Black Tuesday: Changing the Economic Face of Guild Wars

I sell all my items cheap, because I never sell items to other players to make money; only to clear space

I sold a clean, max damage mursaat hammer for 600g the other day

* The problem isn't that noone knows what things are worth, the problem is that more gold is going in to the economy than is going out, so each gold becomes progressively less worth. This is what inflation is. If everyone had on average 10 plat, it'd be a whole lot more difficult to sell an item for 100 plat than if everyone on average has 200 plat. Hence a trading place will make selling and buying easier, but it will not help with the prices, as the problem is that everyone's got so much gold and so little to spend it on.

* What the game needs are gold sinks. Problem is, gold sinks are annoying. Typical sinks would be e.g. that you'd need to repair your armor and weapons after every mission (and cost would be based on the price of the item), that one'd need to buy supplies (f.ex. arrows) or that map-travel costs money. Annoying. But perhaps necessary.

* Gold wipe: instead of wiping all gold, go the turkish way, and delete two zeros. 100 gold before wipe = 1 gold after the wipe. Not sure if it's technically feasible.

* 1.25 million for an axe? I've got a real problem seeing how anyone can sell or buy anything for 1.25 million. Can you even carry that much gold?

* the guys with too much cash are farmers and trader. That simple. If you play the campaign, you'll have just enough money to buy a good armor at the end. An alternative to creating gold-sinks is therefore to instead throttle gold creation/amassing - for instance by making farming hard, or making it impossible to sell items except to traders. If everyone are left to their own devices, they simply will never get all that much gold.

* The real question, though, is - is there really a problem with the prices? It seems to me, here on the euro servers, as if prices are fairly stable, even dropping a bit for e.g. dyes. Presumably Anet has tools for visualizing the amount of gold in the system, and graphs for the prices of e.g. runes and dyes - that way THEY'LL know if the inflation is getting out of hand. We who don't have access to such tools don't really know if the problem exists or not. Personally I think it's severely exaggerated, unless things are much worse in the US than in Europe.

Gold sinks don't have to be compulsory or annoying, though. For instance, the game already has sinks such as dye and dwarven ale. What these show is that people will voluntarily 'throw away' their money for the sake of looking cool or having a bit of fun. So what the game really needs are more ways for people to 'waste' their money for rewards that they cannot sell on again. A few suggestions, then:

• Gambling - gambling is a tried and trusted way of loosing money You could play simple card-like games against NPCs or even if have betting on the outcome of battles etc. Instead of horse races you could have devourer races which you could bet on etc. Of course, the house would always maintain a 10% or so margin...
  
  
• Casual Ware - alongside armour you could also sell 'non-battle' clothes that you could dress your character up in. It seems lots of people have fun playing 'virtual Barbie' with their characters and making them look cool around town. So, why not have a wide range of clothes available that look good but have no practical function? These would all be customised to a character (so couldn't be sold on) and could only be bought from NPCs.
  
  
• Discos - Go to any town and you'll see people love to dance. So, why not expand the concept of Dwarven ale, casual clothes and dancing and make some kind of nightclub were people could hang out? There'd be an admission charge and dress-code and plenty of beer and hallucinogenic drugs to buy Great way of wasting money...
  
  
• Taxation - Not really fun, but if there was a sliding scale of sales tax on all sales then this might help curb inflation. You'd have no tax below a certain threshold, but if you tried to sell goods for more than (say) 10000G then there'd be a 50% sales tax.

The largest reason there is inflation is because high end players continually make money and have nothing to spend it on. When they decide they want something, they are more than willing to pay an "overcosted" amount to save time. This will continue to happen as long as players keep getting money and essentially have nothing important to spend it on. (Note that I'm not talking about farming or anything outside of "normal gameplay"; it's just that high end players have a big income, being where they are, and nothing to spend money on.)

Given that sellers will figure out there are superrich, lazy (for good reasons) buyers out there, the price will just keep creeping up.

