Guild Wars 2

There is little player control of production in this game. How does that design effect our economy?

There are two ways in which players dont have good control of production

Selection and quantity.

• Selection: the production of many items is primarily dominated by non selected creation. This means, players dont choose to create these items directly, a signifigant portion of the supply of most items happens without player intent.
  examples
  • iron/copper/mithril/wood(gathered materials) many are produced through random drop bags, and salvage
  • equipment: much of it is produced through random drops from any monster in the world, some higher level equipment is also produced as an undesired byproduct of trying to obtain a legendary.
  • runes/sigils: mostly created through random drops or mystic forge gambling.

• quantity: a signifigant portion of the supply on many items is a function of how many players play at a certain level. Since leveling is a one way process, this means overall control of quanitity of supply is out of player control, other than to play, or not to play.

So what effect does this have on the economy?

• lack of selection: there is a lot of waste in our economy, this is because the only way to get an item you want is to increase overall production. produce more goods, thereby increasing chances of getting desired items.
  • problems with this are
    • by increasing general output, you overall decrease the value of your product.(you are increasing supply of all materials, while the demand stays the same)
    • any product whose random creation isnt below its demand, will eventually become worthless. (only worth its base parts, or vendor value)
    • Overall we get a fairly wasteful economy, with many items being created with no real value. This also means the methods of intentionally creating these items, has small value. This overall makes most items feel worthless/low value.

• problems with lack of control of production quanities.
  Since we also dont control quantities, the market tends to be unable to handle changes in demand well. When items demand goes down, it continues to be produced, when its demand increases, its value spikes.

• Most of the solutions for these problems must be handled by developers, since players have no control, they have to do things like reduce supply, or create demand manually, they often will respond way slower to these things than the market would on its own. (being that patches are not deployed willy nilly)

So how does this effect different player types in the economy? Well supplier players are at a disadvantage, they provide the same product every one else does. And they dont have a strong ability to target specific items, even when they do, they are competing with people who have little or no vested interest in the cost of producing this product through intent.
In general, players have to take most of their items to market (to get liquid currency) and then spend on market, because targeting specific items is difficult.

This puts players at a disadvantage to marketeers, who can opt in, or out of their services, and target specific markets, because a supplier is competing with a large amount of people with no knowledge (and sometimes very poor business sense)
Essentially suppliers have little personal choice in the value of their time.

I believe this is one of the primary reasons the game tends to feel unrewarding, and why the game tends to feel like a grind to many people who start trying to achieve a specific item.

phys.7689:

This puts players at a disadvantage to marketeers, who can opt in, or out of their services, and target specific markets, because a supplier is competing with a large amount of people with no knowledge (and sometimes very poor business sense)
Essentially suppliers have little personal choice in the value of their time.

If i understand the whole post correctly, you dont like that some items cant be farmed directly and there is alot of rng in lootdrops, t6 fine mats or cloth in general are good examples for that i think.

You didnt really make a suggestion on how to change that (if you were a developer), so its hard to give you any pros and cons about it.

But lets assume that they make t6 farmable more directly, which would mean that they either:
- decrease loot table variety on mobs that drop t6
- directly award a certain t6 mat for completion of a certain event

How would that change the economy?
In demand mats certainly can be farmed more directly. t6 claws are getting high in price? Everybody will be going to farm raptor hatchlings, and i dont mean only farmers, i mean those people that used to run the karma train in eotm or the champ train in FGS. Before you know it, there is an oversupply of t6 claws, prices plummeted and meanwhile t6 bloods went up in price because nobody farmed them or got them through a random drop. Now everybody runs to SSC and kills karka, until the price for bloods goes down again and something else is more profitable to farm.

This would result in prices going up and down more rapidly and frequently, which is in general not a characteristic of a balanced economy (it would also mean higher profit margins for the marketeers, mind you).

I think one big advantage this rng loot system and the widespread sources of each single item has is that those items can be obtained in a wide variety of ways. Anet wants you to be able to enjoy and play as much different content as possible.
As soon as there is a BEST way to farm a certain item, we will be back at farm trains and not play the game you want to play.

What are the most demanded items? I would argue precursors/Legendaries.
Lets see what are the bulk materials for those items:
Precursors:
- t5 fine mats, wood and ore to craft rares to forge
- rare/exotic weapons
-gold
Legendaries:
-t6 Fine mats
-ectos
-gold

Now where is the most efficient way to farm those mats? You guessed it, trains in eotm, FGS and world bosses.

So i could make a point that it already IS possible to farm more or less directly for the most in demand mats in game.
The question is, is that a solution and a way to play the game that you think is engaging and worthwhile?

Wanze.8410:

snip

Well i didnt give solutions to leave it open to people to comment/think about, first i wanted to show the problems of the system.

but looking at your example, you wouldnt see as heavy fluctuations as you think, the items that are most often found in karma train areas would go down, decreasing the value of repetitive karma trains
i think this is good, then people will be making a choice between fast karma, and fast loot gain. Right now, whatever the most people are doing is the most profitable in almost every facet. karma trains give superior karma, superior exp, and superior gold. This would theoretically spread players out a lot more, and make each type of content aside from the meta more profitable

As far as huge fluctuations, wouldnt really happen, people who specifically are trying to supply the lacking items would quickly adapt and jump in. Even with fluctuations, good old flippers would save the day, and actually be providing a better service, because their normalizing effects would be more necessary.

