Originally Posted by generik

Do you even know basic economics? How will this be better for the economy, tell me!

Here is a clue stick, visualise a real economy in your head.. a buzzing economy. Now, cut the wealth of this population and correspondingly increase prices of living. What do we have?

Megapolis? No! Every single corporation in that economy will go bust! Spending will stagnate and movement of goods and money justs seizes.

Originally Posted by Drakron

Runes are worth crap now, a lot because the HP penality they have on major and superior and nobody wants anything but vigor and absortion andince ninor runes have became so common and cheap everyone simply buy then and sell then to the NPC trader.

Originally Posted by PieXags

Yeah Drizzt but you see the problem is that PvE is easy as hell to complete, and a good majority of us here posting have got our 4 lvl 20 characters, we've beaten the game and we've nothing else to do but get money to help better perfect our characters. Without it we can't do anything else.

Sure it's about fun and completing the game.

At least it is until you've done it 10 times.

Then it's about trying to make it last.

Originally Posted by drizzt134

well ok lets think about this, u have 100 million ppl playin your game and after 3 months u decide to make an update. Is it fair to new comers if it makes the game harder? NO... It is not about the economy... The most important point that is being skipped in this onversation I think is the fact that money and items are not the main point of this game, but the fun, teamwork and other stuff like finishing the game or exploring new exciting stuff on the map. well if u made making gazillions of money your only goal in the game, then go for it but it shouldn't be your goal and ANet also thinks it shouldn't be your ultimate goal... That's why they started to apply economical updates in the game. And yes, I did take economy 101 and 102

Originally Posted by Narcissus

You are an idiot if you think the hp penalty on majors and superiors deters people from using them. Vigor runes exist for a reason.



[Translation] Over A month ago prices for runes were insanely high because there was no point of reference for supply and demand. People just looked for the words superior, fire, vigor, healing, sword etc and tacked on zeroes as they saw fit since there was no way to tell how many other people were selling the same rune and prices were not at all competetive. Hi, I like to go shopping with a blindfold on.

Now farming is no longer a neccessity since runes are readily available at super low prices and people DON"T have to grind for the things that they need to play the game at peak efficiency.

Life sucks now. Whaaah. [/translation]

Originally Posted by generik

Okok, let's all be rational here..

I'm really stymied myself. But what would we propose as a solution to ANet?

Seriously I failed to see why a fully capitalist, player price controlled market would be very nasty.

Let's say the traders are implementated such that, supposing you are the only person in the entire world..

You can start buying all of a trader's stock for something, until it reaches some maximum defined prices, and runs out of stock. You can then proceed to sell your said item back to the trader, such that the trader takes a cut of 10%-15% and no more, and at the end of the exercise, money changed hands, the pricing cycle of said material went to the top, and went back down again (in the exact same order), and the player is less 10%-15% of his original gold.

How is this a bad system?

Sure, in a real world implementation..

Potentially one ultra rich person can buy up all of one resource, say... Ectos..

But don't forget this is capitalism! People will notice the prices of ectos hiking from 12 plat.. and slowly approaching 20 plat, and decide "Hey! Screw the 15% commission taken by the trader, 20 plat * .85 is an awesome price!" and proceed to dump their stocks back to the trader.

Remember here unlike the previous and current system, there is no overly obsessed "gold sink" system that causes all merchant trades to be rip offs. Tell me, how can someone possibly profit from the system?

Short of some moron who bought that remaining ingot for probably 3 million plat... He can't! In fact if he does it he will consistently lose 15%!

The real trouble is the pricing offered by the traders was stuffed to start with, and price control measures (by the players in general) failed to kick in, if you'd put the price differential between buying-selling smaller and more reflective of real world economies, I'm pretty sure prices will all find their balances too.

Alright, ectos was an extreme example:

Remember "the price of steel"? Let's try steel.

So a player with one million plat can probably afford 3 million steel ingots (provided he has room either) and provided there is that much stock to start with. This is a very naive estimate made assuming their is no increment in pricing throughout.

But in actuality prices would increase/decrease on a curve based on stock levels, and eventually when that last ingot costs 3 million plat, even our bidding entrepreneur will find it hard to cough out that cash to buy it.

What happens then?

Everyone else crashes the NPC with their gold stock. Money changed hands from rich fool to NPC.. and less 15% back to the other stockists.. what's wrong here? Nothing, free market movements!

Of course some greedy nut is going to hold on to that 1 steel ingot of his thinking that prices will jack up somemore, and is sorely mistaken one hour later.

The issue of course to to deduce the rate at which price increments would kick in.. that would probably involve figuring out the true total daily demand for a given supply, etc.. and could be quite tricky.

But hey, I only gave 5 minutes thought to this post, and like some said.. ANet is a huge company and probably has dozens of devs at their disposable. Please don't throw PvEers a solution that even a 12 year old can come up with in 10 minutes, and again and again reward PvPers with more and more enchancements.

The buy low sell high model is such a joke. Eventually the rich shots are just going to exhaust supplies in the player market.. then slowly exhaust the NPCs.. then what?

Nobody in their right mind will sell black dye back to the NPC for 1 gold when it is out of stock.. or *maybe* the pitiful 1-2 plat even. Would the current system work? Most definitely not, from initial observations it looks to be severely broken. Especially when there is no automatic restocking, the NPC should NOT have been introducing gold/materials into the economy to start with.

I seriously fail to see how the NPC is able to determine supply and demand if trades are not even going through him! Heck, make ALL material trade go through him, and it will totally cut out on all that material spam (unless some dork is going to sell at 5% below listed price which is still 10% above the offered price) and it saves us all that hassle immediately.