Guild Wars 2

We’ve all seen them.
They post spam in chat and send you mails in broken english telling you how fast they are and how fantastic their prices are.

Sure these guys pose a problem but there’s a larger one:

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.

They exist. They take their job seriously, provide adequate security concerning your personal info and have been providing bargain prices since the inception of WoW.

800 gems typically gets you between 4 and 8 gold, depending on the current exchange rate. Thats 10 dollars.

At one of these legitimate sites, 4 dollars can get you between 10 and 15 gold.
50 dollars is close to 100g.

When Dusk is currently selling on the TP for 400g and you can really only currently expect to make 2-5g a day if you really try, between the gem store and a professional gold seller, which is the better bargain?

Sure. A legendary is meant to be a long term goal. It could take years to get. But im not talking about just legendaries and their precursors.

High end mats
Exotic armor
Cultural armors
Rare dyes

All these and more require large amounts of moolah and theyre not getting any cheaper.

Why is abyss dye 20 gold?

You gonna farm for that?

There’s a fine line between playing to achieve a long term reward and not playing at all because the cost of success is obscene to the point of being comical.

Arenanet needs to work on providing a viable counter method of making gold that would attract players who dont wish to spend money to be virtually wealthy.

I understand that grinding this and that will make you rich in the long run but im guessing the majority of players either dont want to do that because it would begin to feel like a job, or they simply dont have the time.

Legendaries are obtainable by all types of gamers.

But the cost is just too ridiculous.

Its going up.

Our rewards need to scale with it, even if it means simply rewarding 75s at the end of a dungeon instead of 23.

Gold sellers win when the morale of a player is crushed by the sheer sight of the cost of their precursor.

Im not trying to be greedy. I dont want to sound like I want Anet to give me everything.

But when prices are continuously going up and gold making methods are being nerfed and all the while our rewards are in some sort of developement limbo land……..Anet loses money to a gold seller.

I dont know how to achieve the balance i desire, where a casual player can still work for his reward in a reasonable amount of time without feeling the itch to go to a gold seller and without feeling catered to.

But it needs to be struck.

And these blues and greens i just looted off jormag are telling me that the teeter totter is horribly off balance.

Oreoz.2573:

Sure these guys pose a problem but there’s a larger one:

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.

Completely agree, this is the bigger issue. If something isn’t done about the drop rate by the time the Dec 14th patch comes along I can well imagine people will be leaving the game.

You can only starve the public for so long before there are consequences and yes you can alienate the public to the point of no return even in a business model that doesn’t have subscriptions keeping the game going.

I hope they are paying attention.

If legendary items required a series of account bound items that didn’t require gold, you could effectively kill the “other” market… but you’d also kill a lot of the gold sink and attraction to use RM in the TP.

Good post OP. Agree with all. Reward for play, in-game, not in-store, needs to be added to the game.

I’ve posted suggestion to help lower the prices of the higher end mats and lodestones which are used for crafting not only the legendary weapons but runes as well here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solution-to-the-T6-mat-issues/first#post923535

My main issue is I can farm for 8+ hours a day for something and have nothing to show for it outside of 20-30s it’s demoralizing…. Atm the only way to get materials is to buy them and they are not cheap…

While I am not up to the point where I am worried about Legendary weapons, as I quickly approach 80, I have noticed that making money in this game is very difficult. Vendor trash amounts to basically nothing. Materials you gather are so abundent for the most part you can’t farm lower level mats for crafters and make any money.

Finding Mats for leather and Cloth items suck. At least in some other MMO you can skin animals for leather. Here you have to hope some salvagble items drops. Buying Leather and Cloth at the Trading company is to expensive. The only good reason I can think of to make an item is to make 4 of something and throw them in the forge and hope you get an upgraded item.

Also Death is a killer, in some higher level zones it can cost almost 2 silver to get to a way point when you die, then another 1 – 2 silver to repair. I don’t mind paying but it nice when you can play for an hour or two and come out ahead.

now that I am hitting the higher level zones maybe that will help. But the exchange rate for gems are killers now, I looked the other day in game gold for gems is almost 1 gold per now and rising, when this game first came out it was 30S per.

Yenkin the leather gets much easier though the cloth still stays somewhat troublesome… Except silk which is really easy to get…. The normal fine crafting mats are easy to get but once you hit tier 6 which is used for exotic/ascended/runes you will not see them…. You can farm for upwards of 8 hours and not even get 5.

Inflation.

Hope that answers the question

Printing more money never helped any economy.

