Guild Wars 2

Intro problem
Lets face it, gear drops are boring. Except for a very few cases, they’re salvage fodder.

The problem is though, this ties in to a greater overall economy concern.

Rewind time a little bit, I think devs realized that gear was dropping far too often. Greens were not worth auctioning, they might as well have been greys. “masterwork”? Apparently “master” is an assembly line somewhere in Metrica.

So they applied a bandaid approach. They made salvaging them give you luck. Okay, so this took a bunch of greens and blues out of the market, great. The price rose as intended. But they at least had the foresight to realize this did a second thing— a huge deluge of materials. So, they added some recipes that took large amounts of these materials to take them out of circulation too. Great.

Looking at it from a purely economics standpoint, the bandages had the desired effect. There’s a problem though. This is a videogame, not an economics simulator. The solution isn’t very fun.

Blue and green gear is still nameless fodder. Gathering nodes are fairly worthless because you can get more from salvaging the gear that drops from nearly every mob or lock box. Furthermore, the system is now awkward and not very immersive.

What needs to happen is an actual fix, not a bandage to cover the problems.

Solutions

Remove gear drops from mobs
Here’s the change that need to be made. Mobs need to not drop gear. Mobs can drop materials, like the claws, blood, etc. That’s great, and it gives plenty of incentive to kill mobs. More rare materials to make the more rare items will drop from harder mobs. Champions might drop the cores a percent of the time and other mobs don’t, for instance. Then, players sell these things because people want to buy them in order to craft them in to things that players desire to buy.

People will still be able to gear up easy enough. Players craft gear that suddenly has a market. As a price control, hearts still sell gear for karma. If the price on crafted gear is rising too much, people can still decide they don’t want to spend the coin and use karma. Furthermore, if players suddenly have an incentive to craft gear, they desire materials. Materials that come from gathering nodes, and of course salvaging still in order to keep the market from being flooded by gear. Gathering becomes more important.

There’s a reason that in this game, crafting has been relegated to mainly leveling xp bonus and a few end-game recipes. There’s too many systems that utterly obsolete it.

So lets stop with the band-aid™ fixes and do a real systematic fix. Lets remove boring gear drops.

*note: There could still be some world gear drops, but make them interesting. None of the generic gear, but some unique gear. A unique sword that can only be obtained from a random rare drop from mobs is interesting and valuable.

Most people probably don’t gear up from common drops (using karma vendors and personal story on the way to 80, and rarer gear after that,) so the change doesn’t seem like it would create much more demand for crafted goods…even though it sounds like it will flood people with crafting materials. If I don’t like crafting, auctioning small-cost crafting materials isn’t any more exciting than auctioning greens/blues. Gathering nodes become even less interesting (to the non-crafter) because most drops become crafting material, unlike the current situation, where gear drops can end up as crafting material (along with essences of luck,) or be sold to vendors/TP, or equipped (rarely) or be tossed in the Mystic Forge.

While having mobs drop materials might sound more efficient, doing away with salvaging kits, it doesn’t sound more fun or interesting, and I’m not convinced it would have the economic effects you’re imagining.

Rukh.9287:

Looking at it from a purely economics standpoint, the bandages had the desired effect. There’s a problem though. This is a videogame, not an economics simulator. The solution isn’t very fun.

The problem is that it’s closer to an economics simulator that you might think, this is why they created gear/money sinks such as salvaging and the mystic toilet. The larger problem within the economy is the unlimited amount of money the gem to gold conversion creates. This devalues the worth of in game gold and causes inflation, which we’ve seen all to clearly with the prices of the most desirable items such as legendaries, precursors and skins. When I started playing you could buy The Legend on the TP for 60g, now it’s 722g, over a 1200% increase in just over a year. This is the definition of runaway inflation and it is largely caused by the gem to gold conversion. There are no limits placed on how much gold can be injected in to the economy and this is a bad thing. There is a reason the US just doesn’t print more money to pay off their debts…it would make the dollar worthless and would destroy their economy.

I think that’s a problem too, Leamas, but it’s a separate problem.

Redenaz.8631:

Most people probably don’t gear up from common drops (using karma vendors and personal story on the way to 80, and rarer gear after that,) so the change doesn’t seem like it would create much more demand for crafted goods…even though it sounds like it will flood people with crafting materials. If I don’t like crafting, auctioning small-cost crafting materials isn’t any more exciting than auctioning greens/blues. Gathering nodes become even less interesting (to the non-crafter) because most drops become crafting material, unlike the current situation, where gear drops can end up as crafting material (along with essences of luck,) or be sold to vendors/TP, or equipped (rarely) or be tossed in the Mystic Forge.

While having mobs drop materials might sound more efficient, doing away with salvaging kits, it doesn’t sound more fun or interesting, and I’m not convinced it would have the economic effects you’re imagining.

