Guild Wars 2

nekretaal.6485:

I hate it when people decide to play games with words to deny inflation when we all see inflation happening.

Prices go up and own, but an across the board increase in prices (due to inadequate Gold sinks as one cause) is here and has been here ever since the patch one year ago that introduced champion bags.

Pick an index of Representative goods and track it and that will show you where inflation is happening. Money moves from one place to another all the time but a spread out index ought to tell you the whole truth.

Green Items – Way up since last year
White/Blue items – Way up since last year
Gems – Way up since last year
Ectos – Gradually moving up
Precursors – up since last year
Crafting Costs – Way up since last year (despite fewer people crafting)

Pick a representative index

Who cares about nominal price when what really matters is the purchasing power of gameplay time?

By paying the box price, they gave you life long access to a game, which constantly updates its content and is playable by every player with relative ease while he hasnt to spend much gold. There are some items which are rare and therefore expensive. You dont need those items to play the game but if you wnat them nonetheless, Anet gives you an option to buy gold with gems to purchase those. Thats how they make money.

NO.

I just flat out reject that argument entirely. That is too pay to win.

Anet gives players the option of turning gems into gold, but I cannot believe that they intend the average player to convert gems into gold in any significant amount. Gems are for buying gem store items and gold is for buying in-game items. You’re meant to get gems primarily using cash and gold primarily using gameplay. If they ever move towards the idea that players are intended to convert gems to gold in order to be able to afford TP items then that would be the sign that they’ve moved into “vampire” territory.

If they would hand out everything to everybody, this game would be dead by the end of the year.

Nobody’s talking about hand-outs, just a more reasonable price point, prices that worked perfectly fine early in the game when inflation was lower.

You are just trolling at this point.

The sad thing is you might actually believe that.

So when people ask you to support your argument, you’re falling back on the “but this isnt my job” line. Quite frankly JS has better things to do than to make it easier for people to get something because they dont want to take the actions already available for obtaining it. Not his job to cater to lazy people.

It is, actually. It’s his job to make the economy work for the players,. not to make the economy work for itself.

You’re associating your argument with a vendor economy. Not only is it an irrelevant argument, it also ignores every economic behavior that governs markets. Quite frankly, the economy of GW2 is a kitten near perfect replica of the same economic we have outside of the game. That’s why it works, and that’s why people have problems with it. Afterall, people are demanding to buy a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster ($4.5 million), dusk/spark/etc, for the price of a ‘98 station wagon ($5000?). It’s not a hard concept for people to understand. If S>D, P-. If S<D, P+. Further, if S>>D, such as thick leather, the price is going to be even lower. When S<<D, such as precursors for the most used weapon types, anyone expecting the price to do anything but be drastically higher is a fool.

Right, except that unlike the real world, when Lamborghini Veneno involve a hundred thousand dollars in high end parts, all machined to precision by experts in a small factory, Items in game are all spat out by a table. If an item is scarce, it is not because it MUST be scarce, it’s not because it takes more work for ANet to produce each one, it’s because they have decided that item X will drop 1% of the time and item Y will drop .00000001% of the time, and that’s all there is to it. If they just decided to swap those two numbers then suddenly Y would be the far more common one.

I’m not arguing that they should be available in infinite quantities, ie zero scarcity, just that their relative scarcity should be reduced.

nekretaal.6485:

I hate it when people decide to play games with words to deny inflation when we all see inflation happening.

I hate it when people draw conclusions before bothering to look at the evidence and get all smug about how their ignorance is just ‘common sense that we all see’.

nekretaal.6485:

Green Items – Way up since last year

Oh yeah look at this baby go!

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/465

nekretaal.6485:

Ectos – Gradually moving up

Yeah baby this is what a steady increase in prices looks like!

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19721

nekretaal.6485:

Pick a representative index

People have done so (samuirai had a pretty good starting point on his site though it’s down now, wayback it) and shown that we have bursts of inflation and deflation around patches, which is exactly what one would expect to happen.