The crash of the armbrace market...

Yet another reason could be that they look awful. There is no way I am going to pay an astronomical price for something that looks like it belongs to Barbara Millicent Roberts.

As there is an obvious realtion beetween the number of gemstones given to the npc and the nuber of armbraces isn't there, by any chance, the possibility to know how many armbraces where traded? then Anet/Ncsoft could have a ratio of true ones and dupped ones.

something like:

15 gemsets = 1 armbrace

xxxxxxxx armbraces traded @ npc

yyyyy tormented weapons out there

now, xxxxxxxx-yyyyyy = nº of legit armbraces tradeable

finally, zzzzzzzz- nº of legit armbraces tradeable= nº of rogue Armbraces


(not counting with the rogue ones that were traded before by tormented weapons...)

its all in the DB


honnestly, i think its not worth the trouble.

consumables and ub do the trick. as Gaile said, its pure economics - offer & demand.

I look at it this way:
People will farm the most profitable area they know.
Let's say the most profitable area for the average player will give 10k/hour.
Now let's say the time to get an Armbrace is 10 hours.

The fair value of an Armbrace would then be around 100K, the amount of gold the average player can gain in the same amount of time.
If people get less, they will farm elsewere. If they get more they will farm DoA more, increasing supply.

Now I don't know how long it takes to get 15 gemsets in DoA URsan style and I also don't know how much gold/hour the average player can farm these days.
I do know current UB is most likely one of the more profitable (cash or fun) ways of 'farming' these days.
The price will drop furter till the next farming spot/build is discovered or the price got too low for the average player to be profitable.

Oh no, it's very easy to believe that they deleted tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of duped armbraces. I'd even believe that they deleted a very large majority of the duped armbraces. It's just that there's still tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of duped armbraces out there that they didn't get. And that's such a huge skew on the market because the number of legitimate armbraces probably doesn't exceed ten thousand.

Lesson of the day: Impossibly rare items are bad game design. (1) They encourage the ugly, petty, nasty elitist attitudes that plague games like this. (2) They motivate people to cheat when they see that they have no hope of obtaining the item through legitimate means. (There's a reason that both of the two biggest cheating scandals in GW happened in DoA.) And now, (3) when someone does manage to cheat, they leave you with an unfixable economic problem. If there were a million legit armbraces in the market, ten thousand or maybe even a hundred thousand dupes wouldn't rock the boat too very much; but with legit armbraces are rare as they are, ten thousand or a hundred thousand dupes totally swamps the boat and sinks it.

I have a question about the dupes, I was watching a u tube video of it a long time ago but it was all blurry, where you able to dupe ONE item at a time or after you got a stack could you dupe the entire stack?
Ie how exactly did it work? Im just wondering since its fixed now..

A few things appear to have been oversimplified.

1) Gaile's statement would be correct if the duped armbraces she refers to were removed by the bans (which many certainly were). I never heard anyone complain that armbraces mysteriously vanished from their inventory. No way the bans got them all (or even close). The duped armbraces are in the economy in quantity. Believe it.

2) This isn't simply a matter of supply and demand; it's a matter of currency collapse. Armbraces maintained value well after their utility as an item began to drop because they were desirable for large trades. Once they became less preferable to hold as wealth for some of the larger holders, the market flooded with them.

The introduction of the beetles probably had something to do with this, as the sellers of beetles probably wanted ecto rather than armbraces. (Unless you want to buy the absolute most expensive items in the game, holding ectos is preferable.)

The reason that armbraces crashed as hard as they did resulted from the fact that their value was tied to player confidence in their value as a means of holding wealth. Once that went away, the value corrected towards the actual underlying value to players who wish to exchange them and remove them from the supply.

