Guild wars Economy My View

alright i would just like to say this *sry if neone has said this i just skimmed* do people really have all this money to be able to spend 100k + 30 ectos on items i really would like to say that also tears up the economy i dont know "honest" people have that much to spend freely

yes there are people that can do that. I could if i chose too. but i dont see how spending 100k+30 ectos for something that i can get from the collector and mod myself for abotu 1/4 of that price will differ me any. what because it looks different im supposed to do more dmg or me godly and cannot die?

and yes ive gotten the "OMG YOU HAVE TO EGAY UR GOLDZ". well sorry to inform these people but the onyl time i ever spent real life money on this game was when i bought the game from the store. other than that i have worked hard to get what i have.

It comes down to 3 things. time/patience/effort. with those in mind you can become wealthy in this game. it isnt hard. Salvage and sell things that get dropped to merchants. save the gold. if you can take old bows and such and salv them for wood. then go to the crafter above sardelac sanitarium and for 5 wood and 5 gold hell make u a parchment. get a stockpile of those. you can resell those for 100g a pop at Droks. simple stuff liek that can help make you money in this game. same thing with drops. find a decent mod say a +25 health pommel off a crap sword that dropped. sell it to another player for 3-4k = insta profit. it takes the time/effort/patience to achieve anything wether it be in this game or in life as a whole.

hi. i originally had a very long post attempting to address the issues at hand. but for everyone's sake, i will keep things nice and simple.

all of this discussion about economics and such is interesting and all, especially for economics majors, but i'm wondering if any of you are even paying attention to the gw economy at all. theorycrafting may be fun, but not when it's completely wrong from actual practice. if you paid attention, you'd notice that prices are down all across the board. things aren't as expensive as what they used to be.

you brought up the point of more gold coming in as the game gets older as a reason for inflation, but you forgot about one key thing: consumable goods. gw has none, which is why there is no inflation. prices are actually down because more and more items are flooding the market.

and in terms of equilibrium price, try selling a +30 hp pommel for 200k or try buying one for 5k. you'll never be able to do either. but if you're in the price range of around 60k, chances are that you will close a deal. if this isn't price equilibrium, then what is?

lastly, the weapons that sell for ridiculous prices do so not for functionality, but for rarity. the power traders know this, and that is why they offer a lot for rarer items. as more items flood in, they become less rare and thus lose value.

i honestly don't see what the problem is. go browse through the trade forums or look at prices ingame and you'll notice that the opposite of inflation is happening.

My two cents :P -- In GW, It Like MLM (Multi Level Marketing) Gold being create (Generate) without any cap, Players are getting richer, I see more players able to afford Fissure Armor...(Farm, Trader, Ebay) whatever the source of income, The more you play, the more hours you put in, chances are you will able to afford anything in the game.....Rare item like Fellblade, Choas Axe , won't be very rare anymore, More players will able to afford, high-end perfect mod.... There are Already Green Items (Perfect mod) Razorstone , reasonable price ...
Players that only play 2 hours/day are one can't even afford Forge (regular) Armor ... without a good guild support, drive those people away from GW... very difficult for them, to have a decent armor and weapon....
Once in a while, very luckily , they found a very rare item like Crystaline , b/c they don't know how much it worth , sell it for 5k or 10k...
Instead of "Value 250 gold" , show the last actually in game sell price for that similar item, so nobody can be cheated ....
As far as Economy goes , Gold being generate way out of hand, There' no limit, It's like Gold raining down from the sky... which encourage Ebay or Online Gold selling Company to their advantage... most players will find the easy way out, people that love GW and can't spend hours of farming, will def pay those Virtual gold with the Real life money......

Some gold does drop out of the economy. Those players that simply stop playing, uninstall the game, get banned, etc. That money goes into the ether and helps reduce the supply of gold circulating.

The reason is habit. Face it... other games made the rare type items vogue, so now all games will have similar.

