Guild Wars 2

Things sell for more now, soo I guess that means it is easier to make money or it is exactly the same and it’s just the lack of botters that is making the price increase.

Any way you think about it, I like it. I’ve found a few farmable items recently that can net me a very large profit with very little work involved. In fact, it is more profitable in 1 hour than farming events in Orr for 3 hours.

It’s all about working the Trading Post. If you can’t flip it, look for something (a drop) easily obtainable and get a bunch of it! It might require you to fight difficult monsters (cough)

Inflation stoke consumer spending on the assumption that if consumer feel that price will rise in the future, they will not postpone their spending. The opposite holds true for deflation.

However, artificial inflation has an ugly side effect on the economy without a corresponding increase in income. I hope that the recent inflation is free market supply and demand response to a larger group of players having seen an increase in income/gold generating ability given that more of them has hit level 80. And not manipulated by Anet to boost their profit.

While many of us complain about vertical progression when ascended gears were introduced, none of us see the similarity of vertical progression when inflation hit the trading post. If things get more and more expensive, and you have to grind/farm more gold in order to maintain your current spending power in trading post, isn’t that a form of power creep in the game? That your currrent gold saving in the vault is getting less and less valued for each passing day? (currency devaluation vis-a-vis gear devaluation for traditional power creep understanding).

I was paying a £12 monthly subscription. Now I plan only to spend half of that on GW2 per month.
So now, I am playing a far better game for half of what it use to cost me. That has to be a bargain.

MithranArkanere.8957:

I predicted this would happen the very moment I heard how the game would manage gems, and guessed how exactly the system would work.

So after the game was released, I bought 20€ in gems and quickly got the rest with coins (about 25..40silver per 100gems by that time), and unlocked 15 characters slots, all bank slots and all bag slots in my main character and I told my guildies to do the same.

Now all of them who didn’t heed my words are regretting it, like everyone else who has ever ignored my warnings.

As people at higher levels keep doing grindier things get more gold than those at lower levels doing fun things, they buy gems every now and them, either to get stuff or to save them for festivals.
Some people sold their remaining gems after they got what they wanted after release, but now they have realized that saving them is better, because you never know what the market may have in the future.
And so, as less and less people sell gems, and a few people grinds more and more gold, prices will keep going up.

Exactly as I predicted.

/boo

Oh, I saw it right from the start. When there wasn’t much money in the whole game economy, all my spare change went into buying gems. I’ve got 1,200 gems sitting around that I purchased for maybe 2.5g. I did this knowing I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the folks who power-leveled to 80 in two days who would farm the high-level areas and would thus inflate the economy, driving up the price of gems. And no, 1,200 gems aren’t a lot, but you’ve gotta admit… it was a heck of an investment.

I’m a simple gamer. If I need more character slots, I’ll pay the $7.50 or whatever it is for another slot. If I need more bank space, I’ll throw in a couple bucks for that. I have a real-life job that pays me decent (not great) money, so it’s not like I’m going to go hungry over it.

But just a cheapo’s word of advice: form a vanity guild. Earn some influence points by logging in and, I dunno, do some junk. Get yourself a guild bank. BOOM. Extra storage for the price of forming a guild and having patience.

they should put a cap on how low and how High the GEM exchange will be. Something like no less than 50copper/1Gem and not more than 1silver,50copper/Gem and play in that range according to the demand… as it is now its just thievery by their end. cause they nerf every possible way to earn Gold even for hardcore players that play all day and the store exchange goes higher and higher…how we suppose to buy gems with ingame gold now..? they were telling us that the gem store was only for some extra fluff things..but there are some essential things like the transmutition stones etc that we need to swap skins. i remember when they even told us that they could make it run with only buy2play… but in the reality they made a cash shop game that u even had to buy the box… and now they force us to buy with real money or grind like crazy at cursed shores for essential things that gem store has. no fun at all on that.. many people already gone..and now its difficult to do the “train dynamic events” at cursed shore… plus they have nerfed the plinx and other events respawn time… making gold earning even harder…. players are not dumb. i was about to buy more gems but now i dont think i will… me and my partner have already spend 350 euros for 2 accounts plus gems… thats more than enough. thats roughly 9 months of subscription for each of us.. or 18 months for 1. (exluding the box price on that calculation.)

