Wealth == How many accounts you own. Should this continue?

I don't understand this argument. What's the big deal? Is it not so called "fair"?

I don't see why not. As long as people purchase new accounts, that means revenue for GW, and prolongs the game longevity.

The last 2 months however, there's been no new wealth based on zkeys - but hopefully they fix it.

OK, let me put a theory on the table.

If we have a high jumping competition, but we set the maximum bar height very low, the competition is pointless. Lots of people jump over the maximum bar height, and everyone that could do better is made worse off.

If we remove the cap on bar height, everyone can take pride in the height that they are able to jump, and people that are not the best are given motivation to work and improve.

If I had a Stygian Reaver drop in Halls 18 months ago, I was excited. Today, I would wipe my ass with it, but it would hurt.

The more you diversify the possible accomplishments in the game, and the more challenging you make them, the better off everyone is.

Now, killing XTH would definitely have the undesirable side effect of rewarding everyone with the foresight to have already invested in zkeys (either by getting the title or hoarding them). But the point is that this never should have been permitted in the first place, and this side effect doesn't present a compelling argument for why the madness should be permitted to continue.

This doesn't follow from the logic. It's easy at any given time to convert X ecto to Y zkeys. The only reasonable argument against accepting the zkeys is your unwillingness to invest Z amount of time making the exchange...but if you get enough zkeys in the transaction, you'd always be stupid to refuse to take the zkeys.

People aren't going to stop accepting them because they have intrinsic value. In many ways, they're safer than the ecto. Eventually, enough people are going to wake up, recognize how many ectos are out there, and drive another panic. You won't observe a panic with zkeys.

You said it yourself, killing XTH would cause a price spike in zkeys and reward the minority who hoard them. This would HURT the majority of the gamers as they would have a harder time maxing the title and getting rare skins and benefit the people who are already rich in zkeys and other commodities. Making the poor poorer and the rich richer, how is that good for the game?

Then they made a mistake. I certainly stopped accepting them for my transactions when they were valued at 5k each. Furthermore, if XTH is stopped, the amount of available zkeys in the hands of the common players would be reduced since more people would be using them up for titles. Therefore they would stop being a currency either way.

Your argument is extremely narrow - doing X would have distributional consequences that favor a minority, and therefore we should not do X. I can think of at least three situations that, if true, would invalidate this argument:

1) Utilitarian - if the tiny minority has a sufficiently high value for the price spike and the majority doesn't care that much, then societal utility is maximized via the price spike.

2) XTH is destroying value by devaluing the acquisition of zranks, and the damage from this outweighs the harm caused by the price spike.

3) XTH is contributing to the hyperinflation of rare items, and the distributional consequences from that issue far outweigh the distributional consequences you are concerned about.

I'm sure that #3 is true, I believe that #2 is true but the conjecture is purely theoretical and not testable, and I doubt that #1 is true. If you're worried about the rich getting richer, well, that's happening because the rich own ultra-rare miniatures and items whose value is constantly increasing, NOT because of increases in value of their zkey stashes.

Who do you think is actually using most of the zkeys, anyway? The people that are all excited about XTH resell them for cash to buy other stuff they want. Guess where those zkeys end up.

In short, the XTH is like trickle down economics. A rising tide may lift all boats, but if you dump a bunch of cash into the system ultimately the rich get richer. Reaganomics and the Bush tax cuts should convince you of this.

You're just wrong. Both markets are liquid, meaning that you can convert back and forth at some price at any time. If the market exchange rate is X ecto:Y zkeys, and the opportunity cost of the time needed to convert the items is Z, then X ecto = Y+Z zkeys if you prefer ecto and X+Z ecto = Y zkeys if you prefer zkeys. Either way, if the amount of the less preferred currency is sufficiently great, you should accept the trade. It's not like you're married to the zkeys if you accept them. You can always go trade them for ecto or sell them for cash and then buy ecto with the cash.

One of the more interesting implications is that if you have more than one currency and the exchange market is liquid, you can ALWAYS make money via arbitraging between players with different preferences. I did this once for a couple of weeks until I got bored, but made a tidy sum of ectos and zkeys (at a per hour rate that compared with event item farming).

This works the same way in real life; it's one of the reasons that a seat on an exchange floor has value. (The others are reaction speed in a boom or panic and informational advantage.)

People were using zkeys for currency early in XTH's run, and there's still a fair quantity of them floating around at the moment. They would not be destroyed as a currency if the XTH were removed because there is ALWAYS a market for their resale, but their actual use would become much less predominant if the number of keys in the system diminished over time. They'd be like Sacagawea dollar coins - perfectly legal tender, but you don't see them all that often.

Do you know how much wealth do I have?
Does it matter?
If I told you I have 1000 accounts and have over 1 million zaishen keys, would you have an heart attack and die or be there all night long cursing the gods because of this grievous injustice?
If I told you I bought 10 mini polar bears, 2 mini pandas and 3 mini kaanaxai with all the zkeys generated by the my 1000 accounts, will that affect your life?

And what would be the difference from that to:

"I'm a fat guy, I play GW 18 hours per day, I've abused every single conceivable farm and some that were destroyed before the public know, I'm in a guild that farms DoA and UW all day long, so I get 5 armbraces and 100 ectos per day. With all that money I farmed I bought 10 mini polar bears, 2 mini pandas and 3 mini kaanaxai".

Either you don't need money and you can play GW all day long, farming/power trading, to get those luxury items or you can't play all day long but you can dish the money you make and buy accounts.

Sincerely, next we will have a thread asking to limit the number of hours a given account can play per day because people can't compete with that!

Time is money explains this quite easily!

Its definitely fair in the sense that it has equal opportunity for any GW player to buy as many accounts as she/he wants. The question is is it ethically acceptable. Many players define a game as a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules or something like that. The point of concern is that a player should have reasonable expectations that purchasing one copy of the game allows him to play the game and compete in every aspect on equal footing. Hence the feeling of betrayal eluded to by players like Martin Alvito in paragraph 17 of post #199.