Why not just drop the whole concept altogether, as well as gold? All it adds to is farming, ebay and grief. Still have ectos, sure... but enough so anyone that wants them can get them easily or find someone with plenty to share. Still have fellblades... but without gold or 'rare' drops they're worth the same as any other sword, just look different.

Don't breed the greed to feed the need. Barter system ftw!

I wish it could be that way but the world is full of greed and unfortunately that what drives the economy in game such as real life and as long as gold selling companies can make their cash nothing seems to be stopping them. I really dont agree with it but our dialogue here wont change it sadly. Me personally I never want to pay money I worked for to get gold in a game. I can spend it buying lipstick LOL

All they have to do is simply change it. People will adapt.

So sad true socialism ruins everything and anet trying to be real comunists,we allow u that and not allow u something else.FFS what are u gods or u have so many complexes,just leave us alone .We can manage our ingame economy our selfs and i can assure u it will work properly(why politics in my country dont want to understand that RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO the central planing)


Btw nicccce avatar

Dolyak forever!

one more thing d2 economie colapsed couse of jerx with HAX....

The inflation issue in this game is not as bad as it seems, there are sinks and commodities (non refundable items) that treat the problem (like dyes and salvage kits), however they do not cure it...inflation IS long term problem. By that i mean that the victims here will be newbie players (like what the OP said). For someone who just bought the game and came out of presearing, who only has about 200g in his pocket and storage combined, paying 5-10k for a shield and 8-12k for a sword may seem discouraging. Ultimately would cause a decrease in the Guild Wars community and the population in Tyria.

Another issue I see here is doing away with gold permanently and making ectos and shards drop more often, there's a few levels of answers for that. First off, GOLD is the only accessible drop for all levels, may your character be level 2 or level 20, everyone have access to it, by simply killing some monster outside the door. Without gold, there is no longer a common "Need" between the level 2 player and the level 20 player. For example:

The level 20 player may possess a purple shield that would be perfect for the level 2 player, but what the hell does the level 2 player have that may interest the level 20 player? Some Grawl necklace?? Hell no! The level 2 player would be forced unable to trade until he can find something of interest to the level 20 community.

Of course, this isn't MSecorsky's point. I was merely citing what may "seem" like his point. MSecorsky's point is actually something that may seem more reasonable, that if Ectos, Shards and Black dyes can drop like theres no tomorrow by simply running outside of Ascalon city and killing some level 3 devourers... there wouldn't be any more need to adjust the economy, everybody would have what they want... but in fact this almost entirely eliminates the need to trade at all. If a level 2 player can run outside and pick up a Perfect Gold Max Dmg Sundering Chaos Axe from a level 0 Aloe Seed outside of presearing Ascalon... what the hell does the level 20 have that would interest the level 2 newbie?? Virtually nothing. Farming would be a thing of the past... Is this a problem though? Not exactly but in a different form... yes.

If a level 2 character can recieve practically everything he needed by killing some devourers and gargoyles, there will be no point to continue playing after he's level 20, or after he's past the missions (which doesn't take that long if you guys remember). The guy can practically have all perfect weapons with FoW armor, all dyed black before he even reached level 10. XP is useless and without gold, I can only assume that all skill traders give you skills for free (or practically free because XP can be so easily obtained). In a nutshell:

If there is no gold, If all the rare items are no longer rare, everybody would have everything they'll ever need in the game.... Why should they continue to play if there's no longer the need to?

Life expectancy of all players would be reduced dramatically simply because there's no longer the "need" of commodities and "desire" of the rares. ( Like Marx's Socialism theory, it sounds good in paper but wouldn't work in real life) Simply put, Capitalism is a NECESSITY, the uneven distribution of Wealth is better than the even distribution of Apathy.

I find it sad to see people paying 100K+ for weapons and items. And the saddest thing is that it didn't take that long for prices to jump up to such ridiculous heights. From day one people started putting ridiculous prices on items. The more people played the game, the more money people had from farming and whatnot, so the prices automatically went up and up and up.

