Real World Economy Strategies for GW

Guild Wars isn't real life, but some principles of real life apply. I'm not going to discuss anything that relies on scamming or decieving, I will only focus on concepts that provide mutual benefit between players.

The one important principle is that you cannot possible get rich off of your own labor. You have to figure out how you can get hundreds or thousands of other people's labor to make you money.

1) Basic example: a manufacturing company. The workers dont have a way to make much money, but the company pays them. This allows them to make more than they could on their own -- which, in the absence of other jobs, would be zero.

Can this concept be taken into GW?

You have to meet one requirement: the amount that they benefit from being in the company must be greater than their benefit of not being in the company. Unless your company/Guild has something extremely super special to offer, this must come in the form of money (for the members) if you want to make a profit. Therefore, if you want to make a company in GW, you must be able to pay the members more than they are capable of farming on their own.

In order to meet this requirement, it is necessary that the product of the workers' labor is valued at more than the value that they could get for their labor individually. There are 2 basic ways to achieve this:

1) Be a middleman. If someone spends all their time farming, they cant spend as much time learning the accurate market values, or making trade connections -- and vice versa. If you are excellent at farming, and you can find someone who is excellent at selling, then you can sell your items to the person who's good at selling for a price that is beneficial to the farmer, and the seller can sell them to the right people to make more money for himself. Win win situation. But, this is small scale. The bigger scale this operation gets, the lower the profit margins can be made, and the more business you can pull in, the more people you can hire, and the closer you get to becoming a Wal Mart.

2) The other way is if the labor does not have any value without being part of a joint effort. For example, if one person knows only knows how to program the chip, and the other person knows how to design it, and the last how to build it,they can combine their efforts and make something that can be sold for profit. There is only one example analogous to this in GW where teamwork can produce something that individual work cannot: the hall of heroes. So, this could potentially be made into a business based around this principle. There are a few ways.

a) The team could be paid a percentage of the winnings. This would be necessary for the startup. You would probably have to start with an even-cut. fortunately your company cant go bankrupt since people might be willing to stay even if they only win once in a blue moon. However, you cant possible make a ton of money doing this, because your team wont be winning all the time.

b) another way would be to pay them not for winning, but for showing up and fighting at the designated times, with bonuses for winning but with most of the profit going to you. this would allow you to make more money If and only if you were able to design teams very well, such that you had a good chance of winning.

c) To REALLY make money from this, you would need to train other people how to make good team builds. These people would run their own teams, paying their members, or even taking them on for free with the promise of a cut of the earnings if they won. All you have to do is find good team leaders to go around gathering the proper players for the builds you design. These leaders would then pay you for showing them how to design the builds in an ever changing metagame. Then you could pull in very big bucks.

However, in order to make the jump from owning a single team to owning many teams, requires that the metagame be constantly changing. If it doesnt change, or changes too slowly, your team leaders will have no need of the expert build designer. Alternatively, if thye think that it is simply an easy thing to adapt to the metagame quickly, or you arent doing a good job, you will lose those leaders...and they may even start to send teams in that oppose your teams.

Anyway, I'm not a GW billionaire, but these are the ways that I see that economics could be used to get rich in GW.

I don't get it.... Why would winning earn you money?

How about this.. you rigg the Arena/Tomb? First you get a large group of "underlins", have them all join the Arean/Tomb, with promise to loose for pay (trading rank for cash). This is best done internationally... when their said have low amount of "native" playing.

Basically you want to systematically exploit people for your own personal gain.

The reason capitalists can get away with this in real life is that people need money for food and shelter and basically have no other choice. Capitalists control capital, ie the means of making money. In this game, people are not desperate for money, and they can make it themselves without being exploited by you since you or anyone else since you/others don't control the means of producing wealth. Anyone can go out and kill monsters for gold/items.

No one with any ounce of self respect would go along with such a scam. Especially if they have their labour exploited all day at work, they're not going to want to come home and have their enjoyment in playing a game subject to the same mechanism of exploitation.

