It's both disappointing and discouraging that, of all the indemic problems and issues in the game right now, the two the developers have seemingly decided to address this is the one that seems to merit such discussion. By my estimation, we've had two major balance tweaks since release and what have they concerned themselves with? Making farming more difficult so that people will have to spend yet more time and effort to find things - both elites and items. And to flood the sigil market so that PvP rewards are all but meaningless.
While I agree that the price of a sigil is a problem, it's largely a symptomatic problem of a larger issue. Namely, that the economy is broken. That's largely due to the fact that there just aren't enough - if any - gold sinks in the game. As has been said, the reason sigil prices are so high is not due to greed or corruption - at least, not on the part of the players involved - but to the fact that people are willing to pay that price. No one would charge 100+ plat for a sigil if there weren't people who could afford it. And, as has been said, 100 plat for a group of individuals is a relatively easy matter to acquire. It might take a day or a weekend of dedicated farming but it's certainly possible and, for a guild, that labor is divided amongst everyone in the group. It can be done, it has been done, and it is being done. Those who can't are either doing something wrong or aren't organized or dedicated enough to the cause. A Guild Hall is not a birthright, no more so than being able to start a character in Droknar's Forge. There are known ways of getting one and various shortcuts if you don't want to follow the "established" route but none of them are without effort or hardships. A Guild Hall is a reward, it's an accomplishment, a goal, and to remain so it needs to be something that takes effort to have.
Of course, just because people can make the sort of money required doesn't mean it's not a problem. Every day, every second, the game's servers are up there's more and more money, more wealth, entering the system. What's out there to draw it off? A plat enterance fee on WaW content? If people can farm out 100P, then 1P is next to nothing. A 15P armor set? Sure, if you actually bother to get one as they're no better than the stuff in Droknar's and even then that's about 75P for a full set and, again, if we take it for granted that 100P is a reachable goal then 75 isn't all that bad, either. I suppose you could get multiple sets for each and every character but then you run into the issue of storage space. I'd love to own a set of every armor in the game but I don't know where I'd put them and still be able to pick up drops. Past a certain point, gold does nothing but sit in your inventory and pile up. And not just in yours but in everyone else's playing too. Inflation occurs, more and more gold is required for even basic goods. And it becomes useless as a medium of exchange because there's nothing to spend it on. Such bloat is inevitable in a game like Guild Wars but there's a lack of anything to combat it that's startling.
But not perhaps, as startling as the seeming obliviousness or indifference to the real problem. It's the economy stupid. Sigils are just the tip of the iceberg. *Everything* you can trade is going to raise in price so it's fortunate that there's so little to trade. If there were no material or dye traders then we'd certainly see skyrocketing prices there too. I'm far from the wealthiest but I'd drop 20~50k on a Superior rune I needed or a max damage weapon with nice mods in a heartbeat, depending. But what else am I going to spend it on? Those conveiniant traders are actually harmful to the economy because they put a cap on prices. No one's going to trade for much beyond what the merchants offer so dye prices, for example, are fixed. Except, of course, for the dyes not available at the traders the black and silver. As we gain more wealth they cost more serving to distribute wealth and lubricate the economy. The more people have, the more they'll spend, so Black dye will keep raising in price. There's no price-fixing there, there's no, in so many words, governemental subsidy, keeping prices stable so the only thing that works on the price of Black dye is market forces. But there needs to be, essentially, a tax on playing that serves to funnel off excess gold in the system to keep the wealthy from getting *too* wealthy and driving costs ever upwards until the currency is so devalued it doesn't matter and you'd need millions of gold to get a black dye. Markets need to open, lacking those price-controlling brakes, so that wealthier players distribute their wealth more but at the same time there needs to be goldsinks to draw off wealth in general. Those who have little need to be able to get wealth from those who do and the wealthy need a reason to give wealth to the needy, trading needs to be facilitated and eased - letting the free market govern itself - either through established trading zones or an auction house or player vending system. And we all need some massive gold sinks like guild hall upgrades or customization or being able to expand vault storage or pay for more character slots.
But what do we get? 2 more sigils entering the market. Oh, and farming's been made more difficult so we all have to work harder to get wealth in the first place. But, hey, this is the same design philosophy that gave us SoC-only elites to replace the gem system that would have let players trade and establish a skill economy. Really, what can you expect?
Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't just give the sigil trader an infinite supply of sigils, as they have with merchants and identification kits, and set the price at a flat 50~100P. That would solve the "problem", wouldn't it? Of course, it also further destroys the economy by removing yet another thing to trade and leaving more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.
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Originally Posted by Gaile Gray
"hypocritical?" Could you explain how that word applies? I'm scratching my head here, being a word person and not seeing its application at all to the preceding commentary.
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Spooky's probably long and, perhaps, wisely fled this discussion so allow me to respond.
It's hypocritical because it's presented as a solution. When, in reality it's nothing more than posting a police officer at every intersection where lack of maintainance funds has caused yet another traffic light to fail. Rather than being helpful and addressing the actual problem, it's a bandaid and one that going to wind up being more costly and troublesome than fixing what's actually wrong.
It's the old debate of direction versus freedom. There is, now, but one source of sigils in the game. That means that anyone wanting a sigil has to deal with how they're acquired in some fashion. Rather than having sigils as something that incourages, rewards, and expands upon a player's, a guild's, gameplay experience and enjoyment, it's an effective impediment to their fullfilment because of how everyone is funneled into one direction and one direction only. There's no choice, there's no option, there's no freedom there's simply "this is the way it is - win your sigil or pay through the nose". In a game where the goal is supposedly to provide options rather than power, to foster diversity and freedom rather than a more determanistic linear progression from start to end, sigils dropping in the hall runs counter to those design goals. The rich get richer, those who have time to spend gain something that those who don't can't, and everything else that comes along with the equation of time=power.