I started playing from day one and after a week or so I came to LA and bought from someone a gold axe (almost max) with +28 HP for around 400g. By that time items were already in high prices so I thought I got a pretty good deal, which it was. The thing is I still use that same damn axe along with another maxed out one and I am quite happy with both of them. I completed the game with my first axe and almost completed SF with it as well... Ok that was a bit random.. BUT.. what I don't get now is why people have the need to buy more weapons if they already have the ones they use, which apparently are maxed out. Is it about status and greed to have more and the best.. I think it is.. and that makes the game less and less interesting. You see more people selling items in LA or other large cities instead of actually playing the game or say.. help someone with a quest or something. Trade channels have become useless as if you want to sell/buy something you need to spam the hell out of it in order to get others to hear you.

Removing gold might be the only solution to fix the economy and ever rising prices for items. More people are forced to farm in order to get money for those "precious" items. In the end it will be Farm Wars and not Guild Wars.

Gentlemen,

First Relax.... Open your minds and read some more interesting material:

-First the mention of "Re-distribution of Wealth" is what will kill a game. (Like it's killing Contries now.) Theres an Idea. Lets rip off people who work harder (or smater) to make more money and give it to noobs who are like poor people on welfare. Doesn't work in reality, doesn't work in GW.
(E.G. Person who has knowldege of how to farm, basic GW econmics that elite items generate serious $$$$, the know what, when, and where to aquire these items. This guy is like an VP of Mangement to Boardmember of corporation.... Now new guy entering the game is like a guy fresh out of High School. He can either go to school pay attention and learn how the world works, or go pump gas & flip burgers at the local SuperBurger. It's up to him, but he is limited on knowledge. If you work hard to achive it he can one day be a VP or Boardmember, but if he just slacks through the game, he becomes the "would you like fries with that?" guy.

-No reason to worry about gold because an account can MAX (1,000,000 in Storage) and 100K per customer resulting in a possilbe total of 1,400,000 per account. GW programers set it up that way off basic econimical equations and probability. Even buying gold from e-bay is still getting it from another character who legitimately farmed it (or groups of poor chinese people farmed it) from the game. Plus account starts with Zero and the overwealming majority of players don't buy from e-bay, the likeliness that you could achive 1,400,000 by questing or normal play is rare and would take months to achive.

-In walks the Capitalist.....Free Economic freedom..... Hey if I'm just smater or have better information than the next guy I make more. Limited knowledge (On average how many noobs just starting the game will farm, and on top of that how long will it take them to learn how to do it?) Think about how long it took you to do it unless you had friends to provided you with that knowldege.

-Supply and Demand -- those who control the supply will thrive (Super Uber Farmers of Green & Elite Items / Ectos / Shards / Etc...) as long as there is demand for those items. People want new Green items or, elite weapons to improve characters, and gather ecto's in search of the famous FoW items. If another Armor came out that was better than FoW, but required Saphires per say instead of Ecto's and shards what would happen? Every noob and elitest would need to get his hands on it. Suddenly Ecto / Shard prices drop and those who control the Saphires would control price.

-If it's not true then answer why I changed the price (Or had a pretty damn good effect on it solo) of Ecto's on 11/2. I have been saving up for FoW item for one of my characters, and almost reaching 700K from Farming and Trading I decided to bo and buy up as many as possible. I purchased 55 Ecto's one right after another in the course of 5 min and watched the price go from 13 - 14 - 15K. Don't know where it is today but I'm holding off on the other 55 until the price drops again or I can find people willing to unload mass quantities of them for a 2-3K less. Special NOTE: Price changing as direct result of buying from Merchant vs. People.

Don't take this as a Flame post, it's not..... It's just for Me a good Friday and I'm on my Third RedBull....

To reiterate what Accurax said about the three factors in the game being the Goods, the Gold, and the Player driven economy: in real life, the exchange of goods vs gold is almost equivalent, goods cannot be produced without gold and gold cannot be acquired without the exchange of goods, this cycle is broken in the game because both goods and gold can be acquired without an actual exchange... it looks inevitable.

