Ebay or not Ebay, that is the question.

id rather farm the game to death than PAY for some jackass's gold

I couldn't possibly have said it better myself. The economy in Shadowbane deteriorated to the point that not only where the uber runes unaffordable, but so were the basic stat runes required to build characters. The game became truly unplayable without help from established players or friends. Bots and e-bay ruin the economy in games and make the games less fun in the long run.

I think you have to look deeper than bots ruining economy.
Items are already highly priced and un obtainable thats why I believe bots have a market.
The game has become extremely hard without friends and other players helping, im lucky to enjoy both, have even given gold weapons free to other playes I have quested with as opposed to try and sell for sqillions.
Its not the bots ppl, they are a band aid. The root of the problem is simply you have to farm, you cannot quest to get all you need.
Imagine going on a quest to get a grip of fortitude - how cool would that be. But no someone is selling them for like 30k so the cycle continues.
Why not have collectors/quests for runes, weapon upgrades, dyes and so that way you have choice. Would you pay 90k for a rune if you could do a quest, I would not, some may pay still and good luck if you do.
As it is now gold rules the day, so bots have a market.

How meny zeros are in a sqillions?

Not Ebay

--closed--

PS: i was like u, 2 weeks ago: "damm how the make 1000k?" And now i fund a place for hunting and did last 3 days 200k.

Find my other Post for Location....


my words

rofl, i think it changes often actually, just check the trade channel for examples.

Economy is based on supply versus demand. Every time someone plays the game gold gets created. Rare and uber items are created much less frequently, therefore they are worth a lot of gold. MMOs usually employ methods of removing gold from the economy via repairs or upgrades, but the bottom line in every game I have played is people always increase the amount of gold they have on hand. A larger supply of gold decreases its value. Bots increase the amount of available gold at an increased (unbalance) rate. Inflation is inherent to the system and bots increase the rate of inflation.

It is up to each person if they want to purchase items/gold on e-bay. I have no control over it and I won't waste my time telling people what I think they should do. Many people would do the oposite just out of spite. What I think we need is a gold tax--a form of gold rot that removed a percentage of gold from everyone's account once a week. It shouldn't be too painful but it should promote a "use it or lose it" mentality. The overall effect would be to punish bot users and maintain the value of gold.

Paying taxes in a game as well as in real life...Man life suks now!

I think you are looking at it wrong. How would all the people who are too lazy to hold a job survive if not for your taxes?

Seriously though, GW was made to fix the problems with MMOs (albeit with some sacrifices) and inflation has always been one of the worst problems. Inflation can make a game unfun.

didnt you buy pixels with real money to get the game? just an observation

heck I gave 100k to our guild treasury to get it started and got a e-mail from anet saying to not transfer large sums like that anymore or risk getting temp banned for suspicion of selling gold. Once I showed them I purchased another account for our guild to act as guild characters they were ok with it. but a simple process like that can and will result in closer attention from arenanet.

Right now that account is accessible by all our guild officers and serves to hold guild money and reward items for Guild Quests posted on our webpage. In the future this will be able to be done legitimately with Guild NPCs or so Arenanet has told me. and we will then use that account and full retail game as a real world prize within our gaming clan for someone that does not have the game yet and wants it. Our gaming clan is much larger then guildwars alone...

So just be aware that transferring large sums of gold to someone else (100k +) sends up a flag at Arenanet in the logs. Any time you send more then you can hold to anyone else it is Almost guaranteed that you are engaged in an activity that is against the EULA and ROC.

Bots have little effect on the economy it is the players that affect it 100%.
I.E Guild sigil = 44 plat this eve, yet 2 weeks ago from the same trader = 1 plat. Why?
More players where playing at tombs and selling there sigils to the trader. That is the economy of GW, not botters altering the prices.
As for E bay, that a choice of the individual, I honestly don't think it is worth it for a game like GW as it is easy to get max level and max level items with out any major hassle. The hardest things to get are the superior rune and the 75plat armours, but the armours are purely cosmetic and the runes, well is is debateable as to there usefulness when the actual damage increase they give over a major is not that huge and the price differece can be alot. Even the vigor runes, a superior vigor only gives 30hp more over the major,(don't event think its that much.) I can get that from a decent weapon haft or sheild

Why use eBay?
Some items in the game are ridiculously expensive - but building resources and finding ways to make money are a part of the game. It took me a long time to farm and save to buy a set of 15k armor - but it became that much more meaningful when I got it. Some day I'll get FoW armor - and I can look forward to getting it.