Mechanix.5719:

“there should be a demand for gems but this is really becoming too expensive to buy with gold” Just what Anet wants how do you think F2P games work?

It’s B2P, why don’t you guys get that?

Anyway, the price skyrocketed after makeover packs came out I think, I mean, it was suggested by a LOT of people in the suggestions forums.

Esrever.8613:

Dogblaster.6713:

Esrever.8613:

people don’t want to give Anet money any more.

I do .. And every friend I have in GW 2 are still doing that.

Only because few angry players on the forums dont want to give money to Arenanet doesnt mean anything

Ive spend already about 300+ euros on gems and its still rising.

You are forgeting one thing. ARENANET has tools how to measure everything. They know how much money they make trought gems, they know everything. We dont.

So you can just make assuptions all day about how is nobody giving money to Anet but the facts could be totally different.

What if Arenanet is making morey money after the lost shore event than before?
What if players are playing more then before?
Did you consider this maybe?

Just because few players complain more on the forums doesnt prove anything.

We just dont know … Arenanet knows.

The chests and dyes were universally considered pointless and even black friday generated less interest than the halloween event.

source please?

Hmmm without RL Cash being used for GW2 there would be no GW2. You want to use in game gold and never “pay” to play GW2 except for the initial game cost then expect GEMS to get far more expensive.

For people who buy GEMS with real life cash the higher the better. And i suspect ANET see’s it the same way. They would prefer people to use real cash to buy GEMS. And you dont “need” anything from he GEM store. everything is cosmetic and quality of life stuff.

ANET have to make some money some how.

ljaphillips.3497:

Hmmm without RL Cash being used for GW2 there would be no GW2. You want to use in game gold and never “pay” to play GW2 except for the initial game cost then expect GEMS to get far more expensive.

For people who buy GEMS with real life cash the higher the better. And i suspect ANET see’s it the same way. They would prefer people to use real cash to buy GEMS. And you dont “need” anything from he GEM store. everything is cosmetic and quality of life stuff.

ANET have to make some money some how.

ANET did earned more than enough by the box sales.. The gem store it would give them something extra in order for them to provide more “free” content. they said it..not me….What it is now though is Anet being greedy….. and that back fired so far… im praying not to be too late..cause the game otherwise is very nice and have huge potential……

People need to think things through logically and not make stupid conspiracy theories.

Let me explain it:

- When a player spends ingame gold to buy gems, the stock of gems in the TP goes down, and therefore the price of gems goes up, via the automatic mechanism. The reverse happens when people buy gems with RL money and then convert to gold.

- There will always be more people buying gems with gold, than the reverse. This is because there will be more people who will never spend RL money on gems, compared to those who do.

- Also, 3rd party gold sellers sell gold at such cheaper rates, that there will be many players who decide to buy farmed gold rather than take the offical Money > Gems > Gold route. And many of those players will buy gems with that gold.

> All of this means there is lots of Gold → Gem sales, but less Money → Gems → Gold sales. Which means the price of Gems will rise.
It’s not inflation, because the Gold price of Gems at launch was an arbitrary starting point. The price is rising to seek the “true” price determined by supply & demand.

- For example, if the gold price of gems rises sufficiently high enough, then buying gold with gems might start being a bit more competitive with 3rd party gold, which means more people who buy gold will choose to do it via official channels instead. This means there will be more gems sold into the system, and this will help slow the rise in the gold price of gems.

As for inflation of items in the TP, once again, it’s not inflation as defined by economists (value of gold dropping due to excess amounts of gold existing in the world.) Sure, every MMO and online game will experience some inflation due to infinite amounts of gold being generated from loot, and not enough gold sinks (There will -never- be enough gold sinks, since players complain too much. See the complaints about waypoint and repair costs.)

