Curse

sunh3h3 · Dec 12, 2009, 06:04 PM // 18:04

and i wonder y obsidian shard prices are going down if ectos are going up cuz of upcoming SF nerf...maybe ppl are selling shards to get money for ectos?

Yawgmoth · Dec 12, 2009, 06:30 PM // 18:30

shard prices are obviously connected to ecto prices - without ectos shards are useless, they're complementary goods.

Killamus · Dec 12, 2009, 07:15 PM // 19:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

shard prices are obviously connected to ecto prices - without ectos shards are useless, they're complementary goods.

Not really. I've noticed, since the UW nerf, a lot more people are doing FoW, and as such, shards are going down in price. So while ectos are going up, shards are going down.

And it's the other way around: Shards are useless without ectos, but ectos do their job just by sitting in your inventory.

Ensign · Dec 12, 2009, 07:48 PM // 19:48

You can't even treat ectos and shards in a similar manner, because they're completely different.

Obsidian Shards are a pure commodity. Prices on shards are closely tied to simple supply / demand economics of fissure armor. They're really no different than Linen, or Deldrimor Steel, or any other single-purpose commodity.

Ectos on the other hand function much more like a currency. Some portion if it's value comes from its use as a commodity, certainly; but the bulk of the price of a glob comes from its function as a highly liquid store of value. People want Ectos as much as they do because they are compact, valuable, and easy to trade for goods the owner actually wants; there's plenty of reason to accumulate and store large numbers of ectos as liquid wealth, in stark contrast to shards.

Demand for ectos is orders of magnitude higher than for shards, and the price reflects this. It's a common misconception that shards are more common than ectos because they are cheaper. Ectos are much more plentiful on the market than shards; I would not be at all surprised if there were 10x more ectos in existence than shards, and wouldn't be shocked if the difference were 100x. The demand, liquidity, and velocity differences between the two items are enormous, and consequentially the two items are not very comparable at all.

Regarding the upcoming balance change - people consistently underestimate the size of inventories and over-react to supply shocks. If Guild Wars had a financial market I would be buying as many puts on ectos as I could.

reaper with no name · Dec 12, 2009, 07:53 PM // 19:53

Ah, but here's the thing: excluding their value as a commodity, their value is tied completely to people's belief that the have value. Other than their use as a crafting material, ectos have no actual value. But most of the people who want chaos gloves and the like already have them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the price does indeed plummet when people go to sell their stocks and realize that there aren't as many buyers as they were hoping for.

Burst Cancel · Dec 12, 2009, 08:29 PM // 20:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by reaper with no name

their value is tied completely to people's belief that the have value.

And what the hell do you think currency is? Ensign already covered this.

reaper with no name · Dec 13, 2009, 07:28 PM // 19:28

I must have missed that. Sorry, Ensign.

True. However, most currencies are either based on the fact that they truly are a valuable commodity such as oil and gold (whereas the commodity value of ectos is far less than the current market value), or the fact that they are a currency enforced by a government (see paper money).

belladonna shylock · Dec 13, 2009, 08:56 PM // 20:56

I've been playing for about 4 years (I know, pathetic). From what I've seen, the price of an ecto has ALWAYS gone up during the winter and dropped during the summer. emphasis on the always. I noticed this last year. So, while some of the price increase is possibly due to the fear of SF nerf, I think the majority of the increase is due to the yearly trend.

If in doubt, feel free to prove me wrong with a spreadsheet showing a horizontal analysis of ecto price over time (seasonal preferred).

Ensign · Dec 13, 2009, 08:56 PM // 20:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by reaper with no name

True. However, most currencies are either based on the fact that they truly are a valuable commodity such as oil and gold (whereas the commodity value of ectos is far less than the current market value), or the fact that they are a currency enforced by a government (see paper money).

Oil has very little if any currency value, it behaves just like every other commodity on the market.

Gold was almost a pure currency for centuries, it's primary value being that it's readily identifiable, scarce, and difficult to counterfeit. It had virtually no value as a commodity; that didn't change until the last century or so. Even now most of its value comes from its function as a quasi-currency. Gold is probably the best analogy to Ectos in Guild Wars, where most of the value is currency driven instead of commodity driven.

