Guild Wars 2

Economic question because I think this ties in with the TP but no clue.

What happened to platinum coins? Was there really a reason to retire GW1’s currency system and adopt WoW’s?

My hunch:
- gold should be the most valuable and 1gp should be really valuable.
- 10 000cp equals 1gp while 1000gp equals 1plat. For finetuning drops and TP values a plat has 10 times less power.
- ancient dragons need to eat gold and platinum to awaken, therefore destroying a massive amount of the old currency base
however this makes for a feeling that people don’t have money at all. I think it would have been a better idea to make 10plat the same value as a current 1gp. It maintains the old currency system, people don’t feel nearly as poor and it isn’t a blatant rip off of the game we all try to avoid.

Am I correct or is there another reason?

marnick.4305:

Economic question because I think this ties in with the TP but no clue.

What happened to platinum coins? Was there really a reason to retire GW1’s currency system and adopt WoW’s?

My hunch:
- gold should be the most valuable and 1gp should be really valuable.
- 10 000cp equals 1gp while 1000gp equals 1plat. For finetuning drops and TP values a plat has 10 times less power.
- ancient dragons need to eat gold and platinum to awaken, therefore destroying a massive amount of the old currency base
however this makes for a feeling that people don’t have money at all. I think it would have been a better idea to make 10plat the same value as a current 1gp. It maintains the old currency system, people don’t feel nearly as poor and it isn’t a blatant rip off of the game we all try to avoid.

Am I correct or is there another reason?

This is taking the WoW clone stuff a tad far. That currency system is hardly an invention of Blizzard. In the UK our coins are copper coloured, silver coloured and the most valuable is gold coloured. It’s been this way for a very long time.

GW1 is not the originator of the copper, silver, gold, platinum system in gaming either. It’s an old staple of D&D and it’s based on UK coinage.

What if they are just prepared for the inevitable inflation of currency and are planning to add in platinum once most of the player base has 1000+ gold in liquid assets?

Geikamir.6329:

What if they are just prepared for the inevitable inflation of currency and are planning to add in platinum once most of the player base has 1000+ gold in liquid assets?

There are clever ways to add gold sinks into the game. My guess would be that they will do this at least once per month. The reason why is simple; they want to add content every month. Since adding content costs revenue they have to find a way to generate revenue every month.

If people don’t have a reason to spend gold then gold isn’t worth anything. It won’t matter if you add platinum, sea shells or popsicle sticks as a currency. If there is no reason to use them to buy stuff with it; they will all be worthless.

Kana.6793:

marnick.4305:

Economic question because I think this ties in with the TP but no clue.

What happened to platinum coins? Was there really a reason to retire GW1’s currency system and adopt WoW’s?

My hunch:
- gold should be the most valuable and 1gp should be really valuable.
- 10 000cp equals 1gp while 1000gp equals 1plat. For finetuning drops and TP values a plat has 10 times less power.
- ancient dragons need to eat gold and platinum to awaken, therefore destroying a massive amount of the old currency base
however this makes for a feeling that people don’t have money at all. I think it would have been a better idea to make 10plat the same value as a current 1gp. It maintains the old currency system, people don’t feel nearly as poor and it isn’t a blatant rip off of the game we all try to avoid.

Am I correct or is there another reason?

This is taking the WoW clone stuff a tad far. That currency system is hardly an invention of Blizzard. In the UK our coins are copper coloured, silver coloured and the most valuable is gold coloured. It’s been this way for a very long time.

GW1 is not the originator of the copper, silver, gold, platinum system in gaming either. It’s an old staple of D&D and it’s based on UK coinage.

Doesn’t answer my question. Why was a working system changed into a less transparent system hammering in your face you’re poor?

a working system doesnt mean its the best system or the only system.
for new people who did not play gw1 this system is easier to understand.

marnick.4305:

Doesn’t answer my question. Why was a working system changed into a less transparent system hammering in your face you’re poor?

In what way is it a less transparent system?

Adding a few zero’s to all the numbers doesn’t make me any more or less poor. The inflation in GW1 was just silly, I can only assume they wanted to avoid repeating it.

Instead of the current copper > silver > gold you had gold > platinum > ecto’s. Copper and silver were essentially worthless and most trading was done using items as an improvised currency. The system ended up being rather ridiculous.

I didn’t play GW1, and that’s actually a pretty amazing story. Did the game particularly facilitate barter at a level where ectos could function smoothly as an alternate currency, or was it a more clunky system?

It doesn’t matter whether you call it gold or platinum or ugly socks. Currency is currency, its value is relative to whatever it can buy.

GW1’s system was just a slight (and often inconsistent) enhancement of single-denomination games in which there is “gold” and only gold. I don’t even know why they bothered with “platinum” when for all purposes it was a glorified comma.

