Your opinion on XTH?

OK, this highlights the flaw in most of the reasoning in this thread beautifully. The core argument of the pro-XTH faction is: you can get this stuff anyway. Here's the problem. XTH dramatically drops the time price associated with getting basic currency.

It does not take nearly as long to make the predictions as it does to farm the Zaishen Elite for 11 zkeys. Or farm UW for 10 ecto. (11 now?) Or farm up 50k from critters. This math compounds as the number of accounts per player increases.

Upshot: XTH increases the total amount of valuable "stuff" in the economy. It permits every member of a very large community to get stuff that they would otherwise have to invest time to get.

Since there aren't many gold sinks in this game, the newly created "money" cycles through the economy. Much of it ends up in the hands of the wealthiest players. These people have figured out how to make in-game cash efficiently and have the available time to convert into in-game cash.

Additionally, a system like XTH creates a class of "nouveau riche" that bought 30, 50, or 100 accounts for the purpose of getting zkeys. These people exist.

The above means that the ability of wealthy players to pay for things increases and the number of wealthy players increases. This increases the prices of the stuff that YOU want to buy. Further, it does so *faster* than you are making money from the XTH with one or two or three accounts!

If you've never bought an item worth 100k, perhaps the attitude of "I don't care" is justifiable. If you want to own nice stuff in this game, you should want XTH removed if you ever want to own it. If you already own lots of nice stuff, you should be pleased that XTH is running up the value of your nice stuff.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm thinking that the majority of the community wants nice stuff, doesn't have it, and is unable to see how this system hurts them.

If only i had thought of that so simple yet i was soooooooo far away, cheers i'll give that a try

Yeah keep it, and in 1 or 2 months I'll finally be able to buy my FoW chest piece.

Work. LoL.

"What is your work?"

"I'm a GW GvG player."

"How much it pays?"

"Some Zaishen Keys."

"Can you buy food with it?"

"No."

"So what you do for a living?"

"..."

There's a few things wrong with this.

First, for 99% of players, zkeys are a set income every month, either in zaishen chest items or by selling the keys directly. For the most part, there isn't a way to increase this rate, it's going to sit around 50kish a month. Anyone who spends their time farming is going to make vastly more than 50k/month. Anyway, the nightfall free chests have been providing a steady stream of "welfare" income to casual players for quite a long time, nobody has complained about them.

Second, the players willing to buy 50-100 accounts for zkeys ($250 at the extreme low end) were probably willing to spend that much money somewhere else. They have always existed, and they always will exist. Companies have been trying to eradicate them for ages, but as long as there's a demand, it'll never go away. Why let a few bad apples spoil everything for the rest of us?

XTH doesn't drive up prices at all, since it doesn't inject any money into the game, it just shuffles things around a bit. In fact, ultra-rich players tend to buy keys from average players, thus redistributing wealth a bit.

Moreover, all the zkey drops drive prices on most items down, not up. Higher supply of shiny mods and items with the same demand means lower prices.

I'll give you that there may be more competition at the extreme high-end market, since a few previously poor players will manage to get rich off of zkeys. However, they're only going to affect the prices on extreme high-end items, like mini-pandas. Since average players didn't have much chance to get items valued at 10 million before, I strongly doubt they care if prices on mini-pandas jump to 15 million.

then there's also the notion of "nice stuff". in gw, "nice stuff" generally mean some nice skin on a weapon, or some useless mini that follows you around in town. "nice stuff" will never give anyone a tangible advantage in terms of game mechanics. in fact, "nice stuff" is different for everyone. no amount of eternal bows will make me give up my skull recurve bow, for instance.

in such an environment as GW, it can be argued that no form of virtual currency are even needed. heck, we can probably delete all the gold in the game, and give out weapons/armorsets based on character-binding tokens obtained for missions/quests, and there won't be a lick of difference in how the game is played. GW does not need an economy, so there's no need in trying to preserve it.

and if you really think having money shoveled around is somehow bad, let me tell you that i've made over 2mil gold over the last eight months in zkeys, and all of that gold is currently in the form of 9 elite armor sets on my ranger. that's 2mil gold gone, and not rotting away in some dude's storage. zkeys are nothing more than a clever money sink to keep currency moving, and is GOOD for this game.

Totally agreed with you there Moriz!

I just thought of this today, selling zkeys = money for armors! I mean, I don't farm much and only play for 2 hours or so. If I can get like few zkeys here and there to sell, I can use the gold to get armors for all my characters.

I think it's obvious Anet does not have the skill or resource devoted to support and run a system such as the XTH smoothly. The point-distribution problems over the last couple of months is an indication of the lack of attention or support for the system.

