Guild Wars 2

I have several toons with the highest in the mid 40’s. For each toon I selected different crafting skills. Initially crafting seemed useful as the vendor items are grossly overpriced and the random nature of usable item drops.

Since the AH is functional crafting is useless IMO. You can buy masterwork armor/weapons at a fraction of what it would cost you in mats. Many mats require an item sold only by a vendor like 10 x jute thread sold for 80cp.

That’s a problem when masterwork weapons and armor can be bought for that amount (depending on level) on the AH.

The vendor mat items need to be reduced in price unless the intent is to make crafting a money sink with no payoff except for xp.

They have to have gold sinks in the game to keep inflation down. Just like TP, you have a listing fee plus a 10% collection fee. It is a way to keep the inflation down, and to keep the community balanced. Without these gold sinks, the game would be ruined and people would just list things for ridiculous prices. It is meant to be like this. Thats why some people dont craft at all since it is a huge gold sink.

The problem is however that the inflation is literally non existant, we might even have a case of deflation where more money is removed from the system than is generated.

On the first glance this is no big deal, but when we look at it on a bigger scale things start to look REALLY weird.

Right now 1 gold is a lot of money. Gem prices are somewhere around 400gems:1gold.
Still not a big deal.

When we look at this from the real money standpoint though this starts to become really really strange.

Since 800 gems through RMT cost 10€ we have a price of 2g=800gems=10€. This is stupidly expensive.

Bank slot and character slot expansions cost around 1.5g which is easily farmable in like no time. Since RMT is the only way for arena net to gain income from a player after the intial purchase this is a massive deal.

Also farmers and botters are magically attracted to this, since a bot can easily yield a farmer 50 bucks a day. And farmers are known to run more than one bot at a time – sometimes even thousands.

Something drastic has to happen to this whole economic system, or this game will be flooded with botters in the near future.

I don’t think this is really about gold sinks. I mean, if crafting was profitable, it’d be no more or no less of a gold sink, since those profits would be money coming from other players, not money created out of thin air.

But it looks to me like crafting could never be profitable with the way the game is set up. Any crafter can make unlimited stuff if he has the materials. The materials are available for sale. So any time there is something that is profitable to buy the material for and then make to sell, there’s going to be someone who does just that until the price is no longer profitable.

Even if there is high demand for certain weapons or equipment, the profit will be in gathering the resources needed, rather than the crafting being profitable.

grueber.2437:

I have several toons with the highest in the mid 40’s. For each toon I selected different crafting skills. Initially crafting seemed useful as the vendor items are grossly overpriced and the random nature of usable item drops.

Since the AH is functional crafting is useless IMO. You can buy masterwork armor/weapons at a fraction of what it would cost you in mats. Many mats require an item sold only by a vendor like 10 x jute thread sold for 80cp.

That’s a problem when masterwork weapons and armor can be bought for that amount (depending on level) on the AH.

The vendor mat items need to be reduced in price unless the intent is to make crafting a money sink with no payoff except for xp.

How can those people sell at such losses? They are probably botting/exploiting…