If you notice, everything slowly starts to rise in price starting on Aug 7th.
Its obvious this trend is caused by the massive farming these last two weeks from the majority of the player base.
So the real question here is whether its caused by everyone being too busy farming to post up items they acquire or is it cause by the influx of gold players are attaining from said farming?
Personally, I think its the latter and can not wait for this event to be over. Its really nice to actually have gold (instead of being broke), but it makes little difference if I have more gold only to find out that everything I wish to buy has raised in price.
Just watch lowest prices for rare weapons (To lv 72-80). Before this hard-farming prices were 17s and If you were Lucky 16. Now it’s 20.50s Only for few item, Then we’re already 22-23s. This farming is terribile and ruin the game. Expecially those farming in Orr. They dont even care about dead people and Keep rushing To another Champion. Really, What game permits that?
No offense to Anet, but their TP is complete garbage. In fact, the entire game economy is garbage. How hard could it possibly have been to balance the economy and get it ready for the players before they released the game and then tweaked it a bit afterward? All they had to do was keep saying “soon” to keep stalling the players. God knows they did that anyway. Honestly, how difficult is it to think about the repercussions of adding new loot, taking it away, or making tier 6 mats easier to get? Anet needs to hire an economist apparently, because they’re really not doing too well by themselves and they just keep digging a deeper grave each time they cater to the casuals and make loot easier to get.
There are probably a number of forces at work here. The increase in supply of tier 6 materials should in theory cause a reduction in costs. However, this has been accompanied by an increase in supply of gold and it loses its value. This ultimately means that there is inflation and everything becomes more expensive because certain people can afford to pay more.
Now of course, something that may not have been true before is probably true now. With gold and tier 6 materials being more readily available, you are starting to see more people actually attempting to get their legendary weapons. People who farm tier 6 materials might hoard these for themselves and spend any gold they get on getting more tier 6 materials. It’s not just legendary weapons either. The increase in crafting to level 500 means that those tier 6 materials will be worth quite a bit for people that want to level their crafting. It’s not surprising then that people would want to hoard any tier 6 mats they have in anticipation of the patch that will drive tier 6 prices up.
ArenaNet has already introduced a lot of gold sinks to the game. Legendaries was supposed to be the major one. Gem purchases is another one. The gem store has a longer term viability because of all the new items that are available for purchase. The major caveat is people no longer wanting to buy gold with gems (real money).
I don’t think a lot of people don’t understand that gold sinks aren’t meant to be affordable. They’re meant for people that have too much gold and don’t know how to spend it. Of course, the gold sinks themselves have to be attractive. So far, they’ve been a little hit or miss. Gold sinks also control the amount of gold in the game and should in theory control costs as well.
What is contributing to rare and ectoplasm price increases is likely that people are spending more time farming champions than they are doing events with guaranteed rare drops. Fewer people running dungeons that award tokens used for purchasing rares is also another contributing factor. Asking ArenaNet to balance the economy at the game’s launch is like telling them to control human nature. It’s true that the economy can be controlled through the reward systems and what not but how people react to them is often unpredictable. Who initially knew that people would farm CoF 1 to the exclusion of every other dungeon? Who knew that people would deliberately fail events to farm for loot?
No offense to Anet, but their TP is complete garbage. In fact, the entire game economy is garbage. How hard could it possibly have been to balance the economy and get it ready for the players before they released the game and then tweaked it a bit afterward? All they had to do was keep saying “soon” to keep stalling the players. God knows they did that anyway. Honestly, how difficult is it to think about the repercussions of adding new loot, taking it away, or making tier 6 mats easier to get? Anet needs to hire an economist apparently, because they’re really not doing too well by themselves and they just keep digging a deeper grave each time they cater to the casuals and make loot easier to get.
