The economy takes a hit, I'm not happy

So the latest patch nerfed the buying prices of the merchants so that those of us who despise trading have to either waste time repeating WTS in 40 districts or take a hit on selling rare materials. What happened, Whose brilliant idea was this? Do they think that forcing people to trade to increase their gold stash will make the game more exciting?

That 100,000 for $10 on Ebay is looking mighty good now. I bought this game to play, mot to join a bazzar of idiots ecking that last gold piece out of each bolt of fur I make from charr hides.

Yes, but rare materials are worth so little, both now, before, and to people that need them, that it's almost irrelevant. There are so many other ways to make so much more gold, not to mention so little for someone to spend it on that it's rather pointless.

I made 6 plat in about two hours...guess what I was doing.


holy mother of crap....I WAS PLAYING THE GAME!!!

Congratulations, you have 920 hours left to get your Fissure Armor and 1.897.097.907 hours left until someone cares.

Black dye, furs, ectoplasm, they aren't insignificant and were worth much more than they are now. The profit ratio for the merchants seems to be 100% now, and for the little guys, that just sucks.

It's called a gold sink. All that expensive stuff is not, in any way other than looks, better than the cheap 1.5k armor. If you have the money to buy it, good for you. If you don't, well, it's not affecting you in any way (other than taking away bragging rights). The whole point of the 15k armors is for the rich people to have something to blow money on.

yeah, because everyone *needs* fissure armour to compete...

fissure armour and to an extent 'normal' 15K armour are carrots, designed to keep people playing if they rely on 'stuff' for enjoyment. I don't think you are supposed to get it in one week, one month or even one year of casual playing.

i'd prefer it if fissure armour was removed, at the moment it's being used as the excuse that lots of farming is necessary. Unfortunately it is impossible to implement long term rewards in mmo's because everyone wants stuff now and is prepared to grind for it.

haha, 300k is going for 21.95 on ebay...well, more power to them i guess

someone is selling a blue collectors flame artifact, labeled it godly and rare, and is selling it for 2.50

Come on, be happy!

I bet some pretty *powerful* people are really taking over the materials market, at least there is no other reason why material prices will shoot so ridiculously high (with ultra rare materials always out of stock..)

Just rid on the curtails and trade your wares at prices like never before! Anet screw us traders, we screw the little guys

What goes round comes round!

I have to say actually playing seeing how the patch is actually starting to have the effect of lowering the price of everything except - Ecto, Shards, Black Dye, and Gold/Max dmg, I'm happy. Still ticked Arena.net hasn't said anything official about it but starting to really like it (was opposed at first I do admit).

And for trying to manipulate the traders, how do you know anet hasn't rigged the traders to have special low pricing on items (ignoring the demand) under certain conditions/triggers.

Actually it is not reducing the prices of anything at all, check the prices of cloth, fur, steel, parchment, linen, damask..

These have all exploded, in varying degrees from 150% to something like 300-400% for damask.

I just find it quite ironic how these "improvements" are causing new issues, but then again it is capitalism at work. Since the trader isn't going to play far, people just drain them outright and become the ones dictating the prices now.

Runes have also gone up. For instance, I bought (last week) a minor rune of swordsmanship for my warrior....about 150gp. Today I upgraded that armor piece and went to buy another for it....854gp. That's a huge increase and pretty darned pricey for a MINOR!

why would I want fissure armor? it adds nothing to my current armors stats....

Amen. For me it's kind of like "meh" if it isn't any better AC wise than my Droknar's 1.5k armor.

For you, Algren, it's just another way for those guys to show off, huh? *hugs Algren* I'm just teasing, you know.

I just see the fissure armor for what it truly is...and not as a "present from anet to those who farm"....It's not a present guys, it has no AC upgrade over the 1.5k armor because it was never intended to be put into the game. The 15K armor and the 100K armor are gold sinks...and a SUPER effective way to make YOU tell arenanet where you are farming....You over farm your spots, this triggers a reaction on their server...they nerf where you are farming....and after you've wasted 100's of hours of your time farming spots and looking for new farming spots you go and spend the 1 million gold on your fissure armor...effectively deleting hundreds of plats from the economy....you've accomplished nothing....great you look different.

