Curse

Akhilleus · Jan 03, 2007, 09:31 PM // 21:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by freekedoutfish

Its a cap which we need in order to try and cut down on oober rich players hording gold and influencing prices ingame.

no one person could influences prices for an even remotly substantial amount of time for more than 1 thing, and even then the cost woule be so absolutly astounding, they would have to be VERY careful in reinvesting in order to make an even marginal profit.
a while back, i aquired 4,800 ecto in about a months time. in order to lower the prices, i would sell my own stocks to the merchant to lower it by marginal amounts (you cannot raise or lower it by a large amount quickly or other people will notice the changes and simply correct the problem in the interests of making their own little profit), and then purchase far larger amounts of ecto, to save themselves money.
i am the ONLY player i have ever known to pull this off successfully; and what were the results?
i sold off 17.5million in ecto from my own stash to the trader, and purchased 36.9million from players during subsequent price reductions crated by my own selling (over the period of this month); with a net gain of 19.4million in ecto. by doing this i "gained" 6.24million gold by buying at cheaper prices, however, because i had to sell off a large amount of ecto at LESS than market value, i lost out on 5.04million; meaning, by doing this systematically in a well-planned-out, well thought-out and well-organized manner, i saved myself appx 1.2million.
a 1.2million gain, out of a base-investment total of 36.9million in liquid assets.
that is HARDLY worth the effort; a 3.25% net gain, about 1/5th-1/10th the gain i could have expected if i had just invested it into trade-capital...which is precicely why i never (and will never) did(do) it again.
and i wont even begin to pretend i could have done anything more than influence the prices slightly for anything more than a short amount of time, even with that level of investment.
quite frankly, thinking any 1 person can control the market is absolutly ludicrous.

lagrand1 · Jan 03, 2007, 10:15 PM // 22:15

This would screw those that worked to get their ecto. Bad idea.
/not signed

MMSDome · Jan 04, 2007, 01:45 AM // 01:45

This would ruin the 100k cap per character and the 1 mill cap in storage....

ADDED: Akhilles your ways of being rich and your knowledge of the Guild Wars economy is outstanding even if it is only for a video game. Just one question, why one morning did you wake up and decide im going to create a system of becoming the richest man in Guild Wars. How did you find this system out, and how did you farm a butt ton of ecto in a months time?

blackbird71 · Jan 04, 2007, 03:49 AM // 03:49

I have to agree with the OP's premise that the price of ectos is higher than it would be were it not used as a currency substitute. However, whether or not anything should be done about it is another matter. I've always admired the ingenuity of the GW community in finding a way around the gold limit.

Raising the amount of gold a character/account can have, whether by a direct increase or a fixed gold substitute at first sounds like an attractive option. However, stop and consider that these limits function as an artificial ceiling on inflation. If limitless wealth could be amassed, there would be a continual increase in available gold in the game, which would result in vastly increasing prices. It would become increasingly difficult for new players to get involved in the game as equipment would be well out of their price range. While the use of ectos as a substitute does still allow some inflation, it is kept somewhat in check by fluctuating market values, gold sinks, and the fact that there is a limited storage capacity per character. Increase the gold limit and you've just removed two of those three controlling factors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venus was her name

Changing this now would be a very very bad idea and would play havoc with the game, would completly de-stabilise the ingame economy.

Whether or not topic creator is correct you couldn't ever change how it is, its too late.

If you think this is true and Anet would never consider destabilizing the economy, you probably weren't here when all the traders were reset and for a brief time there were 100g ectos.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cygnus_Zero

The fact that we need to use ecto for currency is going to need to be dealt with. Ectos exist solely for people to get FoW armor with. Their a rare drop, so it's fairly expensive. But that was only because people needed them to get FoW armor. We are now in the 3rd chapter, and FoW armor is becoming less and less desirable because of it's age and the factt that we have 2 more campaigns filled with fresh new armor. We have another chapter coming out in a few months, and FoW will become even less desirable.

So when the demand for ectos goes further down, how can they be used for currency when noone will want to buy your ectos from you? I had a stack of 25 ectos that I had a very difficult time selling in LA, Kaineng and Kamadan. It's very clear to me that FoW armor is going way down in popularity. And that's when it hit me how ridiculous it is that we have to use them for currency. How can an item be used as currency when noone wants it?

I thought this was a rather interesting hypothesis for the future of ectos. Whether or not it will happen, I don't know, but it is certainly plausible, especially if Anet doesn't add anything new to the game that requires ectos.

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnactor

The have nots are lazy? That's hilarious. I've played the game for ages, but I don't happen to farm for ectos. I don't have a lot of money either but I do help friends out with quests and take multiple characters through all the campaigns. In 'normal' play you don't pick up vast wealth, but by repeatedly playing high end areas (erm, that's called farming) for the express purpose of getting rich, then hey, you're rich, but you can't equate my not having that playing style with being lazy.

There'll come a day when I choose to get some FOW. In the meantime I couldn't care less what happened to the price of ectos because like 75% or more of other players I'm not hording this crap.

When I want to get FOW, or some ectos for trade, I'll earn them like the noble and industrious hardcore players of this board. Or in the case of trade, buy them.