You don’t think so? I certainly did on all my characters. I rarely used karma vendors because plenty of gear is just handed to you. Its twice that at endgame, where you kill a deer and get mastercraft platemail. If I didn’t get a drop, I’d get it off the BLTC, which is a drop another person got, or something they spammed out to raise crafting.

You remove all those drops, crafted gear gains value. Karma gear doesn’t take gold, but karma is more valuable than gold these days.
now.

Leamas.5803:

When I started playing you could buy The Legend on the TP for 60g, now it’s 722g, over a 1200% increase in just over a year. This is the definition of runaway inflation and it is largely caused by the gem to gold conversion. There are no limits placed on how much gold can be injected in to the economy and this is a bad thing. There is a reason the US just doesn’t print more money to pay off their debts…it would make the dollar worthless and would destroy their economy.

You think the rise in prices is mostly from people converting gems to gold, and not, say, from dungeon-running, the Crown Pavilion, Scarlet Invasions, champ farming, or even the normal progress of people just playing the game over a full year?

Unlike a real world currency, the game is required to print money constantly as players earn it. Over time, that inflates the currency supply (devaluing each unit and raising prices,) unless the currency is removed/destroyed, via the TP fee, NPC vendors, waypoints, etc., because there’s more of that currency floating around.

The more people convert gems to gold, the less gold they get per gem, and so I’m skeptical of it as a cause of inflation, or at least as a significant one. It enables a player to bypass the unequal distribution of wealth between serious farmers and others by whipping out the credit card, but I don’t think it creates a substantial amount of gold (since the exchange rate is based on players exchanging currencies, and there is a fee removing gold.) In other words, prices might be lower without it, but I’m not sure they would be, or how much lower.

Farmers farm to pay high prices, which raises the prices even higher.

Rukh.9287:

-snipped for brevity-

Huh, really? I’ll occasionally equip a piece of dropped gear on an alt, but I usually don’t have much use for it, and alts outgrow gear so quickly that I never consider buying gear off the TP until I’m at the end game, and never for blue/green stuff. I’d be curious to hear how other players approach the subject.

I craft my own gear every 10 levels.

The main crash of the games economy is the rapid increase in champion farming – People do this for hours on end, and flood the TP with items, which also means Gold rewards are also increased. More gold = more farming, more farming,= more gold.

The conversion rate of gold/gems is now double what it used to be.

Redenaz.8631:

Leamas.5803:

When I started playing you could buy The Legend on the TP for 60g, now it’s 722g, over a 1200% increase in just over a year. This is the definition of runaway inflation and it is largely caused by the gem to gold conversion. There are no limits placed on how much gold can be injected in to the economy and this is a bad thing. There is a reason the US just doesn’t print more money to pay off their debts…it would make the dollar worthless and would destroy their economy.

You think the rise in prices is mostly from people converting gems to gold, and not, say, from dungeon-running, the Crown Pavilion, Scarlet Invasions, champ farming, or even the normal progress of people just playing the game over a full year?

Unlike a real world currency, the game is required to print money constantly as players earn it. Over time, that inflates the currency supply (devaluing each unit and raising prices,) unless the currency is removed/destroyed, via the TP fee, NPC vendors, waypoints, etc., because there’s more of that currency floating around.

The more people convert gems to gold, the less gold they get per gem, and so I’m skeptical of it as a cause of inflation, or at least as a significant one. It enables a player to bypass the unequal distribution of wealth between serious farmers and others by whipping out the credit card, but I don’t think it creates a substantial amount of gold (since the exchange rate is based on players exchanging currencies, and there is a fee removing gold.) In other words, prices might be lower without it, but I’m not sure they would be, or how much lower.

Farmers farm to pay high prices, which raises the prices even higher.

Economics Disclaimer

hide spoiler

The main thing I know about economics is how much I don’t know. I’m describing inflation very casually in reference to the increased money supply, but the actual situation is a lot more complicated, as the supply of goods goes up, the number of participants in the economy changes, some prices stay completely static while others change, etc. So if someone with more knowledge of economic theory wants to chime in with a more informed opinion, please be kind.

Rukh.9287:

-snipped for brevity-

Huh, really? I’ll occasionally equip a piece of dropped gear on an alt, but I usually don’t have much use for it, and alts outgrow gear so quickly that I never consider buying gear off the TP until I’m at the end game, and never for blue/green stuff. I’d be curious to hear how other players approach the subject.

The way most games successfully combat this is they make expensive but not required vendor items. GW2 has the commander tags, but 100g isn’t very much anymore. They need some sort of 500g nifty to have but not required thing. WoW had mammoth mounts around 10k, and then new mounts for higher amounts. This means that if people save up, they can take a huge chunk of change out of the economy, but it’s not something that’s going to hamper people who make less.

On the other end, when gw2’s economy wasn’t as inflated, having relatively high prices for teleports and auctions (taken out before sales, not taken out of the sale) meant that it was inhibiting to all levels of income, not just the high incomes. A worse solution.