A lot of people on different threads talk about prices inflating, which isn’t 100% accurate. Inflation occurs when the buying power of your money decreases. Now, when looking at the lvl 80 market (precursors, T6 mats, buyable exotics, etc.) you say, “Hey, everything across the board is getting more expensive, yet I’m not really making more gold!”
This certainly sounds like inflation, however, it could also be that there is incredibly higher demand that is outstripping the supply. Which given that the game has been out for 3 months and the vast majority of people have at least 1 level 80 if not 2-5, anything level 80 should be in high demand.

To get a better feel for if your gold is being devalued through inflation, you’d need to take a wide variety of samples of the market and see what trends they have. This would produce numbers more like a Consumer Price Index or a Producer Price Index.

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.

First things first, never believe a gold seller is legit. It’ll be safer for everyone in the long run. o_o-b

Okay, so to my main point, then. Increasing the amount of gold rewards or providing more means to make gold gives Everybody – normal players, gold sellers, that one guy you really hate who bosses you around in dungeons – the same Opportunities across the board.

If the developers were to say make all DEs reward 1 gold instead of the handful of silver you earn, you might think you’d be stoked. “Sweet, Dusk should only take me a week to get!”
However, you’d check back in a week and you’d see that the price of Dusk will have risen to 40,000 gold. Additionally, Gold sellers will advertise prices more like 4 dollars per 1000 gold.

In the end, this idea would really just hurt people who gain most of their income through vendoring blues and greens 1-2 silver. Which I suspect is a surprisingly large group of people. You might as well burn them for warmth instead of using them to buy firewood.

Gold sellers win when the morale of a player is crushed by the sheer sight of the cost of their precursor.

I think this is an important point. Not for the reason you make it, though. In the end, Arenanet is combating gold sellers by attempting to cut of their supply while protecting the normal gamers – you and I – as much as they can.

What I take away from the point you made is that it is us, the players, who are responsible for our own attitude. Stop thinking of yourselves in a place where someone else has to make you happy, because it also puts you in a place where someone else dictates when you are sad.

tigirius.9014:

Oreoz.2573:

Sure these guys pose a problem but there’s a larger one:

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.

Completely agree, this is the bigger issue. If something isn’t done about the drop rate by the time the Dec 14th patch comes along I can well imagine people will be leaving the game.

You can only starve the public for so long before there are consequences and yes you can alienate the public to the point of no return even in a business model that doesn’t have subscriptions keeping the game going.

I hope they are paying attention.

I’m already gone, I only check forums now and then to see any new progress. The mats I require are incredibly stupid low drop rate, I know Anet needs to make money with the gem shop, but trying to push players to the gem shop won’t help their cause. I’m not going to play for years chasing skins, they need to create more meaningful content. Running a dungeon 200 times to get 1 item isn’t meaningful, nor enjoyable.

Hold on. Put the brakes on for a second.

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.
They exist. They take their job seriously, provide adequate security concerning your personal info and have been providing bargain prices since the inception of WoW.

There is no such thing as a “legit” gold seller. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that selling gold is in and of itself an illegal (read: illegitimate) act, there is absolutely no such thing as a legit gold seller. In the same way there’s no such thing as a legit smuggler or a legit counterfeiter or a legit bootlegger, and supporting these “enterprises” under the guise of legitimacy only encourages their existence in the first place.

There is absolutely no situation, under any reasonable circumstances, in which you should justify handing over your credit card information to a gold seller, or hiring farming services, or anything in that exceedingly dubious vein. Not only are you putting yourself at risk for hacking, theft, or possible bans from ArenaNet, but you are participating in—and therefore proliferating—a pernicious culture of gold trading that has done nothing but cause problems for the MMO community.

Every time you fork over real money to these people, you are implicitly encouraging the underhanded business of gold selling, and implicitly encouraging more sophisticated and more pervasive forms of botting, hacking and identity theft.

The problem is not ArenaNet’s prices or the low availability of gold or the cost of precursors.

These are problems which exist independent of the allure of gold sellers. Gold sellers don’t exist because precursors are expensive. Gold sellers don’t exist because gold is rare. Gold sellers exist because enough players are impatient and lack discretion.

If the price of a precursor is prohibitively high, then don’t go after one. If ArenaNet’s economic design leaves you penniless more often than you’d like, then hold ANet responsible. Don’t look to gold sellers for a solution.

