Guild Wars 2

John Smith.4610:

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

I have to say, however, that you have a perfect name for an economist.

Coming from an economist.

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

While that sounds super fun (and I could see it making a community much more involved in learning about who the top of PVP was), I also could see it causing a lot of complaints about “stolen money” due to games that crashed, matches that may have been won due to exploits, etc. I’m sure there could be safeguards though. And you’re right that it could be a good gold sink if the “betting company” took 10% of all winnings or something.

Also, just wanted to say thank you John. For a while you’ve been talking in a few threads without really answering any questions, which I can understand would be frustrating for players. They see someone from Anet coming into their thread and not answering their question when as far as they are concerned, you could easily answer their question.

I’m glad to see that you’re active in the community though, and I’m sorry that people (me included) can give you a hard time.

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

The mystic toilet isn’t enough gambling for you? lol

John Smith.4610:

leman.7682:

John Smith.4610:

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

I have to say, however, that you have a perfect name for an economist.

Coming from an economist.

Thanks! It’s real

That’s why the name was so familiar.

All those wasted hours in CivIII…

Vol.5241:

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

The mystic toilet isn’t enough gambling for you? lol

The MF is just pure RNG. Betting on sPvP tournaments isn’t RNG. Everybody complains there’s no way to make money, this would be an interesting avenue that would also help promote sPvP as an esport.

(I personally am not a gambler and wouldn’t do it. I’m just curious as to whether it’d have an effect on the overall economy.)

John, you sir have made me dislike capitalism after seeing how the trading post works haha XD.

timmyf.1490:

Vol.5241:

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

The mystic toilet isn’t enough gambling for you? lol

The MF is just pure RNG. Betting on sPvP tournaments isn’t RNG. Everybody complains there’s no way to make money, this would be an interesting avenue that would also help promote sPvP as an esport.

(I personally am not a gambler and wouldn’t do it. I’m just curious as to whether it’d have an effect on the overall economy.)

Am I the only one thinking it would lead to “throwing” matches? I expect many players would tell all their friends to bet all their money on the other team, and then watch as they somehow fumble the keyboard, or their cat walks across it, or “Oh, sorry, the power flickered.” Just a coincidence that large sums of money were won when the match itself wasn’t.

RoyHarmon.5398:

timmyf.1490:

Vol.5241:

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

The mystic toilet isn’t enough gambling for you? lol

The MF is just pure RNG. Betting on sPvP tournaments isn’t RNG. Everybody complains there’s no way to make money, this would be an interesting avenue that would also help promote sPvP as an esport.

(I personally am not a gambler and wouldn’t do it. I’m just curious as to whether it’d have an effect on the overall economy.)

Am I the only one thinking it would lead to “throwing” matches? I expect many players would tell all their friends to bet all their money on the other team, and then watch as they somehow fumble the keyboard, or their cat walks across it, or “Oh, sorry, the power flickered.” Just a coincidence that large sums of money were won when the match itself wasn’t.

I think the system that was suggested has to be some kind like this:
Two teams schedule a battle, each team gives something as an entry fee (for example 100 gems from each team), the winner takes everything except for 10 gems or something that would be sinked out of the game.
No reason to “throw” matches.

John Smith.4610:

I post because I enjoy interacting with the community.

Anet is apparently working on improving its ‘communication’ with the community, and yet you continue to demonstrate that with some of its employees, getting even the most basic of answers to straight-forward questions is like herding cats (and in the case of certain threads … cats that like to hide).

Many (sometimes heavy-handed) moderators close threads/delete posts/toss around infractions when discussion is off topic. We have to follow the forum rules, and I would expect someone posting under an Anet tag would at least make an effort to do the same. But please, proceed with more discussion on EVE’s economy, bans, and snowflakes.

This topic is a request for economic data – from you specifically, and after 10+ postings, you still have yet to address the point of the thread, in ANY form of a response. In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has been a bit of a sore topic for a multitude of people of late, but given the fact that you’re GW2’s resident economist, it’s understandable that it may have slipped your attention.

