1) Guilds cost money to get more than 50 players in. To go to 100, you need to spend coin. Because of this, very LARGE guilds will be limited in the funnel to the GM for expansion based on what quest/event gold that players get instead of Trading Post sells or Gem conversion gold.2
2) Upgrades for WvWvW will be limited the same way by the same funneling tech.
But, there are work arounds that I've found....
A) Guilds that like to stockpile siege equipment can do so by just having memebers buy the siege and then dump the blueprints into the guild bank.
Valuable items that can be sold at the Trading Post can be directly deposited into the Guild Bank for a designated seller (most likely the GM) to then sell and compile gold for things like upgrades, player expansion, and the like.
Originally posted by AlBQuirky I thought I saw somewhere on here that the amount of in game gold was controlled by A-Net. I could be wrong. It seemed that this was an argument answering a question about using gems for in game gold, that there would only be gold available if players used their gold for cash shop items? I probably have that wrong. The argument made it sound like that only an amount of in game gold would available equal to what other players have sold (however they do that). Anyway, I came away with the impression that gems for gold was not as easy as turning in the gems for in game gold. That there was some kind of availability factor involved.
I believe the gem/gold exchange rate is automatically set by using a simply push/pull mechanic. In other words, if a bunch of people want to sell gems for gold, the price of gems goes down. If a bunch of people want to buy gems with gold, the price of gems goes up.So I think it is pretty much as easy as buying gems and then clicking a button to get gold...at least it was in beta.
So will this be an economic mini-game? Buy low and sell high?
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Gold sellers will just wait out the 30 days for their sell accounts to be able to send money. Unless I'm reading the given info wrong it should not be restricted anymore after 30 days.
It's a slight annoyance in the start up, but they need time to build gold reserves anyway.
Not really, this will kill them because before all they had to do was open a new account and start selling right away because inevitably the accounts get banned through tracking metrics. Now each time a gold seller account gets banned they will be required to feed Anet another box fee and then wait 30 days.
While true, farmers make more money per box they purchase than they lose. It's not a waste of time either, as these kinds of things are run like actual jobs; the person hired will be there for certain hours per day regardless of whether it's on a new account or an old one. Finally, it's not hard to buy boxes in bulk and have bots running on them while one other account is actively trading, so that when it's banned you simply switch to the next which should already have a higher gold limit due to the botting.
These measures by Anet aren't really going to help anything. But, they also aren't going to hurt anything. People aren't going to hit that limit trading to friends and themselves, chances are the larger majority of players will never even notice it's there. Bottom line though, is there are going to be gold sellers, and people are just going to have to accept that reality and take responsibility for their own actions. If the gold isn't being sold, the sellers won't exist anymore.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Originally posted by AlBQuirky I thought I saw somewhere on here that the amount of in game gold was controlled by A-Net. I could be wrong. It seemed that this was an argument answering a question about using gems for in game gold, that there would only be gold available if players used their gold for cash shop items? I probably have that wrong. The argument made it sound like that only an amount of in game gold would available equal to what other players have sold (however they do that). Anyway, I came away with the impression that gems for gold was not as easy as turning in the gems for in game gold. That there was some kind of availability factor involved.
I believe the gem/gold exchange rate is automatically set by using a simply push/pull mechanic. In other words, if a bunch of people want to sell gems for gold, the price of gems goes down. If a bunch of people want to buy gems with gold, the price of gems goes up.
So I think it is pretty much as easy as buying gems and then clicking a button to get gold...at least it was in beta.
So will this be an economic mini-game? Buy low and sell high?
Hehe you could definitely try that, but honestly, I think that gems are just going to be more and more expensive as time goes on.
I mean, think about it. The total amount of gold circulating through GW2 will be drastically incresaing as players level up, play the game, and just pump more and more gold in the system. But the value of gems is static and tied to real money. Real money will probably not inflate very much at all.
So you have one side of this equation (gold) inflating at an extreme rate, and the other side (real money) staying relatively constant. To me, this is good reason to believe that gems will just get more and more expensive as time goes on.
If you really wanted to profiteer, I would try buying some gems for gold very early on, and just holding on to your investment for a month or two, then selling it for a much larger amount of gold .
I thought I saw somewhere on here that the amount of in game gold was controlled by A-Net. I could be wrong. It seemed that this was an argument answering a question about using gems for in game gold, that there would only be gold available if players used their gold for cash shop items? I probably have that wrong. The argument made it sound like that only an amount of in game gold would available equal to what other players have sold (however they do that).
Anyway, I came away with the impression that gems for gold was not as easy as turning in the gems for in game gold. That there was some kind of availability factor involved.
