Let's have fun with the economy in GW

All of you people with lots of gold and nothing to buy want to have so fun?

What we do is buy a whole bunch of a worthless item and make it incredably valuable. Take iron it averages between 170-220 usally. Now imagine 10 players with say 1000K each all buy all the iron that they can hold on 4 chars and in storage. We just spent 10 million on iron which is very easy to get. What happens? The price soars to massive heights and then once people go and get iron cause its worth so much we sell all of ours to the material trader and drop prices so fast no one will no what happened. Now do this with a different item every week when no one can depend on the value of an item day to day ex. iron is worth 200 gold 1 day and 20K the next then 50 gold the next day. Prices will be forced to be fair as we can change the day to day value of any item in the game world mierly by the value of everything being totally undependable. This causes an economic crash and when the ecomeny recovers
people get better prices because they are more frugal and thrifty with their funds/items.

If you don't like this idea flame away. Tell me howI will destroy an economy that is already broken. I am mearly resetting it to a better less inflated more gold based ecomony.

Ex. On day 1 your 10K gold wil by you 20 of item X On day 2 our group spends our combined 10,000,000 gold to buy 20,000 of item X. The supply of item x is greatly reduced as we took out 20K units. Now your 10K only buys you 1 of item X. We crash the market the next day by selling all 20K of our item X for say 1 gold. Now the item that you just bought for 10K is worth 1 gold. Massive deflation is caused.

The market needs to be fixed and drastic steps need to be taken. This is a very drastic step granted but offer a better solution that isnt as drastic and I will listen with both ears and read with both eyes.

What you propose would do nothing but annoy a few newbs. You wouldn't actually generate money. In fact, you'd be destroying it at an astonishing rate. Because of this, I don't think anyone would actually agree to follow through with this plan.

So, you spend 1,000,000 gold to buy 2,000 X. You sell 2,000 X for 1 gold per. You now have 2,000 gold to repeat the process with next week. Good plan.

If you want, you could just give me your 998,000 gold so I could do something useful with it like buy armor and runes.

here's an idea - trash your money!

The point is the deflation that it will cause. We want the gold destroyed. The problem with the ecomony is that gold is worthless because there is to much of it. We destroy the market we destroy the mony. I already have 4 people willing to do it starting in about a month. BTW money is to easy to get right now so we will just get lots and have fun. As for generating money if you no what parts of the market are going to tank and when you can make gold easily. Its called insider trading. And price fixing.

What if we didn't sell the iron all at once but kept the cost of iron at a steady 5K per by buying and selling to keep it around their. Warrior armor would now be almost impossible to get and would cost more than fissure armor. or do this with obsidian shards or any other rare item and keep the price about double what it is now. The person with 250 shards would make out like a bandit if they were placed in the market in a steady stream.

Buy something else than iron - it's among the 4 most easily gotten materials.

Found 1 more person so far. only a few to go. Imagine buying all those overpriced max damage weapons and selling those 100K ones for 15K like in the beginning. Or black dye that cost 2K not 6K.

I was using it as an example. I would prolly use rares or do it with weapons that other players are selling.

Hmmm...this isnt gonna turn out like Fight Club is it? Destroying the economy and setting people back to 0 or "even?"

Rares wouldn't work. It would have to be done simutaneously with 3 or 4 different common crafters.

For experiements sake, try using STEEL. It's rare enough that you cant salvage 10 of them in an item, and common enough that you can buy them fairly cheap now.

Problem with this, or any idea, is that these resources are constantly renewing themselves. It'll never work.

