Economy impossible to balance (warning: very long).

Ok, yeah, another Economy thread. However, I have some interesting thoughts that I would like to share. I think that the gameplay and the economy based on the way it is right now is impossible to balance. I first started playing pretty early and I recall seeing a rare materials trader in Ascalon. Anyways, I did almost all the quests in Pre-Searing and came to Ascalon with a reasonable amount of gold, however, iron and steel (I was a Warrior) was incredibly expensive. Therefore, I brought a salvage kit and went out and salvaged 1 iron and 1 tanned hide, and slowly built my stock while completely all the quests in Ascalon and I eventually got two pieces of good armor (I also got some of the weaker armor that was sold in Ascalon in the mean time). I think this is the way the game was intended to be played, It was fun and it took time to do things. It took especially long for me to get 1 steel.

However, after beating the game, I decided to start a new character to unlock some more skills. I got a few dyes in Pre-Searing and I skipped most of the quests except the ones that gave me skills. I discovered that the experience rewards on the quests were essentially useless because I can gain experience much faster in the next area because monsters are higher level and I get better items/gold that way too. So I went to Ascalon pretty quickly and then sold all the dyes that I picked up for a reasonable amount of gold. I went to the Material Trader and brought a pack of 10 materials for 150 gold. I saw that the Rare Materials were quite affordable so I brought some of that too. I almost have the best set of Armor already and I haven't even left for my first mission in Ascalon yet. Note that I could have traded with other players for a much better value for materials (ex. I can easily get common materials at 10/piece rather than 15/piece) but I didn't want to be bothered with dealing with people. After a few quests, I completed the best possible armor for Ascalon and had minor runes in all 5 slots. The quests were ridiculously easy with this new armor, most of them I completed with 1 friend instead of 3. So I sped through most of the game.

The point I am trying to make is that stuff like common materials are very high in demand for lower level characters, while some other stuff like dyes are very high in demand for higher level characters. Because items and drops get progressively better in the game and common materials become more and more useless to higher level characters. My Warrior may salvage 30 iron, 30 cloth, and 30 bone after a quest, but I would sell the cloth and bone to the trader and keep the Iron for future use, therefore flooding the market with 60 pieces materials I won't use. Since each profession in general uses one type of material extensively, they sell all the others driving the prices down. So, now new characters can buy stuff for very low values, essentially ruining the early game because it becomes so easy. Also, new characters can find items that are only demanded by higher level players. New characters have no real use for dye as they change their armor in every town they visit. However, if they are to come across a black dye in Pre-Searing, they are virtually set in terms of money for the rest of the game. They can buy the best possible armor in Ascalon and not have to spend anything until much further in the game, and by that time they would have saved up an even larger amount of money because they didn't have to buy any thing. Other RPG type games avoid these types of situations with level requirements on armors, etc, so even though higher level players drive down prices, the lower level players are still limited in what they can equip, making sure the early game is still somewhat challenging, fun, and worthy to do.

In the most recent patch, the economy "crashed" as traders refused to buy materials for a decent price. The material prices seem to have increased quite a bit because people are not selling to them and there are people who are still buying. This theoretically should create better game play for the lower level characters as there is a point in buying a salvage kit and trying to salvage that 1 steel (instead of just spending the money on the materials instead of the kit itself). However, materials are still extremely cheap if players trade with other high level players who come back to Ascalon to unload some of their materials because traders won't buy them for a reasonable price. Bascially, because materials are generated much more than they are being comsumed.

This interaction between high level players and low level players are really messing up the game. I can probably finish the entire game in under 24 hours now. The only thing that is truely valuable to high level players are vanity items (Ecto/Shards for Fissure armor, dyes, Fellblades, etc), meaning that they will flood the market with the lower level items like common materials in order to make money for their future purchases. The new materials trader prices tries to somewhat fix the problem, but people are just trading from player to player (making it extremely annoying for everybody because it's such a hassle).

