Guild Wars 2

I have so much more I can say and debates on economics can go on forever as you can see from a lot of the posts in these forums. Just please stop posting. I am asking nicely. I have dropped out of the debate. You win. Buh bye!!

You admit defeat, and that somehow means I need to stop posting? How does that work, exactly?

First off I didn’t admit anything. I just decided to walk away from it because it can go on forever. Secondly I didn’t mean to stop posting forever. I meant to stop replying to my posts because we basically hijacked this guys thread. I am trying to be nice.

@ Tolodine
I’ve read all your posts – you man have completely no idea how economy works. Zero. Null.

For a persistent world to maintain a stable economy, a balance must be struck between currency sources and sinks. Generally, games possess numerous sources of new currency for players to earn. However, some possess no effective “sinks”, or methods of removing currency from circulation. If other factors remain constant, greater currency supply weakens the buying power of a given amount; a process known as inflation. In practice, this results in constantly rising prices for traded commodities. With the proper balance of growth in player base, currency sources, and sinks, a virtual economy could remain stable indefinitely.

Yes, I do agree with you on this part of it but show me a game where the “economy” as ever truly stabilized.

As in the real world, actions by players can destabilize the economy. Gold farming creates currency within the game more rapidly than usual, exacerbating inflation. In extreme cases, a cracker may be able to exploit the system and create a large amount of money. This could result in hyperinflation.

This is what has happened in every MMO I have ever played and will just keep happening. This is the part that NEVER stops. When people put stuff on the AH for extremely high prices, buying gold looks better and better for a lot of people. They buy the gold from the gold farmers bringing more and more gold into the game and creating a never ending cycle. ANET tried to combat this using the in game gem buying and trading but we all know how that is going. There are some people that play the AH without affecting the economy much at all but there are others that do nothing more than set the extremely high prices to make sure hyperinflation continues to happen for the years that the game will be out. I can predict that in less than 3 months those precursors are going to be over 1k gold if not 2k.

In real world entire institutions are devoted to maintaining desired level of inflation. This difficult task is a serious issue for serious MMORPG’s, that often have to cope with mudflation.

In this game players are setting the amount of inflation and there is no one to govern it. In any and every “economy” rules and regulations have to be built to govern that “economy”. There are NONE in this or in any game I have ever played and therefore it is not a true economy. It is EBAY. I for one would not want any of person from a game running the global economy. There are no calculations or predictions being done in this game by any one person because no one really knows how much gold is actually in the game at this moment or even how fast it is actually coming in. There is nothing to measure any of that. The only thing in game that actually has that calculation is the gem sales. No one goes by that when selling on the TP.

I know what I am talking about. It is putting it on paper that I always have problems with.

Tolodine.6748:

There are no calculations or predictions being done in this game by any one person because no one really knows how much gold is actually in the game at this moment or even how fast it is actually coming in. There is nothing to measure any of that.

What exactly do you think John Smith is being paid to do? Nothing?

We are talking players. Not devs. He isn’t there to set prices on items he is there to keep items coming into the game steady and not get out of control then find ways to get them back out of the game when they do get out of control. No Dev is going to tell you how much gold is coming in or going out of the game at any given time unless they feel things really are getting out of control. In his post he is talking about people using exploits to gain large amounts of any 1 item in the game and how it effects the economy. I don’t see any calculations or predictions telling people how to set their prices.

Of course he isn’t going to tell people how to set their prices – that’s what a market does. If he was going to tell people how to set prices, the BLTC would have had no reason to exist – it might as well have just been an exchange where all the prices were set by ArenaNet.

A quick quote from Wikipedia (important part in bold):

A market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services (including labor) in exchange for money from buyers. It can be said that a market is the process by which the prices of goods and services are established.

You need to give evidence for and demonstrate underlying mechanisms for what you’re claiming, because I don’t see any in your posts so far.

Yeah, no external force would need to tell us how to set prices in order to avoid inflation. They could change gold sink prices quite easily, raising them if inflation is too high, lowering them if we start to see deflation. Price ceilings and floors may make sense when we’re talking about essential goods and services like (real-world) drinking water, but they definitely don’t apply to anything in the fictional world of GW2.

And it’s not like gold farmers just magic their gold into the game from nowhere. That gold is already in the game, whether they then sell it to someone else for real money or not.

Finally, you can’t call it hyperinflation unless/until we see precursor prices continue rising past the point where they probably should be, given the costs that go into making them.

So to continue on the note of Legendary precursors. They have triple since their first listing prices. Dawn in particular has gone from 60g-180g, now I’m no math major but the game has not been out for more then 40 days and the price has gone up by 120g, so ~3g a day?

