I hate to
quote myself, but...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Shyft the Pyro
You, and everyone else who is screaming about "ruining the economy," need to take a long, hard look at what precisely an "economy" is.
"Economy" is not the same as a "status quo."
"Economy" is not something you can "ruin."
"Economy" is always changing.
"Economy" can not become "better" or "worse" - it can only become "stronger" or "weaker."
"Better" and "worse" are qualitative judgments, which depend heavily on the observer who makes them. The problem with this is that there are as many people as there are opinions, which means that "good" and "bad" are different for different people, which in turn means there is no absolute "good" or "bad." The economy may seem to be getting "worse" to you, but an Ursan or perma player raking in the ectos will hardly agree with your assessment.
That, of course, is ignoring the fact that an "economy" cannot actually be "ruined" unless it ceases to exist. An "economy" is the sum of all trade. Making it easier to farm - whether in the real world or in Guild Wars - might lead to a price deflation (as you've witnessed at the rare material trader), but it will not "ruin" the economy unless it results in a complete economic collapse. In the case of Guild Wars, this would require everyone to stop taking part in trade relations, which would only happen if everyone either a) quit the game, or b) could get everything they'd possibly ever need on their own and with minimal effort.
Option b) will never actually happen in Guild Wars, because (as in every economic system) there are opportunity costs: the time you spend farming ectos could at the very least be spent farming something else. The reason people farm ectos is because ectos are easy to turn into cash, and cash is the way economic systems solve the opportunity cost problems: pay someone for something you are unable or unwilling to do, and you can have both what you need (say, your salary) and what you want (say, cash to buy Guild Wars 2), as opposed to needing to do everything yourself (say, designing Guild Wars 2 because you want to play it).
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The "depression" is simply lowering the opportunity cost of
not farming ectos with a perma sin (because it is lowering the profit of the perma sin). Under free market conditions, this simply means that a new equilibrium will soon be reached, one where people stop farming ectos with a perma sin because the profit of doing this (which is also the opportunity cost of
not spending your time doing this) will decrease until it matches the profit of doing something else (which is also the opportunity cost of spending time farming ectoes with a perma sin).
In layman's terms, deflation has made ectoes and ecto-dependent products more accessible to people not involved in perma sin ecto farming, as these people did not depend on ecto farming for their Guild Wars income. People who did - "regular" ecto farmers and "old" perma sin farmers who popularized the build - will now be making less. If the market is left to its own devices, ectoes will eventually bottom out and will rise again, but nothing actually
needs to be done unless ANet wishes to inflate the price of ectoes artificially. For example, if ANet's data shows that ecto farmers comprise a significant proportion of the player base, and ecto farming is the only thing keeping these players grinding away until GW2, ANet (in its newfound focus on keeping people playing GW1 through grind) may indeed choose to artificially inflate ecto prices - either by introducing new ecto-consuming items or by other means, such as nerfing the ease with which ectoes are farmed.