All major real currencies are by fiat, pure currencies with next to 0 commodity value, as those are a whole lot more powerful and functional than using something like gold.

Yawgmoth · Dec 14, 2009, 01:54 AM // 01:54

I agree with ensign on almost everything here, well put. Shards and ectos are a completely different league so straight comparisons between them don't make much sense, but still I think you underestimate the commodity value in ectos. A very significant if not the strongest buying force on the ecto market comes from people who are going to use them for crafting. And there can't be THAT many more ectos in circulation than shards, since their droprate is at least 50% higher and every shard leaving the economy also takes 1 ecto with it. I know people don't hoard shards like ectos to store value in them and many more shards go to the Rare Material Trader, BUT I wouldn't consider materials sold to him as leaving the economy. While it's almost certain that there are more than 10x more ectos than shards in players' inventories, there just have to be many more of them in possession of the trader NPC.

Shadowspawn X · Dec 14, 2009, 01:05 PM // 13:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

While it's almost certain that there are more than 10x more ectos than shards in players' inventories, there just have to be many more of them in possession of the trader NPC.

I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion seeing that the price of ecto has an inverse relationship with trader supply. When the trader has an ample supply of ectos the price goes down and when the trader has less ecto the price goes up. The current trend of upward pressure on ecto is showing us that the player to player market is insufficient to cover ecto demand. This results in players having to go to the trader to have that increased demand satisfied.

The big question is what is driving this increased demand and how long will it continue. The obvious answer to this is the addition of skeletons in the UW it has stopped just enough high end farming to have an effect on the available ecto supply in the player to player market. You will still have the low end farmers killing aataxe and smite by various methods, but this low end scavenging of ecto is not enough to keep up with demand. The not so obvious answer to the source of increased demand is the storage limit of 1000k.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

If Guild Wars had a financial market I would be buying as many puts on ectos as I could.

This would be a huge mistake this time of the year. By shorting the price of ecto in December, January or Febuary you will fall victim to the "festival effect" which is a huge influx of gold generated by wintersday farmers. These players whose numbers are in the tens of thousands all will likely exceed their 1000k bank limit and turn to ecto to store their wealth. This will push the price of ecto up even farther. Given the current market conditions and the impending farming nerfs it will take at least four months after wintersday for ecto to see any signs of downward pressure imo.

Edit:

Look for ecto to hit 9-9.5k by the end of wintersday and for the trader to be sold out completely on some days.

Yawgmoth · Dec 14, 2009, 10:33 PM // 22:33

No chance the trader will be sold out of ectos anytime soon, even if SF gets nerfed to oblivion this week. There's just too many of them in circulation for that to happen - if price goes up considerably there will always be some players willing to dump theirs.

Also I doubt Wintersday will generate much new gold, unless some new additions will make it. Farming wintersday doesn't really generate gold, it generates items. Don't forget that the most heavily farmed is the Mini-Polar-Bear quests which drop a ton of shards and wintersday items, but zero cash. However Wintersday has always been the *spending season*, with the rich players spending their gold on special event items that drop for everyone, Wintersday has changed the distribution of gold in a similar way XTH did - large amounts of gold get into the posession of players who normally don't have anywhere near that much.

Lord Sojar · Dec 15, 2009, 05:18 AM // 05:18

-*adds his scoop of coal to the Speculation Engine*

FASTER I SAY! All aboard!

I mean really... people are either economic geniuses or economic morons. I haven't decided which yet, but I am leaning towards the latter.

Coraline Jones · Dec 15, 2009, 07:56 AM // 07:56

I cannot believe that ArenaNet is wasting their time trying to come up with useless "solutions" to nerf Underworld when there are easier answers than that.

The only reason why anybody is farming ecto is because they are used as high-end trades. ANet needs to just grow up and realize that this is never going away and therefore it will encourage farming/botting forever until they just shut down the entire market.

The easiest solution would be to provide a new NPC called "Banker" that offers an inventory item called a Letter of Credit for a flat rate of 5K gold. Letters of Credit are stackable and can be sold back to the Banker for the same price as the buy price. They can be traded and/or put into storage.

Once Letters of Credit hit the market, nobody will use ectos anymore for trades because then you have a known defined value as opposed to some highly-inflated value set by the random playerbase.

