Your opinion on XTH?

Keys technically add money because you can sell the stuff you get out of the chest. Its a small amount though, so the bigger problem is the one I mentioned earlier.

Because there is a massive influx of them and it is through Anet's pseudo real money trading system.

That doesn't answer how minipets do anything.

Change the rate at which they are acquired, then?

Mini pets don't. But people can hoard loads of accounts to increase the number of mini pets too.

Books is obvious - you trade in and there comes gold.

Zkeys - open the chest get a drop that can have or not sale value.

But that is besides the point.

The only aberration on GW "economy" are "limited things" like promotional mini pets. Not a serious one as it has no impact on the game.


The "economy" for the average player is much better now - all the armors are cheaper to get, no 100k+ superior absorptions or sup vigors, etc.

About the influx of zkeys making rare items more expensive - that is crap.

If Zkeys are used they can't be used to trade.
If Zkeys generates a rare skin it makes every other of the same skin become slightly less rare and so less expensive.
If Zkeys generates something else either is 0 gold or marginal value (top items are like 400g?). If every key generates a 300g item, 100k still needs 334 keys.
If Zkeys is traded for something it will follow one of the previous steps, this one included, generating no gold till is used and an item with gold value is created.
If Zkeys drops (or suffer big variations) in value due to huge influx (as it is happening now) they wont be used as currency and so either they will be used, where at most an item is created with top value of around 400g or just sit somewhere.

The more Zkeys enter the system the less impact they will have, since the most money one can generate is around 400g from a gold item dropped by the chest.

So in the end we will have a game with more accessible skins, inscriptions and mods.

I see no problem in that. It sure beats superior vigor/absorptions at over 100k.

Isn't that just the equivalent of a gold seller raising their price?

I think you are looking at it from a players perspective - "getting an in-game advantage for spending more money is wrong." This is not why Anet dislikes gold selling aka RMT.

You need to look at it from a company perspective to make sense - RMT is fueled by botting, which stresses servers with accounts not really playing the game, and many of the accounts are obtained through stealing rather than buying, giving us customer service headaches and decreasing confidence in a mere password protecting your account. Botting also introduces more gold into the economy, which causes inflation and makes it harder for average players to buy market items, and just makes there be even more demand for RMT and hence supports more bots.

Xunlai house accounts don't create significant inflation and more importantly, don't require bots that are logged on constantly and using up server resources. Although I have to wonder about them encouraging more account stealing.

Several people have expressed a problem with this Xunlai setup on good grounds, but it's not for the same reasons Anet opposes RMT. It wouldn't surprise me if "pay for advantages" (not necessarilly in GvG) AKA microtransactions becomes part of their GW2 model since they won't be living on standalone campaigns.

Disk space is still resource.

They still have to take care of "THX account" like every other (for example periodic backups, updates ...)

Yes, I'm talking about the limited ones. Even the ones made available in relatively large numbers, like Destroyers and Ceratadons are moving up very fast. The more rare ones have been gaining hundreds of ectos/keys in price over the last month or so. The Grawl in particular has skyrocketed. I bought some for favorable double figure key amounts and they've been bumped well into triple figure price ranges where the first digit isn't even a '1'.

That's the reason behind the argument that XTH should be removed. Millions of the things are being dumped into the system on a monthly basis by XTH, and this is vastly more than are created by regular play.

@ moriz: You still just don't get it. Your argument boils down to: money that is not directly exchangeable for something of value is worthless. This is just wrong. It doesn't matter whether you can directly exchange currency for something of value, so long as everyone agrees that the currency is valuable. You would have been in the camp that argued that the U.S. dollar's value would implode when Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard (ie: made it impossible to exchange dollars for U.S. gold reserves). This didn't happen, disproving the antiquated economic theory you adhere to.

Note that this does not even require arguing the intrinsic value of the title track points of a zkey, which you are improperly assuming away (but explains why everyone can agree that a zkey is valuable).

Seriously, people need to get past the 'Action X doesn't add gold to the economy so it doesn't affect the economy' spiel.

It's a myopic outlook. Gold isn't the only currency.

Let me try to explain the effect of XTH through arguing by analogy. I am going to take a game that you are all familiar with, tweak the rules in the same way that XTH has changed GW, and see what happens.