This is the fault of Anet. The official in game currency of gold/plat has been devalued to the point of irrelevancy. Hyperinflation has set in a long time ago causing players to seek alternate currency, since they cannot hold enough gold on their toon to keep up with inflation. Anet has instituted a system of benign neglect when it comes to the economy.

By not nerfing 55ing in August of 2005, letting ursan remain unchecked for a year, and not knocking SF back into the stone age they have destroyed the economy of GW. The influx of currency from XHT is quit possibly the last straw. Not to mention the replacement of the effective anti-farming code for the much more lenient loot scaling which led to the proliferation of botting. The botting issue has only been brought under control by efforts of a few dedicated employees who care about the game. Our esteemed ex-CR Gaille Gray being a driving force to her credit.

You are absolutely right. However, the effect of many individuals with the same mind set will have an effect on the economy keeping the zkeys from their true equilibrium price.


Leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This type of mechanic needs to go away and never resurface again.

"True" market value is a nonexistent chimera. What we can say with confidence is that certain distortions (eg: Rare Material Trader) will produce specific effects of uncertain magnitude.

The players' preferences and psychology are always exogenous to any economic model. All you can do is specify them properly, because you get worthless results if you don't. It doesn't matter where those preferences come from; you judge the validity of the preference specification by the quality of the model's results as compared to real data.

You can explain the empirical phenomenon without your assumption, and the logic of the explanation is internally consistent (if more complicated), so we're better off if we don't make it. Under certain conditions, that assumption is likely to blow up, so making that assumption is likely to lead us into error. What if we have another great ecto panic, as we did after HM's introduction and during the Chaos Plains farm?

I could care less about you. What concerns me is that OTHER players are denied the opportunity to earn those items via gameplay. Your hypothetical fat kid that grinds incessantly packs up his toys and leaves for greener pastures if the end goals become unattainable. That sucks, because all of that time investment has probably turned him into a pretty competent player of the game that is no longer made of fail. He's also not buying the next game, which is also a bad thing in the long term.

If something like XTH sends prices through the roof, that increases the amount of time investment needed to garner the same return. That impacts my life. I'm not willing to be said fat guy that plays the game incessantly to achieve my goals.

Limiting (reasonably) the amount of time players could spend in-game is a better idea than you think it is. You'd improve the health of the true addicts and improve the quality of the servers. How are these effects bad?

The barkeep is still responsible for cutting someone off in this country, right? A free country does not mean unlimited freedom. Nor should it.

If they could earn those items via gameplay you would have a point.

Since they can't it doesn't matter.

All the other items can be gained via gameplay regardless XTH.

#1 is not true. For #2, the value of zrank depends on the individuals so I agree that it is not testable. #3 is not true too because the prices of many of these rare items did come down ever since XTH was first introduced. Furthermore, if more people have access to zkeys then there should be more of these rare items in the market. Since the supply of these rare items shot up, then their demand would come down.

Not necessarily. Like you have said for #2 above, if they prefer to use the zkeys to invest in their title, then they wont be reselling them for cash.

You made the assumption that I would be interested to continue trading my zkeys off for other goods. That assumption is wrong since further trading would take up more of my time away from actually playing this game so there is an opportunity cost involved. How much value does this amount of my time (Z) cost? It differs from person to person. If a zkey was worth 5k, then I made it the responsibility of the person whom I am trading with, to sell his zkeys for gold or ectos before commencing trade with me. If he can get 5k for each of his zkeys, fine, otherwise if he could only get less than 5k, he would have to chip in more gold to make the trade.

And that would be a sad day indeed for many players, especially those who have bought extra accounts because they were led to believe, from ANet's website, that having more accounts gives the potential of greater rewards from XTH.

Besides, I rather see the majority of the players happy when XTH is reopened, than to see a handful of greedy zkey hoarders rubbing their hands together to exploit the market.

It is ethical because the gold reward from this game doesn't come from skill but from time spent playing it. If you spend 100 hours farming, you would be expected to earn more than someone who, with the same skill level, only spent 50 hours farming the exact same way.

If it is from TIME instead of skill, then the question of the player's lifestyle would come in. Does the player have a full time job? Does he have other responsibilities like bathing/dressing up his kids and getting them ready? The player with more real life responsibilities would have lesser time to play this game, even if he/she has a higher skill level than the irresponsible brat that can afford to play GW 8 hours a day. So in GW, the RICHER player isn't necessarily the MORE SKILLFUL player.

But at least the guy, with a fulltime job, spent his/her time working ("farming") to get real money, which the kid with absolutely no real life responsibilities whatsoever loses out on. This is when buying extra accounts can help equalize.

Then they should have used ectos. At least we have a trader for that, so their prices are more stable than zkeys.

A section of posts from the official Guild Wars Wiki under Regina's talk section.

"Considering, the Guild Wars skeleton krewe is already working at capacity, things get prioritized and XTH does not seem to be on the front burner. I do not hear any news or updates at all from ANet or its employees. I hear rumblings from people who want to get rid of XTH for silly notions of jealousy, vanity, and ego. It has been my opinion that the loudest chick in the nest gets the worm and I hope these anti XTH have not been chirping the loudest. XTH has been a big part of the game for me. I look forward to every month of predictions and observing the matches. Looking over the guilds to see what they are running who is playing for who. I really missed that part of the game last month and this month. Of course I can still observe and follow it but without any sense of reward the thrill is just not there. If XTH predictions goes, it will disappoint a lot of fans.--Esth 02:43, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Unless you're actually part of the crew, or near them (fly on the wall?), you don't know what's on the front burner any more than us. So the whole bird thing is just cuckoo talk. If they removed it for fixing, I'm pretty sure it's top priority. -- Alaris_sig Alaris 13:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

My comments are from after reading Regina's July 7 journal entry, as well as the lack of comments thereafter on the XTH.