Players need to get better at saying no, and taking a hardline stance. If getting a precursor is going to be a boring grind that sucks away months of your life—don’t do it. And don’t try to justify throwing away your integrity by paying gold sellers money. That is not a valid solution—it’s a cheap excuse by someone struggling to justify their own lack of discretion.

I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to be blunt. The quote above displays exactly the sort of reasoning that is slowly, steadily and inevitably giving support to gold sellers, botters and hackers. Don’t do it.

It is a fine balance but one I feel that they have not addressed properly yet. There does need to be some MAJOR adjustment to rewards. Not just for the economy but so that people will feel rewarded.

In example, I did Balthazar last night. The mechanic is idiotic to begin with but it took us over an hour to bring him down and we only did so because his healing glitched twice. First and foremost this was NOT fun and nobody felt like they even accomplished anything because the only way to win it was to wait for a glitch.

Now on to the main point again. The end chest of this hour+ long fight dumped mostly greens for everyone. Not one person got even a yellow. The monetary reward was a few silver. That has to change. An hour long fight should reward far better than that just so that people are not asking “WT*, I did all that for this crap?”

We are fighting hard, high level bosses. A yellow should be a given and an exotic should be something that would drop from such a fight more than 50% of the time. Just doing that would lower many of the prices on the TP.

Considering how much it costs to finish off a legendary the drop rate for precursors should but multiplied by 10 at the bare minimum and the places they drop should be far and wide. I say this because people were so concerned that their precursors would lose value after they dropped from the Karka end chest. This did not happen. Prices went UP! All this shows is that it is still a sellers market

DigitalKirin.9714:

Printing more money never helped any economy.

A lot of people on different threads talk about prices inflating, which isn’t 100% accurate. Inflation occurs when the buying power of your money decreases. Now, when looking at the lvl 80 market (precursors, T6 mats, buyable exotics, etc.) you say, “Hey, everything across the board is getting more expensive, yet I’m not really making more gold!”
This certainly sounds like inflation, however, it could also be that there is incredibly higher demand that is outstripping the supply. Which given that the game has been out for 3 months and the vast majority of people have at least 1 level 80 if not 2-5, anything level 80 should be in high demand.

To get a better feel for if your gold is being devalued through inflation, you’d need to take a wide variety of samples of the market and see what trends they have. This would produce numbers more like a Consumer Price Index or a Producer Price Index.

---

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.

First things first, never believe a gold seller is legit. It’ll be safer for everyone in the long run. o_o-b

Okay, so to my main point, then. Increasing the amount of gold rewards or providing more means to make gold gives Everybody – normal players, gold sellers, that one guy you really hate who bosses you around in dungeons – the same Opportunities across the board.

If the developers were to say make all DEs reward 1 gold instead of the handful of silver you earn, you might think you’d be stoked. “Sweet, Dusk should only take me a week to get!”
However, you’d check back in a week and you’d see that the price of Dusk will have risen to 40,000 gold. Additionally, Gold sellers will advertise prices more like 4 dollars per 1000 gold.

In the end, this idea would really just hurt people who gain most of their income through vendoring blues and greens 1-2 silver. Which I suspect is a surprisingly large group of people. You might as well burn them for warmth instead of using them to buy firewood.

Gold sellers win when the morale of a player is crushed by the sheer sight of the cost of their precursor.

I think this is an important point. Not for the reason you make it, though. In the end, Arenanet is combating gold sellers by attempting to cut of their supply while protecting the normal gamers – you and I – as much as they can.

What I take away from the point you made is that it is us, the players, who are responsible for our own attitude. Stop thinking of yourselves in a place where someone else has to make you happy, because it also puts you in a place where someone else dictates when you are sad.

I see your point and I completely agree.

It just doesnt feeeel right. I dunno. Like i said itd be a hard balance to achieve if an effort was to be made and im sure one is being made but currently its just there not there.

Drop rates of some specific items need to be increased.

Obviously if you want Twilight, youll keep Dusk. But out of the tens of hundreds of thousands playing and out of everyone in that pool who doesnt want Twilight but picks up Dusk, Im to believe that as if last night theres only 3 in the TP.

Just 3.

Thats crap drop rate. Lol

Maybe we shouldnt be rewarded more financially, Zi understsnd you there.

But there are certain items and mats in the economy that an average player is just not seeing enough of.

Again, 20 gold for a dye is laughable. Lol

80 content should not reward blues and greens for starters.

But like i said, i dunno for sure.

What I do know is that gold sellers and sleepless grinders are screwing us. Lol

cdsmith.1072:

It is a fine balance but one I feel that they have not addressed properly yet. There does need to be some MAJOR adjustment to rewards. Not just for the economy but so that people will feel rewarded.