But the price rises most people complain about are not caused by the value of gold dropping. Because we see that most items in the TP are still selling at a stable price, at vendor price or slightly above.

The items that people complain about are things like ectos, high end materials, precursor weapons, etc. In other words things that people who reach level 80 / endgame will want.

So don’t you think that, as more and more people play the game and reach endgame, more and more people will want these things, and thus with higher demand, the price rises. Banning bots also contributes to this by reducing supply.

So yeah, when you want to check for inflation, do it by sampling a wide variety of ordinary items. Trying to determine inflation from endgame items which will obviously have rising demand will lead to incorrect conclusions.

Of course, if people see the high gold price of gems as a problem and complain enough, or if people see the high price of lategame items as a problem and complain enough, then ANet can fix these things by manipulating the market.

ANet can increase drop rates for lategame items, increasing supply and reducing the price.

ANet can make gems cheaper in RL money, attracting more people to the official Money > Gems > Gold route and thus lowering the gold price of gems.

So yeah, if you want to make up conspiracy theories, at least get your facts straight.

Does everything has to be a consperacy theory ?

this is a natural progression of things IMHO, at the start people needed gold so they converted lots of gems keeping the price incredilby cheap! $10 worth of gems took something like 2 hours of game play to aquire when gems cost 25s per 100

Now people are doing a lot more gold! farming, selling precursors (those who got them in Karka event). Now that the bots are gone fine crafting material and rare crafting materials shot up in price making people even more money! This in turn generally made less people feel the need to buy gems to convert them to in game gold hence supply fell at the same time demand increased, black friday, the new make over things, prepairing for wintersday etc…

I dont believe its Anet tempering with the prices, It makes perfect sense, this just the natural evolution of supply vs demand! Current price isnt unreasonable either! 1.4g isnt that much for most players now a days!

>Play tpvp
>Win gems
>Profit, literally

Joote.4081:

I was paying a £12 monthly subscription. Now I plan only to spend half of that on GW2 per month.
So now, I am playing a far better game for half of what it use to cost me. That has to be a bargain.

Are you counting 10 months without spending anything on the gem store cause you already spent 60 bucks on the game? If not you’re actually spending more in the short run.

Dogblaster.6713:

Esrever.8613:

people don’t want to give Anet money any more.

Ive spend already about 300+ euros on gems and its still rising.

I feel I should thank you for financing my ‘subscription’ to the game

Account.9832:

Gurpsmeister.9068:

The price is exactly the same as it was when the game launched. Ten US dollars for 800.

This.

I get the feeling that some people think that paying $60 for a game somehow entitles them to infinite updates and access to 100% of all extra content, forever, for free.

Surely you knew what you were buying when you bought the game, right? There were plenty of reviews saying how many character slots it included, how big the base inventory was, and so on. If you play enough to justify more, then surely spending $10 or $15 a month (which adds up to 30-50 cents a day) is a pretty good deal, as far as forms of entertainment are concerned.

A different issue is the pricing of some of the items. For example, I find that 250 gems (a little over $3) for a haircut is extremely high, and have no intention of ever buying one of those “kits” (how boring is that, by the way? Instead of a barber at each city, maybe with its own original hairstyles, etc., we waited 4 months and got a piece of recycled UI – so much for “putting the RPG in MMORPG”).

I think Arena Net has failed to grasp the concept of micro transactions, or to blend the gem economy properly into the game. The lack of (gem-based) vendors in cities is really hard to understand. It’s as if they didn’t know what their financial model was going to be while the game was being developed (and haven’t even managed to throw in some in the 4 months since launch).

If there were actual barbershops / salons at the major cities, where the NPC charged (for example) 15 gems for a haircut, 15 for colouring and 15 for a change to the beard / horns / accessories, people would be using it on an almost daily basis, trying out new looks to match their new armour, etc..

As it is, most people I know say they’ll just wait until they’re fed up with the way their character looks (if they ever do), and then get a single “full makeover kit” (only about $1 more) and keep that look for the following year or so.

