Guild Wars 2

I feel that buying gold in the game is worthless.

It’s been one month pretty much.. and I have found it easier and easier to make gold in the game, it’s at the point that 10/15 minutes before I log off.. I jump on the AH, buy and sell.. go to sleep and wake up with money waiting to be picked up.. ontop of playing wvw, running a explorable path.. it’s all adding up pretty fast.

Then the next problem is what to even spend it on? All I can really see is t3 culture armour and the commander book.. everything else is dirt cheap in this game.

I traded gold into gems.. got a few goodies like a character slot.. now i’m just saving gold for a rainy day.

What do you guys/gals spend it on?

DusK.3849:

So a game company that developed and sold over 4 million copies of a well-received game “doesn’t know their stuff”?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of those extra customers (e.g. not the old GW1-players) came to the game because of the screenshots of the world, the stories about the exploration and the jump puzzles, etc. I know I did. After 4 weeks, only 30% of players has queued up for PvP. They must be here for PvE first.

That’s all about the outside world and leveling your character. That part of the game is great. Awesome even (although it still has some flaws).

Gameplay at level-80 I just don’t understand. I don’t see how it can retain the majority of those 4 million players, and make sure they buy stuff in the cash-shop, or buy future expansions.

I was talking about MMOs in general. Seen Tera ? Beautiful world. The leveling was good, although a bit repetitive. Great dungeons too. But endgame was completely messed up. Not fun. More a lottery than a game (esp enchanting). Droves of players left. How is that possible ? Were the people in charge at Enmasse so blind ? So stupid ? You could see it coming from afar. I know for sure I would have come up with a better system for endgame than they did, make more customers happy, and get more subscription-money. But they couldn’t. I was flabbergasted.

Next you’re gonna tell me how great Diablo 3 is ? That game sold lots of copies. Maybe ArenaNet should hire Jay Wilson ? Jay is a veteran. And a huge name in the industry. GW2 customers will be ecstatic for sure ! “Kitten that kitten” !

It was not my intention to derail this thread.
So let me explain what I mean if I say: “the problems with gems/gold are caused by bad system design”.

All the little mechanisms in a game are tied together.
Together they form a system.
If you make little changes here or there, they can have big impacts on other parts of the system.
Therefor, you need to think ahead. And come up with a good system, in which all those little details can fit. Without contradicting each other.

Example:
There is no monthly contribution.
Therefor, besides box-sales, Arenanet needs to make money in other ways.
They chose a system in which they sell gems for real money.
The idea is that gems can be traded for in-game gold.
Problem: if everybody has enough gold to do what they want, nobody will buy gems. And ArenaNet will lose part of their income.
Therefor, ArenaNet must make sure that players can not farm gold easily.

We know that now. It has a huge impact on all other design decisions ! There are so many ways to make gold in an MMO. And now they all have to be tweaked so that none of them can give “too much” gold easily. Good luck doing that. Maybe it can be done. But right now, it looks like it can not be done without upsetting your customers. You think you design a system to make real money, in a different way than subscriptions. But you end up with a system that alienates your customers. Not good.

Another example: Diablo 3. It seems the whole game was designed around the idea of the RMAH. We’ve seen how that worked out. Crappy game, according to almost everyone who played it. Who came up with the design decisions ? Jay Wilson ? Just one guy ? I’m sure Blizzard is happy with the 8 million boxes sold. But are they also happy with the few dimes they got from the RMAH ? While the RMAH almost destroyed a whole brandname ?

I’ve seen many more of those “systems” that weren’t thought out properly in advance. E.g. Vanguard was terrible in this respect. I just don’t understand how a whole industry can be so sloppy at such an important aspect.

Gryz.8376:

DusK.3849:

So a game company that developed and sold over 4 million copies of a well-received game “doesn’t know their stuff”?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of those extra customers (e.g. not the old GW1-players) came to the game because of the screenshots of the world, the stories about the exploration and the jump puzzles, etc. I know I did. After 4 weeks, only 30% of players has queued up for PvP. They must be here for PvE first.