Any real solution will need to deal with this aspect of the economy somehow. Many proposed solutions do deal with SOME of the problems, and might be good ideas to implement ANYWAY, but if you are specifically trying to fight inflation, this is an important place to start.

count me in

I also think it was a great implementation. The best part is you could buy or sell without the tedium of spamming the chat window or sitting around for an hour trying to sift through everyone's messages. When I played EQ, I could just zip on over to the bazaar, check the wepons (or whatever) to see if someone had what I was looking for - in 3-4 minutes I could see if anyone was selling something that I was interested in and then be on my way and get back to playing. You didn't have to wait for hours hoping that something would offer what you were looking for. Check real quick, no one is selling what I'm looking for, ok, time to move on and get back to playing. OR if I had to go run some errands for an hour or so, just click that I want to be a merchant, pick out what goods I want to sell and the price I want for it, and then leave the game running. I spend an hour IRL and I come back and if soemone wanted what I had, I might have made some extra cash with very little effort. Of course, you do have to expend some effort to get the goods you want to sell, but your goods dont do you any good or get you any money if you can't connect with someone to sell them. You want to buy something specific, you go to the bazaar, you got something to sell, you go to the bazaar, you got an extra 20K and you want to see if you can find something interesting to upgrade to, you can go to the bazaar.

ATM I have more money I know what to do with, not that I have alot but it seems it is way too easy to get items I need. I have never needed to buy a weapon and usually by the end of a quest I have no room in my inventory.

IMO, the problem with the ecomony is the fact there isn't a demand on anything but a few select items. I think the strength economys like WoW is that fact that people are dependant on other people who harvest items for crafting, cooking, alchemy ect. It give players on all levels a chance to participate...and give items that may be considered not very exciting a sense of worth. Also of course there is no auction house.

So my suggestions would be to create an auction house, make people more dependant on raw materials by introducing craftable items that can be traded or sold such as other different armor (which are not just for your own character), and try come up with other things that people might want to spend money on other than PVP items.
I know that this may involve more...umm grind for some people, but there are others who enjoy it.

An interesting solution indeed, especially the shopping district.

I personally have had a lot of experience with economy based gameplay in lineage 2. Since l2 is a very item-acquiring based game, they split these up according to lvl and had a good merchant system ready at launch.

The items were 'graded' (No Grade, D Grade, C/B/A, and finally S)

The merchants sold items up to D-Grade (lvl 20-40) These were sold at fixed prices, and bought back at 50% value. Items could not wear & tear, so people tried to resell their previous weapon at a certain value. Often enough, the resell value tended to stabilize around 75%, since both seller and buyer eventually compromised halfway. At first however, sellers were selling at just a little bit under, especially when it was the only one of its kind being sold in that particular town.

Lineage 2 had a private store function. Anybody could set up their store with 3 items (dwarves could sell 5, because of their crafting ability and importance in player economy) They'd be allowed to have a text box above their head with a message about content or things like "<<<`~DROP ONLY ITEMS!!!---CHEAP!!!`~>>>"... whatever floats your boat.

After a while, towns got crowded, people lvl'd up and wanted their money's worth. So what happened? Towns with about 500 people sitting very closely packed next to stores or at the centre of towns, all with messages above their heads crying for attention. Chats flooded with messages and people would simply go AFK for days leaving expensive items to get sold. Later on, a system was added that disconnected people that had a store open for longer than a set time (like 12/24 hours) from the server.

In this aspect, the shopping district sounds like a good idea. To completely avoid crowding, an auction system of some type could be used. However, auctioning might not be the best way, you could also just let people put up items in the sale house of the current town they are in, and allow them to check back if items were sold to collect the money from sales (perhaps checking back could be done from any sale house) I am indeed hinting at the possible exclusion of auctioning. Rather just plain selling, in the form of a sale house.

I myself have trouble figuring out what to price things I'm selling at, because they often have the same names, looks and special features are generaly not understood in the places you are trying to sell them.

