237 replies to this topic

[fatality39]

Article:
http://massively.joy...st-mmo-economy/

[Gilles VI]

I disagree with him, he doesn't geven give any arguments lol..

[Lordkrall]

It is Massively, they do tend to come up with rather odd statements now and then without even trying to argue for it.

[Ritualist]

What he probably considers a bad economy is what I'd consider to be the basis of a good game.
Give me a single NPC trader that sells EVERYTHING in the game in unlimited quantities and you basically have my dream economy.

Edited by Protoss, 19 January 2013 - 01:47 PM.

[Lordkrall]

Protoss, on 19 January 2013 - 01:47 PM, said:

What he probably considers a bad economy is what I'd consider to be the basis of a good game.
Give me a single NPC trader that sells EVERYTHING in the game in unlimited quantities and you basically have my dream economy.

You mean having no economy at all is your dream economy?
Oh well, to each his own I suppose.

[Perm Shadow Form]

GW2 needs player to player trading. Would fix everything, but of course, it's not casual friendly because it's easier to scam someone who doesn't know the correct prices.

[Gilles VI]

Perm Shadow Form, on 19 January 2013 - 02:03 PM, said:

GW2 needs player to player trading. Would fix everything, but of course, it's not casual friendly because it's easier to scam someone who doesn't know the correct prices.

How would that fix anything?

If you want to 'fix' an economy you need to adjust gold sinks, drop rates,...

[Lycrus]

Perm Shadow Form, on 19 January 2013 - 02:03 PM, said:

GW2 needs player to player trading. Would fix everything, but of course, it's not casual friendly because it's easier to scam someone who doesn't know the correct prices.

thats not true. Only thing that player tading does, is bypassing the auction house fee, which bypasses a gold sink, which makes the game overall worse. player trading is actually something bad when you talk about economy. If you want to share stuff, use mail..

and..i wouldnt give a dime about what massively says..they get paid for such stuff and when money is involved, truth doesnt matter anymore.

[ObscureThreat]

It's not the worst but crafting ATM is broken. Getting a craft to level 400, requires time and gold from the player, and therefore when he has reached max level it is to be expected that he should be able to turn a profit on the stuff he crafts. But due to the drop rates of mats, mats are worth more than almost all of the crafted recipes. Therefore it's become almost impossible for a crafter to make a profit. Crafting just feels tacked on, when almost all the crafted items are worthless. I wonder why ANET just didn't make everything obtainable through mystic forge recipes and get rid of crafting all together.

[Shiren]

Reading through the comments on the article I noticed most of the people who seemed to like the GW2 economy liked it because they enjoy spread sheets, note pads and a market simulator in their MMO. Many of the people who disliked it seemed to dislike being forced to participate on all of the former likes. The economy, whether it's a success or not, doesn't appear to be fun for many people, and in a game target towards MMORPG players, shouldn't the focus be on fun instead of hijacking everyone else's game (and loot) to create a mini game for market lovers?

I don't think it's the worst MMO economy ever, but I certainly don't enjoy it in the slightest and it's current design, implementation and execution is one of the biggest flaws the game has. Being forced to compete with spread sheets and incredibly high profits from power traders (who get more rewards from playing less because they play a part of the game given so much power, despite it's fun being very niche) to access so many of the items in this game (instead of accessing them from merchants, awards, achievements and drops). Competing with RNG, inflation, power traders and having no journeys that place my items in the world (unlike gear in WoW which is typcially earned from specific achievements and events in the world, so much of GW2 items are bought for gold or made from pathetically low RNG drop rate materials that you have to buy them) results in a lower quality MMO experience for me. The game would be a lot better if so much of the itemisation had nothing to do with the economy at all and instead was realistically and reasonably achievable from actually playing the game.

[Rezo]

Lycrus, on 19 January 2013 - 02:30 PM, said:

thats not true. Only thing that player tading does, is bypassing the auction house fee, which bypasses a gold sink, which makes the game overall worse. player trading is actually something bad when you talk about economy. If you want to share stuff, use mail..

and..i wouldnt give a dime about what massively says..they get paid for such stuff and when money is involved, truth doesnt matter anymore.

Last statement is true, especially if you consider that Anet  income depends on gem(cash) shop

[GrrBabble]

The Daily Grind column is asking readers a question. The column is not trying to say why themselves, though they give a basic example or scenario.

She wants to know what "you" think is the worst MMO economy, and intends for the conversation to play out in the comments.

I think the GW2 economy is interesting because it is one of the first that I know of to be cross-server.

Prices are weird and hard to get a handle on. Maybe this is "normal" in a MMO too? T1 materials are often similar in price to some T6 but then T3/T4 materials are much more expensive in comparison. While T5 is cheapest. Strange, and then the finished item is often not nearly as valuable as the components that went into it.

