How we can fix the prices...

Overall, I'm glad ANet rolled out this update. And I did not profit from it, even though I was there early enough to do so. I bought 2 runes for my warrior. That's it. I believe the people who stocked up to make their fortunes at the expense of everyone else are people of absolutely no character and/or class. But enough of that. How do we fix it?

We don't buy from players, if they are selling a trader item. If we see them trying to sell trader items at high prices, tell them to sell to NPC. Spam them all if you must (whispers of course). They can't block us all. If we hassle them enough, and refuse to buy their wares, they'll give up, eventually. This price manipulation needs to stop. We all share this game. Be considerate of everyone, not just yourself.

The problem is, most players ingame will buy items of this new millioners. We can't do a little boycott, it will be 100% useless I think. I still don't understand how Anet could have let players buying so much things (ectos, runes) for a such low price. And skyrocketed the prices just after.

It's simple. If you want to be part of the solution, you'll fight for it. If you want to prolong the problem, you won't. Whose side are you on?

Besides the fact that harrassing people is wrong (even if you don't agree with their prices), no boycott would ever gain enough active support to make it even slightly effective.

There's nothing anyone can do to fix the prices except installing a decent dev team at ANet that knows that not all of the communities wants can be pleased. Because right now all ANet is doing is making one stupid mistake after another. If it keeps going, all GW will have is power players because casual players now cannot:
Farm for items to gain gold
Farm gold to gain gold
Buy good items because they have no gold
Fight in PvP because they don't have good items


Power players on the other hand:
Don't need to farm. They have all the gold they need.
Have mounds of gold for doing nothing.
Can buy anything they want, though they don't need to because they alread have the games best items.
Can pwn at PvP because they have the best armor, with the best runes, and upgrades.


The only way to fix this would be to make an economy. But they succeeded at doing so once, and have screwed it up since.

Here in lies the difference between a game with a 1 time fee and a subscription based game like EQ and WoW. Once the game is sold, there's little additional income if any brought in for the company making the game. The only hope is to get out fairly frequent expansions so they can make more money.

What do subscription fees go towards? Storage on the servers? No, not really, with today's highend servers, and low cost hardware solutions, there's really not much of an expense. A portion of the subscription fee goes towards "policing the server," and "fixing exploits."

Right now in Guild Wars, the in game economy is terribly screwed up. The developers have only 1 real money sink and that's the fancy armor with their seemingly obscene prices.

What happened yesterday (and from what I understand happens every time there's a reset) is that a few people fortunate enough to be online after the reset happens buy up TONS of runes, dye, ect leaving nothing of value on the vendors and then they begin selling things back at rediculously inflated prices. (I was told ectos were purchasable for 300 gold, superior runes were 300 also, even vigor runes were set to an extremely low price.) If you check the vendors this morning, you will find there are no Monk Sup Runes available... (anyone care to speculate how many runes the vendors actually stock after a reset?)

The only possible fix for the economy at this point would be a character/data wipe across the board, and for the developers to have fixed prices on the vendor items. If there's too few of item x, increase it's drop rate, or add rare creatures which ALWAYS drop the item so people can obtain them.

Also, high end farming which is being done, which allows a single player to blow through content quicker and more efficiently than a group of players needs to be looked at. Certain skill / spell stacking needs to be addressed. Otherwise, the game as fun as it is, isn't going to last. (Then again, maybe that's the developers wish... why make a game that encourages people to keep playing since they are not paying to play...)

You are on a slippery slope here..

Why not sell canned foods that aren't really filled with rotten scraps from the landfill since the customer would have paid for it when he finds out..
Why produce a car that make it out of the showroom and go beyond that..
Why build an airplane that can land since the airline has already paid..

Why? Because if they don't all hell will break loose at Anet when their nice expansion comes out, and that's it: it will just sit there nicely on shop shelves.

