Guild Wars 2

I’ve found myself leveling alts, and not exactly playing the endgame anymore and as a result have a small amount of gold that I’d like to invest not to make money but as a curb to the natural inflation of gold.

Now, I know the first inclination is to say, play the markets with your gold. But I’m lazy, I hate playing markets, and finally I’m not sure I’ll be playing the game much more anyway until something new comes out. I just know hoarding gold is a pretty bad thing to do if you want to at least maintain current wealth.

Any good suggestions? I was thinking lodestones, but then again I’m not sure if Anet will do something related to these obviously overly rare items. T6 mats seem too volatile, which leaves me with high end exotics, or perhaps something else.

Or is inflation low enough that it doesn’t matter to just sit on gold?

My money would be on ectos. Buy them when they are at their cheapest; so now is not the time. Everything of value in this game requires ectos. You can’t go wrong investing your money in such a desired commodity.

Holiday skins, stuff like mad moon shield costs ~40g currently, but costs 150g to craft for the 100 corrupted lodestones alone.

Unlike other games in the genre, GW2 has a robust economic design that does not suffer from systematic inflation in the long run. You do not need to sink your money into goods to store value; that is likely to be a losing proposition given the 15% trading post fee.

If you want to even out the lumps from shocks to the economy, purchase goods that will be valuable to you in the long run, particularly globs of ectoplasm and T6 crafting materials.

At the moment we are in the middle of a price spike due to a recent wave of bot bans; the market reacts much more quickly to an output shock than to a monetary shock. That means prices are particularly high right now, and it is a good time to unwind positions in goods, rather than build them up.

I would sit on my gold right now in your position, and start turning that gold into ectos / T6 mats once the price snap-back is clearly underway.

Storing your gold in items is a good idea if two assumptions are true:
1 – The item you store gold in will remain in demand.
2 – There will be long term inflation to keep that items price going up.

Both assumptions are questionable.
For assumption 1 there are two problems. Non-consumable items will lose value in the long run as demand falls as the people who want the item get it and stop wanting it (only mitigated if the rate of new character creation is equal or higher to the rate at which people stop playing characters that are farming the items/ingredients in question). Also, if people only want the item for its stats and ANET introduce an item with higher stats, demand for the older item will crash (only mitigated by the new item sharing ingredients with the old one).

As for the second assumption, the trading post fees prevent that. As the price level rises, so does the amount of gold the fees sink, slowing inflation. The end result is that, unless ANET increases the rate of gold creation, inflation will lead to the TP fees sinking gold faster than it’s being created. Which means temporary deflation and the price level cycling around an equilibrium point. The only question is if we have hit that point yet. I have yet to see anyone make a credible attempt at measuring inflation yet.

In fact, since any inflation measure would need to consider the volume of items being traded, and ANET doesn’t give us that data, I don’t think there is anyone but ANET who has enough data to measure inflation.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Storing your gold in items is a good idea if two assumptions are true:
1 – The item you store gold in will remain in demand.
2 – There will be long term inflation to keep that items price going up.

Both assumptions are questionable.
For assumption 1 there are two problems. Non-consumable items will lose value in the long run as demand falls as the people who want the item get it and stop wanting it (only mitigated if the rate of new character creation is equal or higher to the rate at which people stop playing characters that are farming the items/ingredients in question). Also, if people only want the item for its stats and ANET introduce an item with higher stats, demand for the older item will crash (only mitigated by the new item sharing ingredients with the old one).

As for the second assumption, the trading post fees prevent that. As the price level rises, so does the amount of gold the fees sink, slowing inflation. The end result is that, unless ANET increases the rate of gold creation, inflation will lead to the TP fees sinking gold faster than it’s being created. Which means temporary deflation and the price level cycling around an equilibrium point. The only question is if we have hit that point yet. I have yet to see anyone make a credible attempt at measuring inflation yet.

In fact, since any inflation measure would need to consider the volume of items being traded, and ANET doesn’t give us that data, I don’t think there is anyone but ANET who has enough data to measure inflation.

First point is solid. Second point is not. There are infinite amounts of gold being put into the economy each day, only atributed to how much people actually play. Just look at the dungeons and other stuff that actually creates gold from nothing. This means that sure, the TP will slow the rate of inflation somewhat but not completely stop it. Not by a longshot.

A fullrun of AC adds about 3g to the economy and its not even the best way to add gold to the economy.
Now I think ectos and crafting mats are a bad investment. Their rarity could change at any time and if an expansion with level cap increase happens, new mats (like t7 stuff) will most likely be added.

The rate of money creation is related to the rate of goods creation; the rate of money destruction is related to the rate at which goods are sold and the price at which they are sold.

In the simplest possible toy model, where everyone sells everything they farm to someone who then uses that item without resale, you get a really simple relationship – the price of goods will increase until the average value of items farmed is equal to 6.66- times the amount of gold farmed. In that case, the amount of money created from farming exactly counteracts the money sunk through trading post fees.

In the real game economy, things are not so simple; goods are flipped for a profit, goods are bought to be manufactured into other goods and re-sold, and different players can have very different gold to goods production ratios, all of which fundamentally change the relationship between the price level and the amount of gold in the total economy. But the relationship still holds, and it is stable – if everyone switches to CoF farming, the price level of goods will increase (since CoF farming generates a lot of gold but not a lot of salable goods), but it will stabilize at a higher price point. Similarly, if CoF farming is nerfed, the price level will decrease for the same reasons.

There is no long run inflation in this game, only a fluctuating price level that depends mostly on the gold to goods ratio of farmers and the amount of reselling taking place in the economy.

Gold to gems probably isn’t a bad idea.

No matter what you buy you will be subject to at least a 15% loss due to TP fees. With that in mind the best thing to store money in is something that sells on the TP for 1c above vendor value. It can’t ever go any lower so the MOST you’ll lose is 15%, and if the item rarity/demand changes then the only direction you have to go is up. There are a variety of items currently on the TP that are good candidates.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Gold to gems probably isn’t a bad idea.

I have been thinking about this, but only for a long term break that might possibly jump an expansion. Gold > Gems > Gold incurs an insane amount of taxes. But frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it at all.

I sincerely hope expansions don’t add levels. In that case, ecto will remain a constant, at the very least for the next year.

Ori is really cheap right now. It is only going to go up especially with new events and probably new legendaries becoming available in the future.

The best investment you can do are seasonal items. You buy them cheap when they are released and they are sold high after some weeks/months have passed.

It’s all about offer and demand.

Lets show an example:

When easier ways of to get precursors appears (like scavenger hunt), we can expect:
- An increase of Globs price;
- An increase in Lodestones price;
- An increase in T6 mats price;
- A decrease of Precursor price;
- …

Items that have high offer like ectos will have a low variability (maybe a increase of 10-20s each), independently of the demand, due to the market adjustments.
Items that have low offer like Precursors and Lodestones, will have higher variability (Precursors can be expected 50-300g or alot more in decrease).

Don’t forget, this is predicting based on the knowledge that what you are buying/selling remains the same for the time period you are doing math. If any of the conditions change somewhere along the time before you make the sell, then you might actually loose money (Like people buying precursors at 100g to sell them at 200g. If more ways of getting precursors are added, they might drop to 50g, making you loose money).

Cheers

Skins is probably the best way to go. I just posted this in another thread, but at the time of the Karka event I got a lot of a things cheap including precursors. I really just wanted a Clipper focus skin to have it, so I waited for the second day of the event and the price dropped to 46s. Know how much it is now? 25g+ on the TP. Really mad I didn’t buy more.