Let's have fun with the economy in GW

I'm pretty sure traders aren't city specific but region specific.

They are region specific.

Everyone who has aggreed to do this with me has all the stuff they want so the lost gold isn't an issue for any of us.

The comment that this would only last two weeks is our about low-middle estimate 4-5 weeks if we are lucky. This is supposed to be a temperory fix until ANet implaments gold sinks that work.

No weapon is worth over 100K.

ANets patches are what caused this problem in the first place. Pre-Patch good item drops weren't that hard to find. Post Patch good items are very rare increasing their price to higher levels.

Would 2000 black dye work you think? Dropped in the market until the price hits 2K and kept their.

Total recsources gatherd for this venture hasnt been caculated but well we have over 100 superior vigiors - over 100 superior absorbtions - about 2000 black dye - 250 each of shards and ectoplasm - 2K each of all the rest of the rare crafting items except gems - 30 of those nice gold max damage stormbows - and lots of various other things. Plus so far 25 million gold in liquid captial to finiance on the fly fixes and keep prices in line.

We fully intend to lose most if not all of the items and gold but as we all have between 300 and 400K leftover after this we don't have any real problems expecially with nothing left to buy.

Here's my guess as to what your plan would accomplish. I'm not talking out of a lot of experience with this game in particular as I just started playing a week or so ago. However, my guess is that the main group that will be affected by this is the older players. Since you're talking about items like black dye, superior vigors, etc, unless you drive the prices down very significantly my guess is that most new players won't be able to buy them anyways because I suspect that most new players don't manage their money with long-term goals. If you drive any prices up, it will just make the new players unable to buy anything. This, however, won't affect the new players all that much because they don't really need to buy much anyways, other than things with static prices. However, at the same time, the older, richer players who can afford to take advantage of your market fluctuations will get richer. When you flood the market, they'll buy low and sell in a few weeks. This will overall just cause a more distinct group of older players, which will to an extent make it harder for newer players to reach the standards of the older players. Your plan would work fine in a real world economy, but game economics is a completely different sphere. Many economic principles can't be applied in game economics. It's good that you're trying, but you need to put more thought into how the game economics work. I'm sure there's a way to stabilize the economy for a while at least, and I'm sure you could do it with the resources you have, but I don't think this is the way to do it. However, you could just donate all of your valuable stuff to people and while you wouldn't balance the economy, you'd sure do a good job on the popularity market

EmperorTippy, stop smoking whatever it is that you are smoking. Check your IQ lately?

Listen, with your 500 vigors or whatever to flood the market, all you would do with that is making 500 more people with vigor runes. With the rune trader implemented, prices are controlled by demands. So after all 500 of your vigors are bought and used by the consumers, the price of a superior vigor at the rune trader is still 90-100k.

You, however, will be appreciated by the 500 people who bought your vigors for cheap.

hydrak, your economics are significantly off. An influx of 500 superior vigors won't make the market have everything the same plus 500 cheap superior vigors. It's a balance and the scenario you presented is way off. Of course, you're right in that the repercussions would be relatively minior in scale, but the reasoning behind what you said is way off. In addition, kindly try not to insult people because you think their ideas are incorrect. That's a quick way to get a lot of people to not like you. Just carry on a polite conversation, it works wonders.

Tell me one thing. After those 500 superior vigors are used up from armor upgrading, what do you expect the price of one superior vigor would be at the rune trader?

I'm 100%sure that there are more than 500 people who would buy a cheap (20k as Emperortippy said) to use immediately or save for future use.

Go ahead, I'll just stokepile materials than sell them off at 5000x there real worth when you take all the supply All you will really do is transfer your funds over to me :P

How will he take all the supply? by buying from the NPC merchants or real people?

hydrak, after all 500 have influxed, it will be cheap, but if people buy, the value will approach regular anyway and people won't buy so readily. Hence why I said it's not like 500 cheap vigors will just appear.

The Ages, what he's been saying all along is that it's not one specific item, it's several random items so you can't stockpile unless you're a really good guesser.

How will he introduce this "influx"?

If this is the case I could use about 150k. I want to start a guild and could use a bankroll. Also, the rest would help with some 15k armor. You'd have my gratitude.

I'm serious. If so many people have money they don't need, there's plenty of people who could really use it. Play a mission and reward the best players.


I have no idea how the game got to the point where so many players have enough wealth that this seems like a good idea. It mimics RL perceived finacial barriers almost closely enough to sicken me. If you really have all this stuff, and want to do something worthwhile, why don't you share it with all the players who came in after the economy nerfs and didn't have the chance to build a cash pile? You may not upset the economy as much (though it's argueably how much your plan will upset it) but you will level the playing field between the Guild Wars Aristocracy and the players who didn't have the chance to become wastefully loaded in-game.

