Guild Wars 2

Are you speaking of precursors or in general?

I will sell one for 100 gold

We are always adding new items to the gemstore and plan to do so. I have my own plans for the goldsellers, they just don’t know I’m coming for them yet.

Couple of problems though:
1. Players control that market
2. If we were to step in and do that, we would inflate the economy and the extra value you were getting in real terms would be negligible

Rising Dusk.2408:

I hope that eventually the gem->gold conversion becomes comparable to the black market sellers in an economy where you feel like you can actually get something useful for your money. As it stands, I don’t feel as though I get enough bang for my buck in this economy from gems, and I refuse to support black market traders, so I just don’t spend any money at all; it is frustrating when I’d like to spend the money and get some value out of it, but don’t feel that I can.

This is impossible. If you look at the exchange value trends and the black market trends the black market will always move in sync with the exchange, but significantly cheaper. If it isn’t cheaper virtually nobody would use it, so their prices have to adjust to our prices. They’ll continue to undercut by 300%-500% no matter how cheap the exchange gets until they go out of business and there is no black market.

Joiry.2504:

Rouven.7409:

The only qualifier for this would be people already having more gold over then needed for “anything” – but haven’t bought/equipped/used “anything”. Thus you could deduct that their sole “fun” is the gold itself (/getting more of it).

Of course, if I already expect this kind of answer I can look at numbers and interpret them the way I like to see them. It requires a certain faith to believe that the right questions are being asked.

I doubt 15% of the population falls into such a clear cut pigeon hole. Even if they did, I don’t think you can deduce anything from it.

Take me. I’m not rich in game, but I do have more gold than my “needs.” I have around 30g between 4 level 80s (mainly just from levelling). They are all equiped with rares, with 2 of them having 1 exotic weapon each, that I looted myself. A few even have some greens, because I haven’t figured out exactly what builds (ie stat armors) I want to have. I’m also sitting on over 100 jugs of karma…also, because I’m not sure which exotic armor stat combos I want to spend them on.

I have a set of resources, but I’m not spending them for a variety of non-economic reasons. Some are stat/build reasons. There’s other dealing with what armor skins I want, the clunkiness of the transmutation system, and the question if its even worth it because of the murky timeline on ascended gear.

You can use models and statistics to tell you a lot of things about a data set. You can’t use it to infer motivations, intents and other things going on in people’s heads – not with anything that could be reasonably called scientific in its reproducibility.

I wouldn’t even know where to begin pointing out the massive amount of examples that show that this isn’t true, but for the context I’d start with the Daedalus Project.

Also, holding on to Jugs of Karma for any reason is an economic reason. Economics isn’t about money, it’s about scarcity, the reason you hold those jugs is because you’re mitigating risk on a scarce resource.

Gasoline.2570:

Except right now the few people who are buying their legendaries are spending the money on gold sellers instead of anet, but, then again, we don’t know if anet or ncsoft has directly any involvement with those gold sellers. Who knows.

Goldsellers are a plague on the gaming industry, plain and simple, I would sooner associate with Ralphie from “The League”… much, much sooner

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Gold-sellers-vs-BLTC/first#post581941

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Noerknhar.3826:

I think it’s fair to judge inflation on the items that are worth to think about in end game. Maybe the precursor example is a bit limiting, but it’s the best example for what i meant to say

You would be entirely incorrect in an economic standpoint.

Inflation is measured by the price levels of goods people buy regularly, not the price tags on private jets or other “endgame” goods people buy when they’re extremely wealthy.

This is correct, you cannot measure inflation by luxury goods, or by a single good, or by the several other assumptions you’re making (sell orders represent sales?).

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

Actually about 15% of the population finds making money very fun, irrelevant of the uses of that money. Ever gotten unnecessarily rich in a single player RPG like Skyrim?

The broom is equipped in your town clothes.

cargan.5689:

Arshinark.9083:

I was riding my broom around lions arch when i fell into some water and the broom went away entirely…. I don’t have it equipped and it’s not in any of my bags. What could this be?

Pity John got in first, for all of us old enough to remember the wizard of OZ you would realise witches are water soluable it would make sense for the broom to be also

Wow, can’t believe I didn’t think of that, especially since the Witch Costume allows you to melt. /fail

It’s Town Clothes, so it’s still equipped, just switch to your town clothes.

