Guild Wars 2

My guess is that NC Soft is behind all of this and forcing Anet’s hand in a lot of it. That is why precursors are now the end to obtaining Legendaries instead of the beginning as the video they released would suggest.

The game has turned into another “Korean Style” (Lineage II, Aion, etc etc) Grindfest that requires no skill in any arena other than sPvP and the end all for PvE rewards is not at all about how good you are at playing the game or how much of the game you have completed, but all about how “lucky” you get or if you “got in before the fix”.

Honestly had I done my research before purchasing and realized that this game was backed by NC Soft and not strictly an Anet game then I never would have purchased knowing NC Soft’s history in its other titles.

They had some great ideas for Legendaries in making you do a little of everything it’s just a shamed that the true bottleneck is “Luck”.

I watched a 47 minute video today of someone who went 1000 attempts at the forge and when all was said and done he was out 175 gold and had nothing to show for it….

It saddens me to see the game become nothing but a Grindfest with no payoff at the end.
—-

That being said I do find WvW and sPvP to be fun but still have yet to see them be rewarding.

As far as I can tell, the gem/gold exchange rate is the way ArenaNet makes money.

Why do I say this?

No MMO company posts their subscriber numbers monthly.
No MMO company posts their “free to play” profit numbers, quarterly.
and…
ArenaNet is not transparent regarding how the exchange rate is set.

Customers are ignorant of everything that matters in this context. For most, it doesn’t matter and they will happily pour their wallet into ArenaNets bank account. Without complete transparency, we will never know, and all these clever word games don’t accomplish anything that genuinely benefits the customer.

ArenaNet needs money to pay the bills. Wages, benefits, office space, hosting, space, power/HVAC, and internet transit are not free. They are actually quite expensive, and relying on greed and impatience is not a sustainable business model for years and years. It might create an initial burst of capital, but those monthly opex’s will consume it faster than people will buy new outfits and sunglasses. The gem/gold exchange rate is the "dial-a-profit’ widget for ArenaNet. They can make as much money as they want by changing that number, and there is absolutely nothing players can do about it, nor is there any way to know or call them out when they do it. You just pay. And pay.

Myself, I’ve played MMO’s since there have been MMO’s to play, and loathe, despise, and hate in-game trading, auction houses, and all the conveniences GW2 has promoted.

MMO’s need exactly one player-to-player transaction, and that is crafting items directly into another persons inventory. Everything else, all other rewards should be for you and you alone. No trading, no sharing, no mailing, just no. But alas, MMO devs instead “innovate” with sparkle ponies and glowing footprints, and continue to perpetuate all the ills of all the MMO’s made since 2005, expecting a different outcome. /boggle

I have zero expectations it will change. I suspect, in fact, it will continue to get worse and no-one will care, because MMO’s are now about profit, not about fun, challenge, and social teamwork.

In the economic system we have in place currently, free market will fail. Gems are supposed to be a gold sink from what i understand. Thus, the more gold there is in the game, the more it’s going to cost for gem conversions in order to remove more gold from the game, thus attempting to create an equilibrium. The problem, however, is that gold farmers artificially inflate the prices by creating an in-balance in the system, thus as it tries to compensate itself, those non-bots/non-farmers suffer. Another issue to this is that bots are able to “bypass” the DR in farming via creating more bots for higher volume cash flow, which in reality, DR forces them to have multiple bots in order to truly maximize profits, which in turn ruins farming for legitimate players and ultimately determines the outcome of the game’s economy. I don’t mean to get off topic, but it’s all inter-weaved in the ecosystem.

Now, imo, truly the best way to combat this issue would be to remove DR, but at the same time, remove the ability to mail in-game gold and give the ability to mail gems, or atleast set a limit to how much gold you can mail for specified durations. This will hurt gold farmers/sellers in that it will limit their cash-flow as they will no longer be able to sell massive amounts of gold at a time. It also destroys the automation since someone will actually have to sit there and wait for timeouts to send to a player thus creating a lag in purchaser’s receipt of gold, in turn creating a mistrust in gold sellers. The only question would be how much gold would be limited for how much time? Figure, there are items in game that sell for hundreds of gold, so maybe a scaling feature would apply. IE – 10 gold would have about an hour cooldown before being able to send again, whereas 100g would have a 12 hour cooldown and anything over 100g would have a 24 hour cooldown; All this considering that probably not many people are 1. Able to farm 100g+ in a short amount of time, and 2. Purchase high price-tag items multiple times in the same day.

I feel this is one way to combat bots and gold sellers due to the reasons above plus this will limit how much gold and how often bots will be able to send gold to “mule” accounts if such were to exist, thus slowing their numbers and profits, while removing negative portions of the game that affect legitimate players.

Just my 2cents

vjek.4270:

As far as I can tell, the gem/gold exchange rate is the way ArenaNet makes money.

Why do I say this?

No MMO company posts their subscriber numbers monthly.
No MMO company posts their “free to play” profit numbers, quarterly.
and…
ArenaNet is not transparent regarding how the exchange rate is set.

Customers are ignorant of everything that matters in this context. For most, it doesn’t matter and they will happily pour their wallet into ArenaNets bank account. Without complete transparency, we will never know, and all these clever word games don’t accomplish anything that genuinely benefits the customer.

ArenaNet needs money to pay the bills. Wages, benefits, office space, hosting, space, power/HVAC, and internet transit are not free. They are actually quite expensive, and relying on greed and impatience is not a sustainable business model for years and years. It might create an initial burst of capital, but those monthly opex’s will consume it faster than people will buy new outfits and sunglasses. The gem/gold exchange rate is the "dial-a-profit’ widget for ArenaNet. They can make as much money as they want by changing that number, and there is absolutely nothing players can do about it, nor is there any way to know or call them out when they do it. You just pay. And pay.

Myself, I’ve played MMO’s since there have been MMO’s to play, and loathe, despise, and hate in-game trading, auction houses, and all the conveniences GW2 has promoted.

MMO’s need exactly one player-to-player transaction, and that is crafting items directly into another persons inventory. Everything else, all other rewards should be for you and you alone. No trading, no sharing, no mailing, just no. But alas, MMO devs instead “innovate” with sparkle ponies and glowing footprints, and continue to perpetuate all the ills of all the MMO’s made since 2005, expecting a different outcome. /boggle

I have zero expectations it will change. I suspect, in fact, it will continue to get worse and no-one will care, because MMO’s are now about profit, not about fun, challenge, and social teamwork.

I agree with most of this although I think they’ve done some great things on this game. But you are wrong that there’s nothing players can do about it. They can go to the gold sellers which is what they’re doing. if their prices were reasonable then they could sell more gems for real money. Instead it seems like more and more people are turning to the gold sellers, and to make up for lost revenue they’re continuing to constrict the market to squeeze money out of it. It’s a short term money fix but it’s going to hurt in the long term, as more and more people turn away from it or simply give up on it all together.