It's a bit frustrating, if I want to be a Master Weapon smith it's not really feasible in cost/effort/reward. But if I want to make cash (assuming I gathered myself) I make Insignias or Inscriptions that help others level their craft, leveling the field of maxed out crafters. Or sell the raw materials. blah... Guess until there is a system that has a "Oooh! there is a Great sword made by GrrBabble!" factor instead of "oh, there is a Great sword 13 copper cheaper than the others."

Suppose this is how it goes when a game must be accessible to all. I get it, just disappointed with what that means.

Edited by GrrBabble, 19 January 2013 - 03:08 PM.

[caballo_oscuro]

the economy is one of the main reasons i got bored with the game. everything is focussed on pulling gold out of players pockets and into gold sinks making it very difficult to earn enough to get the shiny things u play the game for.

crafting was fun at first because it encouraged players to craft more but this just destroyed this value of crafted items in days. it's not fun when absolutely everything u make has no return on investment except edging a bar to the right.

the entire economy is geared towards players who enjoy accountancy. once that and the dull grind set in i pretty much downed tools.

now i only log in to catch up with a few friends who aren't on fb...

[jthamind]

the only economy i can compare GW2's to is WoW's, and i think WoW's is much better. things that were expensive deserved to be expensive, things that were cheap deserved to be, things that were rare were priced so, and crafting actually meant something. it probably wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it never once felt frustrated with it, like i often am with GW2's economy.

[Arquenya]

GW2 has an economy?

[matsif]

is it the worst I've played in?  No, that was GW1's because of the fact that it was only player to player trading.  without the help of guru you could go days and never sell anything but ectos and shards due to not finding a buyer.  But since you could actually make good money in GW1 through playing the game, it wasn't a big deal.

That doesn't make GW2's economy good.  It's actually horrendously bad for anyone who doesn't like day trading while watching multiple websites and running multiple spreadsheets.  Way too much RNG and horrible drop rates.

I've never played a game where it was so hard to make money from actually playing the game as in GW2.  EvE you could make a good living by mining and refining on an alt that would take little time to level into a good enough role to make good returns (maybe 2 weeks play time since everything in EvE is real time training), or by running t4 missions in a battleship (maybe 1-1.5 months skill training time).  General PVE play is a waste of time if you want to make money, GW1 it was decent.  Dungeons are ok, but there's only so many times I can run CoF1 and AC until it seems like my eyes are bleeding, CoE and HotW rarely have people looking for groups anymore on my server unless I do a guild run, other dungeons either aren't worth it or are horribly designed.  Dragon and temple events are a waste of time because despite the minuscule chance of a precursor dropping, chest drops are horrible in this game.  I rarely even see a yellow gem from the dragons anymore, and outside of temple of dwayna and sometimes grenth I never see people clearing the temples in orr.  What happened to chests being prestigious and worthwhile to go after?  You could make a living in GW1 by chest runs in FoW.  There's only so many times you can complete frostgorge, straights, malchors, and CS to get the completion bonuses, and the rest of world clear isn't great for cash.  Fractals are economically no better than dungeons in my experience until after level 10, and at that point you are gated by gear due to special conditions.

tl;dr, Anet made RNG so bad that the economy is screwed up.  Too much demand on specific items in horribly low supply.

[shiggidyshwa]

ObscureThreat, on 19 January 2013 - 02:32 PM, said:

It's not the worst but crafting ATM is broken. Getting a craft to level 400, requires time and gold from the player, and therefore when he has reached max level it is to be expected that he should be able to turn a profit on the stuff he crafts. But due to the drop rates of mats, mats are worth more than almost all of the crafted recipes. Therefore it's become almost impossible for a crafter to make a profit. Crafting just feels tacked on, when almost all the crafted items are worthless. I wonder why ANET just didn't make everything obtainable through mystic forge recipes and get rid of crafting all together.

You can often save over ten gold by buying materials and crafting your own exotic set. I'm looking at crafting a set of heavy exotic armour. Making it myself will save me over 40% of the total cost.

[Alex Dimitri]

Gilles VI, on 19 January 2013 - 02:21 PM, said:

How would that fix anything?

If you want to 'fix' an economy you need to adjust gold sinks, drop rates,...

This is the only thing that can FIX gw2 economy !!!

[Captain Bulldozer]

I personally see nothing in that massively article that's worth paying any attention to whatsoever.  We have a self proclaimed "economy junkie" (no other meaningful credentials) who makes a totally unsupported claim that the economy is "bad" and who goes on to provide no specifics about what that means.  There is no form of objective measurement presented, nor is there even any detail given the what it is about the economy he views as "bad".  

