Guild Wars 2

At the beginning of the game, John Smith did an excellent work showing us trends on how the game was going, which profession was the most played etc.

I was wondering if we could have one of those now, after 4 months into the game to see how the economy changed. I am asking that because all the threads on this forum are about how some people control the market, how Anet manipulates gem price, etc etc.

Maybe with some sort of official statistics, we would actually know what to think and all this threads who are only whining ones ( no offense here) could maybe be answered all at once by some stats from the economy team.

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, here is a link to what John Smith posted a while back:

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/4689/2299985-commerce_infographic_en.png

I honestly wanna see the wealth distribution of the players.

penatbater.4710:

I honestly wanna see the wealth distribution of the players.

I’m deeply curious to know this too!

I highly doubt we will ever see another one of those. Considering how “proud” it was listed as even distributed wealth and how far we have come…..ummm yeah really, really doubt we’ll see it.

I loved that infographic, but I doubt we’d see another! Still, i’m all for it.

That wealth curve would look very, very ugly, if what people say is any indication.

The profession curve is pretty meaningless. I’m inclined to believe that most of the more active and ambitious players have one of each by now to acquire the master crafter title. The casual end of the spectrum will create some small variance, but it won’t be as stark as we see here.

The exchange rate curve loses a lot of the things that were initially noted as “interesting”. Plus, Facebook stock wishes it could have done as well as the the ANet Gem value

The two that still might be a pleasure to see:

The trading post distribution would be fun. Crafting Materials might not necessarily lose the massive lead it holds on the market. Consumable goods are the engines that drive a lot of crafting chains. As players become wealthier, some branch into this type of activity for income, and go through tens of thousands of some types of material. Per day!

That first graph would still be interesting too, the one about where the creation of gold is from in the present game. It still has to drop from somewhere. I’m not in the least bit ashamed to say I contribute almost nothing to this, as about ~98% of my present income is generated from the trading post. Love that free market.

LFk.1408:

I loved that infographic, but I doubt we’d see another! Still, i’m all for it.

Me too.

That wealth curve would look very, very ugly, if what people say is any indication.

Usually, what people say is an indication of the exact opposite they say. People lie. If you should have learned anything from Dr House, it’s exactly that.

My guess is that it would probably be very similar to real world economics, where 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth.

If they start posting confirmations on this, we’ll end up with an “occupy wall street” movement in game. Players flooding the trading post in protest. Players refusing to buy/sell materials until changes are made to the game. Huge market crashes as the wealthy players try to offload everything they own in response. Chaos.

Yeah, if only “Occupy Whatever” had actually done any of those things :p.

I honestly don’t care about the lopsided distribution of coin. I care about too many sources of coin that aren’t generating goods. Events and RMT (via ANet) are both terrible offenders – they put coin into the system without generating desirable products.

Yeah, it would be neat to see where the majority of money is coming from, rather than who owns it.

Because technically no money “comes from” the trading post. It’s all earned by players in game and then traded to other players in game.

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

My guess is that it would probably be very similar to real world economics, where 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth.

If they start posting confirmations on this, we’ll end up with an “occupy wall street” movement in game. Players flooding the trading post in protest. Players refusing to buy/sell materials until changes are made to the game. Huge market crashes as the wealthy players try to offload everything they own in response. Chaos.

While there will be some superficial similarities, I seriously doubt the wealth inequality in game will mirror real world inequality as there are a number of factors that drive inequality in real economies that don’t exist in-game

For example, in the real world, having wealth enables you to create/find rent-seeking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking) opportunities that don’t exist in this virtual economy. As a result, those who have already wealth in this game are generally not able to use that wealth to prevent others from gaining wealth.

So… so long as you’re here… can we get some hard data to chew on?

Oh John, you’ve mentioned rent seeking which is a great topic for discussion (and incredibly anti free-market).

Now that you brought it up, a group of us sinister market manipulators would like to suggest the idea of Trading Post fee caps.

Is it really fair that those of us who sell several legendary weapons per week have to bear such large fees while trying to serve the nouveau riche community of Tyrian trust fund kids?

Surely we could put in a good word to your superiors in exchange for certain… considerations?

Think it over…

John Smith.4610:

The entire set of reasons would be a very interesting discussion…Well for me at least

I agree, and I guess many readers of this forum too. This is the main reason why the OP and everybody else is so interested in learning more on the data of the game that you have and that we can only speculate on. So, please, drop us a little fancy chart once in a while…

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

Astraea.6075:

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

My guess is that it would probably be very similar to real world economics, where 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth.