The same thing happened with ectos when the introduction of Hard Mode increased the supply of them on the market. Minor fluctuations in market supply can drive panics such as these when the item is used as a means for conducting transactions. Happens in the real world all the time.

soon, the only thing worth more then 60 ecto's will be rare minipets and q8/7 perfect rare weapons
sad to see
i never had a tormented shield cuz i'm just a small average player
and i won't have one either
why?
i don't use ursan and will never use it
long live the method of skill with the good build

Tormented weapons aren't impossibly rare items. That aside, people are inclined to cheat or do whatever it takes to get even the smallest of rewards. Elimination of rare items doesn't fix the problem, unless you're an anti-elite elitist.

ok pople it's not hard to figure out doping and the 117 pople are to blam not doping of armbraces, the cost of armbraces refects the prices of gems+30k to 50k for cost to gather.

so 117 pople farmed mallyx like crazy completeing the quest in 20 min then going in again 4 to 5 times a hour thats 4 to 5 sets a hour without drops times 8 poeple.

this went on for months btw not just a week or two the omly issue was the org 8 pople or so it was that started this exploit didn't tell anyone. and where smart about it. and did not flood gem sets into the market.

over time these pople most likly lostthose friends got into a fight and then formed ned friends to do the bug with . over time you have 117 pople which i dont think was all the poeple.

if you rember about 8months ago when armbraces drop below 100k+100ecto and gemsets selling for 100k+20 ecto each and then droped below 90k a set ina week. yeah thats when the 117 exploit was used for about 1 month already

249 Tormented Weapons Sold to Merchants.
250 Tormented Weapons Sold to Merchants.
Mallyx Walks The Tyria.

because the game was never hard to begin with, so now that people finally learned how to play, or found something that works for them, like Ursan, they can get where the big kids play and finally win something.


its a game, you cant expect an MMO without rolling difficulty updates to stay totally fresh and economically balanced all the time. we're doing good enough as is.

Duping was done through the reconnect feature. I don't know specifics, but it was something like... you could trade an item to a friend, disconnect, reconnect through a different IP proxy, and then the trade would never happen and both you and your friend would have the item.
The loophole is fixed now.

I'm going to have to disagree with this, although I do respect your point of view. GW has always been about vanity. Hardcore PvEers usually look for the rarest, most expensive items/armor in the game to show their status. That's what FoW armor was for before everyone and their dog got it. I think if anything we need more elite items. And Im not talking about stuff that drop at a very low rate from a chest in a dungeon that everyone and their grandmas can do (Duncan chest anyone?). Bring back the Old DoA, make certain drops exclusive to HM elites, add a Death Mode (DM>HM>NM) to elite missions with unique drops, give us a new elite armor ( full chaos armor?).

All it takes is small visit to DoA AD1 and you'll see how many fow armors are there. Elite items are what PvEers use to reward themselves. PvE Title grinding FTL.

Because - it's just another formerly high-end item that's going to pot, that's all.

Imho, stuff like tormented weapons should keep a certain value to make it worth it's elite status; but at the rate things are going now thx to Ursan/Consumables the armbrace market will most likely continue to decline.

And yes I know it's happened in the past with stuff like FoW armor; I just don't agree with the trend that's all...

FoW didn't really drop that much.

price reduced to 30% of what it used to be over 3 years is quite low deflation if you think about it, especially in MMOs.

[QUOTE]the economy for the average casual player like myself never even noticed the elite currency collapse and we think the economy is just fine.

this only affects the tiniest uber rich splinter group and not the actual player base.

LOL

win ^>^ ^<^

This is just stuff that happens. I remember people buying the runic blades for 100k+250e, I cant begin to say how bad I feel for that guy now.

I got my first armbrace the old fashioned way. Only really looked like the shield that was worth the effort so got one for my warrior. Had to put my warrior, nec, ele and monk through it and do some farming to get a set. Didn't even contemplate wasting my time trying to get my other chars through it knowing how long it took to get a decent team together even as an experienced DoAer.