Melk.6958:

I don’t understand the current gem economy, something is broken with your formula ANet.

Apparently there is a HUUUUUUUUGE demand for “GOLD TO GEM” transactions. Evidence of this is that when I started playing, 1g would net 277 gems. Now, 1g gets you 170 gems. That’s a big change.

However, the opposite is not true for “gem to gold” exchange. If I spent 1g to buy gems now, and then I turned around to sell gems for gold, I would lose 30silver. This doesn’t make any sense to me, at all. If there is huge influx in “gold to gem” trading, shouldn’t it RAISE the price of “gem to gold” by like… A LOT as well? Shouldn’t gems sell for more if they cost more to buy? What gives? You don’t seem to want people to actually sell gems for gold.

Hence, enter the gold sellers, hence the economy of GW2 is in deep kitten.

I don’t know the formula but they are not equal exchanges. If the Gem to coin ratio was equal or higher then to make money all you would have to do is buy gems with cash and sit there all day and exchange back and forth.

From what I see happening is people have been buying Gold from gold sellers, then converting them to gems and getting a better deal in the process then simply buying gems for cash from ANet. I have no idea how much of a difference this makes because I have no data, it’s just speculation.

Now the coin to gem ratio was always going to rise simply because people are hitting 80 and are making gold faster and faster from world drops. It won’t level out until the ratio is so high that people decide that buying it for cash is faster or easier. (1.333 hours of work at a real job for minimum wage will net you at least 800 gems) So, once the the ratio gets so high that you would have to spend X hours of playtime to get 800 gems people will just slap down real cash. God knows I’ve left work early enough times in the last 2 months I’ve easily lost $300-$400, yet i’m sitting here talking about not spending real money for gems.

The current state of legendaries perpetuate the issue we have with so many bots being in game even more. If a player has to get 320+ gold to get their precursor item and they’re making 1-5g per day and the conversion rate on Gems is $10 for 3.5g but a gold seller is offering gold at the rate of $10 for 15g which one do you think the player is going to choose (assuming they don’t think they’ll get caught)?

The legendaries make a massive “need” for gold which give the gold sellers all the more reason to supply gold, flooding the market with the very thing that the gem store is there to remove from the game.

Right now the only items sold in the gem store that are not aesthetic and actually worth spending your gold to get gems for are Boosts, like Karma boost and maybe XP if you’re leveling and want to level faster. MF is worthless so no one who has played and tested MF will buy that one. Fine Transmute stones are a nice perk too. For the most part though there is not a lot you can buy with gems that is worth losing the precious gold over. Even if there was wouldn’t someone just buy 15g for $10 and then convert that into 2310 Gems (Current Conversion rate for 15g)?

(you know economist really don’t like assuming :P )

I’m a 4th year Econ major and what is this?

90% of everything I’ve ever done is grounded in some pretty ridiculous assumptions the get absolutely crushed in real world scenarios. The ones that don’t get crushed are universally necessary, like ceteris paribus.

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

Well, what are we counting as exceptions from the theoretical 100% free market?

In general there are things about markets and market freedom that are really good and lead to good outcomes, but completely free markets tend to implode messily and be devoured by increasing returns and market power. So as an all or nothing thing 100% free markets are bad.

As for individual distortions – the 5% listing fee? More or less there to prevent the trading post from being bottomless storage; if you had some other mechanic to accomplish the same thing (items in inventory being marked as for sale and not disappearing until they were sold, for example) I think you’d have an improvement, since the 5% listing fee is causing market distortions on the ask side.

The 15% tax on all sales? It’s the only hard cap on growth of the currency base and thus the only thing ultimately keeping inflation in check. It’s also a hit on high frequency arbitrage trading and tends to hit the top of the income distribution harder, which will in general make your content more accessible. We can debate the number but the presence of this tax is a very strong mechanic, one of the strongest innovations of MMO economies of the last couple years.

Vendors buying items instead of simply selling them? It injects more money into the economy on the whole and evens out the rate at which players gain money (since most of those items would only be valuable as parts otherwise). Without it you’d basically have items only being worth their scrap cost, which isn’t much; price level in general would be lower to match lower incomes. I’m relatively indifferent here. I think, starting from scratch, I’d prefer a much deeper crafting and deconstructing system to relying on vendors to take junk items – but you’d need more raw currency being injected from somewhere in that case to maintain granularity. Not the design I would have made, but given the constraints you have I think it’s a fine choice and not something that’s causing a problem.

The gem exchange being, well, an exchange instead of a bid/ask market? I’m not really a fan. At the very least I’d like to see the entries based on what I want to buy and not what I want to sell (that is, when selling gold, I’d like to tell the game I’d like to buy 200 gems and have it quote a price instead of having to fine tune offers of 1 gold 20 silver or whatever) – since the exchange is being driven by wanting to buy things I’d prefer it to be parsed that way. I would like a bid/ask spread here since I often have a strike price and am checking the trader frequently looking for it. I don’t really see a problem here though.

Making lots of things bind on equip? Generally a very good thing, for the same reasons you want to sink gold – you need to sink items as well to keep an interesting item structure all up and down the spectrum. Bind on acquire is another story; I think that’s massively overused and distorting incentives in ways that are not healthy. I’d like to see dungeon tokens float, for example, and making things like crafting ingredients soulbound is really just covering up a more general problem with your karma system being broken. I think there’s a lot of work needed there.

Floating prices on the gem store? It hasn’t been tried, but I’ve never seen anyone try to fine tune the prices in their online store before, which makes it both exciting and dangerous. If I was in your position I’d be having a blast modeling that, because your online store, well, it honestly kind of sucks at the moment and you could be making so much more off of it.

Those are the big ones I can think of, did I miss anything? Generally I think the various currency controls in the game are strong mechanics, but the bind on acquire is overly paranoid and you need a lot of work on the cash shop.

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

In spiral knights 25 cents worth of energy = 1 hour of gameplay.
It’s why i believe the gem market will crash to 1g = 40-60 gems.
BTW in spiral knights you were given 100 free energy per day so effectly 25 cents worth(you couldn’t sell it on the exchange) you could craft items with that energy to make money or use it to run dungeons.

The fact is gold sellers are to blame as well as poor game design, right now gems actual value is worth 1g = 40 gems on the black market, $50 from a gold seller buys you 16000 gems, in order for both markets to be equalize gems must fall to 1g=40 gems.

Why poor game design? Simple, the best way to make gold in this game is to farm like a bot. They needed to make dragons, dungeons and very hard dynamic events give the best gold per hour to counter the botting.
The bots and gold sellers are destroying the games economy for legit players.

