How will the new bans affect the economy?

This is an interesting concept, seeing that the botters held the majority of the wealth in the active state of Guild Wars. Will the prices decrease now due to the general lack of money among the average players, or will they skyrocket due to the accumulated loss of rare items?

Just an interesting premise for discussion.

They won't.
Most of the banned peoples assets weren't in the economy in the first place and 3700 accounts is nothing compared to a lot of people who have accumulated vast wealths.

Since Chaos Plains farming is nerfed and 600/smite is too (for a while now), plus the fact that those botters had quite an amount of ecto all combined, which in return lowers the overall amount of ecto on the market a.k.a. supply, I wouldn't be surprised if ecto prices went up. This is all hypothetical of course.

less ectos, should mean higher prices, but rare mat trader had them for sale @ 6500 last night

I would think that prices should spike (much like when the farming nerfs came) but then settle back once the masses realize there was no reason for the spike. I hate to quote MIB but, " A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." The only ppl that will get effected by this are the ones ignorant to buy at inflated prices (much like those who buy mini at release for high prices) and those who profit from those ppl.

well if there banning people from there I.P...then any account they access via there is bummed...so i assume ALOT of rares and ectos have just disapeared today...= a slight increase in prices

I see that the psychological factor behind items with high prices is that there are generally a large amount of people that can afford it, and are willing to spend even more to claim it.

So now that all of these vasts wealths have disappeared, I would assume the actual number of active wealthy players have been cut in half, almost.

This is assuming that the system acknowlages that the items on the banned charecters are actually removed from the game and not just sitting idle.

The demand doesn't rise instantly and neither does the trader price change right after a nerf or in this case, the deletion of accounts. it takes time before everything has settled down.

yeah power traders got XXXXk by playing thru the game a dozen times. More like some very famous names will vanish and less ecto will be farmed, but my prediction is that prices will fall first.

people will panic and sell there stock.

mini-pets will rise because their rarity just increased.

The botters were cheaters. They were the kind of people that will try to sell things for the highest price they could get away with. Remember enron? I think with out thier influence prices will go down, a little. They probably did have a bunch of rare items and those will be harder to get, for a while. Thats my theory. After a month or so things will be back to normal. Although GW doesnt have the best trading system, so prices will always fluctuate. Besides, its mostly power traders responsible for the ebb and flow of the GW market. And I dont dont think most of them were botters.

edit: with the growing sophistication of bots, I dont think it would be hard to make a couple SoS solo spirit spammers to farm UW. So I think they were still farming ectos too.

I would think that the overall flow of gold into the economy (from botters killing monsters) should significantly decrease. That should lead to a drop on prices and I would think LESS demand for ecto (less demand for the gold sink). Honestly I think people are kind of crazy will all the massive skill changes going on to be heavily investing in ecto. I would be much more comfortable with my money sitting in something relatively stable and always in demand like lockpicks.

what will happen you say since the bans

1. players who thought about botting before Dhuum killing people will think twice
2. players that still bot but not caught yet will crap themselves from anxiety attacks in fear of whether they are next.
3.certain rare minis were lost+tonics thus recycled BACK into the game
4.people will still complain that they were wrongly banned...

does that summarize it enough for you?

It won't. This is a very small amount of people banned, out of millions of accounts.

I'm sure there will be close to no observable effect on the economy caused by what disappeared. Remember that players who had stacks of ectos in their inventories don't equal to a supply of ectos on the market. Those same players could just aswell generate more demand for even more ectos. So it should balance pretty fine without a visible effect.

Also despite what many here think, 3,700 accounts is a very very small number compared to the entire active population of GW players which is likely still a couple hundred thousand. And banning is economically no different than players just leaving the game and letting their accounts rot unused. Players with phat accounts leave all the time and loads of extremelly rare or 1-of-a-kind items disappear with them.

The only real economy effects we may see is less bots producing less of what they farmed - in this case probably unid golds and black dyes from raptors may go slightly up.

do not really care about the "economy" never have never will. On a side note though Diablo's "economy" did not seem to suffer after massive bot/hack deletions.

which sucks...

Just a thought, but those minis that there was a highly limited number of to start with may have disappeared completely?

It is kind of sad to see an EL Henchmen go away. Those were truly one of a kind.