Meh, trade spam has increased so much. ;_; When I first read the update notes, I thought prices would reflect more accurately.. since it was based off of player demand and supply, I figured, if prices are high, then they are running low, and they'll be buying high to bring supply back.. so prices can drop.. but now I'm seeing items at traders selling for prices I haven't seen for a very long time: 7 platinum for black dye, 800 gold for fur squares.. ecto used to be 13 platinum, and then last time I checked, it didn't even show up on the list. Buying prices were horrible.. fur squares were quoting at 10 gold, and occasionaly, 120 or so.

As for fissure armor, I don't feel it should be removed, but I feel that the way to attain them should change. I wrote a suggestion for this on this thread and it is basically about questing for armor.

Here's a quote from Gaile:

I wanted to let you know a bit about how pricing works in Guild Wars. There isn't a fixed ration of sell price to buy price. Traders will pay up to 80% of the sell price for items that they need. But, as their inventory of an item starts to fill -- and it will because there are more sellers than buyers -- the merchans will begin lowering what they're paying for an item to try to even out the number of buyers and sellers. They're sort of AI-operated capitalists.

So the merchants will lower their buy price to avoid buying things they can't sell, and then they'll slowly lower their sell price until they find an equilibrium. The programming is pretty nifty for that, I think.

My conclussion:

The price the merchants sell items at is going to drop to near zero and the price they buy stuff for is going to be zero. That equilibrium point that Gaile predicts is clearly zero. Items are being produced at a far greater rate than they are being consumed. This is even true for the current favorites, the materials used to make high end armors. Each player who uses 15k armor uses a finite ammount, yet produces an unbounded quantity. As we continue to play after ascention, we're adding stuff to the economy at a far greater rate than it's leaving.

So what's going to happen is that prices will drop and drop and drop. People won't be getting the reward they feel they deserve and will grow more and more disgruntled at the merchant system.

It seems some of you missed the point entirely. Gold drives the economy. For many players not lucky enough to find the best weapons and upgrades from salvage, the only way to get them is to buy them from someone who HAS them. And the only way for many of them to get gold is to SELL materials to the traders. When the prices offered by the traders drops to near ZERO, the grind as we know it makes the game even more difficult for many.

Those who have could care less. Those who want have just had another door slammed in their faces. And like so many of you who refuse to finish the last areas before Ascention with nothing but Warriors and Monks on your teams, the imbalance continues to drive good potential players away.

And you could care less.

This goes on in every game... just because it offends you doesn't mean that they will suddenly stop auctioning off things they got through bugs and exploits. People are greedy by nature. If it bothers you that much don't play MMO style games.

I don't see why it offends anyone. Why not make money off your 500+ hours of play time? Atleast you get something back. If the people who buy don't want to farm for the rest of their lives for a 15k armor set, then by all means let them! O.x

Good advice (I mean that). I'm actually thinking of not playing MMO style games because of crap like this. I just want to play a damn video game, I dont want to be caught in the polotics of it or get caught between the war of the exploiters and the nerf bat. I find myself enjoying GW less and less because all these nerfs. I'm having a harder time finging gold (I don't farm btw).

The only thing wrong with the new system (if it really does work the way Gaile said it would) is the difference between buy and sell prices of merchants. It's a gold sink, sure, but it's very annoying to be forced to sell to players to make any decent profit.

Other than that, nothing's wrong. It's basic supply and demand; if there is too much wood in the economy, obviously you shouldn't get too much gold for selling it to the merchant. If everybody wants linen, then obviously it should cost you a lot of gold to buy it.

EverQuest was a lot like this too. All the super guilds would go in and get ridiculous items with little effort.. then by the time most of the other people were up to this point the nerfing had made it nearly impossible for anyone else to do. After Planes of Power I put EQ in its grave and never touched it again.

It ISN'T supply and demand any longer. Take a look again. The trader pays 5 for an iron ingot, and charges you 21 to buy it? Same with tanned hides. I needed both last night to complete an armor purchase, and couldn't believe how wacked the prices are.

This sucks, and whosever idea it was to do this doesn't understand player mentality. We lost a guild officer last night because he realized pharming just got more difficult by a factor of 4.

A brief lesson in fixed-point theory:

Any dynamical system with a stable long term solution will approach a fixed point. If a system has no fixed point, it will have no stable solution.

0 buy - 0 sell is a fixed point since if this is the case, no one would sell, and no one would buy.