No one is upset that you won’t provide the requested data; it was after all, just a request. People are upset because with each additional post, you flat out ignore them – for reasons that are beyond me. It’s belittling. Instead of a polite “no”, or even an “I’m not sure if I can, I’ll get back to you” which would take all of two seconds to post, and do wonders for improving ‘communication’ on Anet’s part, you choose to continue with off topic posts in what almost seems like an attempt on your part to purposely aggravate people.

This thread is clearly going to be yet another unanswered waste of time. Congratulations on bolstering the increasingly accurate stereotype of Anet’s lack of basic communication skills. I guess we can chalk this up as one more thread (I’d provide the laundry list, but this is already a wall of text) in which Anet’s profound silence on particular issues speaks volumes.

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

…
Also, just wanted to say thank you John. For a while you’ve been talking in a few threads without really answering any questions, which I can understand would be frustrating for players. They see someone from Anet coming into their thread and not answering their question when as far as they are concerned, you could easily answer their question.

I’m glad to see that you’re active in the community though, and I’m sorry that people (me included) can give you a hard time.

You’re thanking him… for repeatedly not answering people’s questions??? And for doing what exactly? Taking conversations/threads off topic and ignoring people outright? The same thing that we get infractions for (all the the time) on these forums?

We’re not frustrated that he isn’t answering the questions, we understand perfectly well that he has absolutely no need to. We’re frustrated because he doesn’t even respond at all, even though he’s already posted over 10 times in here. The entire point of this thread was a request for data, and instead of a polite “sorry, can’t/won’t provide that”, he just ignores it completely and brings up unrelated topics. It’s the equivalent of a politician consistently saying “no comment” … but without putting in the effort of saying the actual words.

I’ve seen griefers less obvious than you John.

Well, then in line with forum rules and all that, how about a moderator with a maturity beyond that of a 5th grader close this thread. The original post will never get answered it seems, so this thread is destined to just spiral into endless off topic talk.

Zegai.8256:

I’ve seen griefers less obvious than you John.

Well, then in line with forum rules and all that, how about a moderator [edit] do their job [/edit] close this thread. The original post will never get answered it seems, so this thread is destined to just spiral into endless off topic talk.

Small edit aside, I agree with Zegai here. It’s clear the topic of the thread isn’t going to be addressed, just derailed. Mods, please close this thread and let John start a new one with a more fitting title.

Maybe it’s just because he’s answering all my questions and none of yours, but wow are you guys harsh. It’s not his job to respond to questions on forums. He’s not answering your questions because he can’t or doesn’t want to. Either way, he’s not answering.

Ask some different questions and maybe you’ll get an answer.

Xynn.2748:

John Smith.4610:

Vol.5241:

You are under no obligation to reveal that information John Smith, ignore these guys :P

I’d much rather talk about the economics of Guild Wars 2.

-How do you feel about controlling inflation? Do you think the gold sinks we have in the game are sufficient enough to keep the value of gold steady overtime?

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.
I won’t speak to our specific strategies, but there are a couple of different ways to go. An interesting strategy that not many people think about is allowing the economy to inflate a bit, then pulling the money back out in a cycle ( many countries do this, but not on purpose :P ) There are specific benefits to this, that only occur as benefits in games.

Good job understanding the narrow meaning of the term inflation while missing the overall point. Shockingly, “inflation” is commonly accompanied by an increase in (or concentration of) the money supply and/or fear. As hard as it is to believe, when people have more money, the price point in a competitive (scarce resource) market rises.

Sure thing Mr Economist

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

uhhh isnt speculating on the TP essentially the same thing as gambling. Mystic forge is gambling? Whats are the negatives here? Im seriously curious what negative effects gambling on pvp could have on the market?

actually i thought he meant personal betting, but yeah off track betting could cause people to throw matches for gold or somesuch.