If they start posting confirmations on this, we’ll end up with an “occupy wall street” movement in game. Players flooding the trading post in protest. Players refusing to buy/sell materials until changes are made to the game. Huge market crashes as the wealthy players try to offload everything they own in response. Chaos.

While there will be some superficial similarities, I seriously doubt the wealth inequality in game will mirror real world inequality as there are a number of factors that drive inequality in real economies that don’t exist in-game

For example, in the real world, having wealth enables you to create/find rent-seeking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking) opportunities that don’t exist in this virtual economy. As a result, those who have already wealth in this game are generally not able to use that wealth to prevent others from gaining wealth.

You are correct. There are several good reasons why wealth distributions in game don’t mimic the US Economy.
Another reason is that the growth of wealth is exponential in many developed economies, where it’s closer to logarithmic in GW2.

The entire set of reasons would be a very interesting discussion…Well for me at least

John Smith, thank you for your participation in this discussion. I can’t tell you how happy I am that you provide information to us regarding the virtual economy of this game. I find this topic fascinating.

If you have time, would you please elaborate on this statement "Another reason is that the growth of wealth is exponential in many developed economies, where it’s closer to logarithmic in GW2. "

Aren’t most developed countries considered lucky if their growth is a few percentage points a year? Would you describe the growth of the BRIC countries as exponential?

I guess I understand exponential growth in the field of Biology, but I don’t understand what you mean by it with regards to the economies of countries that you mentioned above.

Thanks in advance for your response.

John Smith.4610:

It takes money to make money essentially.

Without a doubt

John, I actually have a question I’m curious about:

Do you guys ever randomly pick characters with a lot of gold and spot-check them in the logs (or look at their TP stuff) to see what they’re doing to make that profit? That seems like it’d be a pretty interesting thing to do, and would also be really telling in seeing what sorts of things are profitable/seeing exactly what market niches exist and at what rate of return.

John Smith.4610:

I don’t mean that the wealth of the country grows. I mean that individuals with wealth will create more wealth an a significantly higher rate than those without wealth. It takes money to make money essentially.

Can’t the same be said of GW2’s economy, where people are buying out crafting materials and relisting them at much higher rates?

See: Buy Armored Scales

I’d bet that those on the high end of the logarithmic curve are most likely market manipulators. They have thousands of gold, which they use to cause the cost of everything to go up (to further their own profit).

Actually, quite a few people who make a lot of gold make it through speculation. I know people who bought 15k mystic coins at 1.5s, when they’re sitting around 15s now. But anyone can do that and the rate of gold increase is the same (percent-wise) if you spend 10g or 100g.

But, interestingly, there’s an upper limit to how much of that you can do, because no one ever wants to put all their eggs in one basket and while you can probably buy 100g worth of toymaker tonics, you can’t buy 1000g worth. Why not? Because there aren’t that many on the market.

Sure, people do market manipulation too, but not on a scale of thousands, which is what we’re talking about here. You can flip your way into hundreds of gold, but after that, the time investment becomes prohibitive. You can market manipulate with hundreds of gold, maybe, but again, after that the cost becomes prohibitive.

EDIT: Also, a fun thing to do when people are actually manipulating the market, not just speculating on it, is to just dump all your stocks of whatever they’re manipulating, because real manipulation comes at a dramatic crash and if you can sell enough to the manipulator at the inflated prices he sets, you can basically steal his profits away from him.

@ Minos: buying and relisting materials on the TP actually removes wealth from the economy due to the 15% tax on every completed transaction.

John Smith.4610:

It takes money to make money essentially.

Now if only we had information so we could cogently discuse how wealth distribution has evolved in the environment… cough-cough.

John Smith.4610:

Astraea.6075:

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

My guess is that it would probably be very similar to real world economics, where 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth.

If they start posting confirmations on this, we’ll end up with an “occupy wall street” movement in game. Players flooding the trading post in protest. Players refusing to buy/sell materials until changes are made to the game. Huge market crashes as the wealthy players try to offload everything they own in response. Chaos.

While there will be some superficial similarities, I seriously doubt the wealth inequality in game will mirror real world inequality as there are a number of factors that drive inequality in real economies that don’t exist in-game

For example, in the real world, having wealth enables you to create/find rent-seeking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking) opportunities that don’t exist in this virtual economy. As a result, those who have already wealth in this game are generally not able to use that wealth to prevent others from gaining wealth.

