GW2 - Inflation

[Fencers]

Kinda off-topic but holy shit, the feeling of getting your mount in Classic was close to an orgasm.

Even more so when the notion of mounted travel in a large continuous world was next to unheard of.

One simply didn't ride a piebald horse from East to West Commonlands.

[Blznsmri]

One simply didn't ride a piebald horse from East to West Commonlands.

I did.

I had a massive repair bill, but I did.

[Fencers]

A real man would have made it to Everforst, Blz. Ubad.

[mistersister]

If people are worried about gold inflating (where everyone has a lot of gold and everything is cheap)

No, no, no. That's not how inflation works. Inflation makes everything insanely expensive.

Take, for example, World of Warcraft. Everything on the auction house for a level 5 character is listed at several gold. Playing an alt, it's not so bad. A few gold is chump change for a max level. But when you are a brand new player? You can't even look at the auction house until max level. And that's WITH several large gold sinks and the continuous small gold bleeds of Flight Paths, Repairs, and Reagents.

Imagine if there were no gold sinks. You would see that level 5 gear going for 100+ gold easily. That's what gold sinks are for, to keep inflation in check.

OT: There will likely be some gold sinks in the game, there are still a lot of things we just haven't seen yet.

[Elixor]

Having it like old WoW would be awesome. Gain little gold here and there for repairs and such. And when you want something fancy, you should prepare for an "adventure".

[zito]

Unfortunatly there is no way to perfectly balance the gold production with gold sinks in an MMO. If the sinks are too strong money slowly trickles out of the economy till its gone or worse never works into the system at all as players start with nothing. if they are not strong enough you get steady inflation. The only way you could balance it is if the gold rewards and the gold sinks fluidly changed based on the amount of gold in the system but then that impacts new players harder than those that have been around a while and already have gold. Chargeing more to those with money does not work as they'd simply "Hide" the money on alts or second accounts and keep a relitivly low amount of gold in their pockets.

Gold sinks are optional, you don't have to use them. Armour repairs or paying for transportation isn't a gold sink. Gold sinks don't fix the market nor does the market effect gold sinks.

Nobody is forcing you to buy that vial of sands mount.

Imagine if there were no gold sinks. You would see that level 5 gear going for 100+ gold easily. That's what gold sinks are for, to keep inflation in check.

Since level 5 gear does not matter since it can be easily replaced at level 6 it will never go for 100+ gold unless some extremely rare aesthetic look is added to it. Gold sinks don't effect the market, players do. Weather you choose to sell x item for y amount and if a person buys it depends on the players.

The main issue is gold becoming useless, however since there is a supply and demand that won't happen unless everything you can buy is from a vendor or you just don't spend money.

[Daos]

Kinda off-topic but holy shit, the feeling of getting your mount in Classic was close to an orgasm.

Again off topic, but when I first got mine, I was so stoked I went into EPL and just rode around at what I considered at the time to be lightning fast speeds. I was apparently going sufficiently fast that my poor system failed to relate to me in time that the Crimson Courier and her entourage were directly ahead, so I plowed right into them.

I was a squishy priest, so I was dead before they loaded on my screen. In fact, I was dead before the game made the "dismount" noise. After that I was considerably more cautious while on my mount, least in EPL.

Fun times.

[omlech]

As for the cost to use the fast travel system, the further away your destination is the more it costs.

[braxx]

I think inflation in a videogame is not really an issue since the supply and demand will be high, prices will rise as our wallets so we will always have about the same purshasing power.
The only problem is when you starve: when i did raid 6 nights a week in wow i had to farm on the side else i could not afford the repairs :s. I hated that

[Lusitan]

If gold becomes worthless, Arena.net could just create a version of "crysta", allowing players to trade ingame gold for a fictional currency that allows you to buy cosmetic stuff from CS

[Mif]

If gold becomes worthless, Arena.net could just create a version of "crysta", allowing players to trade ingame gold for a fictional currency that allows you to buy cosmetic stuff from CS

I doubt it. It would effectively mean ArenaNet would be swapping gold for real world money (instead of making money).

[Deleted]

In Diablo 2, gold was almost worthless and everyone used runes or stones of jordans as currency. The reason was that the developers had made gold inconvenient (losing gold when dying, gold caps for bank storage etc) as well as not having enough uses for the currency that were implemented in the game (e.g. buying stuff from vendors).


It's like in the real world, if there were not laws that forced us to pay taxes in dollars or transact in dollars, no one would use them. They would quickly become redundant and something like a gold backed currency or oil backed currency would emerge, where the currency has real value. Just like in Diablo 2, the runes had real value as you could use them to make items more powerful.


It's thus important to have enough uses for the ingame currency. Forcing one to transact on the auction house through the ingame currency for example is a good way to make it more valuable. Letting people buy mounts or repair gear etc through NPC vendors is important as well.

Finally, making sure that the amount gold dropper / vendor sell value of items is proportional to the prices of the vendor sold items is important as well --- this is one of the biggest factors that determine if there will be strong inflation or a more stable economy.

[Deleted]

This is quite a big problem indeed and it has more than one solution.
Gold sinks are a solution, just as trading gold for something of value (like runes) is.

Another solution is to have a ceiling for gold earned from quests at a lower lvl.
Instead of earning 10 silver per quest at lvl 20 and 1 gold per quest at lvl 80, you earn 50 silver from 20-80 and even beyond.
Prices might go up with lvl due to the market, but at some point, players can't afford to pay the price for an item, simply because they don't have the money.
Of course, this will not stop the real farmers, but it'll stop max lvl players from paying inflated prices for alt items.
This is just an idea, however, and it might be a terrible one at that.

I also think the karma system and the way that players obtain gear will keep the prices down.
No one is going to buy gear from the auction house for massively inflated prices if they can get same quality gear from karma/instances.

[Deleted]

Some really good replies thank you. I don't think people sharing their experience with epic mounts in classic was irrelevant it shows that there is a market for it. In the end effective goldsinks are the ones that makes you buy expensive items from a vendor.
I think Merendel's idea with fluidly changing droprate and vendor prices to balance the economy was very solid.

One poster tried to summarize my post but he somewhat missed my point. Yes I think there is a paradox in a no grind policy while keeping a solid economy. But I don't want to have everything without working for it. What im saying is that in my opinion a good mmo economy gives you just about what you need, but if you wan't extra, if you want to set your self apart you need to earn it. Through grind or through trials.

Thank you all for your great input thus far

[Deyadissa]

I could be wrong, but from what I remember it didn't seem to expensive.

I think I remember seeing some places costing around 15-30 silver?

Although I have no idea how easy gold/silver/copper is easy to obtain :P

---------- Post added 2012-01-31 at 02:05 AM ----------



Yeah I remember finally clicking the "train" button and just sitting back in my chair like; "Thank fuck".

For me, I just stood at my mailbox waiting for something.

[masterpiece]

Having it like old WoW would be awesome. Gain little gold here and there for repairs and such. And when you want something fancy, you should prepare for an "adventure".

as long as that adventure is not grinding one repeatable event over and over... grinding gold shouldn't be suggested IMO as it just leads to gold sellers.

you should be able to spend gold on playing time... all the best players know that buying playing time for a no monthly fee game shows not only class but charisma as well.