You do realize I was talking about GW1 when I said that, right? Oh, of course you don’t.

Gryz.8376:

Gameplay at level-80 I just don’t understand. I don’t see how it can retain the majority of those 4 million players, and make sure they buy stuff in the cash-shop, or buy future expansions.

It’s called basing your gameplay on fun instead of boring gear treadmills which -and you might not believe this, but it’s true- can ward off customers like myself. I stopped playing WoW before Cata because I realized that the “endgame” consists solely of grinding for extra stats waiting for Blizzard to unlock the next part of the most recent expansion. That’s it. GW2 offers so much more than that it’s ridiculous.

Gryz.8376:

I was talking about MMOs in general. Seen Tera ? Beautiful world. The leveling was good, although a bit repetitive. Great dungeons too. But endgame was completely messed up. Not fun. More a lottery than a game (esp enchanting). Droves of players left. How is that possible ? Were the people in charge at Enmasse so blind ? So stupid ? You could see it coming from afar. I know for sure I would have come up with a better system for endgame than they did, make more customers happy, and get more subscription-money. But they couldn’t. I was flabbergasted.

Next you’re gonna tell me how great Diablo 3 is ? That game sold lots of copies. Maybe ArenaNet should hire Jay Wilson ? Jay is a veteran. And a huge name in the industry. GW2 customers will be ecstatic for sure ! “Kitten that kitten” !

Or they could, ya know, consist of a team that made a game where a lot of its player base stuck around for over half a decade. You know, that game I was talking about in my previous post.

The bottom line is that ArenaNet makes good games. They’re proved it with GW1. Calling them “inexperienced” after the success of that game is probably one of the most ridiculous things a person could say on this forum.

Looks like the TP resets at some point in time every week as it was 45+ last time I had checked. IMO checking the price of Gems also keeps the pricing down in the general TP. Take the cap off of Gem trading and the next thing you know items are worth gp instead of cp

Gold sellers can take their pm’s and shove em up their butt, I got all needed by playing, stop pm’ing me. It’s on par with phonecalls from India when you sit down to have your dinner

I do not get the gem store at all.. I mean it is SOOOO expensive. Like 10 bucks for a few consumable potions?!!! You know if it was reasonably priced.. people would buy tons and not notice.. but because it is so expensive very few people will still buy.

Jnaathra.6549:

Krighton.2138:

The only game I’ve seen where there is ZERO gold selling is the Secret World. The game is simply genius. The best MMO on the market today, sadly they didn’t purchase a higher rating from Metacritic so everyone thinks it’s terrible without playing it.

The currency in that game is Pax Romana. Its’ abundant, easy to get and it’s, wait for it.. completely useless as from a few things here and there you farm for 10 minutes or run a dungeon and have what you need.

Unless you base your currency system around fluffy stuff, minor additions, then it’s going to be exploited.

I can already see my need to get gold and working for it…no thanks. I want to have fun playing the game. I have a job I get paid for it too. Well.

Once I hit level 80 if I find that I need to have RIDICULOUS amounts of gold, (I.E. TERA, WORST GAME EVER CREATED ON US SOIL) then I’ll quit. Easy as that.

So far, after 23 levels, I have 86 copper.. LOL really? Doesn’t ArenaNet need that more that I do? Can I mail it to them somehow? Where are the money drops? I’m pretty nervous about this.

Something does not add up with this post…

First off TSW failed because it is niche and it is Funcom… Everyone that played AOC saw that name and wrote it off immediately.

Secondly I can go into game right now and hit like 3-4 nodes (any node lvl does not matter) and sell that for more coin than you have. I could also complete a few hearts and get a little extra coin mailed to me seconds after completion. You do know about that right? What game are you even playing? I have 10g at lvl 73 and I just play the game with its natural flow.

Oh no no, maybe you’re not aware of The Secret World. It’s a fantastic game. It’s certainly far from dead too. It’s a far more mature crowd. Older players. Most of us have grown up and moved from the era of World of Warcraft and the general overtone of “Dungeons and Dragons” with swords and wizardry.