Someone already has. 120g in 40 days is more than just normal inflation. All you have to do is look at the TP and see that the most of the endgame items are starting skyrocket. I didn’t right down figures from day 1 because I have seen it in every single game and don’t feel the need to. I already knew it was going to happen.

Finally, you can’t call it hyperinflation unless/until we see precursor prices continue rising past the point where they probably should be, given the costs that go into making them.

That is not what is setting the prices unfortunately. Whether is took 20g or even 50g to make the thing it will still be put on the TP for 180g or more. No one is saying to themselves “Ok… it took me 2 hours of play time to make this thing and 10g in matts. I only want to make about 10g on it so I think I will put it on the TP for 50g.” Otherwise we would see the prices fluctuate up and down for every sale.

Dawn is now 333g as I type this and it has only been 9 more days since the original post. That is ~17g a day. It has gone up exponentially since the original post.

Anyway…. I am really done now. Botts are running the game now anyways and nothing is really being done about it. I have reported so many in the past few days it isn’t even funny. Take care everyone. It is has been fun.

Kozai.8269:

yooms and Morphemas, what happens when you set a limit on market prices is that items that have more demand then that price get traded off market. I saw it happen in another game I was in, a few very high priced, hard to get items got done entirely by private trades.

In one sense, its a good thing if some players got a bunch of these legendary precursors through exploits early on, as they can now trickle out onto the market. If none had been generated that way, the supply would be even less. And I’d be surprised if the devs make them easier to get, since they are purely optional/cosmetic its hard to make an argument that anyone NEEDs them.

The problem with off market trades is that an extreme amount of trust come into play from one side of the trade in this game. Since there is no actual way to trade items at the same time outside the TP, one player is then forced to send the item first and then trust the other player to send their item.

This can obviously led to scams by players who do not have the item but claim they do (or even by players who do have the item) so the amount of people willing to do this becomes very limited.

Sure, if a player lost 1g or even 10g to a scam like this, it might not be a big deal. But pre-weapons go for over 100g in most cases and people generally do not like to gamble that money in something that can easily lead to a scam.

We’re actually fortunate to have people with big stacks of money in the game. The high end legendary precursors are worth the 300+ gold, and without people able to pay that price there’d be essentially no incentive to dump resources into the forge to craft them. That the items are actually moving at that price now has ignited the crafting economy, as it is now economically viable to feed the forge in search of a precursor.

Some people like playing markets, they use tried and tested market strategies. They employ help from others to flip items like burgers for profit BUT….
they’re not the bad guys here, nor are the bots.
The bad guys are the morons who buy them at hyper-inflated prices like this and add the “demand” to “supply and demand”

If you want to see them drop in in price, stop buying them.

Hmm i think the people who complain about the price of precursors on the TP should take a look at how much a set of obsidian armor cost in GW1

I understand both sides of the argument here,

First of all I agree that getting a precursor out of “luck” is a bit stupid. To be honest if somebody I knew in real life that plays this game a lot less than me just “happened” to get lucky in the mystic forge and get a 300 gold item I’d probably quit playing this game on the spot. Note: “probably” :p

However, I also think that it would be a bad idea to make precursors a set recipe. No matter how hard, people WILL put in the effort and in a matter of weeks loads of people will be running around in legendaries.

I’d much rather prefer if arenanet had complete control of how many legendary weapons circulate on each server (an example would be by maybe giving legendary precursorsors only to winners of certain competitions). This would highlight a sense of achievement rather than mindless grinding or getting lucky. Also, this would allow arenanet to release more legendary precursors as they see fit. E.g.: if the guy is selling a weapon for 300 gold and nobody can afford it then its time for Anet to make new competition and hand out more.

The long term effect of this would be people with legendary precursors too scared to set their weapon at ridiculous prices because then more would enter the server hence reducing its overall value.

Diviner.7405:

The problem with off market trades is that an extreme amount of trust come into play from one side of the trade in this game. Since there is no actual way to trade items at the same time outside the TP, one player is then forced to send the item first and then trust the other player to send their item.

This can obviously led to scams by players who do not have the item but claim they do (or even by players who do have the item) so the amount of people willing to do this becomes very limited.

Sure, if a player lost 1g or even 10g to a scam like this, it might not be a big deal. But pre-weapons go for over 100g in most cases and people generally do not like to gamble that money in something that can easily lead to a scam.

You know what? You’re absolutely right. In another mmo (The Old Republic – unfortunately I subscribed to this far longer than I should have), they had a mailing feature built in called CoD, or “Credit on Delivery,” that addresses this issue. Basically the seller would mail the item and set the expected amount of credits they expected to receive upon delivery. When the buyer opened the message with product, they could choose to accept the item and, by doing so, automatically pay the listed amount; or they could choose not to accept and the product would eventually be returned to the seller and the potential buyer keeps the money. I think Anet should implement something similar to deal with these trust issues.