You are correct. There are several good reasons why wealth distributions in game don’t mimic the US Economy.
Another reason is that the growth of wealth is exponential in many developed economies, where it’s closer to logarithmic in GW2.

The entire set of reasons would be a very interesting discussion…Well for me at least

I really don’t understand how it is logarithmic. That implies a sort of normalization which i don’t really see in the game. To me wealth distribution really seems exponential just like the real economy

Care to provide more food for the brain?

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

Colbear.6425:

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

And all of that is strictly for players who play the market – adventurers and harvesters generate wealth is a linear fasion. After hitting level 80, the second month brings in the same amount as the first month, the third brings in the same as the second, and the fourth brings in the same as the third. The progression actually runs retrograde – 100% growth, then 50% growth, then 33% growth, then 25% growth…

Nike.2631:

Colbear.6425:

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

And all of that is strictly for players who play the market – adventurers and harvesters generate wealth is a linear fasion. After hitting level 80, the second month brings in the same amount as the first month, the third brings in the same as the second, and the fourth brings in the same as the third. The progression actually runs retrograde – 100% growth, then 50% growth, then 33% growth, then 25% growth…

The real world economic wealth gains are mostly from people playing markets as well, or loaning your money to people playing markets. Adventures and Harvesters are all making linear returns, just like a person who works a normal job might. The reason the game doesn’t see a lot of exponential returns is the markets are so much more limited than a real world economy, it means there are way to many traders partaking in smaller segmented markets. That and they tend to ban any players making large returns on new emerging markets like the snowflake ordeal, that ensures player who are making large profits are not allowed in the game.

Astraea.6075:

@ Minos: buying and relisting materials on the TP actually removes wealth from the economy due to the 15% tax on every completed transaction.

Since those costs are calculated in and passed on to the buyer, wealth is actually only removed from those already at the lower end, moving wealth upwards.

….while the GW2 Economy is young we expect to maintain a high level of equality.

Ahhh, that bit cranked me up. Good one John, good one. Except pretty minor things you’re not doing that much. A pretty graph might convince me otherwise (list the gold of the top 20 or 50 wealthiest accounts also, for the lulz).

John Smith.4610:

I don’t mean that the wealth of the country grows. I mean that individuals with wealth will create more wealth an a significantly higher rate than those without wealth. It takes money to make money essentially.

You know, this is exactly why I don’t understand why people are surprised that the income gap grows.

When you have a guy making minimum wage, there is very little he can do to make his wealth grow.

When you have a guy with millions to spend, the minimum he can do is invest a ton of savings accounts and make more off interest than the minimum wage guy can get in a year.

Of course it’s going to expand! The more money you have in your pocket to spend, the more money you can earn if you choose to invest it.

Vol.5241:

John Smith.4610:

I don’t mean that the wealth of the country grows. I mean that individuals with wealth will create more wealth an a significantly higher rate than those without wealth. It takes money to make money essentially.

You know, this is exactly why I don’t understand why people are surprised that the income gap grows.

When you have a guy making minimum wage, there is very little he can do to make his wealth grow.

When you have a guy with millions to spend, the minimum he can do is invest a ton of savings accounts and make more off interest than the minimum wage guy can get in a year.

Of course it’s going to expand! The more money you have in your pocket to spend, the more money you can earn if you choose to invest it.

More importantly, the more you have in you pocket, the more likely you will have money left over to invest
If you can barely make ends meet each month, you’re lucky if you can save enough to have a vacation once a year, or have ‘emergeny money’ on the side, etc.

… I even believe there is a threshold here.

Thank you for your interest in this topic John Smith. Since you saw this post, maybe we will get some stats in the following month, that would be cool=)

It takes money to make money essentially.

Yeah I can basically make 1 gold on the trading post with 10 gold investment without taking any risk. But that is sometimes not enough.

Nike.2631:

Colbear.6425:

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

And all of that is strictly for players who play the market – adventurers and harvesters generate wealth is a linear fasion. After hitting level 80, the second month brings in the same amount as the first month, the third brings in the same as the second, and the fourth brings in the same as the third. The progression actually runs retrograde – 100% growth, then 50% growth, then 33% growth, then 25% growth…

And this is exactly the problem with the guild wars economy.