Silverghost.4192:

The current state of legendaries perpetuate the issue we have with so many bots being in game even more. If a player has to get 320+ gold to get their precursor item and they’re making 1-5g per day and the conversion rate on Gems is $10 for 3.5g but a gold seller is offering gold at the rate of $10 for 15g

Nope, $10 = 20g for gold sellers, how do i know? The same gold seller has been spamming lions arch main chat for 2 hours, this game doesn’t have any game masters, they need comunnity game masters and fast.
BTW 25 reports = temp ban for gm to check the player kitten

I for one think the gem exchange prices are controlled by a fairly simple algorithm based on supply and demand. Whether ArenaNet can directly manipulate the flow would come down to speculation but I have seen no evidence to suggest this. Quite the opposite actually. Since release (with the possible exception of the first few days) the prices have only been going one way. This is what we should expect to see as players gain more and more gold from playing the game, causing (expected) inflation. Because the real money price for gems is fixed, the exchange rate really only has one way to go until it settles.

About a month ago there was a brief period (hours or less) where players couldn’t purchase gems for real money but the ingame BLTC gem exchange stayed up. This resulted in a very obvious spike in exchange rates as the supply of gems for gems-to-gold conversions were cut off while gold-to-gems stayed live. When the systems came back, it settled down quickly. This again is exactly what you would expect to see of a supply and demand market, when either one is temporarily removed.

Finally, using the data from http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem, it seems there is a rigid % relationship between exchange rates. The premium on gold-to-gems exchanges is about 38% (X gems costs about 38% more gold than you would get trading X gems into gold). As far as I’m concerned, this helps prevent speculation in the gem exchange rates, leaving only “legitimate” trades to determine the exchange rates. Making the gem exchange a free market (and opening it up for speculation) would not be beneficial for the average player.

Also, although they only have about a week’s worth of data, the graphs clearly show the exchange rate trend people are noticing. Of more interest are the daily variations, with the same peaks and valleys showing up at certain times every day.

I think it would be interesting if ANet did adjust gem/gold to completely float the exchange rate. It could still work to have the 15% transaction fee.

I really don’t know if it’d go up or down, initially. It does seem like it could be very volatile, as part of the demand for gems will be tied to common events, such as new goodies for sale, for instance, pushing the gold/gem exchange rate up, and push it down on those times when the BLTP is down.

The thing I’d find most interesting would be comparing the “free market” exchange rate of gold/gem/$$ versus the 3rd-party gold sellers exchange rate. It’d give a method of quantifying the perceived cost of cheating.

I’ve been playing MMOs since Asheron’s Call (1999) and I’ve played more than I can count since then. Earning currency in this game is a massive grind when you look at the current prices for things on the TP. I like to do WvW primarily and any money you earn from WvW is a miserable trickle (practically nothing) often times it does not even cover your repair bills.

I can say.. that this is the first time that I have been tempted to buy currency from third party sellers. Yes it would be wrong and yes it would be against the rules.. but just look at the difference!

People are buying 16g from Anet for 50 dollars.
Other people are buying 100g from a third party seller for 50 dollars.

Thats INSANE and a ton of people can not pass up such temptation. They can buy everything they want (minus legendaries) with that money, then convert the rest to gems and get gem shop items galore.

It is going to cost you tons of money guys!

Edit -

I really like a lot of the ideas others have had. Better payout from things bots can NOT DO.

I also think the gem shop and game currency should have been kept seperate, but that boat has sailed.

To me, it seems a bit early to make absolute predictions about the game’s economy, as we have yet to see any significant additions or actions taken that would modify it. Seeing what happens when several all-new elements are introduced will perhaps be a good starting point to make more reasonable assumptions. We may be able to determine “it seems to work” or “it doesn’t seem to work”, but the actual reasons could remain opaque depending on the information available to players.

I’m actually surprised that there aren’t more “fluff” items available to purchase for gems, as well as more items available for a very small amount of gems (say, 25 – 50). Once a large portion of people have gotten their extra character slots, bank space, and so on, there will be a “need” for something to create a flow of gems. After having dropped $50 on gems, just to check it out and buy some items, I can say that I don’t personally feel that 75 gems is a very attractive price for a dye, for example. The current prices make me a “careful” spender if you will, which is obviously not good for any economy that depends largely on a consistent flow.

The game is young. Once there is a sizable collection of items to purchase and the flow of the economy has settled into a more stable state, it will likely be much easier to get a better picture of any bottlenecks that prevents it from flourishing. It’s not that long since it was obvious that the economy revolved around the leveling items. Once it reaches a state where several main aspects of the market is vying for people’s resources, then you’ll probably see an economy that is much easier to adjust.

A 100% free market is a pipe dream ripe for abuse [in the real world]. We have seen what people and corporations do without or with very little regulation. They saturate it beyond capacity, milk it dry, and show us remarkable displays of irresponsibility and carelessness, sometimes with devastating long term effects. Luckily, the game can’t really give us a free market anyway, because players cannot introduce new items into the mix or branch out the market outside of the developer-induced parameters.

It is interesting how a game’s economy can say a lot about the players’ priorities, and that is perhaps a more interesting angle to approach things like gem/gold pricing from: rather than trying to regulate the “key market” into a satisfying equilibrium, then identify and create new markets that can divert some of the pressure across multiple significant things.

After all, what we are trading here is really time and vanity.

Just out of curiosity, but why not set a max price for items? That way someone selling it can’t simply hoard the items and sell them at ridiculous rates. They’d have to sell them at the max allowed price.

This might sound very unfavorable to some, but it would give ANet some control back on the market.

Especially concerning precursors. At one point I think I saw them for 50g or something, and now they are being offered for 320+

Set maximum limits just like you set minimum limits on the TP is my opinion

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I’m relatively happy with the current gem/gold exchange system as it stands, although it would be nice to have some transparency about how the exchange rate algorithm works. Not necessarily the exact formula/values used, but some kind of detail about it would be nice.

While the ability to place buy or sell orders might give players greater confidence in the “honesty” of the market (specifically ANet), it does have its downsides as well. As others have pointed out, it does make it easier for people to manipulate (over the short term), but I think a bigger issue would be the “lag” between purchase and receipt of gold/gems.

That is, unless you accept the current price (for gems or gold), you would have to wait for someone to accept your offer before you were able to use the gems or gold to purchase something. While this is how the rest of the TP operates, I’m not sure many people would accept this with real money. (e.g. “I spent $10 to buy gems to convert to gold, but now I have to wait for someone to buy my gems before I get any gold”).

Yes, with the existing exchange, the buyer of gold or gems is forced to take the current price (or exchange rate if you prefer), but the price is not being directly manipulated by players with large funds, and in addition the “goods” are instantly available for their use.

