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.