10 buy - 40 sell is not going to be a fixed point for any commodity since someone is going to want the 10 gold for his drops rather than simply deleting them. That sale would lower the price, approaching the 0-0 fixed point. People won't pay the 40 for the item since there's people out there selling them for 10. So 0-0 is an attractor.

All prices in the game, once sufficiently low, even for what is currently in demand, will be attracted to this 0-0 situation.

Now... can there be a fixed point at some positive number? Let's say X-4X is this fixed point. This means that some people are willing to part with their item for X and others are willing to buy the same item for 4X. The person selling is paying a commission of 3X to the merchant to not have to deal with selling the items dirrectly to another person. So for large values of X, the chance of someone being willing to contibute to the merchant decreases... thus it's not a fixed point. So there cannot be this "equilibrium" that Gaile refers to other than the 0-0 fixed point.

The designers need to fix this, else players will not be rewarded for playing.

Other games get rid of the stuff that is sold. It's doesn't pile up on the traders losing value. They don't explain what happens to it, but it's gone from the economy.

First of all :

I guess its FORBIDEN --> EBAY Shit...

And the Problem is, it was always so ; but since those updates the prices went down ( higher "Down RATE" ).

Iron Ingots : Sell for 115 Gold 2 Weeks ago, now 54. If more people sell Ingots, or same Mater. so the Prize goes down. or Up like Black Dye ( 7 k ), 2 Weeks ago max was 4 or 5k.

Anet is going to lose a lot more if they keep it up. They better pray that their update and expansion are worth while.

The entire point to being competitive in any game is aquiring resources to purchase better equipment to survive the harder areas designed into the game. Now that pharmable resource prices are in the tank, rare items are trading much higher to offset the gold losses. Early this week, basic 20-24 fortitude sword pommels were 500-1K. Today they're 1.5-5K.

Watching prices today, everything has gone beserk. Fur selling by individuals now 500, silver dye 1.5K and on and on. AN better pay attention real quick because all there are in the trade channels are sellers, not buyers, and this game was designed for PLAYING not trading.

I get more pissed at this situation by the minute.

how will they lose money if the buyers have already payed?

Aside from thinking Phineas has the best Avatar ever, I also agree with just about everything he is typing. Materials trading was a hassle free way of earning cash while exploring new areas. To make a profit now I need to zone and district for awhile announcing that I'm selling. What option is there for me now that I've finished the game a few times, done UW and FoW to death, and have almost all the bonuses?

PvP? Great... been there and done that, and I like it, but it gets old fast. When I started playing GW, I figured... finally a game that will break me away from Mechwarrior since MS decided not to do any more games for that series. But if all GW is going to be for long periods of time is PvP? There are alot better team vs. team games out there.

If the economy crashes (prices too high, by my meaning, for anyone to really buy anything) then, as I've been saying, there will only be WTS, and WTB out there as players don't even bother with merchants.

The process won't happen instantly though. What I hope is happening with ArenaNet is they are planning to fix the system--though do so more carefully and more thought than the last "fix".

The problem is there are LOADS of gold sinks, but...hardly any people have the money to...you know, use up. The gold sinks were put there to stop rich people from having too much money, well they do. It's just that, the rich people are so insanely rich they don't need to sell any materials to the merchants or anything like that, they only buy the stuff.

Gold sinks are fine, so long as there's money going around well so people can spend it on the gold sinks...right now it's just...alright...poor...people...who can't buy hardly anything because...everything is a gold sink.

and where are you ascended? rofl, Gl trying to play the game through and not farming and get some decent armor.

How do you foresee they will *stay* in business if nobody buys their expansions? Afterall people "have already paid".

EVERYONE should read Shagsbeard's post.

Now that you've done that,

Shagsbeard- I don't agree that 0/0 is a fixed point. A-net must have a price floor set in. Assuming the market were to bottom out, people would still buy runes at the low low price, which will raise the values of items.

So the question is, what's the equilibrium price level?

I have found that I get armor with runes where it's better just to sell the armor to merchants. So I would say that the equilibrium sell level is equal to average armor gold piece value of runes. If it drops below that, people will buy but not sell and the price will go up. If it is above that, people will sell, and it will go down.