I believe the gem/gold exchange rate is automatically set by using a simply push/pull mechanic. In other words, if a bunch of people want to sell gems for gold, the price of gems goes down. If a bunch of people want to buy gems with gold, the price of gems goes up.
So I think it is pretty much as easy as buying gems and then clicking a button to get gold...at least it was in beta.
Well if players buy gold from gold traders, someone gets purchasing power and nothing else is gained in return (and gold farmers generally aren't part of the community either).
If players buy gems from Anet to get gold, Anet gets money (some as profits, some as a way to invest in game) and other players get access to cash shop items for their gold.
Or do you think the ability to buy cash shop items for free/cheaper (in terms of time required) is a bad idea?
Oh no, I think being able to buy things in the CS with in-game gold is a great idea. I just am not too fond of being able to sell gems for gold.
The thing you have to realize is that it is not necessary to have the gem/gold exchange to let people buy things in the CS for gold. ANet could very easily just make every item in the CS have a gem price, and a gold price...kind of like how LoL works.
This would be better for the game on a couple of levels. First, there would be no RMT for gold transactions, which I and many others dislike. Second, the CS would be huge gold sink...whenever someone would buy a CS item with gold, that gold would be out of the economy. Right now, whenever someone buys gems for gold, that gold goes right back into the economy...it's not a gold sink, you're just moving it around. But if you bought CS stuff, or even gems, for a flat gold fee, that gold is gone from the economy all together.
Really, there is one reason the gem/gold exchange works the way it does...profit for ANet. I'm not saying that they shouldn't make money, I just don't think they should resort to "paid easy mode" to do so.
Originally posted by Fusion So, in order to combat gold sellers, everyone suffers... nice going.
How exactly are you going to suffer by this?
Example: i make alot of cash on the TP and want to send cash for my GF for say... cultural armor, im limited by the amount obtainable only via events/quests etc.
Just one example how it affects players
So walk your character over to hers and hand her the cash or items you want her to have.... You don't need the mail system or guild bank to do that.
All I heard was... "Well aren't you just a little lolly pop triple dipped in psycho."
There is only one way to fight gold sellers/buyers: Perma ban for every gold seller and buyer first time they get caught. No nice mails, No 3day whatever ban. The risk must be high and it must hurt.
love Gw2 but every game says something like this and nothing changes so i will believe it when i see it, for right now GW2 just told me the easter bunny is real , that is how serious I take these type of anouncements.
Originally posted by Fusion So, in order to combat gold sellers, everyone suffers... nice going.
How exactly are you going to suffer by this?
Example: i make alot of cash on the TP and want to send cash for my GF for say... cultural armor, im limited by the amount obtainable only via events/quests etc.
Just one example how it affects players
So walk your character over to hers and hand her the cash or items you want her to have.... You don't need the mail system or guild bank to do that.
No face-to-face trading in GW, as far as I know. I suppose you can drop items on the ground, not sure about gold though.
Originally posted by Fusion So, in order to combat gold sellers, everyone suffers... nice going.
How exactly are you going to suffer by this?
Example: i make alot of cash on the TP and want to send cash for my GF for say... cultural armor, im limited by the amount obtainable only via events/quests etc.
Just one example how it affects players
So walk your character over to hers and hand her the cash or items you want her to have.... You don't need the mail system or guild bank to do that.
No face-to-face trading in GW, as far as I know. I suppose you can drop items on the ground, not sure about gold though.
There is no person-to-person trading in GW2, everything is done by mail. You also cannot drop things on the ground, pulling something out of your inventory only gives you the option to destroy it.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Originally posted by Creslin321 Sooo since selling gold is "legal" anyway, what is the point of trying to stop third party gold sellers? Way I see it, the damage of RMT is already done to the game...the only party who benefits from stopping third party gold sellers is ANet, because they can undercut the gem/gold rate and take ANet's profits.
Each account, for the first 30 days after its creation, will have its ability to send coins through the mail and guild bank deposits restricted to the account’s net “profit." Profit, in this case, means anything gained from rewards.
Personally I think this measure is genius. Yea, its a slight annoyance in the first month for some.. but down the line this will impact on the gold sellers much more.
Smart to keep track of overall "profit". This is extremely important.
For those of you who have not followed some of the Gold Seller practices they basically use money laundering techniques so that the GM's are basically in a losing battle of whack-a-mole. The farming toons themselves can be banned all day long, its the money laundering you need to find or prevent.