But hey, the “gem economy” was born crooked in the first place (Mike O’Brien said before launch that players would be able to trade gems and gold directly with each other, but then Arena Net decided to become “the official gold seller” instead), so my hopes aren’t very high that they’ll suddenly figure it out. Should have spent more time studying Steam and the Mann Co. Store.

I bought all my gem shop items and slots with real money ($250 or so, including the game itself). Not going to spend another cent, though; the direction taken by the Lost Shores patch felt like a betrayal and makes me think that GW2 lacks a strong designer at the helm. Maybe the game’s original vision came from the guys who left to form Undead Labs, or maybe there was some internal reshuffling after launch that led to the current schizophrenic design. Either way, it’s going to take at least three months “on the right track” (hopefully starting with the Wintersday patch, and necessarily including the ability for players to trade gems directly with each other) to make me reach for the credit card again.

If I may…
Though a lack of strong designer navigator may be the forest, I think the trees are too little/indistinct lore.
Even though everyone posting here is debating supposed economics using mathing, we are really debating what economic lore tells the most accurate story. Since the story is about our wallets, we tend to make OUR wallets the star of the story. But what is the Tyrian lore? What is gem lore? What is BLTP lore? I think if we had the big story, we could braid all of our wallet stories together with it.

I keep seeing these 2 positions:

Goldsinks suck

Nothing in the gem store

The following question is a balloon requiring the hot-air of a vocal minority for lift.

Would you spend Tyrian gold on this gem shop item?

Name of Item:
“I am great at making gold, have plenty to spend, and I like Tyria”

Description:
scalable emote based on the PvP rank emotes from GW1 (aka Specto Petronus)
designed specifically as a Tyrian gold sink, the more gold you sink into it the more emote you get
the global community cost of way points goes down as Economic Heroes progress their emote

I know very little about economic balance, but what would happen if ArenaNet based cost of real-money-purchased Gems on the economy/current exchange rate?

To me, it seems like this would encourage real-money purchases at a time like this and would in-turn drive down the price of Gold > Gem exchange rate. Would this be an organic, self-sustaining/zero-inflation system?

I think outside gold sellers are part of the problem. The design is flawed since if people want gold, instead of buying gems and converting them to gold which would drive gem prices down, they go to Chinese gold farmers. Then when they want gems, they use that gold to buy gems driving gems prices up more (or buy them with cash which does nothing to their value). Gems will keep going up and up until they get so expensive it makes gold farmers obsolete and farming not worth their time which may be a good thing. In the meantime, buy gems with cash to support A-net.

Vangy.7403:

ljaphillips.3497:

Hmmm without RL Cash being used for GW2 there would be no GW2. You want to use in game gold and never “pay” to play GW2 except for the initial game cost then expect GEMS to get far more expensive.

For people who buy GEMS with real life cash the higher the better. And i suspect ANET see’s it the same way. They would prefer people to use real cash to buy GEMS. And you dont “need” anything from he GEM store. everything is cosmetic and quality of life stuff.

ANET have to make some money some how.

ANET did earned more than enough by the box sales.. The gem store it would give them something extra in order for them to provide more “free” content. they said it..not me….What it is now though is Anet being greedy….. and that back fired so far… im praying not to be too late..cause the game otherwise is very nice and have huge potential……

Really? you think Box sales are enough? so in that sense, when i buy say “Dishonored” for the PC i played it for about 30hours for around £24 that’s £1.25 per hours of game play. And the publisher has very little costs for development after release.

Now with GW2 i paid £39.99 and i’m a casual player at around 500hrs since launch, so thats 7.9p an hour of game play. hmmm after release ANET has server costs, bandwidth costs as well as ongoing development costs with two “events” since launch abet they did not work too well considering laggg.

GEMs sales for RL money DIRECTLY affect the longevity of this game, its funny of people think they are are entitled to access to the RL cash GEM resource for as little as possible, so that they never actually have to spend any real money.

If people never want to buy GEMS with RL money that’s fine, but expect the GEMS to just get more and more expensive over time. they will crack 2g for 100 before the end of this year as a regular price.