My suggestion may seem infeasable, but its just an idea. If the Goods vs Gold cycle cannot be fixed, perhaps we can subsitute it with a different form of cycle? Instead of Goods vs Gold, we use Buyer vs Seller, for example:

All players will take the role of a consumer (Buyer), and all npc will assume the role of the farmer (Seller). Monsters will no longer drop golds or goods (DONT FREAK OUT YET... please hear me out first......), instead they only drop crafting materials... hides and fibers. Buyers will give the seller crafting materials and gold in exchange for Gold Weapons, Armors, and green shields (subsituting the drops that would normally only be obtained from farming). At the same time NPC would now sell and buy weapons and items back at the same price... ie. you can buy a black dye from an NPC for 20g and then sell it back to the NPC at the same price.

Now about the Gold, gold can be regulated by having a set amount of gold in the game at all time (much like reality), it may be monitored occasionally by the Treasury (Anet) from time to time in case someone deletes a character with a storage full of gold... in that case Anet can artificially feed gold back into the system by either having a little "Government Liquidation" or "Giveaway event"... This way gold is no longer increasing exponentially but is kept in check by a third party.

If you haven't noticed already I was trying to implement as much of the real world economic system into the game as possible, with Anet being the Treasury, NPC is the manufacturers, and us players be both the Material Farmers and Consumers.

So, the NEW three economic aspect of the game is:

1.) Gold:
NPC give and take gold at a regular non-fluctuating price. Without a source to flood the system with gold (farming), the amount of gold would always be recycled, and stabilized.

2.) Materials and Goods:
Materials: Droped from monsters, and consumed by the manufacturers (NPC).
Goods: Produced by manufacturers (NPC) using materials and gold, and can be sold back to the NPC for the same amount of gold (but no material refunds).


But alas, my suggestion is not without a flaw, while writing this post I just came across a small problem...


3.) The Players.
This is one factor that can NOT be controlled. New people will buy the game and new players will join the world of Tyria, but with a fixed amount of GOLD, theoretically in the near future, people would become poorer and poorer (quite opposite of the problem we have now...)

so thats the jist of it... if I can somehow come up with a fix to that third part... this may just be a good idea...

--- note:
Don't get me wrong on the part about the gold, its not a way of fixing the difference between the wealthy and the poor. Gold must remain in the game, and so does the wealthy... and so does the poor. Its not a fix to the wealth gap, its a fix to the system of exchange and inflation.

Silly, silly Keynesian economists...

I think the idea of throwing the use of gold out and going more towards bartering for items is really good. Theres my 2 cents.

I'm not sure if you're quoting from my post, but I was in agreeance with capitalism and the preservation of the wealthy, the poor, and the difference between them. If you were not quoting from my post then please ignore what i just said... I'm just paranoid of being misquoted..


I agree with you, that in the long end... there is a gold cap.. and that everyone cannot max out there gold beyond 1 Mill. gold. with the price rising, so does the player's wealth, therefore it shouldn't affect the system of purchasing and selling...

... however that only applies if all the players joined the game at the same time. What Accurax addressed is that the rising prices will affect is new players, new people who just joined the game yesterday. They did not have the luxury of 6 months to farm like some of the senior players... thus what may seem like a proportionally even market to the senior players, will seem like an impossibly unachievable market to newbie players... I mean that in a sense that its beyond just rich and poor.

If rich players can sell Max dmg gold chaos axe for 200g to newbie players... this might not be as much of a problem, but of course that isn't a permanent solution...

Bartering really isn't a bad idea... but the only way to make the bartering system work in Guild Wars is to do away with the level differentiation... if all players start in PvE as lvl 20....but of course thats no fun.

My only comment is what source do you base how the economy works. I'm not judging the information at the moment, I'm just curious.

Was your information on how the economy works directly from Anet or is it just an observation? I would guess that Anet is able to tweak the economy as they see fit if something gets too out of whack. They may not tell people this, but I'm sure they have server side tools for it.

If that's true then this whole thread would be for naught... which is a good thing. because we won't have to worry so much anymore

but of course that's still an "if" until some reliable source confirms it.

