Guild Wars 2

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers.

It’d also help if using waypoints and repairing your armor wasn’t so punitive.

Does everyone think these bots are just some asian guys? Come on.. If ANet was banning these accounts, how could they afford to get another account? And do this over and over again..

Theres something serious going on..

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers.

It’d also help if using waypoints and repairing your armor wasn’t so punitive.

Not the solution at all ….. its an economic spiral. If you change the Gem:Gold ratio the cost of all products will increase to the perceived established value. If ANET gave double the gold for gems as they do now, then what costs 4g now will cost 8g.

In addition, without quoting your other post, ANET has a cost of operation or overhead. The gold-sellers do not, as they merely hack accounts. ANET is not capable, nor would I expect them to resort to undercutting gold-sellers.

Vakirauta.6397:

Does everyone think these bots are just some asian guys? Come on.. If ANet was banning these accounts, how could they afford to get another account? And do this over and over again..

Theres something serious going on..

Where do you think the hacked accounts go? They don’t have to afford what they didn’t pay for in the first place.

I have to agree with Icecat, the cost to buy gold legally is very expensive. The cost to port and repair is too expensive. IMO if you make it so everything feels like you always have to farm in order to not waste time, IE using the way points, you will lose people over having them just play more. I am not saying make it easier, just much less costly. If someone plays just a little a week, but always is broke and hurting for money they will not have fun for long. They will not play for long. It’s a game not work. When a game feels like work, its not fun.

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers..

And destroy the economy in the process? Brilliant. You didn’t think this one through, did you? Gold is already less than $0.70/gold from the gold sellers – less than two hours work at the average US salary will net you 50 gold, how long do you think you’d have to farm legitimately to make that same 50 gold in game?

Gold has to have a value in the game or you wind up with stupid levels of inflation where the only way to afford something on the TP is to buy gold from gold farmers or ANet, and then you just threw the game in the crapper as it becomes a game where you either become a full time farmer yourself or you pay to play. To see how well players like this sort of design go look the general feeling of D3 players on their forums.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower. It’s a race to the bottom that leaves the price to buy gold so low that you create the problem where everybody feels the amount of gold they get by playing the game is ridiculously low when they can just take the money they made taking bathroom breaks at work and buy more gold then they could farming for a week. So then you raise the drop rate of currency, which can remove the feeling you need to buy gold temporarily, but then all the TP prices rise and you’re right back racing against the gold sellers.

ArenaNet has to have a basement for the official cash price for gold or the player based economy will have no solid basis – the bots will have all the rare drops on the TP and the players will all have to buy botted gold to afford the rare drops because of the huge discrepancy between time to farm gold legitimately vs. the time required to earn enough to buy gold. They can’t win against the gold sellers in terms of undercutting them.

A lot of armchair economists here…I’m no different, but…

I would be extremely interested to see what would happen if Anet opened up the gems:gold to the free market, allowing players to buy and sell gems directly. Let the market decide what the exchange rate is between gold and gems, not some ambigious algorithm.

They can then focus their efforts on killing bots, stopping account hacks and other illegal means of producing gold, while allowing players to legitimately trade gold. The other enourmous benefit to this is the system for gold stays relatively closed. The only gold that gets traded is gold that was created in game (through ideally legitimate means). That should remove any negative effects on the ecomony (IE bread selling for 1,000 gold) since the supply of in-game gold will still be limited to what players can produce. With the current system, gold is literally produced from thin air as people trade gems for gold.

Chip H.3951:

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers..

And destroy the economy in the process? Brilliant. You didn’t think this one through, did you? Gold is already less than $0.70/gold from the gold sellers – less than two hours work at the average US salary will net you 50 gold, how long do you think you’d have to farm legitimately to make that same 50 gold in game?

Gold has to have a value in the game or you wind up with stupid levels of inflation where the only way to afford something on the TP is to buy gold from gold farmers or ANet, and then you just threw the game in the crapper as it becomes a game where you either become a full time farmer yourself or you pay to play. To see how well players like this sort of design go look the general feeling of D3 players on their forums.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower. It’s a race to the bottom that leaves the price to buy gold so low that you create the problem where everybody feels the amount of gold they get by playing the game is ridiculously low when they can just take the money they made taking bathroom breaks at work and buy more gold then they could farming for a week. So then you raise the drop rate of currency, which can remove the feeling you need to buy gold temporarily, but then all the TP prices rise and you’re right back racing against the gold sellers.

ArenaNet has to have a basement for the official cash price for gold or the player based economy will have no solid basis – the bots will have all the rare drops on the TP and the players will all have to buy botted gold to afford the rare drops because of the huge discrepancy between time to farm gold legitimately vs. the time required to earn enough to buy gold. They can’t win against the gold sellers in terms of undercutting them.

This is such a bogus argument. Completely and utterly bogus.

You guys act as if purchasing gold is a dead-end street. As if the purchasers become rich, and the rest become destitute and unable to afford anything. Patently and completely untrue and, once again, BOGUS. A great majority of the gold that is purchased will be pumped into the community economy — i.e., things purchased on the trading block. Even if you don’t purchase gold yourself, you’ll be able to stay afloat by selling things on the trading block. Indeed, those repair costs and waypoint fees won’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

Again, your argument is completely bogus.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower.