"One of the things the Live Team has been working on is much planning for future updates. This includes talking about features that we think should be included. We have had discussions about the Test Krewe, and what the game update schedule will be like with the Test Krewe involved. We have been working with other functional teams in the office to help create an infrastructure that will support our organizational needs for the Test Krewe. The team we're working with is not full time on GW1 so, their time is at a premium. Other discussion has pertained to Henchman in GvG, and technical and administrative logistics and planning behind that. Another project is Xunlai Tournament House. We're digging into the code for XTH. Know that we're continuing to plug away at it. Incidentally, the folks working on Xunlai, have been drafted in to help with this, meaning that they are not full time on GW1 either, so their time must be scheduled carefully as well." Regina's July 7, 2009 Journal Entry

From this I get that XTH is not "Top" priority but at the bottom of the listed current matters. --Esth 17:52, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

The main bit of information from that quote is that we do not have one person who's sole job is to work on XTH. Like many in the company, people work on different projects at the same time. I did not give an indication of how it is being prioritized in comparison to other projects. As to the OP's question, regarding compensation for downtime, I've passed along your question for consideration and they'll evaluate it. --Regina Buenaobra Image:User_Regina_Buenaobra_sig.png 18:45, 21 July 2009 (UTC)"

Wrong. You play the game, you get stuff. You get enough stuff, you trade it for the rare shinies you want. People want ecto/zkeys/armbraces for their ultra-rare shinies.

We're not talking about the same rare items here. I'm talking about the stuff that no longer drops (q7s, limited minis) or rarely drops (q8s). Any chimp can get an eternal blade.

OK, let's talk about the flow of transactions in our game world.

Suppose that a few million zkeys are minted from XTH every month. Some of these keys hang around, some of them get used by the owners of XTH accounts, and some of them get resold on the open market.

We can infer from the fact that the price didn't crater (and all the r9+ zrank players running around) that a significant share of the keys were used. We can also infer from the fact that the price declined every month that letting the keys rot in the box was probably a minority strategy (it isn't rational, given sensible beliefs about the future).

Let's assume a skewed distribution of wealth, just like in real life: most players don't have a lot of money and a few have a very great deal of it.

So, the punchline: Where did the zkeys from XTH that players resold go?

The answer is obvious: they were used to open the Zaishen Chest by a minority of players with the resources to purchase large quantities of zkeys.

Incorrect. I am merely stating the patently obvious: the time price is finite and you can place a finite value upon it. This is most easily seen by example: if someone offered you 1750 zkeys for your q9 Eternal Blade six months ago, you would have taken that deal. In other words, a quantity of zkeys greater than you have sense existed.

You are correct that the time price Z varies from person to person, but the calculation is simple - what was the average expected value of the time foregone? If you could have been farming up 40k/hour, and it would have taken you half an hour to dump the zkeys, you'd need 20k in zkeys to make the transaction worth your time.

If you refused business by compelling players to sell their zkeys themselves, you clearly cost yourself money. I'm not saying that you should have accepted zkeys at "face" value. I'm simply saying that accepting them at a discount was the proper play.

Personally, I think the whole situation stinks to high heaven. My suspicion is that those of you who purchased accounts for XTH have nothing to worry about. ANet has a choice - offend those who will *probably* be upset by continuing the XTH or those who will *certainly* be upset because they spent their hard-earned cash to exploit the XTH. This is sort of like a recent Senate election where I was asked to choose between a candidate that was probably corrupt and one that was certainly corrupt. Easy choice, right? XTH will ultimately reopen. For the devs, XTH is a Faustian bargain - great short term gains resulting in long term loss, but you can't walk away from the deal once you make it to avoid that nasty long term loss.

Me and my 22 zkeys garnered from the last two weekend events, eh?

Your proposition is too high-risk for me. My guess is that the XTH will reopen eventually, and I cannot predict when that news will break. When that news does break, anyone long on zkeys will get burned badly. Why assume that risk when there are much better, safer ways?

Dead wrong. Some methods of making money are more efficient than others, and the best ones often do not make the public domain or are simply too difficult to become mass standards. Skill (doing that which others cannot figure out how to do) can substitute for time. I've got a life, a wife, a kid and a dissertation project - but I still want to see the game's economy remain the game's economy and keep IRL cash out of it altogether.

The kid with no responsibilities is hopelessly outgunned, because he has no pressure to innovate. Time just isn't precious, and as a result the kid will not ruthlessly hunt down the last scraps of efficiency that produce a large competitive edge.

Except when ecto prices are not. The shifts in zkey pricing have been more or less predictable. The shifts in ecto pricing have been catastrophic. What the trader does is artificially hold the situation in equilibrium until it is simply unsustainable. Once the dam breaks, all hell breaks loose.

The ultra rare shinies are things you can't get with regular gameplay.

Buying a magazine or winning some prize in a contest that was only restricted to a country or whatever don't seem that different from buying accounts.

Anyway, the ultra rare shinies are restricted to some minipets and some one event only weapon skins.

Declaring the GW economy ill because some amount of items that can be measure in thousands, when there are millions upon millions, probably billions of items, got a boost in price, is ridiculous.

It is obvious that since there are only thousands of those limited items and millions of players, only a small portion of the population can acquire them.

Tell that to my Greased Lightning.

There's all the difference in the world! In one case, you were lucky. In the other, you paid money. If Eternal Blades were sold in the in-game store, rather than were distributed via luck, this forum would be up in arms.

Those that purchased magazines or the Factions/NF collector edition derived a very limited benefit, because so many of the darned things were given away. When five bucks spent on a magazine turns into a miniature worth 50k - so what? When ten bucks spent on an account turns into a million gold, we have a problem. It's a matter of degree, and the XTH is a sizable gift that keeps on giving.

Let's put the magnitude of the problem into perspective. A player that bought thirty accounts and played XTH semi-competently with them could have acquired enough wealth to buy an undedicated Island Guardian or rank 11 Zaishen rank by now. That's just three hundred bucks (using the lowest promo pricing for Prophecies which started in December '07) - low enough to tempt people to do it.

Yes, I have met people with dozens of accounts. The pattern I have heard is that such players initially bought a few accounts (like many of us), inherited others from players that left, and later bought a bunch of accounts at a retail promo price to exploit XTH.

