Guild Wars 2

So the quality of chat in game is SERIOUSLY going down right now. Every 15-20 seconds in Lion’s Arch there’s a new bot message from a hacked account, spamming gold buying/power-leveling services from X website and what not.

However, I’ve noticed a vicious cycle about it all…

Gold is hard to come by in this game, making the idea of purchasing gold from illegitimate sources all the more attractive. I don’t approve of this, if anyone was already wondering. BUT – we’ve made gold so important to do everything in the game, that it’s easy to see why it’s such an attractive commodity.

-Waypoint costs go through the roof when you get level 50+
-WvW success is determined as much by how much cash you’re willing to spend, as well as how much coordination you can get between WvW guilds
-Even in WvW, you have to spend a lot of money to repair your gears

Until they can add in a secondary security measure, we’re going to have problems with people getting their kittens hacked, and in turn being used as a spam-bot in our chat channels. Until we can take some of the emphasis off of the in-game gold market, we’ll have a cadre of chinese gold farmers thinking they can sell us what we want.

We need to de-emphasize gold, and make it less attractive to players. This will keep anyone from pursuing illegitimate gold selling websites, which will lead to them leaving us alone. We can’t go after businesses in China, because they don’t have anything like the BBB – they get to do whatever they want and we’re powerless to stop it. BUT – that doesn’t mean we can’t make it non-profitable for them.

Thoughts?

I turn off map chat. Game is great that way.

Not to discredit this post – but I see way points as a convenience, you can always go to the mists and tele to Lions arch and portal places for free. Then you are much closer to your place of interest and can waypoint for coppers instead of silvers.

NyghtProwler.9386:

Not to discredit this post – but I see way points as a convenience, you can always go to the mists and tele to Lions arch and portal places for free. Then you are much closer to your place of interest and can waypoint for coppers instead of silvers.

That’s not the point though. The problem is that if enough people see gold as scarce, RMT sales will increase. You can’t change the way other people view things, as much as you might want to.

The OP has a point. The more scarce gold is (or the more scarce it is perceived to be), the more business is generated for RMT. That’s not a commentary on the rightness or wrongness of buying gold, it’s a simple statement of fact. It just doesn’t matter how you or I or anyone else feels about the moral implications of it. Math is amoral.

Well, ANet sells gold. That part of RMT is built into the game by design.

The top post complaints are from ANet’s inability to secure the game from bots and hacks, not people’s desire to get easy gold.

Travel costs are totally optional. You could run through the entire game and never use the portal system. Its just not as convenient.

I figure anyone silly enough to try and buy gold from any source outside of Arena Net deserves what they get. Have zero sympathy for any of them.

If you “play” the game, coin comes pretty easily.

@Mulch: Before the gold bots took over map chat, it was a wonderful way of socializing outside of the guild (especially if you’re like me and can’t seem to get into a sociable guild!) I want the gold bots gone, and map chat back to where it was~

@Nyt & Raf: It’s not about the fact that way points are optional. It’s about the fact that people prefer them, regardless of whether they have the cash or not – and there will inevitably be people supporting RMT companies because they want the gold to use for fast-travel. I’m not saying I agree with it, but that’s how it’s going to happen. Additionally, coin isn’t that easy to come across, especially when you have to fund a winning-streak in WvW.

@Mulch: Just because it’s not the top complaint by players doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve attention.

@Tallenn: Thank you being the person who understood my post. I’m glad that not everyone sees what I say as mindless rambling!

If people are going to buy gold, why would they do it any other way than purchasing gems from the Black Lion store and exchanging them? I don’t get it.

It really is a shame to see the gold sellers spamming chat, but honestly, I’ve gotten so used to seeing it in other games I report and block almost automatically.

Folks, given that there is a RMT-based gold purchasing system run by Anet, they aren’t going to make changes to the game that cause people to use that less. Think.

I am of the opinion that gold SHOULD be scarce and players should be strong enough to resist buying illegitimate gold. Gas is expensive / necessary in real life, but that’s no excuse to start stealing it.

I think the issue isn’t so much the cost of travel and repairs (that doesn’t help) as it is the inability to turn much of a profit on the Trading Post with the game economy being so out of whack. EVERYTHING that isn’t a rare / exotic or fine crafting mats is going for VENDOR prices on the TP – stuff you find, stuff you craft, whatever. Why people are willing to LOSE money in order to sink the in-game economy is beyond me (I can only assume they’re unaware of things like listing fees and the 10% selling fee). In most other MMOs I’ve played, you could sell drops and crafted items at a pretty decent profit so money wasn’t so hard to come by. But when you can buy a full set of decent level 50 gear for less than 10 silver, something is amiss. To anyone who’s paying attention, it’s not worth selling anything on there.

I think the trading post prices will get better after it’s had time to stabalise.

Right now the game has been out for just over 2 weeks and for a lot of that time the trading post was down. A lot of people used that time to stockpile whatever they thought might sell, somehow never realising that everyone else was doing the same thing.

So when it went back up the market was rapidly flooded with an excess of pretty much everything people had to sell, and at the same time there was relatively low demand because most people had their own stockpiles to use/sell and hadn’t really gotten into the habit of relying on the TP to buy things. (Not to mention a lot of those who weren’t so focused on trading didn’t have much gold to spend yet.)

But it seems to be improving slowly and I think given time prices will settle down to sensible levels.

Even if gold became so common as to make it worthless (the only way to make it so people won’t buy gold from gold sellers), then another item would effectively become currency instead. See Diablo 2 for example. Nobody used gold for anything, because it was effectively worthless, but there were still tons of bots an such that spammed advertising sites that sold items for real money.

LoreChief.8391:

Gold is hard to come by in this game,
Thoughts?

You buy gold from Anet.

Problem solved….

Anybody that buys gold from the botters is an idiot and welcomes their accounts and PC to hacking.

Anet is selling gold to their players.

This is how their free to play model works.

If you need gold, buy it from the gem store.

I bought 4000 gems. Converted all of it too gold.
Guess what, I have zero issues with gold right now.

hauntedwolfman.2930:

I am of the opinion that gold SHOULD be scarce and players should be strong enough to resist buying illegitimate gold. Gas is expensive / necessary in real life, but that’s no excuse to start stealing it.

I think the issue isn’t so much the cost of travel and repairs (that doesn’t help) as it is the inability to turn much of a profit on the Trading Post with the game economy being so out of whack. EVERYTHING that isn’t a rare / exotic or fine crafting mats is going for VENDOR prices on the TP – stuff you find, stuff you craft, whatever. Why people are willing to LOSE money in order to sink the in-game economy is beyond me (I can only assume they’re unaware of things like listing fees and the 10% selling fee). In most other MMOs I’ve played, you could sell drops and crafted items at a pretty decent profit so money wasn’t so hard to come by. But when you can buy a full set of decent level 50 gear for less than 10 silver, something is amiss. To anyone who’s paying attention, it’s not worth selling anything on there.

One main reason why this is the case is that the market is global and huge. More than 2m in this market. It’s very, very hard to make profits in a market that is so big unless the stuff that is being sold is actually very rare in the context of what is dropping for 2m players. Most of the stuff that drops isn’t rare in the context of what is dropping for 2m players, so it is priced accordingly. The stuff that is still not rare but is relatively less common, like fine crafting mats, is priced higher. And stuff that is actually rare like ectos and the exotic crafted gear is priced higher in multiple gold range. This makes sense given that the market is not confined to a “server” but is the whole game.

Remember, the game is designed so that it is hard for people to make money consistently — this supports Anet’s cash store model, which sells gold via people buying gems and exchanging them.