I was more thinking like in duels or spvp, the team could add their own stakes

I think the main topic here is a request to provide instances of the visual representation of quantitative data (i.e. infographics). I think these are very neat and interesting and I’d like to see more.

Let’s leave inflation (and it’s connection to money supply), gambling, and snowflakes out of this

Vol.5241:

Xynn.2748:

John Smith.4610:

Vol.5241:

You are under no obligation to reveal that information John Smith, ignore these guys :P

I’d much rather talk about the economics of Guild Wars 2.

-How do you feel about controlling inflation? Do you think the gold sinks we have in the game are sufficient enough to keep the value of gold steady overtime?

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.
I won’t speak to our specific strategies, but there are a couple of different ways to go. An interesting strategy that not many people think about is allowing the economy to inflate a bit, then pulling the money back out in a cycle ( many countries do this, but not on purpose :P ) There are specific benefits to this, that only occur as benefits in games.

Good job understanding the narrow meaning of the term inflation while missing the overall point. Shockingly, “inflation” is commonly accompanied by an increase in (or concentration of) the money supply and/or fear. As hard as it is to believe, when people have more money, the price point in a competitive (scarce resource) market rises.

Sure thing Mr Economist

Actually it is a sure thing! And I deleted this post because it’s non-productive and would further derail this thread from a very interesting question – Can I Haz Moar Infografix?

EDIT: to clarify, I had posted such a snarky response because I had confused this thread with a thread right next to it in Dev Tracker which discussses the price of runes and in general is concerned with how expensive things are and how people are earning enough money to pay for it; I had thought the ANet poster was attempting to use a narrow technical definition in order to avoid addressing the overall point of the thread. My bad!

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

Mystic Forge?
I guess it’s not gambling; when I gamble I know what the odds are.

I’d really like this chart as mentioned by the OP; which has been diverted from.
For me though, mostly for the race statistics (esp if it was broken down by play time).
Even cooler if this could be tracked “live” (not the economy, I know why you wouldn’t want that) on a set up similar to http://gw2census.com/charts.php but with 3 drop down menus. So you could see a profession breakdown for male charr for example.

Quiznos.4296:

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

Mystic Forge?
I guess it’s not gambling; when I gamble I know what the odds are.

don’t forget the lockbox gambling thats been in every content patch since release!

or the karka event precursor lottery.

the focus of this of this game increasingly seems to be gambling time/opportunity for a rng roll for rewards or even nothing at all

shame we cant go back to a system where you put in the time for something and then you get it

Rising Dusk.2408:

He specifically noted that the exploit resulted in that many ectos created; there is no need for all 275,000 of those ectos having been made by those who were banned. Imagine, for instance, that 10,000 players only salvaged around 5 of the snowflakes, resulting in an average of, say, 4.5 ecto created per player. That alone accounts for 45,000 of the ectos without even factoring in those who were banned. I know that I, personally, only narrowly missed the ban cutoff after having salvaged exactly 184 snowflakes. Imagine several hundred other people being in the same boat, and 275,000 ectos created is not so far-fetched.

You sir entirely deserve a rollback/temp ban. You have no argument against this as you openly admit to partaking in an exploit. At what particular salvage did you realise this method of gaining ectoplasm was an exploit? the 75th? maybe the 125th? Ha!

I’ll just emphasise I do not care that your exploit was not as severe as the 200 banned however you exploited more than me or any people I know who play this game. A rollback may bring back a whiff of parity. If it was me Id ban the load of you that went over 50 salvages.

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

Black lion chests
Mystic Forge

100% not gambling

Afterthought: Oh, how about the Wintersday minipets? To get those, you pretty much had to gamble real life money or massive amounts of in game gold.

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

timmyf.1490:

Have you ever considered allowing gambling in-game? Perhaps on sPvP tournaments? It might serve as an interesting way for folks to earn gold and take some gold/energy out of trading post speculation. (And it could serve as an additional gold sink as well.)

