Guild Wars 2

We all know it will happen eventually. CoF P1 runs are probably the biggest gold source in the game. You can easily create 5g/hr in a normal group, and up to ~7g/hr in a warrior group. I don’t know of anything else in the game that can even reach 20% of this gold creation potential.

Note: It is important to keep in mind that selling things on the TP is not gold creation, it is a gold sink, so yes you may be able to earn 5g/hr doing something else in the game but you’ll only be creating a small amount of gold if any at all once you take into account the gold destruction from the TP.

The big question is, what will happen to the economy when CoF is brought into line with the other activities in the game? Here is what I think will happen, I’d love some discussion on it.

1. Rise in molten lodestone prices. This one is pretty obvious, molten cores/lodestones are currently very cheap because they are acquired as part of the farm. Once people stop farming their price will rise to be in line with other cores/lodestones with similar functionality, probably around corrupted and Onyx lodestones.

2. Deflation(?) of mat prices. With a major gold creation source removed the net effect will be less gold coming into the economy meaning that the purchasing power of gold will increase. It is hard to say by how much, because only John Smith probably knows the extent of the gold creation from CoF. This will be a more long term effect, but I suspect all mat prices will eventually fall to a lower level.

3. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. People will be very sad when their income source is destroyed, there will be bitter people flooding the forums about how the game is ruined and doomed to fail because 1 path of 1 dungeon was nerfed. No economic effect likely, but it will be fun to watch.

A straight nerf of CoF1 would result in widespread deflation as a huge gold source would have dried up. How much, I couldn’t say without access to the data.

Given that John Smith understands that market stability is a big deal and that huge market shifts shatter people’s confidence in the market, I would expect a CoF nerf to be accompanied by new gold sources elsewhere in the game (my preference would be adding significant silver drops to the various champion mobs wandering the world). This would counteract the loss of a popular gold source.

I would argue that CoF P1 is an economy unbalancing factor, oversupplying the economy with gold, berserker gear and ecto-qualifying rare items. Fixing it would enhance the players’ experiance, balance it back to there the economy should be and make other parts of the game comparatively more attractive.

It’s simply too fast. A dungeon path is supposed to take around 45 minutes, according to the devs. The fact that P1 takes only 5-10 minutes makes it vastly outstrip all other mains of acquiring wealth, forcing players to either A) play CoF, being forced into a specific playstyle which might not suit them or might simply havle long lost its charm due to repetition or lose the economic game, lagging behind in wealth, limiting their access to the economy.

Just say you haven’t seen a dozen posts “X is too expensive!” “Shut up, go farm CoF P1, and you’ll get the money!”. In the real world, you could argue that more work resulting in more wealth is a good thing. In a game… not necessarily. In a game, we’re essentially on a vacation. Some adrenaline challenges might be OK, but we don’t really expect to have to work hard here…

Ectos will jump for a short period of time considering its what most players do with extra tokens. I say short because CoF farmers are doing it for the Gold and not the 5 tokens after DR. Depending on how much its nerfed will see many people moving to HoTW or CoE.

Absolute chaos for three days, until someone Youtubes the walkthrough of the next fastest way to make a gold.

Gold wouldn’t deflate as quickly, since the amount flowing into the economy would go down. I’m ok with that.

Well CoF1 isnt only one thing what you can fast farming its just most friendly for casual players who are loo lazy to find better spots:-).
Personaly I have one spot (and few others little less prifitable) in game with lots of mobs where with full MF gear I can drop around stack of T6 mats, 4+ stacks of T5, around 30-50 rares (and numerous trash loot) per 10-12 hours of farming. Solo. If I am lucky I make aroud 100g/day this way.

Rozbuska.5263:

Well CoF1 isnt only one thing what you can fast farming its just most friendly for casual players who are loo lazy to find better spots:-).
Personaly I have one spot (and few others little less prifitable) in game with lots of mobs where with full MF gear I can drop around stack of T6 mats, 4+ stacks of T5, around 30-50 rares (and numerous trash loot) per 10-12 hours of farming. Solo. If I am lucky I make aroud 100g/day this way.

Anet’s DR system makes this literally impossible. Doesn’t matter how good of a spot you find, 30 minutes of sustained farming with a high mob density will reduce your loot drops to 0, doesn’t matter how awesome and secret your spot is.

I hadn’t considered the effect on ectos, but yes they will probably experience a brief spike, though I have doubts about the long term effect of such a spike, there are just sooo many rares coming in from world bosses that I don’t think ectos would rise by more then a silver at most. Could be wrong though.

I believe for #3 you forgot to mention how much ANet hates its players, how this game will obviously fail, and how they are moving on to <insert next game here>.

On-topic: I don’t have an issue with profit in game. I have an issue with it being so easy. The only reason a nerf like this would cause any sort of initial harm is because it is so overdue. If a regular dungeon is going to be so much more profitable, it should be Arah or something else long and difficult.

Everyone having the ability to easy grind cash just leads to a horse race where people are out-grinding each other.

Why would Anet feel the need to nerf a gold source? They should want gold to steadily devalue so that gems become more attractive to buy with cash. Besides, there are plenty of systems in place to drain gold from the economy and with monthly updates they have every opportunity to simply create new avenues for gold to flow between players via the TP or out of the system altogether via gem conversions.

