Guild Wars 2

Okay, weird question, but I was talking to a friend about MMOs and Chinese hackers/gold sellers/prison-players and she mentioned somebody she knew whose account was hacked and looted. This individual had “thousands of dollars” worth of stuff.

I thought, for a moment, about my own account: something like 80g in the bank (I’m not super-hardcore and I hate farming, lay off!) that’s worth maybe $30-40 at current exchange rates… ($32.44 if I use the gold->gem exchange rate, $44.80 using gem->gold)

That led me to this question: the economy should gradually grow in size as the gold sinks are never going to fully keep up. But the exchange rate is also adjusting over time and it’s gotten significantly more expensive in gold terms to buy gems. So…

If we convert the available currency in all player accounts to USD using the gem exchange rate (and $10 = 800 gems), how much is that? How has it changed over time? Same question for gear and Trading Post sell-orders? If you combine all of these, how much in assets are available in GW2? Is it a nation-sized economy? Where would it rank in the world?

I know that we don’t have access to this information, but curious what that relationship looks like and wondering if anybody has any guesses: is it linear growth, exponential, random but generally up?

I assume John Smith could make these graphs and am very jealous of the data he has.