in unbalanced trades the day before.

In this argument, the wealth (ectos/armbraces) in the system was largely created by duping, not by legitimate play. Honest players therefore are permanently shafted, because it is impossible for honest players to acquire the kind of wealth necessary to purchase one of the game's rarest items.

Evaluation of competing claims

The believers in duping have some valid points, but it is impossible (for the community) to falsify whether or not duping is currently taking place. And, of course, ANet has a strong interest in not investigating too carefully; why make trouble? Logically, this is a point in favor of the farming theory of wealth creation. Wealth is coming from somewhere, we don't know if it's coming from dupes, we do know it's possible for it to come from farming, therefore we should assume it comes from farming unless additional data suggests otherwise.

The one piece of evidence that backs up the claims of those that believe duping is going on is the sudden, massive availability of Vizu. I have seen high end posts where the pet has been offered (as a single item or in pairs) in extremely high-end trades by three, four or even five different people. That's suspicious, since there are only supposed to be 50 or so of the things running around. Additionally, compare their rate of resale on High End to that of less rare but more desirable minipets such as Panda and Beetle. The implication is that there are a LOT more Vizus running around than there should be, according to the records of how many have been released.

Of course, this begs the question - why dupe Vizu if you can dupe ectos, since you can sell the ectos a lot more rapidly? I suppose there may be some attraction to one mouse click as opposed to 1000, even if the item takes a while to sell. However, duping Vizu doesn't seem like the most sensible way to proceed with a mass dupe.

In the end, I'd say you have to take the claims of the enraged portion of the player base with a grain of salt. It seems that people forget that millions of people play this game; of them, a small proportion is certain to be incredibly dedicated to the point of insanity. The more functional members of that group should be expected to be capable of making massive quantities of gold; after all, how hard and time consuming is it next to, say, grinding 60,000 fame? Making 100,000,000 gold seems like a sensible and attainable goal by contrast; there are lots of ways to go about making money quickly in this game, and one's bankroll is merely a function of time invested making money and the rate at which one earns it.

Apparently according to some low life in a High End thread I duped my wealth also...

That new bid is a bit extreme for a sword. He'll pull out, always does.

Martin - Vizu = fairly common (for a high end pet) they gave away a load for competition prizes. This is why there is loads up for sell, and why the price took a nose dive. They also gave away Pandas which explains why there is a lot of newbies trying to sell them.

I think an answer to this issue has been indirectly addressed in the post regarding the hours people have spent playing so far. The concept of people having millions of gold through legitimate means is not far fetched considering the fact that there are those who spent a lot of hours on the game...

From the wiki:

Japan netcafe promotion lucky draw (20 prizes): [1]
Taiwan GW official blog lucky draw (9 prizes): [2]
Europe: Ultra-rare miniature found in magazines across Europe. (10 prizes)
North America: Ultra-rare minature found in Mini Madness promotion
2nd prize in the Wintersday 2007 Art Contest.

Clearly the wiki is in error if what you say is true; what competition that went undocumented that isn't posted? I count 39 + the five that haven't hit the street yet.

As for the Pandas, I'm aware of the ones released for the Halloween contest. That's a drop in the bucket, though (5 out of 140-ish?) - that'll create a short-run spike, but I'm not suggesting that Panda was duped.

Wiki fails

They gave away Vizus in the Halloween contest also I believe.

Off topic: I always assumed that stacks could be duplicated. E.g. if you have 1 ecto, you can turn it in to 2, then turn 2 in to 4 then 4 in to 8. but who knows?

The alleged Vizu duplicating was probably just for the sake of it.

The silly thing is that there are already more req 9 eternal swords out there. I saw one in Kamadan being sold for 1750 ectos 2 nights ago.

QFT

That said, the numbers just don't add up unless there was a LARGE undocumented giveaway in the not too distant past.

Presumably they could dupe stacks; I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole there.

Possible that Vizu was selected by someone as a "they'll never find these dupes" rainy day stash by some duper(s); settling on Vizu still remains...odd.

That would lend credence to the notion that the dupe was a short-term phenomenon; you'd think that the preferred target would have been Panda given sufficient time. They're extremely valuable; there's a bunch of them so dupes would be somewhat less noticeable.

QFT.

The solution to the economy is, and always has been, gold sinks. Introducing a new weapon drop in UW will only move money around, not remove it from the economy. So it has no effect on the economy as a whole.

Gold sinks do the exact opposite. They remove money from the economy, and in no way change the game balance.

The first dude that buys/bought an Eternal Blade is like the guy that just HAS to have the hot new TV/stereo/what have you. Odds are, in a short period of time there will be much better ones available cheaper.

If I were to get one, I'd instant-sell it regardless of how much I wanted it. Prices on something like that are only going down; may as well get out while the getting's good and buy one back later.