How is it possible to fix the problem without any major changes to the game's structure? There is one economy but things that are worthless to one group is extremely valuable to another, leading to enormously accelerated trading (ex. materials to lower level players and dyes to high level players). In real life this would be an extremely healthy economy, but this is a game and it causes players to advance through the game way too quickly and then in the end they have nothing to do except to try to get Fissure Armor, and at this point they resort to farming which continues to worsen the problem. People always say "you don't need fissure armor" but that is the only thing to do cause the other stuff is so easy to get past quickly. So now as A.Net tries to balance out the economy, all the people who reached the end already are complaining because the only thing they have to do (get more vanity items) are being nerfed to become near impossible (3 million gold for fissure) and extremely annoying (having to spam "WTS ____" in order to make money). Wow, this is much longer than I thought, but I'm bored.

The problem is that the merchants are giving you exactly what the items are worth... nothing. That pisses players off because they expected a reward, but if nobody wants your stuff, they aren't going to buy it from you.

Gaile said that the prices are buy stuff at X, sell stuff at 4X, creating a 3X commision. She concluded erronously that each item would reach a stable fixed point. The only fixed point is when X=0 or X=infinity. So, no... the economy is not impossible to balance, it's just going to balance out at 0 to buy 0 to sell with no items in stock. Or buy for a lot, sell for a lot, and again, a very few items in stock. These are your only attractive fixed points.

What they need to do is fix the prices for the week. Then based on an average supply and demand, change the price by <10%. Currently the price is changed based on too small of a sample point. Prices should be stable for at least a day, and I'd suggest a week.

I think most of the "whining" comes from the fact that players who were in the game early benefited from those economic conditions, while players who entered after the implementation of various changes (farming nerfs, Rune traders, etc.) are struggling to make money.

For example, before the Rune trader, you could get upwards of 1k for minor runes. Now... minor runes are practically worthless. Before the changes to material traders, you could make decent money buying and selling raw materials. Now... it's tough to break even. So I think most of the complaining comes from this uneven situation. Early players are sitting on accounts full of plat and they can afford "perfect" weapon mods, ectoplasms, and Fissure armor. The players who came in later don't have access to those funds, and therefore find themselves "priced out" when they look to buy "perfect" weapons or ecto that they want for Fissure armor.

I don't know what can be done to fix this, or even if there is anything. But this inequity is the source for a lot of the complaining IMO.

Seriously guys you can still farm 2.5-3 k in 30 minutes. All you have to do is wipe one area with type x monster. Sell all the crap to merchant. Warp to new area with monster type y (or even new map with same monster type x) wipe the map, sell all crap to merchant. If anyone wants me to take them on a tutorial on how to do this send me a pm IGN is Kwai Jane Kaine. I dont bother farming a lot I keep 20 k in storage just in case. I have all the forge armor on all my characters and dont care to buy the 15 k pieces for my characters however I did farm enough gold and materials for my wife to buy the 15k pyro armor on her account. The economy is fine it just takes time to get what you want.

I don't understand the people whining about the economy. Armor is set at a fixed price and the materials are very easy to acquire. Minor runes are quite cheap. Good caster weapons are available at collectors in the Desert and South Shiverpeaks. It's quite easy for newbies to get great gear. The only exception that I can see is that weapon upgrades, Warrior weapons, and bows are difficult to find and expensive.

For the Runes problem, in another thread i stated that all that was need to be done is switch minior and supior rune stats, so that if people want the now-a-days minior runes they will have to pay for it, not just the little money they need to pwn up for the minor runes. keep drops the same, just switch around the stats, simple (btw: not many will like this idea and they are going to flame it)

I'm not whining about the economy, just pointing out the fact that given the current situation in the game, it is impossible to have a stable economy. The fact is, as someone pointed out, to anybody who has Droknar's armor, materials including rare ones such as Steel are essentially worthless to them because there absolutely no use for it (except to sell). Therefore prices have been constantly going down on most materials meaning newbies can get through the game in less than 20 hours because they can get the best armor immediately in any town they go to by simply buying anything they need because the higher level players simply dump all the materials on the market, depressing all the prices. Therefore anybody can complete the game in less than a week and have nothing to do except to go for the cool looking stuff which just continues the cycle of depressing material prices and speeding up the time it takes to send a new player to the end.

