Remove money cap to reduce inflation

This may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but keep reading.

There is a cap of 100k to trade and 1000k in storage, this cap was put with the hope no transactions could be made over 100k so prices dont skyrocket like they did.

omgPOWERTRADERS i-wanna-be-rich-buying-cheap-from-the-noob soon invented a way to get rid of this cap by using ectos as a currency when everyone wanted a fissure armor, so you were quite sure ectos was a very sought after item.

When ectos were not enough to cover their unlimited greed then armbraces appeared as another currency, so actually we have (estimate)

Gold cap 100k
Ecto value: about 7K
Armbrace value: about 25 ecto: thats 175K

There are several problems:

1. Money cap has done nothing to keep inflation low, as we can see people buying minis for insanes 1500 armbraces for a ded panda (262,500,000 gold, almost 263 million gold)

2. Using ectos as currency means people keep them instead selling them back to trader when not needed (hey, i have all my toons with fissure and chaos gloves, now what?) so prices keep unusually high for an item is rare but easily farmable, i bet you there are 1000 times more ectos in game than rubies but their prices are the same.

3. Duping has made people suspicious about the source the ectos and armbraces he accepted as part of payment came from, and the risk of ban is always there, until now there is no news than money can be duped.


Without money cap we have several advantages:

High end traders can set a fixed value on gold, not depending the current value of ectos, (value we now is not real), ectos and armbraces will lower their value as they will only useful for crafting thing and not to hoard stacks of them, and duped items will be useless and wont affect economy, "hey luser, i dont want your 2000 duped ectos, just pay me 15 millions, oh dont have it? go and sell them to merchant, good luck with the bans.

Vote to remove cap, it's useless and has done the opposite it was mean to.

I pay in ectos whenever I can. 50k for a stack of pcons? Here, have my 7e! It's really convenient imo and it won't entirely stop just because you remove gold cap.

I see 20 votes but just 1 reply, please explain your vote so we can discuss this matter and know another point of view.

I'm not sure how removing the cap will reduce inflation. I also don't think ecto prices are particularly volatile.

WHile I am not at all sure this would help on inflation I vote yes remove it, since it is an artificial limitation that is not useful for anything.

i voted "yes" to remove the cap ..........cash should be the prefered form of currency, imho

Escuse me if im wrong but when did inflation rely just on money ?
I could have sworn that say if a material became saught after - say feathers as a gd example , the price rises due to demand and prices fall due to less demand.
Personally i like the 100k limit - how many of us in a trade have almost put wrong amount in , theres probably several thousand ppl who have got things wrong and put 100k insteak of 10k by accident and noticed.Now if amount was raised or made capless then its possible to make really costly errors.
Not only that but the only ppl who actually have more funds that storage can hold are usually powertraders and most of them use ectos or armbraces - the average player probably hasnt 1000k saved - quite a few times ive looked at my cash and thought damn im gettin close to 1000k and converted some cash to ectos .
Dont forget Ectos are like the stock exchange and they go up an down again due to demand .
Now id rather have 500 ectos which i had bought at a nice price and market price rises and my 500 ectos would increase in value - my 1000k wouldnt decrease or increase due to the markets - we dont get interest on our gold.
Just think of ectos and armbraces as the next level of currency - gold/platinum > ectos > armbraces and remember the market fluxes so one day 14e = 100k and next day it could be 12e = 100.
bottom line - we`ve had this currency setup for around 7yrs now and its worked so far

As for the ruby / ectos part - i can 100% say ive had more ectos drop in 5 years of gw than ive had either rubies drop or an item salv into a ruby , and if you need to know - ive only ever had 2 rubies drop and none salv yet i could go into uw and get maybe 1-3 ectos a run and after 3 runs id have more ectos than rubies drop again.
The big reason why both are expensive same time is simple - before HoM fow armor was quite the rage and vabbi armor was lower on a players to-get list but as vabbi armor is in HoM the prices rose and include availability to the ruby part - we know ectos have 2 - 4% drop rate on several foes and i`ll guess rubies have an even lower drop rate.

