The Lockpick Revolution Begins!

i think i'm de only dumb one.. i used my excess cash and got the festival tickets instead... and stored it inside a charc =/

each charc can hold about 45 slots and 100k = 270k ...

i guess... i need to find other ways of storing hmm..

... the day it takes lockpicks to craft FoW, is a horrible day for mankind.

I just don't like the idea, it seems great on paper, but there are 3 things that come to mind.

It is completely stable in its current form- The price cannot go up or down or fluctuate normally like other current rare materials.

It is not used for any elite purpose other then getting titles for your chest/identify/lucky/unlucky.

They are easy to find... look at the merchant, there is no supply or demand they are always accessible.

It's like the gold mining ages, the currency of gold can influence alot on the dollar today. It's like asking all of North America to replace the stock market value of gold for pepsi cans. We all have whatever pop we want, at almost any location. No point.

It's stable method of trading that doesn't rely on supply and demand.

It cannot be artificailly inflated or devalued.

I support making the trading value at 1.2k.

I'm going to encourage my alliance to start using Lockpicks as currency.

Lol, its an intrueging idea. And tbh its alot more useful in a direct exchange. I guess the value of Lockpicks would be fixed at 1300, the almost constant going rate of Lockpicks from people selling em from Discount merchants. I would definatly prefer to trade an Elite tome for 13 Lockpicks or something instead of messing around selling it for cash then searching for a Lockpick seller.

Now... if only i could find someone on my F-list who was in a holding alliance so i could get em for 1200.

Do0d, that's crazy-talk!

That's the point. The ever-changing price of ectos is getting ridiculous. Having to keep calculating how many ectos something will cost is annoying.

okay...

It's good that it's easy, ya? Just go to merchant, but X amount of lockpicks, then buy your item!

What? I don't get it. Doesn't Pepsi cost money? What do you mean???

Anyways, the point is that the ecto is an unreliable amount of currency. The prices of them are changing - sometimes drastically - nearly every week. What this causes is nothing short of screwing people.

Here's an example: Persona A is selling an item with 100k +75 ectos. Normally it'd be 50 ectos but the price of ectos has dropped to 6.5k. Person B pays 100k +75 ectos for item. Then holy bajeesus ecto price jump: they're now worth 10k ea. Person A just made a lot of money. Person A - laughs. Person B - cries.

This is a great idea. At least if you don't feel like spamming WTS... you can always merch it or go out and use the lockpick.

I'm all for it if it's 1.2K, sounds nice and stable, and nobody will really be able to profit from it over anybody else, unless buyers actively offer 1300 each~

Wonder if the price of lockpicks will go to 2k or even 3k?

No. you can buy them from any merchant for 1.5K.

If you want to buy them at 2 or 3k ea, let me know. I'd be glad to sell them to you.

I like the idea of currency having a static value, however to most people they are not worth what is being proposed. I personally would not buy a lockpick for 1500 to have it worth 1200 in trade, trading in ecto is already a decent loss to your gold count.

For example, most people exchange in Ecto for Trader-1k. Last time I looked Ecto was 7k. Trading based on ecto means that your gold is worth 6,000/7,000 =~ 85% of a coin per trade, thus you lose around 15% of you gold converting it to ectos for exchanges.

If you do the same with a lockpick, for "most" players, it will cost 1500 gold to yeild 1200 of value, thus your gold is being exchanged to 1200/1500 = 80% of a coin per trade, or a 20% loss per coin converted to lockpicks.

Thats a pretty hefty tax above ecto. Ecto would have to drop to 5k with the current Trader-1k system to lose its advantage in value, unstable or not. Ecto may keep dropping but I do not think it will drop that low.

Just my 2 cents.

Why would the price of lockpicks stabilize at 1.2k? Sure, that's the price alliances controlling towns can buy them, but where's their incentive to sell them at cost? The goodness of their hearts?

I would suspect the price would stabilize 1200 < x < 1300. Right now, there are plenty of folks selling lockpicks purchased from discount merchants for 1300, but if this lockpick as currency thing takes off, both the demand and supply will increase such that the price will be pushed down below 1300. How far below, I don't know. What's the threshold of profit for somebody to be willing to buy the lockpicks from the merchant and stand around trying to sell them? 75 gold each? 50 gold each? 10? I doubt it gets lower than 10, hell, I doubt it gets lower than 50. At some point there it's not worth their time, when they could be doing Lutgardis FFF or AB or Wa/Rt runs.

I wish Anet would allow us to put stacks of gold into our inventory so that we can trade gold only instead of other high priced items. Or like someone said...money tokens we can buy that have a fixed value...like coins or paper money in the real world (yes I'm ignoring exchange rates).

or just let us trade more than just 100k in gold in one trade...and store more in our storage...

I don't know about Lockpicks...I haven't decided whether they are a good idea or not.

Since there is a group of people who have access to lockpicks at a lower rate than most of the public, this would create a huge profit center to that group and Mr. regular player would lose out. Lets say that I sell something for 15 lockpicks valued at a "market" price of 1.2k. Now I want to turn it into cash. Now I have to spam WTS lockpicks because if I go to the trader it is only worth 750k which would mean I just lost out on 37% of my value. At least with Ecto, everyone has the same access at the same prices. Like someone else said, if I'm in an alliance that can sell at a higher price, why would they give me a deal? Eventually it would level out because of competition between alliances, however, those that are part of the alliance will still make money off my trade.

The idea of having a fixed value item to trade is a good one, but it would have to be something that everyone has the same access to IMHO.

The point of this is that you can store/trade your money at _no_ risk. If you own 100 ectos and their price drops 1k, guess what? You just lost 100k. Any amount of gold you have invested in ectos is always at risk, as a lot of people found out recently.

Paying ~50 gold to store 1.2k of your money permanently sounds like a pretty good deal.

this is only applicable if people take it to be worth 1.2k
unfortunately, most if not all... would take the value to be @ 750g to 1k


another thing to take note of is that if EoTN introduces yet another 1.5k type of key... will lockpick follow obsidian key and get a drop in price?
assuming that you bought a modest 250 keys... a drop of 250g would be 62.5k swiped off.

250/1500 is essentially a 17% drop in value.

what happens if the other person doesn't take keys @ 1.2k in value? essentially it means ur stuck with a value key of 750g. Even if u buy the key @ 1.2k ... u still lose out approx 450g per key.

for some reason... this seems to be more risky to me, and the reason y i used festival tickets till i can find a medium to store my excess $ as.

Still not a good idea.

No player or group of players should have an advantage in a wide spread monetary market. It's bad enough that they get a 300 gp break in price and they are ALREADY taking advantage of it.

What about those that don't own factions? Piss on anybody, as long as it benefits YOU, right?

You'll find two types that will support this lockpick "idea". Those that got their asses handed to them due to hoarding ecto, and those that have control of the outposts in factions (where the discount merchants are).

But chances are it won't. Even if everyone in Guru starts using lockpicks, Guru only counts for a small amount of players.

So unless GWonline, Guru, and all the other fan sites team up to do this, I don't see how its going to happen.

Its the best idea yet though, Lockpicks have a fixed price, problem is they only cost 1.5k, so stacks would have to be bought to amount to anything.

It costs 750 gold to store 750 for an everage player that does not want to sit in town and sell lockpicks all day. With ecto at least the cost is down to 7000 gold to store 6000 gold currently. Ecto would have to drop half in price from when you purchased it to make it less effective.

Thats the core truth.

Lockpicks are a good idea, as long as the price doesn't get bumped down by arenanet