Nope. Unconditional and req 7 weapons really did drop for the fortunate. The Miniature Ghostly Hero and Miniature Greased Lightning are given away in-game. Same for items such as the Miniature Mallyx, Gwen Doll, Yakkington, and Celestial Pig that are rarer and more coveted than most of the miniatures given away by magazine codes.

These items are the carrots that keep the draft horse plodding. Since there isn't any other reason to continue playing PvE after completing the main storyline unless you like title grind...

But a much larger subset of the population desires to possess them. Take that hope away, and that segment of the population loses interest and leaves.

It doesn't have to be feasible for all of them to succeed, but it does have to be feasible for those players to try.

I like how Regina herself expects to be REWARDED for such mundane thing as making the XTH prediction. Isn't it the heart of GW that everything is "just for fun" and there's pretty much no tangible reward whatsoever no matter what you do (other than grinding, that is)?

Sure, XTH rewards people who make the right prediction choices. But to say that "the thrill is just not there" in regards to the game (even if it's just the prediction)? Isn't that pretty much a summary of how the entire GW franshire makes you feel after playing for a while?

I smell hypocrisy. Off-topic and all that.

I am sure this has been mentioned before in this thread, but I'm not going to read all the posts and find it and stuff.

I would have a problem with this if in game gold actually gave one an advantage over others when it comes to playing the game.

I don't see how it actually effects the game in the least bit.

I've got a bit of gold saved up and have a few pretty fun farming builds that can keep me in gold pretty easy, but I know many friends of mine who have GWAMM r6 on multiple characters and have never once farmed and just saved up money from actually playing through the games and are just fine.

We're not all you, careyt. We don't all share your preferences. The problem of in-game gold conferring an advantage during gameplay was resolved at the release of Factions, but that isn't the only thing that people care about.

People play games for different reasons. Some people play GW just to experience the story. Personally, I think that the story in GW is sophomoric, pathetic and not believable. If I want a game that capably tells a story, I'll fire up a game from Bioware.

Other players, like your friends, like to make title track bars go up. That's a slightly expensive proposition, but if they ground max Kurzick the old fashioned way, they'd have the money to deal with it. XTH can help here, but it's not the only solution.

Another pack of players likes sticking stuff in the Hall of Monuments. Depending on how crazy you get with the miniatures, this can get REALLY expensive.

Still other players just like to acquire the rare goodies. They want to make their characters look a certain way, or collect stuff that's hard to find, or just have stuff that very few people have.

It's the last two groups that care. In the view of those players, people that do not care neither need nor deserve a seat at the discussion, because any solution would be equally satisfactory to a player that doesn't care.

From an outcomes standpoint, dumping tons of in-game currency into the system disproportionately favors players like me that already have the super-rare shinies that people trade the in-game currency for. People that are out farming ecto usually aren't farming it to acquire FoW armor or chaos gloves. They're farming it because they want something else. Unfortunately, the rate of ecto and zkey creation is way out of whack, making the prices of the nicest stuff you can buy go up into the stratosphere. The price increases are reminiscent of the price shifts after the massive ecto and armbrace dupe in 2007.

From a morality standpoint, the problem with XTH is that ANet appears to have taken a hypocritical stance. They're against RMT, except when the proceeds end up in their own pockets. This displeases players who would prefer to play a game where in-game cash is not effectively sold through an online store. ANet's aggressive stance against RMT attracted and retained a large segment of the player base that finds RMT repulsive.

Killing XTH would bring the rate of zkey creation down to more manageable levels, relaxing the rate at which prices inflate. This is far from the only step that would need to be taken to address the current problem; either something also needs to be done about what's going on in UW or the trader that props up ecto prices needs to be removed or recoded. However, killing XTH would be a step in the right direction.

This is all academic, since ANet is now permanently wedded to the XTH system by business necessity. This does not, however, stop us from arguing about it.

You forgot title-hunters (although they're not required for GWAMM).

I wouldn't fire guns on them so fast. IIRC there was a mention initially that it'd motivate players to look at the PvP scene and maybe make the jump. But I agree with you on the fact that this idea of getting RL money via XTH was in their mind (at the back IMHO).

There are other solutions, such as go back to the initial idea by limiting the XTH rewards based on how much PvP you play or how much time you spent in obserser mode (I know it'd be abused by people afking observer mode, but ideally it could bring a few people to PvP?), which you'd ofc present as "augmenting the XTH rewards when you PvP or observe". You could even connect this to zquests via zoin rewards or something like "get double zoin rewards from PvP zquests" or special zquests. Design-wise there's a lot that can be done. And to be perfectly fair with Linsey and the Live Team, I'm still waiting for the "PvP <3" update to say more.

I know it'd be a bold (if not mad) move and there'd be complaints on forum (but if we look at Jeff Strain's statement from 2007, see other thread, that forums do not represent the population, it could be allright), but it's like when SF will be definitely nerfed.

I didn't forget the title hunters; those are the people that like to make title track bars go up.

Observer mode is the worst thing that EVER happened to Guild Wars. Let's not go there.

The simplest "not kill it altogether" solution is to make it impossible to resell the zkeys from XTH. This at least dramatically attenuates the monetary factor. Even with ridiculously aggressive drop rate and pricing estimates, I can't come up with an expected value above 1.5k for a zkey. So you've effectively cut the problem of cash influx by more than half and deferred that influx to drops that don't make a hash of the economy to boot.

I prefer anything that forces people to invest substantial time in order to collect their XTH reward. The most elegant solution is to ramp up the XTH rewards as you complete Zaishen quests on that account during the course of the month. The real issue with the XTH isn't that it gives away keys; it's that it gives away keys with virtually no time investment.

If you make XTH no more time efficient than other farms, it's fine. That mission is accomplished as long as XTH makes you do something time-consuming you wouldn't otherwise do in order to receive sizable rewards. Making someone go play Fort Aspenwood for two hours in addition to their regular GvG and HA time would be enough. So would making someone kill a half-dozen bosses at twenty minutes a pop.