Consider Monopoly. Basic rules, so no money on Free Parking. Suppose I bring a bunch of new $500 bills to the table and put them in the bank. They are identical to the existing supply, but are colored differently. Nothing happens.

Now suppose that I increase the amount of money earned for passing Go from $200 to $700. What happens to this game?

1) Players stop letting properties go to auction. People have the money to buy properties, and they are more valuable because you need lots of rents to chew through $700 per turn per player and force bankruptcy.

2) The properties on the far end of the board after Free Parking become more valuable, because players can afford to build on them.

3) Players demand more money in exchange for properties when trading, because all players have much more money at their disposal.

4) The winner is the player that can get monopolies quickly and force an early building shortage.

5) You wouldn't want to play this game, because it would take forever to resolve.

This change in the rules does not affect the odds of winning the game, since all players get an extra $500 every trip around.


I suspect that many of you think that XTH works this way. It doesn't. XTH doles out rewards by the number of accounts owned. The rules change with XTH looks like this: For every $10 you pay me as the banker, I will let you have an additional $100 every time you pass Go.

This is a radically different rule change. Now, the player that is likely to win the Monopoly game is clearly the one most willing to spend real money for play money. The value of properties still increases under these rules, but only the players that paid the banker for extra money every trip around the board can afford to gobble them all up.

You would never agree to play Monopoly under these rules if the neighborhood had a rich kid with money to burn. Why are you doing the same thing by ignoring the long term effects of XTH? If you've never paid anything but gold for an item, and never intend to, I can see why you would not care. The price of Elemental Swords and Stygian Reavers is not going to go up as a result of XTH.

However, if you've ever bought anything worth over 100k, or you want to, XTH is already beginning to get in the way of doing that. It's going to get worse as the months go by.

Let's get rid of the broken system.

XTH is here to stay dude. No sane developer will say no to getting free cash, just as no player will say no to participating in XTH, getting rewards for free.
Yes the inflation sucks and so on, lots of stuff are already WAY away from the reach of a huge portion of the population - I wouldnt mind having an Oni chasing my character around or something like that, but chances are I cant afford it, especially undedicated .

So yea, you have valid , well defended arguments . But nothing will change on Anet's side. The keys value will just come crashing down at some point - possibly quite a bit into the future

and here's what most of the people in your camp failed to realize: gw does not have a "real" economy. it is a basic economy, with nothing more than a currency and goods. the real-life economy, as well as monopoly, has the notion of "debt" and "credit". indeed, it can be said that the real-life economy is now more about credit (or the lack thereof, given the credit crisis) than anything of real tangible value (if you don't believe me, try buying a house with no credit. i dare you. heck, try buying an airline ticket, or even renting a car with no credit). GW's economy does not have debt, and most certainly does not have credit (you can certainly try to have them, but there's no system in place to maintain and enforce it). as such, you cannot directly compare GW's economy with that of a real one.

given that GW follows a very basic economy, here's the long term forecast of your "pricing crisis":

-zkeys will continue to deflate in value (it was overinflated to begin with). it will settle back to around 2.5k-3k after april, the last month in which a unique tonic is handed out
-the people who made money are going to spend it in some way (this includes letting it set in storage. if it is not being actively traded, it is not part of the economy). either way, those people will eventually buy whatever they want and leave the market. demand drops as a result
-prices will readjust themselves (aka come down) as there are less demand for those items

the take-home message is this: the basic economy in GW is set up as a dynamic equilibrium. prices for individual items can and will fluctuate, often doubling/tripling in value, but the equilibrium will always maintain itself, purely because the basic economic pressures will always force it to be this way.

XTH existed before the Zaishen title. It existed when zkeys were worth 2k-3k each. Why is it a crisis that zkey are falling back to the original price there were before the zaishen title and monthly tonics started. And it happening when the monthly tonics are almost ready to repeat themselves.
Remember Zaishen keys are a title item. When people get as far on the title as they want, they quit using the items, so prices drop. Should I be QQ'ing to Anet that unided golds are 650g each now when they used to sell over 1k each 2 years ago. Or maybe that titan gems are now 5-6k each when they used to be over 100k+xxe at release. You may argue that zkey are a form of currency, but who decided that, they players not Anet, so why should they protect it when their only acknowledged gold and ecto being currency.