In example, I did Balthazar last night. The mechanic is idiotic to begin with but it took us over an hour to bring him down and we only did so because his healing glitched twice. First and foremost this was NOT fun and nobody felt like they even accomplished anything because the only way to win it was to wait for a glitch.

Now on to the main point again. The end chest of this hour+ long fight dumped mostly greens for everyone. Not one person got even a yellow. The monetary reward was a few silver. That has to change. An hour long fight should reward far better than that just so that people are not asking “WT*, I did all that for this crap?”

We are fighting hard, high level bosses. A yellow should be a given and an exotic should be something that would drop from such a fight more than 50% of the time. Just doing that would lower many of the prices on the TP.

Considering how much it costs to finish off a legendary the drop rate for precursors should but multiplied by 10 at the bare minimum and the places they drop should be far and wide. I say this because people were so concerned that their precursors would lose value after they dropped from the Karka end chest. This did not happen. Prices went UP! All this shows is that it is still a sellers market

A lil off topic but for Balthazar, just bring 10-15 people. Ots perfect scaling. Me and my guild tested it out last night so if that truly was the optimal number and it worked like a charm. We completed the northern chain, escorted the pact, and downed him in 2 and a half min out of the 8 they give you. No champions spawned. Nothing. It was perfect.

Just 10-15 people. Sorry if you encountered bugs like that but otherwise thats all you need.

Ok back on topic now.

Anyone felt gold seller and not enough reward is a completely different subject?

If anything they need to nerf the rewards more and double the gem to gold exchange rate to combate the gold seller. Which is completely opposite to what everyone is saying.

Just because people is stop buying from gold seller because they stop needing to do it, dont’ mean Arenanet make more money from the gem store.

Making the game less grindy do make the players happier. So they play longer and have higher chance to buy expansion and future content. Which is a valid argument. But that gold seller thing is completely unrelated.

DigitalKirin.9714:

This certainly sounds like inflation, however, it could also be that there is incredibly higher demand that is outstripping the supply.

I agree with most of your ideas in your post but this I do not agree with. I have been closely watching several exotics lately and have observed their price go up each and every day. Whats more is that the amount available on the TP goes steadily up as well. It is pretty clear that many of these items are not selling. Not just talking about huge items like Lidless Eye and Jormags Needle but less desireables like Tsunami and various Destroyer Staffs for instance.

For mats and stuff with higher drop rates I think they are more in tune with the market as you described it but for exotics … and particularly weapons I think there is a huge greed factor everyone is trying to hope to exploit.

If gold was cheap this would be a big deal. Gold is very expensive. I suppose some people have enough $ to buy gold from an outside seller but I don’t know anyone willing to throw this kind of $ around.

It’s about time someone posted the reality of this game’s economy. I hate grinding and Anet promised no grinding. They may be trying to control the economy, but many of us are finding it very discouraging just to try to stay afloat. We want/need good gear. Where’s the fun in being poor all the time. If Anet doesn’t want us buying gold from gold sellers, then FIX the economy!

Yeah this issue is kind of delicate.

I agree that illegitimate practices are illegitimate no matter the circumstance. But at the same time there’s something to be said about Anet seeming to foster an environment that can tempt people into resorting to outside services.

Players who don’t care have probably moved on to some other game already.

There needs to be a balance here.

Sadly, with rare and in demand items, the opportunities arise to create monopolies. That’s what I see when I see Dusk.

My thought is this, and maybe it’ll help you, maybe not. Because I really do wanna help people.

Make a list of your in game priorities (even if it’s just a mental list), then sort them by what you feel is most important to you down to what is least important to you.
e.g. (not prioritized) Fun, Money, Legendary Weapon.

Now I agree that they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, But let’s say you could only have one thing from your list. What would you keep? Could you be happy with it? Would I really want a legendary even if I had to give up all the good I’d ever earn and do things in the game I find unfun? Do I just want to have fun, despite never making a significant amount of money or ever earning that legendary weapon?

Okay, on a more practical application of this thought experiment:
Do what matches the most things in your list of priorities.

Personally, I find dungeons are fun! In the long run, I know if I put my mind to it, I could probably figure out how to play the TP, but I’d rather spend that time running dungeons. I’ve traded potential earning for more fun.

So consider this: if you are wanting to maximize your income, and farming isn’t doing it, what will make you more money? Instead of doing the same thing for little money and hoping the system will change so that you’ll suddenly be making more money from the same action, consider what other options you are willing to do.