All the complaining about the economy ticks me off. Gold isn't valueless; rather, it's incredibly hard for a large portion of players to get it, while people who have been in long enough sit on huge stacks.

By selling all of the item that he has to the vendor. Or at least, if not all of it, a substantial amount.

the best way to control inflation is to convince everyone to buy dwarven ale.
go into towns and convince everyone to buy drinks (perhaps by first buying people some free drinks) -- if you can get a whole drinking party going, then you're all set.

you won't really change the economy all that much, but it's a fun thing to do -- see whether you have the skills to convince people to essentially destroy their own money.

and you can make your own small contribution to the economy by not selling stuff.
instead, aside from saving funds you need to buy yourself 15k armor, trash all the stuff you don't need. that way you are not contributing to inflation.

perhaps another way is to sell stuff at higher prices than they are worth, buy crap with the gold you get... and trash that crap.

all in all, you really can't do anything significant (the ale idea is fun, at least, though -- like convincing people to have naked dance parties).

Anet needs more money sinks.

maybe have it so you can pay for sponserships... like they do for highways -- you get your name posted for a certain amount of time ingame, at certain locations. e.g. on signs: "welcome to Lion's Arch (sign sponsored by Joe Blow)".

everyone likes to see their name publicized. maybe if you pay enough money, you can have npc's talk about your prowess. "have you heard of this great warrior Joe Blow? he's kicking some devourer ass!"

You dont have to guess just wait, When they dump all there supply into a merchant buy in mass amounts what they dumped (Sense its going to be rather cheap) All thats left after that is wait till they start buying mass amounts of that item again, Sell and make a profit.

Or a less Risky way is to just not Sell your Materials and wait for them to jack up the demand before selling.

In reallity they are just dimishing there own cash, and those that are to Impationt to wait untill it switches to the next item.

On a side note, Im sure it will take alot more than 5 People to Make a big Impact on Buy/Sell rates to Material Venders.

Exactly, Emperortippy basically gives you his gold in an indirect way. Prices remain the same after all these transfers.

Yes, please let me know when you launch your terrorist attack against the GW economy. Many people are very interested in knowing how it works, but unless you let us know, I am sure that no one will even notice that anything happened.

By the way, I think after the next patch, the rune market is going to crash. The prices are so high right now because of all the PVP demand. Once PVP'ers can get runs through PVP rewards, demand will drop. I guess it won't be a real crash, but I do not expect Sup Absorption to remain 100k at the rune trader.

But I guess if you are smart, you can just "launch" your strike to coincide with the patch and then claim that you were the cause of the price drop.

By introducing X number of a commodity into the market all at once.

He claims that he and his cohorts have been hording particular items for some period of time. He thinks that they've now horded enough of those materials to cause a prolonged surplus, thus driving the prices down for a long time.

Lets assume you can flood the market at random and make prices appear to spike and valley in a "scary" fashion (ie a visible dramatic change in price), but there won't be panic:

- Those folks that watch the markets and are aware of relative values will jump in opposite you to buy up the items you have driven prices down on. If they're patient enough to sit in town and watch the traders prices, they're patient enough to out last your group.
- Those folks that don't watch the market and just play the game will make their decision based only on their momentary interaction with the NPC traders. They want steel, see that its really expensive and look at their small gold pile... they don't buy and go try to salvage or craft some instead. Flip side, they see the price is something they can afford and buy up as much as they need to craft their armor. Then in either case, they forget about the price they just paid or got for selling.

The failing points in this are that the "unwashed masses" you are hoping to panic are for the most part unaware of prices and their relative settings and the "item speculators" are patient enough to take advantage of your actions.




Wait... what am I saying, you and a group of in-game millionaires are going to drive prices down on rare items.... You go boy!

[QUOTE=RMThompson]

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.[QUOTE]

You know I really wish people would actually do some research instead of just repeating what CNN and Michael Moore have told them to. Bush is a terrible government spender but the bad economy started during the waning months of the Clinton administration. The economy was fuled mostly by the dot.com bubble and companies illegally inflating profits without being checked- DURING the Clinton administration.

Anyway the economy just needs an auction house and all is fixed!

It would also help if EmperorTippy and his millionare buddies would flood the oil market and lower the price of oil "to scare us"

Emperortippy is not launching any attack on the gw economy with his method. All he's doing is giving some of us his gold, indirectly.

LOL @ Trying to destroy the economy by buying Iron Ingots

This would only work if there was a cap on the amount of iron ingots there are in the game, but since there isn't one then your just wasting 100k in gold on something that spawns infinatly and thus anyone can get them from the merchant or salvaging items.