What is contributing to rare and ectoplasm price increases is likely that people are spending more time farming champions than they are doing events with guaranteed rare drops. Fewer people running dungeons that award tokens used for purchasing rares is also another contributing factor. Asking ArenaNet to balance the economy at the game’s launch is like telling them to control human nature. It’s true that the economy can be controlled through the reward systems and what not but how people react to them is often unpredictable. Who initially knew that people would farm CoF 1 to the exclusion of every other dungeon? Who knew that people would deliberately fail events to farm for loot?
I completely agree, and that is why I said ANet needs a resolution before the inflation gets out of hand. Nothing is predictable, ESPECIALLY the market. Economists paid by the government still have trouble predicting the future and we are suppose to be in some magical technological age.
What needs to be done is some form of incentive gold sink, and I am not talking about Legendaries. (If everyone got Legendaries then it definitely should not be called Legendaries anymore) Personally, I believe the gold sink should only affect those that farm 24/7, and not those that play the game in other fashions (wvw, spvp, explorers, etc.)
If anyone has some good ideas of gold sinks, or a fix to this farming/inflation issue, please present it.
I completely agree, and that is why I said ANet needs a resolution before the inflation gets out of hand. Nothing is predictable, ESPECIALLY the market. Economists paid by the government still have trouble predicting the future and we are suppose to be in some magical technological age.
What needs to be done is some form of incentive gold sink, and I am not talking about Legendaries. (If everyone got Legendaries then it definitely should not be called Legendaries anymore) Personally, I believe the gold sink should only affect those that farm 24/7, and not those that play the game in other fashions (wvw, spvp, explorers, etc.)
If anyone has some good ideas of gold sinks, or a fix to this farming/inflation issue, please present it.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet already has in the game in addition to legendaries. You have the commander tag, cultural armors, the hard to get exotics that require lodestones, the trading post’s commission, and maybe the gem store. Now some people would argue that with trading gems for gold you’re actually just transferring gold from one player to another. It’s still in the game so it shouldn’t count as a gold sink. Directly it doesn’t take gold out of the game but indirectly, since gold is still being circulated rather than hoarded, it creates the potential for it to be taken out through trading post commissions.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet plans on adding to the game. We know that they are increasing crafting to level 500 so people with gold will have somewhere to spend it. This will likely contribute to rapidly increasing prices of certain materials needed for crafting but it should taper off after some time. They’ve got more living story content that will likely come with their own gold sinks. Queen Jennah’s Jubilee, much to many’s chagrin, is a good example of this.
What else can they do? Certain people have been clamoring for player housing/guild halls for some time now. In the future, they might add content of this kind to the game if resources isn’t an issue. Interested players would be spending lots of gold on things that would customize their houses/guild halls. Things like:
Paint/wallpaper
Furniture
Knick Knacks
Garden/Backyard
Trophies
In the mean time, they need things that people would want to spend gold on instead of saving up for their legendaries. Maybe additional skins that can only be purchased with gold. Maybe instead of just outright buying/crafting ascended gear they could let you spend gold on upgrading your exotics.
I completely agree, and that is why I said ANet needs a resolution before the inflation gets out of hand. Nothing is predictable, ESPECIALLY the market. Economists paid by the government still have trouble predicting the future and we are suppose to be in some magical technological age.
What needs to be done is some form of incentive gold sink, and I am not talking about Legendaries. (If everyone got Legendaries then it definitely should not be called Legendaries anymore) Personally, I believe the gold sink should only affect those that farm 24/7, and not those that play the game in other fashions (wvw, spvp, explorers, etc.)
If anyone has some good ideas of gold sinks, or a fix to this farming/inflation issue, please present it.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet already has in the game in addition to legendaries. You have the commander tag, cultural armors, the hard to get exotics that require lodestones, the trading post’s commission, and maybe the gem store. Now some people would argue that with trading gems for gold you’re actually just transferring gold from one player to another. It’s still in the game so it shouldn’t count as a gold sink. Directly it doesn’t take gold out of the game but indirectly, since gold is still being circulated rather than hoarded, it creates the potential for it to be taken out through trading post commissions.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet plans on adding to the game. We know that they are increasing crafting to level 500 so people with gold will have somewhere to spend it. This will likely contribute to rapidly increasing prices of certain materials needed for crafting but it should taper off after some time. They’ve got more living story content that will likely come with their own gold sinks. Queen Jennah’s Jubilee, much to many’s chagrin, is a good example of this.
