07 Jun 2008 at 18:58 - 193
1. I see that the title of this thread has been "uptaded."
2. I think all this "the sky is falling" panic is misplaced. In fact, if anything is going to cause a crash in ecto prices, it's this misplaced panic, not the new farm. Let's take a closer look.
Price is dictated by supply and demand.
Let's look at supply first:
The new (or "newly easy" I should say) SF farm affects supply. All of this panic is based on the idea that supply is going to skyrocket, so prices will tumble. But wait, supply isn't going to skyrocket. Why not? Because People have been greedily farming them for 3 years now, so there's already such an enormous number of ectos out there that the extra ectos coming in from SF farming is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the preexisting supply. The total number of ectos in the game, as compared to a parallel world where SF wasn't buffed, isn't going to move more than a few percent over the course of the next few months. Simply put, there's not going to be the big change in supply that people think there will be.
On a related note, it should be noted that most of the new growth in the ecto supply is going into the hands of people who haven't traditionally had more than a few ectos. I can't help but think that this might be the real basis for opposition to the SF farm. It's the return of what I call the "pathetic elitist sentiment" -- the attitude that "I feel special because I have armor/weapons/minis/ecto stacks/armbraces/whatever that other players don't have. And I like feeling special. So I demand that a-net nerf the other players so that they can't get the same things I have." As you can probably tell, I don't think much of this attitude.
One final note on supply: Has anyone been looking at the favor counter? Judging from the rate it's been going down, I'd say we have a little less than 2 weeks of favor left, maybe more if people get motivated to title grind before it runs out. Now, a-net could (and SHOULD) restore the earned favor that was lost when the counter rolled over. And a-net could (and should) completely do away with the favor system and make UW/FoW permanently open. But, assuming they don't do either of these things, the ecto supply is going to stop growing in the very near future.
Now, let's turn to demand:
Ectos' use as currency has always kept their demand high. People hoard them. Many players who have maxed out their gold storage buy ectos as a place to "put" their gold. So long as ectos persist as currency, they'll continue to buy at any price, since they have no place better to put their excess gold. So the demand for ectos is limited only by the rate at which these people make gold.
The important phrase in that last paragraph was "so long as ectos persist as currency." They may not. This panic may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people become worried that their ectos are going to become worthless, and decide switch their excess gold to some other prospective currency, that nearly-infinite demand is going to start to fall.
(Totally aside, I might note that each of the major alternative currencies is undesirable. Lockpicks are inherently unfair because they can be bought at the discount merchants in factions. Only idiots and people who belong to the big faction farming alliances favor using them as currency. Z-Keys have no NPC trader, making it onerous to convert back and forth between between gold and keys. Armbraces have been duped to such an extent that their rarity is further out of line with their market value than any other item. Moreover, the huge uncertainty about how big the supply of armbraces actually is makes it impossible to make informed decisions about their value. And they have no trader.)
In sum, if the bottom falls out of the ecto market, it's not the SF farm that's to blame, but rather the people panicking about the SF farm and causing a "run on the bank."
