Guild Wars 2

What were to happen if a player (like myself) was to invest a large sum or real life money into the gem store, convert it to gold and buy every last rare type of commodity (such as ecto).

Then what would happen if I destroyed every last one of those ectos?
What would the effect be on the TP?

Ok assuming you have the real life cash to do so, you’d essentially crash the market. Gold will suddenly lose its value (as the amount of items the gold supposedly represents is suddenly gone), and farming for the mats itself will be the only viable way to get the items you want again.

Also, you need to be sure to buy again all the saved-up supply most people has. While you see thousands of ectos in the market, there’s probably another 50% sitting on people’s inventory.

But this is pretty curious. Please do it, I wanna see what happens as well :P

Sounds like one hell of a way to troll GW2, too bad I don’t have the kind of cash it would take to pull this stunt off.

I’d estimate you’d probably spend ~$10,000 USD to pull this off. Kinda reminds me of the guy who paid MTV or some channel to play a song over and over again (They were doing this fundraiser thing where you pay a small amount to get a song you wanted played up. I think like $3-5. Then one guy paid like $500, so the company has to play it for 100x straight XD)

BabelFish.7234:

What were to happen if a player (like myself) was to invest a large sum or real life money into the gem store, convert it to gold and buy every last rare type of commodity (such as ecto).

Then what would happen if I destroyed every last one of those ectos?
What would the effect be on the TP?

ArenaNet would probably send you a gift basket for christmas But after that, they’d probably just up the drop rate or instantly restore the items you destroyed. They have interfered in the market before, remember the butter, logs, and something else for chests in the mystic forge? Some people made 1,000s of gold off of that. I wasn’t one of them.

John Smith.4610:

You vastly underestimate the currency exchange and GW2 market.

Granted he couldn’t possibly do this with rares and ectos due to its abundance overworld and means of aqquiring.

He could very easily likely crash the lodestones market, or even doubloons. There are only like 400 300 of them. If he would buy every single one of them and then destroy it, it would completely block a lot of people’s legendary/rare exotics and make the lodestone market drive to insane prices due to its high demand to lower supply.

The market would stabilize after a while, but until there, i can see them costing around 10 gold each.

John Smith.4610:

You vastly underestimate the currency exchange and GW2 market.

If I actually planned to test this,. yeah I probably would and as such Ièd probably cause some serious short-term detriment but in the long term I would cause zero damage.

This was simply a entertaining thought, nothing more xD.

If you tried that and news got around, the hoarders of GW2 would come crawling out of the woodwork and restore the market in short order while making a tidy profit.

First, you can not buy them all. It is technically impossible. But I asume you want to go theoretically.

Theoretically

If you buy everything from one item, people will offer the ectos in their inventory. This will set a certain price. At the same time, new items will come in and a new price)level will be created.

So, that is the answer: people will find a new price level where supply & demand meet each other.

This new price level will not be 2 gold or something crazy like that. The price can not go up indefinatly, because at a certain moment people will simply stop buying them.

Why can’t you buy them all?

A. The current TP.

According to the TP, there are now 12,800 sell orders for ecto, 10,700 of them at 50s or lower.

So, let’s take 42s as the average you will pay for those 10,700, that is 5,000 gold.

1,170 of them are between 50s & 1g, so let’s say another 3,000 gold for those.

350 of them are between 1 and 2g, so that’s another 500g or so and ley’s assume the last 50 ones cost you another 200g (doesn’t matter much).

So, you just spent 9,000 gold to buy all ectos.

That is about 1.25$ = 100gems = 1g28s, so about 9,000 dollars.

B. People’s inventory.

Now… when you start buying up stacks of 250, people will add more ectos. Players will tell it on their guild Mumble servers. People will yell it in map. And as time goes on, more and more people will add ectos, because more and ore people will know someone is paying whatever price for them.

And this is an item that people HAVE stored away, trust me. Pretty much every hardcore player and every trader has them. Dozens. Multiply this with the amount of hardcore players and you are looking at more than 10,000 new ectos, this time at prices waaaaaay higher than the ones on TP.

C. People making them.

Once the ecto-prices are up, alot of people will stopwhat they are doing and start making ectos by buying rares and salvage them.

This will simply break you. You can not keep buying these, because they will keep comming and comming and comming. As in, literally, 100,000 of them if you don’t stop.

The fact that people can make them at will, makes it impossible for you to buy them all.

tl;dr: If you tried this, you’d likely be out tens of thousands of dollars, the price of Ectos would spike, and people would intensively farm ectos until the supply equilibrium with other commodities was restored.

The value of ecto has a semi-rigid upper limit – the value at which you can craft the cheapest or obtain T5 rares and salvage them into ecto. The cost of that process is a natural limit to how high ecto can realisticlly rise; once price rises above this, more people will begin to craft ecto.

