Price Increase? ... or Inflation? ...

With the price of Ecto nearly 8.5k at the trader, the introduction of Dhumm and the impending SF nerf, surely the prices of Ecto are increasing as it becomes harder to farm, and more people hold onto their ecto...

But how much of the price increase is really just due to platinum inflation?

Too many of us make the assumption that platinum is the only hard currency in GW, an that its value remains constant. The truth is that regardless of GW's original intention, items such as Ecto, Zaishen Key and Armbrace of Truth have also become staple currencies for the GW economy.

Try to remember that Ecto aren't the only item whose price is going up, Zaishen Keys have also been increasing in price over the last few months. Or take a look at black and white dyes, why just yesterday I checked and black dye was at 11k.

Lets face it, platinum has become a larger part of the market than it has been in years. Between the fact that the majority of people offer services in enchange for money (Such as Vanquishes/Dungeon Runs/Location Runs) than they have in the past, couped with the introduction of Zaishen Quests and the Traveler's Gifts. More people are spending more platinum than they have in recent times and need ways to dump it; often on Ecto. As the demand for Ecto for platinum increases, so does the price of Ecto in terms of platinum. Same can be seen with all the other money holders, such as Zaishen Keys.

If it were really true that ecto were getting so much more expensive, than naturally the prices of items normally bought with large amounts of ecto would decrease. Does this hold to be true? No not really, a Ded Zhed is still 1600e, and a r13 E Blade is still about 65e.

At the same time I am not oblivious to the fact that UW is harder to clear than it used to be, and that with the impending SF nerf people are worried about the prices of ecto increasing and are hoarding what they have. But I also think that alot of the purely ecto farms remain doable and that with alot of people turning to consumable item farms and services, there's just more plat on the market causing the price of items to increase.

So wut u guys tink??@? Cause i'm pretty sick of all these zomg will ecto keep going up threads.

Underworld is still there. Just play the game, make some friends, and try some new things. Really. There's similar threads to this already open and active.

I understand your point of view jinkies, and i also understand the majority of the player base's OMG ECTOS 9k perspective.

Here's my spin.

Yes, there's always gold being dumped into the game, mainly through zquests. Yes, having lots of gold makes people buy ectos and zkeys so they can trade for the items they actually want. It caused ectos to increase in price over the RR days fiasco. However, its not the main factor of ecto prices rising at the current moment.

The net amount of ectos in the game is not decreasing (obby armor, merching), but consistently increasing (uwsc, solo farms) as usual.

A skill change may make ectos harder to acquire, but it doesn't reduce the amount of ectos already in the game!!!

On the other hand, the net amount of ectos for sale is decreasing (hoarding), as the vast majority feel ectos will keep going up. If players cannot find ectos for a reasonable price from other players, they resort to the trader (I'd rather give the trader 7.6k than a player 7.5k) causing the trader price to rise. When players see the trader price has risen, they in turn horde more as it reinforces their belief about ectos becoming rarer and more valuable.

In essence, its a vicious cycle of speculation. We saw ectos climb to 8.5k before Halloween and the skeletons were added into underworld, and to many's disbelief, ecto prices went back down to 6k a few days after the skeletons were finally added.

The price rise has reduced the price people are willing to pay in ectos, and thus the price people are selling at for many items (mainly items under 250e), as people feel less ectos is worth more. But also the market is very, very stale at the moment because of wintersday, hoarding to buy polar bears, hoarding because of the coming skill changes and awesome lag in kamadan.

I believe ectos will decrease in price after wintersday (less hoarding for polars), the skill nerf (it won't be the end of the world like so many think, there are actually resilient and strong pve players in this game) and when people generally get tired of hoarding because they want to buy things again. In a nutshell, I wouldn't buy 12 ectos for 100k any day.

p.s. this thread is better than the other 2.

Long story short, the item market prices based on the number of ectos in existence. The ecto market prices off the amount of time it takes to farm an ecto. Ecto prices are what they are because people believe that the nerfs will greatly increase the amount of time necessary to farm an ecto in the future.

They're probably wrong, but that's what's motivating the current pricing.

This is an interesting concept. I think you may have meant to say a devaluation of the official currency and I think you are right if that is what you are saying. Diamonds are up from 100g to 550g, rubies and sapphires are nearly 6k, its not just the ecto. I have stated before that I am bullish on ecto, but did not consider that gold has just became such a weak currency that nothing is going up , but its the value of gold that is dropping. The phenomenon could be a combination of things like inflation + the 1000k bank cap, but its best to wait and see before jumping to conclusions.

u must also realize the [b]deacreaseing[b/] number of animals in the game. animals are constantly being killed for money

I'm certain that in GW1 the amount of animals being farmed is a non-factor. This is due in part to an instanced world rather than a persistent one. I have not played one of those mmo's with persistence, but I imagine they even have protective mechanisms for not farming a species (and the drops/materials associated with them) into extinction.

Hmm I started going into this preparing a generic sarcastic response seeing this as another ecto thread. But after reading your post, I actually kind of agree with you. Your view does explain a lot. Kudos!

+1 to insight

@ above poster: I think he was just being sarcastic :P

agree. prices will stabilize after update.

