Guild Wars 2

So what they did was take a surplus of bottom tier crafting materials, which could have helped all the new low level players get their early crafting tiers done, and they gave recipies that only players level 68 or above had a chance at using cost effectively.

They passed the surplus goods to these higher level toons, who then profited off them, and that drove the price of all the bottom tier crafting materials to ten times their previous level.

HOW did this help the game?

John Smith should know, if he really is an economist, that overt manipulation of the Market is always more disruptive then waiting for a natural correction.

Not to mention that the effort also only rewarded those who were able to get there first. For those who came on too late, the ‘surplus’ of materials was already gone.

A more equitable approach would have been to give every player in the game a single use soulbound Mystic Token that was used in the recipie, and let every player have an opportunity to get one Mystic chest…

oh well, Anet, live and learn. I still think you are doing a great job, just not in this particular instance.

Well, as has already been seen, ANet are good at making games, but not at anything economy related.

I made no such complaint about speculators, and I am generally very happy about the market.

I disagree with how John Smith, the Anet economist, implemented a plan today to dump the excess quantities of certain goods by giving away a new recipie on the Mystic Forge that was skewed toward higher level players, and those players that were fortunate enough to get on right when it went into effect.

I believe he should have made no correction, or if tampering with the free market was really necessary, then it should have been more fair to the entire popultation.

I don’t see how it’s ANet’s fault that the Asuran Mystics Guild invented new Mystic Forge recipies.

I think you are talking about the requirement of a ectos. Mystic Coins you just get daily. The reason behind this has more to do with the value of the ectos then the higher levels. It is only skewed to higher level players due to they make more money. If you know how to speculate you could have made that same amount that a average level 80 makes at a low level.

@nuprin
my apologies. Didn’t know about the John Smith thing until you said so. I believe a market should not be tampered with, and they should just let it correct itself…not artificially and benefiting only a segment of the population.

The problem is that for the market to correctly price those oversupplied crafting items, their unit price would have needed to drop bellow 1c (ie allow at the very least 2 units for 1c). Their value was hard fixed by the their vendor price.

So doing nothing meant they were stuck incorrectly priced and building up in number fast.

I agree though that the implemented solution (which is limited in time spam by design) was always going to benefit some lucky few disproportionately.

However, I do think it was a good idea to do something and they did mention some more long term solutions through adjusting drop rates etc. Although you have to wonder if the huge influx in supply was a reflection of the current wave of low level players and thus not a problem that may be experienced with low tier items in the real long term once the game settles.

A knee-jerk reaction from Anet. They should just have waited until more people start leveling alts and/or more professions. The abundance of those low-tier materials would have corrected itself.

Look at WoW where most people are max level. The price of low-tier mats has risen to an acceptable level (actually high enough that new players cannot afford them – but in turn they can sell what they gather when leveling and make quick gold).

What they did, they did on purpose. So let’s try and understand it from that perspective.

They hand-picked and then hand-coded certain items to be higher in value. Soft Wood Logs went from a 2 million backlog @ 2c to 9c in less than 12 hours! Once I caught on I watched the supply of >2 million go to ~500,000 in less than an HOUR.

Why would they do that?

Possibilities include:
1. Increasing demand of said goods [which they did].
2. Decreasing supply of those goods [which they did].
3. Generating more revenue for lower level players [which they have now done because they…];
4. Increased the price of those goods.

So now lower level players have less of a barrier entering the market because they can sell their wood for 9c a hit instead of 2c. Everyone gets richer. It’s quite the opposite of trickle-down.

Yes, some people benefited from this. That’s life and in an OPEN MARKET you will always have speculation and you will always have people making more money than others. Personally I say live and let live and be done with it. They coded the gems to give out riches but I can guarantee you that the drop rate for the 2g jewel was so rare that overall the higher-level players who could afford to speculate but were chasing the lottery probably lost out. I would have coded it that way but why?

To reduce money supply at the top-end of the curve.

Curious isn’t it?

Instead of widening the gap from bottom-to-top they were trying to shrink it.

Thoughts?

I personally don’t agree on dev messing with the market, but either way, doesn’t affect me. Market changes, and you’ll just have to adapt to it like life. Sometimes its to your advantage, sometimes not, so I’ll just deal with it. I think the real problem is jealousy.

The real world market has stuff like this happen all the time. I think the solution they came up with is a rather brilliant one. It does not hurt anyone really as the price of the item did not raise too much. It is still less then some Tier 1 Basic Materials. As a matter of fact if anything is helps the people playing the lower levels.

I am not against the implementation of a procedure that decreases supply and raises prices. I suppose I was a bit heavy handed in my OP about how the change in materials prices would affect the lowere levels. I can see it has a reciprocal effect in allowing them to make some extra coin.

My greatest irritation comes only from the development team choosing an approach to correction that was not uniformly fair to the gaming population. I am not adverse to specualtion, I understand the early bird gets the worm and all that.

But the foks at Anet have a responsibility to fairness across all levels. There was no crisies here, another day of consideration and they may have been able to make a correction without having it be so deliberatley (or unintentionally) skewed.

What truly needs to happen is a correction to the drop rates that caused the glut in the first place. All in all this was one knee jerk reaction to another misstep with the cooking patch. But I am confident that the team at Anet will get it all sorted out. They are doing a fantastic job so far, present guffaws not included, and in the future I hope they will consider their actions a bit more carefully.