Guild Wars 2

The GW2 economy, for low quality items, is broken because of this.
There is too much supply of items that nobody wants, so everyone floods the trading post with them, selling them for vendor price.
i.e. low-level quality greens and blues.

There isn’t demand for these items, because they are inferior to crafting, dungeon, & karma gear.

There are several solutions to this problem.
-Make these items worthwhile, by putting some kind of special stats on them; for example: XP and/or Karma stat increases, or, some other bonus stat to help with leveling.
-Make these items drop less by half or more than what it is currently. This will help new players and people making alts, by giving them a chance at making money, when they sell these on the trading post.
-Just scrap these items and make them white quality instead.

If only players would sell them to a vendor and earn a few copper more, thus destroying them.

Or if players stop crafting so many, which they do to level their crafting past that range.

Or if players stop leveling so quickly because they don’t stop and update their armor and weapons as much since they will be superseded soon enough and at low levels unless you are twinking a new character with the bankroll of an old, in which case you simply buy higher grade stuff to begin with.

There are lots of reasons. And other threads that talk about it.

low quality… nobody wants… no demand… inferior… selling for vendor price

That’s a good train of logic there, which brings us to the conclusion:

Working as intended.

Why should the prices on these go up? To screw over players that are low-leveled and drain them of all their funds so they don’t have money to buy end-game gear when they hit 80?

Behellagh.1468:

If only players would sell them to a vendor and earn a few copper more, thus destroying them.

Or if players stop crafting so many, which they do to level their crafting past that range.

Or if players stop leveling so quickly because they don’t stop and update their armor and weapons as much since they will be superseded soon enough and at low levels unless you are twinking a new character with the bankroll of an old, in which case you simply buy higher grade stuff to begin with.

There are lots of reasons. And other threads that talk about it.

If you don’t want to read them, then don’t click on the thread.

MisterEction.9382:

Why should the prices on these go up? To screw over players that are low-leveled and drain them of all their funds so they don’t have money to buy end-game gear when they hit 80?

I’m not asking for them to go up. I’m stating that the economy is worthless because of this. It’s not always about making a profit, but trying to balance the economic state of the game. What’s the point of having all these items in the game if they are useless? That’s what i’m trying to get at.

Blues and Greens are a pretty good gold faucet, I imagine. You need those too, in an MMO.

I also imagine they are a very tiny part of the global economy. The economy is worthless because of this? Please…

I mostly merch Blues and Greens because their inherent value is higher than salvaging them for materials. To that end, they’re actually a valuable portion of how I make my money during normal gameplay.

I also bought up a bunch of level 79 Blues and Greens recently to use as stop-gap gear for my characters, so there IS a market for them at times. Of course, I did get most of it at 1c above vendor price. XD

How do you define “too much” and “not enough”?

Subjective, not objective.

nexxe.7081:

MisterEction.9382:

Why should the prices on these go up? To screw over players that are low-leveled and drain them of all their funds so they don’t have money to buy end-game gear when they hit 80?

I’m not asking for them to go up. I’m stating that the economy is worthless because of this. It’s not always about making a profit, but trying to balance the economic state of the game. What’s the point of having all these items in the game if they are useless? That’s what i’m trying to get at.

Those item are not useless. I like them being dirt cheap. If only everything in this game is dirt cheap, players won’t need to grind that much.

it would be nice if people could list things at the vendor price (not 1c above it).
that would enable people like us who are fed up with huge supply to buy 6 million thick leather sections at 7c, then sell them to a merchant for 7c (zero cost or profit).

I agree that the economy in this game is pretty bad, but compared to other games it gets some kudos. However, what the real problem is that there is no demand(supply sinks) in the game for low level materials.

So what needs to be done?
Invent demand/supply sinks.

How can this be done?
-Remove the repair vendors and have a player driven economy through homogeneous craftable repair kits available for all trades except cooking. Quality/charges would be based on the tier of materials used to craft it.
-Remove “dust” as the mechanic to convert materials from a lower tier to a higher tier. That way people can mystic forge the lower materials into higher ones. If one would like to keep the dust mechanic in then maybe greatly increase the dust drops to make this economical to do so.

Some people will say that it will be harder to level through crafting, but I hate to break it to people the game was meant to played, not crafted to 80. As far as the low levels goes, they finally can make some good money on there way leveling up by selling these higher priced lower materials.

Everyone wins.

Goloith.6349:

-Remove the repair vendors and have a player driven economy through homogeneous craftable repair kits available for all trades except cooking. Quality/charges would be based on the tier of materials used to craft it.

Now THIS is an interesting idea… So what you’re suggesting to increase demand for unwanted basic crafting materials is allow players to craft “Armor Repair Kits” that use, say, 25 Cloth/Leather/Metal + 25 of another basic crafting material that isn’t the first, to get a Kit with limited uses (15? 25?) that can be used to repair Damaged/Broken armor? I could really get behind this idea.

Goloith.6349:

However, what the real problem is that there is no demand(supply sinks) in the game for low level materials.

So what needs to be done?
Invent demand/supply sinks.

Everyone wins.

Except new players who can’t afford these things. I already can’t afford to buy all of the special blue thingies (claws or whatever) for Huntsman, or things I need to cook with at tier one, and grinding them is not as easy as in other games. You can’t kill boars to get hides, or X to get Y. You can’t use farming. You can’t fish. I was running around for an hour picking random herbs trying to get vanilla beans to drop that I needed, because they were too expensive. I had like 70 silver. They show 2 silver now, but they were more like 5 silver when I wanted to buy them.