The Economic Crash
ALL MMO’s have TONS of bots—this isn’t the first.
Team Peenk
Rare items have seen a MASSIVE price hike and common items are now so cheap they are BELOW vendor value.
Rare items have seen a massive price hike huh? This might be because they are rare items and probably in a lot more demand. Kinda the definition of rare.
Common items are cheap because no one wants it. Bots won’t change that. Rare item has always been expansive. I’ve been watching the market on the weekend…price of fine materials seems stable to me. Keep in mind the economy is driven by 2million players…there has to be a significant number of bots to move the market for any significant length of time. Also, the number of items listed as for sale/buy in the TP is aggregated, not by a single player. I see no indication of the economy crashing as of now.
However, I am interested to see what you have to say about bots destroying the economy. Things I would suggest is to identify event hotspots that bots would camp, screen shot them at different time of day, travel through multiple zones and see if there are different bots around or just the same group, then draw a hypothesis from that on how many bots you think there are (don’t have to be an exact number), and how the activity of these bots leads to the collapse of an economy. That would give more tangible data to support your argument. You might also want to explain how you filter the demand effect, supply effect and bot effect that affects the price.
There must be some morons buying the gold otherwise they wouldnt be operating.
Easier said that done but if people dont buy it they wont bother farming/spamming chat/mail with their ****
Seriously, 2000 items being listed by ONE seller is a pretty big clue.
It’s been mentioned by a dev, that the single sellers aren’t actually that. It means x amount of players are selling the item at the same price.
Since Temperhoof indicated that it was 2000 items and not 1000+ (the display when you click to buy something), we can probably give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t temporarily blind.
However that said.. it might not have anything to do with botting players, but the custom bidding system. I regularily buy in chunks of 500 or so units, and I do not currently have a large pool of wealth. It would not be unusual for a player with 100 or more gold to drop a custom bid for 2k materials, and then consequently resell all those. In this case, that player did not do the farming for those materials himself.
As far as bugs are concerned, I have had the trading post eat a few gold on me already. I cry a little inside whenever it happens.
It is a shame ANet hasn’t better security to manage the bots.
I don’t see the influence on the market tho. Is it worse than the people who went server hopping to grab up unlimited orchalcum ore?
…Driven by a mass, and I mean MASS influx in bot activity… The game’s many events are now under the control of bots. Normal gamers can’t even enjoy these events any longer as an army of bots camp the location and teleport around earning rewards.
Ummm… maybe on your server but not on the one I am one. On Tarnished Coast I have encountered less than a dozen bots in the entire time I’ve played.
I hope you aren’t going to be publishing such a myopic view of the game.
Single players are injecting 1000s of items into the economy, far more that the customer base can actually consume. Seriously, 2000 items being listed by ONE seller is a pretty big clue.
Or you have a bunch of players who came from EVE Online and are used to playing the Station Trading game. They start small and slowly build up their reserve of goods until they start having buy orders for thousands. This is common in EVE Online and has nothing to do with injecting 1000s of items. If I buy up 2000 copper ore and resell it… what is this a clue of?
Rare items have seen a MASSIVE price hike and common items are now so cheap they are BELOW vendor value.
Please provide real data on this. Include data points from the original price point along with when this was and the current price point and -if- the item is selling at that point. I’ve seen a 100g staff on the Trading Post for almost a week now. It doesn’t appear to have been sold at that price but it is definitely listed.
Further, rare items that are useful will increase in price as more people see the value of them.
Common items that are useless won’t be bought up by players so they will have their price lowered to vendor pricing. Why? Because you can just sell them on the Trading Post from anywhere. Or you can use the trading post as a temporary bank slot.
Furthermore, many innocent players are finding that the Black Lion Trading Post is not giving them items they’ve purchased and constantly taking more money than they intend. Many players have been robbed of their hard earned in-game currency and the only response from ArenaNet has been “We do not have the tools to replace lost items and gold.”
“Many.”
I would say few. In fact, I would say an extremely small number of players have been affected by this.
“Robbed.”