It is permanent and account bound.

The gemstore will be updated very soon.

The general consensus of the community is you cannot personally go out and enter the market as a supplier of anything due to DR mechanics.

I literally just asked people to stop doing this.

If you want a “flaming sword” look, you either multibox an ele or you have one choice: volcanus

This is an invalid argument. This is equivalent to saying if you want one specific item, and only that item, there are no substitutes. In the end, that may be true relative to the person, since the aesthetics are subjective. The equivalent comparison is someone wants an iphone and no other phone, then there are no substitutes, except in the case of GW2 the functionality is exactly the same.

Celeras.4980:

John Smith.4610:

I’m not currently aware of any behavior that I would classify as an exploit.

I see this as permission to create characters with my my last 3 alt slots, then have them escorted to the rich node by my friend. From there they will never leave, only going to WvW occasionally to drop by the bank and pick up more mining picks from the endless supply of karma on my main.

I will take you to your word, and hope you simply tell me otherwise if your classification changes.. rather than ban me later.

It would be better if you purchased 10-15 extra character slots to do this.

Let’s make sure to keep a few things in mind when discussing:

1. No single person represents the population, do not assume that you do
2. These forums are not representative of the population

We should attempt to make our arguments based on what we know, not based on who we think has the largest amount of public opinion (Even if a large portion of the populace does agree with your side, using that as evidence is a logical fallacy).

This statement:

2 ) Player “has his” and feels entitled to defend the misery of the vast majority of players who just want to be able to advance at a reasonable pace in a game (without their experience held hostage to insufferable people who are psychologically dependent upon the deprivation of others)"

isn’t helpful.

I don’t mean to pick on you plasma, because you’re solid. To make it up to you I’ll discuss your points (though this sounds vastly narcissistic, I don’t mean it to be, just don’t have a lot I can give you. I’ll tell you the quantity traded of any item over the last 24 hours or something similar )

As a reminder from intermedate levels, many assumptions about what make “pure free markets” healthy break down under scrutiny (both in mmos and often in the real world, but MORE often in mms), including but not limited to:

I assume here you are referring to market failures occurring in natural markets. I would argue this happens significantly more often in the real world, but that may be a larger discussion.

1 – ease of entry for competition (both direct and indirect substitution)
2 – perfect distribution of information
3 – high elasticity of demand for any one product
4 – perfect liberty to bring goods to market (in the real world, when sugar gets too high, companies can sub in corn syrup. Not in any MMO i’ve seen)

1. MMOs are fantastic for this, especially GW2. There is nothing I can think of in the game that players can’t decide to enter into the market for because everything in the game you can just go get, there’s no stopping you.
2. There is imperfect information, but there is significantly less imperfect information than the real world. There is also less market failures associated with imperfect information because of homogeneous goods. Homogeneous goods are one really cool thing about virtual economies.
3. This isn’t unique to MMOs or the real world, neither are the actions associated with it. It’s possible I’m missing the point on this one.
4. For this I would argue the opposite. MMOs are notorious for substitute goods. Especially when it comes to stats, I can change rarity, type, order of stats in a myriad of combinations with less than a 1% change in my total effectiveness. Switching to corn syrup causes significantly more than a 1% change in a product.

The Blue Ace.2850:

John Smith.4610:

The Blue Ace.2850:

John Smith.4610:

I did not promise to do anything to lodestones, nor did that blog have anything to do with lodestones.

You were talking about balancing the market by adding more ways to get items if they were lacking places to get them in game.

And based on how many threads there are on the forums about this topic and how much they cost lodestones are clearly not balanced in this game.

Oh I’m sorry, please tell me what I was talking about in my blog. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, continue.

Again from your blog

“We’ve noticed several markets that are clearly out of sync in terms of supply and demand. It isn’t interesting or fun to have a market flooded with items that contain very little value, so we’re making adjustments to the game every day. Players can expect to see these markets even out over time.”

Just answer me this john, charged lodestones, does a.net consider this out of sync or not?

Because there have be many threads about this topic whether it stirs around manipulators, lack of supply or one lodestone being higher than the other.

I was making the point that you guys are working to balance the TP, on the topic of lodestones, I do not think they are, at all.

Your currently fixing precursors which are like 500 gold give or take,
And yet some people think that 430 gold for 100 charged lodestones is acceptable, what logic is that?!