Well there are some valid points as well.

I think the major peeve of mine is that because the game wants us to focus on the battle part of the game, there is little to focus our energies on except a handful of items. There is no real value of low-mid level items except for what little crafting materials they yield. Level restricting items (a very sore subject with alot of people) would put a little more value into otherwise worthless items.
...But that would make the game just like just about every other MMO.

Accurax,

It depends upon what you/we/they call fun. Go back to Mott's sales system and look at your personality profiling. ANet must meet each of the four types in the economic sense in order to create the kind of attraction your attempting. The only real value they will effect is more Disney Land economics. You know, if business is poor paint the counter.

Artificial inflation is countered by the four things: 1) No one wants anything less than a max. what ever that is in any ctegory, 2) No one cares about role playing, story telling, conceptualization, etc. - only bean counting, which leads to 3) No one that has their gold and max items, has to spend them, and last 4) People are not so generaous, concerned, connected, or compassionate enough to care what happens when their "vitual non-person" is scrapped. Since it has no value it is just as likely to be erased and its wealth destroyed or held for another of the four character slots. No one else benefits from dead money.

Obviously these may not occur in every case, but I suspect them in a sufficient number of cases as to make the situation what it is. I do not participate in the trade economy. I do not find it to be of any value to me. I can make more money killing monsters and SS then I can selling anything to my fellow players. I'm not going to sit for hours waiting for someone to think about buying something I could get off a staff or Axe. (I'll never play PvP, it takes too long to DL anything to bother with.)

This part of the game is the second worst aspect of it. That it is more about how much money you can make and less about the personal development of the character and their experience in the aftermath of a near nuclear holocaust like we hope we have missed.

Fitz Rinley

I would accept level restricting items in a heartbeat. I would enjoy it immensely. Especially if the items actually were present that were capable of being used in the various areas you were in. I'd even go one step further, if you gate into an area with items that do not match that area - you lose them. Gone Droks Armor in Ft. Ranik on the 8th level player.

As it is I see little reason to play the game for more than how much can I bean count. "It will take me X number of times doing this area to reach this level. When I pass thru this trench I average Y amount of gold from objects over 10 passes. Between X and Y I can max out and be ready to farm without having ever done a mission or quest after Z hours worth of WORK." There is no reason to play this game. It has no role value.

Fitz Rinley

It's very difficult to relate an MMO's economy to real life because they are two different animals.

We don't have depressions and recessions. People always have a way to make income at anytime. There is not a finite supply of goods.

I think there's so much concern over the economy and money because a lot of people who play this game are young, and they are experiencing the complete freedom of both having substantial amounts of money and trying to manage it as well for the first time.

Not trying to bash anyone. The majority of people 28 and younger are lacking even basic knowledge about how to manage and maintain their finances. I may be off a year or two, but I read the study in the paper a few months ago. It's everyone's fault, parents dont do enough to teach their kids, and they avoid the topic pretty much completely in school. You are left on your own. Why do you think people who do finacial planning or any kind of investing for others as a career do well? It's not because it's a profession that deals with money and the economy, it is because most of us don't know how to do it ourselves.

If you have poor money management skills, or none at all you will not have money in the game either. It's that simple. No economy fix will prevent you from buying every set of armor along the way in the game. No gold sink will stop you from buying a max damage axe when 5-27 is just as good.

The economy is fine. You never have to worry about a downturn, and items will always go down in price over time or remain stable.

On a side note, mudflation will not hurt the overall population, only people in the merchant profession in the game. But the smart ones will stay ahead by having the newest and alos the most demanded items. The game is set-up too much to hinder merchants so you are seeing now a weeding out of the tons of people doing it.

You guys and gals do all this over-analyzing but it's really simple if you try and look at it that way

Even then I wrote a million words lol.

Indeed, like I said unless the OP is privvy to some inside information about the game mechanics and exactly how they work... you can't really be sure what Anet controls and what they do not.

Money management skills aside, most player soon realize there are a limited amount of things they really need in the game.