Again, not true. The gold sellers are going to hit diminishing returns very quickly. I imagine they’re being stretched pretty thin as it is.

Mavajo.5796:

A great majority of the gold that is purchased will be pumped into the community economy —

Of course it goes back into the economy, that IS the problem. If it were a dead end street, what you seem to think people are throwing out as a counter, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. Some subset of the player base would buy their gold, buy their cultural gear, get bored and leave. That would be comparatively awesome. The very problem is that it’s not a closed system.

You don’t even understand how the system works and you call my plainly obvious observation bogus? Good lords.

ironzerg.3196:

A lot of armchair economists here…I’m no different, but…

I would be extremely interested to see what would happen if Anet opened up the gems:gold to the free market, allowing players to buy and sell gems directly. Let the market decide what the exchange rate is between gold and gems, not some ambigious algorithm.

They can then focus their efforts on killing bots, stopping account hacks and other illegal means of producing gold, while allowing players to legitimately trade gold. The other enourmous benefit to this is the system for gold stays relatively closed. The only gold that gets traded is gold that was created in game (through ideally legitimate means). That should remove any negative effects on the ecomony (IE bread selling for 1,000 gold) since the supply of in-game gold will still be limited to what players can produce. With the current system, gold is literally produced from thin air as people trade gems for gold.

Well…. here is my armchair economists view of that …. If gems are open to a free market price… the gold-sellers buy up all the gems they can …thus inflating the value of the gems and making an illegal profit off both ends.

Mavajo.5796:

Chip H.3951:

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers..

And destroy the economy in the process? Brilliant. You didn’t think this one through, did you? Gold is already less than $0.70/gold from the gold sellers – less than two hours work at the average US salary will net you 50 gold, how long do you think you’d have to farm legitimately to make that same 50 gold in game?

Gold has to have a value in the game or you wind up with stupid levels of inflation where the only way to afford something on the TP is to buy gold from gold farmers or ANet, and then you just threw the game in the crapper as it becomes a game where you either become a full time farmer yourself or you pay to play. To see how well players like this sort of design go look the general feeling of D3 players on their forums.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower. It’s a race to the bottom that leaves the price to buy gold so low that you create the problem where everybody feels the amount of gold they get by playing the game is ridiculously low when they can just take the money they made taking bathroom breaks at work and buy more gold then they could farming for a week. So then you raise the drop rate of currency, which can remove the feeling you need to buy gold temporarily, but then all the TP prices rise and you’re right back racing against the gold sellers.

ArenaNet has to have a basement for the official cash price for gold or the player based economy will have no solid basis – the bots will have all the rare drops on the TP and the players will all have to buy botted gold to afford the rare drops because of the huge discrepancy between time to farm gold legitimately vs. the time required to earn enough to buy gold. They can’t win against the gold sellers in terms of undercutting them.

This is such a bogus argument. Completely and utterly bogus.

You guys act as if purchasing gold is a dead-end street. As if the purchasers become rich, and the rest become destitute and unable to afford anything. Patently and completely untrue and, once again, BOGUS. A great majority of the gold that is purchased will be pumped into the community economy — i.e., things purchased on the trading block. Even if you don’t purchase gold yourself, you’ll be able to stay afloat by selling things on the trading block. Indeed, those repair costs and waypoint fees won’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

Again, your argument is completely bogus.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower.

Again, not true. The gold sellers are going to hit diminishing returns very quickly. I imagine they’re being stretched pretty thin as it is.

sorry but its not wrong or bogus … if you want an example of the open economy you are looking for… go check Diablo3 ’s RMAH and AH. The prices there are outrageous and it is because Blizz chose the path you advocate…. its also why I dont even bother with that game.

Bottom line – this isn’t the solution to the gold-seller and buyers problem and this gem discussion is so far off topic that, as the OP, I am requesting that you start your own thread on gem to gold ratio if you wish to continue it. Thank you for your understanding.

I’d like to comment on the fact that gold sellers sell gold at a cheaper price than doing gems to gold:

That seems to be on the way out. It’ll just take some more time. I do a lot of gold to gems conversion and that price has been going up steadily. It costs me more gold to buy 100 gems now (was less than 40s for 100 gems a week ago, now it’s like 50s) than it ever has and the price is continuing to go up. When that happens, people that do gems to gold get a better exchange rate in their favor.

In a month it’ll probably be a lot less desirable for people to buy gold from gold sellers, because that exchange rate for gems to gold is going to keep getting better for a while yet.

to the poster that said others games don’t ban for GOLD BUYING, they do. Aion, in recent memory, has banned plenty of players for buying gold. A persistent and sincere player can get their accounts unbanned, but stripped naked and goldless. Repeat offense is perma ban. i’m not claiming it’s a perfect solution, because i see plenty of gold spammer and bots in aion still, but it’s not true that other MMOs don’t ban for gold buying. Other games did so too (2moons for another example).