Or maybe it would just make everything worse?

While that sounds super fun (and I could see it making a community much more involved in learning about who the top of PVP was), I also could see it causing a lot of complaints about “stolen money” due to games that crashed, matches that may have been won due to exploits, etc. I’m sure there could be safeguards though. And you’re right that it could be a good gold sink if the “betting company” took 10% of all winnings or something.

Also, just wanted to say thank you John. For a while you’ve been talking in a few threads without really answering any questions, which I can understand would be frustrating for players. They see someone from Anet coming into their thread and not answering their question when as far as they are concerned, you could easily answer their question.

I’m glad to see that you’re active in the community though, and I’m sorry that people (me included) can give you a hard time.

I would be ok with this but I easily see fixed tournaments becoming the norm and the players getting a share just like real life. There arent a lot of players left that do TPVP and I am sure it wouldnt be hard for them to get the fix going.

What about xunlai house? Wasn’t exactly gambling but was a way to “bet” on winners
I quite liked the xunlai

So what happened to publishing wealth distribution for the first time since beta?

John, do you think people would have less of a problem with the TP if the real world wasn’t currently in a banking crisis? The AH in other games was also manipulated heavily, but in those games people never complained.

Infographic please John.

Can we have some proof that the 1% indeed kittens everyone over by flipping precursors and selling legendaries?

Zegai.8256:

John Smith.4610:

I post because I enjoy interacting with the community.

This topic is a request for economic data – from you specifically, and after 10+ postings, you still have yet to address the point of the thread, in ANY form of a response. In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has been a bit of a sore topic for a multitude of people of late, but given the fact that you’re GW2’s resident economist, it’s understandable that it may have slipped your attention.

No one is upset that you won’t provide the requested data; it was after all, just a request. People are upset because with each additional post, you flat out ignore them – for reasons that are beyond me. It’s belittling. Instead of a polite “no”, or even an “I’m not sure if I can, I’ll get back to you” which would take all of two seconds to post, and do wonders for improving ‘communication’ on Anet’s part, you choose to continue with off topic posts in what almost seems like an attempt on your part to purposely aggravate people.

Macroeconomists don’t care for the plight of single individuals. If 10.000 people have 10g each and 10 has 10.000g, the average is still only 20g, nothing to see there, move along.

Iehova.9518:

Infographic please John.

Can we have some proof that the 1% indeed kittens everyone over by flipping precursors and selling legendaries?

The real question here is, if the infograph would show that 90% of the money is carried by 40% of the players and the distribution is considerably better than Real Life, would you believe him or call him a liar? Because for John Smith, there’s no win scenario here.

Imagine a guy with commander, +30 AR and a legendary and all miniatures yet has 3gp to his person. One could consider him poor, yet he has a ton of wealth. Merely counting gold on a person doesn’t mean anything.

marnick.4305:

Iehova.9518:

Infographic please John.

Can we have some proof that the 1% indeed kittens everyone over by flipping precursors and selling legendaries?

The real question here is, if the infograph would show that 90% of the money is carried by 40% of the players and the distribution is considerably better than Real Life, would you believe him or call him a liar? Because for John Smith, there’s no win scenario here.

Imagine a guy with commander, +30 AR and a legendary and all miniatures yet has 3gp to his person. One could consider him poor, yet he has a ton of wealth. Merely counting gold on a person doesn’t mean anything.

Very good point you made there. Solution would be to assign a price to every item the account holds (problem there would be the prices used – can’t use vendor prices, perhaps somekind of average of TP price + assume minimal value for bound drops, I doubt having 20 different infused rings makes you much richer than having 2 random rings ).
There’s also people with multiple accounts, idk how much work would that be to add them together and if they even represent a statistically relevant population.

Visiroth.5914:

I hope you realize legitimate guild leaders of WvW guilds have been banned with a false positive of being gold sellers. These people had to send in tickets to get the ban reversed. So no, ANet’s process of determining a real player from an RMT is far less than perfect.