I would love the no cap rule, but at this day and age of GW, ectos have become part of currency, and is currency in GW. It too late to change that, anet would be screwing over many people, if they added the no cap rules, ectos price will plummet. Maybe 4-5 year ago i would vote yes. But now i would have to say no. Maybe allow us to hold more than 1000k would be fine.

this is like saying remove silver and gold and platinum from real life,

why would i carry 7 k when i can carry 1ecto , ecto prices shift up and down maybe my ecto is worth 15-100k somethimes 12-100k

i say no , this is used in real life and it wouldnt matter , i think some people are just mad that they cant afford armbraces or a stack of ecto

what difference having a stack of ecto or the same amount in cash

what weights more a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?

If this was implemented from the start - Yes

At this point in the game - No

Fundamental misunderstanding of how an economy works on many levels here.

Removing the gold cap on trades and in storage won't magicly make gold have value. People trade with ecto and ambraces because they have value. Gold is worthless in guild wars, because its far to easy to obtain. If you want gold to have value in guild wars again, you'd have to make it harder to obtain, and add gold sinks to remove excess gold from the game. However as others have said its far to late in the life of guild wars to make changes like this.

Everytime this subject comes up, it gets put down. At this point in time, it makes no difference to me whether there is a cap or not. 2 or 3 years ago, I had enough gold to fill storage and most of my characters, and a higher or no cap would have been good.

I say remove the cap purely for those who don't have ectos, but have gold. Not all who have enough gold for x have ectos. Yes, they could buy the ectos themselves, but maybe they don't want to for some reason.

I say definitely remove the cap from storage.

Well if you believe that, feel free to give me all your gold!

I say remove it, it probably wouldn't change much this late but it would make things easier.

Removing the gold cap will do nothing to reduce inflation.

Pretty much this. The concept was to put a cap on high end trades, but like many other things they never considered how trivially easy it was to circumvent. As a result the entire foundation of the economy has grown up around the concept of some items having an artificial value. Removing that cap has the potential to collapse large segments of the economy.

And before anyone jumps down my throat about being upset at the prospect of losing a fortune, don't bother. At this point I don't even interact with the market anymore, and I never played heavily in it. I could quite conceivably play for years to come with the reserves of consumables and equipment that I have. I still feel that this idea is stupid, and will not accomplish the intended goals, regardless of whether or not I even agree with the stated goals.

Given that a Ton is also a measure of VOLUME, then clearly a ton of bricks would weigh more. Perhaps you should use Tonne next time?

As for the gold cap on transactions, do away with it... it is simply an artificial limitation that forces people into currency speculation on trade goods as a means of storing wealth or engaging in large transactions.

Please share your knowledge with the ignorants so we can learn.

The mere fact that the game market has remained relatively stable over a long period of time is impressive. World of Warcraft's Auction House can be manipulated easily by a small amount of players and exploit the economy around raids, pvp, holidays, etc.

People who have assloads of cash spend it on vanity items - if you're still working on HoM, then you're probably spending gold as you go. Gold acquisition has never been a problem in this game, but has only been improved with time; whether you PVP, solo grind, group for high end dungeon SCs, or even just play through the storylines without farming, you're likely to make what you need with minimal effort.

Like others have said before me, it might reduce inflation but why fix what isn't really broken?

Your suggestion is the equivalent of saying that the US can fix its money problems by getting rid of dollars and making everyone use pennies instead. Do I really need to go on or is that comparison enough?

Not that I have anything against getting rid of the money cap because its simply annoying, but the reliance on ectos is actually working against inflation at the moment because the material traders take their cut off those transactions. Other items are purely benign.

Not only that but the value of ectos is largely faith based at the moment. Ectos are worth what they are because people treat them like they are worth that. People treat them like they are worth because they need them to conduct transactions.

If ectos/braces/anything valuable are no longer required the market will get absolutely saturated as the faith in them as currency rapidly declines. Look at every depression or blip in the economy in the last several hundred years. The bank collapses, the housing market popping, the dot com bubble. All of them happened as a result of rapid depreciation of certain assets because people realized they were heavily overvaluing things, and the drop was exacerbated by people panicking, and trying to get out of those markets.

There are probably billions of gold sitting in ectos. If not it's certainly in the high hundreds of millions. I myself have several million stored in ecto alone, and millions more in DoA related materials, and I'm a pauper compared to the big wigs. They serve as a means to hold money. There are far more in the game than will EVER be used. Maintaining them as a form of currency keeps them out of circulation, and keeps their value at least somewhat stable.