I like nice looking gear and stuff but I only use what I can offord. Fortunatly for me my ranger has a set of 15k armor. Thats about all I can bare to work for because I dont farm.
And Im content,...my other armor may be common but its just as good as anything else.

The only time the economy ticks me off is when I realizes I need to roll a PvP character because my PvE character doesnt have the runes and weapons/mods to PvP with the optimal edge.

Put this on the front page instead. It will tell you a lot more than about the GW economy and a lot less about "RW" politics.

The OP obviously has little idea of how the game works, like many of those interested in the GW economy.

He gives out scenarios, saying that they will happen based on theories, see this well ahead of time and already know the solution to the problems that corporate Think Tanks could neither foresee or find that same solution to. Most interesting.

I also enjoyed how the OP sums up the Guild Wars Guru standard of being for a generalised crowd and "family friendly" when he says I misunderstood a portion of the OP that made me think that you wanted to give starting players a certain amount of money when they start the game. I also though that you classified this as an "RW" governmental trait. I've corrected my post.

Forgive my ramblings, misspellings and double post. It's 2am, hot, and has been a long day

From your prevoius post, I was not really quoting anyone and you provide an interesting perspective. I really like the GW economy and I think when you mention new players coming into the game I would like to point out 2 things.

New Person Makes it over to Pre-Searing:
1) Get Discourgaged because he only has 200g to his name and can't buy some items that people are selling. [This would be the burger flipper I mentioned in my earlier post.]
2) Be pro-active and realize that "Hey if these people are trading these Items that is what I need to learn how to do!" and he will try even harder to get from the 200g to a more reasonable number. [Future VP / Boardmember]

This page link below was a recent article from the GW Programmers about Farming and the Economy. Actually scarry to me, because it seems a little socialist. But it does mention some intersting statistics.
http://www.guildwars.com/community/f...-friday61.html

The mention of 75% of all accounts have < 20 Platinum means that 75% of the people can't afford any of these new green items that are selling for 50-70K or the no longer available HoD +5 Energy sword that is going for 100K +.

Read the article because it sounds like they really hate the e-bay gold for cash thing that is going on.

Anet's #s are also misleading. The amount of gold an account has is hardly an indication fo the player's wealth. It diesn't add up how many globs of ecto that account is buying up to buy his/her FoW armor, or now many black dyes an account has stashed away.

I'd guess the average GW player has probably 100-150K in gold or like valued items either on their characters or in storage. I consider myself fairly average, and I have two characters (out of 7) with 15K armor - the other characters all have droknars. That's 250K easy right there, and doesn't count the goodies in my stash.

So I don't pay much attention to their #s, they are deluding themselves if they actually put much stock in them and think everything is hunky dory.

reminded me of this one time i spoke to a caucasian and the first thing he asked was, "hi are you from china?"
and i asked back, "what made you think that?"
and his reply was, "duh, you're chinese aren't you?"

please exercise some sensitivity and grey matter my friend. banning asian IPs will hurt "other asian countries" that churns out pure-harmless-fun-loving-rpg-gamers such as yours truly. where is the love?

anyway, with regard the thread, Accurax has it on point. also, the earlier anet nips the problem (e.g. tax, caps), the less painful it will be.
easier said than done no less.

Money Sinks. Money loops. Money's money. The Economy.


Every shifting issues that will be discussed now until when the sun explodes in 5 billion years. My input:

Usually by leaving economies alone, when the hype of the game dies down, and you get regular basis players like us, the economy with the "invisible" hand law, it will right itself. When everythings done being hyped up, like perfect mod this, or ecto and shard that, in the end, the economy will flatten itself out in the long run. It may spike now, dip in the future, spike again, then level out. There's so many if's, or when's or who's what's how's, but through experience with world economy, unless you start from in-debt, you really have as much as a chance to make it like that person advertising those perfect mods. You just need to put time and effort and eventually, they'll drop for you.

Invisble hand, my friends. Invisible hand.