Originally posted by Creslin321 Sooo since selling gold is "legal" anyway, what is the point of trying to stop third party gold sellers? Way I see it, the damage of RMT is already done to the game...the only party who benefits from stopping third party gold sellers is ANet, because they can undercut the gem/gold rate and take ANet's profits.
much respect.
Not quite. Whether a gem sells for 1 gold or 10000gold is irrelevant to Anet, it's still going to take a certain amount of gems to buy an item mall item, gems which someone else has to buy first. They don't materialize from nothing. You have it reversed, the only people that benefit from the stopping of third party sellers is the gamers.
And the difference between players trading among each other and botting gold farmers doing so should be obvious to anyone who's ever touched an online game.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
There is only one way to fight gold sellers/buyers: Perma ban for every gold seller and buyer first time they get caught. No nice mails, No 3day whatever ban. The risk must be high and it must hurt.
Specially for the buyers. Ban the buyers, advertise it. There's no excuse for buying gold from some annoying spammer in GW2, since you can do it totally legally via the official shop. You buy gold from some annoying spamming asshat? Perma ban for your account, go to the shop and buy another one, and learn your lesson that time.
I don't get this. I hate the gold spam as much as the next person but in a game with a legitimate money farm there will be poor people trying to cut corners. The punishment should fit the crime. Somebody buys from a farmer means a victimless crime unless you are trying to protect Guild war's profit margin or are one of the people hacked off with gold spam. If the former then employ more moderaters. If the latter then I am with you but can we keep it real?
If, like me, you are one of the latter group then I agree with sanctions but a perma-ban does not teach people to learn. To borrow a boring analogy the death sentence in the UK was never linked to a reduction in crime but proportionate sentencing has been. So a first time offender/eejit gets a month's ban.
They come back to the game older and wiser and rejoin the community. If they'd just been kicked NCSoft would have lost a customer and they'd have learnt they do not like NCSoft. While the Guildwars 2 model apears to mean the developers need cash from the store to develop future content (if i have understood it correctly) it also neds to foster a community. I fail to see how perma-bans can foster anything but anger if used as an initial response to buying currency.
Sanctions are a good idea to rid us of the spam we hate and solely targeting suppliers is ineffective as they have effectively circumnavigated the restrictions blizzard allegedly employ so they'll probably do the same with this game. However it would appear moderated servers with sanctions that punish transgressors without forcing them out of the game forever appears a sensible and strategic approach. Plus perma-bans for all sellers' accounts obviously.
Originally posted by Creslin321 Sooo since selling gold is "legal" anyway, what is the point of trying to stop third party gold sellers? Way I see it, the damage of RMT is already done to the game...the only party who benefits from stopping third party gold sellers is ANet, because they can undercut the gem/gold rate and take ANet's profits.
much respect.
Not quite. Whether a gem sells for 1 gold or 10000gold is irrelevant to Anet, it's still going to take a certain amount of gems to buy an item mall item, gems which someone else has to buy first. They don't materialize from nothing. You have it reversed, the only people that benefit from the stopping of third party sellers is the gamers.
And the difference between players trading among each other and botting gold farmers doing so should be obvious to anyone who's ever touched an online game.
?...How do you figure?
You know those "gems that someone else has to buy first?" Who do you think they buy them from. Oh that's right...ANet. And let's say I'm a player who wants to buy gold...if I buy it from a gold seller, then my gold never gets spent on gems...which means the exchange for gold in terms of gems gets pushed up. In other words, gems become worth more gold because there are people trying to buy gems with gold, but people trying to get gold, are just buying them from a third party instead.
This means that if I want say, 5000 gold, I will have to buy less gems to make that happen...thus cutting into ANet's profits.
There is only one way to fight gold sellers/buyers: Perma ban for every gold seller and buyer first time they get caught. No nice mails, No 3day whatever ban. The risk must be high and it must hurt.
Specially for the buyers. Ban the buyers, advertise it. There's no excuse for buying gold from some annoying spammer in GW2, since you can do it totally legally via the official shop. You buy gold from some annoying spamming asshat? Perma ban for your account, go to the shop and buy another one, and learn your lesson that time.
I don't get this. I hate the gold spam as much as the next person but in a game with a legitimate money farm there will be poor people trying to cut corners. The punishment should fit the crime. Somebody buys from a farmer means a victimless crime unless you are trying to protect Guild war's profit margin or are one of the people hacked off with gold spam. If the former then employ more moderaters. If the latter then I am with you but can we keep it real?
If, like me, you are one of the latter group then I agree with sanctions but a perma-ban does not teach people to learn. To borrow a boring analogy the death sentence in the UK was never linked to a reduction in crime but proportionate sentencing has been. So a first time offender/eejit gets a month's ban.
