Your opinion on XTH?

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.