And that, in a nutshell, is the core of the problem.

If I had the money (and lack of life) to purchase 50 GW accounts I'd make a crapload of in-game money each month regardless of the price of the ZKey. If the value comes down I'd take a hit, sure, but because of the sheer number of accounts playing for me each month the hit would hardly be noticeable. I could log in once a month, collect my keys, sell a couple, use the other halve and then sell the items dropped from the chest as well (creme, firewater, tonics, tomes). That's quite a handy income for doing absolutely NOTHING ingame the rest of the month lol...

ANet needs some way to ensure that this part of the system cannot be exploited. Someone mentioned character /age in an earlier post but character XP will be a far better measurement. Apart from this multi-account exploit there isn't that much wrong with the XTH idea tbh.

Monopoly is a game where you "fight" other players.

PvE is a game where you fight the monsters.

If I was Anet I would just give a pack to every player with one of each limited mini pet and not allowing them to be traded between accounts, in the April patch.

Or did I lose last month "GW Forbes PvE rank of players based on gold/items"?

Just because you don't care about certain aspects of the game doesn't mean they don't exist and rate highly to some other players.

Guild Wars has a 'strive for prestige' part to it that's clearly apparent in the design. You can dismiss it, but you'd be plain wrong. It's not even a matter of opinion, because prestige items and the challenges of obtaining them is easy to recognize. You're confusing your own preferences and disinterests with fact about what the game is supposed to be.

Playing and excelling at that part of the game is just as valid a way of finding entertainment as excelling at the more obvious ways, like killing monsters, finishing missions, or pitting yourself against other players.

Of course zkeys add money to the economy...they are free and give items that for the most part get merchanted. Some items are used instead of sold to a trader/merchant but the vast majority of them are junk.

Money paid to other players does not count, it's still in the economy.

It is interesting you talk about game design, because the max amount of gold you can store and use in a trade is capped.

Zaishen keys exist for a long time and so does the xunlai house.

Only once there was a title did the zaishen keys went up in price. As it went in price more people became interested in the xunlai house, making the keys go down in price.

Those are facts.

Title increased the value of the zaishen key. More people betting decreases it maintaining its value stable.

As it decreases in value, less gold is possible to obtain from selling/trading the keys. So less profit will be available to people with more accounts.

And having more because of spending more gold isn't new in gws - if you bought 10 factions collector editions you have 10 kuunavangs that will keep going in price. The same goes for some of the promotional mini pets that could only be obtained by magazines or in tournaments not everyone had access to it in the first place.

The only thing wrong in "gw economy" is limited items that will just continue to rise in value, while everything else will eventually drop.

But anyway, the point was that zkeys introduce loads of money in the system and they don't.

If every key generates one item with an average merchant value of 300g you need 334 to achieve 100k. The max keys you can get per account is 50 (?). So you need 7 accounts if you get all your predictions correct to get 100k per month.

You can say 100k times millions is loads. That is true, but loads split by millions isn't that much. People being 100k richer (or even 200k/300k/400k) won't make much impact in items priced in the millions range.

The side effect of introducing a few ultra rare skins every month will dilute that and make a few more people happy as they got a skin they like but the chances of getting it as a drop would be slim, or getting an ultra rare skin they don't like but can be traded for the skins they like.

So pissing a few people to make happy a big number of them, in a thing that is a "game" and involving things that have no real life worth and not even any game play effect seems a good call.

Yes, you are right. But currencies need to have stable values.

Zkeys is a bad currency since it doesn't have a stable value.

The true currency in this game is the gold and the platinum.

People need additional currency because the trade is fixed at 100k + 7 slots.

Lockpicks are perfect for this role as they have a fix price - 750g to sell to the merchant. Actually their price is a bit higher because the cheapest it can be bought for is 1200g.

That will increase the value of the trade from 100k to 100k+1750 lockpicks or 1412500g (for 750g per lockpick), 2200000g (for 1200g per lockpick) or max of 2725000 (for 1500g per lockpick).

Any stuff used that exceeds its merchant value is used at risk of devaluation since the community perception changes.

For some reason Anet capped the money allowed in a transaction and didn't introduced another currency.

