Guild Wars 2

I am not a huge speculator. I dabble a little here and there. I am more of a hoarder/miner. Sometimes I am lucky and a price goes up, I might get upto 30g for a stack of something I listed months ago at what I considered an unreasonable price.

I’m not claiming to be an expert, but from my perspective, the market seems to have taken a dip overall – maybe a 10%-20%ish drop over the last month.

I’m hoping from some enlightenment from the likes of John Smith or Wanze.

Deflation.

Decreased liquid gold rewards in dungeons.

Increased trading post activity post hot for guild halls and legendary crafting. (TP Taxes)

Less gold in a considerable amount of folks pockets.

Well, the biggest rush for ascended equipment with the new stats as well as the rush for guild halls is almost over. The demand was bigger because of the new, HoT stuff and is now going back to a normal level.

It is and it’s by “Design”.

So, remember it well….The only way you’re currently allowed to have fun or make money is by being the 1% that caused the market to be shifted this way. If you have any aspiration of playing the game naturally and making money stop now because that way is dead like the american dream. The only way to make money in this game at any reasonable pace is to sit in-front of a trading post all day and flip items.

But that’s okay lets talk about that wealth disparity and how this deflation is helping solve that /sarcasm.

in my opinion what anet did to the economy was a brilliant move for all parties involved.

Firstly they removed the goldfarm places in the game that accelerated the inflation.
So what did people do? They farmed. The winners here were the ppl outfarming the average farmer. the losers where, who farmed only little of their time.

The goal? to keep up with inflation, you were barely gaining any real buying power with farming, it was just a waste of time and a means not to get lost behind other ppl who farmed.

Now that this is gone, people have more time in the game they can distribute it as they wish, not bc they are forced to do so.

Furthermore, the introduction of highly rare items, auras, unique skins and such, that have a low drop chance or disturbingly high amounts of required goods made one goal of arenanet obvious. the distribution of the gold of the rich to the poorer ones.

How so?
There are numerous items in the game right now that are valued between a couple of hundred gold to several thousand gold.

Only the richest of the rich can afford these, while this may be to your personal discomfort bc you like these items, it allows to get some gold of these people who hoard ridicoules amounts of gold, which otherwise they had no incentive to actually spend bc everything but legendarys were dirt cheap – worthless, just pennies for them.

With these items we can take out big chunks of the rich ppls hoards and distribute it between the ppl who are lucky with the drop and the ppl next in line who sell goods to this newly funded person and so on.

Additionally the seasonal items, recently the wintersday event, was genius aswell.
10.000 drinks are an amount you can hardly farm yourself. i would even claim it is unreasonable and straight up impossible to farm all these.

So what does the person have to do to get the wintersday presence? buy the gifts on the tp. And here it gets good: while it is nessecary to buy a large amount of gifts on the tp, it was also relativly easy to farm these gifts – it took a couple of minutes for a couple of dozen gifts or more. Your average player could do a few wintersday activities a day and come out with a large amount of gold from selling these on the tp.

I think it is safe to say, these items werent intended for the average player – it was however a way to get some gold in the normal persons pocket without introducing new ways of creating gold and therefore without inflation.

If you know that, i would say it is easier to get gold (with actual value) these days than it was before the dungeon nerf.

And one final thing aswell: the rising value and demand of gold is keeping the gem prices in check. if the previous trend were to go on, gems for gold would have reached a level where almost none would have been able to convert some gold for gems and therefore buy an item for ingame currency on the gemshop.

The average player is winning on every front here. It is only the ingame rich or the rl rich who get to pay here!

I blame the falling oil prices and devaluation of Chinese currency.

Time to invest in precious metals… Deldrimor Steel, Orichalcum, etc.

Alex Eternity.8195:

Furthermore, the introduction of highly rare items, auras, unique skins and such, that have a low drop chance or disturbingly high amounts of required goods made one goal of arenanet obvious. the distribution of the gold of the rich to the poorer ones.

Reganomics never works. Stay in school kids.

First of all I just don’t see that recession or deflation you are talking about.

Yes some item fall in price, but that’s mostly because of offer and demand. Take for exemple fine tier 5 and tier 6 material. They got a lot less popular in use, while a huge spike in offer (mostly from fractal) dropped their price. (you can make tier 6 with tier 5 so their prices are linked). That’s not a recession or deflation.

Most item you look, you can trace back why it drop in price because of offer and demand. Item that would be a good indication of deflation or inflation would be Ectos or Crystalline Dust. The source and use for each of those remain pretty much steady over time for now and they are both linked together. (Because you can salvage ectos into dust).

Both those item suffer some variation, but they don’t seem to suffer deflation at all.

So what make you think (and those that responded with explication why there is a deflation) that there is a recession or deflation in the game??

TexZero.7910:

Alex Eternity.8195:

Furthermore, the introduction of highly rare items, auras, unique skins and such, that have a low drop chance or disturbingly high amounts of required goods made one goal of arenanet obvious. the distribution of the gold of the rich to the poorer ones.