--The Shim

You'd think that Anet would be better off perma-banning botters that banning IPs in any event: since companies that sell gold on Ebay will just buy annother account, every ban is annother $50 for Anet(once the 10-hour free trial deal is dealt with). With luck, and a deal of effort on the part of Anet, it might eventually become unprofitable for these compaines to sell on e-bay.

But I digress. What supprises me is the lack of discussion on what is bound to be the most signifigant upcoming item to impact the GW economy: the in-game auction house. My own thought is that this feature continues to be delayed not for lack of the technical savy to impliment it(I'm betting they have a working system already written), but rather by virtue of which strictures to place on it so as not to hurt the economy.

The one real flaw with such a system would be auction-house "campers". Remember when the rune traders were 1st introduced and the amount of runes available was dictated by the # actually sold to the rune traders? Players with money (and likely using bot/macros due to the instant timing required) sat at the rune traders all day and would instantly scoop up any and all popular runes the moment they became available...which allowed them to turn right around and sell those rune directly to players at rediculously inflated prices. If you wanted runes you had no choice to either pay these prices or farm them yourself; you had 0 chance to actually buy them directly from the vendor.

If Anet wants to try and tweak the auction house in such a way that new players can hope to afford "the good stuff" within a reasonable timeframe (couple weeks or so; i.e. not the moment they hit 20 or some such short period), and thus keep said items always within the realm of "attainable" to potential new players, then placing strictures on the auction house is one way to do so. However; how do you do keep the max value low enough, and at the same time prevent the already-rich & bots from camping the auction house for these same items...effectively removing them from the new-player market entirely?

I don't have a solution to this myself. But if you folks are truely interested in a continued and healthy GW economy, this is really where your discussion should be focused.

If anything sounds a bit odd here, it's almost 7am and I'm still up...so I claim fatigue-induced stupidity.

Both issues of e-bay and power gaming come down to an environment where points are more important than concept. Since it does not matter what the character would do or how he or she interacts with the world or others, only points matter. These points will be sought after at the average level of the moral state of the end users. Hence, e-bay is more attractive because there is no draw to an inspiring alternative. Afterall, being good, looking good, winnning, is only a matter of points - not values.

Fitz Rinley

Why not just make everything available from traders in the game - that will force price caps on all items. Unfortunately, what holds true in in macrocosm of RW is even more prevalent in the microcosm of GW: People are willing to over-invest in things just to make them (the people) appear to be of better worth to others. The same solution works in both instances, too: If you are happy with your +28 hp mod on the weapon you use, what do care if others go crazy over one that is +30? let them...sit back and enjoy the show and be content with the fact that you are a more highly evolved indidual and understand the only differences here are not really functional, but are pure fluff - something to make them feel superior to others. Think of these people like people driving Range Rovers in the middle of a city - does this vehicle offer anything in terms of better functionality in an urban setting? Hell no it doesn't, but they need to have one anyway, just to let everybody else know how uber-whatever they are.

The beautiful thing about this game is that you can play it and enjoy it without having to resort to this sort of behavior. I can (and do) use a collector's staff from the desert on my primary character, it is better than Morgriff's staff which sells at 10k or so. Wanna know what I paid for the items to trade to get the staff? 400g or so. It is a sad reflection of the state of our culture when such trivialities come to have such import.

I remember how Neopets deals with merchant campers....they restock the shop at random intervals. >.>;

I think with an auction house, global prices will be for the first time VISIBLE. And hopefully new players will have common sense. I think of Ebay and some stuff that happens there. Theres an ebay user who likes to snatch up rare toys and the like. I have a lot of friends who have been out-bidded by him simply because he has deeper pockets. Usually the person turns around and resells the item for much higher prices and very often makes no money because: people wont spend $1300 on a single toy. And everyone knows him and his MO. Its simply not smart collecting and better prices for the same item can always be found. Especially when re-issues of it are released, it depreciates the original value.

Essentially there is no way to stop rich players from buying items from people who are trying to drop the prices (like me) and ripping of newbies and reselling for higher prices when the auction house comes. If this auction house does behave like ebay, it BETTER have some sort of fee for putting items up and deducts from your total sale cost.