Lol... Ever wonder why Emperortippy stops posting? He found out that his plan would do nothing to the economy except giving some of us all his gold.

No...remember he has changed his plan. Instead of giving us all his gold, he now plans on giving us all his runes and eternal equipment. I think he mentioned giving us all his black dye too. Hold me I'm scared!

Ok thanks for the tips.

Afk, checking the rune and dye traders.

I fail to understand why online game developers create flexible economies or allow any kind of supply/demand/circulation dynamics to gain momentum in the first place. I understand that they're fun, that they allow people some control over their economic destinies, that they become a form of entertainment in their own right, etc. But if they generate so many problems, why introduce them? Why set up a system involving value fluctuations, inflation, and the rest? Fix the prices for everything and then leave them alone. Implement a system whereby players cannot go over or under a certain price for anything -- anywhere. The value of a thing is . . . what it is . . . always and invariably.

This whole business with NPC traders is lunacy. The idea that people can stand around in Lion's Arch and sell things for extremely high prices is lunacy. If Anet is sweating over this (and maybe they're not, I don't know), they should release a patch that makes inflation and price fluxuations impossible. It will be objected that certain items are so rare that people will gladly pay high prices and should be allowed to do so if they wish. Well, all right. If you want this to go on forever, let those people continue to trade. If you want to stop it, create NPC merchants in all major cities who sell every item and weapon in the game. Make rare items and high-damage weapons expensive, but make them available at fixed prices. Unlike traders, merchants will always have the items in stock. Additionally, give players an assurance that they can come up with the gold to pay for these things. Some games charge "rent" and do other things as gold sinks. Why have gold sinks when you can do the opposite -- give everybody a base salary? Every so many hours, players receive X amount of gold simply for being active in the game. If they hang around long enough, they can buy something nice, but they should be paid more for being valuable to teams (or something).

Am I serious in offering this as a solution? Only partly. Anyone can instantly see a thousand problems with this scenario. But what I'm getting at is the utter weirdness (to me) of trying in any way, shape, or fashion to imitate a real economy. Why do it? Why create all that horror for yourself as an online developer?

The GW economy is a fantasy but has no more likelihood of reaching stability than a real economy -- and, while you're at it, please define "stability." What is it? At what point does an economy make a majority of people happy? If you want to curtail inflation in a make-believe economy, don't treat it like a real economy. Get rid of the things that make it behave like one. Do single-player RPGs have these problems? Usually not. Why? Because they use extremely artificial "economies" that aren't real economies at all. And people usually go about their business and get on with the game.

if you want to play with your cash, I recommend my course of action once I've reached my first 100 plat take 10 plat and buy 1000 dwarven ales, that's 4 stacks if they stack the same as everything else. Then give 2 stacks to a mate (or get him/her to buy 4 stacks) and while taking screens and video if possibe, go to ascalon and try to drink them all in under 3 minutes... I'm oh so very curious if the effects just don't advance any further after a while or if you can cause serious dmg

First of all, there's how many districts/areas in the game. Now consider that he was somehow able to be logged on and spamming EVERY district, then he might actually control iron ingots. Something as common and cheap as iron ingots can't be monopolized. It's like saying you want to control all the oil in america and you'll start by paying 3x more than anybody else, unfortunately, you'll have to get business deal's by walking across america. Then consider that every 50 barrels you buy 5000 more are distributed. If you want to try to waste money by collecting 1% of the iron ingots in the population in hopes of a monopoly effect, then go ahead, more laughs for me.

actually Deathlord... although I agree that the original post is an unlikely project, diamonds are among the most common of substances. But the world diamond market is controlled by a powerful cartel and our opinions of diamonds are controlled by this same cartel, driving the prices up so ridiculously high that if I were to actually obey my girlfriend it would cost me (in gw terms) something like 10 plat just to get engaged.

I stopped posting because I went to sleep

Fixed rates have their own problems along with making everything avalable.

What is this wonderous action you speak of?

I used Iron as an example so as to not give away which items will be effected. We know that we can never corner or control a market that common for long.

Yes an off topic post those are fun.

The point is that these people will buy the first or second item that we drop the price on.
Then we sell many more items that they now can't afford because all their money is tied up in this low cost item that they just bought lots of noing that the price was going to come back up.

As I already stated if you get some new people to buy/sell at these prices then when you offer for tripple that people will ingore you and buy from the cheaper seller. This causes you to stop posting WTS: Superior Vigior - 60K when the current price is 15K. If you stop posting this new players wont no that they used to be worth that much or are worth that much and will sell theirs for the 15-25K range. This leads in a circle like what happened in the begging. When people realized how much they were worth 70K became the norm. In the beggining though they were worth 15-25K.