What else can they do? Certain people have been clamoring for player housing/guild halls for some time now. In the future, they might add content of this kind to the game if resources isn’t an issue. Interested players would be spending lots of gold on things that would customize their houses/guild halls. Things like:
Paint/wallpaper
Furniture
Knick Knacks
Garden/Backyard
Trophies
In the mean time, they need things that people would want to spend gold on instead of saving up for their legendaries. Maybe additional skins that can only be purchased with gold. Maybe instead of just outright buying/crafting ascended gear they could let you spend gold on upgrading your exotics.
All nice in theory, but in practise people will just find the cheapest way to do stuff. You are also assuming that the ones farming for money are actually spending it on things outside their planned expenditure. People are greedy and do not like to lose their money.
As for the overall economy. Anet made the same mistake almost every other MMO developer does. Trying to use real life economy strategies in an MMO. That does not work. In MMOs the rich will get richer and will inflate the prices out of reach for most after a while, which is why crafting really should be the backbone of any ingame economy. Crafting can be regulated. RNG drops can’t.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet already has in the game in addition to legendaries. You have the commander tag, cultural armors, the hard to get exotics that require lodestones, the trading post’s commission, and maybe the gem store. Now some people would argue that with trading gems for gold you’re actually just transferring gold from one player to another. It’s still in the game so it shouldn’t count as a gold sink. Directly it doesn’t take gold out of the game but indirectly, since gold is still being circulated rather than hoarded, it creates the potential for it to be taken out through trading post commissions.
Let’s take a look at what ArenaNet plans on adding to the game. We know that they are increasing crafting to level 500 so people with gold will have somewhere to spend it. This will likely contribute to rapidly increasing prices of certain materials needed for crafting but it should taper off after some time. They’ve got more living story content that will likely come with their own gold sinks. Queen Jennah’s Jubilee, much to many’s chagrin, is a good example of this.
What else can they do? Certain people have been clamoring for player housing/guild halls for some time now. In the future, they might add content of this kind to the game if resources isn’t an issue. Interested players would be spending lots of gold on things that would customize their houses/guild halls. Things like:
Paint/wallpaper
Furniture
Knick Knacks
Garden/Backyard
Trophies
In the mean time, they need things that people would want to spend gold on instead of saving up for their legendaries. Maybe additional skins that can only be purchased with gold. Maybe instead of just outright buying/crafting ascended gear they could let you spend gold on upgrading your exotics.
All nice in theory, but in practise people will just find the cheapest way to do stuff. You are also assuming that the ones farming for money are actually spending it on things outside their planned expenditure. People are greedy and do not like to lose their money.
As for the overall economy. Anet made the same mistake almost every other MMO developer does. Trying to use real life economy strategies in an MMO. That does not work. In MMOs the rich will get richer and will inflate the prices out of reach for most after a while, which is why crafting really should be the backbone of any ingame economy. Crafting can be regulated. RNG drops can’t.
No doubt, people will find the most efficient means of acquiring what they want. I can’t speak for farmers but if we look at real world spending habits, living beyond one’s own financial means tends to be the rule rather than the exception. While there certainly are people who save money, many will spend everything they have and then some. If ArenaNet actually allowed people to borrow money from some in-game bank, I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of the player base went into debt to finance whatever they were trying to get.
Perhaps the real world economic model is the mistake. You’re proposing something similar to what is known as a resource based economy. There’s this guy named Jacque Fresco who heads something called the Venus Project. It’s actually really interesting and worth looking into. Now the great thing about the in-game economy is that it’s still tightly regulated. Currencies like tokens, karma, and badges can’t be traded so they would never affect the economy. Also, unlike the real world money does get destroyed through gold sinks so runaway inflation can be controlled to a certain extent.