Basically we end up having Players who have nothing to do except to get some cool looking items. In order to get good looking items, they need to make more money by selling what they don't need (which is virtually every item that drops in the game). This crashes the rune/materials markets (in fact, the people is actually selling to new characters with the trader as the middle man since only new characters really need materials) so new characters can get anything for virtually free. Also another way to make money is to run new characters to towns, etc. So the best way to make money is to help new characters directly (rushing them, trade to them) or indirectly (selling stuff to traders who sell to them), which means that there will be a ton of new characters who end up with nothing to do but try to gather cool looking items/armors.

Personally I feel a good RPG should take 100 hours to complete, not 20. It did take a long time to complete in the beginning as people cannot be rushed and it took forever to gather the required resources to buy one piece of armor (therefore there was actually a point to complete the non-primary quests, because you are gathering materials while doing them, whereas right now it is a non-efficient use of time to spend 30 minutes to get a 500exp reward). When the game takes this short to complete we have everybody at the end who have nothing to do, so they try to get fissure armor, but cannot because it's too expensive, so they start whining. I would probably be whining too if I finished the game in 1 week and the only remaining thing to do takes a year to accomplish. Good thing I got the game early and got in some good entertainment because it actually took time to complete the game back then.

Ahhh ok. I see your point now. I have been playing since the first BWE and I do agree they did make the game far far easier. I do actually find myself longing for the good old days when getting Altheas ashes always resulted in at least 1 if not more party wipes and char were something to be fought cautiously and using a bit of strategy.

Low prices are good. Inflation ruins things for newbs because they can't participate in the economy. This is so much better than other MMORPGs where the only people that can get decent gear are those who grind for hundreds of hours.

The gear that you can afford without rushing is not overly powerful. Sure, Ascalon Armor makes Warriors invulnerable in the early parts of the game, but the rest of the armor is well balanced. On the other hand, if you rush for Droknar's armor, then the game will be exceedingly easy up until you ascend. Still, newbs won't have access to Droknar's armor until they get there legitimately, so I think it's a non-issue.

The game shouldn't be defined in terms of equipment. I'd rather spend my time playing the game, instead of grinding in order to receive some mediocre gear. Items shouldn't be too difficult to acquire.

Plus, although you can beat the final mission within about 30-40 hours, it takes hundreds of hours to complete it. UW and FoW take several hours to clear, each, assuming that you can do that your first time through (probably not).

Also, PvP is half the game. You can get perfect armor and weapons for free when creating a PvP character. That hasn't ruined the game, it just makes it more enjoyable.

you guys seem to care more about this in-game economy more than you care about your country's economy

just go with the flow, stop complaining because its a freaking game

You are missing the point. Also, I found the criticism to be quite constructive, and therefore OK.

While I see what the OP is saying about it being easier to get materials and armor (especially low-level armor), I think they should keep it this way. There is no way in hell every time I start a new character I would have to grind or cough up a lot of money for simple low-level armor.

But I do agree that the game is too easy. Most of the missions can be done first try easily with even only a half-decent group, as long as there are no morons who aggro everything in a 12 mile radius.

The problem with GW's PVE is not that its too hard or too easy - it's that it's linear in nature.

Many people have been locked into the recent mindset of "Play through linear story, when you die, go back to save point and try again". That's just lazy game design, for single player games that the companies want you to play, finish, and then put away so you can buy another game.

Games that have replayability and longevity, have progressive difficulty with progressive rewards. For every mission, rather than 1 bonus, they should have dozens of optional objectives, some seperate from each other, some in progression. The bonus objectives need to be of varying difficulty, and failure should give a poor result rather than instant death (most of the time).

So when you complete a quest/mission, rather than just "Finished!" or "Finished with bonus!" You'd get some sort of score, or "56% complete". To make it even more interesting, your performance should affect the story in some way. People you save, will come back later to help. Things you do change the way later missions behave. Completing an early difficult bonus should open up an even more difficult and rewarding bonus in a later mission.

There should also be some randomisation or variation so people cant just stick to a fixed plan to beat things easily - it needs to keep players on their toes.