I'm not blaming Anet, but it's a matter-of-fact that they (supposedly) have all their resources devoted to GW2. The XTH and all things GW1 are left to suffer.

Here are some specifics of why the XTH fails as a whole:



It, and the Xunlai chest, were essentially added seperately from the GW games, without incorporating it more thoughtfully into the overall scheme of the market

The Xunlai chest rewards calendar repeats itself, contributing to the inevitable decline in the price of zkeys

Zkeys are available on a mass scale to those with multiple acnts for spending little time placing predictions. The number can be hundreds of zkeys per month in one's spare time.

See the last few months and Anet's mismanagement of distribution points. They clearly cannot support such a system atm

Dr. Strangelove: Your story has no appreciation for summation sequences or time price. If every account gets 50k/month for no time investment, half of the GW accounts are signed up for XTH, and half of the accounts sold were added on to an existing account, we have around 1.5 million accounts receiving 50k each, for an additional 75 billion in the economy each month. Call it 20,000,000 zkeys or so. That's money injected into the game, just not in the form of plat.

That's a LOT of virtual money. It would take 25,000 UWSC farmers working 40 hours a week to generate 20,000,000 new ecto every month.

This comes together nicely with the next point:

moriz: Did you resell the zkeys on the open market or use them? If you resold them, odds are they're moldering in someone's storage. Just not yours.

What happens is you get a bunch of people in the middle price tier that bought tons of accounts driving up prices on moderately priced stuff. This sends limited edition minis skyrocketing and props up prices on overfarmed stuff like Eternal Blade and Obsidian Edge.

Meanwhile, things in the extreme high end just get silly because the zkeys resold by people like moriz end up in the hands of the champ point sellers.

Now, if all you care about is the low-end stuff that drops regularly and comes out of the Zaishen chest, Dr. Strangelove is correct that you won't feel this. How realistic is that for the people still playing this game, though?

For instance, what's eventually going to happen to moriz is that he's going to finish out his armor shrine, want to start sticking minis in the hall, and have to choose between tossing his stacks of zkeys at the problem or avoid the less rare limited edition minis (eg: Kuunavang) altogether.

Yes, but the thing is, weren't Keys, the Chest and the title all implemented for the purpose of increasing interest in PvP, rather than be a "clever way of moving money around"?

Given that deflation of the value of keys, with the existence of the XTH is inevitable, we'll find that the incentive for ppl to try out pvp will still be small, especially since you'll find you need to pvp ALOT to gain the same number of keys that you get each month form XTH.

Also, don't any of you find it just a bit flawed, that with the XTH, the introduction of the Zaishen title means little more than an indicator of your account's /age? It's only going to be a matter of time before everyone's walking around poking each other with that 4 weapon animation...making it quite a pointless introduction, other than to spread some gold.

Even if spreading some gold was the intention, the job's been done, enough's enough, kill the thing before it gets out of hand.

I can see this actually happening in the game, so it's hard to argue with. I'd amassed a decent number of Z-keys because I hadn't used one since I hit level 3 of the Zaishen title and got the monument, and I couldn't be bothered to figure out what to do with them for some months. I 'only' receive keys for 3 accounts (2 guildies I know IRL left their accounts in my custody); and the keys were piling up pretty fast.

About 2 months ago, when I noticed Z-key values were starting to slip, I spent all the ones I saved on (moderately) rare minipets (grawls, destroyers, Kuunavangs, celestial pigs) and not a minute too soon. Now, prices for these are skyrocketing, and I can't put one out in a trade city without receiving a few whispered offers within a minute. People are in a feeding frenzy, wealth without an outlet seems to be driving everyone crazy lately.

Ehm. You can sell your IG money for real (I know its against the EULA but I know a few ppl who have done that and no ban ofc).

Then killing the economy (if a place with infinite resources can be economically bound) might be Anet objective.

There are only a few "items" that are limited in numbers. All the other will just rise in number - the only difference is the amount of time needed to get them to drop in price and demand.

You can see that with "yearly" mini pets.

If Anet really wants to be naughty they can just release a mini pet pack gift in the April update with all the "exclusive" mini pets out there.

Wouldn't that be fun?

That would be great for mini-pet collectors. But only if it's about the birthday mini's. Promotional mini's and contest winners' mini's shouldn't be able in some online shop. Some things were created to be rare.


Next time you quote me, don't change the quoted part. Thanks.

