What's Up with ECTO Price Plunge?

you know what would be cool!! An applet that allows me to buy/sell my crafting materials in the game with a online tracker of prices from the trader that updates itself with charts and all.

Now a name for it....lets call it Northern Wall Street.

There should be an in-game ticker that you can turn on and off that shows rare merch prices.. Yeah.. Then we don't even have to walk to go see prices..

The golden age of ectos over...

i think the new versions of ectos and shards will be the amber and jade stuff the kurzic and luxon faction points are about....

i saw armous avalable for crafting but they didnt need ecto or anything but the basics (and they were about 1.5k per armour piece) so i would assume that instadof fissure armour, its Faction armour.....

*but if that is true, then at least with re-doable quests, anyone can realy grind enough to grab the amount needed for the faction armour...however, i would assume that there will be some spankeyer version that needs something expensive, with a different skin, and available in hard to reach Factioned off areas for the girnd monkeys that want to heve the leet version ^^ lol*

Going to dissagree with you Rayea. Amber and Jade will not be the new ecto and shards, for the simple fact that you can trade faction for them. Therefore, they will not be rare enough to have a value similar to ecto and shards.

The Factions FoW armor will be made from rare materials, be it ecto and shards or some others, not relatively common amber and jadeite.

The "rich" will just rebuild their riches and be rich again. People stay "poor" because of their styles of weath accumulation. Applies in life too.

Except that FoW is not, or has ever been, a universal end-game goal. It signifies someone A) with a copious amount of time on their hands, B) who has a character of farmable profession, or C) who eBays ftw.

The fact that the general level of incompetance as a player is spread evenly amongst the 1.5k, 15k, and FoW wearers ensures that FoW armour will never be seen as the status symbol some seem to think or hope it would be.

Whether its yet another notion that looked good on paper or simply another aesthetic option is left for speculation.

Some people, myself included, don't even like the looks of FoW armor. Since it offers nothing as far as additional armor or skills, I have no reason to blow buttloads of gold on it. As soon as I accumulate ectos or shards, I sell them. I like the looks of the 1.5 or 15k armor more than anything I've seen in FoW. I'm not slamming anyone who has it. It's just a matter of personal tastes. But I do like doing FoW runs. They're fun, I gets lots of xp and they help make me richer.

Three words: Chinese gold farmers.

Cool, let it keep plunging. ill be able to get my war's FoW armor sooner than i hoped

So, do you farm, guy with 4 FOW armors and no guild?

The prices seem to have rebounded a bit...

6.5k street price as of now.

It seems, except for when there is an exploit/glitch, it has been programmed to NEVER go lower than 6k at trader. At that point, it goes back up to highs of 8.5k then goes back down. Very unstable as of right now.

You forgot D) is a skilled merchant.

You know, it'd be great if they added armor and other gear that really would reflect your level of skill and therefore would become a symbol to others. I would love to see solo missions geared to your profession that would progress in difficulty with better rewards after each one. Perhaps you would get your boots after the first one, your gloves next, etc. It would go a long way towards proving that you know your skillbar and didn't just ride the coat tails of a good FoW farming group to get ectos and such.

There could even be team missions that applied medals and such to your character to show that you can work in a team. Guilds could possibly gather statues and other decorations for their halls by participating in really tough guild only cooperative missions. Maybe trim on their capes like they did for the tournaments.

Dobo, your second idea is brilliant.


Also an intresting point, if the prices of ectos drop, shouldn't also the value of items drop too...as the price is so tightly defined by the rare mat trader, money would otherwise be simply 'vanishing' out of the economy in collosal amounts...

Thus my sword is worth say 100k+50 ectos

ectos crash in price (they are depressed right now, but no where near crashed - crash = sudden massive drop which fuels itself), so my sword is now worth 100k+100 ectos? unless the amount of ectos in everyones possesion has literally doubled, that would be bad logic, equating to a massiverise in price of rares. am sure players with any sizable amount of ectos have already given this some thought.

If ectos did suddenly crash (say to 2kper, through a lack of confidence in their ability to hold value - which might happen soon - and thus they loose value), what would the effect actually be? Rubies and saphires would probably take over, and their price (due to rarity) would sky rocket as confidence in them as being able to hold value grew. A bit like when ecto used to be 11k, I brought a load, I was confident (as other buyers were) they would increase in value, and they did.

Their is always the possibility a 'cartel of players' is waiting for the right moment (lower the ecto price, more ectos they can buy) to bump ecto prices right back up (by simply buying from the trader in huge amounts) this would perhaps be countered by people selling back to the trader however...who knows.

ive always wanted to buy ectos on ebay just to sell them all to the trader and see what selling 100ectos would actually do to the trader price. but that requires real money and its a form of price fixing which im sure is in the TOA so ill never do it.

Ectos were only worth alot before because it was used as currency. Earlier in the game, the standard was 10k gold = 1 ecto, and the price stayed like that for a while. However, it is not true that everybody wants to spend 2-3 million gold on Fissure armor, so why is ecto worth 10k gold?

Well, it's basically like a bubble (like the dot com bubble in the real life economics). Suppose I were to sell you a paper promising that I will pay you $1000 next year for only $100. You don't trust me (because it's just a stupid piece of paper and I can run away), but you buy that paper because you can sell it to some other guy for $200 (and that guy believes I will be able to pay out). He buys it hoping to sell it to another guy for $300... and the pyramid scheme goes on. Whoever is the last one with the paper gets screwed. Well, this is the economics example, but what has happened to ectos is similar.

Not everybody was willing to spend 2-3 million gold on FoW armor. Many people don't even want it. However, if they ever see ecto at a price less than 10k, they would buy it and use it to trade at 10k gold a piece, so they make a profit. Also, 10k is such a nice number (easy to trade with), so it makes a good symbolic peg. So in a way, ectos were worth way more than they should be. Even people who don't want ectos are accepting them as payment because they know they can trade it to someone else. So the amount of ecto used as currency keeps going up, but the amount of items that people really want (the Chaos Axes, Crystalline Swords, etc) are not increasing by much. It's clear that the system will eventually bust and once ectos are worth less than 10k, there is not nice number to peg it at and it goes down some more. Ectos have been fluctuating quite a bit since, but in general it has been fairly low (around 6.5k-7.5k). This price more accurately represents demand because at 1 million gold to 1.5 million gold, many more players are willing to go for FoW armor. In fact, most trades don't involve ectos any more because prices in general have went down a lot since farming has been nerfed, green items introduced, etc (I remember seeing perfect long swords sell for 2 mil gold in ecto, but this was when farming yielded as high as 50-60k gold per hour). So ecto is less used as currency (although there are still many trades involving ecto) and more used as crafting material now, so it reflects the price decrease.

Another explaination of the decrease in price is that everything has been decreasing in price. Superior Absorption was 100k not too long ago, then it dropped down to 80k, now much less. Same with superior vigor and many other weapons (for example, I brought a 15%^50 long sword for 32k gold the other day, much less than 1 million+ gold last year).