Guild Wars 2

Out of the many aspects that can make a mmorpgs pace stall, virtual economy is by far one of the most overlooked by players. While most players look for pacification in terms of game design and mechanics (also very important ofc) there are few who look for game improvements in this area.

Virtual economy is, most likely, the bridge that separates the casual player from the hardcore player on a gear/equipment perspective, with a significant impact in game progression.
While a hardcore player has the time to devour the content of a game and achieve about every goal in a given game, the casual player relies on the virtual economy to slowly but steadly play the game and obtain, wether by crafting or buying from players/auction houses, some satisfaction and completion towards avatar progression.

Now, this is a problem for almost every mmorpg in the market, and for me was never going to be a problem for gw2 but, as most of you noticed, the phrase “GW2 takes everything you love about GW1” has fallen into a shabby bag, so i guess the dev team should start to focus on it.

Presently the costs of crafting most of the non-dropable items in the game are astronomic and, with this, crafting itself has become stale. Fun as it is and well designed, it has fallen into the same rotting zombie as in every other game i played, with exception of EvE online, but that game plays in another league.

Not talking about legendaries, lets grab an example: the exotic hamer “Mjolnir”, the hammer to be said the companion in battle of the warrior of thunder Thor. Well i must say that he should be glad his father was Zeus, because this really takes divine help to craft. As this is an exotic item, it does not fall into the rumoured promise of ANET to balance the legendaries stats with any other weapons that may or not be released in future expansions wielding stronfer stats. So if u want one prepare yourself, as it costs the following:

- 1 Eldritch Scroll
- 100 Mystic Coin
- 250 Charged Lodestone
- 1 Gift of Lightning ( 10g for the recipe )
– 250 Orichalcum Ingot
– 250 Bolt of Gossamer
– 100 Charged Lodestone
– 1 Gift of Ascalon ( 500 ascaloninan tears )

Almost every item in “mjolnir” recipe is obtained by jsut playing the game, but when it comes to the charged lodestones it would cost a player around 700g to buy them, roughly what you would pay for a percursor to a legendary weapon…well, you can always go farm them…but no!! Remember the manifesto!! Dont do that omg!

So this economy needs a serious revamp in order to make it true to the beloved Manifesto.

Here are some suggestions that i picked up from other games i played:

- Make every ingame item tradable. This will help economy by constantly providing influx of materials/tokens that are currently locked to souldbound or accountbound wich makes no sense in a “economy”. You can even throw in Karma and Skill points and Laurels;

- Open the Gemstore to crafting materials: in a small amount, players should be able to purchase crafting materials of all Tiers with gems. It is a delicate field i know, but it can help to decrease the population of bots and gold sellers, and help casual players;

- Make PvE and crafting dailies wich award players with mats/token from all different tiers: would help virtual money outflux, would populate a bit more PvE areas and would empower all players with a tool to get the materials they want.

- Revamp Meta events: probably the most well designed part of this amazing game, and barely see any people doing them. Revamp the award system on those. They are very very fun and you need to give players a decent excuse to play them. Spawn a reward chest with T5 and T6 mats in it and you will see.

- gtg. will finsih later.