1 million limit

i am new to the threads but can someone plz tell me why there is a 1 million dollar limit in bank storage and 100k in your pocket, i know each char can hold 100k but thats a pain to try and keep up with who is holding what, i know i have a fair few ectos but i would rather have it all in gold im sure there is a good reason plz any info would help

1 mill is max for storage, after that you have to find another way to store money.

Covah, badger is asking WHY there is a limit on the amount, not what the limit is. That's something he's already aware of. I don't really have an answer for you sadly, but perhaps they have a limit because at 1 mil you aren't restricted in what you can buy so there isn't really much of a need to save up so much money if it isn't going to be used on things like high end weapons, elite armour, etc.

i guess to add another thing, why cant i carry unlimited gold and trade unlimited gold instead of the normal 100k+XXX ectos it would be good if this limit of 1 mil in storage and the 100k carry on char and 100k limit in a single trade was changed to unlimited, im sure there is a reason for this and always wanted to ask

Basically that 1 million plus whatever your character can hold should (in theory) be enough to buy whatever you want and then some. It's player-side pricing that has driven items to near absurd levels in the tens of millions range. GW was designed in such a way that max equipment can be had cheaply with no differences besides aesthetics to vastly more expensive items.

but in reality there are alot of items worth more than 100k like why cant i buy a tormented sheild for 270000k in a a trade? it has 2 be ectos and the way they go up and down in price its not safe, i would rather have all my ectos in gold and be able to trade in gold, i dont want 2 do away with ectos but it should be our chioce how we have our assets in gold ectod armbraces or whatever, once again im sure that there is a reason i just dont know why yet

It was a (failed) attempt by the designers to cap prices and create a fair and reasonable in-game economy.

I believe the original designers of the game just didn't realize how easy it is to make money and didn't anticipate money storage being a problem.

I smell a troll. The OP knows what the gold limit is, he also says he has a fair amount of ecto. The reason for a 1 million cap is because Anet set it at 1 million. Its an arbitrary number no more no less.

Badger dont you have multiple bait threads atm? You post someone answers and then you tell them why their wrong.. I smellz a troll!!!!



Cronk

EDIT*** if im wrong in my assumption i apologize***

I don't remember them ever stating a reason for this design decision. Every theory you find on forums is just players' speculation.

IMHO it wasn NOT an attempt to control the economy and stop multimillion prices possibility, because its obvious that players would find some valuable items to use insread. And if there weren't any stackable valuables the economy would really turn complete shit, with all high end trades would be pure barter and gold would be worthless to high-end traders. If you remember the first months after GW release you should know that the gold limits have caused many serious problems and it was one of the main causes of scams - it took several months till ectos became the widely accepted means to trade above 100k, before that players tried everything and the majority wanted just gold, so trades had to be split.
"You pay 100k first, then 50k again and I give item then" was the way people in LA traded, which only left many people scammed. Placeholder items were used for the first 100ks and then were to be traded back with last gold payment for the expensive item that was being sold. But those placeholder items often were worth much less than 100k and scammers used that as a way to sell crap for 100k and log off after first transaction...

Anyway, I think the real reaons for the low gold caps is that the devs feared:

1. a possible exploit like duping would collapse the entire economy if absurd amounts of gold were created and quickly spread around the world and through the npc traders system. With low caps the effects of such an exploit would be minimal on the scale of the entire game, and exploiters would need to dupe valuable items instead, which would be far easier to track, wouldn't spread so easily and wouldn't require a full game rollback.

2. RMT business - With such low caps the RMT companies need lots and lots of accounts to store their gold, entire networks of accounts. And moving millions of gold takes multiple transactions, they needed to do them often to unload their bots. This made them far easier to be tracked and banhammered than if those businesses could be disguised as much smaller groups of accounts, but we all know it wasn't enough at all.

its probably some really bad coding that doesnt allow more than sooo many digits, thus the 1mil cap. (its anet, anything is plausible!)

generally I find that high-number coding caps in videos games to be 2^X, unless it's something solid like 1,000,000 or 100,000.
and if a-net messed up the code and it resulted in a 7 digit cap, our max storage would be 9,999,999 gold.