The fact of the matter is that for people who don’t have the time or the interest to speculate on or flip commodities in the trading post, you’re basically getting shafted every single time you buy something from someone else instead of farming it for yourself.

Add this to the fact that the t6 crafting materials are few in number and used almost everywhere (that is, cooking aside, all of the crafting disciplines share the same crafting materials, and all of the crafts use all of the fine materials, and the legendary/top-end cosmetic items also use the same t6 materials only in much larger quantities) and it honestly becomes discouraging to try to farm up enough gold to pay for the inflated material prices to buy anything from the trading post.

I find it highly ironic that in guild wars, where one of the stated aims was to remove the grind from the game, that I find trying to farm up money (whether it be actual coin drops or crafting materials from mobs or running around trying to harvest materials) to buy anything from the trading post invariably involves more of a grind than in a gear-treadmill game such as Rift.

And unless something is done to curb the effect the speculators have on the game’s market, I don’t see this changing in the forseeable future.

I love how John comes into the thread and does not even acknowledge the OP

John, could we get some numbers on what the current wealth distribution is?

Walrus.6390:

I love how John comes into the thread and does not even acknowledge the OP

To be fair he probably can’t. That’s why all we hear is about theory crafting and nothing meaningful about the actual game economy and the mechanics/dynamics there.

I would love to know how happy he/Anet is with the model and if it played out the way they thought it would. But it’s most likely the best to actually not say anything about it from a developers perspective. That is always reserved for the pre-release phase.

One could wonder why the comparison to the real world USA 2007 was done in the first place. Well because it looked good and there was no need to question it. Any new statistic coming out now will be questioned – which is the most important thing looking at any statistic really.

I don’t like it and I’m disappointed because think it goes against what I perceived to be the spirit of this game, but I made my peace with it for now.

John Smith.4610:

I don’t mean that the wealth of the country grows. I mean that individuals with wealth will create more wealth an a significantly higher rate than those without wealth. It takes money to make money essentially.

You’ve pulled a clever word swap here. Going from “wealth” to “money”. Players using money to increase their money (ie playing the TP) aren’t increasing the wealth of the game – they’re only welath shifting to their own benefit.

The wealth of the game only increases through the production of materials, coin and items (ie farming – be it mobs, events, etc). There are relatively low fixed costs associated with this production (some equipment, weapons, armor, gathering tools). Perhaps the only real way to “improve” production is magic find. Otherwise it all comes down to time spent farming – because that is the only source of actual new wealth production. After an initial investment of the equipment (gathering tools being a negligible cost), extra wealth doesn’t lead you to having a higher wealth creation.

Your argument really only works for the TP players – who aren’t actually generating new wealth. Just shifting wealth to themselves by taking advantage of how poor economic information is in the game. Ie, they’d do a lot worse if proper tools were made available (eg a real price history of sales, rather than what the current buy/sell orders are – with some meaningful statisitcs beyond the mean value).

@ Joiry: The quote you are using was answering a specific question about his previous statement. Nowhere is he stating that this is increasing the wealth in the game.

I don’t know why people here think they know more about the economy than an economist.

Vol.5241:

I don’t know why people here think they know more about the economy than an economist.

A couple reasons, but the main reason is that the study of economics is the study of human behavior and psychology and as such, it is imperfect, incomplete and subject to very different interpretations and perspectives.

It’s the voodoo witch doctor profession of our age.

Animal spirits yo.

Double Post….

Complete data…. I guess you mean mostly complete or more complete than in reality. Unless you guys keep up with off market trading, which I suppose you can. But how do you sort legitimate trades from gold sellers moving gold or players shifting funds. I’d be interested to hear more about your process. Seems like it’d be very cool to explore. Anyway, economics has rigor behind it. It’s not just magic.

John,

I think Dreamslayer is referring to Lionel Robbins.

As for your second statement, I must wholeheartedly agree that economic data in a closed system that doesn’t pass through a human interpretation filter before it reaches your screen, does offer a deeply insightful view.

Like a super-Bernanke, you have the godlike ability to shape the economy to suit the needs of the game. Was it iron that you first tried out these powers on, when there was the glut that crashed the value? Or was it butter? My apologies for it slipping my mind.

For all the accusations of players manipulating the economy, I’m quite shocked that I haven’t seen any fingers waved in the direction of those that do hold the keys to the kingdom. Suspected currency manipulation (to stop the rampant inflation we’ve been living off of since the opening game crash) through the gem exchange rate is a great example.