I don't quite follow how the gold cap in trades makes my mention of game design interesting.

They are facts beside the issue, much like how the fact that grass is green is beside the issue.

I don't see anything wrong with limited items per se, as long as the original means of obtaining them makes sense in the context of the game. Lotteries and arbitrary giveaways aren't a good way in my opinion.

And here's where you're wrong. Z-keys are money. They're a token to facilitate trade, they can be used to measure the worth of other items, and they represent both an inherent and an opportunity value. They're a different currency, coexisting with gold. Adding keys adds money. You can spend it at the Zaishen merchant (the one strangely shaped as some kind of chest) or you can use them to make purchases off other players. They are money.

Who cares about gold? Minor shifts in the gold flow are irrelevant. You're babbling about dollars while people are printing euros. Some of the things now priced in the millions range were not priced at a third of their current price hardly more than a month ago. That's not a natural progression of value for limited items, we're talking revolution here, not evolution. And it's happening because there are suddenly quite a few players able to bully their way into the market by throwing insane amounts of Z-keys at anything that strikes their fancy. (Or ectoplasm, which is what many of them trade their keys for first, 'laundering' them.) I had a grawl minipet out yesterday night. Someone kept pestering me about buying it. I told him it wasn't for sale. He went as high as 480 Z-keys. I bought it for 85 not long ago.

All of this is making the rich richer, and turning many have-nots into will-never-haves. Sure, most of the latter don't give a damn of course because they don't play to 'have'. But the ones that do are screwed if they want to compete in the market against people who print themselves insane amounts of Z-money every month. The monopoly example should tell you why.

The irony of it all, it's my distinct impression that the rich are the ones complaining about it. Most players apparently rejoice at the opportunity to buy another armor set, and I can relate to that. Good for them. It's just a shame it's happening at the expense of the integrity of the prestige game.

It means Anet didn't want any particular item to go over the roof it terms of price.

Although their position is a bit dodgy when allowing items like armbraces to stack.

Buying a magazine that doesn't even has circulation in some countries seems a bit arbitrary.


Zkeys are exactly like lockpicks and any other item that stacks.


And I have a couple because I bought a magazine and bought 2 others for 50k each long time ago.

You bought that grawl at 425k (which was the value of the zkeys not long ago). My GF bought one for 300k like 3 months ago.

That guys was offering you close to 2 million (at current 4k price if it is still that high, when it was 5k it would be close to 2.5 million) and you still didn't sell it. That is why limited items like grawls will keep going in price, regardless of zkeys value.




See where you went wrong?
Both you and he trade in Zkeys. Why didn't he offer 6 armbraces?
You are dealing with a product that has been appreciated over its real value.

Zkeys are worthless. There are tons of them and they have no value whatsoever other than to be used to open the chest, get 5 points in title and have a chance at some item.


They have no value. There is no npc trader that buys zkeys.

As we have seen, opening the zchest in hopes (or gamble) of getting a drop wouldn't make anyone buy zkeys over 2k. It was the title that increased its perceived value.

They will "keep printing" currency and they will need to print more and more and more to achieve the same amounts since zkeys will lose value. The more they print the less each zkey will be worth.

100 zkeys was 500k some time ago. Now its under 400k. In a few months will be less and less. When that happens it will stop to be a currency and return to be a zkey.

The true irony is that removing the XTH at this moment would increase the value of zkeys, making anyone that has them hoarded richer and allowing only the rich or the PvP players able to attain the zaishen title.

If Anet intention was to create another PvP title they should have made sure the keys couldn't be traded.

What ANet wants and what the community decides to do within the framework of the game are two separate things. They created a setting with enough freedoms that the community could decide upon their own choice of currency.



No. You can't get Zaishen title points from seared ribcages, and people won't be lining up to sell you a Kuunavang for stacks of baked husks. These are but two examples how Z-keys are not exactly like any other item that stacks.



I'm afraid you're mistaken again. I wasn't offered close to 2 million gold. I was offered 480 Z-keys.





Frankly, I don't see where I'm going wrong, because you're not addressing my points. Everything you're posting here is a big mess of non sequiturs. You're not even touching remotely upon the point of contention I'm trying to debate, which is how it may be conceived as 'wrong' how the Xunlai Tournament House pumps more and more Z-keys into the hands of people based upon their willingness to spend real money.