Guild Wars Anti-Capitalists unite!

Inflation does work in GW. We see it every time when there's a skill balance, and it's harder for some people to farm, the total amount of money going around because smaller, so prices in the trade channel don't go up too much up to the point that people can't pay it, essentially making their money worth less. If you can work around this principle, you could make money, but skill balances don't happen very frequently.

Someday people will learn that GW doesn't have a real world economy. I pity the foo's.

I only think the 'middleman' would work, as a farmer probably most of the time sells to merchant. If the middleman then would pay a bit more, he too would make a better profit.

Option 2a
You mean, put all earnings together and then split it up again? Isn't that the way it works?

Option 2b
I don't think many people would want to show up on specific times.

Option 2c
I don't think those teamleaders, will pay you for the rest of their life. They maybe would pay you a few K for once, but that's it I think.

It is not a scam because everyone involved benefits with more money than they could make otherwise. If they arent benefitting by being a part of it, then they wont last long and they wont develop skills worth the cost of them anyway. It would be very easy to scam such a corporation by taking up front money and then not doing the workoad...but they could make more from the company by simply doing what's asked of them. That's the point.

Oh please-- this is a game not a platform for some pathetic socialist agenda.

But if you insist, capitalism works--if you don't like your job, quit, get a new one or go into business for yourself. The best way to drop the illusions of a hopeless political agenda is to start signing the front of the checks for a business instead of the back of one. The joys of a free market place are out there and if it works in the real world as well as in this game then by all means take advantage of it. The difference between the haves and the have-nots is the willingness to take some risk.

be a shark. abuse new players who don't know prices. try every forms of tricks to make money. if you hope getting items from trades forums, and armors from screenshots, then you have no choice. oh yes you have, you could buy gold on ebay. or be a shark

I think the real problem is that there are so many kids playing GW. You could easily set up some kind of cooperation between 2 or more people which would streamline the process of making 'money' (I dont think you would nescessarily need to call this "Real World Economy Strategies", more like division of labor).

But this would seem to be impossible to set up with random people who you met online, the whole idea (real life, or not) requires some small amount of trust, which is really lacking in a game.

Looking like this could be in a book called "Pimping in MMORPG's for Dummies"

I make plenty of money on my own, or enough to satisfy my current needs. Made 10k in a day and a half, that'll hold me over quite well for my singular purposes, plus teaming up with Guildmates for free and not having to worry about being scammed/weasle'd out of gold is much more appealing to me.

Actually, the middle man thing is a good deal.

Let's say that I spend 30 minutes farming and I get 2 greens from FA runs. I then sit in town for 30 minutes trying to sell them.

So, figure if each green got me 20k I'd have 40k at the end of the hour.

Or, I can farm for an hour and have someone else sell for me during that hour. Then when the hour ends not only have I more greens but I've also already sold more.

They sell 4 greens and I find 4 more for sale. Then we make 4x20k=80k per hour. Split it down the middle and we both make out winners.

Now you might say, but you still only make 40k, and that is assuming that I would get the same sell price as the person who exclusively sells. However, since I spend my time farming I may be less familiar with market values and sell at a loss while they would have an excellent handle on market values and get a much more profitable sell price.

Also, there is an additional benefit if I'm not the only farmer. If multiple farmers are all working at once to keep the seller stocked up then the seller can reach a wider range of buyers more quickly. He wouldn't have to wait for that one ranger looking for gargash's bow, he could sell to anyone looking for greens.

Can't we all just get along? Socialism or Capitalism, communism or "marijuanaism"
all agenda aside, I just don't feel this would fit with the general rule of gameplay. Not because it's exploiting anything but when's the last time you ever saw medieval vikings in a factory house?

Let alone factoring wal-mart as an example.. bad man! :P Walmart is perfect how it is..if vikings ran a medieval walmart, I'd only buy weapons...

--The Shim

And what's the point of all of this? Do we need more money? I just play the game and have been able to buy anything I've wanted, except I guess some superior runes, but I instead use what the game gives me.