I don't see any problem with acquiring better (statisticlaly) equipment once you reach the Desert. There, you can pick up enough mob item drops (most of which even sell for about 100gp a pop) trade it to the right collector, and walk away with the best armor (well, best AL armor. Not all the armor is the best armor, as the bonuses might not be suitable), best focus, or best weapon available to you. My Ascalon Short bow is worth about 500-700gp in Hydras claws and has the stats of a 300K Yellow Short Bow. if having the equipment you need to finish the PvE is your worry, just use the collectors.

The only things hard to afford under this current economy are vanity items, and honestly, thats all yellow and purple items are to me when I can get the upgrade components and items I need to max out one out to my heart's content. 15K Armor? You're never going to have it before you finish the PvE, and its not in any way necessary.

For the record, most desert drops (weapons/focus/shields) sell for around 50gp each, not 100. In fact most sell for less than 50gp, and the collectors items sell for about 20gp.

The problem with collectors items its not optimized, sure we get max damage swords +15% when enchanted but were is my +1 to swordmanship and my +30 health mods on it?

And you cannot salvage it.

Besides since drops have been nerfed good luck on finding 5 of some required items since in some cases (like sand wurms) its hard to get then to drop anything since henchies take a cut and few players are willing to go item hunting.

Also collectors dont offer subsets, you get stuck with the basic set.

There are multiple types of collector weapons, which cover pretty much all the bonuses. Also, you can simply buy the upgrade components and slap them on the weapon.

P.S. A maximum defense upgrade (+5 armor) yields better results than +30 HP.

As for 5 of the required items? I never had any problems, even with the bleached shells. I got three of them on my own (One of the wurm that always spawns near Hero's Audience and 2 in Dunes of Despair), and I bought the rest in town. Losaru manes, hydra claws, mandibles, carapaces and minotaur horns are all almost no trouble to get at all. I seriously don't think I ever devoted more than 30 minutes to actively finding some of this stuff. The rest I just picked up wandering the desert.

Collector items are optimized.. base items. You get the best possible stats for an item with no modifiers on it. If you want +30 hp, go out and find or buy one.

As for the reason prices are insane.. I feel it's because of greed. Take black dye as an example.

As of the time of this post, it's going for 6 platinum. Now, if people were to sell black dye to the trader, the prices would eventually go back down. However, since selling black dye this way will probably only get you 4.5 plat, most people opt to selling to players for 5.5 platinum. The seller gets a deal, the buyer gets a deal, and everyone is happy. The downside being since either the dye trader either has very slow or no natural increase of how many dyes he has left, players will continue to buy, but not sell, which only further drives the prices up. A good example of this, is the globs of ectoplasm.

When people first started selling them to the trader, the trader had no experience with the product, and probably didn't sell very high. Many players, however, didn't see the demand (I don't think there was much demand at the time) and so, a good many ectoplasms were sold to the trader, giving it a healthy base. When demand first skyrocketed, ectos were 5 plat to buy and probably around 3 plat to sell, and, since demand was high, why sell for 3 what you can sell for 4, or 4.5?

And again, since greed took over and nobody sold back to the trader, prices continued to increase, and at 10 plat an ecto, why sell for 7 when you can get 9 or 10 from a player? And now, because nobody sold ecto to the trader, both it and shards are now out of stock, never to be sold by the trader again. I have no idea what players are buying for it now, but even if the trader offered 10 plat for an ecto, players would still pay more.

This same things goes for every other trader as well. Since everyone wants that extra bit of money, traders are eventually all going out of stock, and *then* the economy will be in a mess, as just about everything will be player controlled.. and well, that's not going to work.

And for a suggestion. Perhaps if the game monitored trades somewhat (people selling 1 ecto for 10 plat and such) then took the averages of those recent trades and set that as the base price that traders would buy for, maybe then the economy would start to fix itself. Sure, there would be a few free trades between guild members, but those could either be ignored or might not even show much decrease at all in the overall picture. Maybe then people would start selling back to the merchants instead of spamming towns (since prices would be what most people would get anyway).

Sure, there would have to be safeguards (to prevent people from just taking an ecto and selling it back and forth between two people for 100k, perhaps only look at the first trade between players, not any others between the same two people for an hour or even a day), and still factor in the merchant's natural supply and demand scripting. But if the merchant isn't going to pay what people are willing to pay, it's just going to be skipped completely and it won't matter how good your code is if it's not keeping up with the economy.