True. Essentially, every pattern recognition technique is only “probably approximately correct”. It takes a lot of fine-tuning to simultaneously minimize the number false positives and false negatives at the same time. Given enough (high-quality) training data, you can get better and better, but no system will ever be perfect.

~MRA

Interesting thread. I haven’t read all of it though. One thought that did come to mind, pardon to the OP for not getting what he wants, Arenanet should consider opening up GW2 ala open source. Arenanet can be like other opensource companies and make money by stewarding the game. There are alot of talent in the userbase that can used to make GW2 better.

I’m advocating for a more harmonious synergistic relationship between the userbase and ANET. Of course not all parts can be opensourced due to trade-secrets, but ANET owns the IP so I don’t see any issues, more money for ANET too because of the enhanced content will attract more players.

For example, the OP wants more macro/micro-economic information. ANET could develop a platform for players to develop such information. John Smith can be the architect of such platform.

This is kinda the future, anyways, in the next decade… A game company making an MMO where a beneficent entity stewards the community, allowing for content to be created by the same users, ANET?

Thanks.

John Smith.4610:

Vol.5241:

You are under no obligation to reveal that information John Smith, ignore these guys :P

I’d much rather talk about the economics of Guild Wars 2.

-How do you feel about controlling inflation? Do you think the gold sinks we have in the game are sufficient enough to keep the value of gold steady overtime?

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.
I won’t speak to our specific strategies, but there are a couple of different ways to go. An interesting strategy that not many people think about is allowing the economy to inflate a bit, then pulling the money back out in a cycle ( many countries do this, but not on purpose :P ) There are specific benefits to this, that only occur as benefits in games.

This statement rings untrue on a few levels.

1) Inflation and the money supply do correlate in economics.

MV = PQ

The reason why inflation hasn’t occurred the same way as a real world model is there’s artificial things going on in GW2. Bots increasing the supply of materials. Every round of bot banning has shown that GW2’s pricing mechanism has been out of whack because Supply and Demand has never been a natural one.

And I am puzzled how you think your second statement is true. You described Monetary policies to a T that are completely intentional in most countries.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

John Smith.4610:

Vol.5241:

You are under no obligation to reveal that information John Smith, ignore these guys :P

I’d much rather talk about the economics of Guild Wars 2.

-How do you feel about controlling inflation? Do you think the gold sinks we have in the game are sufficient enough to keep the value of gold steady overtime?

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.
I won’t speak to our specific strategies, but there are a couple of different ways to go. An interesting strategy that not many people think about is allowing the economy to inflate a bit, then pulling the money back out in a cycle ( many countries do this, but not on purpose :P ) There are specific benefits to this, that only occur as benefits in games.

This statement rings untrue on a few levels.

1) Inflation and the money supply do correlate in economics.

MV = PQ

The reason why inflation hasn’t occurred the same way as a real world model is there’s artificial things going on in GW2. Bots increasing the supply of materials. Every round of bot banning has shown that GW2’s pricing mechanism has been out of whack because Supply and Demand has never been a natural one.

And I am puzzled how you think your second statement is true. You described Monetary policies to a T that are completely intentional in most countries.

One thing to keep in mind about a game vs the real world is that there is not always a consistent relationship between input and output or work and product.

I can go kill X amount of creatures in a certain place and the value I acquire will not be the same as another person doing the same thing.

I assume that the loot tables are fairly static, but I’m sure John and others have thought about connecting the loot tables to the economy in some way.

Let me just speculate and ask – what if this has already happened? What if the loot table is designed to inject a certain amount of certain items into the game at certain intervals?

There have been a lot of complaints about loot but the only official word I have seen seemed to indicate that Anet does not see a problem. Maybe there is no problem because the right amount of loot is being injected into the world, but something about the way it is dispersed or gated means that some people see worse loot than they would with a static RNG based loot table and others might see better results?

