Curse

Jake_Steel · Mar 12, 2008, 11:59 PM // 23:59

I won't be happy untill Ectos are less 1K each!

Gregslot · Mar 13, 2008, 12:01 AM // 00:01

YOU ARE FORGETING ONE THING:

*WHEN YOU BUY AN ARMOR/GLOVE, THE ECTOS DISSAPEAR! They arent handed over from one player to another! So the supply goes down down down

RedNova88 · Mar 13, 2008, 12:12 AM // 00:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregslot

YOU ARE FORGETING ONE THING:

*WHEN YOU BUY AN ARMOR/GLOVE, THE ECTOS DISSAPEAR! They arent handed over from one player to another! So the supply goes down down down

Bingo, it's not a circular motion, it's more like a semi circle. Some will stay in the market from people hording them and using them for 100k + purchases, but not always.

Farmer gets ecto
Farmer sells ecto
Ecto buyer spends ecto on item
ecto disappears forever

Oh and for the record, some people here clearly do not understand how economics works and would do well to pick up a book and learn about it.

Dante the Warlord · Mar 13, 2008, 12:17 AM // 00:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregslot

YOU ARE FORGETING ONE THING:

*WHEN YOU BUY AN ARMOR/GLOVE, THE ECTOS DISSAPEAR! They arent handed over from one player to another! So the supply goes down down down

Ah true i forgot! Yea they do dissapear as well as the trader having a near unlimited supply of it.... lmao

Also the entire ecto thing is a monopoly anyways if you think about it. They have NO COMPETITION at all, since no other people can make the same things they do and they always want the same price regardless of economics.

kratimas · Mar 13, 2008, 12:30 AM // 00:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Koudelka

Today ectos were priced at 4.8k. The reason for such devaluation is, imo, because of the increasing availability of quick and easy ursan uw runs. As surely, high availability = low price. As more and more people get their hands on ectos and sell them, the overall price will go down. It's not just demand, remember supply.

I am so tired of everyone blaming Ursan. Ursan has nothing to do with it. Right now there is nearly limitless access to UW the Ursan population is maybe 2% of all that is in UW. The fact that you can solo, duo ectos so easy is the reason. The price would be the same if Ursan was in the game or not.

I personally don't use Ursan because it is too slow, I can farm ectos much faster duo with a guild member or hero then a team can Ursan the UW.

Anyway I wish all the Ursan haters would find something else to bitch about, it is getting really old.

Krat

Trinity Fire Angel · Mar 13, 2008, 12:30 AM // 00:30

ummm.... everyone is forgetting the other factor involved in prices in a free trade market that we have in GW. Humans. Just say that i want to sell my ecto';s fast. i Just lower the price and flood the market and bring the price down. it;s easy, America has been doing that with the wheat market killing Australia for years.

So, we now have favour that lasts 33,000 minutes. LOL so i can go in whenever i like and farm ecto like mad. Just say then i want to make money faster rather then i would i say, flood the market with prices such as 250ecto for 3k each. that is still 750plat and would sell like crazy as compared to trying to sell 250 ecto at 4.5k. oki... i might have made 250-300k more... but that 750plat might go into other uptrade items.

given the fact that there are a huge number of gold sellers (and BUYERS!!!!) then gold really isn;t worth that much anymore. So, people can just easily buy ecto like it is water and the price will go down. simple.

also, i might be an ecto scammer. Say i have saved up 500k. i want to buy ecto cheap and sell high. my friends and i spam trade channels that we are selling cheap ecto at 3k and pretend that we have always just sold the stack when people PM. "sorry, just sold them". We do this for a month and artificially bring the price down. Then we buy up at 3k and stop trading... a month later we all start setting the price at 5k. the market will soon come up to that price.

remember, we are like sheep. once enough people start selling an item for a certain price, the whole community catches on....

Savio · Mar 13, 2008, 12:38 AM // 00:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dante the Warlord

Also the entire ecto thing is a monopoly anyways if you think about it. They have NO COMPETITION at all, since no other people can make the same things they do and they always want the same price regardless of economics.

No, that's more like perfectly elastic demand. A monopoly would mean a single firm has control of the supply.

Also, ecto prices were down before GW:EN was released.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trinity Fire Angel

remember, we are like sheep. once enough people start selling an item for a certain price, the whole community catches on....