The problem you have there is that you're violating the implicit contract you marketed the additional accounts with. The purchasers of those accounts expected to get shinies "for free" every month after buying the account. If you add a time cost after the fact, a lot of those players would not have chosen to buy the account (or as many accounts) and feel cheated. This is bad for customer loyalty.

As a result, I only see prohibiting the resale of zkeys from XTH as a viable resolution. This accomplishes what is needed while only nerfing the RATE at which benefits from XTH can be collected. You've still got an RMT system, which sucks, but the second it was put into place ANet was wedded to that system forever. All you can realistically do is limit the damage once the genie is out of the bottle.

Your argument with high jump is flawed since in gw drops do not depend on skill. I can be the worst player ever with an empty skill bar and still get the best drops. I can pay for fame farming service and get undead ghostly in halls first time being there and having an empty skill bar. In my opinion your are all trying to fix something which is not broken and forget about less fair things which are just the design based. XTH is a problem for you but someone doing UW 100 times and getting 1 ecto and some doing it once and getting 5 is fine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

Yup, it's fine. In the long run, these problems take care of themselves. Of course, in the long run we are also dead.

GW drops over time do depend on skill. If I can engage in an activity with a higher expected value than your activity, than given the same time investment I will eventually acquire more shinies. If I can make the achievement gap wide enough, I can outrace you while investing less time.

Let's look at your hypothetical player that is made of fail. Since he sucks, he dies a lot. Since he dies a lot, he doesn't get a lot of opportunities to get a drop. By contrast, the farmer that doesn't suck gets a lot of opportunities to get a drop. Over time, the farmer that doesn't suck will almost certainly earn more stuff. Repeated selections from random distributions result in predictible patterns; given enough iterations the farmer's results start to look much like the underlying distribution, and he receives the desired item(s) in more or less the correct frequency given the number of runs invested.

Even better, if I sell services rather than farm, I can eliminate the problem of random drops altogether.

Sure, there are short-run fluctuations in drops with distributional consequences, but there's nothing inherently unjust about that. Everybody comes to the same feeding trough. Some days you hit the jackpot, and most days you don't. If you let the vagaries of chance get to you in life, you're going to spend a lot of time upset.

Its seems so silly to think that getting rid of XTH predictions will be better for the game and that it would get rid of people buying ingame gold for real money.

If XTH is gone for good, Third party RMT will come back. You will get the spamming, the account hijacking, bots all over again. In addition, ANet will lose revenue to offshore, Chinese Farmers. And you still get the people walking around with titles bought for real money.

For me the most important thing we would lose is that people would lose the interest in the AMT. This was a big part of the game for me. I loved observing the matches, the builds run and analyzing this for my predictions. Ya, what ever I am a geek.

You have no clue what you're talking about. I guess the thread is so long you haven't bothered reading any of it, but there's been an uptick in RMT precisely because they can buy many accounts cheaply and 'farm' with little to no effort and make a profit.

Which is good imo.

With a permanent close to the XTH the only way to get zkeys is through zaishen quests or PVP, like it should be. More gold for me because GW-pve is bad anyway.

I have only one account (always had) and I consider myself fairly rich, so I don't care about those who spend rl money for more ig money.

So are you saying that third party farmers are using the Zkeys from the accounts, to buy additional accounts and farm on those accounts and sell the gold for real money? Or are you saying that since ANet is selling accounts cheaply, that Third Party Farmers are buying accounts using them to farm and then selling the gold to people in game in a RMT? ---either or just clueless.

I say to that, where is any supporting evidence for this? I have not seen any increase of third party RMT activity for the last few months. If there is any increase in the last couple of months it may be a direct result of the fact XTH predictions has been down for the last couple of months, causing a temp demand in in game gold.

ECON 101, if there is no demand, there is no market. People buy accounts from ANet farm Keys so they don't buy from third party gold farmers.

The price decline can be due to a number of factors. It could be due to the fact that people are still buying new accounts to play XTH. If there are many players that have more than one account and are still buying accounts, then the supply of zkeys from XTH has been increasing over time. Then the price of zkeys would have to come down even if most players are using them on the chest.

Then that is barter, and not using the zkeys as currency. It is the same as someone not having enough gold for the trade, decides to throw in a mini pet or an unid rare into the window to try and make up for the difference. If at that time, 1 zkey was legal tender to worth 5k then by right, he should be able to pay for 5k using 1 zkey. What I said was, I refused to let him use zkeys as currency payment to me, meaning he was trying to tie in the value of 5k to 1 zkey in his transaction to me which I refused to accept.

If I say, my time spent reselling that zkey is worth 4k per zkey, then he should have an exchange rate of 1k per zkey, which he understandably refused because he could easily get more. Therefore, I let him sell his zkeys before trading with me.

Not necessarily. If zkeys are indeed currency then they should have a guaranteed value at that time, but they dont. Even when they were supposedly worth 5k for 1, some players were trying to buy them for only 4.5k. Unlike Ectos, they dont have a merchant to guarantee a certain value.

Keep in mind that it was ANet that first advertised XTH on their website and they mentioned one entry per account on their website too. Therefore, ANet has an obligation to fulfill to those who bought accounts for XTH. It would be unethical for them to take those earnings and do nothing. If they do that, dont expect people who have bought extra accounts to keep quiet and go away because I am very sure they wont. There is alot of real money involved in this and their reputation is at stake just before GW2 launches. To put it plainly, if they have taken the money, they are obliged to deliver what they promised.

I did qualify my statement with the phrase "farming the exact same way." It doesn't matter whether you use a public domain farming method or not, the guy with more time to farm would average out to be richer than the guy who has only half the time to farm. Does that mean that the richer guy has more skills? No! It just means the richer guy has hardly any real life responsibilities.

And my point still remains that zkeys doesn't even have a trader to "artificially hold the situation in equilibrium ". I dont see how it can be a currency.

The reason why zkeys were used as currency in the first place, is because there were lots of it due to multiple accounts and XTH. And of course, these people with lots of zkeys would artifically try to prop up its value when trading until they can't do so anymore due to the influx of more and more zkeys from XTH every month. Since nobody is guaranteeing their value, or controlling the number of accounts for XTH, it cant be used as a stable currency.