Well to answer that specific question, I’d say that gating max profit by challenge rather than easy grind would do the most to add incentive for gem purchases.

I think OP is pretty spot on with initial predictions. I also think it’s easy to see people will simply move on to “the next thing”. I’m just hoping there is some challenge and variety to said thing.

Not sure why people think ectos would spike in response to a CoF1 nerf. Any sort of spike would be pure bubble, they’d drop in price alongside everything else.

CoF1 is mostly impacting the real price of gold, not other goods (save molten and crystal cores/lodestones).

CoF P1 is not the best profitable place in this game, there is an spot in Orr where I can farm 5G+ / hour close to 0 DR in drops, but depend on luck and MF gear. With everyone playing COF P1, the mats supply are low, so if you farm this way you can certainly earn more gold.

klarkc.3754:

CoF P1 is not the best profitable place in this game, there is an spot in Orr where I can farm 5G+ / hour close to 0 DR in drops, but depend on luck and MF gear. With everyone playing COF P1, the mats supply are low, so if you farm this way you can certainly earn more gold.

The question is more about gold supply then gold earning potential. Mats don’t add any gold to the game unless you vendor them. If you sell them on the TP they are actually removing gold from the game. As far as I know there aren’t any gold sources similar to CoF1.

HotW might be a candidate if CoF gets nerfed, but I don’t think even a pro group could complete it in less then 10 minutes, so it will never be as bad as CoF currently is.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Anet’s DR system makes this literally impossible. Doesn’t matter how good of a spot you find, 30 minutes of sustained farming with a high mob density will reduce your loot drops to 0, doesn’t matter how awesome and secret your spot is.

I hadn’t considered the effect on ectos, but yes they will probably experience a brief spike, though I have doubts about the long term effect of such a spike, there are just sooo many rares coming in from world bosses that I don’t think ectos would rise by more then a silver at most. Could be wrong though.

If you farm 15-20 mobs at once like me it doest matter if you have DR or not it still drops pretty well:-P

But you have 3 options how to mitigate DR:
1. My personal favourite: After one MF food expire (30 min) take a 15 minutes break and DR is gone.
2. DR affects only certain mobs in area of current zone if you have 3 different spots in 3 different zones (or 2 at least) you can rotate them without DR.
3. Use guesting. Rotation between 3 servers every 30 minutes to bypass DR. But It can be eventualy counted as exploit so I strongly DONT recommend this.

Well, path notes are up, still no CoF nerf… guess the chaos continues for another month.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Well, path notes are up, still no CoF nerf… guess the chaos continues for another month.

Or maybe your classification of it as chaos is wrong?

Sure, deflation. But keep in mind that large amounts of gold have already been farmed. The net result would be deflation, but proportionally to average total wealth instead of average common-folk wealth. In other words, rich people’s effective worth increases, poor people’s effective worth decreases.

So nerfing CoF doesn’t actually help anything. The core problem to be solved is that it’s so much better than everything else. Answer: Make everything else better. The end result is that other places become equally viable sources of income, without polarizing the economy.

Nerf it. It needs it bad. I don’t think devs had a gold mining operation in mind when designing dungeons.

I think it boils down to how much new gold is being created in COF runs. That is, how much coin drops or is gained from selling items to vendors. Items sold on the TP aren’t inflationary as was noted in the OP, so how much gold is this dungeon path actually creating (and how does this compare with other similar activities).

To UN-thread jack, here’s a few other side-effects that I can think of (I agree with the ones in the OP):
4. Decreased demand for Zerk-Warrior gear (Berserker armor and weapons).
5. Increased demand for whatever gear people think of for the next repetitive farm: If it’s open-world, that probably means magic find gear. If it’s another dungeon, disregard #4 because it will probably be Berserker gear again.
6. Increased supply for whatever comes out of the new farm. If it goes back to Orr, that probably means T6 mats will go down in price due to Heavy Moldy Bag drops for instance.

One thing is for sure – there will be a new farm. Judging from the CoF P1 mentality, the farm will have to be profitable and easy-to-access for the impatient. That second property is why I don’t believe a naturally long or difficult instance like Fractals or dungeons with minimal skipping can be the next farm. If the chance of failing due to a bad group is higher, then the farming types would rage-quit before the run can be completed.

Short term impact would possibly be a spike in lodestones and ectos as well as some deflation, coupled with lots of QQ. That is ofc assuming they nerfed it without taking steps to prevent any or all of the above.

Medium to long term would be people moving on to the next best farm or any new farms anet adds in. At which point we would see movement in the prices of the items centric to that particular farm.

It does seem strange they haven’t done anything about it given how out of whack it is considered to be by most. Especially since they have effectively put the kibosh on Orr event farming with the insane scaling in there (whether that is unintended or not).

Without the income from CoF 1, I think a lot of the weekly server-transfering would end.

People would probably start to farm other fast dungeon paths like Ta UP/UP. Ectos would probably go higher in price, eventhough many will start farming t5 or t6 materials many , but other things will probably lose a bit of their value. Oh and molten cores will probably go up for like 400%.