It introduces a very different concept, which most of the younger player base can’t adapt to because they’re naturally resistant to change. It’s bred into everyone to fight it. Leaving ones comfort zone is terrifying, until you grow up.

Now that’s clear to you, the gold, is well. There isn’t any. Each quest provides less than 15 copper at 23, very useless. Quite useless to the point that I don’t even look. The only thing I spend money is to travel. Which is stupid in terms of the concept since it doesn’t actually them anything to teleport me. Does Southern California Edison control GW2 powergrid ingame? I think not.

I don’t work, I play. Perhaps when I hit level 73 I will have 10 gold as well. 100 gold would better until the young elitist scumbags inflate everything out of porportion.

This game is a cheap, free to play game. It shouldn’t really try to be anything bigger. Hey it’s better than Rift, without the Rifts actually. It’s got my attention for a few more months then it’s on the next best thing.

Something from a company that can afford to use DirectX 11 and hire talent to utilize it like FunCom did with The Secret World. Gorgeous game. Yes I play both. Thanks.

the thing is… most of sellers spam i see is like 20 bucks for 50-100 gold… so that is… 2.5 gold roughly per dollar spent, vs anets 1 gold for 10 bucks…if anet wants there gold selling system to be viable gonna have to match and beat gold seller prices… and means gonna have to research ect.

Real problem is that if you start selling gold in game going to cause a massive inflation of cash in game. This is kinda why WoW has never did it because it destroys economys.

Krighton.2138:

The only game I’ve seen where there is ZERO gold selling is the Secret World. The game is simply genius. The best MMO on the market today, sadly they didn’t purchase a higher rating from Metacritic so everyone thinks it’s terrible without playing it.

I played it. I’m sorry to tell you that the game is very niche. For me it was a waste of money and time.

Krighton.2138:

Jnaathra.6549:

First off TSW failed because it is niche and it is Funcom… Everyone that played AOC saw that name and wrote it off immediately.

Oh no no, maybe you’re not aware of The Secret World. It’s a fantastic game. It’s certainly far from dead too. It’s a far more mature crowd. Older players. Most of us have grown up and moved from the era of World of Warcraft and the general overtone of “Dungeons and Dragons” with swords and wizardry.

It introduces a very different concept, which most of the younger player base can’t adapt to because they’re naturally resistant to change. It’s bred into everyone to fight it. Leaving ones comfort zone is terrifying, until you grow up.

“Resistance to change” and “growing up” has nothing to do with it. The combat and skill system is more niche then “EVE” – it’s almost regressive. The game’s PvP sucks more kitten then Nancy Pelosi.

As long as Anet is proactive in banning gold buyers (as well as gold sellers), the deterrent should be strong enough since hopefully people values the $60 payment for the game.

The reality of MMO is that there is no eradication of botting and RMT no matter how hard devs try. Of course, them trying hard is important, but not being a F2P game has its advantage because the ban hammer weights a lot more.

The Secret World is a terrible game which was predictable based on it being produced by a terrible developer who has a terrible track record in gaming — AOC, enough said.

The pathetic support the game has received is indicative of this. No, it is not innovative in the least. VO/anim story missions are not new. Modern setting? Snore. I live in a kitten modern setting. No need to play a game to see real life replicated in it. And, finally, the endgame is standard WoW kitten — 10.1, 10.2., 10.3, 10.4. And more coming soon. Absolutely terrible, tired, pathetic design, with very few fans (almost all of whom are in desperation mode because of the abject failure of their game, and soon to come of its developer). Sad.

The problem is simple:

For some weird reason, game companies seem to allow the design of the “systems” in their games to be done by utter amateurs.

This includes the system on how to make a profit for your company. There is the old subscription-paradigm, which kinda worked well. But everything else I see, seems weird, inefficient, unattractive to large amounts of customers, etc. GW tries something else, but tbh, I don’t understand the details of the plan. Because I don’t see how the B2P paradigm is gonna bring in extra money. But even if B2P can bring in extra money, I don’t how the way ArenaNet does it, is optimal.