As for the divide between the rich and the poor. People will always try to find a way to put themselves above everyone else. That’s what capitalism really is. It’s not about making money for the sake of making more money like many are led to believe. It’s about trying to make it to the top. There’s not much that can be done to avoid such a situation other than to not have money in the game at all or make it so that money can’t be traded. That’s what karma is. The problem is that players will find something to represent an actual currency. Globs of Ectoplasm is the first thing that comes to my mind. Any kind of crafting material that is hard to get could in theory function as a currency.
I wouldn’t go leaping out of any wall street windows just yet
ANet is very aware of the economy and in fact have a chief economist and staff on board that diligently monitors supply and demand. They also have the luxury of a closed world system that they can control. There’s no oopsie daisies happening here, they know what they are doing.
Remember the Great Butter Crisis of 2012 when butter was literally falling out of trees? They added a temporary Mystic Forge recipe that used a large quantity of butter and the price corrected. Or how about the critical Pile of Crystalline Dust Shortage coupled with the crashing price of Globs of Ectoplasm from the oversupply spike of 2013? Now we can salvage globs of ectoplasms into dust and the price equalized on both. Or most recently, our Zephryrite visitors coming to trade surplus materials we had on hand.
Anet needs to hire an economist apparently, because they’re really not doing too well by themselves and they just keep digging a deeper grave each time they cater to the casuals and make loot easier to get.
They have hired an economist. He probably knows way more about the economy in and out of Guild Wars then a lot of people. Go poke around the Black Lion Trading Post subforum. You’ll see that he knows full well what he’s talking about.
Just watch lowest prices for rare weapons (To lv 72-80). Before this hard-farming prices were 17s and If you were Lucky 16. Now it’s 20.50s Only for few item, Then we’re already 22-23s. This farming is terribile and ruin the game. Expecially those farming in Orr. They dont even care about dead people and Keep rushing To another Champion. Really, What game permits that?
Every other game, but to a much harsher degree, eg letting you die so they can kill your tagged champion or grab your rare mining node. If you never played an MMO before, trust me, this is a vast improvement already.
That said, none of your examples show a significant price hike since august 7th. If anything, prices have lowered a little bit.
If I can’t play Guild Wars 2 at work, I won’t work in Guild Wars 2 either.
Delayed content is eventually good. Rushed content is eternally bad. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto
That said, none of your examples show a significant price hike since august 7th. If anything, prices have lowered a little bit.
You didn’t look at my chart did you? The prices are rising. Look at GW2spidy.com
BUT the inflation still in its infant stage, and I am just hoping it gets nipped in the butt before it grows to become an ugly Troll sized inflation.
ANet is very aware of the economy and in fact have a chief economist and staff on board that diligently monitors supply and demand. They also have the luxury of a closed world system that they can control. There’s no oopsie daisies happening here, they know what they are doing.
Heh, if you take a look at the real world, a lot of economists appear to have no idea what they are doing. Economy isn’t that black or white; even ignoring how there are multiple schools of Economics, it’s not exactly an exact science when applied in practice.
ArenaNet has an economist, great. I wonder what his goals for the economy are, and if it fits what the players want the economy to be; and I wonder if what’s he’s looking for is a good model of a real world economy, or if it’s a better system that would only be possible in the confines of an online simulation.
I wish ArenaNet would take control of the economy in full force. The player driven aspects of the economy tend to be bad, and often detrimental to the game as a whole (see the current inflation as a perfect example).
“I think that players are starting to mature past the point of wanting to be on that
treadmill, of being in that obvious pattern of every time I catch up you are going to
put another carrot in front of me” – Mike O’Brien right before Ascended weapons
No offense to Anet, but their TP is complete garbage. In fact, the entire game economy is garbage. How hard could it possibly have been to balance the economy and get it ready for the players before they released the game and then tweaked it a bit afterward?
This farming is terribile and ruin the game. Expecially those farming in Orr. They dont even care about dead people and Keep rushing To another Champion. Really, What game permits that?
