Black Tuesday: Changing the Economic Face of Guild Wars

The issue of player stores is an intersesting one but doesn't fix anything if all people care about are high end expensive PVP items.

So few sane voices in a sea of chaos.

Do you think that if i find a +15% hp>50%, max dmg fellblade, i will just give it to you for free? You people see the gold, and completely loose track of the only real currency in an online economy: time.

The problem is that you can gain money from nothing, you just need to spend x amount of time, and receive y amount of gold. In order for the price to be unreasonable, finding a perfect weapon needs to be easier then farming 1,3m Gold.
Is it the case now?

You claim that there is no point in selling a good weapon for 200k, because gold is worthless. So i now should sell it for a price you can pay? I just delete it, cy and have a nice day.

If a new player is supposed to get a rare, perfect weapon, then make the rare perfect weapons easily aviable. In order to get something that is hard to get, you need to CONVINCE me to give it to you. Whats the point of even picking it up if i only get worthless gold for it? Not everyone needs 15k armor for his 7th char, and some dont even bother with it for the main char.

The problem of the current prices are NOT the players, its the lack of gold sinks. Frog Devourer made it very clear. He made a mistake though. Every item sold for 1,4m gold is worth every single coin of it. At least, under the current economical situation. The market is always right.

Sorry but if i have something that only drops once in a month, you still wont be able to get it even if i sell it for 10k. Know why? Because its rare. Sure you have the gold, but you still cant buy it. I just sold it ...


As of now, gold is totally worthless. You should be glad someone bothers to sell something for gold at all. A shop system would only lead to the following: shops filled with junk. the real items will still become barter only. Either nerf gold drops or make good gold sinks. No way around this.

*edit: the traders currently in game help reduce the prices for low end items. runes may be common as hell, but they are not interchangeable. Why would i bother to sell the mesmer rune to the guy who needs one for 100g? It takes 10mins to find him, and in that time i could farm / earn gold through regular gameplay. At least 10x times the amount i could "make" (lose) doing the sale.. Since time is the only currency, AH / traders DO lower prices, but you just wont notice it on the high end.

It is considered required, because another core facet of the game is to be able to instantly get to level 20 and PvP, charging for that would break the back of that system completely.

What have you heard about WoW? Have you played it?

I agree with this, however money sinks won't assign a real value to items, thus allowing people to continue to sell items at outrageous prices. I understand that a money sink is required and I understand why its required- the economy needs to be deflated. But I ALSO think that we need to make people aware of the true value of the item they are selling or buying- this will prevent over-the-top pricing. WoW had a way to do that with auction houses because pricing became competitive.

I'm not arguing money sinks. I agree a money sink is needed. But please understand that you cannot undermine core facets of gameplay in order to reduce the amount of money available in the game. 15k armors were meant to be sinks- those apparently haven't been working too well.

Does anyone have any ideas for potential money sinks that would help reduce the amount of money currently in the economy?

Actually i think that people who sold perfect weapons for 200k got scammed. In order for a true value to exist, the currency needs to have a worth. Black dyes are like gold (the real one). Noone killed people with golden swords, but everybody still wanted it. It was totally pointless from a RL powergamers point of view, yet it was one of the best currencies humanity ever had.
Same with black dye. Or SoJ. It needs to have a point besides just trading.

If the government screws up, and the dollar becomes worthless, your out of luck. If you do your trading with gold / diamonds / guns, you still have something that most people will accept, even if the artificial "tag" that says "accept me, im a currency" is gone.

When gold gets a value, AHs will help to reduce the problems with the economy. They will do this by making everything cheaper. people forget that you have to pay 1000g if you want to sell something for 10-20mins while not doing something else. This is a hidden fee, since you could DELETE the item, but just go out and farm / play the game and get 1k in that time.

So trading systems reduce the amount of time it takes for the buyer and seller to find each other. For the low end, this lowers prices. Some Sup runes are sold for 125 gold i hear, because few want them. The only reason they were so expensive in the first place is because it took a huge amount of time to find the seller for the rune you currently needed. Vigor is still rare (may change over time, if more vigors drop then characters created that need it), so its still expensive.

*edit: im against ruing this game even more by having a "p2p" sytem for arenas. You really thing the wealth is in the hands of pvp players? It will stay there, but the players wont

Auction Houses / Trading Centers / Personal Shops / etc. have all been covered in the Sardelac suggestions forum. Most posts mention a need for one of the above.

This was my detailed proposal for an Auction House, and it goes in depth as to how it would function, as well as some pros/cons, etc.

nah I haven't played WoW...as a whole I'm not entirely interested in MMORPGs...basically for the exact reason that this game is pretty awful. You get too many people all arguing over stupid bullshit that doesn't matter....and nobody ever cares to think about how much fun they are having playing it. I mainly stick to FPS and Console RPGs...atleast that way the only thing I have to argue about it is whether or not I'm hacking.