In some ways, I think of the gem exchange as operating in a similar fashion to the material traders in the original GW. The prices they might bought/sold fluctuated based on supply/demand, but they always had materials available if you wanted them. The analogy fails a little because of the existence of player-to-player trading that (mostly) operated between the margins of the buy/sell prices.

when i started playing, i got 390 gems for 1gold……

If people keep buying from gold sellers, then doing gold to gems, it’s just going to keep raising the price on gems until a point is reached where it’s not desirable to buy from gold sellers for that purpose anymore.

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I do. Well I’d like to see the exchange done via a buy and sell order system like the rest of the trading post. The way I see it:

- We know how a buy/sell order system works. We don’t know how your algorithm works. Transparency leads to greater trust of the system.
– Because we know how it should work, we can also see when it isn’t working. When ANET’s algorithm isn’t working as intended, we have to hope that ANET notices.
– It works at reducing gold sellers in Eve Online (which is why ANET copied the PLEX system). It doesn’t seem to be working here. The super secret unknown algorithm is one of the differences.

What advantages does ANETs secret algorithm give ?
I can’t see any for players.

I can’t even see one for ANET. Having a separate algorithm means more code to maintain. Assuming it’s working as intended, all the algorithm allows is for ANET to manipulate gem prices without adjusting the number of gems in circulation. Which is just asking for more trouble later on.

If you want to adjust the gem<>coin exchange rate, do so by adjusting the number of gems in circulation. Either by changing the price people buy them with cash (a sale is one idea), or by buying/selling them directly on the exchange system. Nobody would notice if ANET is the one placing or filling trading post orders and, even if they did, I doubt they would care.

Aveneo.2068:

Just out of curiosity, but why not set a max price for items? That way someone selling it can’t simply hoard the items and sell them at ridiculous rates. They’d have to sell them at the max allowed price.

Guild Wars 1 limited players to carrying 100,000 gold on them at any time. Meaning that’s all they could pay in a single trade. That sounds like an attempt at setting a maximum price to me.

It didn’t work.

Instead players picked an alternative currency for high value trades. Which had a side effect of increasing the demand, and thus price, for ectoplasm.

Do that in Guild Wars 2 and the high value trades will be done over mail. Which is just asking for scams.

Would I be mistakened by saying that purchasing diamonds AT ALL is bad or this “economy”? By purchasing these products you’re literally taking the gold out of the game and making it more scarce, thus, more in demand. Unless this is intentional…

Joshmans.8937:

Star Trek Online has a decent system for their cryptic point currency i believe, or whatever they may call it now. The pink stone things. Completely forgot the name of it.

But yeah, you can list x amount of ‘gems’ for y price same goes for buying.

I think that would be dilithium.

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I wasn’t going to involve the woes of the TP in this discussion at first, but given that Gold is linked to RL money via Gems, I don’t see a way around it.

Real life markets are regulated for a number of very good reasons. I see no reason that in game markets should be less regulated.

The question then becomes “How much regulation is good, how little is too little, and how much is too much?”

The answer to that being “That depends on the nature of the regulation.”

Unfortunately, a monopoly is bad. And there is precious little way to get around the fact that we have a monopoly (ANet) in the Gem market. I consider this to be a monopoly because neither the buyer nor the seller can set the prices. Since ANet controls the pricing, we have a de facto monopoly.

Move the Gem market to the regular TP. Let people put in buy orders and let those with Gems to spare sell them at whatever price they see fit. This is the only way to break ANet’s de facto monopoly.

And I am 100% certain you don’t like that answer. The TP is quite obviously set up to be a buyer’s market due to the nature of the interface and the type of consignment house you have elected to implement. And a strict consignment house is what you have created, with a listing fee rather than a selling fee. As both the selling price and the asking price are visible to all parties the price is constantly driven down on any item that may potentially be rare enough to have value. IOW an item must be EXTREMELY rare, not simply rare to retain any semblance of value on the current BLTP.

CoH used a double blind Dutch auction system and had mixed results (i.e. hyper inflation but a functioning market where players could usually get what they wanted…. for a price) until they stabilized their economy by introducing a way for players to grind out most of the really desirable items in a reasonable amount of time (10 days of 5-6 missions a day).

Obviously, this is not an option you can use in GW2 because you live and die by cash transactions. Completely stabilizing the economy by allowing players to quickly and easily grind out top tier items is not an option for ANet.

What I would propose is a many fold solution that starts with redesigning your TP. First off, make it a double blind Dutch auction. No one knows what price items have been offered at, nor at what price they are bid at. Keep a sales history of the most recent 25 sales on that item, how many bids (buy orders) there are for that item, and how many of that item are for sale.

Secondly, kill flipping. Market PvP is all well and good fun until real money gets involved. And real money is what we have here when one can exchange Gold for Gems. The practice of flipping (buying an item for a low price and selling it for a higher price) is arbitrage. Oh, not technically since there is only one market involved. But the fact remains that the flipper adds no value to the transaction. Simply making an item purchased from the market unsellable on the market for 90 days except to fill a buy order will fix this issue.

And thirdly, allow players to put up buy orders for Gems on the market, and allow players to sell Gems on the market.

Then you have a mostly free market economy, have removed ANet’s de facto monopoly, and have made the market a useful tool for many players rather than a PvP playground for a few.

Wreatch.3812:

“Oh yeah, one more thing.

Checking Gem prices I find that I can sell 100 gems for 44g70s.

However buying Gems I find that if I spend 44g70s I get 72 gems."

Wait wait wait, this math is completely wrong and misleading to everyone reading this thread.

100 gems as of this writing nets 46 silver 1 copper, not GOLD, silver.

My mistake, I was tired when I wrote that. Everyone knows that I meant 44s70c, and I have corrected the post you quoted.

Thank you for pointing that out though.

I guess I can add thoughts, but I’m not an expert. Suppose somewhere in between a hardcore / casual (530hrs), but you can lump me into a maller class (200.00 typically in a f2p mall game). I’m assuming here the free market was related specifically to the gem conversion and I wonder, if in fact, it could BE a good thing.
For the 15% TP and 38% Gem to gold, I understand this aspect and agree it helps curb issues. My perception of the whole gem to gold (from the dev’s pov) was to help reduce 3rd party gold sales and increase revenue. This most likely would be a “fine line” as gem to gold introduces the possible argument of B2P / P2W. It would seem, that the main reason / purpose for allowing gold to gem; is to nix / reduce chances of the above argument. It would seem logical that gold to gem was not considered / wanted to be a sink as it avoids revenue.
If a free market for gem to gold,, would refer to buy /sell like the tp (margin of course); this may be a win win. This potentially opens another aspect to “play” as some seem to do with the TP. If there are players buying cheap farmed gold and placing lots of buys; the value of gems should rise (more G per gem) over what they are currently. If we exclude or correct farmed gold / excess gold; then the gems should drop. In either case, from a dev pov; you don’t take the heat for these changes as you will / do currently. I suppose that’s a bit of a plus too.

