Guild Wars 2

At the moment our extremely open and unregulated market is seeing some ‘problems’. This market does not know the complexity and many barriers that a real life market face (the only factors affecting sellers being fixed taxes, almost fixed amount of item spawns and the fixed difficulty of acquiring them, and now the effort of using the TP to sell items); causing items with (even a little) low demand to quickly drop in price while supply keeps raising and the prices drop to the point where they almost match vendor selling prices with just 1c difference.
Currently there are 5.3 million pieces of a certain log in the TP, the gross amount of them being sold for only 1c above vendor selling price. How long will the supply increase, and how long will it take for the supply and demand market to even out again and cause price changes? Weeks, months, a year?
More items will see this problem and i call it a problem because it makes the TP and the act of finding a good deal very uninteresting.

Some things that could make it less boring:

- Dynamic NPC vendor buy and sell prices, depending on TP prices and supply/demand activity.
- Dynamic item spawns (drops, raw material nodes, etc), also based on TP prices and supply/demand activity.
- More markets; for example a separate market in every city, split the global server market in different markets that are also accessible but have their own prices and supply, or other possibilities.
- Vendor prices depending on location.

Take a look at the economy in EVE online, you can buy anything anywhere but there are different factors that both sellers and buyers have to take into account when trading, such as the location of the item and the wealth of the buyer (such as fast trade ships and couriers). This causes even higher priced items to sell and makes for different prices in different areas of the game world, creating a much more active and interesting economy. Where prices don’t stay at the bare minimum in the whole world for a long period of time.

They’ll probably close this because it’s not a bug report.

However, you should be aware that ArenaNet have an economist on staff for GW2.

I think the reason that many prices are 1c above vendor price is because people simply aren’t valuing their work. After fees, 1c above vendor price is basically throwing the item away. Most people will eventually realize this, but for now they are mostly just trying to empty their bags to trading post with the least amount of thought. So you’re real question should be, does the game allow you to take advantage of this pricing? Well, sure, to some extent: don’t chop down the trees when you see 5.3 million logs for sale—spend your time mining or gathering food or salvaging or figuring out what you can build with wood.

I suspect that the open-ended nature of this style of auction house is generating an unusually high number of entries that are responsible for it’s continuous downtime. My main concern right now is that trading post will fall over of its own weight once everyone has 100+ different items on the shelves and custom buy offers on 100 more. If this is the case, I would be in favor of splitting the trading posts so that one trading post served a selection of servers rather than all of them. Perhaps, rotating the servers in each trading pool periodically. Or set some limits such as a limited number of open transactions or an expiration time for each transaction to go unfilled.

If GW2 has a team of economists they are either performing a daring experiment or are just doing a bad job.

As for the bug thing, there is no suggestions forum… and this is the closest thing to it.

It’s too easy to just chop down a tree even if you know the prices are super low. When you run across a tree it takes a few second to get some copper and also some xp. There are too little limiting factors.

I just realized that if you have multiple TP’s in the same world you can easily buy them here and sell them there for more. In EVE it is hard to travel large distances. With GW2 it is very easy to do so with Asura gates. A solution: to charge extra (transport) taxes when you place a listing or buying an item on a different TP based on the distance from the original TP the item was bought on. Or just make it impossible to trade an item bought on TP 1 on TP 2.

Having more TP’s would create interesting specialized markets. A TP based in area with lots of platinum ore will probably have a lower price on platinum than in the capital or a TP close to copper ore. As a buyer you can get this this cheap ore by spending time and money to travel to the TP in the platinum area.

The economic principles of eve online wouId be almost impossible to implement in this game. There distance traveled means something and its possible to lose goods on the way because of players killing you to steal it. Finaly its almost entirely player driven which makes crafting necesary and lucrative but can also lead to an imbalanced economy. Its a lot of fun but implementing something like this in GW2 would require fundamental game changes that are never going to happen.

I think the fundamental problem with the economy is that its to easy to gather resources. Everybody can just gather anything they need by themself and I bet a lot of people aren’t crafting but just gathering stuff and trying to sell them for a profit. What you need is seperate gathering proffesions. In WoW you can get 2 professions just like this game but there you also need gathering professions if you want to get the materials yourself. Also in several cases you need materials from more then one gathering profession to craft items. Of course you can just have an alt do that gathering but most of the time this encourages trading to get the items you can’t get yourself. Also if you have a gathering profession that effectively limits you to only one other production profession. That means that less people do what you do and that also encourages trading. Gathering professions also need to be trained so at high level you can’t just decide to go pick up a mining pick and go gather some high end resources to sell on the market. Al these restrictions make it so people have to trade with each other and there is a limited suply of materials.

Just introducing gathering proffesions would fix a lot of issues.

I think that would also help as there clearly is too much supply. The other thing is this sterile global unrestricted market. We need some diversity and difficulty to keep it interesting.
Sure, EVE’s economy cannot be implemented. But i’m saying there are certain factors that keep that economy active and fun.
Anet’s economist ofcourse knows a lot about economy, but we all know economy is pretty boring, what does he know about gaming?

This is the bug report forum, not the suggsetions forum. We are currently aware that they suggsetions forum is not online but will be soon. Please, feel free to post this back on the apropiate forum when its available.
Closing this thread.