I've just been told that the WoW economy is WAY out of whack...there's far too much gold in the economy and nothing to spend it on.

no i really dont think i have missed the point, you do NOT need a perfect weapon OR a superior vigor rune to be competitive, it is a very minor edge that these things will give you.

also, no matter what gold sinks are put into the game, if people want to hoard gold, they will hoard it, its already been made much easier to get runes and rare crafting materials, how much easier does the game need to be????

and for people who say they dont have time to play enough to find items or gold, well, if you dont have time to play the game, then dont play the game, dont whine because you dont get things because you cant play the game

Exactly why i suggested a gold wipe- it puts everybody on the same footing. have it be a surprise deal so people can't buy hordes of items to resell AFTER the wipe and gain a fraction of the gold back. , and with the current farming nerfs and fixes coming up, the ultra rich won't have a chance to get their pool of gold back at all. Every mmo, no matter what kind of mmo it is, have to keep their enconmy under control or they would lose new players all the time.

and i think sinks greater than 15k has to be put in and be non optional for most. I would also suggest that , have the game itself gauge how much gold you have, then charge you a percentage of the value you have to get something really awesome looking, like a unique looking weapon or a entirely new map. may it be the mursaat city that Saul saw, or lost ruins of ancient civilizations that contains weapons/armor never seen before. Something has to be done at least. Anything would do!

They problem with a gold wipe is that you have people like me.

I refer you to another thread were I commented on this extensivily.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=23111

And as for your second idea the sinks should stay optional because what about people trying to buy the fissure armor which will cost you over 300K if you buy even half the shards and ectoplasm that you need. Now if you add in this sink that takes xxxx amount of money away from me then a) i will use friends to get around it b) you are punishing me, a person who has only farmed in Fissure of Woe for shards and ectoplasm and everything else that I've got has been giving to guildes.

So stop blaming others for your inability to make money in this game as it is one of the easyiest things to do.

In EQ when they opened a zone where you could set up your character as a shop it really helped price gouging because buyers could search for an item or a class of item and it would bring up all the players that were vending that item. This forced the sellers to put in reasonable prices because if you have 5 vendors selling an item for around the same price and then Might Joe Gougeprice was selling the item for more who do you think got the sale... I would love to see a dedicated selling zone where you can open a shop via seller bags, set prices for your items and go afk... The only issue will be lagginess because this kind of thing really needs to be done in a singular district (unless they can code it that you see all items for sale across districts which would be ideal)

nothing wrong with getting crafting materials for guildmates, but if you have a rather excessive pool of gold, and charging people whatever like 1,4 million for a bad rare ax, there's a problem. 1.4 millon is literally enough to fill your storage, your 4 characters to the max.

We need to eliminate that kind of thinking and go back to a real enconomy and set a permenent value on gold. nothing wrong with trading, bartering, but the gold isn't going anywhere but more is coming in and it depricates in value. look at d2, you only need to get like 500k and that's it for the game. The other mmorpgs has more successful control of how much gold is in the enconomy at a time. in EQ they ACTUALLY use gold to buy things! the way gold is going in guildwars, it'll just become a d2 style market- everyone will want to use something like superior rune of vigor as a soj- 5 vigors for that ax or 6 vigors for that sword, etc.

Personally I really like the idea of an auction system (I understand that Starwars Galaxies had a pretty nice one). If you put in something like a 2-5% sales fee on each successful transaction it would help leech gold from the economy too.

Only problem with fees is that in some cases they will force prices up slightly because players wish to cover their losses. But it does leech from the economy, along with stopping players from buying up the market, then putting items back up at ridiculous prices. If a player does that and no one buys into his scam, he ends up loosing money. I like the fee system on auctions; I fell its gains outwiegh its costs.

i think the auction idea is very good too

I really like the shop idea, similar to EQ's ... oh good lord i've forgotten!!... trader zone. An area dedicated to AFK(or not, i used to sit in EQ and bater with prospective customers) players who wish to peddle the wares they have and dont need r just want to sell.

Many say it ruined EQ, but the nature of Guild Wars may make it work.

But until then, i'm up for an auction house, sometimes buying up all items then reposting them to sell backfires.

Alright just ot put in my 2 cents into this whole debate:

I really like th shop idea but I think the WOW item search should be used as well (GW Ebay?). This will allow players to easily find what they are looking for, compare prices and buy, plus it will help with overcrowding. I mean seriously can you emagine how long it would take to find what you want buy having to "walk" your charecter through umpteen cities that are duplicated over how many servers? I mean the sink hole idea is good, but I don't want to spend hours on end to comparison shop.