NinjaKnight.1340:

Gideon.2071:

NinjaKnight.1340:

Gideon.2071:

Indeed they can track it if they are fast enough and they know who the bots are.

Apparently they weren’t prepared for this which is why bots stay up for days even after players report them.

It becomes more difficult to track when the botters are using hacked acounts and sophisticated methods to constantly move small amounts around thousands of accounts.

Then there is a foolproof way to cut the trail in the end assuming they haven’t already sold the Gold through a hacked account.

Find a thinly traded item on TP. Clean it out by buying and filling all the listed orders. Relist the items from a Genuinely purchased account at a slightly inflated price not too high to elicit suspicion. Buy it with the hacked account using the botted Gold. This efffectively cuts the trail dead. A sophisticated Gold selling house could do this pretty fast with systems or cheap labor.

Now we have the Gold in the genuinely purchased account which can freely trade with little ability for Anet to prove it is not legit. The only cost is the 15% transaction fee. So obviously this is the last resort. When there is excess gold not yet sold through hacked accounts.

But Anet already knows hacked accounts and bots by the reports (and because it’s so laughably obvious) that they could simply track who the bots are transferring money to. Parsing this data will reveal where the gold is flowing. I bet they could find the primary gold holders very easily. That’s not even counting the huge transactions of hundreds of gold. Once the tracking system is in place, it’s extremely easy to tell if that 300 gold was farmed legit and just being gifted to another player, or if the sender is tied to a bot net.

It would be nearly impossible to ban all the low level bots this way. With the volume of currency sent via mail, you could grab the bots pretty easily. Because all banks are central to an account, there is no reason to mail gold or items to yourself. This greatly reduces the amount of gold travelling through the mail, and therefore the number of times someone is likely to mail gold. It should be pretty easy to pick up regular gold shipments. If the farmers slow down the frequency of shipments, then they have to ship larger quantities at once, which would still flag the account.

The idea is to hammer the large gold transfers (20+ gold). It’s kind of like busting drug dealers – go after the source. Except in this case, Anet can see where all the drugs are at a glance. They know exactly how much gold any person has, where they got it, where they spent it, and what’s in the mail. Why they haven’t implemented an automated system that detects large gold transfers is beyond me. It’s not like gold selling is new. I figured they would have put a system in place, knowing it would become a problem.

Instead it looks like they had no clue this practice existed and left the doors wide open.

Your idea is theoretically good if Anet had a system in place before hand. The situation is actually reversed it would seem. Goldsellers had multiple systems in place ready to deploy as soon as GW2 launched.

You assume that all 2M+players play regularly. It is possible that many haven’t bothered to change their login becuase they weren’t hit by the first wave of hacks. With that many accounts out there even a 0.5% number of hacked accounts is 10,000 accounts.

Also ATM 10-20G is a small amount to transfer. A full exotic lvl 80 set could easily cost much more than 20G. Genuine players can make 1G+ per hr grinding and more in the TP.

Who is to say it isn’t a friend sending 20G if both accounts are legit? I personally send stuff to my daughter all the time. So do i suddenly get banned if I decide to send 20G?

If the sending account is hacked, well the buyer can be permabanned but the Gold seller is still in biz.

The state of the system is bad, they really need to act faster, maybe buyout multiple Goldselling companies and turn them into agents to find and combat the others.

You’re missing the point entirely. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 gold or 1 copper. The point is that you can detect patterns. Bots and gold sellers have specific behavior patterns that do not match a typical player. Does your friend send 20 gold every day? Does he receive gold infusions from 30 of the same players every day? For 20+ gold? The frequency of gold mailing is going to be leagues different between a legit player and a gold seller. The number of wrongful bans would be tiny, probably only around a hundred per year. Out of 2 million accounts, that’s pretty small.

Given that all that our characters “are” and “do” are database registers and fields, the appropiate datamining scripts could fairly easily identify gold sellers and even goldbuyers. Crossing those datamining scripts with others that look at mails sent and received, Anet could create a fairly effective and nearly error-free method.

As stated before, the errors in the system could be corrected by human customer service professionals.

godofstorm.6201:

Given that all that our characters “are” and “do” are database registers and fields, the appropiate datamining scripts could fairly easily identify gold sellers and even goldbuyers. Crossing those datamining scripts with others that look at mails sent and received, Anet could create a fairly effective and nearly error-free method.

As stated before, the errors in the system could be corrected by human customer service professionals.

Except reading the in game emails of players would be a criminal breach of California Law (and several other US States), Canadian Law, European Directives (specifically the ePrivacy Directive), Korean Law, Japanese Law, Mexican Law, Brazillian Law, Australian Law (do I need to go on?)

Just because it is a game it doesn’t mean private communications between users are not protected by the same laws as every other private communication.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Mavajo.5796:

Chip H.3951:

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers..

And destroy the economy in the process? Brilliant. You didn’t think this one through, did you? Gold is already less than $0.70/gold from the gold sellers – less than two hours work at the average US salary will net you 50 gold, how long do you think you’d have to farm legitimately to make that same 50 gold in game?