Judging by most of the comments, I have little faith that the average MMO player (let alone the crazy obsessive ones who write articles like that one) has any real understanding of what goes into an economy or what a successful economy should entail.  Let's face it, if you're spending 40 hours a week playing a video game, its not all that likely that you have the training or experience to understand the minute details of economic theory.  If Warren Buffet or the Koch brothers make a comment on the GW2 economy, we should probably listen... but when "xXx Legolas the tall xXx" starts spouting off (and there's no other reason to believe he knows what he's talking about) we should all do the smart thing and simply ignore whatever Sarah Palin speak is coming out of their mouth.

[kendro1200]

Captain Bulldozer, on 19 January 2013 - 05:03 PM, said:

I personally see nothing in that massively article that's worth paying any attention to whatsoever.  We have a self proclaimed "economy junkie" (no other meaningful credentials) who makes a totally unsupported claim that the economy is "bad" and who goes on to provide no specifics about what that means.  There is no form of objective measurement presented, nor is there even any detail given the what it is about the economy he views as "bad".  

Judging by most of the comments, I have little faith that the average MMO player (let alone the crazy obsessive ones who write articles like that one) has any real understanding of what goes into an economy or what a successful economy should entail.  Let's face it, if you're spending 40 hours a week playing a video game, its not all that likely that you have the training or experience to understand the minute details of economic theory.  If Warren Buffet or the Koch brothers make a comment on the GW2 economy, we should probably listen... but when "xXx Legolas the tall xXx" starts spouting off (and there's no other reason to believe he knows what he's talking about) we should all do the smart thing and simply ignore whatever Sarah Palin speak is coming out of their mouth.

^ This.   Apart from minor inflation that appeared from killing off a bunch of bots, exasperated by the aggressive limits Anet implemented to try to limit the affect bots had on the economy, the economy is fine.  By basic smart gameplay you can build up 30 to 50 gold in a handful of days, without having to play the TP.  There are things to sink that gold, like cultural armor, mats for legendaries, crafting, etc.  If there's nothing you want to spend your gold on, then that's your choice.  You can hoard your gold till the end of time, unlike real world economies, which are closer to a closed system; GW2's economy has multiple sources of currency infusion that prevents any issues from having people just stockpiling gold.

[Gilles VI]

Alex Dimitri, on 19 January 2013 - 04:59 PM, said:

This is the only thing that can FIX gw2 economy !!!

What?

[Baldur The Bold]

I dont play the tp at all but I think a major factor is that tp traders horde ingame items required for legendary items making them out of reach for most people. 500g for a precursor is just terrible and add in the cost of mats and your looking at a major flaw with the game. When you have an economy based upon the rich get richer by playing the tp instead of playing the game then there is a problem. I would rather make gold doing dungeons and looking at spread sheets anyday.

[Wifflebottom]

I just don't like that to make a profit you pretty much have to turn to the TP because nothing in game actually gives you much of a profit. The TP also caters to monopolizers so once they own a particular market they can manipulate the price however they see fit, making it completely inaccessible to people who don't want to study the market obsessively. Of course if changes are implemented to make this less profitable I'd lose money but until then I guess I'll just be exploiting my fellow players to no end.

[cheezewiz]

they need to fix the place orders mechanic in the TP. Its killing the economy big time. A good example of this is with thick leather sections. There are 15439 orders to buy for 7 copper, but they vendor for 7 copper so the lowest they can be sold for on the TP is 8 copper since the TP wont let you sell something for less then what it vendors for (cant sell it for 7 copper on TP because of the TP %). There are 130653 thick leather sections that will hardly ever move so that item has now been killed on the TP. This will eventually happen to everything unless they do something about it.

[Loperdos]

In regards to the article, I don't care who someone THINKS they are or what kind of credentials they throw around, "I'm known around Massively as a total player economy junkie", if you make a broad, overarching statement about something like the author does in saying that GW2 has the worst MMO economy and then proceeds to give absolutely no evidence or proof to back up the statement, you lose all credibility with me and your article just looks like a giant "I'm going to make a complete 'shock and awe' statement to garner more attention to my site and my articles! Yay me!"

cheezewiz, on 19 January 2013 - 05:41 PM, said:

they need to fix the place orders mechanic in the TP. Its killing the economy big time. A good example of this is with thick leather sections. There are 15439 orders to buy for 7 copper, but they vendor for 7 copper so the lowest they can be sold for on the TP is 8 copper since the TP wont let you sell something for less then what it vendors for (cant sell it for 7 copper on TP because of the TP %). There are 130653 thick leather sections that will hardly ever move so that item has now been killed on the TP. This will eventually happen to everything unless they do something about it.