So, you can’t do a Dr Evil and hold the world to ransom for 1 million dollars, because someone will craft a new one for half that

penatbater.4710:

I’d estimate you’d probably spend ~$10,000 USD to pull this off. Kinda reminds me of the guy who paid MTV or some channel to play a song over and over again

Sounds like it might be the time they (4chan, ebaum etc) rickrolled MTV

Well, we lack the actual data to be sure. How much money can be actually be removed from the game’s economy with gems? How much gold is the game making available for gem purchases? How much money would you need to get the algorithm?
Tens of thousands of euros? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Following Smith’s statement, the gem market is big, but how big? 10% of all the gold? 50%? 100%? 200%?

So, starting, you essentially buy out Anet’s gems. Which I’m sure is actually impossible, as Anet is like a central bank in this respect. But say the algorithm gets to the extremes. I’m pretty sure Smith would have to wipe the coffee off his monitor, dazed by the amount of money Anet suddenly possesses, and then call out an emergency meeting. Providing Anet doesn’t decide they like things the way they are and close shop for a year while they move to the Bahamas, they’d probably adjust the algorithm to allow more gems into the system. But Anet’s end is not the issue here.

You exchange all the gems for gold. Everyone upgrades his accounts to the max, and you essentially now possess all the gold that people are willing to spend on gems. This is unlikely to be the majority of the gold that people are willing to spend on the economy, however.

If it’s a minority, you could now buy up say a single commodity. You fill out all the sell offers, and the additional ones that people post after they realize the prices have spiked insanely and the supply dries up. Prices rise to the highest you offer. Flippers keep offering the remaining stock at ever more exorbitant prices, and you HAVE to keep buying at THEIR price, of course. People’s buy offers raise and raise, but remain unfilled. Eventually, you drain the market of all the items that people are willing to sell and aren’t using themselves.

(the forums are, of course, clogged up with complaint posts, and mods don’t get to sleep at all thanking everyone for their feedback)

Now, don’t forget, the BLTC is not a source of items – it is a commodity exchange only. So, now that the BLTC is not an option, people who really want the item simply switch to the actual way that the item is produced. Taking ectos as an example, youtube gets filled with rare item farming spots, guides to the most efficient ways to craft and resalvage rare items, etc. Oh, people are also going to buy up some more gems, to buy BLTC salvage kits, but since gems are available in infinite supply (provided the central bank keeps up the currency printing efforts) from Anet for real money, people can get them without involving you.

Mostly, people learn to farm ectos or they learn to live with greens. Some leave the game in frustration. More feedback is thanked for.

Anet’s customer base is in part happy (all the BLTC parasites just made a TON of money off you and are happy), but the rest are very unhappy. Even actual casuals start coming to the forums. Anet faces ever more pressure to fix the obviously bugged BLTC or to increase drop rates and similar. No one believes Smith when he says this is normal market operation and not a bug. Still, they are not stupid. Smith SEES where the gems went and knows what you’re doing. Possibly, he tells people what he sees, possibly not.

Anet probably does something to ease the situation. Probably, they address the situation by adding alternative ways of procurement. You are, after all, their favourite customer now, and are unlikely to be hit yourself. You have just proven yourself alone worth more than the entire gem market, after all.

This is a single commodity, of course. The effects are limited. The larger the market share you own, the more seriously people are affected.

*In the end, however: people adapt to being unable to use the BLTC, and either farm the items themselves, barter for them with other players (you’d soon see “reliable third party” broker systems set up to allow safe direct trading without BLTC) or leave. Ectos become an unofficial currency, hopefully secondary and not primary, since gold is now useless for item procurement. *

John Smith.4610:

You vastly underestimate the currency exchange and GW2 market.

People vastly overestimate the free market nature of your economy and underestimate your ability to control it.

Anet would reduce the gem supply and inflate the gold exchange rate back to their target rate.

Cirroq.2531:

Anet would reduce the gem supply and inflate the gold exchange rate back to their target rate.

Pedra.4381:

People vastly overestimate the free market nature of your economy and underestimate your ability to control it.

If only we could craft and sell tinfoil hats, I’d make a killing on the trading post

Alternative possibility:

What if someone were to continually buy up all the precursors off the TP, and then summarily destroy them all?

The example of destroying ectos is slightly undermined by the ease with which people can “make” ectos; but since precursors aren’t nearly so reliably/easily created, would that be more of an upheaval since people seem to want them so much, or so little of an upheaval because not many people can afford them in the first place?

I suppose the only reliable way to try and crash the economy would be to find a low-drop, high demand (read: necessary for crafting or something or another) item that either can’t/is extremely difficult to craft, and destroy them all. Hm.

Thoughts, anyone?

I’m surprised that no one mentioned that gems are of unlimited supply: whenever you throw your money (gold,dollar/euro) into the exchange, new gems are created out of thin air for you.

If OP was actually to pull this out, it will probably affect other markets too, because those rares are tied to ecto. However, unless you have ~$100k to burn, I doubt you could ever pull this (and, as others have already said, not to mention Anet’s interference).