GEM prices will not stabilize until the cost of buying illegal gold match that of buying legitimate gold via GEM purchase from ANET

GEM costs are driven by the player base wanting to buy with ingame gold the GEMS people buy with RL cash. Thus GEM to Gold ratio increases, and will do for a long time.

Kite.2510:

My problem with that is that some TP stuff are considered almost mandatory, like the BL salvage kit and the bank space.
Now that the gem prices have gone through the roof I feel stucked.

They’ve added an NPC with Black Lion Key that you can acquire by sacrificing equipment/food or other stuff. So you don’t need so many gems.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Black_Lion_Key

Eli The Yahoo.9782:

So, the gems used to cost about 60s and now reached 1g40s, i understand that due to the events(lost shores + black friday) there should be a demand for gems but this is really becoming too expensive to buy with gold.

It’s the same with any game with an economy.

Take Diablo 3 for example – during the first week, gold was about £&-8 iirc. Now it’s about 30p for a million. Gold / whatever currency loses its value as time goes on and everyone has lots of it.

People complain whichever way the wind is blowing.

People complained that they didn’t get much money playing the game: so Anet made dungeons more profitable. Thanks to the completely interconnected global economy, that made gems and TP prices rise – so people complain about that.

What people really want is high income and lower prices… but then they’d complain that the game was too easy and nothing was unique anymore because everyone had everything.

It’s really an unsolvable problem.

Are people seriously buying the keys? Why buy the keys for a 99% chance to get some useless junk like ooze tonics rather than buying what you actually are hoping to get from the chests?

alcopaul.2156:

grind more gold or pay cash. that’s the way it is.

Or quit playing. That’s always an option too.

The solution to a problem in a game is never “suck it up and deal with it”. Anet wants to make money, players want to play. There needs to be a nice balance. Anet promised the gem store wouldn’t be mandatory and a lot of us scoffed.

Well, guess who appears to be right?

There’s no such thing as a F2P game unless you don’t want to really play the game, so Anet needs to offer a decent solution. Personally, I don’t understand the disgust for just offering a subscription. I would pay a subscription fee if it came with some modicum of gems or access to all bank and bag slots, etc. The gem store is idiotic and this is exactly why.

Black Regent.5897:

alcopaul.2156:

grind more gold or pay cash. that’s the way it is.

Or quit playing. That’s always an option too.

The solution to a problem in a game is never “suck it up and deal with it”. Anet wants to make money, players want to play. There needs to be a nice balance. Anet promised the gem store wouldn’t be mandatory and a lot of us scoffed.

Well, guess who appears to be right?

There’s no such thing as a F2P game unless you don’t want to really play the game, so Anet needs to offer a decent solution. Personally, I don’t understand the disgust for just offering a subscription. I would pay a subscription fee if it came with some modicum of gems or access to all bank and bag slots, etc. The gem store is idiotic and this is exactly why.

GW1 was F2P after you bought it and we never had these issues with the ANet store. It’s the new management and general direction they are going that is ruining this game, it can and has been done correctly before and worked for 7 years so before you say there is no such thing as F2P maybe you should look at the facts.

Monthly fee’s are hilarious and only stem from greed. Companies don’t actually need that money to produce content, it is also fact that enough revenue is gotten from expansions alone to create more. Gem store is just icing on the cake for ANet just like the store was in GW1 but this time around they are looking to make more cash obviously.

Just take a look at how much revenue they got from GW1. Out of new campaigns and the store which was completely optional and only had things like costumes and bonus misisons they had enough to make GW2 and then some.

There is no reason for them to pigeon hole us into using the gem store other than greed simple as that. Honestly it would have been easier for them to just add a monthly fee, but I wouldn’t be playing if they did.

Btw it’s not ANets fault that the market price is increasing, that’s because of players. Supply and demand, we have a real player controlled economy in this game. But it IS ANets fault for nerfing every single available farm making gold hard to come by which is obviously a plea to get people buying gems turning those gems into gold.

demand increase because of Makeover kit

People has too much gold, this is the main issue

Back then the majority of people hardly had 20-30g, now sitting on 100g+ is quite common.