It'd never happen, as smart traders would buy cheap ecto and sell it for more.

aleaf92 · Mar 13, 2008, 01:14 AM // 01:14

Anet needs to increase the uses for ectos.

This might be a flame magnet:
If the entrance fee for the UW cost one ecto. Then hundreds of ectos would disappear as people went to farm them and more ectos would come in as it was farmed. This would encourage group play as well because 5k is a lot to some of us and when split 8-ways, its fairly cheap. Farmers would be more reluctant to sell for cheaper as well. I don't know just an idea.

FrAnt1c² · Mar 13, 2008, 01:30 AM // 01:30

I think That Anet has set a minimum price on ectos, imo otherwise the ecto prices would have been far less then they are atm

Gwmaster · Mar 13, 2008, 01:38 AM // 01:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by nvmu

lol..
do you know anything about supply and demand,
they are putting out more oil than ever, and what are prices doing INCREASEING, hence as supply increases price increases,
ALSO that works on elastic products, OIL IS AN INELASTIC PRODUCT people will buy no mater what the price is, which is why they can raise the prices so high

euh...mister imo you are kind of lost, although the oil production is increased, the price is rising because, (if you read newspapers etc..) the government has to spend billions to protect the pipelines in war zone, if supply increases, the price will go down..its logic economics, if my apple store in a town of 10k people has 1 million apples, i wont increase their price to sell them, decreasing the price of the apples is the only way i will make people buy them hence making a bigger and quicker profit. Another example is when i used to work in a supermarket, sometimes we had to much "supply" of certain items that people didn't really buy, so what we did? decrease the price.

high supply+low demand = low prices
low supply+high demand = high prices

Savio · Mar 13, 2008, 01:42 AM // 01:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrAnt1c²

I think That Anet has set a minimum price on ectos, imo otherwise the ecto prices would have been far less then they are atm

Wrong; it's people who affect prices, the trader is just a reflection of the player market.

Faction Gambler · Mar 13, 2008, 01:43 AM // 01:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrAnt1c²

I think That Anet has set a minimum price on ectos, imo otherwise the ecto prices would have been far less then they are atm

They have. Its 100 gold each.

Nemo the Capitalist · Mar 13, 2008, 01:46 AM // 01:46

another reason not to paly gw if u were a farmer

Sniper22 · Mar 13, 2008, 01:54 AM // 01:54

To get into economics further (from what I think I remember...) as price goes down, so does the suppliers (1k per ecto = very little incentive). At the same time, if price goes up then there also wont be any buyers. So the current price seems to be balanced (equilibrium?). There is also a certain term given to this kind of market, there are many buyers and there are many sellers and no ecto has better quality over the next, so the sellers don't have too much control over the prices. If 90% of the people are selling ectos for 4.8k each, then its gonna be very hard for 10% of the people to sell them for 5.5k. Yes I know that there are those stupid "power sellers" though.

Now why is there such a large supply of ectos right now? It's because everyone needs to earn money somehow, and this isn't like a real economy where certain skilled people can do specific jobs. Anyone can become an ecto farmer. Ectos are one of the reliable items that can be farmed to make a decent profit out of it. Ever notice how when there is a new green item, it's really expensive? Then after a week everyone mass farms it and then it's worthless?

Also, the trader merchant can mess things up a bit. For all those people who go to UW in a group and get one ecto, they might just wanna sell it off fast. Why bother waste 20 min trying to sell the ecto only to earn an extra 1k? Merchant is much more convient (trading only district/auction house please :P). Now obviously the merchant sells for high. Some people must be buying from the merchant though to keep the price high. This whole merchant puts pressure on the ecto price to be competitive with the merchant so the price stays low.

Now really, making money isn't that hard in this game. Sure it might be hard to make 1 mil gold, but you don't need all that money. All these green weapons and mods and inscriptions are cheap. You can get a nice weapon for like only 20k. You don't need FoW armor or expensive titles. Those things are supposed to be hard to get so we dont have 5 million wammos running around in fow. Just by playing the normal missions through a campaign will earn you decent money to buy weapons and maybe with a little extra you can get 15k armor.

Btw: Yes the ectos do disappear when people spend it on chaos gloves, but they also magically appear from killing monsters. An equal balance of ecto production/use should keep the price steady.