Then i got to admit, other than joining in with the odd guild team, it was maybe 6 months before i paid DoA any attention when Ursan arrived. My guild put a few teams together and i joined in intrigued to see how it all worked, and was impressed. We had alot of low level LB and Ursan levels in our teams, with many with no DoA experience at all..not something we worry about as an all adult guild team, even though it slows things down. But we were managing to complete areas without to many problems, although i say Ursan way is not easy, its just alot easier. Once everyone started using consumables obviously it got easier.
DoA originally was awesome, when NM/HM was introduced i got confused and didn't know what the hell was going on anymore. Ursan opened it all back up. Let me get other chars through it, a nice torment scythe for ursan and now my gems are just stacking. I don't trade at all, never had, if i don't need something i give it a guildie or merch it. I'll probably use em for coffers or some random torment weaps. But even now my ursan bubble has burst and i only really do it when guildies need someone and can be bothered.
I applaud the revitalisation ursan gives to DoA, i've got everything i needed from it that i wouldn't have managed before, including some nice new HoM statues. My guildies have had a boost of interest and theres now hundreds of us running around with torment weaps, most of them we've earnt ourselves.
Why's the price dropping
1. I can get my own thanks
2. I got the weaps i wanted ages ago, don't need one thanks
3. More and more and more people are finding it, it hasn't peaked yet... and we can all farm our own thanks.
4. Alot of people have been distracted by other things, CoF, rapture farm, destroyer farming etc etc in eotn, Festivals and weekend events. But now i've time to give it a go and need to make some fast money after 9 rings.
5. Ursan is not only easier but its so quick i can do a quad run in less time than it used to take to do foundry so all my guildies with time restraints can now come...but it only takes a few runs so we'll farm our own thanks.

Think that basically comes down to demand, there is no demand. You can ask for 100k+10e or 100k+50e, we're just stood here waiting to go get our own while your aimlessly spamming WTS, get some coffers maybe you'll actually get something that someone will think worth buying!!

You could dupe as much as you could carry. Start with 1 armbrace at a time, then 2, 4, 8, etc. It maxes out at 11,250 armbraces per trip.

What if I told you that, if you worked on it for about 50 hours, you could find an exploit that would allow you to get 200% more bog skale fins? No other items, just bog skale fins. Would you be at all inclined to invest 50 hours for that? No? Me neither. I don't think anyone would be. But what if the exploit was for armbraces? Voltaic spears? Mini-beetles?

Many people -- I'd like to think most people -- simply don't cheat. And there's a few sociopaths who feel the need to cheat whenever they can get away with it. And then there's a sizable group of people for whom cheating is an option, but only when they realize they don't have any legitimate way to reach their goal -- that is they will only consider cheating if "cheat" and "fail" are their only options.

Creating a desirable item that the average player can't get except by cheating is going to motivate a fair number of them to cheat who wouldn't if they believed they had a legit way to get the item.

Classic!

ive seen for 100k no ecto ,no bs

*Hint*

Buy many armbraces now while the economy is down, because when the UB nerf comes.... hello big bucks!!! *wink wink*

ok strait simple fact of the matter. It has nothing to do with dupes, ursan, cons or anything else. Its supply and demand. I tried it just for fun to see how fast i could sell an armbrace. I sold one for 100k+40 in 3 days, 100k+15 in 2 hours and 98k in 3 hours. That right there spells everything out. Its not the price. And it not the buyers. Its the people selling. They have the "OMG i have to sell it now" syndrome and keep reducing their price drastically. Now when you couple this with a weak buying market atm, mostly from the recent festival and MANY MANY MANY people trying to save money for certain titles you get alot fewer people buying anything. Armbraces are not the only thing to suffer a decline in price right now. Even the asian mini's have seen a decline in price. But the simple fact is once people have more money in their pockets again they will begin buying. GW is just in a recession right now and the people that panic and sell things really cheap just add to the fire. So personally i'll just hold onto my rare stuff and wait untill the market comes back up. And you all know that it will, it will just take time....

How can you say it has nothing to do with UB??? Do you know what armbrace prices where previously... back when owning a tormented weapon meant something? Since the institution of UB and Consumables, DoA is overfarmed and gemsets are dropping in prices. You can buy gemsets at 13k each... if not lower... a far cry from the 25k+ days. remember then? Or maybe you never completed DoA back then and only have noticed the low prices post UB and duping...

100k +40e is still low to me... especially when I think of what it once was.

I'm not sure what you're trying to show with your analogy, other than that people won't waste their time doing something that's not worth doing. People scam for a few hundred gold or a few K all the time. It's not much, but it's worth it for them as it takes just a few minutes.


There is a legitimate way to obtain everything an average player would reasonably need, so I have a hard time believing people exploit because they no other choice.

The players who do find exploits aren't average players looking for an easier way around something, it's the knowledgeable, hardcore group who have done everything in the game and who're looking for their next challenge. They enjoy the thrill of doing something that was unintended, or they want to be impossibly rich to enlarge their epeen.