I say we take a communistic approach! Each player gets x tokens to buy certain goods with :P Solves the problem, no one has any more than anyone else

~prime

I'm talking about the physcological impact that this will have. Peoples perceptions are what cause market crahses. The 1929 Crash the day after the crash the exact same physical items existed that did the day before the crash. I want to do the same thing in causing a psychological impact in that there is no confidance in the value of pretty much any item in the game. After a massive crash it would take probabily 2 weeks before the market stabilized (as opposed to 20 years for the 1929 crash, this is because of the new gold and items added) then the market would rise and inflathion would start again. It will take the inflation about 3-4 weeks to reach the really bad levels again unless ANet places some good money sinks in game and the like. Once the levels are reached again we crash the market again. Start the process over. The GW economy is esscentialy the same as the RL economy except sped up so that something that takes 20 RL years takes 2 weeks to accomplish in game.

Moron. The only way to make money when you know in advance the commodity market is going to tank is to trade in derivatives. When prices are high, you buy "worthless" options and futures to sell your inventory at a price that people will laugh at (a bit below the current market value). Then when the market collapses, you call all of those options and bankrupt everyone that you have a contract with.

Unfortunately GW does not allow this.

Now, if you are going to do this crap let me know so I can make some money. I'll go start farming iron and wait for you to drive the prices up and then I'll sell it all for a huge profit, driving the prices down again. At the end of the day, your wealth will have been transferred to me and you will be stuck with a bunch of cheap iron and no way to drive the price back up.

Hell, even if I stay out of it, the only money you will destroy will be your own: Each transaction you make (20 iron at a time?) drives the price up incrementally for your next purchase. By the time you spend all your cash, you will be paying significantly more for your iron. Poor people that don't have money for iron will just go farm it for themselves since they cannot afford to purchase it. Then when you flood the market with your iron, the merchant will pay you only about 60% of what you paid for the iron--the remaining 40% goes into his pocket as profit.

At the end of the day, you will have half the money you started with. Everyone else will actually have MORE money than they started with because:

a) Those that saw the prices spike would have sold out their inventory for some quick cash. (they can buy it back once you flood the market like a dumbass)

b) The poorer players chose not to spend their money and instead farmed for iron and thus are better off financially than they were plus they have lewt they can sell from their farming.

Your only other option once you have cornered the market is to NOT sell it back to the merchant. Now, in order to keep prices high, you must buy any new iron that is produced AS FAST AS IT IS ADDED TO THE SUPPLY. Considering you will have no funds at this point and the price of iron will be sky high, it will be impossible for you to do this.

By the way, this holds for any materials. You could play the same scenario with something more rare like black dye or sup vigor runes. But the same principals will apply: you cannot buy the product as fast as it will enter the market--the harder you try, the higher you drive the price and thus the harder it is to buy and the greater the market pressure for others to increase the supply. It's like trying to accelerate your rocket ship to the speed of light. It's just not possible.

how about you buy a ton of the minor and major runes that sell for 25 gold so the people that want to sell then can get like at least 100 gold.

There would be LITTLE to NO impact.

The speed you talk about is exactly why.

Think about why people buy any item, say for example, iron. It's because they don't want to go out and get it themselves. If you COULD succeed and raise the price of Iron to say, 2000 gold, (this is of course assuming the influx of these items could slow enough for your buying to make an impact) people would then go get the damn items themselves. IT DOESNT FREAKING WORK.

It just annoys me when people try to STABILIZE economies of virtual worlds yet as a country we voted in the worst economical President in history.

In other words, give up. Don't worry about it. The game's money system ain't perfect.

One thing that is a variable, how "linked" are the traders. If there city localized, I can see this working, if there server wide, it be much harder, now if there universe wide, it be extremly hard unless you have a very large number of people on all 3 servers.

The point is that you wouldn't no what item was going to be raised to levels that are way to high or beat down to the lowest level possible so you would have no idea what to hoard or sell. If this was done everyday for a week with a different item every day no one would be able to gage the worth of their items. They wouldn't no what to buy or sell to preserver their gold. They stop spending their gold for the fear that whatever they buy will crash the next day and they are stuck with something worthless. This fear stops them from buying with no new buying at the prices people are charging they will lower their prices. This causes the crash. ITs the psychological impact that we are going for and not a real impact.