This sounds suspiciously like real life.

Never have understood why people feel a need to amass large amounts of money. If there are things you want to buy with it, then save up and buy it. But to simply store it? What is the point? Nobody sees it but you unless you take screenshots to post on various forums. Stop saving it and start spending it if you are running out of space to store it.

QFT! (with edit)

I think there are two main issues here. One issue involves the game mechanics themselves. We don't know why ANet put the limits on gold levels. They may have had a good reason, or it could just be that they never thought anyone would need more than that - it doesn't really matter! GW was intended to have a continuing series of campaigns and expansions. This would have meant that people would have continually wanted to spend their gold on new armor, new weapons, new goodies. It's really only since they stopped expanding GW that the gold limit has been any sort of an issue as people have bought everything they need or want and have no where to put the excess gold any more.

The second issue is the strange (to me) way that people get concerned about storing their imaginary wealth. I mean, seriously folks, it's play money! What does it really matter if the price of ectos fluctuates. Does it really matter if you had 6milllion gold (in ectos) last week and this week it's only "worth" 4 million? You really can't take it with you and you can always get more!

because ectos=time and prople dont want to waste time

How's that a troll? I actualy find it interesting. (for now)

Even in real-life, hording absurd amount of money is kinda pointless, isn't it? No matter if you store 10^99$ real-life dollars, it gives you nothing if you don't spend it. And then, spending that much money (without just throwing it in pointless things) is actually hard. That being said, I'm not saying I intend to live with 20k$/year. ( I think that's minimum wage for a fulltime job).

On topic, 1 mil is probably a "random" number that was judged too high to achieve by someone who would spend gold normally (considering new expansion), at least not before 10+ years. Then gold became easier to gain, and there was farming... We know the rest.

I think that, back in proph era, skill cost grew beyond 1k. Maybe they had this to stop people from reaching max before the first expansion. Maybe they wanted to use this to make buying skills in later games a gold sink ( even with skill quests allowing to get every skill for a given profession).

Another thing, the higher the maximum, the more memory is taken on the servers, propably the same amount is reserved no matter the actual amount of money. And accounts in GW are never deactivated unless banned. Add this together, and I can understand restricting money to such a "low" number.

For trading, I guess they didn't expect people to trade with a lot more than 100k in 1 chunk.

The game was (originally) designed so the need for that amount of wealth would usually not be needed. Also making storage/money storage unlimited would take up more server space.

Live a little, spend your money on something

well that reason wouldnt much apply anymore. Anet once used that same excuse many times for a few years as a reason for not giving us more storage. then they turn around last year at the 4 year anniversary and give the ability to double storage space and introduce the equipment packs.

After getting what you need/want for your toons hoarding money seems a little strange to me aswell, some ppl are just that way i guess and it really impresses ppl when you stand in kamadan bragging about your wealth it seems.
Maybe there should be an old folks home in game for the really rich of course so that they have a place to spend their money on their toons when they get old and decrepid
See i could understand that attitude if my landlord came by and i could pay him in ecto or go to the supermarket and pay with an armbrace, but in the REAL world ppl don't want the ooh so precious ecto or armbrace, and i think bragging about it while at a bar with friends wouldn't make a great impression either.

I like this one too, does your toon have a doctors appointment or somewhere else he/she has to be ? Does your female ele have a date with a hot warrior in WoW ? did it miss the bus or did it have to stay after school that it's in such a hurry ?

After reading this maybe we should add a bank into the game, with mortgages and loans and get evicted if we can't pay our rent.
And have you guys ever thought of what your toon is upto when you are not playing ? maybe we should set a thread up for that aswell !

The last time i checked the G in MMORPG stood for GAME

i accept your apology i dont know what a troll is i think it was a good question and alot of people seem 2 have responded, im not super rich or a horder alot of people in game are far richer than than me plain and simple i just dont like the limits on our gold in storage or limit per trade, anyway thanks guys for all the info, some intersting reading

Really though, 1 million is an insane amount of money that will get you through GW. You wouldnt be able to buy those consumable titles, multiple sets of armor, and nice skins with 1 mil, but you can still have exceptional wealth status.