Removing rare items isn't going to change anything - average players generally do not have the know-how to find exploits in the game, and anyone who can, probably aren't doing it because there's some item they can't get. If Armbraces didn't exist, they'd just dupe stacks of Ecto, it just so happens Armbraces have the highest value out of any stackable commodity.

25k+ days for gemsets? Even a single Titan gemstone was once more expensive.

Prices were already lowering before the whole duping thing and the recent DoA/UB craze. Lootscaling (less buying power) and the change of DoA NM (faster DoA runs) contributed to that.
One thing that kept prices still high was that DoA looked mainly abandoned before the UB craze. Keeping supply low.

However, you are right, the current drop can be mainly explained to DoA/UB.
At the moment, about every player that does DoA/UB for profit is playing on the safe side, selling the gems/armbraces as fast as possible. Creating pressure on the prices. Why? Because they fear prices will lower even more since 'everyone' is doing DoA/UB now. And there is no demand, since everyone is getting the gems themself now.
Is there a good reason to fear lower prices? I doubt it looking at the long term.
If prices lower too much people will abandon DoA again and farm other places. Making it harder to team up again, increasing the time to get the gemsets and thereby increasing the value of those gemsets.
But that's a bet few of the current DoA 'farmers' are willing to take.
They are there to cash and to cash fast.
Because of this, I think the price will lower even more in the near future.
The thing that will change the market again is the gemset/armbrace price hitting the bottom or a change to UB/DoA.
And the bottom might be low, because people will realise too late that the price has past the gold/hour ratio that should determine the lowest price.
They only think: omg, I can sell gemset for 100k, great!, not realising they used to farm 125k in the same amount of time before they jumped onto DoA/Ursan.
One thing is sure, as long as UB or DoA are not changed, the price of gemsets will remain very low, even compared to the 100k+40e.

I think the final price of the armbrace will be in around 100k+10e if nothing is changed.
Giving the (dedicated) average player can farm/earn 10k/hour elsewere in the game and most DoA ursan PUG teams play Noob Mode and not Hard Mode.
It takes 6 runs to get an armbrace (10 gemstones for each full run, 60 gemstones for armbrace). And the average run including teaming would take about 2.5 hours (not even counting the risk of failing when playing PUG).
That would be a total of 15 hours to get the armbrace.
15 hours could net 150k elsewere, so a price of 100k+10e (at 5k/e) seems justified. when UB stays in the game the way it is.
That's half the price of 100k+40e.

However, I made some assumptions here.
First, I don't know for sure if the average player who is now in DoA can earn 10k/hour. Could be less, which lowers their sellingprice of the gemsets. Doubt it's much more though.
Also, the 2.5 hours average is taken from what I hear in the game and is based on the current craze in DoA. When people move away it might be harder to team again, raising the time to form a team and finish.
If it takes the average team 3 hours instead of 2.5 because teaming takes longer, we are looking at about 100k+16e for the gemset.
Raising it to 4 hours (which should be doable with decent balanced teams according to what I hear) we are looking at 100k+28e.
The 100k+40e times seem gone forever.

There is also something the 'high-end' players should not forget, investment in a shadow-currency like armbraces and ecto is never safe.
Their value is determined by the market and as ectos already showed several times, that market behaves strange sometimes.

I am disagreeing with Savio's statement that "people are inclined to cheat or do whatever it takes to get even the smallest of rewards." That is not an analogy, but rather a hypothetical example of a "small reward" that no one is inclined to cheat to get.

They may have everything they need but not what they want. Even with ursan, tormented items are waaay out of the reach of average players. So, if Average Joe wants that tormented bow, he must either (a) cheat, or (b) give up on it. Sadly, some choose to cheat.

True. But once discovered by an e-peen enlarger, the knowledge gets spread around to others. Look at the forum posters here who took part in the duping and the AB-crashing -- they were fricking idiots who couldn't put a grammatical sentence together to save theirs lives. Surely these weren't the individuals who discovered the exploits.
Now, imagine yourself in the shoes of one of these morons. Your smart friend comes to you and tells you that he's found a way to use an exploit to get tons of bog skale fins, and you can use it too! Do you take him up on that offer? How about if he's found a way to get that tormented bow you've been drooling over for months, even though you've never made it past the first mob in City?
When cheating is the only realistic way to get what you want, the temptation is just much greater. (Most likely, you (Joe Average) will never get the opportunity, so the point is moot; but for some -- enough to do some real damage to the in-game economy -- the opportunity to cheat does present itself.) It's really not that hard a concept to grasp. And a-net would be wise to keep it in mind as they design GW2.