There must be some guidance, some direction, so that we're not all thrown to the wolves where only the fittest will survive but the flaw here is not that sigils are rare or that Guild Halls are something to be worked towards and earned through gameplay or that there's a tweak needed in just how much effort is required for it to be a reward rather than a feature, it's that people are forced, railroaded, into the pre-approved path. It's not just that the economy is broken or that there's a slight problem with sigil availabilty compared to the guilds clamoring for one, it's that the game has been poorly designed and is need of a structural overhaul to fix the root causes that lead to problems like sigil prices being high.
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Originally Posted by jwoody
I am also hoping they do something about elite skills, but I don't understand "gold is useless." I would think that with all the gold you have you could easily buy all the runes you want, you don't need to unlock them.
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What the most dedicated and "hardcore" of PvPers want is not simply more runes but the flexibility afforded by those runes. To do so through purchasing those runes - to say nothing of the various upgrades and high-end weapons and armor - is not a good method of achieving that flexibility. They would need, I believe, about 28 runes. One each for every profession's attribute at each of the 3 levels of Minor, Major, and Superior. All professions have at least 4 attributes although some like Warrior and Elementalist have 5, and the Warrior has an additional rune in the Absorbtion but that, like the Vigor you only need a Superior for because they're just strictly better yet rarer versions of the lesser runes. Now, obviously, you don't need all the runes as some of them will be useless to you - I can't see using Superior Healing or something along those lines - but the point is not to have what you think you might need but to have everything you might possibly need so you dn't have to hunt it down once you do - you never know, maybe some day someone out there will come up with a way of using that rune to good effect, best to have it on hand for that day than to have to scramble for it when it comes. All of that takes up a lot of precious inventory space, far more than you have available at your vault storage so such a player would be constantly shuffling their runes around from character to character eating up more time beyond simply arranging for the purchase of each rune. Then, too, they'll have to constantly replenish their supply because runes must be added to armor and to get them back you'll need to salvage them out and that's a risky process. It might be a 90% success rate or something along those lines but eventually you'll lose a rune and need to buy it all over again. That means you'll need to have more money on hand or more farming done to get that money in order to replenish your stock.
Buying runes is a stopgap measure because what they really want and need is to unlock those runes so they can use them again at a moment's notice without having to "grind" away at maintaining their character. That's why the going rate of currency is unidentified rare armor pieces (or runes - you can salvage without identifying and those rare armors are going to pop out an unidentified rune. Why people doing do more of that so they can advertise un-IDed Necro or Ele or Warrior or Vigor runes is beyond me).
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Originally Posted by Dreamsmith
Sorry for the long rant, I'm just tired and pissed seeing people post who clearly don't even understand the problem. The problem isn't that we have to farm gold to buy a sigil, the problem is we can never buy a sigil, no matter how much we farm! The more we farm, the FURTHER we get from meeting the price!
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of course. Demand outstrips supply. And, as such, more and more of your productivity - represented in game as your "farming" output - goes towards the good you wish to acquire. Those who are most productive, those who have the time to devote to sitting in town looking for "WTS Sigil!" or to bash more and more monsters into the ground to gain every more wealth, will be those who are best able to meet the demands of those who are doing the supplying. The proble, as Charles deftly illustrated, is that there are far fewer sigils than peopel who want them. They drop at a rate of, perhaps, 15 per hour now no matter how many people are playing the game. The more people play, the more people there are that want the sigils, the greater the demand while the supply remains fixed. Ten teams storming the Tombs or ten million, there are only fifteen sigils per hour up for grabs. This creates a seller's market, where the only check on the price of a good is the amount of money in the other person's pocket. Why is it 100P? Because that's the limit on how much gold a character can hold at any given time. Take away that limit and it'd shoot even further up and, in fact, that's why people are turning to asking for rares and items rather than gold - they're worth more than 100P. There's no need for a monopoly or a shadowy conspiracy of people out to keep the PvErs down or anything of the sort. Market forces drive the price of sigils ever higher because of people doing exactly what you're doing, Dreamsmith: working harder and harder to earn more and more. What's limiting the price of sigils is not their number or availability. It's the amount of wealth owned by the average person who wants a sigil and wants to pay for the privaledge of not having to win one.
Simple economics theory is enough to explain the current predicament. And, as with many other inovations and changes to the game that have been made over the long months that I've been following it, something like the current situation was predictible long in advance of the present day. People were complaining and warning about the sigil system when it was introduced just as they warned about the SoC or elite skills or SoC-only elites or mission design or item dependancy and numerous other issues that remain to this very day. A fixed supply with burgeoning demand is a recipe for inflation. And burgeoning demand with a time-sink based infinite supply of wealth is a recipe for an economy circling the drain.
In so many words, the only way for you to get a sigil is to work harder, not smarter - you need more people earning more gold to get above the average wealth level or "poverty line" - or you need to wait until demand has leveled out and the supply of sigils begins to outpace the market - and given the current state of things that's probably going to take weeks if not months. Either way, you need to invest more time in order to get your reward.
it looks like gold is officially worthless just like it was in Diablo 2. Congradulations Anet, hope to see a 1.10 patch soon if this keeps up.