The intent of this idea was never to make money but to crash the market and put it back to the preinflation levels.

Please do tell. I'm in Droknar's with under 4 platinum, could use some cash and don't want to play Sim Flea Market or Insider Trading Wars anymore.

In all seriousness, at least you're trying to do something. I don't think this particular plan will work, but kudos for the effort.

I have the people to tank the American and Europe servers working on getting the koreans. The traders are defanatly the same price accross the server and are pretty close accross the world but this may have been a coincadence as they were about 5K different on sigils in america and europe earlier today.

GW economy is nothing like RL economy. You are correct: the crash of 1929 was caused by perceptions. However the BIG difference between the RL Economy and GW economy is the fact that in RL, people are acquiring DEBT and lending CREDIT and, more importantly, overextending themselves.

The market crashes when consumer confidence levels drop significantly and they start calling in their debts. This has a cascading effect because these people in turn call in their debts and so on to the end you get to the guys that can't repay the debt so they go bankrupt, then the lenders that needed that money back go bankrupt and so on...

Look at the stock market: the value of the market exceeds the actual amount of physical money in circulation. If everyone calls their debts then there is not enough money in the system to pay it out.

This cannot happen in a GW economy as there is no lending or borrowing. If you do lend someone some money, and they don't pay it back there is nothing you can do to enforce it, hence as the game currently stands, lending will never become a common occurence.

You're a fool to try this.

For every rich ally that you get to do this (let's call you disruptionists), there will be 10 speculators watching the markets, attempting to keep the prices steady. You might be able to get black dye down to 2k if you flooded the market, but it would only stay that way for about 5-10 minutes. People like me are constantly checking prices. If I find black dye at 2k, I'll start buying as fast as I can until I either:

A) I run out of cash,
or
B) the price reaches 3200.

Likewise, I have very large stashes of silk and scales in my bank. In the past, I've had large quantities of parchment, steel, or leather. In any case, these stashes have just been sitting there, waiting for the market to spike. I acquired them from the NPC trader some time back, when the price was abnormally low. Once that market does spike, I'll finally sell them off and make a profit. It should be no surprise to you that there are hundreds of other players just like me, who watch the NPC traders closely, hoping to skim a few dimes off here and there.

So, the day you and your disruptionist friends buy lots of silk, I, and all of my hidden speculator "friends" out there will sell our silk, to equalize out your disruption. (Personally, I really hope this happens ) So, you'll be stuck with a large amount of silk in your bank, but you'll have bought it at normal market prices (in contrast to me, who bought at extremely low prices Sunday morning, 6/19 at 7:15 am)

No matter how you look at it, you lose.

---------------------------
I remember hearing a story about someone who tried to corner the silver market. Basically, he bought and bought until there was a national shortage. Then he slowly sold it back, to make a profit. This would be impossible to do in Guild Wars, because most of the trading is done player to player, not through the NPCs. So, there is no way to completely corner a given market.

Thank you. Heres my advice buy low sell high works every time. I can make 10-20K in about 5 miniutes of actualy game time. I might by something and sell it to days later for 10K more but actuall time I spent was only about 5 miniutes.

Sounds like a party. Do it with runes though, not easily salvagable materials, and do it soon before A-net allows ppl to unlock all the runes they want doing PvP. If you get enough consenting millionare's you can control anything irl or virtual. Good Luck.

nonsense. there is a ton of ppl sitting on sup vigor runes because the prices have fallen so much on them. If you were to corner the market, all of a sudden these people would pull out their inventory and sell it, dropping the price and destroying the value of your investment.

I know that some people would make money but for every person who does what you do (I do the same thing though) There are 100 people who don't.

As for peoples above arguments that I couldn't buy taht much cause it would raise prices what makes you think that we don't already have the items taht we are going to flood the market with.