I find this post disrespectful and rude. Until you learn to stop and think about what you’re asking, take in the information you have and make a logical question I’ll not be replying.

The Blue Ace.2850:

Ursan.7846:

The Blue Ace.2850:

the few stones we do have in the market are being manipulated

You don’t know this.

The Blue Ace.2850:

in the space of 2 day I’ve seen the price shoot up by 30 silver!

Well yes. If you look at GW2spidy and look at charged lodestones, you’ll see a decline in supply from 2 days ago (~600 to ~400). That will increase the price. Supply/demand.

I don’t know that theres a lack of charged lodestones in the market?!?!!?
And they are being manipulated, why do you think they jumped in price by 10% of their value.

Take closer look at this screenshot!!!

In the last 24 hours 2193 Lodestones have been traded. The amount of sell orders on the TP doesn’t necessarily represent supply.

I did not promise to do anything to lodestones, nor did that blog have anything to do with lodestones.

I’m not currently aware of any behavior that I would classify as an exploit.

GW2’s TP is by a wide margin less effectively manipulated than the other games mentioned in this thread.

I’m aware of this issue, and keeping track of it.

Short answer is usually a hybrid, but you also have to wonder how much is long term investment for profit and how much of it is investment against inflation. Holding liquid wealth in any economy is a mistake.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Astraea.6075:

To make up for my last couple of off-topic posts, here’s a couple of things I’d like to see in terms of statistics:

1) Some kind of index to measure inflation – there may need to be more than one index to cover different groups of items, but it would be useful to have some solid data to prove or disprove claims about how inflation is affecting the economy.

2) Wealth distribution – this may be tricky because it should not just be focused purely on gold held by an account (in real life a person’s wealth isn’t measured solely by their cash assets), but it won’t necessarily be easy to assign values to some items that people are holding onto.

3) Trading volumes/values – As well as the raw figures, I’d be interested in seeing this broken down in a similar manner to a Lorentz curve for buyers and sellers (e.g. percentage of players by both volume and value of activity)

Players can actually measure inflation for themselves.

I got bored in my Public Speaking class today and was determining the Elasticity of certain GW2 items, heh.

With Spidy you could easily track data and determine inflation based on a decent sample size of goods.

You could try, but you’d be wrong 99.9% of the time. You also most certainly cannot measure elasticity through spidy because 1. It updates slower than trading. 2. It doesn’t show actual trades.

When doing math over time, don’t forget to discount future money.

I worry less about current prices and more about trends. Overall it takes time, but it’s a solved problem how to fix individual markets (there are lots of solutions).
Just to kill any conspiracies, I don’t WORRY about anything.
A small portion of what I study is faucets and sinks, profit an loss for each section of industry, drops/loot, wealth and income, and RMT.

Here’s my 3 second summary of each of those:
1. Faucets and sinks: It’s a lot easier to make faucets than sinks, this causes problems.

2. Profit and Loss: There is nothing in our game that doesn’t consistently have places where good profit margins exist, including crafting.

3. Drops and Loot: People mistake the sell and buy orders of drops as static, but don’t see the velocity of those items. It often seems like there aren’t new items, when the supply might cycle 4-5 times in a day.

4. Wealth and Income: While there are some super rich, it’s significantly less people than brag about it. There are also very few super poor.

5. RMT: I’ve made my feelings about RMT pretty clear before. One day I hope I’ll be able to release numbers on how much money is wasted and how many people’s lives are damaged by RMT to give people some perspective on who they’re supporting.

Making new characters for Black Lion Keys is NOT an exploit. Have fun all!

This also assumes that all cash values are literal and not fiat money. It only cost $1 for a bunch of paper, but dollar bills are worth more.

I can’t answer questions about my specific feelings about individual item prices here.

aramina.2591:

As someone who adored that instance of the economy being rebalanced, (I could finally sell Iron Ore to other players w/o losing money!) I keep hoping you guys will do stuff like that again. It’s a personal thing, but I hate selling crafting supplies to vendors because I’d be selling at a loss on the TP, when I know that people could be using the mats that I’m essentially destroying. Are there any plans to do more limited-time mystic forge recipes like that again, or was that a one-off experiment?

Never say never

Vol.5241:

Now that you’re on your lunchbreak, question!