What is it, $10 for 800 gems? That gets you a character slot, no? Last time I checked, that is what they charge for a character slot in GW1 as well. Seems really reasonable. Oh! You want to buy it with gold and you want it to be cheap.

I know it’s all opinion and all are entitled to their opinions. I just think it’s laughable that you can get 800 gems for the price of a movie ticket and have a new character(I haven’t even maxed all 5 of the slots I have been given) and play it for hours on end.

I have very specific tastes when it comes to paying real money for cash shop items. Those things are not in the cash shop yet. So far, they have been giving the stuff I like away for free. You know, new dungeons, new zones, new skins, etc.

Gems are not worth buying for 60s. When they are 5-10g or smth like that it will get worth a thought, but until then it’s just too easy to get gems buy buying with gold.

Eli The Yahoo.9782:

So, the gems used to cost about 60s and now reached 1g40s, i understand that due to the events(lost shores + black friday) there should be a demand for gems but this is really becoming too expensive to buy with gold.

well, i have bad news for you. those gems need to hit about 10 gold per gem before people will start buying them more often with cash.

and thats what matters.

buying gems with gold doesnt pay the bills and is not a concern to anet or to people that actually spend money on this game.

I know people stop spending money on gw2 just read the whole forum and ingamechat, mostly wvw players.

at the beginning of the game, when gems were still cheap, around 25s-70s per 100 gems, i played my game slowly, accumulated gold and purchased gems when i have enough. then i slowly unlocked my bank space one by one till the limit, and also unlocked 2 extra character slot, all with gems converted from gold. at one time i was thinking am i doing the right thing, do i really need to unlock all these ? now with the gems price at current rate, i know i did the right thing….

Rukia.4802:

While I don’t disagree, I always laugh when people say that others are quitting the game in masses.

I’d say 90%+ of my guild has stopped playing; that’s at least several hundred players, if not more (it’s a very large guild). Some of them probably did break off to other guilds, but most simply left the game.

I don’t know how people, having witnessed contraction in other games and seeing it right in front of their face here, can plug their ears and scream “lalala only the devs know.”

Unless they’re just trolling.

Ansultares.1567:

Rukia.4802:

While I don’t disagree, I always laugh when people say that others are quitting the game in masses.

I’d say 90%+ of my guild has stopped playing; that’s at least several hundred players, if not more (it’s a very large guild). Some of them probably did break off to other guilds, but most simply left the game.

I don’t know how people, having witnessed contraction in other games and seeing it right in front of their face here, can plug their ears and scream “lalala only the devs know.”

Unless they’re just trolling.

well i must be a troll then since the guild Im in is seeing more activity than ever. But hey that cant be true cos everyones quitting. Hell ive even quit but it dont stop me playing.

Death Reincarnated.3570:

Basic necessities such as bank slots and equipment should be standardised even though the exchange rate is going up.

600 gems for 30 extra bank slots equates to about 8G at the moment. This, in my opinion , is not reasonable.

And why is that? You can get 8g of gold easily in about a week without even trying. Even in one day if you’re super serious about it.

grizzlebizzle.9371:

Are people seriously buying the keys? Why buy the keys for a 99% chance to get some useless junk like ooze tonics rather than buying what you actually are hoping to get from the chests?

People are buying the keys because of the chance of getting a permanent trader items. You also get a chance of Black Lion Salvage Kits.

Don’t get me wrong, but i really don’t see any point for extra character slot.
i have clocked 300h with 1 characters and still got alot more to come.
plus, there are 5 races so 5 character slots are fine.

can’t really see the point of buying BL keys, random = throwing your money away.

i just want to buy the 2000gem Digital Deluxe Upgrade.

if ANet will release an gw2 expension pack that cost you about 50$ and you get 3 new races and 3 extra character slots, and ofcourse maps – i will gladly pay real money.