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