For those who haven't paid attention to Linsey talk pages, Anet stance that the XTH does NOT print money into the ecomomy, unlike the MOX quest line that did. Zkeys were not made to be currency, that was not their purpose. So QQ'ing now that there value is dropping because there more on the market now, people already got the rank in the title they want, or chest rewards have lost value, shouldn't be Anets concerns. You gambled in the stock market, it crash, o well it was a risk.
Remember Zkeys were worth 2k each before the title, and no one complained about that then, so why should yall qq'ing about them slowly returning to that cheap of a value.

ArenaNet need to hire someone who has a clue what economics is.

XTH would be fine if there were sufficient gold sinks to filter out excess money. But there aren't.

Having ZKeys move wealth around freely isn't any good, that's because it's moving the wealth to people who don't deserve it. It's taking away from those who actually earned their wealth and spreads that wealth as free gifts!
FREE ZKEYS is not free new wealth, ZKeys are NOT MONEY, someone has to pay for them for them to be worth something.
Every single FREE zkey given out reduces the value of existing ones earned legitimately! The amount of money in economy ready to be spent on them is limited. Ever increasing supply of ZKeys will continue to tank their value, hurting the PvP players the most.
Only lamers who use XTH as their main money maker (even without buying lots of accounts) aren't complaining, they don't care about the game as a whole but only about their own gains. Just like abusers of perma SF or other exploits.

I've got over 2 million gold for FREE from XTH but I want it gone and always wanted. It's just totally wrong.

ZKeys before update were just a sink for faction/rps. Nobody used them as a currency, their only use was to open the chest, their value was based on what the average drops were worth. But since May'08 they stopped rewarding top Monthly ATs finishers with RealWorld prizes, so they updated the ZKeys to give them more value and make them worthy replacements for RL prizes. Now having people with a bunch of cheap accounts from a supermarket, or even worse - dozens of thousands players with just 1 account generate A HUGE LOT MORE zkeys for doing nothing than all players who actually earn them. That is a problem.

wait...how is giving someone 5k and giving them an item worth 5k really any different?

but in this case, mox gave people a one-time allowance of 10k/per chara (80k in a common scenario), while xth gives people a monthly allowance of ??? (someone fill me in, i honestly don't even bother with it)...but people in this thread are saying 2 million over a course of under a year?

so how is mox worse than this? can someone please explain?

The difference is simple - the item is only worth 5k in a given state of the economy. Every new one spawned reduces its value, it becomes a real visible reduction when thousands new ones appear out of nowhere, without any work required. And it becomes a real problem when it's not a couple thousand but a couple hundred thousand of free ones given away, every month. The economy just cannot bear the burden of so much wealth given away for FREE and it crumbles.

Clear evidence of the problem is the prices of monthly tonics - earliest ones are rarest and most expensive, simply because during the first few months XTH wasn't anywhere as popular as it is now. Every new everlasting dropping reduces the value of ones of it's kind, and not only that, it also reduces value of all other everlastings (in a much smaller degree, but it does).

And I say to hell with your 'time price'. My time is worth around $30 an hour currently, not including benefits. I had a limited amount of gaming time when I was in school, and I have a limited amount now that I am working. The allure of GW was that it is a game one can play and enjoy the benefits of without having to grind.

I know people (or more like knew) who played WoW or DAoC, and they have to devote every waking moment to the game to keep up. If they don't, they can't enjoy it.

ANet created titles, and if they make them attainable only by people willing to give up books and movies and a social life, then I will take my gaming dollars elsewhere.

If stuff is dropping in value, than people will look for something else of valuse and sell that. Isn't that what a 'free market' does?

People speculate on Zkeys and Ectos, and get upset when the prices drop. The former is only worth what someone will pay, and the latter is only worth its merchant value. If someone is willing to pay more, than bully for you; you have to separate the market value from the intrinsic value. The only difference between Faction farming and XTH is that people can spend their time playing the game (PVE or PVP) rather than turning this into some virtual stock market.

I wish I knew where everyone was getting all this gold to sink. It's all I can do to get my toons into Acended armor. Of course working on my Lucky title doesn't Help

I want nice stuff too, but since I don't have the time to spam trade or farm for hours, I will take what I can get. I have resigned myself to never having Obsidian armor or a stack of ectos, simply because I don't have that kind of time to dedicate to the game. XTH allows me a way to collect some ZKeys and work on my Zaishen Title without having to spend an inordinate amount of time in PVP, which is not a big priority of mine at the moment.

