Guild Wars 2

I would first like to say that I am impressed Anet hired an economist to monitor and improve on this aspect of the game. Just another way they demonstrate their commitment to the game for everyone.

Now down to business. I also appreciate the state of the economy posts. Knowledge is power, and it empowers our players.

In the last state of the economy post, John Smith stated that Anet was going to make changes to the item drops in the game to bring the BLTP out of a vendor based equilibrium. I’d like to add my two cents. I am not certain how much should be done about this at the moment. Following are my reasons why.

The game is young. Thus, people haven’t had time to accumulate wealth or get to high levels (for the general population). That said, people are still relatively “poor” compared to where the economy will be after 6 or 12 months. This has an impact on prices at the trading post since people don’t have the fat wallets to buy everything up.

It has also been mentioned that it is easy for players to surpass the level they can craft at compared to their current level. While I do agree that is true, I don’t view this as a problem. It is easy to level a character, even casually. It is also easy to level crafting. If I want to craft something my level I have just leveled my crafting skill all in one shot. This has happened a couple of times. I find myself wanting to adventure more than stop and craft a couple items here or there to keep my skill up. I found it was easier to work with the BLTP to buy extra materials and do all my crafting at once (since I was already set up to do so). I think this is also another reason why trading post material costs are so low. There is a huge supply that isn’t being demanded all at once. People start to undercut to make a sale, and it becomes a race to vendor price + 1 copper.

It won’t be hard to get to max character level. If you truly want to get people to level their crafting more linearly with their character level, the most obvious way to do so is slow the overall leveling speed down. That is without thinking outside the box of course. I have seen time and again Anet make minor changes which have a big impact to accomplish their goals. I have no doubt you guys will sort this out without negatively affecting gaming experience.

I look forward to more on the story!