Simply put, a market needs a relatively stable currency to function in any useful sense. This is why the majority of real world transactions are done in the US dollar. It's been unbelievably stable, and even with the recent hiccups of the past decade, it's been far more stable than MANY alternatives. Ectos have been a solid form of currency for years, and people use them because of this.

Removing the need for them as a currency will cause a panic as everyone that gives a damn tries to be the first person to cash out so they can get the most. We can't just agree to pretend that their value is fixed. It's an open and free market. As soon as a few people make a cash grab selling low, they depreciate. The only solution is for everyone to engage in the cutthroat behavior because only the first comers will actually get anything out of it. Even if most people refused to sell below certain thresholds the material traders will raise no objections to buying anything you have, and eventually they will undercut the stalwarts.

Congratulations, you just removed an enormous amount of gold from the economy so that it sits in banks till the end of time, accomplishing nearly nothing. In exchange for flooding it with now worthless ectos. The same hold true for braces, zkeys, other rare mats like shards, and anything else that people use as alternative currency that is backed on faith. You've also removed the material trader's interference to curb inflation And to what end and purpose have you done this?

Ectos and armbraces will not become worthless, just become the thing it was mean to be, a way to craft something and useless for itself.
Some of you say, it's crazy, you can not remove dollar from economy and force people uses pennys, ectos are an stable currency, you can't change this.

But i feel it's me the person that can teach you some economy, the economy of GW is broken because the "currency" ectos are easily farmable and have a value not based on their rarity, but in the people thinking they are valuable, i cannot print new money, every time someone goes to UWSC and take out some ectos its like they are injecting more money in the economy, like a goverment printing money dont stop.

Why this is wrong? Because ectos has made gold worth nothing, but GOLD worth lots, as is harder to obtain.
Make a simple test, go to UW with empty storage, get everything you can, whites, blues, gold, ectos, and sell everything but ectos to merch, i did the test, i got 4 ectos on a run and selling everything i got i got a mere 3,3K, thats is the game gave me 3,3K in gold but as everyone want ectos to be a currency, and 4 ectos worth 32k, so i hava injected 32k in a game that was supposed to give me only 3,3K.

Like in the real life state bubble, and credit bubble we are living in the ecto bubble.

You saying this does not make it so.

To put it bluntly, I don't think you've taken even basic macroeconomics courses. This is covered in the first half of a semester of one. Ecto has nearly no value as a material. It's not rare. There's so much of it that every person who wanted to could craft several sets of obsidian, and the market would still be completely saturated. It's value is inflated because it is perceived as a stable means of storing money, and because there is currently a need for a stable means of storing money due to the gold/trade caps

Removing the need for that will crush their value, and flood the market with them. Every single stock crash has followed the exact same pattern. I fail to see how you can pretend this is any different.

Look at any number of nations that have undergone hyperinflation because of complete lack of faith in their currency. When nobody cares about your currency, it devalues, and that makes people care even less. That's why you end up with situations like what's happening in Africa where some paper money is so worthless it's better used as wall paper.

You do realize the US govt has been generally increasing the amount of money that exists since the federal reserve was established, right? The only difference here is there is no central governing authority to regulate the rate that money is injected. Now depending on which economic practices you follow, and what your goals are, this is good and bad, but it's not purely so.

The whole point of 'elite areas' is that you are rewarded greatly for completing them.

I implied that we are in a bubble. However a bubble is not a problem if it is stable. It is only a problem once the bubble pops. Ideally you would never want to create a bubble in the first place, because of what happens when they pop, but once you have a bubble, removing it is exceedingly difficult to do without massive damage. The gold cap should never have existed to being with, but removing it now is a very, very bad idea.

What you are proposing will pop every single one of these bubbles and cause a market panic. It will not remove inflation, and in fact removes many of the controls on inflation that already exist (not that those controls are very effective, but it is better than nothing).

Kelvin, you've made a great deal of valid points and outlined the system pretty well, saving me the need to do so, which i am grateful for However...

On the verge of GW2's launch, depreciating ectos and shards would actually be a good thing, letting more people get their obsidian sets. ZKeys wouldn't be hurt that much, as people would still need them for their HoMs. Same thing with braces - they'd be simply flat ~220k each - after all, what's the difference whether you pay 23e or 200k for one?
So yeah, the only thing getting actually hit would be ectos and shards.
Who would lose? Those who keep their great fortunes in those materials, and only them. Who would gain? Everyone else.