Is there anything surprising (economically) that has caught you off guard in regards to the game? Perhaps price manipulation?

When I released the blog post about pulling some of the surplus items like butter and soft wood logs out of the market with the Mystic Chest. How fast that took effect and burned those items really surprised me. 7 Million Items in 2 hours, never seen anything like it. It was really cool.

mucco.1867:

Just tossing my 2c on why Smith is griefing us all and denying us data.

He has very explicitly avoided the question on purpose, and has made a point of it. It is clear he is trying to convey that he can not, or does not want to, disclose any information. But, I am sure he is physically able to disclose some information – heck, I’m pretty sure he has like 10 charts of wealth distribution glued on all sides of his screen at work. So he does not want to, or someone forbids him to.

I can very well see the reason: for one person on the forums that can actually gain insight from the charts and be reasonable, there are twenty hate monkeys who will jump on the newly acquired data to “prove” that Anet fails @economy, is an evil corporation trying to pass subliminal messages about buying gems, is behind Guantanamo Bay and the Cold War, etc. Sometimes it’s better to leave those people without tools – I certainly would handle stuff this way if I were at Anet. I think John Smith is trying to tell us this with his behavior.

Presenting data for release is a more serious undertaking than you realize. Think of how many languages it has to be presented in, and the graphics have to be universally understandable, and for my purposes that means custom design, timing, approval. I’ve said I haven’t had time to prepare the information for a blog, though I would like to.

Seriously, enough with the conspiracies, I’m not saying anything, except exactly what I’m saying.

Nike.2631:

One way of presenting a wealth chart that would be fascinating to me is gold (or other broader account value assessment) vs. hours played.

Not so much an “average gold per hour” thing, but looking at wealth vs. account age to see if there are any distinct bends in the curve. For example, I just finished my master crafter title this week and expect my ability to make gold to go up noticably now that I’m not hording materials for conversion to crafting XP.

I could probably spend a month coming up with meaningful combinations of wealth and income. Your suggestion would be at the top of the list, and the immediate question that comes up is: Do players who spend more time in game have more wealth because they play more, or are they more efficient because they’re really good at the game or both.

When/if I release a Lorenz curve or something similar to show distribution of wealth you can be sure it will be accurate.
It will also only probably be gold only. Counting the value outside of gold would be interesting, but would be hard to do accurately. I would consider doing both, but would definitely start with gold.
I really wanted to get a new blog post out for the first quarter of the game’s release, but I haven’t had the time, and issues in the game have to come first. It’s on my list of things to publish though.

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

leman.7682:

John Smith.4610:

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

I have to say, however, that you have a perfect name for an economist.

Coming from an economist.

Thanks! It’s real

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

Aurrynthea.7581:

Budchgon.2108:

I hit 80 and had a look at some of the runes i can use in my armour…

The prices are crazy!!! 8+ gold for a single Superior Divinity rune!!! Is this to force people to use the cash shop? :-(

That’s nothing! How can anyone justify 450 gold for a single item? most of the legendary stuff can’t be bought without spending real world money on gems – and as much as I enjoy GW2 I am NOT spending more money after buying the collector’s edition !

You should never be surprised that your preferences are not representative of the preferences of the population.

When I say the last round of banning encompassed, I mean those who were banned created that many.

timmyf.1490:

John Smith.4610:

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.

Somebody get Glenn Beck on the phone! ;-)

But in all seriousness, I have a couple questions, I don’t know if you can give much detail on them…

1) It sounds like you have some sort of target in mind when you “balance” the economy. Is this an inflation target (e.g. we’d like to keep inflation at or around 2%) or is it a price target (e.g. we think 1 gold should buy 3-4 ecto… which is my guess, btw)? And did you guys come up with these targets before the official release or was/is it something you’re constantly refining?

2) People have criticized ArenaNet for being very harsh with the ban-hammer, but I tend to agree with your decisions in the name of protecting the economy. I’m curious as to the size of exploits/RMT transactions that get caught in relation to the size of the economy and the amassed wealth. Meaning: if the snowflake exploit created 2 million “illegal” gold, how does that compare as a percentage to the daily/weekly/monthly gold-creation rate and how does it compare to the accumulated wealth of all players?