Another way to assist with overcrowding would be for Anet to set up a dedicated server for shopping, pull trading from the PVE game system. This would allow people selling and people shopping a common area to meet and trade without interferring with people who are questing.

The idea for a web-based Auction House is good. There's no real reason why it has to be part of the actual game interface and, in fact, there are advantages in it not (reducing load on gaming servers, for one).

I don't charge that much for items the most I ever sold anything for was a sigil at 80K when the trader was selling for 85K. Everything else that I sell as a single item stays under 15K. I would love a more permenant value on gold but I don't really worry about it as I can always just go make about 30K in 20 miniutes of play without faming or scamming.

As for an auction house I love the idea granted none of the farmers would like me. I would put a gold max damage stormbow up for sale at about 5K as soon as I get the money for my fissure armor I am going to ruin the market for runes. Buy all those runes that no one buys and make a superior beastmastery worth 100K

I think they'd still need to pull the data off the servers so there would still be a load. I'd rather have something in game.

I agree it would be nice to have one, but I don't think it will solve the problems that people have with the economy

That wont work because no one will pay. If that happened, I would sell my account and all its gold over ebay then go play UT2004. So would most rich PvPers.

While an auction house could create some lag issues, with the constant pulling up of information from thousands of other players. I do think something of the sort needs to be implemented... and i personaly think it's sad that i can't talk or find a group in lions arch without switching districts a few times. It shouldn't be this way, and people should be using the trade channel... It's incredibly annoying, and not to mention it does them no better then the trade channel would.

**I think even adding a trading section (Call it something catchy) and adding a new zone, would be incredibly effective. And personaly i would call it a "quick fix" compaired to an auction house... And more effective, since not all people in certain towns are there for trading... it would make the spam in towns go down(since some kids would still be peddling around like morons... can't create a fix for stupidity ), and create a quicker area for trading. I personaly think the maximum number of people in it could be higher, and make no merchants or anything of the sort, just the storage, and anything like that... which is a must for trading.**

The only problem i see with having a trading channel is those that may somehow create "trading bots". and that would be hard to spot, but meh... at least they'd save alot of bandwith over making an auction house, or having player set up shops.

Thoughts flying around regarding an auction house that you don't need to be logged in for are unreasonable- the data is still stored on ANet's servers, so its still taking up space. Not only that, but you also have to handle the load of all the people trying to view the webpage. Better off with an in-game auction house.

Hmmm, if only this much effort was put into solving REAL LIFE problems.

Main problem I see is that even for the nub who JUST bought the game, sees some item go for 75K (Sigil or so). He sees that other items go for 120gold, 500gold, so damn, that Sigil must be expensive. Now, someone mentioned the only currency in this game is TIME.

Well, enter eBay. Time goes out the window. This game cost me 60$, I'll make that much in 2 hours at work. Now, if I work another hour, then I can buy myself 200K gold. If I invest as much REAL money into this game as I did to buy the game, according to the price breakdown that amounted to 500k posted by someone, I'm set till the end.

THAT is where your inflation is coming in! New people are working weekends or so to pump REAL money into this game, because itll take them 2-3 hours to get 200-300plat, but tell me, how much gold will you get from farming in 2-3 hours?

Look at one unnamed seller on eBay. 122 100K packages sold in the past month. That's over 3 grand real money he just MADE there, and 12 million gold pushed into the economy (which is a LOT when items should NOT cost as much as they do).

If we didn't have buying on eBay, these items would not be nearly as expensive, no, they would be trade-for-trade only. The rate at which gold drops would make it useless to farm for gold in order to get a Sigil, and you wouldn't sell a Sigil for 10K because that 10K doesn't get you much. A sigil would go for a tricked out sword, or a sup rune of something, but thats about it.

The game's design isn't too much of a problem (ie. if you really want to sell something, you can), its the greed and the immaturity of people buying/selling on eBay that are ruining the experience for all.

That said, does anyone know where I can get 12 mil gold?

Join a guild, then sell the sigils. Could that be another source of inflation- massive guilds acquiring sigils and selling them high? Because they're worth so much, everytime a guild wins in HoH, they essentially gain 100k.

The only source of inflation is the gold dropped off mobs and chests (either directly, or in the form of merchant-salable items).

Sigils, runes, and really rare weapons do not cause inflation. They don't create any gold. You can't 'create' more than 1 platinum off of a Sigil (what it sells to a merchant).

I've never particularly liked the idea of AFK shops - having to leave my pc on and connected to the game and selling whilst I'm away really bugs me. Plus I think making people talk to one another to buy things is a good thing, you can haggle, trade, argue and all that fun shopping stuff.