I agree with the fact that it doesn't take into account armor and items your character does have. But put it in perspective, how much gold do you have at one time. What they are saying is that the overwealming majority of players don't have these great items and don't have ectos'. Now that I do believe and would say is factual. How many guys you see running around in 15K? Compare that to total number of players..... If a guy can't keep 20K in his storage he's probably not walking around wearing FoW armor or even 15K.

BTW and this is just my opinion most people that are in these Forums are part of that upper 25% class that have $$$$ and decent items. Mainly because of the information that they can get out of the forums. Knowlege is power and every 15-35 year old that purchases the game doesn't register in these forums (maybe that statistic is like 75% or less).

That article is a joke. 75% of accounts have < 20 plat? How many of those accounts aren't played anymore? How many of them were activated within a couple weeks of the statistic? Due to the lack of a monthly subscription, Anet can talk about "active accounts" all they want, and refer to accounts that were turned on...even if they aren't played. In a monthly fee game, active accounts mean something (even then, some people buy long subscriptions and stop playing), however in GW it means next to nothing.

Anet can spin it however they like, really. Unless they start talking about "accounts played within the last month" I'll continue to take their statistics with a grain of salt.

Perhaps the problem, and I'm just throwing this out, is the game isn't really about accumulation of items and wealth (I think I remember reading that somewhere) but rather action/combat.

Despite the fact that most people say that they prefer this over grinding over gold/crafting/levels in traditional MMOs- what people 'say' they want and what people 'really' want are often 2 different things. It seems to me we're trying to find complexity in a simplistic economy.

Quite frankly, I have no idea how much gold I have.

The biggest problem with GW's economy is that there simply is no problem. Which is quite strange, since economies have a natural tendency to become problematic over time.


First of all, let's set things straight. There's no such thing as "gold" or "items" having any value in Guild Wars. The only real commodity is time.


Do you want a perfect PvE character? Go play the game for a week or two.

Do you want perfect items? Go farm some greens in Sorrow's Furnace for a week or two.

Still not satisfied? Go farm griffons for another week or two.


Basta.


You never ever need to interact with another player to get anywhere in this game. And I'm not even talking about PvP-only, where almost everything is presented to you on a golden platter to begin with.


As for the truly hard-to-get PvE commodities (ectoplasm, shards, perfect crystalline swords), they are reserved for the hardcore playerbase and offer no advantage whatsoever over the newcomers, apart from "looking cool".


So for heaven's sake, don't take away the time sinks.

A fee and deducts would have some effect similar to OP. The difficulty I see is the maturity of play. E-Bay had trouble with supposed 'children' getting on-line and jacking bids up to ridiculaous prices just to watch them not sell. With some of the things I see in the game, I would not put this past several or even many of these certain players. (And I don't think all of them are young enough to be in school.)

Fitz Rinley

Truer words were never spoken. Most of the rest of the thread is redundant.

I love how, when faced with information they don't like, people will choose to ignore statistics.

It's in Anet's best interests to maintain an economy that will please the majority of the people (not all the people). All of the information on your character is stored in a database. A simple SQL command can give them all of the information that they need to tweak the economy. Want to know how man ecto's there are. select count from char_inv where item="ecto" will tell them.

Guild Wars economy isn't driven by need, it's driven by vanity. Personally, I have 15k armor for my female warrior because it looks neat, whereas my monk uses normal Droks armor. I'd never buy any fissure armor (except the warrior helm) because I like the 15k better.

And I'm one of the stabilizing forces in the economy in that I regularly go to Old Ascalon and GIVE AWAY nice stuff. I gave a near max +10% ench chaos axe to a new player the other day, just cause he seemed like a nice guy. His appreciation was worth more than any vanity item I could own.

Oh, and I never charge for running people anywhere, and do not accept tips. My wealth, like it was in Runescape, is measured in goodwill, not in the accumulation of "perfect" items.

Imagine what would happen if some of the the wealthiest people in GW decided to become philanthropists.