I don't think XTH is good or bad. It presents an opportunity. Some people choose to exploit it for fun, some for titles, and others for profit. When I started I sold my first batch of Zkeys so I could afford an Armbrace. What people do with their Zkeys is their business. Its sad that people treat GW like serious business but we can't control what people do. Only what we do.

Your first projection is accurate enough; the other two are dead wrong. Exogenous shocks force systems into new equilibria. If you print money, nominal prices increase. Go grab a macroeconomics textbook if you want to know why. I'll give the specific explanation for GW; if you want the broader explanation, go to someone better qualified than me to give it to you.

Demand is limited by the ability of most players to pay. They want the shinies, but they cannot afford them. Give them enough money with which to buy the shinies, and they will buy them. As you relax the capacity constraint on everyone, prices on everything increase. Players that were shut out by inability to afford the item now enter the market and drive the price up by outbidding other players. Sellers adjust their expectations and raise their prices. If you continually increase the supply of currency in players' boxes, this cycle will repeat.

Want proof? Go look at the thread graphing the price of a Kuunavang. The general price trend since Hard Mode's introduction (and the resulting increase in ecto supply) is clearly upward. The curve goes sideways prior to that. This implies that prices are stable when rules are stable, and that they rise when you change the rules. Additionally, it appears that ecto probably started being created faster than it was being destroyed sometime around the introduction of HM.

I would explain the recent spike with XTH. Why is there a spike? The masses have reached the point where they have sold off enough zkeys to have 100+ ecto worth of cash laying around.

What I'm on about is the fact that the effect of such price increases is not symmetrical. If we all got the same number of zkeys every month, fine. That has no impact on players' relative ability to pay for stuff. The problem is that players that purchase tons of accounts benefit under this system at the expense of everyone else.

If you print money and distribute it unfairly, there are winners and losers. Rules changes naturally do that, but they normally occur inside the context of the game. This one compels behavior outside GW, and that's a further betrayal of the principles the game was built upon.

Skill > time has been replaced by money > time > skill. Given enough RL cash, you can now buy every accomplishment there is in this game. Want champ points? Want GWAMM? Want rank? Want shinies? Just trade the zkeys you earned from XTH with your RL cash for them.

The devs have been responsive to player concerns before. I don't think that they will do anything because they are incentivized not to. However, I'd like to prove that contention before I give up on them.

This is so true its sickening.

moriz made a point that money shouldn't be that important in gw because it has no affect on your skill level. it would be nice if gw was all about skill... but apparently, to many people playing gw this is not the case.

That is because baked husks stacks are worth 750 gold.

I have no problem to sell 1 lockpick and receive 2 stacks of baked husks.

Curiously, baked husk is a nice currency, always worth the same. It is just worth very few and people are restricted in adding 7 stacks to any transaction.

Exactly. They offered you 480 z-keys and you still didn't sell it because zkeys only worth is to be used for zaishen title points and a random drop.

Apparently you have the choice to refuse zkeys as opposed to being "bullied" by tons of zkeys.

Sincerely I wouldn't trade a limited item/miniature for all the money of GW. You can always get money in GW. All the money in GW wont make more kuunavangs/grawls/zheds etc.


So restrict your point to that and stop embellishing your argument with talk about "economy crash", "rich people becoming richer", "people getting more money with more accounts", "people with less accounts will be unable to compete" and arguments like those.

The only thing people with more accounts get is zkeys. They can use those to get the titles faster or to have better odds at gambling a rare skin. Period.

The same could be said by people that have loads of characters and accounts and get more mini pets or could do more quests/missions/whatnot.

Zkeys isn't loads of money. The sooner people realize that, the sooner people will stop buying accounts to get more zkeys.

And meanwhile very few to no damage happened in GW.

Trivia moment:
What two things do the XTH, The Great Depression and the American economy have in common?

1.) People who are looking for a way to make a quick dollar
2.) Abused opportunity.

Look, the XTH is neither good nor bad. It's the people who are using/abusing it. I have never used it but my thoughts are that if it's going to make people lots of money, then yes, people will be guarenteed to abuse it. It has its good qualities and bad qualities and we all know what they are. They have been stated earlier.