I bought two Superior Runes yesterday for 8K total (Sup Protection,Sup Divine). I didnt even Think of buying up more then what I needed at the time. I would have bought a Superior Vigor however it is still way too high. 55K as of this writing. I didnt even think of buying up a couple for my good friend that is on vacation. That I should have done.

I just dont see the Need to be Greedy. It is just Monopoly Money anyways. I wish I had thought of buying some black dye. Just didnt think of that either. I have two on my Droknar's Monk armor now. Would have been nice to have a couple more. Oh Well...I will find them in the game somewhere as I did the two I used already.

If someone offers me 100 ectos for an item, I wouldn't be able to refuse it...

However, all the people who benefitted from the patch, they should be selling their items really soon. People brought up all the runes so vigors skyrocketed to almost 60k and absorption up to almost 80k, but how much longer do you think these prices will stay so high? In the old patch where the market was similar (traders gave good prices), these runes were at about 40k for vigor and 50k for absorption, and I don't see why it won't settle down to these prices given that we have almost the same economy again. Eventually the bubble will burst because one of these horders will decide he needs gold and he doesn't want to waste time spamming WTS and he sells to the trader. Then the trader prices start to go down. The market will eventually reach equilibrium, so if you feel the prices are expensive right now, wait several days and see if it goes down. If it doesn't then buy from another player. Let them compete.

I hope that anybody who harasses people over whisper gets their accounts disabled for LIFE.

If you don't like the person's price, don't buy it. Simple as that. I see somebody selling a rune for like 20k that I don't want to pay more than 10k, I don't bother them about it, I simply don't buy it.

I like people who proclaim "either you are with me, or you are scum".

I will be part of the problem then.

Say if anyone bought a Superior Vigor Rune cheap recently I will buy it for 10K if that makes you feel better.

The real issue here is that they pegged prices. Ecto is pegged at 9K, when it is sold out you can sell back for 7K, but the price doesn't fluctuate. Superior Monk Runes sold out, still buying them back at 1.5K and selling them at 3-7K. This is crap because ANET created a artificial supply of goods (just linking all servers across the world wouldn't change the prices like this).

I hate to admit you're right....because I hate badmouthing a company that tries so hard to please it's respective community. But I'm honestly dumbfounded by ArenaNets recent decisions. Did I capitalize off ArenaNets blunder? Absolutely I did. 40 Superior Protection Runes later I was dead broke...but in about a weeks time I'll turn those 40 runes into a million plat and then stop playing the game. ArenaNet has made mistakes at just about every corner possible...it's almost as if they WANT the game to fail. I honestly can't understand what was going through their head when they thought "zeroing out the rune prices is a good idea".....


A.Net....Hire an economist...you obviously can't figure out an active economy on your own.

Normally, I might agree with you. However, in this instance, I see these people as taking this game down hill. I think a little effort at driving a point home and having the economy stabilize for everyone is a much greater cause. And far worth it.

And I don't take issue with the prices. I take issue with people not letting the new system run itself. A few select people have taken things into their own hands. I'm simply opposing that.

I am sorry to come across that way. The fact is, the people who capitalized on this, did so for selfish reasons. My approach, is to help rectify the problem for everyone. So whether I see you or anyone else as "scum" really isn't the issue. I just want people to wake up and help make this community better. I want this game to be a level playing field for everyone. Sorry if I'm an idealist, but that is the role I choose to play in all of this.

I just saved myself hundreds of hours of farming to afford FoW armor with the profit I'm making. Selfish? Mabey. Do I give a damn? Hell no.

There is no "selfish" in business, and I'm a business man.

But hell, if you're so into being high and mighty and not being selfish, how bout sparing me some ectoeplasm and gold for free?

Which is EXACTLY what was needed!

Look at today's "merchants". Do they rely on people to sell them things to sell back to the public? No, they get resupplied regularly from a central point. K Mart and Target even share the same supplier to keep costs down.