I no that there is no way to compleatly corner a given market. I don't want to corner the market I want to cause prices on items to be so random that noone will buy them for fear of losing massive amount of money later. People don't look to the long term view were buying at these rock bottom prices could make them money when the market stabilizes. They fear the loss of their gold.

For the post considering the buying on magins in the 1920's I know that you can't do this in Gw. This is why this crash won't be as effective and why it has to be carfully planned and engienered for maximum effect.

You all don't seem to realize that we don't want to make money. We want to reset the ecomony to a more manigable level i.e superior vigiors comon selling price is 20K not 80K. There will still be very many very wealthy people but areyou willing to risk your hard earned gold betting that we arn't going to tank the item that you invest in? OR you do nothing at all this is no problem as your gold isn't being added to the market sitting in storage.

Yeah, don't tell Captain Kirk that!

If you buy up the supply of something, the price the trader will give for that item will go up. More people will sell that item to the trader to make money. Thus, through the medium of the trader, you'll just be handing out money: you give the money to the trader, the trader gives it to the people resupplying him with what you bought out. Now they'll have more money to spend on things they want, so prices for things that really are in demand will go up. Thus, this isn't going to make superior vigor runes go from 80K to 20K, but it could make them go to 100K.

You're basically telling everyone with lots of money to, through the medium of the trader, distribute it to people who don't. This will cause inflation, not deflation.

If you want to fight inflation, horde your gold, and sell lots of runes to the rune trader. You can make a far bigger impact on the price of expensive runes by farming and selling them. Increase the supply, and the price will drop.

The problem is: I don't want to do that and quite frankly don't think I should have to. I didn't buy a stock market sim or Rune Tycoon, I bought Guild Wars and want to play Guild Wars.

Unfortunately it's not possible to generate sufficient income playing Guild Wars. If I wanted to buy my 15k platemail, which I do, I would have to play 24 hours a day for a month to generate 75k just playing Guild Wars. Ridiculous. Unless we want to play Rune Tycoon there isn't anything we can do as players to remedy the situation except grind our life away. Which happens to be the exact opposite of what ANet wants us to do. Imagine that.

The effort:reward ratio is entirely out of proportion and only ANet can fix it.

Who says that we don't already have a couple hundred vigiors to flood the market with? the point is to crash the prices on many items in the right sequence to bring about a fear that what ever commidies that you have be they shards or sup. vigiors or gold max damage storm bows will be crushed in they market by our selling these items at such low prices as to force you to sell your item for a compeating price or to hold it. If you hold it it will most likely take a couple of weeks for the price to raise to the level were you would consider selling again. If you sold at a competive price then this leads to a cascading trend accross the board on this item causing a lower price for the item. Reducing the price causes deflation.

Except that will not happen.

You are correct that people that have a current inventory will pull back and not sell at the low price. But there are also lots of people sitting on a ton of money. If you flood the market with sup vigor runes, someone else will see the cheap price and buy all the inventory until the price stabalizes at what it was before you started. They then wait for it to rise a bit, then start trickling it back out into the market for a huge windfall.

Won't ever work for items controlled by Traders. There are hundreds of thousands of people that play this game. Even if every person that reads these forums bought in on your plan, it wouldn't work.

As for weapons and mods and stuff... you won't actually be removing any money from the system. You'll just be trading it around. You'll sell low, and buy high. How do you know you won't just be selling to someone you just bought from? Maybe you could avoid those who you directly made deals with... but the # of people you'd have to get to agree to do this, you'd never be able to track all of those transactions and ensure that you aren't selling to your supplier at a much reduced rate.
A couple weeks? How many people do you think are playing this game? 100? Give me a break. You'll buy up all the X in a day, and the prices will be right back to where they were in under a week. I guarantee it.

You will cause price fluctuations for such limited periods of time that you might as well not have bothered.

You will be proving the underlying theory of trickle down economics, however.