The same is true with many other “systems” in MMOs.

E.g. how are going to do itemization while leveling ? (AoC and Vanguard really messed that up. I think many more MMOs did).
How are you going to keep people excited with new gear while leveling (tip: buying all your gear on the TP/AH is not exciting).
How are you gonna make PvP fair ? (tip: giving the best players negative handicap doesn’t make sense (handicap as in golf handicap)). GW does better than average here.
How are you gonna keep your PvE-players happy after they ding max-level ? (tip: making all your dungeons one difficulty-level, and make them all super-hard, isn’t gonna make your average PvE-customer keep playing).
How are you gonna keep the best players from finishing all content in a week ? (WoW has the wrong mechanisms. GW is even worse, imho).
How are you gonna keep players excited about their own progress ? (Removing progress, like GW2, isn’t gonna win you extra customers. Making all content trivial, giving away gear “for free”, and only making the heroic mode of the newest raid challenging is going to upset the middle majority of your customer-base).
Same with this gem/gold/cash-shop discussion. No system, on consistency, nothing smart at all.

So many “systems” I see that are the same in all MMOs. And in so many games, I so many bad designs and implementations for those systems.

The game worlds in MMOs become more and more beautiful. There are more talented and experienced artists in the industry every day, it seems. I think the majority of the budgets for games (including MMOs) must go to the artists who develop the world, the characters, the animations, the textures, etc, etc.

But why can’t a MMO developer hire a smart guy, with a background in gaming, and a maybe a background in accountancy or economy, to do this stuff ?

Why do they hire some freaky nerdy 35y-old kid, who probably played EQ1, and never grew up, to design the overall system of PvE gameplay at level-80 ? And let whole hordes of customers walk away from your beautiful game ? $50M or $100M budgets, and they let some joe-average design critical parts of their business plan.

It blows my mind.

You make a lot of points and padded them with empty arguments ,that says you know fuzz all really.

You say :

.AoC ,Vanguard and most MMO’s did it wrong.
But thats it , you say nothing more, thats it…just wrong you say

.Buying gear of of the TP is not exciting you say.
You dont have too?

.Dungeons are to hard for level capped players.
On your next point you go on about how the game does nothing to do that challenges you.

.Wow did it wrong GW2 even worse ^.
but then nothing again ….

.Good PvPers are being handicapped you say.
uhm…right..mmyeah……uhm..sooooo? what?

.You say that the cash shop/gem currency has no system and consistency
This one is so LOL it is ‘special’.
it so obviously does have a system , it is a player market and the market just started those thing need to settle. Go back in time and play eve-online to see how things work.

heres a hint: Its economy ,there isn’t supposed to be a set consistency.
A small educational point for you in economics: If market made predictable AKA consistent = people abuse it.
You get that?

Could you at least at one single point detail any of your ‘arguments’ or are you going to armchair everything without busting a single braincell yourself ?

It is tremendously easy to point the finger and say how something is done wrong. Any monkey can and usually will do that but that doesnt change the fact that your post is worth as much as a clunker at ferrari dealer.

Gryz.8376:

The problem is simple:

For some weird reason, game companies seem to allow the design of the “systems” in their games to be done by utter amateurs.

This includes the system on how to make a profit for your company. There is the old subscription-paradigm, which kinda worked well. But everything else I see, seems weird, inefficient, unattractive to large amounts of customers, etc. GW tries something else, but tbh, I don’t understand the details of the plan. Because I don’t see how the B2P paradigm is gonna bring in extra money. But even if B2P can bring in extra money, I don’t how the way ArenaNet does it, is optimal.

The same is true with many other “systems” in MMOs.