Gold has to have a value in the game or you wind up with stupid levels of inflation where the only way to afford something on the TP is to buy gold from gold farmers or ANet, and then you just threw the game in the crapper as it becomes a game where you either become a full time farmer yourself or you pay to play. To see how well players like this sort of design go look the general feeling of D3 players on their forums.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower. It’s a race to the bottom that leaves the price to buy gold so low that you create the problem where everybody feels the amount of gold they get by playing the game is ridiculously low when they can just take the money they made taking bathroom breaks at work and buy more gold then they could farming for a week. So then you raise the drop rate of currency, which can remove the feeling you need to buy gold temporarily, but then all the TP prices rise and you’re right back racing against the gold sellers.

ArenaNet has to have a basement for the official cash price for gold or the player based economy will have no solid basis – the bots will have all the rare drops on the TP and the players will all have to buy botted gold to afford the rare drops because of the huge discrepancy between time to farm gold legitimately vs. the time required to earn enough to buy gold. They can’t win against the gold sellers in terms of undercutting them.

This is such a bogus argument. Completely and utterly bogus.

You guys act as if purchasing gold is a dead-end street. As if the purchasers become rich, and the rest become destitute and unable to afford anything. Patently and completely untrue and, once again, BOGUS. A great majority of the gold that is purchased will be pumped into the community economy — i.e., things purchased on the trading block. Even if you don’t purchase gold yourself, you’ll be able to stay afloat by selling things on the trading block. Indeed, those repair costs and waypoint fees won’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

Again, your argument is completely bogus.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower.

Again, not true. The gold sellers are going to hit diminishing returns very quickly. I imagine they’re being stretched pretty thin as it is.

sorry but its not wrong or bogus … if you want an example of the open economy you are looking for… go check Diablo3 ’s RMAH and AH. The prices there are outrageous and it is because Blizz chose the path you advocate…. its also why I dont even bother with that game.

Bottom line – this isn’t the solution to the gold-seller and buyers problem and this gem discussion is so far off topic that, as the OP, I am requesting that you start your own thread on gem to gold ratio if you wish to continue it. Thank you for your understanding.

No. If they change the Gem:Gold ratio such that it’s no longer a feasible business model for the gold farmers, the problem will be saved. Your armchair economists completely blow these issues out of proportion. Nerds whining about the economy in MMOs is as old as MMOs themselves. Completely overblown and exaggerated in order to push agendas.

If they adjusted the Gem/Gold ratio, the gold farmers would be gone before the end of the month. PERIOD. And the “economy” would be fine. Hell, it’d actually be even better, since these waypoint fees and equipment repair costs wouldn’t be so punitive and obnoxious.

Paladine – Just stop. You’re completely wrong in every post and you’re embarrassing yourself. Putting out false facts and lies is not going to protect you from being banned for buying and/or selling gold (you’re obviously doing one of those).

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

Gideon.2071:

Paladine – Just stop. You’re completely wrong in every post and you’re embarrassing yourself. Putting out false facts and lies is not going to protect you from being banned for buying and/or selling gold (you’re obviously doing one of those).

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

Careful who you accuse, I haven’t purchased any gold nor sold any, in fact I have spent $150 on Gems.

As for being wrong, no I am not, it is my job and I know these issues incredibly well – but thanks for your feedback and have a lovely evening.

Some poor kittens are making a living off of gold farming and power leveling. I find that I just dont care if they do it or not I just play the game. So good for them. On another note didnt wow make game gold so easy to get that it became pointless for most of the farmers to continue? I recall seeing very little ingame gold seller spam in wow last year. Of course if it was that easy here that would make it near pointless to buy gems from Anet. Im one of those who doesnt mind paying a sub. Geez I cant spend fifteen bucks a month on something I enjoy? Spend more than that on coffees on the way to work monthly….

Now if every time I bought 800 gems from Anet I got an account bound mount that lasted for a couple hours riding before expiring say…. Wouldnt most prefer to buy from Anet rather than gold sellers in this case? Thanks for reading and have fun.

Paladine.6082:

Gideon.2071:

Paladine – Just stop. You’re completely wrong in every post and you’re embarrassing yourself. Putting out false facts and lies is not going to protect you from being banned for buying and/or selling gold (you’re obviously doing one of those).

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

Careful who you accuse, I haven’t purchased any gold nor sold any, in fact I have spent $150 on Gems.

As for being wrong, no I am not, it is my job and I know these issues incredibly well – but thanks for your feedback and have a lovely evening.

So your job is knowing the laws of more than 8 countries? BS. Even armchair lawyers know that what constitutes private communication is limited. That’s why lawyers send their email with a signature that disclaims any privacy. Also, if you’re such a whiz of a lawyer, why didn’t you bother to read the ToS? Anet OWNS everything you do in that game. Everything you type becomes their property. Whoops. That’s industry standard so you can’t claim a copyright on a section of their game.

Also, them selling gold exclusively does not constitute a monopoly, as the digital goods hold no value and do not exist in a real market. The entire premise of your argument is laughable. Next you’ll say that they can’t have exclusive rights to sell weapons through their weapon vendors, and they have to allow gold farmers to set up NPC’s to compete with them.