Last from my pov, I’ve been waiting since release TO get gold with gems. I’ve added several bank and inventory so far, along with some mini’s and dyes. however, I still haven’t “felt” that my gem value (to me and my real money) is worth gold transactions. I’ll continue to wait there. I suppose also if I add the gem cost and total gems I spent; it may be around 4500-5000, but with $$ to anet. One guild mate who leveled up with me took his money (when he hit 15g) and put it all to gems. He was around level 65 at the time and this was all his money; but he thought, it came so quick, why not get gems “it’s free”. At that time, he got 5900 gems….. I was a little taken back that I chose a “dumb” path paying $$ for gems (still would, but wow). I wonder if a free market may help the most long term for micro’s.

Sorry to be long, I also agree with others for better reward / money from un-bottable areas. Ty

Flipping does, in fact, serve a useful market purpose. It reduces the gaps between buy and sell orders, which means that players who want to buy/sell their items right now instead of waiting have to pay a much lower relative premium.

100% free market?
Nonononononononono.
“Why precursors are so expensive?! Price has 10folder or 20folded since release” While gem prices are yet to 10fold…..

Seriously guys. Gem<→Gold exchange is working fine. In fact, gems are still too cheap when compared to gold. Only way to say they’re too expensive is if you compare to real life prices since some of the items in BLTC are somewhat overpriced. (Keys, anyone? Majority of people don’t play slot machines with 1.5 euro at shot but 20 cent a shot, and that way they spend a lot more in long run…)

My 5 cents, like nobody cares, is that “free” market without algorithm would be a lot more vulnerable to market manipulation. This leads few getting rich (ones with capita to invest and play market with tens of thousands of gems/gold – gold sellers included) and majority losing (ones paying gold for gems when they need 100 or 200).

Also, to people who are crying that “I get less gold back if I first turn my gold to gems and then my gems to gold” take breath and think for a moment. There’s transaction fee of about 16% to both directions which plays important role to prevent market manipulation.

Why? Because we players (of tp) are way less tempted to exchange gold to gems and back because of that fee (bit over double to standard in TP). There are better options to steal common players’ gold in other sections of TP and this keeps gems cheap for everyone. Take the feee off and you’ll see less stable and more spikey exchange ration.

So yes, “We who buy gems to exchange it for gold are taxed in exchange!” is somewhat fair reason to cry out loud, but since everyone is traited equally it’s not really that unfair. It’s just that the price of gems (in relation to real money) is somewhat high, as I stated earlier – or some prices in BLTC GS are too high.

part 2.

So, what can we do/say? Buy gems with gold now while they’re still cheap – if possible. Kinda wish Anet would make buying gems with RL currency more appealing at it is right now, but that’s slim hope. (So those of you who buy gems and convert it to gold would be happier.) Let’s hope instead that there’ll be something worth of buying in BLTCGS in future outside bank updates/backbag updates/character slots(/digital deluxe). We need more look sets in their current price range, not some overpriced dyes and slot machines. We need vanity stuff! Hats, for example, if you want TF references.
New dance animations, and animations overall, ability to show off our city clothes (because that’s somewhat limited feature at the moment) or even some single prices minipets. There’s tons of good vanity stuff in other games’ cash shops that can be used as inspiration (not to copy directly, ofc). Just please don’t add anythign that’s “required to win”.

Anet, it’s your job to kill those bots farming gold and those companies that sell that gold. Heck, give a message. If player’s caught buying gold, remove that gold from their account even if it goes negative. In some cases that can be worse than just banning them for good – depends kinda if they already bought everything they need with that gold and can be at ease with negative gold. (Would require account wide fix for that, not just character based.) Rollback + one weel ban could be also nice punishment for first timer… If people know that they’ll be liquified for buying gold then they’ll be less tempted to buy gold. Less tempted they are to buy gold, less tempted are companies to sell gold which in fact should mean that they’ll eventually move to some other games. (Not all of them, naturally, but just ones looking to maximize their profits. Few stubborn ones are bound to stay I bet as long as there’s any opportunity to make money. Cannot really blame them.)

So yeah, Anet, do your job and make their (gold sellers, not us the players) life as miserable as possible. (Stricly in game/business reference, please don’t go to China and abuse them in their slavery gaming rigs – hopefully not too offending joke’ish.) Remove demand and supply will go down. We players will thank because gold in circulation will go down and gem prices will respectively go down as well (Those who complain how expensive gems are to buy with gold and compare RMT offers for gold to be used to buy gems – I’m looking at you here), or in worst case scenario we don’t have to QQ as much because of juvenile brown bear infestations. Yeah yeah yeah, some of us who actually benefit from their spam in TP will cry because there’ll be less profit opportunities. I wonder how many players actually feel bad because their buy-orders were completed by bots? Or how many are just happy because they “found genuine spot in trade post that generates easy gold” – for them.

Inflate gems (more gems per euro/dollar/yen) to give gem buyers more gold if you’re looking for short term solution. Otherwise exchange ration will go towards real balance at steady speed and both sides will be happy once they realize that gold today is worth way less than gold three weeks ago, or way more then gold after today. Our pleads to add ability to set our price should be ignored, or such option should at least be serverly limited so market manipulation could be evaded as much as possible. Some visibility wouldn’t harm since that kinda gives good PR and you guys really need PR in mmo-market. Just not too much if that leads to system’s vulnerability. (Heck, you could/should point out that there’s tax in current exchange.) Removing the competition (rmt) and sending message to goldbuyers is really really really important. Sure, you’re doing your magical automagic banhammer for botting, but please, don’t be silent. Silence is close to worst PR there is.

And for finishing move; I’ve spent, by my calculations, 10 550 gems in store. And they didn’t cost me a cent (well, it took time to gather gold for them but I count that time spent as entertainment – not working like it’d be case with earning those 131,875 eur to buy them.)

Apologies for ranting, I’ve had some of this stuff on my heart for while (week, tops) and post may lack some coherence because it wasn’t written in direct order. Feel free to send hatemail.

Zoris.5870:

Would I be mistakened by saying that purchasing diamonds AT ALL is bad or this “economy”? By purchasing these products you’re literally taking the gold out of the game and making it more scarce, thus, more in demand. Unless this is intentional…

Of course that’s intentional. That’s part of the reason for the price differential I noted earlier. It’s also the reason for WP costs that scale up as you level, and for the TP listing fee, and for armor repair costs.