If it was REALLY that bad to the game (I mean absolutely killing it), then guess what, people, A-Net would have probably done something whether it be raise prices or would have removed it. Period. However, it's not truly hurting anyone.

If you're upset about how "it's a PvP title that's turning into a joke" then guess what, poor you. Most of the other titles in the game are jokes anymore. So why should PvP be any different?

Nono, I'm quite sure most PvP'ers couldn't care less whether or not the Zaishen was PvP exclusive or not.

However, I for one can see that Handing out crap loads of Tournament Reward Points Every month will be very detrimental to the PvP scene.

And it's not just PvP that people are concerned over obviously...

Put it this way;
Does any body think that it's right and just, that someone with... say 20 accounts can very consistently gain more TRP per month (20*105trp per acct), than the winners of the Monthly Automated 1v1 tournament (1500 trp)?

This is the point where your argument logically collapses. There's this concept called fungibility. It's a fancy word that means that you can turn one thing into another (mutual substitutes is the technical way of putting this). Ecto and zkeys are nearly perfect substitutes, much like the dollar and the euro.

If you're willing to accept a 5:4 (z:e) ratio, you can turn your zkeys into ecto (regardless of quantity) more or less instantly. Other people will gladly accept the time price of getting a better bargain for those zkeys, and there are more than enough ecto in circulation to permit a single player to make that shift without disrupting that market.

That exchange rate may vary over time, but the principle will remain. There are players that want to use zkeys to max that title and will trade other stuff to get zkeys.

I would actually be totally cool with the Xunlai House Giving out Zaishen keys every month IF AND ONLY IF Keys had no relation whatsoever to PvP rewards. The fact is, the XTH gives out Tournament Reward Points, which are THEN changed to Zaishen Keys.

Right now, there are no more cash prizes from winning Mats, and only TRP is given out.
If keys do indeed go the way of the securitized subprime mortgage asset, why will people still gvg? or 1v1?

If the XTH gave out tonics, or anything that did not contribute to any other pre-existing title track, then yes, it would have no harm on the game, it would be fun and every month people will rejoice! But this is not the case!

But if you start to print more and more euros, euro will be less valuable and you need to exchange more euros for the same amount of dollars.

The economy in GW isn't in peril (if there is 1 economy in the first place) because its currency is the platinum and the gold coin.

People like to say that obsidian armors are a lot cheaper today, that before they cost several millions and now they cost under 1 million.

That isn't true.

Obsidian armor cost exactly the same amount of ectos/shards and exactly the same amount in gold.

What is more common is the ecto - and that happened for several reason - more people can go to UW since HA stopped being related to it, people keep farming it even though they have no direct use for it and such.

Now returning to the point in question- XTH makes the zaishen title cheaper.

Zaishen title is what increased the interest in the XTH in the first place because very few cared about gambling zaishen keys or TRP.

So the more keys exist the less value each individually key holds. The less value each individually key holds the more expensive each account gets.

In the end we see money that takes time to win in real life being traded by ectos that take time farming in GW.

Anyway, the economy of GW wont be disrupted because its currency is the platinum and the gold coin.

That is why when loads of people farm ectos the ecto price drop. That is why when you have loads of zaishen keys the price of them drop.

When the zaishen key lowers enough you might as well use them yourself instead of trade them. And once you have the title you are reduced to play the zaishen gamble for a good drop, which generates very very low currency.

GW economy isn't equivalent to real world economy so analogies with it tend to fail because they have different rules.

Have no idea. Maybe people find playing games fun?

People who buy more accounts get more gold isn't a problem for the economy per say. It's not screwing up the prices of items the way bots used to. It does create a situation where you can buy-in to a larger share of the traded gold out there if you spend more cash. You can definitely argue that this hurts players, but in this context you can't speak of an "economy" that is abstracted away from players as it is when we talk about mini-pet prices and so forth. The value of most items is not threatened, trade is not threatened, inflation is not an issue.

So really many people are talking at crossed purposes here with their definitions. Many concieve of the economy as concerning the value of items on the market, and the XTH is not causing big problems in that realm. It is causing another kind of pay-for-advantage problem, but they may not view that as a strictly "economy" issue.