The analogy of casino chips doesn’t work either. Players become the legal owners of those chips when they win them. They literally become the property of the player. But the casino will kick you out for doing it. Anet owns everything attached to GW2. Everything. Let me emphasize – everything.

Also, try going into a casino with completely different chips and selling them. Good luck with that. You’ll either be in jail or in a ditch with your limbs broken.

anet sell gold too expansive. i wont buy from illegit sellers,but ill wont buy from anet either. anet sell crap items and services on market. and at insane prices! i would spend alot of euros for cool items,as i did last 5 years in cabal online. 50-100 eu/month in a f2p game. but there they sold skins for char and weap, and other cool services/pets. anet sell crap,sorry to say that.

Gideon.2071:

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

What. I think you’re completely confused.

If you adjust the Gold:Gem ratio, it becomes more practical for people to just buy Gold from ArenaNet (via Gems) than from gold sellers. The gold sellers actually have to go out there and farm the stuff, whereas ArenaNet just types in a new value. It won’t take long for ArenaNet to adjust the Gold:Gem ratio to such a level that it’s no longer feasible for gold sellers to farm and re-sale gold as a means of real world income.

Mavajo.5796:

Gideon.2071:

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

What. I think you’re completely confused.

If you adjust the Gold:Gem ratio, it becomes more practical for people to just buy Gold from ArenaNet (via Gems) than from gold sellers. The gold sellers actually have to go out there and farm the stuff, whereas ArenaNet just types in a new value. It won’t take long for ArenaNet to adjust the Gold:Gem ratio to such a level that it’s no longer feasible for gold sellers to farm and re-sale gold as a means of real world income.

That’s called price fixing, and as I keep stating, it has never worked once in history. You cannot artificial set a boundary where people are happy with the product and the price. You have to let people decide that for themselves.

Gideon.2071:

Mavajo.5796:

Gideon.2071:

Mavajo – A controlled market will always fail. Anet cannot simply adjust gem prices to fix the problem, they have to switch to a free market like the FLEX system for that to work. Yes, gold sellers can buy all the gems. But then people will buy more gems an the gold sellers will never make any money. They would just end up with a ton of virtual gems that come out of thin air. That doesn’t help their cause at all. Selling those gems back for in game gold won’t get them money, and the people will determine how much gold they get for the exchange.

What. I think you’re completely confused.

If you adjust the Gold:Gem ratio, it becomes more practical for people to just buy Gold from ArenaNet (via Gems) than from gold sellers. The gold sellers actually have to go out there and farm the stuff, whereas ArenaNet just types in a new value. It won’t take long for ArenaNet to adjust the Gold:Gem ratio to such a level that it’s no longer feasible for gold sellers to farm and re-sale gold as a means of real world income.

That’s called price fixing, and as I keep stating, it has never worked once in history. You cannot artificial set a boundary where people are happy with the product and the price. You have to let people decide that for themselves.

No, it’s not price fixing at all. I don’t think you have a clue what price fixing actually is.

The point is just to undercut the gold sellers to the point where it’s not profitable for them to do it anymore. Easy peasy, and the gold sellers are gone within a week.

People only buy gold from gold sellers because it’s cheaper than buying from ArenaNet. Easy kittening fix — make it cheaper to buy gold from ArenaNet.

Account.9832:

Foolsage.3019:

Fair point. I do not however believe that I have any legal right to engage in competition with the casino to sell their chips to their clientele.

How would you be “in competition” ? If you had the chips, then surely you had bought them from the casino in the first place, no? And if you didn’t sell them to other casino clients, you’d simply cash them in, so the casino would be no better off.

It appears my analogy wasn’t clear. What I was proposing was setting up my own business inside the casino, to buy and sell their chips. That’s very much akin to setting up my own business inside a video game, to buy and sell goods within that video game.

How could this work? Easy enough. Imagine for instance that an incredibly wealthy person goes into a casino and asks to buy chips; maybe he or she offers to buy literally all the chips. Then he or she stands right in front of the casino cashier and resells those chips at a markup. This person is just acting as a middleman, conveying a product from one person to another, while taking a profit. Exactly like a gold seller.

I continue to disbelieve that this would be allowed on any level.

This is my favorite subject ever. LIKE O-M-G
A big thanks to gw2spidy for all charts and resources and to Microsoft for Excel lulz.

Quick Facts / Terms:
PPG: Price Per Gold
RMT: Real Money Transaction
PPG-G Price Per Gold – Gem

Current Transfer Rates:
100 gems sells for 36 s 56 c .
100 gems costs 50 s 60 c to buy.
100 gems costs 1.25 USD to buy.
1g costs 3.42 USD to buy through gems

Here is the problem we face.

Gems do not buy you anything of value that you could purchase with gold. There is no reason for exchange of currency – which is why gems aren’t worth the digital pixels they are printed on

There is no backwards compatibility, you are forced to buy back into the Gem market to access those mostly wonky items. I am sure the intended effect was minimizing the total currency in circulation, in an attempt to make in game currency more valuable.

That didn’t happen, we borked it and now you can’t go back because we can’t revalue gems. In the meantime you guys have made a handsome fortune on Gems, but probably lost at least the same amount to RMT transactions.