Some people think it's unfair when they see others with top equipment or tons of cash - but what they don't consider is that most (not all) of those people worked hard to get that way.

If someone doesn't want the challenge of doing things for themselves then why not pay $30 to play the game for them and unlock all the bonuses? In that case you can pay $50 + $30 for someone else to play the game for you.

OK missing the point here, for you spending a lot of time farming is part of the game, thats what rewards
you

Not ME! Not I!

I absolutely do not care one little bit what items you have and what you do with your character, it does not affect me and never will. I have my own game to play.

I find my challenges doing things I like to do.

Play how you like, i have no problem with that, just dont tell others what gets their rocks off in the game - you dont know!

Kind of get sick of pointing that out

And I get kind of sick of pointing out that by buying gold online, you affect the playing experience of every other GW player. If you're too ignorant to notice, or too unscrupulous to care, fine. But I'd really like it if people would stop claiming buying gold doesn't hurt anyone. It has hurt many online games to the point where it caused a significant player exodus already, these are practical examples of the botting/buying system at work, this is not just elaborate speculation.

first of all im pretty sure pixels are way out dated, its 2005 not 1995..

second of all your wrong... you see, we payed for a game that a company spend time working on, not something some bot programed by some low life picked up on last month's sunday (date may vary)... oh and did anyone else know buying guild wars from retail ISNT againt the rules... unlike ebay.. i think ill wrap this up with your words "just an observation"....

When did forums become more interesting than the game, how come no one told me? LOL

This can be an offshoot to GW, FW forum wars.

I purchase things like the piece of cheese that looks like the virgin mary on Ebay. I do not purchase non-palpable things on Ebay. I have common sense signet.

i never said i supported ebayers, i was just makin an observation. lol ive never had my comments written up like that w00t

Buying in-game currency and items always seemed hella lame to me. If all it takes is a few minutes on eBay to get anything you want, doesn't the game get kind of old? What's the point if there's nothing to work for?

hahaha transfering 100k gets their attention. Thanks for telling me, i go open my bot service

It seems that everyone in this thread chooses to ingore pvp. You dont work for pvp by unlocking stuff. You destroy your pvp skills by unlocking stuff (though henchmen AI > most PUGS). So if you want to work for pvp, you "HAVE" to buy an unlocked account ... [If you have a good guild you found before GW, it does not matter. You will get rushed, given unIDed runes etc. then you can farm low level GvG with smurf guilds to unlock weapon upgrades, the missing runes, and hard to get elite skills]

Er...I'm not sure, I really understood...any of that. I missed something.

Ebay money = bad

That's what ruins the economy, rich peoples who keep buying pricey items from peoples, while the poor peoples...stay poor, since they can't compete with those prices. Well, unless they buy from people off Ebay.

But...yeah...whatever. I've stopped caring about the overall economy, I buy what I need if I'm able, and sell what I can to do so. If it's screwin' up the economy, well...it can't get much worse.

The day when all this ebay bidding/selling ends is the day when a collector item is worth the same as that ultra uber weapon with same stat.

It’s a billion dollar industry by some accounts, that day will never come my friend.

This issue happens to be one of my points of interest when it comes to these games. I have never found anything that offered solid proof that this caused people to leave games, in fact if the numbers are to be believed the people buying far outnumber the people complaining. Even when Sony decided to start allowing this type behavior on some of their servers, no where in their reasons for doing it did they list trying to correct some virtual economic disaster. They say they where doing it to PROTECT the people doing it. Sony is in essence taking the e-bay out of e-baying to protect their players from fraud. I’ve written many online publishers asking about the reason that have for being against this type of behavior and by far the biggest answer is that the bottom line is other people are making money off their hard work and not paying royalties for that profit. In a why I understand that but more companies are going to have to take direct action and follow the lead of SOE or this problem will never go way.