Money sinks are a healthy part of an MMO/MUD economy. I’d hazard a guess that a good player can generate about 1G/hr at the level cap. If there wasn’t some way to remove 80%-90% of that from the game we’d have rampant inflation on a scale that would make 1932 Germany look like an economically desirable place to live.

Think about this;

For the past century (give or take a few years) the price of milk and the price of gasoline have remained mostly equal in the United States. Now I guarantee you neither one of those was $3.50/gal. in the 1960s. But they sure are today.

The point being that goods have value, and that value remains mostly constant. The difference between the 1960s and today being that there is a lot more money in circulation. Supply & Demand cuts both ways. If the supply of each individual unit of money (in the case the dollar) increases the value of each individual unit decreases.

lackofcheese.5617:

Flipping does, in fact, serve a useful market purpose. It reduces the gaps between buy and sell orders, which means that players who want to buy/sell their items right now instead of waiting have to pay a much lower relative premium.

Sorry, I completely disagree. Flipping artificially inflates the market. Let the market find its own level.

Besides which, your statement makes no sense. If you put in a lower buy order you will probably have to wait longer to get it filled. You lower your price if you want to sell faster, you raise your price if you want to make more profit. Raise your price too much and you’ll constantly be undercut by more reasonable sellers and your good will never sell.

It’s a balancing act and should not be interfered with by someone who adds zero value to the process.

How exactly does flipping inflate the market?

What it does is increase the liquidity of the market, which achieves exactly what I said – it allows items to be bought/sold quickly without paying a significant penalty.

I don’t see the point of introducing an artificial limitation that prevents people from doing it. What purpose would that serve?

If flipping was not an option anyone buying from a sell order, or selling to a buy order, would lose a lot more money from doing so than they currently do.

@John Smith, by that logic there’s never been a 100% free market in the real world either, because all sorts of things that aren’t markets themselves are capable of creating and destroying or modifying markets overnight; game patches aren’t any different than resource shortages, changing weather patterns, famines, or technological innovations (in this context anyway, obviously famines tend to kill people, but…)

So there’s absolutely no reason to worry about ArenaNet as game gods, in the context of this discussion, as the real world has to deal with disruption on the same order of magnitude. Static design is an unnecessary constraint, all you have to posit is that ArenaNet does not deliberately regulate the markets via design changes (ala the removal of excess butter from the market with temporary forge recipes); as long as you guys don’t start acting like a central bank, there’s no conflict. And of course you’d need to remove all of the things that prevent players from price setting.

That being said, please act like a central bank. There is a reason why those are a good idea in the real world, and it’s just as valid in the virtual. The limitations on price setting are also way too important to get rid, as you’d be greatly limiting the number of effective gold sinks (rampant inflation is bad!) and you’d be running the risk of making important items too expensive for poorer players to easily afford.

Just wanted to post in this thread to agree with Venge and with the free market approach, both in the game and in real life.

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

Well, I don’t.

(But, then again, I come from the socialist EU with their social market economy. We even have universal health care! This, of course, can only mean that I have been brainwashed by the communist propaganda of my tenured professors at the university.)

I appreciate that you try to discuss this topic in the light of a real world economy. However, such a discussion will always be flawed right from the start since the production of goods in a game is so fundamentally different from the production of real-world goods (‘creation out of thin air’ versus ‘consumption on non-replenishing resources’). Hence, as tempting as the suggested discussion might be, I don’t think it will lead to any meaningful conclusions.

Please don’t try to make GW2’s economy a copycat of the real-world economy. Instead, try to make GW2’s economy a working (aka ‘more or less stable’) in-game economy.

~MRA

(edit:) And all of you who think that your concerns and doubts with the current system are the results of the machinations of a malevolent actor who built a system to specifically harm you, with no other explanations possible, please look up here .

Melk.6958:

I don’t understand the current gem economy, something is broken with your formula ANet.

Apparently there is a HUUUUUUUUGE demand for “GOLD TO GEM” transactions. Evidence of this is that when I started playing, 1g would net 277 gems. Now, 1g gets you 170 gems. That’s a big change.

However, the opposite is not true for “gem to gold” exchange. If I spent 1g to buy gems now, and then I turned around to sell gems for gold, I would lose 30silver. This doesn’t make any sense to me, at all. If there is huge influx in “gold to gem” trading, shouldn’t it RAISE the price of “gem to gold” by like… A LOT as well? Shouldn’t gems sell for more if they cost more to buy? What gives? You don’t seem to want people to actually sell gems for gold.

Hence, enter the gold sellers, hence the economy of GW2 is in deep kitten.

the exchange rate moves in sync at all times as proven by spidy:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

The reason why there is a gap is that this system is designed as both a gold sink and as a method to encourage gem purchases for people who may not necessarily want to buy anything that’s on offer in the gem store. It is not really meant to be used for you to make a profit by exchanging currencies back and forth in quick succession.

Although based on the info I have apparently some people actually have claimed to make some profit from the currency exchange, but theirs was a long term investment.

To John Smith,

How do you explain gem prices jumping on non peak days at non peak hours, it may be supply and demand but who’s buying all the time, I’ll tell you who…bots. Bots are ruining gem price fast. Obviously free market at this point would just ruin the game even more because of the botters. I think arena net needs to step in and slow the gem inflation or put a daily limit on how much gems can be boughten with gold per account. In the month or so I’ve been playing gems went 280/g to now 150/g, which is close to 100% inflation in that time span. I realize gems are a luxury for gold but it’s just annoying to log on and everytime need to farm more and longer everyday consistently. I haven’t been upgrading my gear as much because I’ve been trying to outrun inflation to upgrade my bag slots/bank slots and get a few extra character slots before inflation really just sucks. I wish I started playing sooner when I heard rates were closer to 500+/g but I feel bad to newer players that will be stuck with an even worse rate then me. Anyways back to the gold grind!

Let me pop in for a bit,

The motivation for this post was the dismay at the rapid increase of gem prices (and also stated, no ability to put sell or buy prices), hence leading to the accusation of it not being a free market.

We have established that gem exchange (and the trading post at large) is not a free market. ANet has never advertised this in any way either. The market is however as ANet advertised a “player driven” market, and that is true. This also accounts for the gem exchange which is in essence player driven. As John Smith explained around launch that they would set the initial gem price and then use an algorithm to determine gem price based on b/s. Whether they alter this algorithm or not has not been mentioned, but I speculate that for the better of all of us they do. If they do, then they would do it to counter two events “inflation” and “deflation”. I see no reason to come with baseless arguments on them gradually bumping the gap between b/s prices. You may ask if they do. But please do so in a more serious and polite manner.