The main problem would be the devaluation of whatever items are dropped by the current meta in terms of non market focused play.

As far as being back to farm trains, thats where we are today, except they arent varied, rarely change without developer intercession, There already is a best way to play, and it essentially generally becomes more and more the best way to play the more people that do it. This would increase the variety, and knowledge, and depth of being a supplier, much like TP players are generally less bored, because they have to adapt to a living breathing economy, suppliers would as well.

To reduce the effect of the non suppliers favorite meta decreasing the value of drops, I would lower the output of certain materials through non-targeted play.

to balance this loss in items, one could make karma be a more horizontal currency, giving you the option to buy many materials with karma, the caveat, would be that based on mathematical analysis of general karma flow, these items value would be noticeably less effecient to get via karma, they could even automate the costs of these tradeable materials to cost more or less depending on how much karma is generated versus supply of these items.

Monsters outside of these karma focused areas/events could have higher drop rates, or players could take on titles that enable or increase certain types of drops, or any of many otherways to increase drops through focused play.

In this way the supply would be intentional, while at the same time people would have ineffecient access to items they need. It wouldnt increase the overall gold, and supply would adapt much better to the demand of an item, and the time of aquisition

however, i do agree that the current system has the advantage of a relatively stable, and abundant supply, most of the time. However with that advantage it basically means that supplies will generally be of low value almost by definition.

I would suggest that any targeted item systems be saved primarily for later game for this reason. While leveling, the current system is fine, it tends to become a problem later on in the game, when players have matured, and the farming meta tends to become fairly stale.

As far as the things you suggested as direct farming, its not really accurate, those are the best ways to mass farm items, without any specific focus(other than level of items). You just increase your volume of random drops. All those farms are based around the realization that killing lots of stuff with as many people as possible that allow you to still claim credit will give you the most of everything. They dont target a specific supply, they just increase production overall, which actually lowers the value of items for everyone.

Making stuff available for karma has 1 big problem that i realized in my karma tax topic. It greatly favours those that have a huge stockpile of karma.
But i agree that switching farming spots (for specific items or karma) more often and cycle it through different content would improve the general game meta to break up trains or at least give some more variety to them.
For karma i already made some suggestions in the other topic:
-DR for karma gain
- add a karma gain buff for different content each day (dungeons, wvw, pvp, fractals, heart events or certain maps)

The same could apply for items. Well DR is already in place but buffing certain content would work:
- additional t6 crafting bag for completing a dungeon on a certain day
- increased droprate of associated skins/weapons from teq/wurm on a certain day
- a specific reward for doing a map completion again (would need to talk to a npc on that map to reset your map completion progression, if already completed)

Wanze.8410:

Making stuff available for karma has 1 big problem that i realized in my karma tax topic. It greatly favours those that have a huge stockpile of karma.
But i agree that switching farming spots (for specific items or karma) more often and cycle it through different content would improve the general game meta to break up trains or at least give some more variety to them.
For karma i already made some suggestions in the other topic:
-DR for karma gain
- add a karma gain buff for different content each day (dungeons, wvw, pvp, fractals, heart events or certain maps)

The same could apply for items. Well DR is already in place but buffing certain content would work:
- additional t6 crafting bag for completing a dungeon on a certain day
- increased droprate of associated skins/weapons from teq/wurm on a certain day
- a specific reward for doing a map completion again (would need to talk to a npc on that map to reset your map completion progression, if already completed)

massive karma people would be a problem its true. But they would be a problem no matter how they readjust it, since the problem is they already have it. Perhaps they could limit the max karma expenditure per day for tradeable items (to a pretty high number) yes some people would be pimping for awhile, but ehhh, they earned it. They could also do something like allow karma trading for black lion chests/transmutation charges/ other gemstore consumables for a short time frame before making changes to karma aquisistion.

Honestly though i dont think karma aquisition is that bad, My main change would probably be to scale it better on difficulty, give greater bonus to events that have failed, or not been completed in a long time, and reward it based on how much of the events you were actually involved in. Say you only participated for 1 minute in a 10 minute event, 1/10 the karma.

karma is mostly event based, so i wouldnt say DR is a good idea, yeah people who play more get more of it, but ehh, they played more. people who want dont want to get left by players with a lot of time will either need to have more skill/knowledge or buy gold, that doesnt really change. Except their may be more varied methods/meta for earning gold effeciently.

The thing with stockpiles of karma is that it’s still a one-time anomaly. Once it’s gone those players are back on an even playing field.

These kinds of anomalies are created (and exploited/taken advantage of) every time some special event comes around anyways.

Overall I don’t see it as that big of an issue.

DaveGan.8065:

The thing with stockpiles of karma is that it’s still a one-time anomaly. Once it’s gone those players are back on an even playing field.

These kinds of anomalies are created (and exploited/taken advantage of) every time some special event comes around anyways.

Overall I don’t see it as that big of an issue.

well i think the worry is a flood imbalancing the economy for awhile if karma becomes more valuable, but they could just put a limiter on it like they do with wvw chests, andachievemt boxes.