Again, relating back to previous experience, l2 featured a clear set of weapons per grade. There were, however, best-of-the-grade weapons/amror that could not be purchased from stores. (after d-grade, you could buy c-grade from a 'luxury' store, that only took crystals. These could be salvaged from any weapons higher than non-grade) These items, at first dropped and later crafted, were sold at rediculous prices when they first arrived. I remember selling 29p.def gloves (you could buy up to 27 I believe) for 3 times the value of the best ones from the store. This went down to only 120% after about a week. I did, however, make about a million 'adena' from simple bartering and running from town to town buying and selling for 3 days. a million in this aspect would be the best buyable weapon at levels 20-40, which is generally about 1-2 months game time. A considerable amount at least.

I am very pleased with the rune/dye/scroll merchants GW now has, since they stimulate actual 'fair' trade based on the demand of an item. Perhaps this could also be stimulated further through a better indication of weapon worth through merchants.

Currently, weapons that would sell for a lot of money are only bought for a small portion of their apparent 'worth' by traders, making it all very confusing. Up to now, I've simply not even tried selling things more than a few times, unless I 'knew' they were top notch equipment, and even then, I was only comparing to experience descriptions of other players. It's much easier and less frustrating to just salvage weapons and then sell the salvage to the merchants, rather than go through the enormous fuss (IMHO, currently that's what it is at the moment) of finding a buyer.

Oostdyk, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, you bring about some interesting points. While I have never played L2, the shop system you mention that they set up seems overly chaotic and ineffective. Rather than having a message over your head, would it be easier to simple have a box with the item's information above your head? You would be able to select an item for sale, and that item's stats would appear in a small box over your head. Of course, you would only be able to show one item, otherwise the display would get far too crowded.

In order to solve crowding around shops and shops being placed to close to one another, "collision bubbles" must be set. These "collision bubbles" are invisible spheres which prevent any player from setting up a shop within your little bubble. Perhaps a small patch of dirt, or maybe stone, could appear underneath the shopkeeper. This would be the shopkeeper's area, and no other shopkeeper would be allowed to set up a shop in that small area. This way, areas won't flood with billions of shops on top of each other.

Districts will, of course, have to have a pop cap, but what if we had selective districts? Since weaponry is most commonly for sale, we could have a bow sale district, a hammer sale district, staff sale district, etc., another district for selling focus items, another district for dye sales, and another for selling crafting materials. This way you could have an easier time finding what's for sale, and a seller can have an easier time finding potential buyers.

These are great ideas, I would have little problem with some sort of Auction House or setting up a Bazzare (sp) since there is alot of people standing around anyways. I do think there might be overcrowding if people did put up permenant mules though.

But ATM this is this is the question I have about the economy:
As it is now seems like everytime I go out on a quest I get alteast one or two purple usable weapons along with about 10 other weapons, so what incentive is there to buy anything else? Other than high end high priced weapons, runes, dyes ect (which I don't really need). There's not a whole lot to really buy. Concurrently what incentive do people have to buy my things when its reletively easy for them to get themselves?

I might be playing devils advocate here, but it will eventually goes back to high end items going for insane prices.

Inflation is created because there is an infinite supply of gold within the game. The money in the entire game will only get higher and higher due to the fact that monsters drop gold. In real life you can't simply go and kill a monster alone and get a couple hundred bucks because of it.

but there's little girl's cape and dwarven's ale.... That should prevent inflation.

My name is hard to pronounce in english. I usually put it like this: 'Oh-sst-die-k', all sections should be seen as their respective seperate words :P

Indeed. I'm all for not even using that system. I mean, in lineage 2, the items had different names altogether. In GW, you'd have 50 people all selling a Flat Bow, with differing stats and prices... VERY confusing, on top of the way it's built.

I'd definitly suggest some sort of crowd stopper, but not one that prevents people from selling after a cap is reached. This would be a little unforgiving IMO (if that is indeed how it was to be read) But this would probably only be with the system that I myself do not really think will work.

I'm definitly all for a straight sale house, which you don't need to be online for. And a town sensitive one for selling, but a non-town sensitive one for picking up the cash from sales. This is mostly because some items are in higher supply in different area's, and having them up for sale everywhere without travel to get there, could unbalance them. However, since there is an instant travel option, there is only so much this could really do to balance it out...