If you like farming, can you increase your rotation of farmed monsters to avoid DR? Are you willing to do dungeons for an increase in revenue? (my income goes up the more dungeons I do compared to just farming mobs mindlessly). Are you willing to learn how to gamble on the TP or the Mystic Forge?

What are you willing to do and what are you willing to give up?

My last bit of advice:
“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
Recognize what you have for what it’s worth. Instead of wondering why it isn’t better, understand that it is what it is. If farming nets you 50s an hour, you should be saying either, “I’m happy earning 50s/hr because I’m doing what’s fun,” or “I need to farm smarter to increase my income,” or “I need to stop farming because there’s money to be made elsewhere.”. What we need to stop saying is, “why can’t troll farming get me more money?”

Nothing Anet can do with their gems for gold pricing or droprate will stop gold farmers and sellers. The only solution is to ban them and ban buyers, too. Which requires some serious detection, it seems, since no MMO has ever completely managed it, sad to say.

As for calling these guys professional, please don’t. It’s still mostly sweatshop and prison labor.

Anet should never have introduced gems for gold, I loathe the system and everything that comes with it and I think people who buy in game currency with real money…well, I won’t go into what I think of them, but if you are going to do it, at least be slightly less of a (won’t say it) and buy from the developers of the game you enjoy and not from some thieving gold farming company.

The problem is that Anet is trying to force people to use the gem shop. It works in a F2P game because there will always be some idiot that downloads the game and buys something.

Anet should consider making the gem store more attractive. Instead, they’re nerfing drop rates and trying to force people to convert gems to gold. Not gonna happen when gold sellers have better rates and the prices for precursors/mats are going up.

What are they do? Increase supply and no one will need to buy gold. Decrease supply and people will buy from gold sellers. Anet can’t win. Gems to gold will never work. Time to make the gem store more attractive another way. No, RNG is not the way either.

IIRC, the reason for selling gems for gold (and vice versa) was to try to discourage gold sellers and the people using them. But what really ended up happening was that they encouraged the gold sellers even more.

Yeah funny how they claim they aren’t making the game play to win, though seeing as they allow you to buy gems then trade them for gold from their store but you do so else where and they want to ban you. Also if you didn’t want your player base to pay to win you would remove your in game option to “BUY GOLD” no it isn’t worded as such but we all know its what it really is.

But I’m sure we’ll get claims from Anet and others that they make gold neigh impossible to farm because of gold sellers meanwhile they can sell as much as they want. It was also funny how fast the suggestion of GW2 becoming pay to win on the forums got deleted in my last post but I could care less anymore, this games not fun the way it is, so delete this if you feel the need to.

If they didn’t want you to buy gold why do they let you pay real cash for gems then trade those gems for gold?

ghettogenius.9174:

DigitalKirin.9714:

This certainly sounds like inflation, however, it could also be that there is incredibly higher demand that is outstripping the supply.

I agree with most of your ideas in your post but this I do not agree with. I have been closely watching several exotics lately and have observed their price go up each and every day. Whats more is that the amount available on the TP goes steadily up as well. It is pretty clear that many of these items are not selling. Not just talking about huge items like Lidless Eye and Jormags Needle but less desireables like Tsunami and various Destroyer Staffs for instance.

For mats and stuff with higher drop rates I think they are more in tune with the market as you described it but for exotics … and particularly weapons I think there is a huge greed factor everyone is trying to hope to exploit.

That is interesting, and I haven’t really looked into any of those items, so I trust your judgement on that. o_o)-b

Part of that is maybe because there is currently no time limit on posting an item on the AH. So whatever was posted a month before is still there, even if the price probably already changed.

If I wanted to remove an item from the AH and resell it, I have to remember to do so. The UI to do so is there, but is also a bit out of the way. It took me a few days to even know that I can remove items from the post in the first place.

What do you feel like you actually need to buy in GW2? Bags, and ??

The way it’s set up, you can easily level up without worrying about gear. Once 80, you can go masterwork-rare-exotic progression in a bunch of different ways. Get dungeon weapons, get karma armor, gather up for your jewels. Invaders’ if you’re one of those types. Oh and rings and back from fotm if you want.

It’s not like games where you have to spend a huge amount for your spells/skills, or a mount or anything. Top tier gear, except for necklace and earrings can all be obtained without a gold. And hey, we just got a fancy earring from the lost shores fiasco.

