I wanted to write something about ArenaNet's post on the Guild Wars 2 economy. But then I read my newsreader first, and found Azuriel had already written that post. I very much agree with Azuriel's analysis on the sources of oversupply, and the doubts that all that can be fixed with the Mystic Forge. Not to mention the practical difficulties of trying to forge 500 sticks of butter. :) Maybe John Smith should change his first name to Adam and try again.
Three steps that I think would help:
ReplyDelete1) global vendoring. If you can put something on the AH from anywhere, why can't you vendor it too? I mean, neither one is realistic. Ebay doesn't descend from heaven and spirit your item off to the warehouse for you. Take on a fee to AH something and the massive oversupply probably goes away. I mean I guess things would probably stay cheap since people would only vendor when the AH price is too low for them to make a profit, but at least there wouldn't be 8 million of the same thing.
2) If not that, then make people hold AH items in their bag or bank until it sells. Watch the destruction ensue.
3) Limited recipes. Each crafter gets a limited # of recipes, chosen at random by the computer, plus some acquired recipes. That way everyone isn't making the same thing. If you choose to specialize in an item you can make it better than most. While the global AH would reduce the usefulness of this, it would introduce a little uniqueness to each crafter that might be fun. Or it might be very frustrating.
Personally I would want to wait a while before making massive changes to the economy. Almost everyone is doing the exact same thing at the moment, and this problem doesn't sound that different from what I encountered trying to level blacksmithing in WoW during an expansion. Crafted gear never sold that well, but when everyone was trying to level the same skill at the same time, even the desirable crafted gear became cheap as hell, far below the cost of making it. I'd wait for it to settle down for a while.
Hey Tobold I've been wanting to share something with you but wasn't sure where to post it.
ReplyDeleteMy interent is a 2G thumb drive that I pay 17.5kd for 10gigs a month for. (Roughly $62) in Kuwait. I'm able to play GW2 with NO noticeable lag and I'm playing on an American server. I've only had one evening of lag spikes and everyone in /map was complaining about it.
GW2 has really impressed me on stability.
What is your ping? I'd be mostly worried about taking a wrong step in a jumping puzzle with GW2 if my ping was high.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, everyone can gather from the same nodes/trees/herbs. On the down side, everyone can gather from the same nodes/trees/herbs...
ReplyDeleteI guess they didn't really think it through :)
I'd imagine they would have thought it through, otherwise John Smith wouldn't be an employed economist, and we wouldn't be snarky armchair theorists who think we know better. After all, non-exclusive nodes are simply exclusive nodes on a faster clock. The economy is still developing in what is akin to a gold rush community. Like the first commenter said, give it time to settle down. Wall street wasn't built in a month :)
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ReplyDeleteGive loot to temples / factions for points which give exp or other benefits e.g. 1 pt for an orc sword and 50 pt for a mino boss axe
50 pts gets you something from a list e.g. 1000 exp or a one time full heal that casts automatically if you go below 10% health or million other possibilities.