I found a niche in the Guild Wars 2 economy where I can get a bit of gold. I'm not rolling in piles of gold coins (that emote hasn't been added yet), but I no longer feel poor and I think I can get fairly steady income from this.
But it involves the trading post. That creates a strange problem, or at least what is in my mind a strange situation. These are rough estimates, but depending on the product, I destroy the 15% on my sale, baseline, plus more on top of that for merchant materials, with the result being that I estimate that 20-30% of the gold I touch is destroyed in the process of me getting it. That doesn't include the fact that whoever I buy from also had 15% of their sale destroyed.
This isn't part of some convoluted scheme of buying and reselling and rebuying to distort markets. It's little different than how I got gold in WoW: buy gems off market, cut gems, sell gems. Some gold is lost to failed sales and auction house cuts, but that's just the inevitable result of the system. Buy-craft-sell. Nothing fancy, and yet, it burns piles of gold.
What disturbs me about it is the inefficiency and the implications for other players. If for every gold I get, 20 silver are destroyed, that suggests that for every gold I have someone had to farm 1.2g through events (which in the mid 40s are giving around 2 silver) and vendoring. I shudder to imagine what happens if I'm not selling to consumers but instead my product is bought and recrafted or simply reposted, destroying even more gold.
I'm not opposed to gold sinks, but GW2 does seem to be rather excessive. If I were looking for a single crude fix, I'd remove the trading post's cut. Leave the posting fee, but don't take a further cut at the time of sale. That takes the baseline burned gold from 15% to only 5%.
But it involves the trading post. That creates a strange problem, or at least what is in my mind a strange situation. These are rough estimates, but depending on the product, I destroy the 15% on my sale, baseline, plus more on top of that for merchant materials, with the result being that I estimate that 20-30% of the gold I touch is destroyed in the process of me getting it. That doesn't include the fact that whoever I buy from also had 15% of their sale destroyed.
This isn't part of some convoluted scheme of buying and reselling and rebuying to distort markets. It's little different than how I got gold in WoW: buy gems off market, cut gems, sell gems. Some gold is lost to failed sales and auction house cuts, but that's just the inevitable result of the system. Buy-craft-sell. Nothing fancy, and yet, it burns piles of gold.
What disturbs me about it is the inefficiency and the implications for other players. If for every gold I get, 20 silver are destroyed, that suggests that for every gold I have someone had to farm 1.2g through events (which in the mid 40s are giving around 2 silver) and vendoring. I shudder to imagine what happens if I'm not selling to consumers but instead my product is bought and recrafted or simply reposted, destroying even more gold.
I'm not opposed to gold sinks, but GW2 does seem to be rather excessive. If I were looking for a single crude fix, I'd remove the trading post's cut. Leave the posting fee, but don't take a further cut at the time of sale. That takes the baseline burned gold from 15% to only 5%.
3 comments:
Compared to WoW, GW2 has two valuable currencies. Gold and gems. Gold has a cap after which more gold won't be any more useful, that's the same for WoW and GW2. There are only that many things you can buy for gold. But in GW2 you can trade your excess gold for gems. And gems have a very high cap after which there's nothing more you can buy with them.
For the gold/gem exchange to work a big chunk of player must buy gems and exchange them for gold. And they'll only do that if they don't already have to much gold.
GW2 needs huge gold sinks because a big part of the player must be kept poor. Otherwise their gem/gold exchange won't work.
Well, and also it sounds like GW2 decided they didn't want much inflation, while WoW decided they didn't mind having rampant inflation.
That's quite awesome. I'd much prefer lower inflation through the devices you've described, than the gold sinks and inflation of WoW.
I'd even go so far as to say it's more like a gold vortex than a sink.
Post a Comment
Comments in posts older than 21 days will be moderated to prevent spam. Comments in posts younger than 21 days will be checked for ID.