Wild speculation on my part, but as a casual armchair wannabe economist, I think it’s an intriguing idea. In a sense, it’s almost the inverse of the DR mechanic: someone who is doing too much of the same thing will see their conduit pinched for a while – but you still need a certain amount of crafting material and loot entering the world at a certain pace and if a bunch of people hit DR, maybe other people experience ER (enhanced returns) – not to compensate the player, but to compensate the economy.

Mithril foil hat firmly in place

John Smith.4610:

When/if I release a Lorenz curve or something similar to show distribution of wealth you can be sure it will be accurate.
It will also only probably be gold only. Counting the value outside of gold would be interesting, but would be hard to do accurately. I would consider doing both, but would definitely start with gold.
I really wanted to get a new blog post out for the first quarter of the game’s release, but I haven’t had the time, and issues in the game have to come first. It’s on my list of things to publish though.

I’ve had similar quandries over evaluating the value of my account.

Still, having information is better. I look forward to seeing more of it .

One way of presenting a wealth chart that would be fascinating to me is gold (or other broader account value assessment) vs. hours played.

Not so much an “average gold per hour” thing, but looking at wealth vs. account age to see if there are any distinct bends in the curve. For example, I just finished my master crafter title this week and expect my ability to make gold to go up noticably now that I’m not hording materials for conversion to crafting XP.

Novalight.7568:

marnick.4305:

Iehova.9518:

Infographic please John.

Can we have some proof that the 1% indeed kittens everyone over by flipping precursors and selling legendaries?

The real question here is, if the infograph would show that 90% of the money is carried by 40% of the players and the distribution is considerably better than Real Life, would you believe him or call him a liar? Because for John Smith, there’s no win scenario here.

Imagine a guy with commander, +30 AR and a legendary and all miniatures yet has 3gp to his person. One could consider him poor, yet he has a ton of wealth. Merely counting gold on a person doesn’t mean anything.

Very good point you made there. Solution would be to assign a price to every item the account holds (problem there would be the prices used – can’t use vendor prices, perhaps somekind of average of TP price + assume minimal value for bound drops, I doubt having 20 different infused rings makes you much richer than having 2 random rings ).
There’s also people with multiple accounts, idk how much work would that be to add them together and if they even represent a statistically relevant population.

I was thinking of myself when read marnick’s response. I’ve spent probably around 50gold on bank and bag slots. Am I rich, poor or just average? You can’t put a TP price on a slot. Does ANet track where your gems are from? I’ve also bought some gems using my credit card for the bank slots. What about the exchange rate at the time of purchasing gems with gold? Some bank slots cost 9gsomething while others were over 10g.

The other quandry that comes to mind immediately is WHY would a player be keeping gold? For a dedicated trader I would imagine money sitting is money wasted. For me, as a completionist-style player, I look forward to having 200g in my account bank once, for 1 second, ever, to trigger the availability of the Golden title and score some achievement points, but after that keeping large stocks of coin on hand is mostly superfluous to me – it’s better to get that coin turned into gear, outfit my stable of characters for maximum performance, and get back to swinging that sword or mining that ore. I might like to have a cushion on hand to be ready for new content (“Ooo, new armor skin – wantses it now!”) But for me as an adventurer-harvester, shiney yellow coins are a by-product of my gameplay, not the goal of it.

This is not to say I can’t see and enjoy that my account is accruing value, its just I measure success by having full sets of level 80 exotic items ready and stored for when alts reach elvel cap, rather than sitting on the money to buy that same gear when it happens. I guess I’m investing against the inflation of those items. For my slugishly slow wealth multiplying style it has paid off – I have full sets of Mad King Armor banked from when they cost about 2g a piece – getting that gear now would be 4-6 times as expensive. If I were a trader I could no doubt have done better over that time with that money, but as a harvester, I’d have to rule out getting that gear now as too expensive.

