Guild Wars 2

@whiran – Fair enough. But none of us really have definitive, concrete way of proving that bots are having a substantially negative effect on the economy… So I guess we should all just disregard such assertions and let those exploitations continue?

I give up – I now lump myself as part of the “apathetic” group in the community. I guess we should just limit the discussion to the effects of human activity (since we’re making that distinction) on the economy and call it a day.

MrGorkajuice.8391:

“It surely doesnt offer the ability to make money or ‘play’ the TP.”

My initial investment has paid back by more than a factor 10 over the ~3 weeks I’ve played the TP. And that’s in actual gold coins available for me to use, not some expected future returns from stockpiled goods.

This.
I’m not having any trouble making a profit using the TP to buy or sell. Just as in every mmo I’ve ever played, what sells is the materials to make items and not the items themselves.

@Ageia – That’s an interesting point. Makes me wonder what the point of crafting is besides XP. And the cost of the mats I think far outstrips the gains in XP in my opinion. Maybe I should just buy the exotics from the suckers who actually did max out a crafting discipline. I’ll sell them the mats at a cost more than they can sell the finished products back to me. How’s that for profit?

GreyInsomniak.1328:

@displaceTitan – /sigh. I took an AP Stats class in high school and as a Computer Science major at Virginia Tech, I am required to take a course called STAT 4705 Statistics for Engineers in order to graduate. So I’d like to think I know a thing or two about “basic statistics” and “critical thinking.” Am I saying that I actually performed a test of significance and that my resulting p-value was lower than the significance level alpha, and therefore my null hypothesis was rejected? No… frankly I’m not because I do not have access to the data that allows me to use the word “significant” in the sense that he is supposedly using it.

Excellent job proving displaceTitan’s point that you don’t understand “significant” in the sense I’m using it, because the sense I’m using it isn’t the statistical one. I’m using the more basic sense of “large or important”. As in, evidence or proof that bots and gold sellers exist does not constitute evidence that they are having a large or important effect on the economy of the game.

Admittedly, this sense of “significant” doesn’t have any precise numerical values we could attach to it, so it is a bit harder to pin down. So I’ll make my statement more precise and say that evidence for the existence of bots isn’t evidence one way or the other for the actual magnitude of the impact they’re having on the economy.

If you’re more comfortable falling back on your engineering stats class, I could pick a (completely arbitrary) precise value that I’d call “significant”, and work from there:

Bots have a significant impact on the economy if their activities can explain more than 25% of the variation in the prices of at least half of the 100 most-traded items on the TP.

What I’m saying is that no one has yet provided any justification for the claim that their impact is significant, and has instead felt much more comfortable just repeatedly asserting that it is so. Many times (though fortunately not in your case, GreyInsomniak, which I appreciate), people further retreat from useful discussion by going on to accuse everyone who disagrees with their baseless assertions of running bots themselves.

@Hippocampus – Thanks but I’ve moved on. Not that it matters at this point, but I don’t think either of us was using the word “significant” in the statistical sense. I just didn’t appreciate the way he was insulting the intelligence of the people in this discussion (He may not have done it intentionally, but it came off that way and I’ll even admit that my reaction was probably a poor one). And no, there’s no need to get defensive – I never accused anyone of botting just because they disagreed with me. That would be kind of shameless.