You can get one by playing, so inflaction doesn't matter - you play you can get one if you are skilled.



BMP - some great looking skins and no one cares (or mostly no one) about them.

The limited stuff will keep going in price regardless of zaishen quests or not.

Have you sold your mini grawl even though they offered you a ridiculous amount of zkeys? No? Why not?

Aren't you saying zkeys can buy rare stuff?

But is that stuff for sale at all?

Would people that actually have those items ever sell them if it wasn't for those insane amount of zkeys created?

We will never now, but something that isn't for sale might as be seen as priceless. Priceless beats hordes of zkeys

Would that Island Guardian be for grabs if for for those zkeys? Would the person owning it sell it if wasn't for that huge temptation? Would he sell it for much less?


Again, some of those are limited, and others can be attained by playing and not buying.



You don't need to farm to have money to buy a mallyx. You can go and get gemstones and get coffers.




What we will never now, is that if those limited miniatures would ever be in the market if not for zaishen keys.

You can complain that people with tons of accounts can buy limited mini pets due to ton of zkeys.

But I can counter that if it wasn't for the tons of zkeys that have an emote linked to it (emotes are carrots too) those minipets would never be for sale, so still making it impossible for the average joe to buy it.

We will never know.

I would posit that 90% of the Greased Lightnings out there are NOT in the hands of the players that won them. Ditto for Ghostlies. Since the majority are resold on the open market, inflation does matter.

It's a matter of speed. Look, there are two important functions here. One is the rate at which time can be converted to stuff, and the other is the rate at which item prices inflate. If the second rate is greater than the first, than it becomes infeasible for players to acquire these items through gameplay. If the second rate is nearly as great as the first, it remains theoretically possible but becomes prohibitive.

What happens is that only a small community that already possesses the items can EVER afford them, and that's not good for the game. You never want to lock the status quo in place in a game economy.

I am perfectly willing to sell ANYTHING given a sufficiently large overpay that ensures me the ability to buy another copy of the item and still book a profit.

Sure. Keep in mind that every zkey would have been considerably more valuable, so it would have taken considerably fewer of them to equate to the same amount of in-game wealth. What probably would have happened is that there would have been somewhat fewer transactions and they definitely would have been distributed differently.

Everything is worth what someone will pay for it. There's no such thing as priceless. There's just when someone else has more money than the owner has sense. The owner's reserve price differs from person to person.

Every single item that I listed was originally acquired in the game. Whether the item can be farmed today is immaterial. The argument that you made is that promotional miniatures and items are the same corrosive RMT as XTH. My response was that, with the exception of the Grawl, an insignificant benefit was gained. So someone got 100k in a one time transaction that cannot be repeated for five bucks? Who cares? Lots of non-limited stuff continues to be far more valuable than those items.

The problem with XTH is that it keeps printing money month after month after month for a very low buy in. It's the combination of repetition and the low price that are problematic.

Explain how repeating DoA to get gemstones is not farming.

Alternately, explain how acquiring the money to buy said gemstones on the open market is not farming.

This is conjecture that is without a doubt incorrect. As I noted, the distribution, and probably frequency, of transactions would have changed. But transactions still would have taken place. It's not like the market for these items had dried up prior to the introduction of XTH.

People also probably got fed up with the game and quit playing XTH during this period, too. It's fruitless to speculate about which effect was greater, because we have no data.

However, we have a certainty here: at some point any player buying zkeys is going to stop, because the title track and their capacity constraint are both finite. Either they max the title, reach satiation or run out of funds with which to buy zkeys, at which point they drop out of the market.

Since this effect is certain, it's more reasonable to infer that shifts in the demand side drove the observation. The market was nearly clearing each month, and as the price declined slightly new players with lower reserve prices came out of the woodwork and started making purchases.

You lack imagination here. Here you have a reserve of X, and the player is trying to pay you some amount of money less Z time price. However, whether or not the player has "made up the difference" depends entirely upon which miniature or rare he throws up in trade! If that miniature were a Kanaxai, you say, "That'll do nicely," and click accept.

So the point remains: given enough zkeys, you click accept, resell the zkeys and book your profit, even AFTER accounting for time price.

You misapprehend market pricing in this game. You need to conceive of the price of every item as a range. We'll call it C to D. C represents the highest actual price at which someone will always instantly buy your item when you spam it. D represents the highest price you could possibly sell the item for, given an infinite amount of time to query possible buyers.

Your power trader pounces on deals as close to C as possible (and occasionally lands a deal below C) and resells the item for as close to D as is feasible.

That range from C to D varies over time for every item, but it always exists. The ecto is an attractive way to store wealth because the range is highly compressed. You can get rid of them quickly, but you're not likely to buy a bunch of ecto, wake up the next morning, and find out that they've doubled in price. Of course, you're not likely to wake up the next morning and find out that the price is half of what it was, either.

As you correctly note, this stability results because of the trader. However, the security that the trader provides is illusory. The trader irons out temporary fluctuations, but if market pressures become sufficiently great, the trader also sends a clear and unambiguous signal to everyone that the price is declining for real this time. When that happens, it is rational for everyone that has ecto to sell it NOW, because that signal makes it certain that everyone else will be trying to do the same within in a few hours. So the price declines further, leading more people to recognize that they need to sell, etc.

That perception is why I argue that XTH is here to stay. This isn't a high minded fulfillment of obligations for ANet, though. It's capitulation before naked greed. Let's face it, you knew from past behavior that ANet could nerf XTH at any time. You elected to assume that the present status quo would remain in place indefinitely when you purchased those accounts. It's an easy assumption to make, and you probably didn't even realize that you were making the assumption. Now, its removal makes you feel cheated. You feel like the implicit contract between yourself and the developer was violated, and if that contract is not honored you're going to generate bad PR for them.

This assumes that all means of converting time to in-game money produce equivalent returns, which is not true. In fact, it's so wrong that the logic of your argument breaks down.

This is what people said when the U.S. ended the gold standard established at the Bretton Woods conference. They were wrong. Stability is a relative measure for any currency without backing, but it is perfectly possible for a currency without anyone "guaranteeing its value" to be more or less stable.