Nike.2631:

The other quandry that comes to mind immediately is WHY would a player be keeping gold? For a dedicated trader I would imagine money sitting is money wasted. For me, as a completionist-style player, I look forward to having 200g in my account bank once, for 1 second, ever, to trigger the availability of the Golden title and score some achievement points, but after that keeping large stocks of coin on hand is mostly superfluous to me – it’s better to get that coin turned into gear, outfit my stable of characters for maximum performance, and get back to swinging that sword or mining that ore. I might like to have a cushion on hand to be ready for new content (“Ooo, new armor skin – wantses it now!”) But for me as an adventurer-harvester, shiney yellow coins are a by-product of my gameplay, not the goal of it.

Don’t forget the cultural armors.
The Emperor’s New Wardrobe will require a total of 644g 90s 00c

Hmm. Thinking on my desire for the Golden title, a factoid I’d be interested in that might be revealing is a graph of peak gold values (assuming the database tracks this).

Basically what % of the player base has ever had 1g, 10g, 100, 1000g, and 10,000g at one time. I’m not sure I want to know if anyone has had 100,000g :p.

A real percentage of the players would have only new characters leveling up and still have probably never broken 1g yet. Only the most dedicated of traders would have the 4 digit and elusive 5 digit moments. But somewhere in there are a lot of folks who have broken the 3 digit barrier at least briefly. Maybe.

Khisanth.2948:

Don’t forget the cultural armors.
The Emperor’s New Wardrobe will require a total of 644g 90s 00c

Arrrrrggg! I want that title too.

Back to harvesting mithril I guess!

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

cough Mystic forge cough

John Smith.4610:

I really wanted to get a new blog post out for the first quarter of the game’s release, but I haven’t had the time, and issues in the game have to come first. It’s on my list of things to publish though.

Basically, he can’t/won’t post because the economy is in the crapper, Anet knows its in the crapper, and showing anything would both acknowledge this and waste time as they desperately band aid things. That’s why he’s so evasive in this thread.

Most everything sells for vendor price, or in the case of crafting, far less than the cost of materials. Materials below T5 are worth only something for the purpose of levelling crafting. Some T5s are valuable because they can be used to get higher tier materials. And Tier 6 materials have value because the greatest (and crudest) economic hack in any game, the gaping maw of the Mystic Forge, is endlessly hungry to suck up whatever it can, skewing the economy for all the non-super-grinders.

Anyone else notice how John Smith entered the thread and completely ignored the main question? lol Going in to discussing real world economics that no one cares about. The question was can you print up another gimmick… I mean infograph so we can see how terrible the economy is now. Of course not. Thanks.

John Smith.4610:

the immediate question that comes up is: Do players who spend more time in game have more wealth because they play more, or are they more efficient because they’re really good at the game or both.

I’d say neither. The people that have more wealth are those that spend more time on a few, very specific activities (namely: farming and TP playing). If you do anything else, you accumulate wealth very slowly, if any. If you are good at the game, it also doesn’t make you any more efficient, since neither of wealth-gaining activities require any skill whatsoever (well, any skill at the game. TP playing does require some ability, but it is an ability completely unconnected to the game).

Just tossing my 2c on why Smith is griefing us all and denying us data.

He has very explicitly avoided the question on purpose, and has made a point of it. It is clear he is trying to convey that he can not, or does not want to, disclose any information. But, I am sure he is physically able to disclose some information – heck, I’m pretty sure he has like 10 charts of wealth distribution glued on all sides of his screen at work. So he does not want to, or someone forbids him to.

I can very well see the reason: for one person on the forums that can actually gain insight from the charts and be reasonable, there are twenty hate monkeys who will jump on the newly acquired data to “prove” that Anet fails @economy, is an evil corporation trying to pass subliminal messages about buying gems, is behind Guantanamo Bay and the Cold War, etc. Sometimes it’s better to leave those people without tools – I certainly would handle stuff this way if I were at Anet. I think John Smith is trying to tell us this with his behavior.