Speculations on Guild Wars 2 Economy: Part 3

Part 3

With the many huge changes from the original guild wars and the second there's obviously going to be different things that the player base will be getting us to, namely the auction house or market place. In the first, there was only a trading chat channel in the game message system so many may not have experience with it unless they played wow or similar games. This means that many may still stick to trying to sell things by spamming "WTS..." in chat channels making some things hard to buy or sell.

Also, in the first game the only way to make money was to farm for hours or to get very lucky drops in a high end dungeon which also takes a lot of time to complete. So the act of crafting and selling will be entirely new to most and some are even against the whole idea of making money by buying raw materials to craft a piece of armor to sell for a profit. That means that there will be potentially very low competition for quite some time. It also means that there may be very little market as well. But the ease of acquisition and immediate gratification will change that in no time I'm sure.

Another potential factor that could influence the economy greatly is that arena net (the company that runs guild wars) generally keeps a much closer eye on the game economy than others. By this I mean if it suddenly becomes very easy to solo farm the most expensive drops in the game, they'll nerf it. They do this because this is a large amount of the purpose of doing the higher end stuff so being able to solo it easier than going as a group trashed their value to nothing. This has happened many times in the original and I wouldn't be surprised if they keep it up. So because of that it's unlikely that a single thing will be 20 times from profitable than something else. At least not in the long term.

The biggest question of course, is just what will we be able to craft and sell? Will the gear from smithing be any good? will we be making consumables like belt buckles? The only thing we know for sure is that other professions have something akin to the crests from tailoring. The ones from tailoring will only effect light armor for casters and such. But what else will the professions be making?

It is unlikely that there will be addons as there were none in the original and there has been no word relating to any chance of it, so working the AH will require more work the more you wish to sell. This would lead most away from full on enterprises and have many people focus on their one or two niche markets. Where as somebody like me may choose to run several niche markets from every profession to keep my income high.

Lastly there are the bots. In wow they are the source of many cheap raw materials for many servers. However in GW they take a fast approach to baning any account that bots. Not too long ago in fact, they banned almost 4,000 accounts for bots. and you'd see them in certain farming locations all of the time. But since then not any more. I'm positive that this hard stance against botting will remain and this of course will make the goblins rely on the farmers to do their "honest day of work" to do our honest day of "take advantage of the idiots and the lazy" work.


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