Zahr Dalsk · Mar 13, 2008, 01:55 AM // 01:55

The main people who want ecto prices back up are the people sitting on stacks of them who stand to make hundreds of thousands more gold if they can sell them at a higher rate.

You can take your stacks of ectos and stick 'em where the sun don't shine, how about that?

enter_the_zone · Mar 13, 2008, 01:59 AM // 01:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by aleaf92

Anet needs to increase the uses for ectos.

This might be a flame magnet:
If the entrance fee for the UW cost one ecto. Then hundreds of ectos would disappear as people went to farm them and more ectos would come in as it was farmed. This would encourage group play as well because 5k is a lot to some of us and when split 8-ways, its fairly cheap. Farmers would be more reluctant to sell for cheaper as well. I don't know just an idea.

Except that UW is not the fastest way to make cash in GW, not by a long shot. I rarely bother with 600/smite anymore, since the number of dry runs (for both people) was making it marginally profitable as it is. Increasing the entrance price would certainly decrease the number of people willing to farm UW by a good percentage. This would have a feedback effect of driving ecto prices up, aided by the ectos being taken out of the economy by the entrance fee. Increasing ecto prices would essentially drive the entry fee up, driving more people away.

As for GW economics, it tends to be driven by scenarios as follows.

1) (Mob Mind) I want to make money, fast
2) (Mob Mind) Wow, 100k+40ectos for an armbrace, that DOA thing looks profitable!
3) Much farming of DOA ensues, without an increase of people who actually want the item to use it. (ie. items are being sought purely to sell, with no increase in the total number of buyers or "item users")
4) (Mob Mind) QQ, my armbrace is only worth 100k+15ectos

This is less noticeable with ectos because there are many people who have yet to get even 1 set of FoW, keeping prices buoyant longer.

Remember, a finite population with a "open economy" like GW (items being "injected" for no cost aka drops), and almost all MMO's, will saturate the market with every single item over time.

As to how much control Anet does exert over the price of ectos, I'd say it's questionable. They certainly could keep prices around 5k, by simply removing ectos from the traders stock when he has too many. In fact, the recent spike down to a couple of plat for an ecto (and the quick bounce back) argues that they have autobalancing systems in place to attempt to stabilize the price.

Um Yeah · Mar 13, 2008, 02:19 AM // 02:19

Tbh those first 2 and a half pages or so were one of the funniest threads I've ever read on here.

You can't see me · Mar 13, 2008, 03:01 AM // 03:01

You're all forgetting that there's another "Ectonomic" rule in play here; the law of drops.

In any multiplayer game, any drop that is available and stays available is doomed to steadily decline. Lack of demand or bulk of supply can speed up this graph, but any item, ectoplasm not being excused from this, will decline in value if it keeps dropping, as in games, there will always be an easier way to get old items as the game develops. Ursan is a prime example of this in guild wars.

Sure, there can be small spikes of high demand, but prices won't stay that way, they'll just stick to the steady decline.

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Graph says it all.

Zorian Direspell · Mar 13, 2008, 05:04 AM // 05:04

As supply goes up, assuming no increase or decrease in demand, prices drop because suppliers must compete with each other to attract the same clients. Similarly, as demand decreases, assuming no shortage of supply, prices drop because suppliers must compete over a shrinking market.

In short: Just about everyone has ectos. Just about everyone has FoW armor if they want it. Hence, supply is high and demand is low.

Ecto prices could sky rocket when or if the game becomes abandoned for GW2, and new gamers buying GW are exposed to a gaming environment with fewer players (suppliers). This should create the establishment of a niche market (low demand but commensurate low supply leading to a customer base with few purchasing options).

I'd also like to say that I agree that giving ectos more uses would help to improve their value. 5 ectos = appearance change would be my solution, however ... no need to choke the supply and make it impossible for people who can only afford 1k from experiencing UW.

Snow Bunny · Mar 13, 2008, 05:31 AM // 05:31

I actually had an economics midterm today, if you all must know. My teacher also emailed me to tell me I got an A- (woot!

) so I think, on the most basic of principals...

Demand for ecto is relatively stable. It's not very high, nor is it that low.
Supply of ecto is very high. And keeps getting higher.

I do believe Anet keeps it at a certain level though