That's 4 characters with Droknar's armor, most with multiple choices to maximize one attribute over another, and two more on the way to the Forge. What more do I need?

Oh and I generally give away the good stuff I can't use to guildies.

I think the idea here is to get a ton of cash quickly. When moving new characters up, I find myself pulling out my lvl 20 warrior to go farm to raise cash for the other players armour or rune or whatever. Nothing like handing your lvl 12 monk a nice rod or staff that your warrior found in the Desert or Shiverpeaks. I think the idea here is to maximize efficiency.

I won't buy GW cash on ebay, as some people do.

I don't need no stinkin' money!

I do this also, but it is usually a collector's item. No cost, I just save all the collectibles from the characters that have gone thru the areas already and have some donations of same from guildies.

I'd never do this, for fear of being banned!

Ya ya everyone vehemiently denies doing it, yet IGE advertises powerleveling, selling gold, and selling acounts in magazines. Apparantly they are doing very well.

I don't understand why people buy in the first place, it's not like it gets you anything you couldn't get on your own.

When you start buying your stuff on ebay you are no longer playing the game, it is completely irrelevent to the discussion that I brought up.

After more consideration, I have decided that probably the most efficient way to make money would be to run an organization where people work for you either by being buyers or sellers. You would have values or items available on a website, the buyers would buy at lets say 80% of those values, and the sellers would sell at 120% of those values. Bother buyers and sellers would frequent the trading channels looking for deals, and post who bought what on the website, so that the sellers could hook people up with the goods. As the owner of the company, you would supply the buyers with the necessary capital to buy low. If they pulled in loot relative to what you alloted them, you would keep them around, and keep paying them. The key is to get a large operation going so that you could pay them more money than they could make on their own, and enough that the promise of continued funds does not make them rip you off with their current allotment. You would, invariably, get ripped off a bit...but if you were making a good profit, it could still be win-win over all.

I went Wal-Mart style. I have a few traders selling my items for a cut but my suppliers have dwindled down.

I don't think the wage / reward system would work very well in GW. You would need to pay them a high enough salary to make it worthwhile for them but the payouts don't offset the salaries.

Not to forget the other money/loot received from farming for the farmer, and bigger chance of cheap prices for the middleman.

Despite the validity of the argument, this is precisely the thing that Anet are against.

Let's say 20 slave labourers working in horrid conditions...farming solidly for 12 hours a day so that one person can sell the stuff in LA and sell the gold on ebay.

I know this is not what you are meaning or intending, but this type of organised behaviour is exactly what Anet are trying to prevent in each of their farming nerfs.

In the real world the "free market" which in fact isn't free at all, has left half the world's population living on less than a dollar a day, and the vast majority of the world living in utter poverty. I suppose a billion starving people in Africa are starving because they refuse to take some risk. Arguing in favour of such a situation is juvenile, and trying to transfer it to a video game would make it extremely painful to play.

If you replace your suppliers with smart trade-channel-buyers (using your capital), you can essentially use the entire GW community as your suppliers.

No, that's entirely different. I'm not talking about slave labor, although I have heard that this practically does occur in games like wow or gw. In the situation I am describing, the people involved would be few in numbers, respected, and would also be getting rich off of it.

Actually, you are completely wrong. First of all, people do not need GW money to survive. Second, GW money "grows on trees" in that anyone can just run out of town and start picking it up. Thirdly, since money does not grow on trees in the real world this allows economies to collapse and make everyone poor...in GW, that's not possible. So really, your argument is completely ignorant.

Now, there is a lot of money flowing around, and being created continuously...basically, there is continous inflation...there is also some deflation when players quit, but the net is continuous inflation.

In my opinion, the goal of a game like GW is twofold: 1) beat people in pvp 2) become rich. Both are fun goals, and if you are shocked by these goals, I dont think GW is right for you.

I am able to make money by being the middleman knowing cheap suppliers. If my sellers can buy cheap as well, they wouldn't need me to supply them. In GW money is relatively easy to come by, they would be able to come up with their own capital rather quickly.