A ded Zhed is still 1600 ectos, but that's because they can ask that price because it's that rare, while armbraces went from 45 to 40 ectos last week. Mainly because a couple of players were selling like 10 armbraces at a time in Spamadan. Can be just coincidence, but you will never see 10 mini Zheds sold at the same time, which would force other sellers to lower their price.

zkeys are going up because there are no more hero battles

Pls refer to the price elasticity of demand. Those perma-sin already destroyed gw economy due to ecto excessive surplus of ecto supplies. Thus, the price of ecto should have driven down to 100g per ecto due to uber surplus ecto supplies -- the ecto is more likely perfectly elastic and it does not worked out in GW. Volt spear is a good example for perfectly inelastic because people willing to pay high price no matter what the req is.

If GW implement the price elasticity of demand in the system, everything will be fair. IE, higher supplies of ecto = lower price per ecto or less supplies of ecto = higher cost per ecto

Therefore, GW violated economy law. That's why GW economy blows donkey balls.

Edit: If you want earn more profit per item, try force everyone to stop farming ecto, popular green and gold, etc. The less supplies and high demand eqauls to higher price per item. Whoever plays perma-sin a lot do not understand economy at all, and it will not make them profit at all in the real world.

That's why smart people don't want you to know about the price elasticity of demand law. Those smart people will MANIPULATE the price until the price is acceptable to everyone to purchase the price and ACCEPTED by seller, that's known as cartel. Cartel is pretty illegal in the USA btw and they will be arrested on the soil of USA. IE, Cartel of OPEC.

jinkies u got about 50,000 ectos in ure storage...i wouldn't worry about inflation your the bill gates of guildwars!...but one thing ure correct about is even tho ecto prices have increased...people still ask the same ammount of ecto's for items when ecto's were 4.5k

Then don't buy any ecto anything above 4.5k. Let the sellers desperately sell the price of ecto above 4.5k until the price driven down to below 4.5k. Those seller only if did not sucessfully sell any ecto equal to the fixed cost, they will sell anything lower than the fixed cost until the buyer accepted the reasonable cost. It will return to less elasticity, and the economy will back to normal like old time.

RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO the seller, you have a power to change the price of the market. You will have 100g per ecto if you are uber stubborn and refuse to buy any ecto that cost more than 101g per ecto. Capisce? (Proper way to pronounce capisce is: Kap PEE Shay, not Ka PEESH). Got it?

Communist will set the price to 4.5k flat rate. Capitalism will change any price until the buyer accepts the price.

not nearly enough gold sinks = massive inflation. 4 years later of that shit and here we are. i can tell you right now when the game was in development as a utopian universe in the designer's heads, never in a million years would they have thought rare items would be going for trade offs worth millions and millions of gold. they didn't think 100k would be cake to get and not worth all that much. the main gold sinks are what?
armor mostly.
-materials
-runes
-dye
lockpicks and salvage/id kits, other crap from merchant.
that's all, and all of the above you can find from players (eliminating the gold sink) except for armor which is only a one-time requirement.

what i say is start nulling our ways of making simple profit, and just like runes and materials, make an inscription/tome merchant whos pricing works like the rune/material trader based off supply and demand. that'd start sinking gold, and stop simply moving gold from one player to another while more cash flows into the market causing inflation.

isn't it something else how in-depth the economy of guild wars can be? lol.

Actually gold sinks are the reason for inflation. If there were no gold sinks then there would be no point to having gold and so nobody would farm it.

Since I aquired everything I wanted I have no need to farm anything, so I don't. If they added something that I want that needed to be farmed then I would.

Its amazing how quickly people forget before ursan and more importantly SF, ectos were pretty expensive. So were shards, I am sure those will go up in price too.

I remember when the chaos planes farm was at its peak ectos were 4.2k, people still wouldnt pay more in ectos for an armbrace. Made me sad to realize an armbrace was below 200k in cost.

Disagree.
People don't farm only for gold to spend that gold on gold sinks.
The reason there's inflation is that players farm also for gold they instead spend on things bought from other players AND they farm many other things, like for example raptors for event items, and they produce new gold on the way.

Inflation of gold that we had over this whole year is caused by the lack of new gold sinks, since the playerbase gets old and has already acquired most of things that require sinking gold out of economy.

The value of gold is in fact affected by a very delicate balance, and even very small outside adjustments can make a big impact on it. For example see the only real gold sink that was added this year - the Small Equipment Packs costing 2,500g. I have observed quite a drastic shock wave in the whole economy as prices of every low-end item and resource has dropped visibly. Such a small addition caused likely over 100 million gold to have disappeared from the economy, that gold would normally be spent on everything else.

And remember what the M.O.X. quest rewards did? They single-handedly reverted the massive ecto price drop caused be extreme overfarm going for a couple months since SF buff and for a short moment went even higher than before that SF buff. That was a lot of new gold that had to go somewhere.

So even very small changes can upset the delicate balance and affect the prices of all common goods. People who keep saying that GW needs more gold sinks should know that all a new gold sink can do is change the balance to a different level. But the question is - where would be the best balance then?

you gotta be pretty narrow minded to think that.

in every single MMORPG game ive played there have been UBER rare items which go for "insane" ammounts of money, thats just how online gaming works. As time progresses, the rare items get rarer, people get more money and the price of the rare stuff goes up up and up.