I said BAD coding....and how about the 'stack' limit of 250? why 250, not 999 or 100????

lots of strange things like that in this game.

2^8 = 256. 8 bits of information to store the quantity. That's the theory anyway.

you cant even buy a dedicated YETI for 1 million, 1 mil is alot to some but very little 2 others who have spent alot of time trading or farming

In real life rich people know how to invest their money so that they can stay rich or earn even more money (which is the most common case). Those people use their head and observe the market, how it is changing, and decide how to use it in their own advantage.
In game you can do the same with one exeption only. Even if you check the market and know what is good for you (what can earn you a lot of money NOW) there is no 100% guarantee that you will be rich - ANet might decide to update in a new direction. With this in mind you should accept that your money will change (it was mentioned before - today you have 6 mil in ECTO, tomorrow you have 4 mil in ECTO).
One million is enough for any player to "survive" in Guild Wars. You can have your armor, weapons and runes.
The more important thing is that you can win gold capes with Luxon/Gladiator armor and a barrel hammer - Jatt Kittenstomper, or you can have ONE BIG NOTHING with Obsidian armor and Tormented set.

I think ANET did the 1M Storage limit and 100K Character limit because it helps on the game's economy. Simple like that. Now that the limit is 100k per Character , players needed something else to balance the high prices and that are Ectos or high value stuff, forcing them to be trated constantly on the game's market. I am not saying that Ectos or Shards are valuable only for that.

IMHO

They thought 1 mill in chest and 100K on person was enough.

Lets review.

1st game was Prophecies, Known back then as "Guild Wars"

Presearing is where you stated. Most foes (other than the Northlands which is the ELITE AREA) drop 2-12 gold. To max out your 100K you would need to kill 8,333 foes.

Outside of Fort Ranik there is a bunch of scale. Lets say you can agro 20 scale in 2 minutes (I do this during festivals and special drop weekends so very easy to do) and it takes 1 minute to zone. You then could do 20 runs an hour killing 400 foes.

At this pace to kill 8,333 foes at 400 foes an hour would take you 20 hours to max your 100K. However in reality scale only drop 2-6 gold. Even at 6 gold its 40 hours STRAIGHT farming to max the 100K. Now that is devotion. I play 3-5 Hours a day so it would take me 8 solid days at 5 hours a day to max my 100K. (loot scaling is in effect in presearing, Not all the scale will drop something if you stack them)

IN THE BEGINNING...

The developers did NOT want this to be a GRIND FEST. Read some of the old articles like the Nov 2007 PC Gamer mag (the one that the Destroyer came in) and you will see that they wanted SKILLS over Time. It was the Skills that made the game not the amount of time the player put into playing.

If Anet changes its ETHOS then the game is forever doomed. It is what it is cause the players MADE it that way.

@imnotyourmother:

1. There's no way Anet balanced the gold caps considering the low level areas at all, while mobs in high level areas were dropping 100+gold each.
2. There was NO loot scaling in the game for the first 2 years, so they surely didn't consider that aswell.
3. Farming of huge amounts of pure cash was possible in many ways since the very release, even without sophisticated farming builds.
4. It took just a couple weeks since release to have items on the players market sell for over 100k.
5. I doubt the low gold caps have anything to do with Anets stance on grind, and if it really was a major reason then it's only demonstrating their horrible understanding of economics. It doesn't take much economic knowledge to realise beforehand that gold caps in an otherwise free market would NOT stop rare highly wanted items from being expensive, but only make trading harder - multiple transactions, placeholder items, scams, alternative currencies, potentially leading even into gold being completely abolished by players and the market turning into pure barter.

@Yawgmoth

1. You are assuming that Anet was stupid and not thinking that 100g drops would be spread across the 8 toons as it divides across the whole party = 13 gold each. THIS IS the SAME amount of money as the MAX dropped for SOLO runs in PRE. DO THE MATH!!!

2. Loot Scaling that I talked about was for PRE. Please read that. It says that when the foes are BUNCHED up not ALL of them 20 will DROP something. Try it and see before posing that there is not loot scaling as this has ALWAYS existed IN PRE.