This is the true key to making it "fun" to play with a 2nd character. Or to replay missions to try and perfect your score. And it also makes the difficulty self-adjusting, based on what you want to attempt. And it provides a reward for skilled teams in pve.

Otherwise, you've seen and done everything already, you're just trying to rush through to unlock another set of skills etc.

I don't think people should need to grind for a long time after they have finished a character, they should be able to hand some gold down from their original character to get through the game a second time much more quickly so they can unlock more skills. However, the game was much more challenging and fun when I was still wearing some pieces of the weaker version of Ascalon armor when I was in the northern shiverpeaks. I liked using strategy to win rather than blindly charging in, quests needed skill to complete. However, it is possible in 1-2 hours to grind out enough gold in presearing to get you through more than half the game. The only way to get steel back then was to gather enough planks and pay to have it converted to charcoal and then gather enough iron and pay to convert the iron and coal into steel. Right now everybody is probably laughing at that trader because you can buy the steel for about 1/3 of the price and zero grind. If you already completed the game, you should be able to give 15k gold down and get through the game quickly to unlock stuff. However, the PvE game is just so easy now that people complete it quickly on their first time through. We are virtually just placing everybody at the end and people are wondering what there is left to do.

If you want a 100 hour story line, play Neverwinter Nights.

Beyond that, all I really want is an expert salvage and a map point north of the wall... in pre. And more pre to explore. It's prettier

And pre collector caster armor needs an upgrape... not a lot. 10 AL would rock.

lol what economy? In guild wars you don't need anything to progress. Everything is basically for show only. So I don't see whats the big deal. Can't make that armor black because it costs 10k? Oh noes! Seriously though, economy is for real mmorpgs not gw. Prices are low because everything in game is worth nothing.

Thread Revival!!....
...
....

how the heck could any1 find this.....

nice pick btw^ kinda looks like racthoh

wow.. just wow, this is a game, not life, let the economy screw up, we learn from our lessons

as for this revival WTF XD

Thread necromancy is truely an amazing phenomenon...

even more amazing when the point made to raise the thread from the dead hasnt even got anything to do with what the OP posted

Your statement about stable points is mathematically incorrect, through iteration and assuming that certain parameters are constant it will establish a equilibrium or stable price. This not perse need to be 0 or infinitely high. I don't see the need to manage these markets so much. Basically i dont care much as supply and demand will always change depending on the "comission" that can be made. It would be utterly futile to try and stop the fundamental rules of free market. individuals selling items or materials would be "outlawed" in such a way. People will find ways to generate extraordinairy amounts of gold, and people like me see ways to waste their amount of gold (on skills or whatever).

If Anet doenst want to create a hyperinflating market then they should reduce the drops from monsters, in terms of gold and materials. But even that can have consequences i cant oversee. As long as people don't bot then I don't see the problem of having a vivid economy.

well hey, he searched and posted in a thread relevent to his interests, which happens to be mmorpg economy

Well, I do have a monk in Pre. He probably rezzed it...

One-time only though, because the only Pre res is the signet.

Oh God, took me two minutes to stop laughing over that mummy head.

Even more amazing is that the original post isn't even really valid any more. It's complaining about a patch which is almost a year and a half old. As usual, the only things that are actually expensive are prettier versions of the cheap crap, which means the economy is fine.

Why on Earth did you bump up this long since dead thread? Its not been posted in for ages for a reason hehe

Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.

And yes, any educated English speaker should know what that means.

That's «Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.» to an educated French speaker .

And in AMERICAN ....(that's me) /end sarcasm

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose-The more things change the more more it stays the same..

A mod complaining about thread necromancy?

Maybe the mods should "close" threads that are more than a month old, or have them close automatically after a month of no replies. A month is just a suggestion, maybe 2 weeks, 3, whatever.

But then we get the "use the search, stupid" post.

You just can't win on a froum.

ok im done with the pics now

Kudos for a new member reading posts of an ancient time.
Smack all of you for flaming him.
Shoot all those that say use the search. Uh, hot off the press, newsflash, the search thing is the sorriest thing ever created.
Smack the thread necro for reving long dead threads
Smack all of us for posting in this thread.