• E.g. how are going to do itemization while leveling ? (AoC and Vanguard really messed that up. I think many more MMOs did).
• How are you going to keep people excited with new gear while leveling (tip: buying all your gear on the TP/AH is not exciting).
• How are you gonna make PvP fair ? (tip: giving the best players negative handicap doesn’t make sense (handicap as in golf handicap)). GW does better than average here.
• How are you gonna keep your PvE-players happy after they ding max-level ? (tip: making all your dungeons one difficulty-level, and make them all super-hard, isn’t gonna make your average PvE-customer keep playing).
• How are you gonna keep the best players from finishing all content in a week ? (WoW has the wrong mechanisms. GW is even worse, imho).
• How are you gonna keep players excited about their own progress ? (Removing progress, like GW2, isn’t gonna win you extra customers. Making all content trivial, giving away gear “for free”, and only making the heroic mode of the newest raid challenging is going to upset the middle majority of your customer-base).
• Same with this gem/gold/cash-shop discussion. No system, on consistency, nothing smart at all.

So many “systems” I see that are the same in all MMOs. And in so many games, I so many bad designs and implementations for those systems.

The game worlds in MMOs become more and more beautiful. There are more talented and experienced artists in the industry every day, it seems. I think the majority of the budgets for games (including MMOs) must go to the artists who develop the world, the characters, the animations, the textures, etc, etc.

But why can’t a MMO developer hire a smart guy, with a background in gaming, and a maybe a background in accountancy or economy, to do this stuff ?

Why do they hire some freaky nerdy 35y-old kid, who probably played EQ1, and never grew up, to design the overall system of PvE gameplay at level-80 ? And let whole hordes of customers walk away from your beautiful game ? $50M or $100M budgets, and they let some joe-average design critical parts of their business plan.

It blows my mind.

You make a lot of points and padded them with empty arguments ,that says you know fuzz all really.

You say :

.AoC ,Vanguard and most MMO’s did it wrong.
But thats it , you say nothing more, thats it…just wrong you say

.Buying gear of of the TP is not exciting you say.
You dont have too?

.Dungeons are to hard for level capped players.
On your next point you go on about how the game does nothing to do that challenges you.

.Wow did it wrong GW2 even worse ^.
but then nothing again ….

.Good PvPers are being handicapped you say.
uhm…right..mmyeah……uhm..sooooo? what?

.You say that the cash shop/gem currency has no system and consistency
This one is so LOL it is ‘special’.
it so obviously does have a system , it is a player market and the market just started those thing need to settle. Go back in time and play eve-online to see how things work.

heres a hint: Its economy ,there isn’t supposed to be a set consistency.
A small educational point for you in economics: If market made predictable AKA consistent = people abuse it.
You get that?

Could you at least at one single point detail any of your ‘arguments’ or are you going to armchair everything without busting a single braincell yourself ?

It is tremendously easy to point the finger and say how something is done wrong. Any monkey can and usually will do that but that doesnt change the fact that your post is worth as much as a clunker at ferrari dealer.

I think you guys are missing the real point here. Who in their right mind wants to trade gold for gems when gold is so hard to get in the first place? Even though I am 80 its still not easy to get gold its very time consuming. Why would I want to sell my gold and make less then some one flipping burgers?

tureliox.9362:

Just did a quick comparison on a German gold selling site I’d consider “trustworthy”.

I’d get 10g for 13€.
13€ via gems on the TP would result in about 4g according to gw2spidy.

Comparing this to the EVE PLEX mentioned above which I’ve used a lot in both directions (money to ingame currency and ingame currency to subscription fee):

You get a little more than 500m ISK for one PLEX. One PLEX via game time code costs 12€.
The site I’ve used above would sell me 500m for 10€.

This matches my observation in game: No one buys ISK from gold sellers.

Exactly, that’s what I mean, no-one buys ISK from ISK sellers because getting ISK the “official” way via PLEX is a pretty good deal.

I think that’s partly because PLEX has an anchor in that it has real value – it is in fact the precise value of a month’s subscription to EVE Online (not “value” in money terms, but the thing itself that’s valuable that you can get for a PLEX). Hence people who make lots of ISK buy PLEX to extend their game time.

