Guild Wars 2

Please don’t mistake this thread for one complaining about drop rates or the prevalence of bots.

My concern is that the game has no real economy. In other MMOs the economy is a big portion as to why people play the game. Academic essays have been written about virtual economies which I find very interesting. Is this something we may see in GW2? So far things are off to a slow start.

There seems to be too much supply and not enough demand. By making every crafting material and skill accessible to everyone at the same time there is not much of a reason to buy materials. You just spend some time farming and you make money instead of paying money.

I am curious as to people’s ideas and theories as to why the GW2 economy is failing. Again we all know bots exist; I think there are reasons which have nothing to do with bots. I see the market as flooded and uninspired.

To me, one solution is to limit the amount of gathering skills a player can have. That way they need to buy some materials and stimulate the economy instead of largely ignoring it. What are some of your ideas?

It’s not failing. The difference between this and other games is that the TP is global… not just server.

People buy materials all the time.

That’s why selling them while leveling is so much more profitable than just hearts, DEs & loot.

Well I can make a decent amount of gold off of merching so there has to be a decent supply and demand in the economy. Though there are items out there (butter) that stagnate, though its probably due to the high drop/nodes there are out there.
There are only 3 gathering skills so im curious as to how many you would limit it to. Limiting it to 2 would most likely make a lack of herb gathering. I often see people running right by herbs and preffering to go for the logs and ore.

Which would drive up the price of herbs which would encourage people to pick herbs. I don’t see a problem with limiting it to two gathering skills per character.

I have cooking and Weapon smithing as my main crafting traits. allowing only 2 gathering would force me to buy or roll an alt. Limiting it to 2 would most likely cause cooking to die as a profession since its the only one that uses herbs. People wouldnt pick a gathering trait that only sells to one profession.

“My concern is that the game has no real economy”

Are you sure your logging into GW2 ?

The Economy is fine untill now, it’s quite passive but fine.

About this Forum i’m really confused if we can say only “omg I love gw2” and if we say “there’ something I don’t like” the thread is infracted and deleted?

Soo the point is say only good things about the game right?

Not sure why you would say something like that. There are plenty of threads with folks complaining about the game that are not deleted.

There is a difference between a legitimate complying, and troll flamming on issues.

The economy in this game is currently in freefall inflation. The price of gems has doubled over the past week, and the price of desirable in-game items like Superior Runes of Divinity have gone up 50% in that same time.

Theres a million people farming and nothing to buy. The game needs gold sinks that people are willing to use – WoW has high repair costs and expensive mounts, for instance. All this game has is the cultural armor sets, and even the few people I know who wanted those just buy the cheap low level ones and transmute.

I’ve only played about with the trade window gingerly over the last few days, and today I made 65 silver in about two minutes, just by putting up various materials that I didn’t need anymore.

Seems to be working okay to me. Only thing is it’s a shame that there’s so little weapon/armour/item variety – I’ve sold every single thing I’ve crafted to an NPC merchant because it’s way below my current level and even the high level drop items I put up for sale in the trade window don’t shift.

not everything can be solved with gold sinks. The issue is there is no reason to farm because ore/food is not scarce everyone can have it. The price of things move depending on time of day or day of the week.

Farming 500+ ore and selling it for 1g is terrible i’d rather spend 15 bucks and get 20 gold.

If you ask me, they just need to parachute in a plethora of rare cosmetic skins for all weapons/armour that occasionally drop from mobs/chests and which high level crafters have a small chance of creating. The issue, if there is one, seems to be that there are only a small number of items that anyone really wants.

Adding desirable things that you can find or craft doesn’t fix the inflation problem. The problem is that money is constantly being printed via selling to vendors or exchanging gems for gold, but nothing is taking any money out of circulation. Even if you added a bunch of rare craftable stuff or drops, the prices would still be spiraling upwards because nothing is removing currency from the economy.

Massive problem with Bots farming and dumping their stock on the TP (increasing supply) coupled with a mass exodus of players (decreasing demand) are sabotaging any attempts Anet is or could be making to develop a healthy in game economy.

Until those two issue are addressed I don’t see anything changing.

My concern with the economy is only in items with demand that are pegged at vender price +1c due to over supply. After all not only is supply global but demand is global too. So supply needs to balance enough with it so that anything with demand is at least minutely profitable. That is to say vender price +15% fee +1c. At least then at times when an item is over supplied everyone will still profit 1c during that time. But a valid concern is if items with demand will never stop being over supplied. Obviously that is a problem to be concerned with.

Right now I don’t think there is anything we can do about trash being offered on the TP. Since those items have no demand or virtually no demand they will just pile. And the only concern there would be any negative impact that would have on the performance and stability of the TP. It also contributes to the impressions of the economy being poor due to the sheer volume of trash item variety.

We do know materials sell well even those pegged at vender price +1c. Which isn’t a profit problem when posting in quantity since the total value of the quantity is the basis for the 15% fee. At least as far as I can tell. We also know certain quality of gear sell well. These items that sell well appear to not have the problem of constant over supply like a lot of other stuff does and is the main concern of the economy being bad. After all it is only natural to expect in a healthy economy that anything with demand will sell for profit. Because without profit there would be no economy and everyone would just vender everything since they get more coin by doing so. There is no logical reason to do otherwise. Imagine someone in real life selling everything at a loss and then think why would that be ok in a game since it isn’t ok in real life.

Hello!

In my opinion if the recources are worth more than the product you made of it the economy is broken. Think of a baker who gets less money from selling his bread than from selling the grain. Under these circumstances why would someone bake bread? Of course in our world we would starve if no one makes or sells food – unless we produce the food ourselves – so the economy in our world is working.
But that is the economy of GW2 and many other MMOs where you get your equipment mainly through slaying mobs – and in that case it doesn’t matter if you do it yourself or buy the item from someone who did it themself.

On the other hand if the dropped/vendor items would be removed from the game, we probably would get the same situation mentioned above as far as there is no system included to replace the equipment from time to time and/or limit the amount of goods one can produce. The later could be a timesink – e.g adding a mini-game – and/or limitating the amounts of profession – e.g. one can only have a gathering or producing skill.

And the third point – mentioned in these thread – is the money sink. There is none – not really. What do we have? Three skill books and teleportation/repairing fees. All others that too exist are so expensive – e.g. adding more storage room to the bank – that it is easier to buy it with real money than to get it via making money in the game.

I’m not an economist so I don’t know if my thesis are adequate.

Kind regards,
Tops

They should be offering more armor like cultural but without the massive 20g a pop tag. If it was 5-10g a piece I’d be more inclined to spend my gold on it. There isn’t much of a reason to spend gold.