I'm not giving you gold. In the end my gold will probabily be down to about 350K but the gold that I have used is replaced by items that I spent it on. When the markets stabilized I would probably make back most of my gold anyway. This is besides the point as none of those involve care about the gold.

When you saw black dye costing 2K at the trader you would buy right? When the new players leave pre-seering and see that they can sell black dye for 1k-1.5K they will be like WOW and sell real quick. We don't have to keep the markets down we just have to start a substantial downward trend.

It is simply the market. It continues what ever trend it is on until a major event occurs. It was trending up. What happened? ANet put in rune traders. The market in superior Vigiors went down and is now about staying even but it will rise when the next wave of people start PvPing and realize that they want these runes.

The whole market is trending up overall, possibly it has leveled off after a very high rise. We intend to start the downward trend.

An auction house would be great.

Yes. But it isn't all at once. We need to start a trend. A spike rarely causes a trend. We need many smaller spikes so that people consider this the norm and not an abrassion.


Abrassions are profited on by many, norms only profit a few.

So really you're talking about a race between you and the botter supported community. Those folks that have access (via ebay or third party programs) to nearly as much cash as you and your group which has accumulated a vast wealth in items. With the hopes that you can outlast/confuse the buyers... Interesting take. I'll look forward to the momentary dip in prices on top items.

From my pov, the free market that was created by NPC traders naturally set a price that you find to be "too high" or "unrealistic". However, those very prices were generated by many factors that you have no control over: gold streaming into the community and desire for certain items. As long as the amount of gold coming into the community is high, the ability to pay more will exist. So yes you may articificially lower prices for a short while, but those prices will return to their previous values. Any time someone is willing to pay me 1 gold more then another person for item X, I'll sell it to the higher bidder... Thus prices will rise until they reach a level that is "too expensive" for half of the folks to buy at.


But again, please don't let me discourage you and your group from donating your wealth to the global economy to bring better items into reach of the lowly masses. We'll all appreciate it.

I got this game about 33 days ago and have 1.330 million gold so far. I haven't farmed, received any really expensive items, been given any money, scammed anyone, or anything of the like.

If you can play the market you can make money in this game. On a new character I started 2 days ago because I was curious how hard it was to make money now-a-dayes.

Giving him no money or items from any of my other chars and not getting any money or items from any of my friends or guildes I did this:

-Farmed old aschalon until I got 1K (took like 1 hour about).
-Bought iron when it was selling at the trader for 5 gold per. I bought from other playes at 7-8 gold per ingot. I spent all but 100 gold this way. I had bought 130 iron.
-Waited until the trader started selling for 210. (took like 20 miniutes)
-Sold all my iron to the trader for 10-11 gold per ingot.
-Now the trader was selling for 200 gold per 10 ingots.
-11 gold (highest price the trader paid for it) - 8 gold (highest I paid for iron) = 3 gold of profit per ingot. 3 gold * 130 ingots == 390 gold in profit.
-Actually I made 453 gold in profit because i paid 7 gold for many more of the ingots than I paid 8 gold for and the trader paid 11 gold many times more than he paid 10 gold.
-Repeat until you get the money to buy more expensive commoditys ex. black dye.
-Do the same type of thing with black dye until you get enough to buy a sigil.
-Contiune this until you get the sigil and then do the same type of thing.

Withing 3 hours of buying the first piece of iron I had 16.739K gold.
That is a 12.739K profit. That is roughly 4.2K per hour.

I never left a city or gained an xp point. I had the following points on my map:

Aschalon, Fronteir Gate, Ft. Ranik, Piken Square, Sacred Temple, Nolani Academy, Salderic Sanitarium, The Great Northern Wall. (Not sure of the spelling for most of these).

My reguarly used character can make about 30K an hour (on a good day 20K on a bad one) doing this type of thing.

So gold isn't hard to get if you know the market.

We want this dip to last as long as possibel but we would be perfectly surprised if it lasted more than a week or two.

As for the e-bayers: How many of you are really going to spend real money to counteract what we are going to do?
They would rather to get more items for their bought gold so that they don't have to spend as much real money to get these items.

Now for botters. These are the people who sell on e-bay. They may cause trouble but will they really sell that item that their bot picked up when they no that if they wait a week or two the price will come up? If they do sell for the markets price at the moment then they help us keep the prices down for the reasons that I have already stated.

As for inflation: We no that it will happen we just want to reach a point were it will take the inflation a couple of weeks to get back to todays levels.