Am I lazy because I'm not farming my butt off. No.

QFT Personally, I've played this game for over a year and a half and I don't own a set of FoW armor, or even one piece. All the weapons I use I looted, and I only have a single piece of 15k armor. I've never had more than 300k on my account. I play a lot (probably way too much, 1,107 hours according to /age

), but I prefer missions and quests to mindless farming. So I'll probably never get FoW armor. Oh well, big deal. One day, GW will go offline and then it will all be deleted anyway, I'd rather spend my time enjoying the game than proving to everyone that I can kill the same creature a million times over. But I do find it incredibly ironic that Anet continues to do everything they can to stop farming while they put a highly sought after item in the game which, by virtue of the sheer number and rarity of materials needed to make it, can only be obtained by farming! Does anyone else find this a little hypocritical? Oh well, that's the game, we can find ways to enjoy it or we can stop playing.

Flame shields up, Mr. Chekov!

Morgenstern · Jan 04, 2007, 04:06 AM // 04:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackbird71

But I do find it incredibly ironic that Anet continues to do everything they can to stop farming while they put a highly sought after item in the game which, by virtue of the sheer number and rarity of materials needed to make it, can only be obtained by farming! Does anyone else find this a little hypocritical? [/I]

Lol I do find it kinda funny and ironic, but then you realise ANet is just trying to make these items, and in turn the things they make harder to get. It also may be to promote GW as being a multiplayer game, no a UW solo game...

Cataclysm · Jan 04, 2007, 05:03 AM // 05:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by MMSDome

This would ruin the 100k cap per character and the 1 mill cap in storage....

ADDED: Akhilles your ways of being rich and your knowledge of the Guild Wars economy is outstanding even if it is only for a video game. Just one question, why one morning did you wake up and decide im going to create a system of becoming the richest man in Guild Wars. How did you find this system out, and how did you farm a butt ton of ecto in a months time?

Simple economics methinks. You can learn a lot in that class... If you can stay awake

I have a whole 2 ecto in storage, so a price drop wont really effect me, but this is really a bad idea. People have "worked" hours to get these stacks of ubermoney and probably wouldn't like to have their months work obliterated...

Akhilleus · Jan 04, 2007, 08:13 PM // 20:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by MMSDome

This would ruin the 100k cap per character and the 1 mill cap in storage....

ADDED: Akhilles your ways of being rich and your knowledge of the Guild Wars economy is outstanding even if it is only for a video game. Just one question, why one morning did you wake up and decide im going to create a system of becoming the richest man in Guild Wars. How did you find this system out, and how did you farm a butt ton of ecto in a months time?

to answer the question vaguely on my reasoning.
in EVERY rpg (online or not) i have ever played, i have always continued a policy of "economics first, character development second." this leads me to having excellent equipment at early levels in mmorpgs where items make a difference.
in GW, they dont make nearly as much as a difference, however my policy held the same.
as for getting the ecto quickly; because i was manually lowering the prices, i would tell people i knew that i'd pay the market value +250gp.
yeah, i probably could have saved myself an extra 750k not doing this, but because i knew i could only INFLUENCE the ecto prices, and only for LIMITEd periods of time, speed was more important than being nitpicky...i counted on high volumes of bringing ecto in from different people in different districts, before the prices went back up, and i had to smite them back down again.
the whole process was quite organized and labor intensive, but it worked...the fact that the results were quite marginal, is the reaosn i'd never consider doing it again.
i do, however, suppose that if you got 10-15 wealthy players, all with a stash of about 2,000-3,500 ecto+, so sell to the merchant, and then buy en masse, or buy form the merchant and sell en masse, while periodically taking turns selling/buying to/from the merchant to stabilize prices to the range you want them in, a lot of money could be made, as you could control the prices for a far longer period of time.
in order for a single individual to be able to do this with any hopes of coming out ahead in large numbers; they'd probably need a base of 50,000 ecto (400 million in liquid assets) or more. but as i said earlier, they'd probably be looking at a profit margin of 3-5% (probably lower, since they'd have to dump/buy ecto VERY quickly; as in thousands per day, to break even).

rohara · Jan 05, 2007, 12:23 AM // 00:23

tbh, i'd LOVE to have an alternative to ecto. i think fow armor is teh ugly and i'll never buy it, so i have no real use for ectos. i farm them and sell them to my guildies for cheap so they can get their fow armor.

but when i have an uber expensive item to sell in the 100k+ectos range, i get stuck with a bunch of ectos i don't want or need. then i'm stuck trying to sell the stupid things. imo, items such as ecto have no place in buying/selling unless the seller wants it. something like "xunlai checks" would be perfect, as i could hop over to the agent and cash the checks without spamming WTS ecto for an hour.

Crom The Pale · Jan 05, 2007, 06:11 PM // 18:11

There is nothing wrong with Ectos.

If you want a more stable item for trading 100k+ items with use Keys. They are just as rare a drop as ecto and there value at merchants never change.

note: the addition of 'checks' would actually drive up the price of ecto not down. With less people farming them and fewer selling to merchant you would see the price for FoW armor climb back to the 5million gold area where it was about a year ago.