Guild Wars 2

Having spent 12 years as a research engineer in the game industry, I got sucked in playing Guild Wars 2 lured in by the innovative ideas associated to it. A game challenging both the Tank/Healer/DPS trinity and the global economy would get my spare time for sure. I followed some of the threads and John Smith answers, and my opinion so far is that the GW2 global economy while impressive on the technology stand point remains flawed at the roots:

1-Time is Money:
In my opinion, this is a fundamental concept in the design of a solid and enjoyable game economy. It did not take me more than the 5 levels to figure out that this concept was not respected in GW2 and it does not take much brain cells to figure out the consequences of this design choice on the long run. Basically each raw material has a vendor price, one can cash them by selling to a vendor or posting on Trading Post for more or spend time to craft something out of those raw materials. Unfortunately the vendor price of the crafted item is lower than the sum of the material vendor price. Meaning that time spent in crafting has negative value, meaning that any item crafted to skill up is a money vacuum and finally meaning that crafted items TP low bound price does combine the same money sink with extra 5% post and 10% taxes.

2- Offer and demand:
When I went for the first time to a crafting trainer I noticed the 2nd flaw in the economy design: we are all collectors and crafters. I could not make my mind at first on this one because of the time parameter impact and the fact that while you can craft everything and collect everything on a single character, it still takes time and thus one person can’t do everything. But using the online tools available to observe the TP it was very clear that fierce competition was affecting crafting and nearly every craft market was selling at lost ( bellow material price x 1.15 ). So since every one could collect every resource and every resource spawn to everyone, everyone trying to compete on crafting would waste money. All in one GW2 design pushed people to brainlessly farm computer controlled monsters without creating profit space for crafters who prefer spending time converting material ( in GW2 Time is not Money ).
The irony is that for a period of time crafters could make money by converting resources on the forge, salvaging 80 rare into ectoplasms and producing jewels ( the only crafted exotics that do not have drop competition ). What made this possible is the proliferation of the so hated BOTs flooding the TP with low price crafting material by balancing the offer with the demand ( mostly on T5 for 80 rare weapons to forge and armour to salvage ). Maybe the issue here come from the poor drop rates or the enormous amount of components required to fill the recipes at the root of the global demand. But the irony is, BOTs actually balanced it. I am not encouraging the BOTs, far from it, but there is a point to be made here that removing them will increase the prices of most demanded items 4x and while the farmers will think they benefit from it, they won’t think twice the same when they see it also affects what they want to buy in the same proportions and thus that they earn 4 time more in a 4 time more expensive world where it also takes twice more time to achieve anything.

3- The cloning forge:
After the “craft for less”, the “we are all farmers”, I thought there can’t be another thing that bad in the economy of GW2. I was so wrong and I realized it when after reaching 300G from jewel crafting ( the only craft with no drop competition on exotics ) I cycled level 80 rares into exotics at the forge. This section is not about the precursors and their rate cause this is really a secondary subject, but about what comes out the forge. To assert on the device I focussed myself on 4 weapon types: axe, shield, sword and rifle. That way I would process 1000x level 80 rares a day on average, bought from bidding at the bundle at 10-12silver or crafted with weapon smiting when the T5 claws and venoms alike were at 15-20 copper. All in one 110G spent a day and mostly recovered through reselling the exotics produced. For those interested I evaluated my gold decay between 5-10G a day, exotics at about 1 per 7 forging so I would expect at 15% rate ( keep in mind that only 75% the rares get consumed on a fail try ).
What annoyed me the most about the forge was the terrible software engineering behind it and the lack of thinking on its impact with crafting. How frustrating can it be to put 4 items in a the forge and get generously 1 of them back from the process. Seriously is the item table so small that a test could not be made to prevent the forge from returning one of the item it was fed with? And more seriously with an average of 7 tries per exotic output, making it 7×3×12silver cost per exotic output so 2g52, why the hell are crafted exotic a great fraction of the output table? It cost more in materials for a weapon smith to craft an exotic weapon without a sigil than to get one at the forge from drops with a sigil.

4- What about fun:
Because I am one of those busy people in real life I don’t like brainless farming in game, I don’t like endless grinding for continuous hours and I get turned off by being told how I should play and what I should have fun doing in game. I like variety and I find it more enjoyable when there is space for players who use their brain rather than an enormous amount of spare time to achieve things and I believe economy to be the vector of fun for people like myself. And this leads to what is in my opinion the biggest flaw in GW2 economy: Fun was not part of its design and having fun is what games are all about.

JC

“But using the online tools available to observe the TP it was very clear that fierce competition was affecting crafting and nearly every craft market was selling at lost ( bellow material price x 1.15 ).”

I am concerned that you were and engineer. your math is incorrect. your breakeven point is material price / .85. if you’re selling at price x 1.15 you’re losing money! : (

This is why the TP is all messed up!
I still find tons of places to make money.

I wonder if OP is claiming to be an economist and still not able to find it fun already to play GW2’s trading post.

My understanding is I find it utmost fun to play not only the game content and the trading post.

AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN I still need to claim that you DON’T have to grind to have the best stats. You are NOT UNDERPOWERED by any sense. A full exotic sets is easily achievable within a month I doubt you could find it in other MMORPGs. You only need to grind to be different looking COSMETICS. So you have a choice, please remember that, no one and no rational sense is driving you to grind.

And back to our topic for the trading post. The design of this cross server trading post is ensuring the minimum market manipulation and the free market. It’s one of the most if not the best design that I’ve ever played. Buy order, and sell order making the item value more tend to the true value because if it’s not. People will make profit out if it and competition will drive it to the true market value.

Having said that, there are always fun to find those market by observing the mechanism of the game as well as the general supply / demand. Good example are the butter hype, black lion chest hype (totally a hype doesn’t make much sense due to the “key is the key” reason), and the recent hype on lodestone and ectos. I very much enjoyed being part of the trading community and I could observe the other traders are competing with me on certain product which is again healthy to the market in general.

So my suggestion is, if you like to think more about the market and economy in this game. You could really have a BLAST fun out of it. So you might need to spend more a little bit more time to read and think about the investment you put into the market.