This. Who in their right mind makes it so you can post a request to buy something for less than it sells to a vendor and then makes it a rule that the seller HAS to post it for MORE than the vendor price.  Either make it so people can't make buy orders for less than the vendor trash price, OR get rid of the mechanic to stop people from posting on the TP for less than the vendor price.  You can't have it both ways!

That being said. The economy in GW2 is not the best I've played, but neither is it the worst.  There are quite a few MMO economies that are just horrendous like Requiem (back when I played it a few years ago, don't remember which rendition they were on, but right now its Memento Mori) where starting off is ridiculous and good luck being able to do much of anything with the economy.  Another one that comes to mind as having a terribly built economy was SWTOR, the way they did the trading posts was rather short-sighted which made it so there was no overall price for certain things, but they could be wildly different depending on where you were trying to pick them up.  The fact that GW2 has a game-wide TP makes it a very different beast than a lot of MMOs' economies, which makes comparing it to other MMOs a bit difficult, IMHO.

But then again, what do I know? I'm no economist.  

Edited by Loperdos, 19 January 2013 - 05:54 PM.

[Krazzar]

Arquenya, on 19 January 2013 - 03:35 PM, said:

GW2 has an economy?

Yes, and it's run by an economist.

The root of economy is a Greek word that means "the household manager", and there are management measures in GW2 for the "household" or game world in relation to currency. If they didn't ever consider economic controls (GW1) there would  be no economy.

[Redhawk2007]

The biggest problem with the economy is the excessive taxes that discourage players from playing the game. Death penalties in WvW discourage people from participating and have turned it into a massive zerg fest with victory going to whoever has the biggest zerg. Excessive waypoint costs discourage players from exploring and just popping into zones to see what is going on, resulting in deserted zones and frustrated players who leave the game.

Of course, the standard response will be "every MMO needs gold-sinks!" but that is simply not true. What is the difference between an economy where an average player earns 20g per week but spends 5g on goldsinks, and an economy in which an average players earns 15g per week but has no gold-sinks? None, as far as inflation is concerned. But in terms of utility, players in the non gold-sink economy will get more out of the game because they are not being punished for things like going to WvW, dungeons or traveling.

Now people will say that you earn more money in WvW than you lose to repair costs and that is generally true, but it nonetheless discourages new players who go into WvW because they tend to die a lot and incur massive repair bills before they earn any real money.  On the whole it makes all players excessively cautious and turns the whole thing into a zerg fest. I find it very difficult to recruit players to run in small groups to hit enemy camps, because the odds are good you will hit a zerg and get wiped. But you usually make more money than you lose to repairs and it is fun and desirable to go behind enemy lines and harass them. Nevertheless, the death penalties are a deterrent to small unit or experimental tactics.

[Virdiana Sovari]

matsif, on 19 January 2013 - 03:48 PM, said:

is it the worst I've played in?  No, that was GW1's because of the fact that it was only player to player trading.

This is the one best thing about GW1's economy. Player to player trading.
It encouraged being active player, talking with others. Also, because of this, there was a totally awesome trader's community.

[Krazzar]

Redhawk2007, on 19 January 2013 - 06:07 PM, said:

Of course, the standard response will be "every MMO needs gold-sinks!" but that is simply not true. What is the difference between an economy where an average player earns 20g per week but spends 5g on goldsinks, and an economy in which an average players earns 15g per week but has no gold-sinks? None, as far as inflation is concerned. But in terms of utility, players in the non gold-sink economy will get more out of the game because they are not being punished for things like going to WvW, dungeons or traveling.

What is the difference between a game with gold sinks and a game without? GW2 and GW1. In GW1 the wealth grew to be so large with nothing to spend it on an alternate currency was adopted because gold was so plentiful it become worthless. You have a system where wealth can be generated from nothing, therefore some of it has to go back to nothing through gold sinks. In a real-world economy there is a limit to the wealth that exists and can be generated, and yet there are proportionally much higher gold sinks through taxes, cost of living, and other expenses. Unfortunately your example would work against your argument; there there is no real downside because no matter what you are doing you will get 15g per week, you really should have set them equal at 20 instead of 15 if you wanted to make an anti-gold sink argument. If your actions are dictated by a currency that is not real you may want to reevaluate your motivations, they are clearly contradictory.

Don't forget GW2 also has methods of acquiring what you need without ever using gold, that being karma and tokens.

[Lordkrall]

Virdiana Sovari, on 19 January 2013 - 06:08 PM, said:

This is the one best thing about GW1's economy. Player to player trading.
It encouraged being active player, talking with others. Also, because of this, there was a totally awesome trader's community.

And there were also massive amounts of scams going on more or less daily, that completely destroyed the whole game for some people.