I think that this solution was provided in the past and people just mocked it and said, "Then this will only encourage more obscene trades worse than it is now." How can it get any worse? One million gold in this game is total garbage. You cannot buy any true rare item in the game with a million gold pieces, indicating how "stable" the market is today.

rkhanna · Dec 15, 2009, 08:20 AM // 08:20

I am pretty new to Guild Wars in general, but I thoroughly agree with Coraline's assessment.

In fact, at the risk of being flamed, I have played WoW before I came to Guild Wars, and I think the system they use there (of multiple currencies...copper/silver/gold etc) with a fairly high limit of cash per character is better than the 100k ceiling on cash per trade.

Trader of Secrets · Dec 15, 2009, 09:11 AM // 09:11

Tru ecto is seen more as currency. I wonder how this happened though, how did ecto get chosen over shards way back then.

optymind · Dec 15, 2009, 09:27 AM // 09:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trader of Secrets

Tru ecto is seen more as currency. I wonder how this happened though, how did ecto get chosen over shards way back then.

One is pink. case closed.

Nerel · Dec 15, 2009, 09:27 AM // 09:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coraline Jones

I cannot believe that ArenaNet is wasting their time trying to come up with useless "solutions" to nerf Underworld when there are easier answers than that.

The only reason why anybody is farming ecto is because they are used as high-end trades. ANet needs to just grow up and realize that this is never going away and therefore it will encourage farming/botting forever until they just shut down the entire market.

The easiest solution would be to provide a new NPC called "Banker" that offers an inventory item called a Letter of Credit for a flat rate of 5K gold. Letters of Credit are stackable and can be sold back to the Banker for the same price as the buy price. They can be traded and/or put into storage.

Once Letters of Credit hit the market, nobody will use ectos anymore for trades because then you have a known defined value as opposed to some highly-inflated value set by the random playerbase.

I think that this solution was provided in the past and people just mocked it and said, "Then this will only encourage more obscene trades worse than it is now." How can it get any worse? One million gold in this game is total garbage. You cannot buy any true rare item in the game with a million gold pieces, indicating how "stable" the market is today.

This would have very little to no affect on in game farming, botting etc... people would just move on to the next cash farm... UW would be dead and gone, DoA might pick up some traffic... farming/botting/economy would just be more of the same in a different area of the game for a different item.

This is a baby with the bath water solution. The problem isn't the ectos themselves, and never has been.

untouchable · Dec 15, 2009, 04:32 PM // 16:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trader of Secrets

Tru ecto is seen more as currency. I wonder how this happened though, how did ecto get chosen over shards way back then.

Quote:

Originally Posted by optymind

One is pink. case closed.

They were and still are the highest priced material you can buy from the trader. Thats why ectos were chosen.

Why convert 1 mil of gold into diamonds worth say..900g each. Thats a little over 4 stacks right there, unless you got money to waste on guild wars for extra storage space I don't see why anyone would do that.

Converting money into the highest priced material is only common sense. Less space needed, not as much fluctuation in price at trader, and obviously hardest to farm.

Ectos as currency will never change. Probably a little more than half the guildwars population has 1 mil in the bank. Why spend it when you can invest it and buy something you really want.

Chthon · Dec 15, 2009, 07:47 PM // 19:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

the bulk of the price of a glob comes from its function as a highly liquid store of value.

More gelatinous than liquid if you ask me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkhanna

In fact, at the risk of being flamed, I have played WoW before I came to Guild Wars, and I think the system they use there (of multiple currencies...copper/silver/gold etc) with a fairly high limit of cash per character is better than the 100k ceiling on cash per trade.

The relatively low bank and trade caps were a deliberate design decision to make the game more egalitarian. Item values were supposed to stay below 100k, so that anyone could save up for even the most expensive item. It failed, of course, but that was the idea. Now, it is a valid question: since the caps have failed at their purpose, why are they left in place? Perhaps they still keep prices down a little by mildly discouraging transactions over 100k. (Though that seems to me a good way to fragment your economy...)

Quote:

Originally Posted by untouchable

Probably a little more than half the guildwars population has 1 mil in the bank. Why spend it when you can invest it and buy something you really want.

I very, very much doubt that.