That said looking at how economy works and how the GW2 gem prices currently fluctuate I’d say the behaviour is not abnormal in any way. If anything it doesn’t fluctuate as fast as I’d expected it to do. By reasoning when people hit level 80 they would begin to buy gems for Gold. Before this there is a percentage that has bought for RW$. I’d suspect a large amount of the player base have reached 80 or somewhere close by now, so in other words the demand for gems would skyrocket driving prices in the roof, considering the percentage that pour RL$ into the game is much less. It is not the case however since the prices for gems seem to rise rather slowly. You could argue that the initial price for gems was high since Gem to Gold conversion seems rather unprofitable. However I wouldn’t see it from this angle. It is the case that Gem demand is higher than supply. However the price gap between Gold and Gems is not fully elastic, and is and should be designed within an algorithm to to prevent Gems sales stem into gold farming and the other way around. This is because a high RL$ – Gold return rate would depreciate Gold in-game to such an extent that everyone would run around with expensive gear. We don’t want that.

We want the economy to be stable and ANet is doing exactly that; trying to keep the economy stable. The BLTC has less friction than the Gem Exchange and you can see how supply is depreciating goods worth: most buy orders are listed under minimum sell price for a lot of equipment. Why is that you may ask? Well, at equilibrium buy orders vs vendor price should be largely equal. The problem here is that drop rate is higher than demand and the salvaging measure is not providing enough incentive.

If we had the same issue in the Gem Exchange then we would currently see Gems at a sky-high price and gold at rock-bottom. This is due to the mechanics of the game where you can buy things in the Gem Store that will benefit you in-game when harvesting Gold with which you could in turn use to buy gems that would again increase your gold inventory.

ANet is keeping the economy balanced, period.

The price of the gems is undoubtedly set by Anet. Whether or not there is an algorithm, or the rate can be manually set by Anet doesn’t change anything.

If it isn’t a bid/ask system then there is no way anyone should trust it as being player driven when by design, it isn’t.

I understand it works as a pressure valve for the inflation, and that’s not the only obvious benefit of having it controlled by Anet. However you could have the gold/gem exchange as an ask/bid and still have your pressure valve.

You have taken inspiration from the game with the very best economy in the MMO sphere these days : EVE. Let’s look further into it : PLEX (that can be bought for real life money) is traded as any other item on the market and the price is set by the players. Flipping and speculation on PLEX is common (currently PLEX prices are rising like never before because of it), hell, you can even lose PLEX permanently in the game, who cares !

What CCP controls however is the rate at which they sell plex from real life money, not the ingame price of PLEX in in game currency, which means they can open or close the plex faucets when they choose, hence influencing the price in the game. Note that when they make a PLEX discount, they also make a very substantial amount of money from it.

100% free market for anything ingame, yes please. The fact that a patch can change the supply/demand of an item doesn’t make it less of a free market btw. Other games have made it work much better than what we are seeing in Guild Wars 2.

drake.2135:

It makes sense for it to be on a free market. Just beware when no one is buying with real money.

This. ^^

I buy gems with real money and convert them to gold. So, the market in its current state is to my advantage. However, in a Free Market, should people like me decide to stop purchasing gems with real money it could have quite a negative impact on the economy.

To address Anets questions.

Free market? Or even a semblance of an economy? There cannot be a free market or economy unless all resources are finite, and grown resources are seasonal. So thats out the door. Like any other game, devs set the price, not the players, this is the ways it has always been, even in those game touting a 100% player driven market (cough, eve).

In order for ANet to make money via their gemstore they MUST constantly “fiddle” with the buying and selling curve to keep people buying gems so they can make hard cash and keep it attractive. One such game mechanic is the legendary weapon money sink via the gemstore, out of control folks use the gemstore quite a bit i imagine, but then Anet does not show the monthly profit margins.

Player questions.
Yes, Anet fiddles with the Trading post and Market, if you think otherwise you’re fooling yourself.

Fix the world?
Are there better ways to handle a fantasy economy, if one were to be implemented? Yes, but it would require massive dev involvement and that requires real cash to pay them, something no company wants to spend money on, more employees.

It is better to make resources infinite, as they are now, make armor and weapons non degrading and simply have the devs fiddle with the numbers from time to time, because the less they have to interact with the players the less real money they lose in time and resources. Automation, saves money. Making game mechanics that interact directly with the gemstore makes Anet money.

It is these “free” games that end up costing more to play for some than they realize, most of the time too late for the parents CC. Sorry to unglamourize the world.

Graill.8596:

It is these “free” games that end up costing more to play for some than they realize, most of the time too late for the parents CC. Sorry to unglamourize the world.

Well said.

I would rather spend $100 each month on a game that I enjoy than pay a subscription for a game that has a screwed up in game economy because it also has a F2P option (See: EQ2, SWtOR, etc.).

I entered GW2 knowing how that I would be spending money on the game regardless that it was subscription free. In fact, that was a primary draw to the game for me beyond all the great in game features.

Anybody who feels they have to spend RLM in order to enjoy a F2P game should probably consider a subscription based model instead. Especially if the economy bothers them.

Heaven.4385:

To John Smith,

How do you explain gem prices jumping on non peak days at non peak hours, it may be supply and demand but who’s buying all the time, I’ll tell you who…bots. Bots are ruining gem price fast. …

An interesting item of note:

During the first few weeks, when the BLTC/Awesomium interface was down more than it was up, the exchange rate would rise even when no-one could buy or sell gems. It was a perfectly smooth rising slope. No variation. Looked to be a rise of about 1c/hour or similar.

In other words: No-one was using it, and the exchange rate was rising. I’m not going to point out precisely what that means, because it’s pretty clear. If there are historical records of the exchange rate for the first 1-3 weeks after headstart, you can see it for yourself.

You’ll also note: Every in-game change, to date, made by ArenaNet has caused the exchange rate to rise. Given you cannot choose what price to sell at, nor what price to buy at, it seems extremely unlikely the exchange rate is “player driven”.

As much as I loathe and despise Turbine, they were pretty spot on with their Turbine Points to be used in their store and there is zero gold seller exploitation unlike in GW2.

Turbine gave players two options to earn stuff in their store:
1.) Paying cash either by a flat out fee like ANet already has or by a VIP status that is sub based but you have numerous benefits to include a monthy cash shop allowance 2.) Earn points through favor which ANet can transcribe to achievements.

This will obliterate gold sellers I think or at least curve it substantially as really why would one want to spend money on at a place that has atrocious rates? Turbine allowed for players to earn points, however it is long and grindy which is why people still buy Turbine Points.

While I never support gold buying but if I do decide to put money down on some serious gem banking I will go to gold sellers for gold to buy my gems and not the gem store to buy some at a much higher marked up price. Not saying I do it now nor have I ever bought gold.