There is one major differentiator between the Guild Wars 2 trading system and the real world stock/commodities markets: the age of people using it. What percentage of Guild Wars 2 players are under 18? What percentage are under 15?

As a result, I suggest it is significantly easier to increase wealth in here vs. real world trading.

Vol.5241:

I don’t know why people here think they know more about the economy than an economist.

I do not think people are saying that they are better than an economist, all that they are saying is that they do not specifically agree with the method used to solve a specific problem.

In economy, you have different theories that belong to different movements, most famous one probably being the invisible hand by Adam Smith stating that the market will regulate itself if no exterior resources are used to try to make it shift ( the government for instance).

This is probably what Anet tried to do when they decided to have a trading post and no player to player trading like in guild wars 1. And they actually succeeded. The market in the game is pretty much independent ( I assume this, since we do not have specific information about what could Anet do to the market). Everyone needs everything, but resources that are harder to obtain are more expensive. The ones that have the expensive resources have more money because they were lucky enough to have them in their hands or because they took the chance to gamble.

Now the problem that the community is having is that they do not feel that the loot is good enough to follow the rising prices (almost 30s for a glob of ectoplasm) mainly because of the rush to legendary weapons. From that we had some theories saying that it was Anet that was controlling the market to make us buy more gems to turn it into gold. Other said that the market was controlled by players with a lot of resources (which is probably true).

Now this is why I posted this topic in the first place, to know what to expect of the trading post, and how to look at it. Am I really giving money to players who already have a lot of it? Or am I just giving money to players like me who rise their prices because they, just like me, need money to get what they want.
Now what can I do if it is the first one? Well nothing, but it least their wont be any more complains that Anet is controlling the trading post.

This will therefore make us come back to a topic that is already open, which is " are the loot tables broken?" and also something like “what is done to regulate the economy?” might appear. But in a game that values the equality between player, it is just normal=)

(sorry if it might seem a bit complicated, English is not my main language)

John Smith.4610:

This is very far from the truth.
Even more so inside of MMOs where there is complete data.

I’ll bite. Do you have a good sense of the percentage of people interested in playing a heroic adventure game that are being driven out of the playerbase by occasional contact with a highly predatory market simulator that is little more than semi-consenual PvP in the path to achieving endgame cosmetic goals?

Could you describe in terms well enough to base a company’s finacial well being on the differences between appealing to a rational actor in an economic model and appealing any substantial segment of the MMO playing audience, an audience I’ll mention that is often specifically looking for a little escapism from a strangely similar system that has served them so well they are dinking around in a game instead of vacationing somewhere in the real world.

The numbers available are solid, but they are driving the actions of people in decisions that range far outside their next buy or sell order. Sometimes I think the broader context of GW2 gets lost when defending the efficiencies of this particular sub-system within it .

The economy is headed for a state where new players will be powerless to purchase certain items. As the inflation grows out of control, new people will need to rely in irl friends or generous guild mates to be able to function. This will shift the game to having far less casuals playing. Like everything in the game is doing now.

@Karsusk: I imagine that if that day comes, ANet can easily rectify the situation by reducing the cost of the items in question, or by increasing drop rates. We saw it in action with Vanilla Beans a while back.

SteepledHat.1345:

Complete data…. I guess you mean mostly complete or more complete than in reality.

I guess he means that they log and store each an every action taken in the game. Which would be smart move to do, since you can choose to mine the data for whatever reason later.

SteepledHat.1345:

But how do you sort legitimate trades from gold sellers moving gold or players shifting funds.

They can utilize pattern recognition techniques to sort out malicious from legitimate actions. If they have enough data, the observed features of these actions should be significantly different. You should keep in mind that gold sellers, to be a business, have to repeat certain activities over and over again to do their “trade”. This is very distinct from a legit player that occasionally shifts funds.

~MRA

Nike.2631:

Yeah, if only “Occupy Whatever” had actually done any of those things :p.

I honestly don’t care about the lopsided distribution of coin. I care about too many sources of coin that aren’t generating goods. Events and RMT (via ANet) are both terrible offenders – they put coin into the system without generating desirable products.

A.net’s form of RMT, Gems, don’t put a single coin into the economy. All that is earned by players converting their gold into gems. At a hefty 30% fee gem conversion actually destroys a lot of gold instead of creating it.

Vol.5241:

I don’t know why people here think they know more about the economy than an economist.

And yet so called “experts” are known to give less reliable predictions than amateurs.