If this is what ANet is (hopefully) doing, then we'll have a stabilized economy that no one can exploit to make a fortune.

I think the economy will balance itself out with this latest patch. Give it a week, you'll see. I say this because I think the majority of players are like me, I mostly just deal with the traders. I don't like the hassle of trying to trade with other players.

I had a stock of runes (salvaged from just regular playing) that I hadn't sold, because I was waiting for a patch like this that would fix the traders. I was very happy to sell them all last night to the trader for a decent price.

Just my 2 gp.

While I think the prices were dropped to rediculous levels for a brief moment, I think letting things continue the way they were would be flat-out stupid.

As things were going, price inflation to buy things was out of control. And yet, if you wanted to sell those items back to a merchant, you'd get insanely low prices. Red dye for 3k? Okay, but I'll buy it back for 42 gold. WTF?

That said... why the HUGE price drop? I was hearing stories of buying Sigils for 10 plat! Sup runes for 2k! While I was expecting some kind of price drop, I wasn't expecting anything of that magnitude.

However, that's the only problem I've got with the new update. Prices seem to have stabilized, and that's what matters.

What people made away with from ANet's price reset, is not what I'm complaining about. I'm complaing about what some people are doing with the items, after the fact. I'm talking about people who stocked up on it and plan to control the market by not selling it back to the NPC.

Please, everyone, stop taking my comments out of context. If you would like me to elaborate my position further, just ask. Sorry I haven't been right to the point, as I've been up all night working on a project...

So if ANet resupplies the merchants regularly...

Problem solved before it becomes one.

Yeah, if there are NPC merchants, why not assume they hire NPC fighters to go whale on crap and bring them back runes? I like the idea of periodic resupply.

It'll keep prices balanced and reasonable and render hoarders irrelevant.

Indeed, this totally has to happen. I'm getting annoyed with people.

I've been trying to buy some ecto for about 40 minutes now and it's perpetually out of stock. Out of the maybe 20 offers I've gotten ONLY ONE PERSON offered to sell to me for 8k (tyvm btw ) and the lowest offer I've gotten otherwise was 10k.

Totally stupid. Sorry guys, but we're not buying from you.. and eventually you'll all run out of money and feel completely stupid!

Haha. That's a good point. But since henchmen steal drops, why not make the relevent drops go straight to the market?

Oh, that's good.

There's a definite distinction between selling something, and selling something meant to last. The game, for 50$ is very nice. Play it through, as you would any game. It's a rather linear progression like most console RPGs.

Unlike normal RPGs you would find on a console (xbox, ps2, nintento ect...) you have other players. These other players directly effect your gaming experience.

In games like EQ1, EQ2, WoW, and others which are also MMORPGs, painstaking steps are taken to control the economy. Items do not flood the market too quickly, if they do, then drop rates are reduced and encounters are made more difficult.

In this game, prices are artificially controlled by vendors who can easily be manipulated. The developers lacked the foresight to do anything to prevent the messed up economy you see in the game today.

Fixed prices are necessary to regulate the economy and keep players from driving up prices.

What SHOULD happen? A server rollback to prior to the changing of vendor prices.
Why should it happen? Because hundreds of runes were bought up, as were dyes and other rare items such as ectos. These items will in turn be resold at extreme prices. This totally defeats what was intended by the price reset.

I like this idea.

Sooner or later things will even out. Hopefully the traders will occasionally resupply (as in real life) either from "delivery" or from those dope henchmen selling to them. Players who hoarded things will not find the market they so want OR they will have to compete with the traders for business. Once that all falls into place, it may be more profitable for them to sell to the trader rather than spend hours looking for buyers, hence resupply, decent prices, etc. etc. etc.

I've always sold to the vendors... or given stuff to my guildies to sell. I just don't have the patience to trade in this game. My time is valuable, especially now that school started :P, I don't have time to spend hours trying to sell something. So this update suits me just fine... helps to streamline my GW experience.