Tarvok.4206:

I didn’t play GW1, and that’s actually a pretty amazing story. Did the game particularly facilitate barter at a level where ectos could function smoothly as an alternate currency, or was it a more clunky system?

Well, in the sense that GW1 had direct trading, yes, it facilitated a smooth ecto-based trade system.

People associate anything that is similar to WoW and associate it as clone. It’s like apple suing everyone because their phones are rectangle. Then we have the people who say anything that’s not similar to wow is crap eg. the phone isn’t rectangular so it’s crap.

There is a 250 years difference between GW1 and GW2. In the real world, things change over the course of 250 years in terms of currency and coinage. Why wouldn’t that be also true in a game?

I have to admit the GW1 system of having ecto as the ultimate commodity was awesome. What was it roughly? 30 ecto for 100 gold? I wish I could bring all my GW1 ecto over to GW2. My Xunlai Chest was full of the stuff.

Lafiel.9372:

People associate anything that is similar to WoW and associate it as clone. It’s like apple suing everyone because their phones are rectangle. Then we have the people who say anything that’s not similar to wow is crap eg. the phone isn’t rectangular so it’s crap.

Actually, it’s more like when people accuse the guys that made the Lord of the Rings movies of ripping off Harry Potter. :p

Or like, back in the early days of Napster, how every song with comedy was attributed to Weird Al.

Ema.4953:

There is a 250 years difference between GW1 and GW2. In the real world, things change over the course of 250 years in terms of currency and coinage. Why wouldn’t that be also true in a game?

I have to admit the GW1 system of having ecto as the ultimate commodity was awesome. What was it roughly? 30 ecto for 100 gold? I wish I could bring all my GW1 ecto over to GW2. My Xunlai Chest was full of the stuff.

Personally, I’d like to see an MMO that had no default currency. It’d be interesting to watch and play through the period when the players inevitably shifted from pure barter to the adoption of some sufficiently rare but sufficiently commonly demanded product for use as money.

Tarvok.4206:

Lafiel.9372:

People associate anything that is similar to WoW and associate it as clone. It’s like apple suing everyone because their phones are rectangle. Then we have the people who say anything that’s not similar to wow is crap eg. the phone isn’t rectangular so it’s crap.

Actually, it’s more like when people accuse the guys that made the Lord of the Rings movies of ripping off Harry Potter. :p

Or like, back in the early days of Napster, how every song with comedy was attributed to Weird Al.

Ema.4953:

There is a 250 years difference between GW1 and GW2. In the real world, things change over the course of 250 years in terms of currency and coinage. Why wouldn’t that be also true in a game?

I have to admit the GW1 system of having ecto as the ultimate commodity was awesome. What was it roughly? 30 ecto for 100 gold? I wish I could bring all my GW1 ecto over to GW2. My Xunlai Chest was full of the stuff.

Personally, I’d like to see an MMO that had no default currency. It’d be interesting to watch and play through the period when the players inevitably shifted from pure barter to the adoption of some sufficiently rare but sufficiently commonly demanded product for use as money.

This is actually a pretty brilliant idea. Would never work though, the sheep would freak out. But back to the OP, yes it should have stayed the same. No idea what happened to Plat. It’s pretty silly.

How about this though….. In GW2 I can mine gold and then turn the mined gold into solid gold bars. I can then sell the solid gold bars on the TP. However, the solid gold bars are only worth several silver coins.

In what universe is there a meaningful difference introduced by adding yet another “decimal point” to the way the game counts the exact number of copper you have? Its not like our money has weight we need to condense.

All a “platinum break” would do is make the buy, sell, deposit, and withdraw windows even more annoyingly twitchy to opperate.

Theplayboy.6417:

This is actually a pretty brilliant idea. Would never work though, the sheep would freak out.

Maybe. What I’m thinking of is something along the lines of what you would get if you were to combine Eve Online with A Tale in The Desert. (I plan to check out ATiTD once I have an income again ankittenired enough of GW2 I’ll actually spend enough time with it to justify the subscription fee.)

Tarvok.4206:

Personally, I’d like to see an MMO that had no default currency. It’d be interesting to watch and play through the period when the players inevitably shifted from pure barter to the adoption of some sufficiently rare but sufficiently commonly demanded product for use as money.

Path of Exile has something like that but the game is more like Diablo.
There is no currency but there are items that can be used to trade for stuff so you can still have NPC vendors. The item themselves can also be used for various things. For example one of the items can be used to turn a common white item into the equivalent of a rare.

Ectos weren’t an official monetary system in GW1 although they became a very commonly used trading mechanic. You have to look back at why that actually occured. Trades were limited to 7 items and up to 100k (plat) in value. For trades involving items valued over 100k, the community deemed ectos (and also Zkeys and armbraces) to be used.