3. Farming was NOT THE ORIGINAL INTENT of the GAME. Do you HAVE the article that ANET produced for the Nov 2007 PC GAMER? have you read it? If not then you can no more comment on what is going to happen with OBAMA care and my taxes than you can with the ORIGINAL INTENT of ANET unless you actually READ the article.

4. Black dye were used in PRESEARING as the ECTOS in pre. Wait a second.. BLACK DYE is STILL the item used as Ectos in PRE.. so your point is??? Your deflection of the GOLD Cap was nice but totally off topic. this thread is not about ECTOS but about the GOLD CAP not whether or not you could amass a fortune but weather ANET wanted a GRIND for Gold.

5. the 100K and the 1,000K Gold caps have EVERYTHING to do with GRIND. Please read anything that has been published by ANET in its ETHOS when compared to WOW. GW was about the SKILLS (Guild Wars) over GRIND (WOW).

In conclusion, you can tell yourself whatever you want. The facts are still the facts.

Its the PLAYERS that made the economy the way it is. The PLAYERS decided that ECTOS would be the item sought after to maintain their GRINDS... Farming.

Otherwise, it would be to use LOCKPICKS. You can trade 2,187,500g in Lockpicks in one fell swoop. Yes there are some items that are worth MORE than this but for the Average player - Guild Wars TARGET MARKET - they would NEVEr use this at 3 hours a day WHEN THE GAME CAME OUT 5 years ago.

As stated before 100 gold drops across 8 players is 13g EACH. Farming SOLO in PRE is an average of 12g/drop in the NORTHLANDS. ITS THE SAME!!!

People, math is math and the creators thought are their ETHOS.

I remember someone selling Superior Absorption for 100k+5 ecto in Droknars Forge. He wasn't trying, he was actually selling it, and I saw him sell at least 2. This was back when Superior Absorption worked on all sources of damage and 1 piece of Knights armor was global damage reduction against ALL damage sources as well. In short, large trades over 100k have been around for a REALLY long time.

I do not believe Anet placed the cap of 100k and 1 million based on trades/farming. I don't know why they chose those amounts, but I believe they didn't give it a lot of thought. Probably a matter of 'this much will allow people to do what they want to do', and it fits in our coding for server storage.

And people have been farming in the game ever since I started playing, which was 3 months after release. I myself made a character after playing for 4 months specifically to farm. Griffons were easily done solo by a W/Mo and they dropped large amounts of gold and had a decent chance at gold weapons. So arguing that people hit the 100+ gold drops on a team of 6 or 8 is correct, but that doesn't mean people will ALWAYS be on a team. And if you think Anet assumed that people would be the same years down the road as they were at the start of playing, you are assuming Anet are idiots.

I don't think it matters WHY the caps were placed there. I think it is safe to assume that without a SIGNIFICANT problem with those caps, nothing will change.

This.

Besides, when you factor in the innate human desire to accrue wealth, even imaginary wealth, and have surety of it, any cap on stockpile will end up being insufficient. And if you don't want to ever deal with fluctuating markets . . . I'd tell you to start a fiefdom on Mars, but you'll still end up having to trade with Earth, so unless you can completely remove all other humans and their opinions on value representation from existence, you're kinda stuck.

Also there seems to be an astounding abundance of CAPS lately....

The only reason I could see coding wise would be that they have some weird integer data type that has a size of 2^20 (like the standard 16 bit integer + 4 bits, or 2 bytes and a 'nibble') as a follow through to the theory that BlueNovember stated as to why the size of stacks is 250.

Meaning that the real cap is 1,048,576 gold (2^20), but it's rounded down to 1 million for the sake of having a nice number. I suppose it's possible they made up some kind of weird integer becuase they didn't think a 65k gold cap would make sense (a standard 16 bit integer's maximum value; 2^16) and 4,294,967,296 gold would be too much (a standard 32 bit long integer; 2^32). That justification does make sense to me, originally they would have done it, along with other measures, to minimize the memory usage and maybe manage the game economy. And, if they did eliminate the cap now, they would have to go through all the coding and rework the data types, and their memory management would be completely messed up. Though I'm not sure you can just invent your own data types like that. :/

First off, its completely possible to solo farm in end game, so that 100-200g drops goes entirely to me. Hell I still bust out my 55 monk and go grind trolls and hill giants in normal, cause they don't AoE scatter as much (it can be controlled if you don't AoE too fast).