Players will go the cheaper route, hell many or at least a very significant playerbase play GW2 because it’s B2P and it’s a good-decent MMO to em that keeps em as entertained as a P2P MMO. Allowing gold sellers to continue is only hurting ANets pocket as one cannot ever get rid of gold sellers, they will always be there no matter what just like one cannot get rid of crime in society.

lackofcheese.5617
How exactly does flipping inflate the market?

Yer kidding me, right?

If flipping is disallowed the price settles at what people are willing to pay and what people are willing to accept for the goods

A flipper buys up the lowball sell offers and relists them at a higher price, thereby artificially inflating the price of that good. And this doesn’t stop after one cycle. Once the higher price is the new norm a player wanting to dump his full pack while in the field will list for the new low, only to have his goods snapped up by a flipper and relisted at the new high price.

When enough flippers do that to enough goods the value of the unit of currency is degraded.

This is one reason that arbitrage is illegal IRL. And while flipping technically isn’t arbitrage it has the same effect.

Currently Gems have very weak purchasing power for the money you spend on them. Pretty much everything in the store costs too much for it to be worth buying gems with money to spend (besides maybe karma boosters and BL salvage kits).

This is also reflected in how little gold you can buy for gems even if it is getting better.

Increase buying power of gems and you increase their value without hurting people who are converting gold to gems.

Arbitrage isn’t illegal afaik. You can and do place buy orders only to resell at a higher price in real life markets.

Arbitrage doesn’t change the fact that prices settle where players will be willing to buy and sell from. Should you buy a whole market and relist much higher, and people not be willing to pay that much, the price will lower naturally, and the flipper will be stuck with a stock that he can’t sell.

What’s the problem again ? Also, can I have a source on arbitrage being illegal ?

They.9516:

Honestly, we just need more ways to make gold in game, you guys have stomped all of the “low-risk” ways, and the high risk forms of farming aren’t very rewarding.

An MMO could not possibly account for all of the VERY involved dynamics that make up a real-world economy. Thus, I think we can all agree that a completely free game economy versus a totally controlled game economy are unhealthy extremes. Nevertheless, it is a documented fact that the GW2 economy is progressively leaning towards a command economy with every patch. We not only have DR for gold, but now for karma as well! I understand that bots are a plague for any MMO economy, but I am telling you: if these controls keep increasing as they have, you are simply driving players directly to the gold sellers in hoards. I personally have never bought gold this way for any game nor will I ever. I would rather pack it up right now and uninstall the game than give those illegitimate parasites my money. The developers deserve every penny of my gem purchases as it is a superbly crafted game. However, there are LEGIONS of players that are on the fence about this issue, but would RATHER obtain gold from ANet or through other legitimate means like farming and map completions. With this level of control over the economy, you are creating the very thing that you are so ferociously trying to control.

They.9516:

I’d say make dungeon gear bind on equip instead of bind on aquire, or allow dungeon tokens to be exchanged to npcs for gold, this way people can do their daily dungeon runs without feeling like the game is trying everything it can do to prevent them from progressing.

This is definitely something that warrants further discussion. Why so many “bind on acquire” items? How about NO bind on acquire and just bind on equip for ALL items? Let’s talk about getting rid of account bound items like dungeon tokens, badges of honor and (humorously) lemons! That would legitimately and conservatively open up the economy just a little and would serve as a good starting point.

I tried to answer the question if I prefer free market, but it’s an impossible question if you do not know the current system.

How many gems are bought by players with dollars?
How many gems are bought by players with gold?
How many gems are saved by players?
And most importantly, how are the current prices set?

-If a player buys 800 gems with dollars, does the price of gems in gold goes up?

-If a second player buys 800 gems with 4 gold, does the price of gems in gold goes up?

- When that player then spends 800 gems on a bag upgrade, will this affects the price of gems in gold?

Can I still reply to this? Logged in for only this one thread so I hope I can…

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I worry that this is a very dangerous question that is only going to attract conditioned responses based on an intentionally obfuscated reality. And not one that Anet created, heavens no. In some ways the GW2 economy is more transparent than our real economy. But I see no way for most people to answer this question while fully understanding all the repercussions of what it implies.

Look, pure unadulterated Capitalism is GOOD. But that’s not the reality we’re in. What we’re dealing with both in Reality and Games, are very heavily manipulated Economies because our real economy IS a video game (where “botting” is also running rampant) as well and that exacerbates the problem because no one has a clean uncorrupted model to base their idealisms off of.

Let me keep this short and brutal…
The Reality is Gems are like the Fed Interest rate, they NEED to go up in value. When we engage in selective protectionism there, we only end up hurting average people who’s only crime was building their savings responsibly; therefore, irresponsibility is being rewarded. Governing bodies, be they Designers or Regulators, need to stop crutching on this type of variable to attempt to control inflation because it’s just not effective. Inflation can only go up until it crashes back down again after reality has sunk in. Let it do its own thing for now until a better response to inflation that (directly tackles disparity) is made possible. Worry about the Manipulators instead and don’t try to fight them with fire. Peel back the obfuscation & give honest players more water buckets so they can do the fighting. (improve transparency!)

Thank You.

Hello John Smith,

Other games that I have played which have in-game exchange markets for cash currency for in-game currencies are Eve Online and Star Trek Online. Although I played these games only after they were well established, I feel that the Cash to Gold exchange rate is artificially low and disincentives me to actually purchase Gold through your market at current rates. I’ll make plenty of use of the gold to crystal conversion though, as I feel this is a good deal.

I don’t mind paying for cash shop items and currency, and enjoy the ability to do so in other games. However, it’s much easier to farm gold in the game and exchange for crystals at this point in time. I don’t really mind this, I will naturally gravitate towards whatever is the most efficient. A free market may better balance this, and I’m sure you can tell from your own data whether more people are buying crystals or exchanging for them using gold. I’m sure that Arenanet is losing out on some revenue if more crystals are being generated by the system to be exchanged for in-game gold rather than cash.

At the same time I feel cash shop items would benefit from having a lower cost. I think more people would purchase these items. One of the reasons the mobile app gaming market is doing so well is because the cost of the game is a buck or two and it’s underneath a decision making threshold of having to debate or justify the purchase. I feel that many pc games go in the wrong direction, pricing their cash shop content at a premium while losing the opportunity to sell more units at a lower cost.

Those are just some of my thoughts and I hope it is useful.

royalme.6208:

However, it’s much easier to farm gold in the game and exchange for crystals at this point in time.

Assuming you are serious, I just want to know two things: HOW and WHERE are you farming? Brother, farming in this game is like finding water in the desert, and those expensive magic find boosters have little or no effect even when stacked with magic find consumables. I have given up any serious farming.

royalme.6208:

I feel that many pc games go in the wrong direction, pricing their cash shop content at a premium while losing the opportunity to sell more units at a lower cost.

A+ on this one. The gem shop is way overpriced when you consider the conversion from gold to gems.