You can't buy much worth buying with gold/platinum due to caps on the amount of plat you can trade and store. Players use alternate currencies to get around this problem. Long story short: there's one currency for absolute necessities and another set of currencies for luxuries.

You can play and complete the PvE game with just the necessities. Still, players will eventually get bored with the campaigns and either start trying to get luxuries, go to PvP, or quit. If ANet wants to retain customers, the luxury item markets matter. Luxury items provide goals that would not otherwise exist for players. Make those items unattainable, and people quit.

Because of transactions costs associated with trading, the two markets behave differently. Prices tend to be sticky in low end markets because it is not worth spending an extra hour trying to get an extra 1k out of an Aptitude not Attitude mod. The markets for luxury items that trade for lots of zkeys and ecto behave differently. Supply is limited, it is therefore difficult for the markets to clear, and arbitrage opportunities exist.

Sure, but the value seems pretty sticky. ANet dumped double keys into the system two months running and the value only moved down by 20%. That's MILLIONS of keys! Further, the price of the zkey appears to be bouncing back a bit of late.

Meanwhile, the price of the stuff you can trade zkeys FOR is rising rapidly. My basic contention is that the fixed supply item markets are the canary in the coalmine. The prices on other high end items will start to rise sooner or later, because the rate of zkey creation currently exceeds the rate of shiny item creation. Players with money to burn will ultimately drive up prices across all markets.

To paraphrase Isaac Asimov: any idiot can see a crisis once it arrives. The service is to locate it in embryo.

In the long run. But in the long run we are all dead. (Keynes)

See the inconsistency there? How to explain theory to someone:
1) lay out how the causal process works
2) instantiate (ie: give an example where the causal process is present)

RL analogies are unavoidable when you talk about the in-game economy. Don't throw stones when living in a glass house.

Go look at the thread showing the spike in the value of the Kuunavang in the last couple of months. For that matter, look at the general trend across the graph. How is this not inflation?

The bots caused deflation, not inflation, for most of their run. They drove the prices of in-game stuff down by increasing supply. That is problematic because it decreases the number of items it is worth trading. This makes everyone that plays the game "regularly" poorer, as more potential gains from trade are eliminated by transaction costs. The inscription system had the same effect, but people could not see this and the system persisted.

The only time when the bots are inflationary is when they produce currency. However, during the vast majority of GW the bots farmed (farm?) other things. Gold items and lockpicks were the botter's usual stock in trade; they produced "necessities" as well as the gold with which one buys them, and ANet eventually got smart and hit the rate at which they produced gold pretty hard via loot scaling.

And as the seller you are free to accept or refuse what additional currency you accept.

If zkeys are entering in the system by the millions every month either:

a) they are generated at a faster pace then other currencies (like ectos or black dye) and so are worth less,

b) they are generated at a faster pace but destroyed/consumed at a faster pace,

c) they are generated at the same pace and consumed at a lower rate,

d) they are generated at the same pace and consumed at a higher rate,

e) they are generated at a lower pace.



The luxury market generates exactly 0 luxury items.
The luxury market needs someone with the item and that is willing to sell it.

Perceived value takes time to change. Additionally, zaishen title is still young and the title enthusiastic are happily doing UWSC and trading those ectos for zaishen keys.

Zkeys also generate gold items. I don't know the exact drop rates but 20+ millions keys should generate a decent amount of rare skins.


You are looking at a limited item. You can offer 1750 zkeys to me and I wont sell you my kuunavang or my grawl or any of my other limited mini pets and items.

Why? Because for someone that cares for them they are priceless and irreplaceable.

If that was a trend you should also see top rare skin items like celestial compass, eternal blades, BDS and such go up in price.

For long time bots cause inflation by making money be worth less.

Yes, later bots and farmers alike drop prices, making those luxury items available to a larger portion of the population.

That is quite more recent.


Additionally we need to be careful between luxury item, exclusive item and limited item.

Many players want luxury items, that are rarer that normal items but still aplenty, probably because they like the look of it.

Then you have the exclusive item. Those are (or were) extremely hard to acquire so very few people had access to them.

As farm methods evolve, time pass many of those items lose their value for the portion of the player base looking for the so called "epenis".