I think a quick fix, fairly easily implemented, and kinda fun would be this:

Open a bazaar/shopping district in most/all towns. Now, WHILST YOU ARE STANDING in that district, you are able to make a Persistant Speech Bubble (which I will call a "billboard" ) appear above your head, one that has a variable size so that people can read your entire post. So rather than spamming the trade channel, you stick the billboard up above your head and stand in the bazaar.

Obviously, everyone has the option to turn off the Billboards so that they can't see them, so it wont be annoying. Possibly also an option to only display the Billboard of your current target.

It would make "shopping" kinda fun - you go to the bazaar, walk around, look at the various people advertising stuff, haggle with them over whispers and stuff, just like a real shopping trip

Now that sounds like a plan to me...

That's true and yet not true.

Obviously, it's true that gold only enters when gold enters, or items enter that get sold to merchants (adding gold into the system)

However, wealth is indeed created by new items that aren't chopped into gold. Added wealth does create inflation. If everyone (or some people) becomes more wealthy, the average cost of goods will go up: hence inflation.

It's a little counterintuitive, because the price for the exact good being sold goes down (when there are more sigils, the price of sigils goes down), but all sigil-owners, who don't need sigils (or need the item less, in case of other things) now have more gold to spend on other things. This inflates the price of all other items as a result.

I am by no means a economist, but this whole discussion of setting up shops and inflation doesn't seem to me really the problem. There just isn't to me too much to spend money on except high end items.

So far I've played this game to progress at a reasonable rate, and except for upgrading armor I haven needed to spend that much money. Money is a non-issue. If people set up shops it would make no difference. I do farm for items but it's just as easy to sell them to merchants and npc traders.... I've pretty much given that up because everything is provided for me and I've got more money than I really know what to do with (not that I'm saaying I'm rich, just that there's nothing to spend it on).

I think the game would be far more interesting if they limited the levels items can be used, give the myraid of item drops some worth other than salvagable value, and make thing that people will be interested in spending money on that can't be dropped by mobs (or farmed by high level players to be sold for thousands). At this point a store or an auctionhouse would be interesting because everybody not just highlevel players could participate.

People complain about soaring prices of weapons, yet the best of weapons are available to everyone from collectors. Assuming beating roleplaying will get you enough money to buy armor, and collectors will supply the weapons, the problem does not seem to be as drastic as people have made it out to be. Thus, the neccesary funds required to sustain a character would around 100k + various upgrades. The only commodities that would require a larger amount of gold would be runes and weapon upgrades. It really is ironic how people say 15k armor is a waste of money yet go ahead and spend over 500k to buy a sword with gold lettering. The problem is only as complicated as people are vain.

well actually, I believe collectors give you the best base weapon. They don't come with prefixes/suffixes, which have to be bought in the form of grips/hafts/heads/wrappings.

It's these upgrade components that people charge an arm and a leg for, and for a good reason. The good ones, especially those with perfect stats, are incredibly difficult to find. And having enchantments that last 20% longer or weapons that do 15% more damage is a huge advantage.

Then I say add an upgrade trader. Therefore, gold will begin to leave the economy, as every item in the game is bought by gold. Then, every single item for a character is buyable and people dont need to go to the money horders to buy good upgrades. Assuming people are not as vain as they say, there will be no problems.

I have to agree somewhat, so why not then have people spend thier money on a wider variety different styles of armor (within thier level range), potions, and reasonable weapons ...and make them earn through quests the elite uber items rather than buy them.

Just a quick question for all of you; Now that we've been focusing on weapon costs and inflation being related to them, I must ask...

Does anyone think that even if the amount of money in the game was reduced, that there would be a drop in price for sigils? Reducing inflation may be totally irrelevant to their cost. The fact of the matter is, if the playerbase is WILLING to pay 100k for a Celestial Sigil, than the sigil's WORTH is 100k. Inflation is irrelevant.

On the other hand, if the value of a gold was worth more, it wouldn't be necessary to have 100k prices for a sigil, because it would suffice to the seller to have a lower price and a better chance of attracting people to buy his merchandise.

The best way to fight sigil costs would be for a guild to win HoH repeatedly, then sell them at lower costs in order to saturate the market.

I think A net would make smthing like lower the max money you can wear to 30k, why 30k ? first ^^ it permice to buy 15k armor piece in a rune speaking about fissure ...

Second ^^ if you guys dont know 1 lingot of a thing = 1kg of a thing so 30k would be 30kg ^^ still hard to hold in your bag ahah !

And then apply 30k max limit to shops , rune = 30k max , cigil = 30k max ===> general deflasion of the market xD

So what happens to all of the people who have over 30k? Right now? They loose it? Damn, I'd be pissed if I lost 70,000 gold, do you know how many hours upon hours of playing that is?

Gold simply go in Storage lol ....

If that were to happen, we'd probably get people selling and buying in two payments. It wouldn't stop inflation, just attempt, likely in a failing manner, to cease overpricing.