A.Net nerfs drops in order to bring down the prices and stall inflation,
People find that they can't get the money to pay up for people still trying to sell their items for huge prices
They go to ebay and pay 4 bucks to get enough money to do whatever they want
Because of this, the people selling their items for rediculous prices continue to do so
As a side effect, those who don't Ebay money get left in the dust because they can't afford anything anymore
Even the rune/material/dye traders are effected, because players are willing to pay high and high costs - and yet the buy price is always low due to a bad script

...do I have anything to back it up? no, it's theoretical. but I don't think it's far fetched.

Your point is valid but you are leaving out an important variable in your equation. People that play games tend to get bored with them, and when they do they move on. Some companies actually release the numbers of accounts canceled vs. those created. When people quit games they more often than not just quit. Trying to sell accounts is a pain and most people don’t bother, so if you have 20 (old school) players quit in one month taking all their accumulated wealth with them to the ether, and in that same month you have 20 (noobs) start the game, that accounts for a good bit of money leaving the system. Granted no one (quits) GW it’s free, but a lot do get bored and leave.

Stur, people don't have to leave before the ruining of their gaming experience 'counts'. Many people continue to play games despite rampant botting making the game miserable for them, they stick with it out of loyalty for the game, because they're too attached to their characters, etc. Game companies don't seem to publish much information on what causes people to leave their game (I'm sure they will want to gather this information though), so it's hard to support either side of the argument with numerical data - there's merely a wealth of experiences to go by.

Maybe the number of new players outweighs the number of bot-related quitters, but in regard to the problem at hand, the new players will not know about the problem, while the people who quit do.

#1. Take your Prozac before you post pls - no reason to get mad.

#2. You're right. I can't tell you what "gets your rocks off in the game." And, no doubt, someone can have more fun paying for GW gold on eBay. I'm also sure that same argument can be applied towards people who say that using bots, exploits and cheats lets them concentrate on the elements of the gaming experience that's meaningful to them.

I didn't mean to imply that earning your gold during gameplay is supposed to be as fun for you as it is for me, but the issue with buying GW gold on eBay, using bots and using exploits is a matter of principle, not just about personal gaming experience.

#3. Before you respond, please take a deep breath and see rule #1.

BTW - It doesn't matter what I think is "right" and "fair." I'll leave that for ArenaNet to decide. IMO there will always be people who work around the rules in some way or another to gain advantage - every game is like that. I don't lose sleep over it.

Then this leaves you with one of the oldest problems in the world. Some people work realy hard at factorys (like my father) and some poeple work as managers. Both of these work the equel amount of time. Though the manager ends up with a lot more cash. Which in some people eyes make this person succesfull.
Now the factory worker is playing GuildWars. He is quite proud of its accomplishments and realy shows it around. Now the manager sees that, buys something even better on ebay and here you go again. The rich taking away the last peice of dignety of the factory worker.

Now you might reply that the factory worker is stupid to think this way. Though lots of them DO (not factory workers alone, but people as a whole think this way. Now I find it unfair for these people that even there last escape from reality is being destroyed by people that had just a bit more luck on their side in real life.

In other words. for some poeple a MMORPG is an escape from real life. An escape to where they can start all over and maybe have luck on their side for maybe just a small while. Now who am I to take away that last peice of selfrespect.

So we might stop all real life trading, cause you might be actually buying something that it is stolen? The fact that many of those ebay money come from bots, doesnt mean much. Its Anet's issue to solve. Some of that money might come from real players who just wasted tons of personal time and they want to earn some money from that.

So you just reward their time and effort. Nothing lame or disasterous here. How to stop botters? Well they could add a mechanism so that when it detects that you are doing exactly the same thing for more than 1 hour, you get a message asking you to write down the numbers/letters that a picture has(similar to the forum bot control mechanism). If you fail to do that within 15mins, you are kicked out of the game. If you repeatingly fail to do that check, your account is disabled. Of course an email and lots of warning are given to the player before the account is disabled.