That's so wrong it's not even funny. If we can assume staff = sword, then sell your staff and use that same money to buy the sword. To say that inflation stops this trade using currency is absolutely ludicrous.

Is inflation really that bad ? Once you buy that +15% while hp above 50% health you dont need any other swords. So say you spend 150k on your sword and another 150 on the shield, then to look pretty buy 60k armor and spend another 100k on runes with 40k on dyes (you buy every vial and mix them all together). You've totalled 500k and never even have to buy gear again. That's also considering you havent already found the items you need to be maxed. It's really not that bad especially that when one character is pimped to the max it gets so much easier to equip your two others (that's assuming you have 2 characters). I just don't understand where the problem is, once you got your gear you're set and as for Sigils, well if you need one you should be able to win one so technically you don't even have to buy them(topics to be discussed in another post)

WTB 230 skill points

I think the problem is, and I may be talking to deaf ears, but it is easy to say things are all ok when you hit a level that money becomes not a problem.

Personally I think the game should be challenging and I expect to butt handed to me until I earn it.

Unfortunately there are gamers who think that it's unfair low level people that have high end weapons..... because for some reason they were under the pretense that this game was not based on leveling, farming, ect ect...all about skill and crazy stuff like that. Unfortunately this is not the case.

I'm the gamer who likes PVE/ grind end of it, so I have a hard time feeling sorry for the casual pvp end of it, but I can't help to think that they sorta kinda got the short end of the stick.

Okay, but no one weapon is ever equal to another, and on top of that, different players and different playstyles create a preference in weaponry. Equillibrium is nonexistant.

I just skimmed through and didn't see it mentioned but I could have missed it so I apologize if this was already brought up.

A possible issue I see with having "afk shops" is that people will never actually log off the servers even when they aren't really playing. I doubt anet would appreciate having 75% of the total possible player base logged in at all times because 60% of them are afk in their shops trying to sell things. In other games there is a monthly fee to take care of bandwidth costs. Since GW has no monthly fee this could be a problem. Of course i have no idea what Anet's bandwidth costs are like so it might not even be an issue but it seems like it coul d be a problem.

As a possible aside, there could even be a web trading board for trading (auction house or anything else), allowing players to trade from outside the game interface.

This has technical advantages and disadvantages, including separate servers for handling the trade load. It might be nice, though.

They just should get rid of skill points to make a very good money sink. If i remember correctly, 1st skill brought - 10gp, next skill 20 gp etc. So, if you buy 400 skills then it costs 10*(401*400/2) = 802 platinum

I really don't like shops idea. Playered owned shops I think are terrible Idea because it uses up space, everyone will want them. It isnt a gold sink, better locations get better sales. IMO it dosent solve anything whatsoever.

I really like the idea of pointless vanity items however.. I want a scarf!

My Idea For Selling Stuff

Why not get rid of player trading altogether? That would solve the problem with people charging ridiculous prices ....

Seriously though, this inflation is a tough nut to crack. It's good to see people providing solutions although as with any, there are pros and cons. We probably need some actual economists to take a look at the state of the virtual economy in Guild Wars and suggest recommendations on what to do about it (I'm sure some of you here *are* probably economists in the offline world).

Inflation is bad. What if someone buys the game a year or two after release? If inflation is high, then they wouldn't be able to participate in the economy at all. If you want to see how inflation ruins game economies, look at Diablo II. Unless you have several SoJs, you're completely broke.

oh inflation is just so horrible! the prices are so high i cant afford...

#1 a celestial sigil(maybe you should MAKE a guild first so they can help you)

#2 a superior vigor rune(a whole 10 more hp than a major, WOW!)