Lets Illustrate:
Sure players can buy 8000 gems for 100 bucks but lets look at the transfer of those gems into in game currency.

$100.00 = 34g 2s 8c

Now lets look at the bad guys offer – and not pretend that you can’t just google: Guild Wars 2 gold to find this out.

$71.19 gets you 108 gold.

Conversion:
GEM: $3.42 per gold
RMT: $0.66 per gold

Hmm. That is problematic. It is the margin that is the biggest issue.

The age old paradigm Risk Vs. Reward.

One could spend $71.19 and get what is quite a bit of gold. Enough to outfit their character and buy many shinys. All in a world where the only risk is the initial purchase price 60.00 and about 2 weeks of leveling casually.

A Silly rhetorical question:
Is it more profitable for Anet to ban you, hope that you return on a 60.00 new game code and risk your future gem transaction revenue? (which I would estimate right now is about 15 dollars per player, per month across all players)

I can’t say all of this without giving some reasonable feedback, so here it is from another game that took a serious look at how economics effected its play:

EVE and Isk, there account market, their game time cards that could be sold in store – those all helped stabilize the economy and prevented players from needing to go to outside sources where the margin was only 15-20% better than what they could get through legitimate purchase. Thats a good margin to strive for. Reduces farming activity, and creates more profit. There are even confirmed stories of a Russian gamer spending $50,000 USD on EvE time to make billions in currency. Thats a nice payday for Anet on a single transaction.

Potential fixes.
a) introducing something more valuable in the gem market. (value in gold)
b) make valuable items unobtainable through currency. Not just legendaries.
c) spend more time analyzing potential profit lost to RMT. It is your money that you are losing.
d) actively introduce new vanity items – multiple times a week – limit item counts
“on sale now – limited number available”

Gideon.2071:

So your job is knowing the laws of more than 8 countries? BS. Even armchair lawyers know that what constitutes private communication is limited. That’s why lawyers send their email with a signature that disclaims any privacy. Also, if you’re such a whiz of a lawyer, why didn’t you bother to read the ToS? Anet OWNS everything you do in that game. Everything you type becomes their property. Whoops. That’s industry standard so you can’t claim a copyright on a section of their game.

Also, them selling gold exclusively does not constitute a monopoly, as the digital goods hold no value and do not exist in a real market. The entire premise of your argument is laughable. Next you’ll say that they can’t have exclusive rights to sell weapons through their weapon vendors, and they have to allow gold farmers to set up NPC’s to compete with them.

Well said.

Anyone can come on an anonymous forum and claim to be a world expert on whatever topics they please. Proving it? That’s clearly another matter entirely.

I really do wish the ratio was better. I’m not sure who to place blame on though.

Anet for designing the system…
Botters/Gold sellers screwing with the economy…

I am thankful that my current goal is to earn T3 and not a legendary… The T3 stuff is from an NPC and that NPC isn’t likely to change prices. Legendary items though (the base part) just keep going up and up and up. They are to the point now that your average gamer will likely never have the gold to buy it… Unless they buy gold.

The problem is, the economy is so weird right now… That no middle class joe is going to buy that many gems from Anet. They will however, be continually tempted to buy it from the gold sellers.

You can get around 12g for 50 dollars right now (from anet) or you can get 100g from a gold seller for 61 dollars.

Stuff is so outa wack.

BrienBear.6073:

No game, as far as I’m aware, has ever banned buyers. See, here’s the thing. Those buyers, they’re also customers of ANet. Those buyers, I’d assume, will continue to play longer because they have their (wrongly acquired) gold. So as much as it sucks, it’s somewhat counter-productive to the game-makers to actually kill the buyers.

Final Fantasy XI has and still does ban players for buying currency. They published a long list a few years back on how many characters they had banned. They do indeed ban/remove RMT’s but anyone caught buying was banned.. I believe some may have got a temp 3 day ban but most were certain perma-banned.

Hang on, hang on, I have a question!

Somebody mentioned that it’s not illegal for the gold farmers, just against the TOS, and that due to anti-trust laws it would in fact be illegal to prosecute them.

However… isn’t it illegal to profit off of somebody else’s IP?

One way to help alleviate the issue is to increase the amount of gold you get from gems. Atm it is imo way to low. They should double it to about 100 gems = 1g. Gold sellers will probably still undercut this but it would help reduce buyers.

People that say this would hurt the market are WRONG. Currently the market is saturated with more product being sold and produced then available gold being produced.

Not to mention the fact it costs RL money to buy the gold which will deter a large portion of the market from buying the gold. However for the large portion that do spend real cash to get the gold it will help bolster the economy of the game because now those people will SPEND their gold on the market pumping more into it.

You may say this will cause inflation. I doubt it will tbh. As I have said there are more products being produced and listed then buyers spending. Just look at a how many goods sell for vendor or at a loss.

Silentstorm.7531:

I don’t get why we can’t just have a GM every server that sole job is to destroy bots. He fields all complaints and seeks and destroys. I know personally I report every obvious bot i see. And continue to watch them exist for a few days thats totally unacceptable. No should need to buy gold or bot. I made a guide just to spite this whole situation http://youtu.be/D5t7yY0IihI.