Goodness, I can tell that this will be an unbiased article already.
So with no real word from ArenaNET, it’s time that the article finally be released describing the troublesome Black Lion Trading Post and how it has become the Achilles’ heel of Guild Wars 2.
I will post a link to the finished product late today or tomorrow after I’m done editing and drawing out the graphs and screenshots.
I hope people will be able to comment on what is sure to be an unbiased and insightful article.
Okay guys and gals, the brief article has been written up and will be posted on MMORPG.com shortly. I will link you guys as soon as it’s on the front page!
Officially, it’ll be posted up tomorrow.
(edited by TemperHoof.6438)
There’s clearly BS in the original post as it’s not possible to sell anything below vendor price.
how can you see if 1 seller is selling thousands of items? – Doesnt it just cram everyone selling at the same price into 1 listing?
Anyway, The OP is right in that the karma events in Orr is completely overrun, wether it be bots or actual players, they are a complete zerg fest. I cant even see the waves of mobs in some cases before they are dead. People run out to meet the waves of mobs just to get a hit in, which just makes you so aware of the game mechanics, any kind of immersion is completely lost.
It makes me sad, because my frame of reference is being in Orr 3 days after pre- and not enough people were there to turn the events into the joke they are now.
As for rares going up in price. I allways asumed they would increase slightly if they were in the category suited for crafting the exotics needed for the legendary precursor. As more and more people discover how to use the forge, Im sure those items increase in price.
Almost all the avatars you see in Orr are human gamers not bots.
This is happening because its so freaken hard to earn money in the game.
Seriously, 2000 items being listed by ONE seller is a pretty big clue.
What a load of crap.
I’m also a veteran of Eve Online – an MMO I played for 5+ years primarily for the economic aspect of the game. I started trading the GW2 trading post with a small seed of starter funds (6G) I bought via the online interface the first few days of the game, and began trading on the TP as soon as it opened.
Over time, I slowly built up the number of markets/commodities I’m trading in, as well as the volume of the trades (both number of trades, and overall volume of units). I now routinely order in excess of 10k units in several different markets, as (I’m sure) do many traders that actually know what they’re doing.
…as for people that think that they "can’t turn a profit’ with the TP…honestly, you’re simply doing it wrong. This is – hands down – the easiest in-game marketplace to turn a profit from I’ve ever had the pleasure to play with.
Join the No Heroes Guild, See http://BeMyGuild.com for more info.
1) each 250x of one item actually count’s as 1x seller, so listing 2000 items would display 8 sellers.
2) I play the trading post, I enjoy making money in mmo’s and learning the economics of what run the server. I currently have 25k of an item buying and 10k of a certain item selling. Do I bot? nope, I don’t even pve.
3) Since the last time the trading post went down I have not noticed any loss of gold or items, however I hope it does go down, why? it create’s demand, and demand means money.
I went ahead and posted the article in General Discussion already, Bots Overrun Guild Wars 2. Of course the article will be released in mass tomorrow, you can preview it there to get an idea on what was said on this subject.
While I agree the economy in GW2 is terrible; this article also sounds terrible.
No matter how many bots there are, it’s impossible to post items below vendor value. -.-
You had me interested until I got past most of the first paragraph, then it just felt like reading a doomsayer post.
Blackgate
While the so-called Trading Ghost Bug is a very real problem for some people, which has so far received a pretty kitteny level of attention from actual humans working for ANet, I really don’t think it has a place in a discussion of some alleged “Crash” of the economy. Yes, it’s awful for the people who’ve lost all their gold, and a bit scary for the rest of us (who know about it, at least) not knowing whether it might happen again, but it is nevertheless a technical glitch which will hopefully be fixed eventually (which may in fact already be fixed, though we wouldn’t know since no one official has acknowledged that the glitch ever existed in the first place…).
Once that real problem is removed from the picture, the rest of the OP’s complaints start to look a lot like all the other posts by people who know enough about economics to realize that they don’t know enough about economics to ever use the BLTC to their own financial advantage, and who are bitter about this fact.