You missed his point, he said for the first two years of the game there was no loot scaling, something I can attest to. I made a large killing off my 55 monk. Every troll in my troll run used to drop something. This isn't the case anymore, but for the first couple years it was an easy way to make 2-3k every five minutes. And if you got a gold armor drop with a superior monk rune or superior vigor or superior absorption you were looking at a larger intake.

Original intent or not farming happened and Anet took their sweet time to put in half ass measures to stop it. As a result its a very much accepted part of the game. It might be the reason they originally put the gold cap in, but they sent a very different message to the player base through their actions or lack there of over the course of the first 2-3 years.

I find it somewhat confusing as to why you make claims about the game based on 1% of the content. Pre-searing might be a good example of a "limited" economy, but the rest of the game has never followed that standard. Solo farming has always existed and for first couple years you could do so at a far more profitable rate than 12g/drop.

I agree with this, but the key word is was about the skills. This really isn't the case anymore. As I said it might be the reason they originally put the gold cap in but they have failed to send the memo to the player base.

True, but again Anet was aware it was going on and didn't do anything to limit/stop it for over two years. And when they finally did the measures put in place were mediocre at best. And it ignores pretty much anything worth farming. Straight off wiki...

People don't farm for white items and actual gold coin drops. Those are nice they supplement the grind, but anyone who farms an area is going with the intent to get something off the exempt list. And I seem to recall reading that Hard Mode further relaxes these measures, though it can be more difficult since HM mobs are more sensitive to AoE.

tl;dr While Anet may have originally put in the gold cap to try and de-emphasize farming/grind, they failed to put any measures in place to limit the profits of farmers and when they finally did attempt to address it their measures weren't strong enough to have much effect and with the release of HM these measures are pretty much moot. As a result there really is no viable reason to keep the cap where it is.

Maybe they just saw the inevitable rise of gold sellers showing up, and wanted to make them work harder at stockpiling that gold to sell.

<--- I agree with ^^^

It might just be that when 100,000g is entered into the trade transaction that it triggers an auto responce to Anet staff to look at the transaction.

So Here is the Fact that everyone can agree with;

IT WILL NOT CHANGE so adapt?

Agree = 1
Disagree = post some more

@imnotyourmother

You clearly weren't playing at release or in the first months so almost everything you say is full of complete BS.

I have read all official articles and interviews with Anet staff since early 2004 and even searched the historical ones from 2003, and was following practically everything that came up till today, so you can't accuse me of lack of knowledge.

I don't need to assume anything when I know the FACTS. And the fact is SOLO farming of high level mobs was already known and done in beta BEFORE gold caps and Xunlai storage were introduced at all! Oh, and pre-searing is not only completely irrelevant to this topic (what math lol) but it didn't even exist at that time.

I just can't bother to reply to all that nonsense, but I'll quote this again just to show how retarded your post was:
Baseless numbers are baseless and completely irrelevant to this topic. If you divide late game 8 man areas drops by 8 why don't you divide the 2 man presearing area drops by 2?
/fail at math and basic reasoning.

So your saying that 12 Gold drop while solo in Presearing = 100 Gold drop for 8 man party in post?

100/8 = 12.5 or 13 rounded?

ITS MATH.

HELLO. Did they design the game to be played with a party of 8???

Why is it 12 gold in PRE? and not 20 gold in pre? Cause 100/8 is 13 not 20

More likely it's because the base gold drop for low-level monsters is (GASP) lower than the base gold drop for Lv OHMIGAWD things. That line of reasoning also fails to address the discrepancy in white-drop value after identification; if you're relying on gold coin drops to justify your claims you're using confounded logic, whether or not you're actually right.

Being in cruise control for cool isn't helping your case much, either.

Edit: Whoops, forgot you cats don't like Calibri.