I’d be really curious as to the exact process by which gems come into existence. My guess would be that they come into existence when people buy them with real money, then cease to exist when someone cashes them in to the gems store. But I get the impression this really isn’t how it works.

Ryuujin.8236:

If only we could craft and sell tinfoil hats, I’d make a killing on the trading post

If you believe that ArenaNet doesn’t manipulate the game “economy” then there’s nothing I can do to convince you.

But given your views, would you be interested in buying a bridge from me?

BabelFish.7234:

What were to happen if a player (like myself) was to invest a large sum or real life money into the gem store, convert it to gold and buy every last rare type of commodity (such as ecto).

Then what would happen if I destroyed every last one of those ectos?
What would the effect be on the TP?

The sum of money you are talking about is unfeasibly large.
You would not reach the stage where you could buy all the ectos because you would first impact the market for gems, reducing the price of gems to somewhere around 1 copper per gem. You would end up basically just buying free gems for whoever wants them. And, let’s be clear, it is a ton of real world money – tens of thousands of dollars at least – before you even get to that point.

Let’s say you somehow end up with a ton of gold out of your gem-buying scheme. You now need to buy all the ectos. And this is, again, stupidly unfeasible. They start out at, what, 27 silver an ecto, but by the time you’ve bought maybe a couple of hundred of these you’ve bought all the cheap ones and you’re now paying upwards of a gold an ecto.

You won’t get to buy all the ectos because the price will keep going up, and people putting new ones on the market will reflect this. You’ll be shelling out multiple gold per ecto; everyone who’s able to farm ectos will get rich for a couple of hours or so.

You’ll end up with a giant stack of ectos that you can’t sell because no one will pay the price you’ve just driven it up to, and then in probably only a couple of hours (or less) the price will revert back to normal and you’ll just have made a huge loss on your ectos.

Maybe, maybe during that period the price on other crafting components will fluctuate, because (a) people will divert to farming ectos instead of their usual patterns, or (b) people will be less inclined to craft endgame stuff while ectos are so expensive. But it’s unlikely you’ll be able to distort the market long enough for people to even notice.

But once again, the amount of real-world money required to even start to distort that is ridiculously huge. And if you want to try it, I’m sure Anet would be happy to let you try. :-)

I estimate the cost of doing so would start at somewhere between 200k and 2 million assuming gem prices stay static, which they wouldn’t. Instead the price would drop and continue to get more expensive for you as you continued to buy gems. During which time the gem market starts to see the effects as you try to explain to your CC company what’s going on.

When you finally get enough money, it would take you a long time to buy up all the rares and exotics because there are actually quite a lot. Every time you turn your back on one it would begin to restock more quickly than you would expect.

• Ingame gem buyers rejoice as it becomes temporarily cheaper for them
• The over-pricers who restock the ectos and items waste serious listing fees as the prices come back down to normal faster than they expect
• ArenaNet receives your millions of dollars and also benefits from the press publicity caused by your stunt
• All of your gold is dispersed all around the player base and the fans who were arguing for GW2 socialism get their wish for a few days or so

And that is my uneducated guess

Tarvok.4206:

I’d be really curious as to the exact process by which gems come into existence. My guess would be that they come into existence when people buy them with real money, then cease to exist when someone cashes them in to the gems store. But I get the impression this really isn’t how it works.

Your guess is as good as mine, and I think it’s safe to assume that that is how it works.

Instead of having to keep track of gems being exchanged into/out of BLTC, they could have an algorithm that checks if x amount of gems are bought, then that will up the exchange rate by y amount, and vice versa.

Pedra.4381:

Ryuujin.8236:

If only we could craft and sell tinfoil hats, I’d make a killing on the trading post

If you believe that ArenaNet doesn’t manipulate the game “economy” then there’s nothing I can do to convince you.

But given your views, would you be interested in buying a bridge from me?

I challenge you to provide a single reasonable argument suggesting that they do.
Here’s a counter argument: If ANet DID manipulate the gem exchange, the rates would be reasonably competitive compared to 3rd party gold sellers.

MrGorkajuice.8391:

I challenge you to provide a single reasonable argument suggesting that they do. Here’s a counter argument: If ANet DID manipulate the gem exchange, the rates would be reasonably competitive compared to 3rd party gold sellers.

If ArenaNet saw the gold sellers as a competitor you might have a point. But, they don’t. They see them as nasty vector carrying vermin that must be eliminated and eradicated. For a whole host of reasons, they can’t legitimize them by competing with them and they’ll not change their business model as a reaction to them.

@OP. You would be surprised at the inventory that speculators hold of “rare” items.

Take a look at the jakalope mini – I’d estimate that the early speculator on that holds 20-50 of those (given that the tactic has been employed by a certain someone in guildwars 1 to create artificial scarcity).

So basically the effect would be to briefly rise the price on a “rare” item but it would rapidly normalize due to existing inventories. This can only be effective with VERY low supply items of which exotic minis and precursors are a prime example and we have seen with the later that Anet will happily flood the market to solve limited supply problems if the community creates enough fuss