slowly lost their value, even before HOT
But that’s what the market dictated. Not everything needs to have a relative value. Not everything is designed to be utilized at high rates.
Unfortunately, this principal of niche markets, seems to have been lost on our current economist. Now everything must have an “arbitrary value” determined by “reasons”.
It’s dumb, and the person who designed this new concept should know that forcing (read Fixing) markets like this has only ever been detrimental to stabilization from a historical standpoint.
ascended materials are the ‘end game’ materials for armor and equipment, why should they be worthless?
and the longterm need for many different materials, even low level materials, ensures that almost all content stays relevant
They were not worthless. Their worth was being determined appropriately by the supply of the materials at the time and the need for their use.
Keep in mind, that nerfed dungeon rewards has effectively removed part of the reason those materials were in such high supply, while additionally those recipes were altered to require more materials over all.
Additionally, lower level materials still had value. The problem with the assertion that they did not have value is that the market determines the value. The principal being that you can shift the market by meerly adding or removing sources slowly. The problem with this is that when changing the market your “Game Economist” should ideally be thinking of how much of the game is removed when designing it. As is, several markets are crashing, whether by design or not.
Do you think those markets also need intervention ?
How are you going to determine what items are supposed to have what value ?
What we currently have here is effectively over regulation of markets causing stifling and pretty massive deflation. The problem is, this is taking players out of the game. Making them play more economic focused than they probably should be. It’s still a game, however the trading post and the economy at large is being treated more as a commodities exchange market than an traditional marketplace.
Anet no longer wants players in dungeons. Hence they told their economist to remove the rewards from dungeons to move players out of them. It worked.
Anet determines what items have value. They change that list of items over time in a cyclic manner. Some items they keep constant (ectos) while others they let be cheap for a while then increase their value later.
I see no evidence of deflation. All major market indicators are either steady or increasing in value, indicating a slight inflation if anything.
Anet only makes big changes to the market about twice a year. I wouldn’t call that stifling or over regulating.
Anet took a single item, increased its demand, and thus increased the demand of 30+ items from 0 to having value. If they change the influx of mid tier dust it would increase the value of an additional 30+ items, while also regulating the price of gemstones. With a major festival coming up I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw dust and crystals drop from the loot tables.
Anet has a history of using temporary festivals to inject supply into markets that give them temporary fluctuations.
So having some markets trend at 300% inflation on goods while other more common materials have seen their prices decline by over 500% is perfectly fine and not a sign of deflation to you.
How is any of that acceptable by any standard ?
You can say Anet dictates the market, and you’d be technically correct.
However, shouldn’t the market be a direct representation of the players and not an economic policy put in place to cater the most extreme demographics ?
After all it’s a marketplace not a stock exchange. It should be treated as such. If items don’t have what someone sees as an appropriate value (whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean) there are better ways to address it.
Case in point back near launch of the game, instead of changing the “supply” or removing gold Anet added new recipes for under utilized markets. This lead to the original mystic forge conduit. There’s something to be said about then and now.
I cannot believe the same person made the same design choices. Adding content and recipes is the right way to adjust markets. Adding something that incentives players to chase it. What we have now is neither. We have markets collapsing, near imploding and skyrocketing for the sake of some failed economic policy.
Yes it met it’s target goals, but in doing so it failed the average player base drastically and turns people away from actively playing the game. I’m saying this as a player who is a part of several large guilds and the same sentiments can be heard from a vast majority of anyone who is not new to the game.