#3 a weapon with the perfect mods on it(practically no difference than one with lower %'s on it)


did i miss anything????? cause the 15k armors are for looks only so you people are whining because there are 3 items you cant afford

I gave up on the 15k armors. I recreate characters a tad too often to discover new combos that i might like better. I enjoy mes/r better than r/mes for some reason

Once my chars stabilizes. I'll get the 15k armors when I have the gold :P probably when anet makes gold drops a lil more often and in a fair amount instead of 120 divvied up with 8
I'd rather have 1200 gold drops in the desert with 8
maybe they should make gold drops scaleble with the amount of members in the group as to keep it balanced.

since this game was geared towards PvPers and marketed to PvE(ers) nobody will agree with me....and ArenaNet won't do anything to address my suggestion. But the majority of the wealth is controlled by the PvPers that got into the game early and have ammassed a fortune before the 'fixes'....you want a money sink? start charging PvPers to fight in PvP.....

hmm what about the pvers who dabble in pvp?

- make an 'elite' wealthy pvpers arena where it costs 5k-20k(How crazzzy am I? ) to get in, but 1 round for a ' unsellable' and undroppable rare item for unlocking random stuff or something?

That can be paragraph one for your new book: how to kill Guild Wars in one easy step.

ROTFL! just make 1 arena where you can't get in without paying hefty sums for the whole team and have the reward equals what you pay into. there's always the catch of only getting the reward if you win. make it similar to the underworld or fissure, but pvp style! leave tombs and Team arenas and GVG alone.

I doubt that in one year you'll start seeing items go for over 100k. The more items are created the less the demand will be. Look at what happened with Sigils, they went from 100k+all your gear to 60k in under 3 days. When more and more ''godly'' (I don't know why people refer to yellows as ''godly'') weapons will be inserted the demand will decrease and so will prices. Right now gold for me is to buy unidentified superior runes and that's basically it. What you need to do is look at the economy not in terms of inflation but in terms of money sinks. What are they ? And to what extent are they working ?

No offense but this is wrong. Simply put, inflation is created by the lack of money sink. Gold and items are created much much faster than they can be spent/spent/burnt.

Farmers and people who have high level characters are amassing fortunes and they have nothing to spend gold on. As soon as an item is decent/good/ubber or simply valuable like good runes or sigils, rich players can afford to spend dozens of platinum to acquire it. They do know this item shouldn't be worth that much gold, but they don't care.

Lots of gold in your pocket & few good items/runes/sigils.
Demand >> offer.
Prices skyrocket.

Auction house & player-controlled shops won't solve this problem. For the records, I'd like to have an AH in GW, but only AFTER the economy has been fixed.

simply put frog is right.

Players exchanging money has nothing to do with the amount of gold created. The reason 1p isnt worth what it once was is because more gold has been created than destroyed. The only real money sink now is the 15k armor, which simply isnt worth it for any of my characters. I wont spend game money just to "look cool". Most of the 15k armors look cheesy aswell (but thats just my opinion).

The best player-run shop systems I've seen in MMOGs are Ultima Online's and Knight Online's. Try Knight Online, a completely free MMORPG; although, I tested the beta when the rules weren't the strange rules they have now due to the Premium Service option...

maybe so...but fact is "point" "Click" "wait for them to die" isn't PvP......

Please read the entire thread; these issues have been brought up and solutions have been obtained.

This is a serious problem. With the amount of players they have attracted, ANet could still be charging a monthly fee and making a much higher profit than they currently are, though doing this would cause them to loose a large portion of the casual playerbase, which makes up a very large percentage of Guild Wars; thus ANet may in fact suffer lower profits as the result of monthly fees.

Regardless, I have to compliment ANet on their ability to maintain completely stable servers without ever charging us a penny. I've never seen a crashed server in Guild Wars, wheras in WoW server crashes were regular things, and WoW servers suffered incredibly long maintenance periods.

Thus, I feel like it would be highly unethical to set up a shop and then go AFK, because we'd basically be screwing over a company who has given us a massive amount of MMO-style service without an MMO-style fee. It would simply be disrespectful for people to hog up such massive amounts of server space.

There are two ways to stop this:

1) ANet implements an idle disconnect feature, which disconnects you after a certain amount of idle time; unfortunately it would have to be fairly high in order to stop people who go AFK for realistic reasons from being punished. One or two hours is a possible time limit. Chatting will need to reset the timer, because a player won't be able to move while in his/her shop, and thus the only way to prove he isn't idle is to chat.