So what would be the equivalent in this game? I guess stuff you can buy for gems that’s actually worth buying? So that people who make lots of gold in-game are willing to trade some of that gold for gems, which in turn makes gems more valuable, which means that someone actually buying gems with real life dollars (instead of in-game gold) is able to get some decent amount of gold.

This is what I don’t understand about their system: if they keep the price like it is, who’s going to buy gold with gems they’ve bought with money, if the amount of gold you can get is so miniscule, because gems aren’t valued highly, because few people buy gems with in-game gold, because there’s nothing much worth buying with gems?

Or maybe I’ve got the whole rationale wrong?

I wish a dev would chime in and explain lol

The gold sellers offer much better rates atm because they obtain their gold by CHEATING. They hack peoples accounts and/or run bots 24/7. That’s how they get their gold. Their competition, real players playing the game, are averaged due to the global trading post so the gold you get from them is an amount corresponding to a level 20ish playing for an hour or two a night. Of course that “average player” isn’t going to offer as much.

But it is going up. Two weeks ago gems were ~20 silver per 100, now they’re around 40 silver. As real players level up and accumulate more gold, they will have more to spend. It’s not really fair to compare a 1 month old game to one that has been established for years like EVE.

ANET really really needs to crack down on the kitten botters. I’ve reported the same 2-3 bots running the same loop in the same area 3-4 times this past week, and they are still there grinding away.

Soulwatcher.2604:

I think you guys are missing the real point here. Who in their right mind wants to trade gold for gems when gold is so hard to get in the first place? Even though I am 80 its still not easy to get gold its very time consuming. Why would I want to sell my gold and make less then some one flipping burgers?

I traded gold for gems and got a free extra character slot. Its actually a nice meta game/extra challenge to play, buy everything from the CS without spending real money.

I was dead proud achieving this : 3

This is, prices for gems go up which is no wonder. People dropped some bucks, got some gems and bought inv slots or bank slots. Less and less people do that now and gems get more pricey. Ok, I get that.

But why is the conversion rate from gems to gold completely different and stayed this way since release? Shouldn’t there be a 1:1 conversion rate? I honestly don’t get this system.

The way it is now I’ll never ever buy more gems with real money. Ingame gold is so easy to get and the conversion rate to gems is -still- not so bad.

Now if you want to go the illegal way, buying gold and then converting into gems gives you way more gems.

So, yeah. I’m not sure what their economists is doing.

The question is:

Why i should buy Gold from the Store, when i can buy it from a gold seller for a MUCH lower price (i seen yesterday something like 1.6 € = 4g)?

The real worry: is buying Gold ever going to be worth it?…

Until Arena Net gets competitive, then yes.

As mentioned in the post above mine, the ratio now is about 3:1 in favor of gold sellers.

Most people will fore go any security worries for that alone. And add on that a lot of sellers are reputable now, it’s a no brainer.

Get competitive Arenanet, or the gold sellers will keep on botting (but secretly that’s what they want. All MMO developers are often in bed with gold sellers). Proof is in th pudding in how they design the games.

Yea I don’t even know what to do with all my BL Chests. I can sell em on the TP for 1c a piece, which just goes to show that everyone has a stockpile of them and nobody is buying keys. The townclothes stuff in the BLTC store is ridiculous. I’d much rather some awesome race-themed outfits. Bank slots, bag slots, and character slots are the only thing worth buying in the gem store. Otherwise, the gem to silver ratio is just too harsh. I’d love to have some dye kits or chest keys but they’re too pricey.

DeadlyConqueror.6130:

The question is:

Why i should buy Gold from the Store, when i can buy it from a gold seller for a MUCH lower price (i seen yesterday something like 1.6 € = 4g)?

The price of gold at a gold seller is a little bit skewed. It does cost less money but it also includes the risk of getting your account banned sooner or later and seeing how strict Anet is about things in the game and its forums chances are pretty high, It usuualy does not happen straight away as the purges happen weekly or monthly batches in most mmo’s that i have seen but it is bound to happen.