Reganomics never works. Stay in school kids.

seeing as we cannot tax the rich in an mmo and they will keep saving their gold unless a worthy incentive is given (such as status symbols for high prices) what else do you propose them to do?

Svarty.8019:

I am not a huge speculator. I dabble a little here and there. I am more of a hoarder/miner. Sometimes I am lucky and a price goes up, I might get upto 30g for a stack of something I listed months ago at what I considered an unreasonable price.

I’m not claiming to be an expert, but from my perspective, the market seems to have taken a dip overall – maybe a 10%-20%ish drop over the last month.

I’m hoping from some enlightenment from the likes of John Smith or Wanze.

It’s weird that you are claiming a down market, when many other posts are claiming severe inflation. To demonstrate either, you need to first:

• Establish a set of goods that represents the overall economy (sometimes called a “market basket”)
• Compare pre-HoT and post-HoT prices (or whatever time period you like).

Generally, in these forums and reddit, people selectively choose the items that will ‘prove’ their point of view. The fact is that, at any point in the game’s history, some items go up and others go down, depending on a variety of market forces.

Generally speaking, after any market upheaval, people dump old shinies (and related goods) and panic purchase new shinies (and related goods). This happened with HoT, with the wardrobe, and any other time there was content|adjustments that altered the suppy|demand curves across markets.

These days, T5|T6 fine mats are down (more sources, reduced demand) and orbs|doubloons|crests are up (same sources, spiking demand). Flax Fiber spiked when Dulfy published someone’s guide to maxing Scribe; log & leather prices have spiked (due both to changed & new recipes|collections).

An alternative for tracking a basket of goods is looking at the gold:gem exchange. In theory, when there’s “too much” gold in the economy, players buy gems (not having other things to spend it on), driving up the rate. However, gem shop sales (hello shared inventory slots, hello wings, etc) also influence this, as well as RL Christmas (resulting in lots of people getting gem cards as presents and selling their gems to buy golds). As a result, the exchange rate has fluctuated between 16g and 21g per 100 gems for most of the last two years (overall trend is up, with brief periods below|above those numbers).

tl;dr I don’t think it’s accurate to say “the market” is receding (or inflating). I think you can talk about a recession in fine mats and other markets, just not about the entire market.

Alex Eternity.8195:

TexZero.7910:

Alex Eternity.8195:

Furthermore, the introduction of highly rare items, auras, unique skins and such, that have a low drop chance or disturbingly high amounts of required goods made one goal of arenanet obvious. the distribution of the gold of the rich to the poorer ones.

Reganomics never works. Stay in school kids.

seeing as we cannot tax the rich in an mmo and they will keep saving their gold unless a worthy incentive is given (such as status symbols for high prices) what else do you propose them to do?

You promote economic growth by adding reason to use said gold. This gold should not be going to “Players” especially if you want it to come out of the economy as a whole. Anything you create using this method, should also retain its value by being unique (account bound/non-tradeable). This keeps the notion of trickle down economics in check as this never actually happens as the wealth only transfers hands between the 1% who speculate on said items value.

The current state, tried to do this but failed miserably. Adjusting resources and rates at the same time as adding some very minor changes to recipes does not work. It shocked the markets far harder than it should have. Additionally the availability of unique items was not increased. Due to the policy shift with dungeons as a whole, recipes and unique skins that would have come out of that dungeon are shrinking. The exact opposite of what you desire to happen.

Take into account a lot of people are spending hundreds/thousands of gold on their halls (among other things). So materials and things have stayed level or gone up in price.

The only things I’ve noticed dropping noticeably in price are skins and minipets, aesthetic items.

Also, a lot of people are trying to sell those high value items, to fund their other projects, thus increasing market supply, with no increase in demand.

Lots of new sources and sinks when HoT went live and the economy readjusted and still is.

TexZero.7910:

Alex Eternity.8195:

Furthermore, the introduction of highly rare items, auras, unique skins and such, that have a low drop chance or disturbingly high amounts of required goods made one goal of arenanet obvious. the distribution of the gold of the rich to the poorer ones.

Reganomics never works. Stay in school kids.

It worked for me during Wintersday. I never normally have much gold at all (as in less than 20g, frequently less than 1g), but I made approximately 300g by farming presents and selling the contents, mainly drinks and candy canes to people making the shoulder skin.

Of course then I ‘redistributed’ just over 1/3 of that to one person in return for a mini jackalope, almost 1/3 for mini Gift Skritt and Snowmen and most of the rest for crafting materials. So it probably all ended up back in the hands of rich players who follow the market (minus some TP fees).

But it still worked for me. I got several things I’ve been wanting that would normally take me over a month each to get, all in one month.

Of course this could never work long-term as either the demand would drop and those items wouldn’t be as valuable (which started to happen towards the end of Wintersday anyway) or the economy would adjust and my new gold wouldn’t be worth as much. (Also I’d get sick of farming and give up on it even if it was still profitable.)

Gold farming isnt gone, they just moved it to other places. It’s still there if you now where to look. It’s also a lot more rewarding now.