I think people are way too concerned with the whole economy issue. How about we all just play the game? If ANet does something that makes your current method of virtual earning less lucrative, look for another. Buggy makers went out of business when cars were invented, and landlines are being replaced by cellphones. That is how it works in the real world, why should ANet be any different?

i got that part...
what i meant was that i don't understand is why anet recognizes the mox quest reward as a problem, but not xth as one?

Simple

The MOX quests reward you with 10K. Thus the game created 10K.

The Zaishen Key isn't money. When people buy your key, they do that with money they allready have. So no money was created. Only when you use your key and get a gold item which you sell at the merchant, the game created money.

If you want a flame war, you got it.

I'm finishing up a Ph.D and not exactly rolling in time these days. That doesn't justify demanding that the developers provide a service that puts money in storage without time investment.

At numerous times in this game, there have been commonly known farms worth 40k+ per hour. Event item farming still works quite well. You need around 3 million gold to max the three consumables titles. "Lack of time" isn't an excuse here. Can't spend 60-70 hours over the course of four years? Come on.

Your argument boils down to: I want to max titles but I don't want to have to do minimal work to do so. I expect that from the twelve year olds that play this game. You're an adult, act like it.

I could care less about fluctuations in the prices of Zkeys and ecto. What does upset me is the fact that the prices of fixed supply items have gone through the roof, that this effect was completely predictable, that it has a negative effect on the vast majority of the player base, and that if permitted to continue things will get much, much worse. Sadly, players seem to be unable to see past positive short run benefits to see the likely long run consequences.

No, see, the problem is that you have to trade time for money in every other form of in-game wealth generation. Putting a marginally more efficient farm into the game has little effect. Inserting a farm that costs almost no time has a BIG effect, because people continue to farm up money AND collect the proceeds from XTH.

Worse, there's a major wealth redistribution effect going on here. People are engaging in legalized RMT by purchasing dozens of accounts. This is a clear betrayal of ANet's stance on the matter. It's not OK for players to trade in-game items to one another for real money, but it's OK for ANet to sell in-game items to players for real money?

I think I demonstrated up above that you could have a stack of ectos for about a twenty hour time investment. If you are intelligent enough to make $30 per hour, you should be intelligent enough to recognize that time is money and reallocate your time efficiently to accomplish your goals.

Try reading previous posts rather than making unwarranted assumptions.

Actually, I'll argue that the issue is a little more complex than that.

Z-keys aren't gold but they are money. It's a monetary unit representing an unassaible value of 5 Zaishen title points (and the accompanying random chest drop). They can be used as a medium of exchange, and (lately quite unreliably) also as a measurement to value other goods and services.

They're basically another currency, its strength solely determined by the playerbase. Players gaining insane amounts of them without any effort will definitely impact the economy.

The Xunlai Tournament House aka Zaishen Lottery...^^

... I use 3 accounts, and just vote random crap. I get tons of items from candy to alcohol to party items every month, despite not playing Guild Wars at all.

Those who really care can get almost every item possible in game, without having to do anything.

No, it is not right. The idea of a lottery/betting is great, but as usual, the implementation is sub-par.

Honestly, I could live without the XTH. While it's here though, I'll get the benefits from it.

Therefore the Zashien keys DO CREATE MONEY and EASY money because you can just collect EASY keys doing the XTH or anything that gives easy and/or free Balthazar faction which can be traded in for Zashien keys soooooooooooooooo Balthazar Faction ALSO CREATES MONEY in this game. Shouldn't be that way, the only thing that should create money is adventuring for it and most of it should be deep in chests somewheres hard to get to so everyone doesn't have millions of plat.

Because giving a bunch of people maybe 4k in gold items and title points once a month is seriously destabilizing the economy. It's not like the worst player ever can't make that money by playing for an hour...

Savio, if you iterate that a million times, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

It's not like all the keys get spent, either.

The biggest danger to the high-end part of the economy is the fact that the we, the playerbase, are quite stupidly refusing to accept that the growth of the Z-key creation rate should go hand in hand with a much more rapid drop in their value.

Z-keys and ectoplasm are the currency of the high end market. Gold doesn't come into it in any significant way. Because of a recent sudden influx of players with many hundreds of Z-keys to spend, and an urge to spend them on rare limited supply minipets in particular, minipet prices have been skyrocketing. People are still accepting Z-keys at a value close to that of ectoplasm, and as a result, ectoplasm won't buy you as many shinies anymore. Our painstakingly farmed ecto is being usurped by thousands of Z-keys appearing from thin air, and we're letting it happen. People buying extra accounts for more monthly Z-keys are practically printing money. Not gold, but the other currency.

All we can do is wait for the Z-key bubble to burst.