As a fair commoner with a stack of ectos to my name at the moment, i'd gratefully welcome the proposed change.

This is not true. Both of them have enormous reserves that are not in use, and never will be used as anything apart from large value currency. Zkeys may be partially exempt because they can be directly converted into a title, but I don't think their value stems solely from that.

Again, people don't keep dozens of braces/ectos/whatever because they like them, they keep them because they are literally forced to find some alternative form of money. As soon as you removed the absolute need for them as currency, they will deflate due there being no reason to use them over gold. I have my modest collection of braces partially because I cannot be arsed to trade them, but mainly because I quite literally cannot hold the gold that they have come to represent without them, or something similar.

Removing the need for any these items as currency runs the risk of near total devaluation of them because of the saturation. The highest end farm could quite literally be raptor farming, or equivalents in a worst case scenario. I can think of few faster ways to utterly kill the moderate to high end player base than to remove any value out of their attempts to perform high end content. Like it or not, these types of people are the ones who keep large facets of the economy going with their desire for 'prestige' crap, and relentless consumption of consumable items. Killing high end clears kills material farms by extension, and so on and so on.

In addition, as the market becomes utterly saturated with ecto/braces/shards/etc, gold will be removed. You could conceivably grind a lot of trade to a halt purely because there isn't enough money in circulation to meet expectations.

Do I think the gold cap was an incredibly a stupid idea? Absolutely, but like it or not, it has become an absolutely integral part of this game's economy. I sincerely believe that shocking the economy this heavily will kill it. This is not real life. We are not forced to play.

You may as well just give everyone whatever stupid titles, armor, pets, and merit badges they want and call it a day. Nobody is going to give a shit anymore because like it or not, all that trivial cosmetic trash is what keeps the majority of the playerbase interested. Nice way to kill off an already aged and feeble game.

Just take away the ability to stack minerals in trade. lolwut? problem solve. *sarcasm*

I'd love it if they removed the gold cap for trading and storage. Then we could convince them to implement taxes. Then you could sell things for 24,999 + 10% Sales Tax. The sales tax goes back into the game immediately. Any time you trade materials they could tax them. So every 50e you trade you have to add 5 more as tax; those ecto go back to the merchant. Man I love getting these ideas. So exciting.

You see, you don't reduce inflation like that.

There's inflation because gold is practically worthless for some people.
It's worthless for them not because people do not use it, but because those people can easily get lots of it.
They use ectos and armbraces to trade to go bypass the cap. But they do so because they can't pay stuff with gold, because gold is worth so little, because they can get so many of it in so little time.
That's because prices have been steadily increased, since those that get more gold can pay more, increasing the prices for the rest in the process.

If you remove the cap, those that farm more, can hoard even more gold, and still use ectos and armbraces anyways.
It won't make much of a difference for them. But it would only make things worse for the rest.
And you can't assume everyone can farm or should farm, because, well, it's not the way the game it's meant to be played alone.

Do you really want to reduce inflation?
Then you must DESTROY farming and SC's and add a market like GW2's.

But none of that is going to happen, and there isn't really any other solution, so you'll have to cope with the current situation, which has been stable for a long time.
People got used to it.

I voted to remove the cap simply because of gold transactions that I make. I personally don't care if ectos/shards/ambraces/keys or what ever else gets cheaper as I don't hoarde any of it cap or no.

I'm not a power-trader and thus have no opinion about the trade cap, but I can see how removing that would devalue the investments that a lot of people have in ectos and armbraces, so I would vote no on that.

It's because of the points made about the delicacy of the value of those things that I have avoided storing my money in them. So I'm very much in favor of removing the storage cap.

dont remove the money cap and empower the dupers who are still doing their dark magik.

Aren't there enough gold sinks in-game for you already?

So every time I trade something from my storage to my main account I am to be taxed?

The easy way to bypass that would be going into an explorable and dropping it for the other person anyway. This is not a feasible idea at all.

Raise the cap to 250K per character.

When the game started, having so much per character at one time was unheard of. Now power players shuffle that around that on a daily basis.

The game needs to evolve.