The currency with backing is more stable in the short term, but if the backing gets out of whack you experience huge shifts in price in a hurry.

Sure, I wouldn't want to hold thousands of zkeys for months at a time, but there's nothing wrong with using them as a marker for value in a trade. The price fluctuations are more or less predictable, and as a result you can manage and deal with them. If I wanted 80 ecto for an item, and you offered 90 zkeys, I'd cheerfully take that at present exchange rates. I can play that 90 zkeys into more than 80 ecto fast enough to make it worth my while.

I don't even understand why this thread is still open. It was started under pure speculation that multiple accounts was somehow "damaging" the economy, mostly through the abuse of XTH and the z-key spam it was causing.

Now that XTH has been closed for well over a month, there is no evidence that z-keys have shot up suddenly in value. This suggests that the hypothesis that a flood of z-keys has damaged the economy is untrue, and it is likely that the decline of cost of z-keys is due to other factors.

I would say that a more likely reason is that, in the beginning, any kind of "new" feature in the game is a sudden source of excitement regardless of how inane it is. As soon as M.O.X. was released, despite that there was little to no evidence that a Dervish Hero would be useful to most players, dervish rune prices skyrocketed as fans rushed to "load up" their hero. Months later, the prices cratered again indicating that dervishes have once again returned to the niche build spectrum, and I've yet to see any serious party pull out M.O.X. for over six months now.

When the Zaishen chest first appeared, people rushed to get keys for the chest. It gave you a title, an emote, and a possible ultra rare. In time, like with anything in the game, these things quickly lose their luster. Nobody cares about your title, and z-ranking your opponents is only good for a laugh at best. More than likely, people just didn't want to pay the high prices for keys anymore because there are better uses of their time, or the rewards are not paying off for them. Or perhaps serious Zaishen key fanatics have found easier methods to obtain keys via various modes of PvP combat instead of just buying keys from other players.

Even if the original poster is correct, and multiple accounts is really "ruining" the game, then what is the solution? Tell ArenaNet to stop selling accounts?

If anything, if ArenaNet really wanted to just "equalize" the whole game, then it would be very easy. They could just open up the flood gates. Make Voltaic Spears so common that it drops from every third monster in the game, and that would effectively kill all farming in Slaver's. Have Bone Dragon Staves and Obsidian Edges craftable at the weapon crafter in Kamadan.

It's truly unbelievable that the game has become a bunch of Haves and Have-Nots complaining. The Haves claim that the game is "too easy" and they are becoming a dying breed as their precious loot devalues so fast. The Have-Nots complain that stuff is too rare and we should have a more egalitarian society. And the best part is that all loot, no matter how you look at it, indicates nothing. If you see a person with Obsidian Armor and Chaos Gloves, it no longer means somebody is good at a game, understands teamwork, or doesn't spam on the mic in Teamspeak. All it means is that some guy had a lot of money from farming or a gold seller, and he blew it all on armor.

Let's review the evidence:

1) Zkeys have increased in value somewhat since the announcement. Previously they sold for well under 4k, and now it's hard to find them for 4k. This suggests that the supply has diminished markedly.

2) You're ignoring the fact that people expect XTH to reopen. This is artificially depressing demand for the keys, because people know that the flood gates will reopen and that the keys will be cheaper at a later time. People therefore rationally defer the purchase decision until later, when the supply is expected to be greater and the keys chaper.

Nerf the proceeds from XTH?

It's nice that you have your opinion about these things, but other people don't share your prejudices. This isn't a fascist society, and so we don't all have to conform to your opinion. Other people like having this stuff, or at least having the possibility of acquiring it via effort. Still other people like getting stuff by investing real money rather than effort.

This isn't a debate between the Haves and the Have-Nots. It's a debate between players that think that in-game loot should be allocated by time and effort, and those that think that in-game loot should be allocated by who is willing to spend the most dollars. The two are mutually exclusive states of affairs.

Look, the Haves are winning under the XTH regime. If you already own the ultra-rare shinies, inflation is fantastic! Your items become worth more and more markers of value without you having to spend a minute of time in-game. I AM a Have, but I think the whole situation sucks. There's little incentive for me to fire up the game at this point, because what I can do with my time in-game is a drop in the ocean compared to what I will already receive by doing nothing. Further, players that aren't willing to buy tons of accounts to get zkeys get a raw deal in the end.

I look at a kid running on today's hamster wheel chasing ultra-rare shinies at current prices and I say: that sucks. You'd have to put a LOT of effort in these days to climb the mountain.

Not true, the player that I traded with, insisted that his zkeys are worth 5k each.

So the point remains that if the player doesn't give me a good enough exchange rate of 1k or less per zkey, I am not going to accept it. That is my opportunity cost.

And that is what has been happening to zkeys all the time since it doesn't have a trader.

That's where you wrong. It is an obligation that ANet has to fulfill otherwise they risk a class action suit to return the money that they took, regardless of their disclaimer.

Of course it is true, and this can be easily proven. Take 1 hour to farm your very best and I will take a month to farm my very best. Even if I am not a better farmer than you or even if I am a sucky player, I bet I can still earn more gold than you did in that 1 hour.

Not true. That is what made many local currencies fail in the first place. This is why modern currencies are backed by central banks. A zkey is not a legal tender. Furthermore, it is not even an IOU from any authority that promises a particular exchange rate. This is why a game economy that uses zkeys is going to be chaotic and unstable.

But what if the backing doesn't get out of whack? That means the currency becomes stable in the long term too.

Except that they FAIL as a currency because the price fluctuations that continue to fluctuate over long periods of time. If people think that zkeys prices would drop, then everyone would start trading off their zkeys like hot potatoes. This makes the zkey value drop even further so those who have bought their zkey earlier would lose even more money.

Actually many of us do share that same view.

In-game rewards should be allocated based on skill, rather than time and effort because time to play depends on lifestyle. Which means that the game is intrinsically biased against those players with a full time job and real life responsibilities. Having it based on dollars would at least help those who hold full time jobs a chance to catch up, with the fat kids farming 8+ hours a day while eating from their parent's hands.