2) Force all shops to be set up for a maximum of half an hour, at which point the owner must set his/her shop back up.

This would undermine one of the core principles of the game: That you don't need to grind for cash and waste time in order to compete. Inflation causes this core mechanic to be undermined because it forces players to work up to a set amount of gold in order to aquire the equippment required to play at a certain skill level. If your armor and weaponry is of lower quality than your opponent's, you start off at a disadvantage. Forcing people to buy skill points and buy skills themselves will cause a large percentage of a playerbase to need to grind for cash and spend it on something required for making progress within the game. Therefore, if we create a gold sink, it should be an optional sink which players do not HAVE to participate in. WoW created this with mounts- they were extremely high priced, and provided only a convenience: faster movement speed. A money sink must be something which will be a convenience to the player, not something he is forced to participate in so he can compete.

Renting out a merchant is an interesting idea. Unfortunately there are only so many merchants and there are far more players- in order to implement this idea, we would need just as many merchants as players. This simply creates the same problems we've encountered with player shops, including overcrowding, wares needing to be advertised, etc. Though it does solve the disconnect problem.

You've missed the point. The prices are SO ABSURD that participating in the economy is become something only for the rich. The rich are the only ones getting richer from the economy. Its creating massive income disparity, and thus prevents players who do not invest as much time into the game from competing in the game. Its forcing people to grind in order to afford the weaponry the would like to buy. While I believe a certain amount of effort needs to be put in to buy your most desired weapon, I also believe that needs to be balanced with prices so ridiculous that only ultra-rich farmers can afford. Thus, inflation makes it so only ultra-rich farmers can participate in the economy. This is one reason why farmers are so hated.

No one will agree with you because you haven't thought your suggestion through. See my response to Ellestar, which states that money sinks need to be set up which do not FORCE players to participate in them, but purely provide a convenience.

(In response to inflation being caused by players.)

While you state true fact, even if a money sink is implemented, you will still have people selling items at skyrocketed prices. This causes inflation. Implementing a money sink will help the situation, but will not cure it. People will just find a way to cover their losses by selling their items at outrageous prices.

This is also true, but because farmers are the ones selling some of these great items, and because prices have risen, the farmers are the people who are buying the items; thus the casual playerbase is beginning to become excluded from the economy. The players exchanging money are now dealing in very high cost terms, and a lot of players can't keep up with it anymore because they don't want to grind. This is an issue.

As proof of my claims, go back to pre-searing Ascalon and study the economy there. Its a LOT more stable, because no one has really been grinding that long and thus has not accumulated massive amounts of items and money.

my suggetion is the only one that will work effectively as a money sink....the PvPers that have been playing the game since beta are the players that control the majority of the gold....nobody else has a chance to get gold because the PvP players don't need to spend theirs...they buy from eachother, they sell to eachother....still at ridiculously high prices...if the poor can't get rich and the rich can't get poor.....you have a screwed up economic system. But arguing this point is like trying to argue why taxes are good to a republican....so I'll leave it at that.

While a large percentage of gold may in fact be possessed by the beta players, farmers also have a large portion of it, there's no denying that. And you are incorrect about your suggestion being the only one to work correctly-that's a very close-minded view. WoW's money sink didn't REQUIRE you to invest in it, but most people did, because they wanted the conveinience. And WoW's money sink works great, so apparently your suggestion is NOT the only solution.

If you think we have a screwed up economic system, I'm inclined to agree.

As far as republicans and taxes goes, that wasn't really a necessary, nor appropriate, comment. Especially because taxes are needed to keep this country going and have always been needed among nations in the past. Regardless, I argued your point regarding money sinks- feel free to write a rebuttal.

but....charging PvPers to play in the arena's isn't REQUIRED...it's only required if you want to play PvP....just like it's only REQUIRED to buy Ale if you want to get e-drunk....Charging a player 200 or 300g to play in the arena is NOTHING...nobody would have any problem with it. They might bitch and moan for 23 seconds before they realized that they have 200plat and it doesn't really matter...but over time it would be an incredibly effective money sink...and from what I've heard WoW's attempt at fixing their economy has failed notoriously.