It’d be really cool to see numbers like “during the two days the exploit was being used, 15% of in-game value creation came from snowflake salvaging.” I’m not even sure if you guys have the data for that, but it’d be really interesting. Ditto RMT: you guys are regularly banning accounts and undoing transfers, I assume… what percentage of the economy is involved in illicit trade?

1. We have ideas for the ideal scenarios for everything, but they are constantly changing. As we release new content (which as you see is a lot of new content, and a lot more to come) the value of items involved and involved by proxy (substitute and complimentary and transitional goods) in the new content changes.

2. The economy is so massive and filled with good players that RMT holds relatively little total percentage of the economy. To give some perspective on banning for exploits. Our last round of snowflake banning encompassed greater than 275,000 illicitly created ectos.

Vol.5241:

You are under no obligation to reveal that information John Smith, ignore these guys :P

I’d much rather talk about the economics of Guild Wars 2.

-How do you feel about controlling inflation? Do you think the gold sinks we have in the game are sufficient enough to keep the value of gold steady overtime?

Inflation is a really tricky topic. One important thing to understand about inflation (the EVE guys have done a great job explaining this) is that it isn’t a change in the quantity of money available, it’s a change in prices (not individual prices). It’s easy to double the money supply and not inflate the economy.
I won’t speak to our specific strategies, but there are a couple of different ways to go. An interesting strategy that not many people think about is allowing the economy to inflate a bit, then pulling the money back out in a cycle ( many countries do this, but not on purpose :P ) There are specific benefits to this, that only occur as benefits in games.

Zegai.8256:

I’m really quite confused here. The thread made a very specific request, and yet the actual topic has been avoided. When I see an ArenaNet symbol next to a thread, I usually assume it means they’ve taken the time to provide constructive feedback and answer questions.

Other people have even reiterated the question to John in this very thread after he responded in here. If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am, and it’s a problem that in my opinion is becoming rampant the forums. Why bother posting at all if you aren’t going to address the issue raised in the thread? It drives me up a wall when ArenaNet takes the time to post on a thread that they’ve obviously been reading, and then have unrelated sidebar conversations while completely avoiding the point of the particular thread.

So, I’ll repeat the request again, is this data something you can provide to us again?

A simple, “I can’t provide that for you at this time”, or “it’s something I will work on getting out” is all that’s needed. Even a flat out “No.” will suffice. I feel like it’s a game sometimes (of pulling teeth) to actually get an ArenaNet response on these forums that’s relevant to the purpose of the thread. No one expects you to reply to every thread and post, but if you’re going to take the time to post in one, please at the very least address the heart of the thread, instead of just ignoring it.

I post because I enjoy interacting with the community.

Astraea.6075:

I was going to reply to Tallis, but I realised there wasn’t much point… people believe all sorts of crazy things despite evidence to the contrary.

marnick.4305:

it makes my brain cry.

I really laughed at makes my brain cry, going to use that in the future, thanks!

Exterminans.9723:

This is achieved by (there are more tricks, bugs & exploits used ):

• Use of “hacks” to automatically extract the information from the TP (guess how GW2Spidy works, it uses a basic “hack” to update itself by accessing the TP server directly)
• Use of external tools to calculate margins on forgeable items (includes salvaging, regular crafting and MF crafting)
• Use of external statistic tools to predict daily / weekly / event based price fluctuations
• Cheating around TP fees (it is possible, not all traders do that)
• Placing orders, selling and withdrawing items automatically (this is new, since December there are bots which can do the TP without human interaction, not all traders do that)

Quick Note:
GW2 Spidy is not hacking, they are not doing anything illegal, it’s a fantastic site.

Dreamslayer.7659:

Vol.5241:

I don’t know why people here think they know more about the economy than an economist.

A couple reasons, but the main reason is that the study of economics is the study of human behavior and psychology and as such, it is imperfect, incomplete and subject to very different interpretations and perspectives.

It’s the voodoo witch doctor profession of our age.

This is very far from the truth.
Even more so inside of MMOs where there is complete data.

When you place a buy order, you are stating that you are willing to pay X money for Y item(s). The buy order is a contract of demand for that item.

Academically; from your perspective it shouldn’t be relative, you stated you were willing to pay X for Y and were successful. There is no such thing as false demand, because at any point while those orders exist they can be filled.

I don’t mean that the wealth of the country grows. I mean that individuals with wealth will create more wealth an a significantly higher rate than those without wealth. It takes money to make money essentially.