The only way to have any meaningful impact on the price of goods would be to destroy gold. But your plan only succeeds in destroying (or redistributing) your gold. I don't see any way for you to acquire enough gold and destroy it to make any meaningful impact. And redistribution will likely only further increase the price of all goods across the board.

The problem with Guild Wars, and any online RPG where money is unlimited, is that gold loses value fast. Best example is of course Diablo 2, where Stone of Jordan took over the economy. In Runescape, rune items ran the economy because they were, although rare, easy to make if you'd put tons of time into the game. In Guild Wars, gold is rather worthless in small amounts. ANet has attempted to fix this by basically stopping all high gold drops, and making rare weapons very hard to get, but they haven't really succeeded so far.

We have the items and are only waiting for me to get my fissure armor and someone else to buy something that he wants and we will ruin the market. So far we have 22million gold at our disposal plus more superior vigiors and absorbtions than you would no what to do with. We have been planning this for 2 weeks so far and since I posted this we have got 3 new members adding 3 million gold to the pot.

The point of this is to crash the market on commidity items be they runes, rare gold weapons, mods, crafting materials or the like. If we sell in a few big blocks 1 then the other later what it does is lowers the price of the vigiors and keeps them low. Say you buy 20 vigiors cheap how do you no that the price will come back or will it continue to plumett. This Fear of being screwed in that your item becomes worthless causes people to stop buying items for fear that we will ruin the market. Prices decrease with less buyers.

To sell you have to match their prices or hold your items. If you hold them then inflation is lowered temporarly because of the lack of the item to buy. If you match the sellers price then you can start a trend in people thinking that this is going to become the norm price so they sell before prices are pushed lower.

And we have the ability to keep superior vigiors cheap for about a week in a half on both the Europe and American servers. Were working on korea but we don't have much hope.

We don't buy the items we already have them and are steadly getting more. So no problems of selling back to the guy that you just bought from.

Remembers me when the "Neocron" economy got screwed up by introducing a new market feature.
The money of some people simply grew to random numbers with 12 digits within 3 Days.

This is how you can stabilise the economy. Convince people that no weapon is worth over 100k.

We'll see. I don't think you have a monopoly on any commodity. And you need a monopoly to impact the prices. There's simply too many people playing. 22M is a drop in the bucket, on a global scale.

How are you going to do this? Do you have 1xxxxxx black dyes to sell to the dye trader?

Quite frankly ... money isn't an issue in guildwars, your intuitions are correct but you will need more money than 22 million. With 22 million you could maybe cause an impact of 25 gold item for 1 - 2 weeks tops by the end the market would have refilled its resource and your items now are worth less than you paid.

It can work ... but your sacrificing your money to do this and quite frankly you would need a sustainability and marketing plan to be anything other than a one shot wonder (which by the way people wont even look twice at) ...

You can count your azz that 'GAMERS' aren't the only ones watching the economy. Anet is too. And when they see this within days your commodity will be nerfed and worth less in the end. But as your pattern grows ... Anet will likely follow it, track it, and base its decision on whether or not to nerf it. In the end they could and laugh because now they took a chunk of your money away. Without sustainability you'll never be able to compete with the actual game. Please keep in mind that your not the only one who has done this, or tried to, and that they are likely prepard for this. Aside from that ... I wish you good luck, because you found a new aspect of the game to toy with, and in your original post i quote ... this is just for fun .... so everyone else keep that in mind before you respond to him. If I had a million yet I would join ya. If I get there I'll let ya know. Money comes and goes but fun ... is well ... priceless.

If you want to crash the market, you have to do it in a localized, small area. Get about 100 people, and simultaneously buy all of whatever in ascalon city. Newbs (like me) only have access to one set of traders- those in Ascalon City. If you drive up the prices there, none of the newbs can buy anything, and they get the impression of a much more frugal market. They learn to save, and then when they get out into other areas, they're richer than everybody else but have nothing, and aren't buying dyes because they can't afford to waste their gold on appearances, and the newbs end up stabilizing the economy.