Guild Wars 2

The title says it all, what do you think the effect(s) of bots disappearing would have on the market? I see more bots than players roaming around, so I would hope a profound effect.

There’s quite a bit of disagreement already about how much effect bots are currently having on the economy, so I doubt this thread would be any different. Folks who think bots are ruining the economy will think removing them is going to make prices go back to how they were weeks ago. Folks who think bots are having no significant impact on the economy will think removing them is going to continue having no significant impact on the economy. Folks in between will predict something in between.

Personally, I’m one of those in between folks. I think bots are driving some prices down with oversupply, but they’re not the sole cause of declining prices over the past week or two. Supply and demand among regular completely legitimate players has also been changing over time, naturally leading to changes in the same direction as we’ve seen them going recently. They may have changed faster due to botting, but I don’t think by all that much. Players are probably having a significantly greater effect than bots still, at least for the time being.

People think that whatever their pet peeve is (be it bots, people undercutting for 1 copper, or anything else) causes a lot more than it does.

If every single bot were removed, and all their buy / sell orders invalidated, I think it would have less of an effect on the average buy / sell price of items than you imagine.

You’d see some sectoral shifts in the economy if bots were removed (for example, fine crafting materials would rise in price, while common crafting materials would tend to drop in price) that correspond to the things bots mine and ignore. You might see some very mild deflation if bots have dramatically different merchant patterns than human players.

I doubt it would have much of an effect though; GW2’s tax structure makes it pretty robust against botting.