I have 6 accounts and (back when I cared) I got like 135 points per. Which translated into about 750k/month (810 if I actually took the time to sell the keys at proper prices).

That is some ridiculously good money for doing absolutely nothing. 750k "per" month.

Daesu, I'm done arguing with you. It's fairly evident that either:

a) you believe that it is possible to induct general principles from single instances - in other words, you are ignorant of basic principles of logic OR
b) you are such a concrete thinker that you just aren't comfortable moving beyond instances to address the abstract machinery that links all those instances together.

Worse, you are clearly ignorant of basic economic principles such as what it means for a currency to be backed, so there's no point in discussing currency with you further. If I talk about apples and you think I'm talking about oranges, we're going to talk past one another.

I agree with your sentiment regarding allocating drops via skill. I think it's the "fairest" system, but the problem is that the fat kids buy a lot of games, and so as the game designer you have to give them some hope of getting what they want in order to sell them the game.

In what I see as the ideal gaming world, you'd unlock a skin by completing X task in under Y period of time, and unlock another skin by completing X task with only Z people, and unlock yet another skin by doing it in Y time with only Z people. The stuff that the in-house design team thinks is the nicest would be associated with the most challenging objectives.

But that's just me. An awful lot of people would HATE that system.

2000 ectos over the course of a year. Figure that's a clean Ghostly for doing jack-all. Not bad, eh?

I never agreed with XTH, but I'd be damned if I wasn't going to abuse it. -shrug-

And you are twisting economic principles just to suit your own agenda. When I said modern currencies are backed by central banks, you would say but the central authority can fail and everything will fall apart. Of course in real life anything can fail, even the US central banks, but the US has been using USD for quite awhile now. You rather go back to the ancient days of barter. What you are suggesting for zkeys is not currency, but a mere commodity whose price fluctuate like a sack of flour.

So you think the working adults dont buy enough games then? Many of my co-workers who are avid gamers have all kinds of consoles, ranging from the PS3, PS2, old XBox, XBox 360, Wii, etc. and many other PC games. You heard of rock band? They have the full actual band sets that can connect to their consoles that cost hundreds of dollars. With 6 figure salaries, these are just small money for them.

Do you know what MMOs they play? Games like wow and everquest. Do you know why they dont want to try to play GW? According to them, it is because it would take them too much time to grind to a level where they can really enjoy the game. They dont have as much time to play since they have full time jobs, but they have the money and gaming skill/experience. By designing GW to be biased against people holding full time jobs would just be detrimental for the game because these are the people that would WELCOME micro transactions and are able and willing to support a game for many years. Yes, these are the people that have been supporting WoW and made it as successful as it is today.

Really I think GW attracts a different type of gamers than WoW. GW gamers tend to be more cheapskate (reminds me of Vork in the Guild episodes). Many GW gamers would rise up in arms against each transaction in the online store and suck every single update without wanting to pay even a single cent. Even a simple thing like XTH, they have to kick up a fuss about it even though it obviously funds ANet efforts, they dont want to support them. Go ahead if you think that this game should remain a game more catered for little fat kids, instead of working adults. Either that or you are just zkeys hoarders and plan to exploit this situation for your own selfish purposes.

i have 4 accounts but dont hate me !D: i had 1 that ran out of space so i got the other 3 so i would have all campaigns and more character spaces, it's just cheaper than paying £3.99 for 1 character slot when each campaign is £10, i don't bother with the xunlai house and nicholas things, but i've still got lots of things to do around GW

I feel compelled to respond to this misinformation, so that other people reading the thread are not misled.

A backed currency is directly convertible to something of value. This is usually gold or silver, but sometimes services rendered by the backing agency are used. You bring X amount of currency to the backer, and the backer gives you 1 unit of the backing instrument for X amount of currency.

This is fantastic at keeping the currency's value steady, until too many people lose faith in the currency and prefer to exchange it. Governments print more money than they can actually afford to exchange, because not everyone (under normal conditions) will prefer to exchange it. This is similar to banking reserve requirements; the bank doesn't keep enough cash around to make good on all of its deposits at any given time. Banks fail all the time; when the demands of their depositors outweigh their available assets, they are compelled to close. Backed currencies also eventually collapse.

Since the Bretton Woods agreement blew up during Nixon's presidency, modern currency is not backed. It's what we call fiat currency, meaning that it is issued by a central bank without being linked to anything of value. The central bank does NOT guarantee that money in any way, shape or form. They merely control the amount of it in circulation at any given time in order try to keep the price reasonably stable as demand for the currency fluctuates.

Note that the price of these fiat currencies DOES fluctuate like that of a sack of flour. However, it would be more true to state that the price of the currency has fluctuated, unless there has been some underlying change in the way we make flour or the demand for flour - which is rare with commodities but does happen (eg: corn and ethanol).

You should be aware that a dollar is different from a Treasury bill or Treasury note. The government stands behind its instruments of debt (until it doesn't, but that's another lecture), makes its interest payments and pays off the face amount of those notes that mature. The value of a dollar on the open market derives from its function as an open-ended options contract on U.S. government securities, as well as private stocks and bonds that trade on U.S. exchanges. However, that dollar in and of itself is worth nothing and the U.S. government certainly isn't going to compensate you if it becomes worthless tomorrow.

So why do I say that zkeys make a more attractive currency in some respects? Well, hardly anyone actually buys FoW or Chaos Gloves any more, but there's plenty of demand to exchange zkeys for points to the title track. With ecto you have what has become more or less a fiat currency that is constantly being printed. Inflation is more or less assured, which is bad for the ecto sitting in your storage.

This is not true of zkeys...except for the fact that so many of them are being dumped into the system via XTH that you're observing satiation of demand for convertibility, moving zkeys towards being essentially another fiat currency.

As for the remainder of your post, it just further reveals your prejudices. The idea that adults substitute to WoW and Everquest because they require less grind than GW is absolutely laughable.

It's the rational play. You cannot control what everybody else does, but you can control what you do.