I have to agree with this point. The zergs going around killing champions are so fast that you have to focus on getting a few hits in and rushing on or you miss out. It does mean that people who die are on their own a lot. You just don’t have time to ress people or you lose out on loot. It’s that simple.
Why? Because the champions that are being killed die and respawn too quickly. Get a decent size zerg and these champions die in like 10-15 secconds and then the zerg moves along like locusts. It takes a few seconds to ress someone, a bit more if they are defeated.
To quote a now-famous woman: Ain’t nobody got time for that!
It’s a game forum. The truth is not to be found here.
No offense to Anet, but their TP is complete garbage. In fact, the entire game economy is garbage. How hard could it possibly have been to balance the economy and get it ready for the players before they released the game and then tweaked it a bit afterward?
Players ARE the economy.
Absolutely. Players wanted more gold for themselves so they demanded better rewards. Giving them what they want in turn increases the amount of gold in the system and hence creates inflation. That’s not to say that champions shouldn’t be more rewarding. After all, there was no reason to kill them prior to the previous patch.
These patches can be very disruptive to the economy overall. The dungeon gold patch was supposed to alleviate inflation. The champion rewards patch pretty much undid all that and made it even worse.
There were an awful lot of shocks to the economy at once, and I’ve been impressed by how well they’ve balanced out. Fine materials have dropped a bit but basic materials have surged; lodestones are down but ectos up. If you compare the cost of making a legendary now to the cost right before the path, the prices line right up +/- 10% across the board – and legendaries use a very broad basket of resources.
That said, none of your examples show a significant price hike since august 7th. If anything, prices have lowered a little bit.
You didn’t look at my chart did you? The prices are rising. Look at GW2spidy.com
BUT the inflation still in its infant stage, and I am just hoping it gets nipped in the butt before it grows to become an ugly Troll sized inflation.
I did look at your charts. Most of them show a slight decrease since 10th of august, others show a non-significant rise. Only ecto rose quite a bit but that’s hardly an argument. If you look at the all time charts, it’s hard to notice anything but low prices across the board.
If I can’t play Guild Wars 2 at work, I won’t work in Guild Wars 2 either.
Delayed content is eventually good. Rushed content is eternally bad. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto
I have proposed Anet should have regular inflations figures. This is to be used as objective factual data for coming to a general agreement about the state of the economy and inflation. As of yet Anet have given no indication whether they are favourable to this. Anet may not even have inflation figures to be used in their planning and adjustment of the economy and inflation. With out such hard data people can selectively pointing things out as representative as what is happening to the economy and inflation as a whole when in fact it might not be. For instance people have pointed out certain items have gone up in gold prices and from that fact the inflation is going up. However at the same time gold prices for Superior Runes of Pirate has gone from 10g to 3g in just 2 weeks and now it has come down from 20s to 5s. Not only that Waypoints cost is coming down as well. So from this can it be said that the economy is in deflation?
We really need Anet to give out regular inflations figures like CPI or some weighted average basket price indices to determine whether the economy is in inflation as a proven fact.
The best way to beat inflation is to farm harder. You just need to stay ahead of the curve! Everyone needs to go farm more, it is the only way to stay ahead of the inflation bubble.
We now live in a farm or die game. You will quickly be left behind if you don’t farm for a couple hours a day.
I’m not an economist, but even I know that a spike in prices due to a temporary rise in demand and/or a decline in supply is not inflation. Living Story events move players around so some items are in higher demand, others in lower demand, and supply for various things change. In a few weeks the LS events change and supply/demand shifts again.
The Gauntlet and Crown Pavilion events are temporary and so are their effects on the economy. The loot from champions is not significantly different from CoFp1 speedruns. You’re reacting as though temporary situations were permanent.
With out such hard data people can selectively pointing things out as representative as what is happening to the economy and inflation as a whole when in fact it might not be.
If we use the real world as a guide, hard data is insufficient to prevent people from selectively pointing out things as representative of what is happening, or disregarding data entirely to make up their own narrative.