Rare items are not at the root of the problem - people will find and use exploits regardless. If Armbraces and other expensive items didn't exist, do you think an average player would still pass by an offer of a free stack of Ectos? Even though there wouldn't be rare items for him to spend it on, there's still plenty of incentive to take free money. Maxing out titles, equipping heroes, buying tons of armor and playing Barbie, etc. are all desirable things for average players, but are beyond what they can afford. I can't see how rare items are a design flaw where the flaw is really the players' mentality (e.g. "I want X but I don't want to earn it" or "I get a thrill out of exploiting the system").

/careface

crash already would ya!
I'm glad there are sooo many rich people in the game that care about things that are more than 100plat----but the majority of the people in the game arent rich--so this is a very, dare I say elitest?, thread....
so just let them crash.

lmao @ video clip xD

It's Ursan that really has driven down the prices, but it doesn't help that there is no 'manufacturer's' price. What I mean is that there is no price control like there is for the real world market; retailers can maintain a relatively shallow decline in value of an item, because there aren't thousands upon thousands of people supplying the goods (gems).

In Guild Wars there is always someone who doesn't want to spend hours trying to sell a gemset at a price hundreds of other gemsets are going for, so they lower the price by 1k and suddenly the market value of gemsets has gone down.

More people will sell at lower prices to get the gold faster. They think "Hey, it's just 1k." And so the gem market value has crashed, since gems are not hard to get. If gems were harder to acquire, we would not see such a drastic drop in their market value.

That is just the same tactics any real business doesn, like Walmart, BJs, or other wholesale companies. That is called smart business, however, it does ruin the average players chances of getting a good return for his product. I think it is funny. Again, I am stockpiling gemsets for the inevitable nerf of UB.

Just like anything else when regular people can and have start aquiring these items "easily" (as it is now because of Ursans Blessing) then all these prices are going to drop as these normal people start selling the items for 1/2 the price or less. Elemental swords since they started dropping from the Zashiens chest took a nose dive as did other rare valueable weapons/gear as they too started dropping from the Zashiens chest. As it is there's just nothing of great value in the game anymore as Anet has input features and ways for the normal joes to get these items just as easily as the farmers and the clans. It's another reason GW has failed and equals boring game moreso than it was. Might as well get used to it GW has turned into a romper room game and a socialist type game not a game that has equality with capitalism being a part of it as well.

You'll be holding onto that stockpile for a long time then, UB was implemented for a reason and it wasn't to make the capitilists happy. It was to increase the ability for the casual player to gain anything and everything without having to bow to the likes of farmers and clans or people like you.

Actually, I am willing to bet that Ursan blessing's synergy will get nerfed, and you will will be forced to use other skills besides UB. Only a matter of time...

Arenanet doesn't want to piss off 70% of the playerbase by nerfing it. It would be like taking candy away from a three year old. Sure, it will rot his teeth, but you'll be up all night listening to him cry if you do.

lol... you are exactly right about the situation. However, I still think that they will nerf it.

Blame everything on Ursan Blessing.

Good idea.

Fck Ursan, gogo nerf it!

sorry, forgot my sarcasm tags

Hmmmm

I wonder how much of the crash in armbraces is due to the BMP going on sale.

I went ahead and bought it for my son and then last night noticed he sold off the onyx he was saving for destroyer weapons. I asked him why and his answer was basically that he had now had access to an unlimited supply of free weapons that looked just as good (plus a free 30k or more from discoveries).

If the BMP is affecting other players that way it may also be changing their attitude about the tormented weapons. Why save 100k +25e when they can get weapons that looks just as good for free?

It makes sense - the only reason to get destroyer or tormented instead of buying at crafters is that tormented and destroyer look better. And many of the BMP weapons do look just as good as destroyer and tormented.

(I should also mention that between the weapons he is getting and the books he is running out of room in his packs - another reason he doesn't see any sense in getting a fancy and expensive weapon)