If you look in arah final zone especially on anvilrock my server has atleast 10 bots going mad right now. We all reported them but they still there

Let’s assume just one GM per server, and during the 16 hours he’s not on shift the reports are just piling up. That’s several dozen new full-time employees, with whatever benefit package the company provides, and overall costs to the company far larger than just their wage. Especially if their existing offices don’t have a lot of unused space currently, that’s a fairly large additional office to put all these Bot-Killer GMs, with rent, utilities, maintenance, significant networking concerns, etc. It’s additionally at least one additional IT position to support this team, and several management positions to supervise them. Plus probably a substantial amount of time spent by one or more of their software developers putting together the tools these guys will use to streamline the process of tracking down and verifying problem behavior, unless they’re able to swing it with just the tools available to the current GM team (probable, but not ideal).

This is not a small undertaking you’re suggesting. Even at a very conservative estimate, assuming they load up on part-timers to avoid having to give full benefits and pay them minimum wage, it would easily stretch into seven-figure yearly expenses.

How do you propose they pay for it?

Dark.6083:

Hang on, hang on, I have a question!

Somebody mentioned that it’s not illegal for the gold farmers, just against the TOS, and that due to anti-trust laws it would in fact be illegal to prosecute them.

However… isn’t it illegal to profit off of somebody else’s IP?

The legality is incredibly murky. A case like this, saturated in US Intellectual Property concerns, would be impossible to prosecute when the actual offenders are most often located in a country that doesn’t recognize international copyrights. If any of these companies operated primarily out of the US, Canada, EU, Australia, etc., it would be much more cut and dry. I don’t know if this is still the case, but back in my FFXI days several of the largest RMT outfits were being run by Chinese front companies for Russian Organized Crime as well. It’s hard to tell if this is still the case, since you can never tell if a new RMT website is actually a new company or a re-branding of an existing one after the old one started to draw too much fire.

Melchior.2135:

How do you propose they pay for it?

Ummm they just made MILLIONS on the sale of this game and I am sure they are also making thousands per week on item shop sales. Not to mention I highly doubt sales of the game have suddenly stopped.

Mog.1589:

Melchior.2135:

How do you propose they pay for it?

Ummm they just made MILLIONS on the sale of this game and I am sure they are also making thousands per week on item shop sales. Not to mention I highly doubt sales of the game have suddenly stopped.

Yeah, they made quite a heap of money with initial sales, and are still bringing in a fair amount on ongoing sales.

Do you know what their current production costs are? How big their staff is? Do you know how much has been sunk into this during development? How far over budget they wound up? Do you know how much of Arena Net’s earnings NCSoft is siphoning off to other projects?

While the game has done very well for itself, I wouldn’t be surprised it it’s a net loss for both ArenaNet and NCSoft so far. But let’s assume it’s already broken into sustainable profits. What ongoing development are you suggesting that they cut to divert funds to this? Their income isn’t just getting put into Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin. Some is likely invested or banked against future need, but most of it is going right back into the game.

I have to side with banning the buyers also. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Anet would have to introduce this slowly….beginning with short term bans that remove all bought gold.

If players don’t see it as a risk, they will continue to support the gold sellers…..and fuel all the crap in the game that we all really don’t want.

A simple removal of the gold obtained, and a short ban (24 hours) would be a good place to start.

In my opinion, there is no question that the gold seller gets an immediate perm ban, but the gold buyer needs to pay the price also, as they are also breaking the rules of the game.

Dark.6083:

Hang on, hang on, I have a question!

Somebody mentioned that it’s not illegal for the gold farmers, just against the TOS, and that due to anti-trust laws it would in fact be illegal to prosecute them.

However… isn’t it illegal to profit off of somebody else’s IP?

Non-issue …. They dont have to prosecute anyone anymore than they have to allow anyone access to the server to play. ALL parts of GW2 remain the sole property of ANET to do whatever whenever however they choose. You purchased permission to have access to the server to play the data disc you purchase as long as you follow the rules ….THEIR rules. If they feel you arent following and permaban you … not a legal thing you can do. The TOS goes both ways.

And…to be clear…control of market prices is not the answer…just like in real life. Proper enforcement of the rules is the answer, and let the economy run itself from that point.

Mog.1589:

One way to help alleviate the issue is to increase the amount of gold you get from gems. Atm it is imo way to low. They should double it to about 100 gems = 1g. Gold sellers will probably still undercut this but it would help reduce buyers.

People that say this would hurt the market are WRONG. Currently the market is saturated with more product being sold and produced then available gold being produced.

Not to mention the fact it costs RL money to buy the gold which will deter a large portion of the market from buying the gold. However for the large portion that do spend real cash to get the gold it will help bolster the economy of the game because now those people will SPEND their gold on the market pumping more into it.

You may say this will cause inflation. I doubt it will tbh. As I have said there are more products being produced and listed then buyers spending. Just look at a how many goods sell for vendor or at a loss.

It wont hurt the market AND it wont help the market either. The perceived value of the items in the TP dictates the price and NOT THE RATIO OF GEMS TO GOLD. Go ahead give more gold for your gem exchange. The item you want will also cost more gold period….. NOT GONNA HELP.