It might be an extra hassle for players(like waste 1sec every hour to fill out the control mechanism), but it will remove the bots. Or Anet can sit down and find a better way to stop bots. But just cause there are bots or thiefs, doesnt mean that we should stop all trading or that trading is lame.

The manager is way more qualified than the factory worker. The manager is in a position, that his actions can benefit the factory a lot more than the worker. The worker is easily replacable. 1 managerial decision can turn a company upside down. 1 worker cant affect a company at all. The manager deserves his inflated paycheck cause of the extra authorities he/she has.

Not really. If anything, everyone is equal on gw. Does it matter if you have an ascalon bow or a stormbow? Of course not. In fact 99% of the time, your ascalon bow will have way superior stats than a stormbow. So you are more efficient in game than the stormbow person. You can even make fun of the stormbow user, cause he/she has a weaker bow which cost a fortune.

Luck has very little to do with it(most of the time). Its all about will and determination. Assuming that you live in US or in a EU country, you will have your chance to succeed. And it will be up to you to do it. We could talk about luck when it comes to some poor child who is born in africa, but when it comes to western societies, luck doesnt play a big enough part to matter.

As i explained over and over again on this post and on my previous ones, guildwars is 1 of the most communist(in a good way) games out there. Even the poorest person can get the best weapon. The fact that you can pay more money to buy a better looking one, doesnt mean anything when it comes to in game efficiency. Go get an ascalon bow and laugh with those who spend a fortune to get a crappier(stat wise) stormbow.

... no more needs to be said. if you thing that some useless manager benefits humanity more then a factory worker or a nurse ...

Its not about will and determination. Its pure statistical luck. There where millions of people who tried as hard as for example Bill Clinton. He just had statistical luck to get through... noone talks about the remaining 999.999...
Its not effort alone that makes the poor succeed. Or else we would only have millionaires. Its fact that as long as the probability is is not exactly 0, someone will do it someday. Few will admit that Fortuna chose them. No, they did it all by hard work ...

Buying drugs supports terrorism.

(read into that and apply it here).

Guild wars is only a game.
Why are we talking about terrorism and management?

Cos they are analogys of whats happening here, people use analogys to help other people see a certain situation in a differn't light, in this case terrorists = botters, drugs = ebay money.

All in all, I belive that buying gold from ebay could possibly hurt the econ more then it could help it, but thats the players fault for selling stuff at stupid prices.

Storm bow for 300k?, how the hell am i ever going to be able afford that without farming or buying gold?, and if I farm it'll take 3 FULL days of farming, thats if i dont get banned/suspended first.
Also, the reason people farm or buy gold is cos no-one likes being left out, when i see people with gold this and gold that, black 15k armour or FoW armour, They want it too, as quickly as possible, it makes you feel good when you have good things, even if it's stolen.

Just so people dont forget, if i wanted and max damage axe 15>50 with vamp 3/1 and fort 30 the cost would be astronomical.

Clean 15>50 - 50k
3/1 Vampiric - 75k if lucky
30 Fortitude 75k if lucky again

People think they can take the piss and thats whats ruining everything.

That's like complaining that the US economy is hosed because Ferraris are expensive.

Please dont forget that guild wars = video game.

Short and simple.

Let see, it appears the max gold any one character can carry is 100K.. and thus the max that can be traded during any one transaction is 100K. As this is the design, it is quite clear that items were never designed to ever be worth more than 100K at the extreme top end.

100K+ items, what a joke.

Don't make ebay sellers richer because they have maybe more time to play then you online. It's better if you just do it yourself.

well, i dont ebay and i have a lot of gold, and it doesnt take me 30 hours .. doesnt even take me 2 hours... just think outside the box... stop trying to assume farming is only way to make gold.. try other methods.. my methods are great and i can make 100k+ on a given day in a short amount of time

buying ingame materials on line is probably the stupidest thing you could do. i agree that it sucks how hard it is to make some cash now. however, dont go so low as to buy ingame material off of ebay. Getting that 15k armor will be the last thing you spend money on in the game. once you get that armor and you have your weapon and shield/focus item you dont need money anymore. buying money off of ebay only takes away from the game by shortening the game time. You will have your armor but you will have no fulfillment.