Slyder.9215:

Part of that is maybe because there is currently no time limit on posting an item on the AH. So whatever was posted a month before is still there, even if the price probably already changed.

If I wanted to remove an item from the AH and resell it, I have to remember to do so. The UI to do so is there, but is also a bit out of the way. It took me a few days to even know that I can remove items from the post in the first place.

I think a time limit on TP items would benefit the economy greatly.

Cost too high? Dont buy. The seller sees this and costs go down to something more reasonable.

Unfortunately itd be incredibly difficult to put a timestamp on each individual seller’s items in a global market. That would consist of endless lists of auctions. However the implementation of some sort of “control” variable i think would help immensely.

Im sure theres some poor kid out there waiting for his greatsaw sword skin to sell for 100g. Lol

I get Anet’s reasoning. They base their notion of the “anti-grind” on the strength of their gameplay which is, i believe safe to say, fun for all of us.

But even fun, awesome, stupendous gameplay cannot dissuade a gamer from going to an outside source for virtual financial help because the price of success is ludicrous.

I understand the stigma towards all gold sellers. They msy be sweatshops. They may be slavers. But all the player is seeing is an organization thats making good on their word to make them rich.

An in-game alternate method is needed. Obviously itll never beat the bargains of the other guys, but its not meant to.
Its only meant to be a viable option.

Right now GW2 has none.

The most basic thing I think we can ask for is level appropriate drops and tiers from events and dungeons.

Blues and greens from a level 75 dragon encounter is unacceptable and very disheartening.

mulch.2586:

What do you feel like you actually need to buy in GW2? Bags, and ??

The way it’s set up, you can easily level up without worrying about gear. Once 80, you can go masterwork-rare-exotic progression in a bunch of different ways. Get dungeon weapons, get karma armor, gather up for your jewels. Invaders’ if you’re one of those types. Oh and rings and back from fotm if you want.

It’s not like games where you have to spend a huge amount for your spells/skills, or a mount or anything. Top tier gear, except for necklace and earrings can all be obtained without a gold. And hey, we just got a fancy earring from the lost shores fiasco.

Im not sure youre on the same page as everyone else. Its not just about gear. To do what you want, to build the character the way you want, to repair, to travel, etc

It all takes money. Money that is not coming at a rate that is balanced. It cant be too fast and it cant be too slow.

Right now its too slow so gold sellers and sleepless farmers are causing prices to continuously go up because i feel the majority of us feel rich with 10g. Lol

You have 10G? (jealous)

Slyder.9215:

You have 10G? (jealous)

Barely five actually, myself. Lol

Oreoz.2573:

mulch.2586:

What do you feel like you actually need to buy in GW2? Bags, and ??

The way it’s set up, you can easily level up without worrying about gear. Once 80, you can go masterwork-rare-exotic progression in a bunch of different ways. Get dungeon weapons, get karma armor, gather up for your jewels. Invaders’ if you’re one of those types. Oh and rings and back from fotm if you want.

It’s not like games where you have to spend a huge amount for your spells/skills, or a mount or anything. Top tier gear, except for necklace and earrings can all be obtained without a gold. And hey, we just got a fancy earring from the lost shores fiasco.

Im not sure youre on the same page as everyone else. Its not just about gear. To do what you want, to build the character the way you want, to repair, to travel, etc

It all takes money. Money that is not coming at a rate that is balanced. It cant be too fast and it cant be too slow.

Right now its too slow so gold sellers and sleepless farmers are causing prices to continuously go up because i feel the majority of us feel rich with 10g. Lol

Travel & repair, I doubt anyone is buying gold for that sort of thing. If they are, $10 of gems will last you a long long time.

We’re at the point where the economy is maturing. The only thing left to buy for most people are the fancy stuff. The weapons with nice effects, the cool looking gear, the splurge sorts of things.

It’s to be expected that in a game with a very shallow power curve and a lot of tradeable goods, the price for “fancy” will go up at the same rate that player wealth goes up. Cuz there’s nothing else we’re spending on.

Increase gold/loot drops 10% and you’ll see inflation go right up to match it. Just like real life capitalist markets, if you’re poor, you’ll stay poor, no matter what happens in the macro-economy.

I know this is not the place to argue about whether you like it or not, but they will be rolling out the rest of the Ascended tier soon. And from what I understand from the AMA, then they intend for this to be the final stop of gear stats before you go for cosmetics – the way Exotics kind of are now. We don’t know yet, but we’ll probably need gold for those too.

But I get what you mean.