VendettaDFA.9368:

It wont hurt the market AND it wont help the market either. The perceived value of the items in the TP dictates the price and NOT THE RATIO OF GEMS TO GOLD. Go ahead give more gold for your gem exchange. The item you want will also cost more gold period….. NOT GONNA HELP.

That would be true if demand was greater then supply. However atm there is far far more supply then demand. People are not spending as much because they are too poor.

Dude…. you are not getting it … it doesnt matter what the supply or the demand is. If any product ..ANY PRODUCT is currently worth 5 silver and suddenly 10 silver is now worth what 5 silver used to be ….then I as a seller of said product will expect 10 silver for my product because that is the true value of the product. Ever wonder why grandpa talked about 25 cent candy bars and you cant find one for under 89 cents??? Same product … inflated cost because you live in a world where your income is almost 4 times higher …and guess what… everything else went up too….. perceived value …plain and simple.

Bots don’t thrive in a Dynamic Event environment. They thrive in areas with high spawn rates where the bot doesn’t have to move around to the mobs, they stay where the mobs spawn. My line of thinking would be creating areas like this to attract bots and then watch those areas. Create traps for the bots and then let Dhuum do his work accordingly.

Speaking of Dhuum, we need a visual message that something is being done about this problem.

can a site be shut down by anet and any other game creators if it is creating/provides a 3rd party app/service for a game and that is against the game’s tos rules

I don’t know about your server, but I guarantee you there are several hundred bots on maguuma and at least 100 in cursed shore alone.

What that means is there must be a lot of cheaters buying gold.

Problem is ensuring intent can be tricky. They could pretty easily end up banning innocent people by mistake.

Banning people who buy (which is a violation of the tos) is a tool but it shouldn’t be treated as a panacea (just like how asking nicely for people to stop buying is a tool).

Um, wrong. Asking nicely does nothing because obviously there are lots of scumbags willing to cheat.

Closing their accounts removes them from the game. End of story.

Of course no automation for this will be 100% perfect, it’ll require a bit of human intervention to undo wrongful bannings and/or to verify bannings, which is why ANet is sitting on their thumb, they don’t want to spend the money it’ll take to deal with this.

Instead they’re going for the world record most bot filled MMORPG ever…nvm, they won that weeks ago. There has never been a game more filled with bots and a company so useless at dealing with them. Ever. You could never have imagined anything this bad without it being intentional.

Dark.6083:

Hang on, hang on, I have a question!

Somebody mentioned that it’s not illegal for the gold farmers, just against the TOS, and that due to anti-trust laws it would in fact be illegal to prosecute them.

However… isn’t it illegal to profit off of somebody else’s IP?

Someone said that, but that someone was making things up as it happens.

Anti-trust laws have no bearing here for a number of reasons, the most compelling of which is that everything we’re talking about is 100% owned by ArenaNet. Nobody has any innate right to buy, sell, or trade things owned by other people.

That’s not just a theory though; game companies have successfully sued gold farming businesses many times in the past. Zynga’s done so, as has Blizzard, as did the folks who made RuneScape. Here’s an example:

http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/02/01/peons4hire-blizzard-injunction/

Blizzard sued Peons4Hire in 2007. Peons4Hire settled out of court, and Blizzard got an injunction preventing those gold sellers from conducting their business in WoW.

Your question about profiting from someone else’s IP is a copyright/patent issue, so that really isn’t involved here. If e.g. you wrote a book about Tyria, including characters and scenes from the game, then you’d be in violation of ANet’s copyrights. If you used some code they’d patented (I don’t know if they have any such) in your own game, then you’d be in violation of their patents. The whole point is that IP infringement involves taking someone’s ideas and using them in another context; that’s not at stake here.

This is a pointless discussion. You will NEVER have a stable economy when the currency is printed “as needed”. Every quest you finish , every mob you kill, everything you do , you are rewarded money that didn’t exist before. Gold farmers/sellers contribute to this, but the system in inherently broken in name of fun. This is a problem that every MMO to date has faced.

There are mathematical and computing techniques that can assist with the detection of bots or RMT transactions but I do not know if ArenaNet has staff with the technical expertise to implement them. Their programmers are already quite busy with working on game content. ArenaNet has hired a team of data specialists to help but it will require more than that.

I suggest reading “Detecting Real Money Traders in MMORPG by Using Trading Network” by Fujita et al. (2011) and “Identifying MMORPG Bots: A Traf?c Analysis” by Chen et al. (2009).

Anyone has tought that 1 bot = $60, so the last 2.000 banned = $120.000.

Thats assuming they do not keygen accounts (and i dont think they do) then, what is leaving more profit to Anet, the gem store or goldsellers buying back account as the Anet team bans them.

Alexander Dragonfang.1759:

Anyone has tought that 1 bot = $60, so the last 2.000 banned = $120.000.

Thats assuming they do not keygen accounts (and i dont think they do) then, what is leaving more profit to Anet, the gem store or goldsellers buying back account as the Anet team bans them.

They arent BUYING anything …… Hacked account’s are free.