When your account does get banned for buying gold it will be a permaban. If you want to play again you will have to buy the game again or give up playing so unless you don’t care about playing the game which kind of goes against any reason to buy gold in the first place then this risk should definitely be taken into the prices account as in ,you get what you play for.

DeadlyConqueror.6130:

The question is:

Why i should buy Gold from the Store, when i can buy it from a gold seller for a MUCH lower price (i seen yesterday something like 1.6 € = 4g)?

You’ll get your account hacked, banned(because your account is used), and your items disappeared. And probably your credit card details now belong to someone in another country.

The gold – gem ratio at this stage makes it unattractive to sell gold for gems.
We know that Anet has a hand in this ratio. So it is intentional.

The game is new. Gems are for extra’s and are Anet’s income aside from the box price. The simple conclusion is then that it’s in Anet’s best interest at this stage to make buying gems with gold unattractive and when people want to use gems for stuff in the gemstore, buying them with real cash is the better deal compared to the effort of getting all that gold together to buy the gems.

This makes perfect sense for me at this stage of the game. Later when people have had level 80s for a while and stockpile some gold, then it might become interesting to use it as a gold sink.

At the moment however the fluctuations allow for those interested to treat it as sort of a stock market, but little more.

Perhaps you want to avoid spending cash on gems and save gold instead but this would not be the best approach for the whole player base as many people do have the cash to spend on it.

Just face it, at this time it’s not being used as a mechanism against gold sellers…and why would they?
There’s an increasing amount of accounts being banned for gold selling / botting and the prices on the gold seller sites are going down. The laws of supply and demand tell us then that the demand is much smaller than the supply.

As someone mentioned, this is a new game and then there’s always a lot of spam. That’s not the moment to decide if there’s a lot of gold buying going on. Especially because people will start realising that getting exotic gear at level 80 isn’t that difficult and you don’t need legendary stuff to do dungeons. Once this sinks in, perhaps the need to buy gold will be even further reduced.

The gold prices I saw in my mailbox went from 4 Euro per gold to less than 1 Euro per gold in less than 2 weeks. That tells us people won’t spend 4 Euro per gold so they had to make it a lot cheaper in the hopes to appeal to their customers. It also means they need to dedicate more resources to make the same profit.

Someone said that to them it doesn’t matter but you need to have more copies of a game running around botting to collect gold in game to sell it at those prices. It means they need to hack a lot more accounts or buy game copies themselves to be able to manage that.

If Anet can stem the tide on account hacking and bans more accounts that have been abused it can hurt gold sellers if at the same time their prices go down so quickly.

The situation is far from perfect right now but I can imagine that if they made buying gold with gems very attractive right now, it might also make gold buying from other sources “feel” more legit. I suspect they don’t want to encourage that feeling and cut their own gem sales at the same time.

The game has no sub but they do want to make it attractive for as many players as possible to buy gems with real money I would think.

One thing to consider: gold farmers don’t know the payout yet either. It is a speculative market, so you have to get in and get established early to reap the rewards. So for first month or so they operate at a loss to measure the profits. If they see that people do not really buy gold in GW2 or they cannot truly compete with official gem store, then they will cut back on farmers.

ANet should, in their turn, figure out how to spot a botter programmatically. This also takes time to analyze and come up with solutions. If they make it to the point that a bot account cannot make more that $60 (price of the game) before getting permabanned, then they win (except hacked accounts). Unfortunately, this is an unending game of cat and mouse that must be done.

After all this, also remember: everyone is responsible for their account security.

mulch.2586:

Boxing gloves?! How’s that fit in Tyria? Aviator sunglasses? Kttens!

I have to say this one puzzled me. After all the trouble they went throught to make this game immersive and ’’real’’, why throw these immersion breaking trinkets in the mix ? And why would I want to buy those ? To look out of place and ridiculous ? It’s some people’s thing I guess.