Look at obsidian armors, sephis axes, elemental swords, death swords, etc.

At last we have the limited items. Those are really exclusive since they cant be created anymore. Those will go up in price till they reach the 100k+1750 armbraces and still people wont sell them.

So, as I see, XTH create a problem in the limited market but a much smaller one in the exclusive/luxury market and none at all in normal market.

People can complain that this game is about skil>time and so skill>money, but since time is money I feel very unsympathetic, unless you are telling me that a person that started playing last year isn't in a disadvantageous position when compared to someone that has been farming since day 1.

While there are stuff that Anet can do, like making zkeys impossible to trade between accounts (and people still have ectos/armbraces/black dyes/lockpicks for currency, the game survived for 3 years without zkeys), removing the XTH isn't one of them.

Punish the abusers not the folks that use them as it was supposed to be.

Things go ruined when the made title that requires 10,000,000 gold in z-keys. You want to complain because there's a way to make like 20+ keys a month... sure that really ruined the economy

WOW is calling you.

I say we punish the people who put the abusive system in place.

Doesn't matter what I accept or don't accept. If players exist that will trade ecto for zkeys, then getting zkeys every month is just as good as getting ecto. There are millions upon millions of ecto out there in the system.

moriz is trying to make an argument up above that the zkeys are not inflationary if they end up in someone's box. The problem is that the zkeys hit the monetary markets right away. It's not like the zkeys are given to people that are inactive; players get them and then either use them or sell them to buy other stuff with the proceeds. Let's look at the indirect means by which zkeys increase the amount of money in the system.

Think of it this way: a rich player that wants to max the title can blow the dust off the ecto in the box and trade ecto for zkeys. The ecto ends up in the hands of players that want to spend it, and the zkeys vanish. Currency ends up in the hands of those that actually wish to buy stuff; the supply of money in the system increases and prices go up. You don't see movement in the price of an ecto because the markets are sufficiently liquid, and because the trader's code fixes him in equilibrium rather nicely at the 4.5k-5k plateau.

moriz is correct that eventually the ecto lands in someone's box or gets tradered, but this takes a while. There's a selection effect here. The guy trading the item is probably selling it because he either needs the ecto to make a purchase immeidately or plans to make a purchase on down the road once there are enough pinky globs in storage.

On top of that, you have all the new zkeys that hang around and get used as currency in trades as well. I pay with zkeys less frequently than I pay with ecto, but I also have fewer of them.

Right, but the drop rates stink. An aggressive estimate of the value of the drops from your zkey would be 2k, and that includes the probability of pulling everlastings and super rare skins. Further, the Z-chest doesn't drop everything in the game.

You're one seller. Assuming that your own preferences are shared by the owners of other Kuunavangs is probably a bad idea. If you put a mini Kanaxai on the table and insisted that I include my mini Kuunavang in the deal we strike, I'd cough up the Kuuna. In fact, if you stick 150 ectos on the table, I'll sell and go through the hassle of finding another one.

There's always a reservation price. Yours may just be higher than mine.

Canary in the coalmine, man. Those prices have declined because those markets are currently saturated by overfarming. Add another 100 ectos to everyone's box so that the masses can afford these items, and you'll start to see movement in those markets (assuming all else stays equal). Give it a few months.

I agree that the market for sub-100k items is unlikely to be affected in the long run. However, the luxury market will eventually suffer the same effects.

Everyone knows that this is the norm in an MMORPG. Either you come in at the beginning or you face a long uphill trek to the top of the heap. Why is it justice to devalue time invested by players that have been around longer? Sure, ANet is incentivized to do this in order to continue to attract new players. Doesn't make it fair, just or right.

Personally, I would be fine with making Zkeys untradeable. However, doing so punishes the innocent that legitimately want to max it but have not. Removing XTH punishes the abusers and inconveniences everyone else.

Then they should obtain the keys through PvP...you know...the original reason for them.

I fail to see how its an "inconveniece". I've heard this argument all the time for keeping abusive things in Guild Wars. The stuff should not exist to begin with. Anet has always preached against RMT, and not only is this RMT, it is abusive RMT.

It would be very interesting to see what kind of equilibrium we'd arrive at if Z-keys were to become untradeable between players but have them added to an NPC trader instead.