I've been waiting for the ecto bubble to burst for years, but it never has in the same scale as diamonds and onyx. Closest was during the prenerfed permasin month.

I actually wouldn't go so far as to say that Zkeys will cause the value of all things to change significantly in the long term. Really if the price of things in general has gone up its more because of a "wealth effect" where once poor people tend to spend more now that they have more money, and I think it will die down eventually, when the rich people run out of gold, and zkeys lose value, hence reducing every1's monthly income.

Having said that... The XTH is still something that needs to go. As i've stated, the main prob with the giving out of Tournament Reward Points every month, is that it Cheapens the achievement of actually winning in tournaments. If eventually, the value of keys approaches nil, as they will inevitably, there will be little reason to enter tournaments other than to receive a gold cape trim. Established guilds/ Players will definitely still enter because they have winning down to a routine, until it gets boring, but there's no incentive for newer players to even try tournaments, because they have such an easy access already to obtaining decent TRPs every month. With no new contenders on the Tournament scene,PvP WILL stagnate, crawl into a hole and die.

edit: removed the drama queen bold fonts =p

maybe so... but giving people 10k once in direct money will?

i still never really got the answer i was looking for...perhaps i've worded it too ambiguously.
i'll put it more simple and direct: is the mox one-time 10k quest reward worse than the xth monthly zkey reward?

i'm not asking if they're both bad, or if they're both good. i'm asking if mox is worse than xth. if yes, why? if no, then why did anet remove mox but not xth?

There isn't a "bubble." There are actually people that want to buy their way to the max title, probably much fewer than those selling, but said people have a ton of money to spend. (Which they'd need to actually hit max.) Eventually that demand may die down, but until then it's keeping zkey prices high. Sudden influxes have seen keys sell as low as 3k, but the stabilize back to an actual price as the demand kicks in.

I don't think Zkey's actual value is even 4k/month. Average amount for most players seems to be 100 RPs or 20 keys. Most of those will be firewaters and brulees, which you could get the equivalent from a merchant for 1k, but no-one merchs alcohol anyway when the market price is already below that due to all the special events. Crap golds sell for around 200-300, and seem to me to be around 1 in 10 drop rate. All the other stuff is rare/unmerchable and thus generates no gold. So in the end we are left with under 1k/account entering the system, and some slight inflation of everything else balanced by the drunk/sweet titles becoming proportionally cheaper.

I don't think Anet considers the 10k from MOX to be a long-term economy issue or they would've removed the quest reward (they haven't.) It's a short-term issue when each account gets a sudden extra 50-80k in the week it was released, which causes prices to go haywire for a bit. Similarly the new storybooks do offer extra gold to new characters doing the missions anyway, but you don't get that sudden influx of numerous advanced characters picking up gold at once that retroactive rewards would've done.

It enables me to obtain things on my wishlist more efficiently then previously.


If this was changed, I wouldn't find a new way to obtain the things in question. I'd remove them off my wishlist.
Which would reduce my interest in the game even further.


XTH is A.Net's currency for buying my interest in the Guild Wars saga.

My response was to the question why Anet doesn't see it as adding money and I explained it. My personal view is much like yours.

Actually, MOX quest reward influx did catch anet by surprise and was perceived to be issue: next time players would have gotten similar gold influx (when books for campaigns we introduced), they prevented people from getting retroactive rewards and used MOX as reason.

Removing 10k reward for MOX was pointless - by time it impacted game, it was too late and removing gold reward would only piss off people who did not get around to do it.

Perhaps the XTH should have an entry fee to be able to make your choices.

zkeys shifted the wealth balance from pve to pvp

i dont see why allowing the pver's to gain them also via xth is a bad thing.

I think it's kind of ironic that Anet doesn't want any gold selling in this game and bans people for it, yet, they do that exact thing by introducing FREE items in the game with zashien keys and XTH. Thus, now they have made a LEGAL way to BUY GOLD, just go buy more accounts and bet on the XTH and get free keys which turns into GOLD as well as FREE items that used to have VALUE. I suppose as long as THEY are the ones selling gold it's quite alright long as the greenbacks are coming into their pocket.

There was a time when this game was fun an exciting and going farming was FUN because there weren't millions of items like the ones we found all over the market. But, with the flooding of Zashien keys and the ability to turn them into GOLD as well, they have ruined the market and the fun of adventuring for loot content. Hell, why farm at all anymore when you can get practically everything for 10k or less now. Making Perfect Salvage Kits didnt' help it either. Making inscriptions was another killer to the economy. It seems everything we found of value to farm and sell they have come along and ruined it. Thus making PVE boring and repetitive waste of time.