When I started playing this game about a month ago the gold/gem conversion rate was somewhere in the high 20’s/gem. Now it is in the low 80’s. Additionally, the highest priced named exotic weapons on the trading post have increased significantly.
While gems and certain rare item prices have increased, the prices for many of the high level crafting materials has decreased in the same time period. I’m no economist but I know there has to be something driving this.
As the average player level increases and previously scarce items become more common it makes sense to see the prices for some items drop. What does not make sense is the exchange rate of gold for gems doubling while most of the rest of the “commodities” on the trading post going down in price. Where is the gold coming from to fuel the exchange rate boom?
Seeing packs of bots prowling the high level zones for weeks on end without getting banned makes me wonder how much of an impact they have on the economy. If their farming is depressing prices on the high level commodities their gold sales are probably also inflating the gold/gem exchange rate.
A player that plays the game for fun might be annoyed at this but think of the bot situation from the game developer’s perspective. In some respects the bots represent competition for Arenanet so long as the gold/gem exchange rate is low enough for players to buy more gems with bot farmed gold than they can buying gems directly from the company. Whatever the issue really is with banning bots and despite claims to the contrary from Arenanet it is common knowledge that bots operate for long periods of time without being banned. I have a few on my contact list still going strong almost 3 weeks after I first spotted and reported them.
Currently on my server you can buy 15g for about $9 usd. That gets you 2040 gems at the current exchange rate, or roughly double the amount of gems if you bought them legitimately from Arenanet. This is cash slipping through the company’s fingers that could be put into new content, hiring people to read our gripes on the forums or whatever. Since the game has no subscription fee the gem store must represent a decent chunk of the game’s bottom line. Why the company isn’t acting more aggressively against botting amazes me.
There are fixes for this. Some are probably harder than others. Chasing down every bot account or introducing new code to the game seems pretty labor intensive and possibly an endless arms race between developers and bots. I would propose changing the current gold/gem exchange scheme to something tied to pve and pvp activities that generates tokens that are account bound. The bots will still probably be there but if they are forced into behavior that is similar to the rest of the player population they will be less obvious and effectively marginalized.
From the way this game was designed it is very, very easy to level to 80 quickly if judged against other MMO’s. Many players complain that once you reach 80 all of the world event content is “zergable”. Assuming there are no bugs with boss encounters and from what I’ve seen this is true for the most part. This leads to a lot of boredom in the “hard core” crowd and absolutely no incentive to participate in world events. A token economy that rewards players with the skill to excel in WvW and/or pve dungeons MIGHT give them the sense of accomplishment that many feel is lacking in GW2’s “endgame”. This would fly in the face of the egalitarian design of the game (no gear competition, easy levelling, level normalized pvp) but this lack of equality is integral to some players’ sense of enjoyment of the game.
(edited by Cirroq.2531)