Guild Wars 2

There’s also the problem that, recently, some gold-earning mechanisms were hampered. Farming isn’t as effective as it was before, and the Dungeon rewards are also diminished (along with a higher difficulty in some specific dungeons).

That decreased the ammount of gold injected into the economy, and can even possibly increase the gold-sinks, if you take into account that the remaining dungeon-crawlers will have to spend more in armor repairs and won’t always be well-rewarded.

Another problem is that there aren’t many useful, consistent and reliable mechanisms for grabbing good gear (either for yourself or for feeding the TP):

• Random drop isn’t so reliable, specially when some players simply sell most of the drop at the NPC for quick gold, while others simply salvage them, others use some of them (high-lvl Rares) at Mystic Forge for trying to get Exotics and only a subset actually sells them at the TP;
• Crafting is suffering from lack of dynamism, and some people are simply doing it for the EXP and then flooding the TP with the crafted results; while some simply salvage them again, or sell at NPC for quick gold;
• Buying at NPCs for gold at specific locations (like the Cultural Sets, or the Order Sets). These ones are a problem, since the prices are imensely inflated and aren’t regulated by the current state of the economy (a single Rare piece usually costs 5 to >20x more than an equivalent [crafted or dropped] item at the TP). As a result, most players either ignore them or just get them for the skins or for achievements;
• Karma rewards also had their prices increased in the first few days. Most of them (Cultural weapons, in special) just aren’t worth buying anymore, because their prices don’t match the ammount of karma the average player would own at that given level, or because there are easier ways to get similar or better equipment (at the TP, for example). Not even their models are that useful, because most of them use the same models from the low-lvl gear for that race.
  …And most of the non-cultural Karma equipment (usually found on-field) are Blues and Greens, which are usually only worth it until the player can afford Rare stuff from the TP. Then, it just stocks up thousands of unused Karma points (and we can’t convert it to Gold anymore, because all the methods were considered “exploits”). So Karma becomes an almost dead currency at higher lvls;
• Exchanging them for Dungeon Tokens. After the added reward limiters and the increased difficulty, there’ll be less dungeon crawlers, and less people getting tokens. And since each item costs the equivalent of a few dozens of fully succesful runs, very very few people will actually bother to get Dungeon Sets at all.
• Quest rewards. They are mostly soulbound. And usually a joke (specially at higher levels). Not even worth counting;

So… if the money-income and item-income methods aren’t improved, we have two problems:
- The economy will still be deflated and highly deffensive;
- Many people will jump at the first good oportunity for grabbing easier money (since most of them have few or none); which will be considered “exploiting”, will be “corrected” and again the economy stays as it is. Weak and slow.

EDIT: Minor tweaks, and a few typos.

Dungeon token rewards just aren’t worth it as they are.

A full set costs over one thousand tokens, and a dungeon run only gives what, 20~25 tokens? Before the reward reduction system, token rewars were already very hard and boring to get. It demanded many days of pure dungeon grinding just to get enough for a single piece of armor. I though the point of GW2 was to eliminate the grinding, boredom and repetitive routines, right? What’s more repetitive than having to run the same dungeon over 50 times just to get a single set of armor? (actually, just to get the skin, since we can get similar armor — stat-wise — by just buying it at the TP).

Now with the reward reduction, it’s just not worth it anymore. You can’t grind the same dungeon for tokens, running the same dungeon every day just for tokens is boring and the items are just too expensive.

Either drastically reduce the item prices or give an alternative (like guaranteeing a “one-armor-part” token after each dungeon branch). The current solution basically doesn’t justify the token rewards.

On a side note, an Inspect option (to see other people’s equiped items) would be nice, too.