They come back to the game older and wiser and rejoin the community. If they'd just been kicked NCSoft would have lost a customer and they'd have learnt they do not like NCSoft. While the Guildwars 2 model apears to mean the developers need cash from the store to develop future content (if i have understood it correctly) it also neds to foster a community. I fail to see how perma-bans can foster anything but anger if used as an initial response to buying currency.
Sanctions are a good idea to rid us of the spam we hate and solely targeting suppliers is ineffective as they have effectively circumnavigated the restrictions blizzard allegedly employ so they'll probably do the same with this game. However it would appear moderated servers with sanctions that punish transgressors without forcing them out of the game forever appears a sensible and strategic approach. Plus perma-bans for all sellers' accounts obviously.
in wow you can just make a lame excuse that it was the hacker and not you who traded gold . my brother did it three times and each time he gave blizzard the same answer and everytime his perma ban was lifted .
The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets. Let’s run through some quick examples.
1) Give something to my friend. – As several of you noted, target your friend, right click the item and select ‘mail-to…’. Done, this works in contact list, guild list, or in world anywhere without having to ‘meet’ them or ‘catch’ them.
2) Get a fair price for an item (anti-scam). – Because ALL trading goes through the trading post we can guarantee that highest bidder meets lowest seller and we can give every player the benefit of current market information.
3) Barter item-for-item. This is the grey area and also the most risky kind of trade because even with UI many items look alike in icon and many social engineering scams take place in this kind of system. It’s a risky trade environment which is why when you support it you have to have these multi-stage UI’s where everyone double-checks everything, and then eventually get’s lazy and stops double-checking and gets scammed anyways.
In the end we decided with super easy access to mail for trusted trades and trading post for untrusted trades that such a system wasn’t worth the risk, complication, and fragmenting the player market off of the trading post..
In testing we’ve found that mail is easier 90% of the time we’d want trade and the other 10% trading post is far safer and avoids drama and thing like random trade windows being thrown at you and lots of other unsavory hawking in game.
There is only one way to fight gold sellers/buyers: Perma ban for every gold seller and buyer first time they get caught. No nice mails, No 3day whatever ban. The risk must be high and it must hurt.
Specially for the buyers. Ban the buyers, advertise it. There's no excuse for buying gold from some annoying spammer in GW2, since you can do it totally legally via the official shop. You buy gold from some annoying spamming asshat? Perma ban for your account, go to the shop and buy another one, and learn your lesson that time.
I don't get this. I hate the gold spam as much as the next person but in a game with a legitimate money farm there will be poor people trying to cut corners. The punishment should fit the crime. Somebody buys from a farmer means a victimless crime unless you are trying to protect Guild war's profit margin or are one of the people hacked off with gold spam. If the former then employ more moderaters. If the latter then I am with you but can we keep it real?
If, like me, you are one of the latter group then I agree with sanctions but a perma-ban does not teach people to learn. To borrow a boring analogy the death sentence in the UK was never linked to a reduction in crime but proportionate sentencing has been. So a first time offender/eejit gets a month's ban.
They come back to the game older and wiser and rejoin the community. If they'd just been kicked NCSoft would have lost a customer and they'd have learnt they do not like NCSoft. While the Guildwars 2 model apears to mean the developers need cash from the store to develop future content (if i have understood it correctly) it also neds to foster a community. I fail to see how perma-bans can foster anything but anger if used as an initial response to buying currency.
Sanctions are a good idea to rid us of the spam we hate and solely targeting suppliers is ineffective as they have effectively circumnavigated the restrictions blizzard allegedly employ so they'll probably do the same with this game. However it would appear moderated servers with sanctions that punish transgressors without forcing them out of the game forever appears a sensible and strategic approach. Plus perma-bans for all sellers' accounts obviously.
You are assuming so much. People don't come back "wiser" to the game, it's obvious you shouldn't be buying gold in the first place. It's not about wisdom, and it's the idea that buying gold is a "victimless crime" that makes it easy to become a repeat offender. It's not victimless, and there's plenty of reading and research out there to show you why. Economies are destroyed overnight by gold sellers, and they are only emboldened by the people that buy the gold. I'd do more than ban them if I could, I'd run their IP and notify GMs of any and every game they play that they're yet another one of the locusts.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Originally posted by Creslin321 Sooo since selling gold is "legal" anyway, what is the point of trying to stop third party gold sellers? Way I see it, the damage of RMT is already done to the game...the only party who benefits from stopping third party gold sellers is ANet, because they can undercut the gem/gold rate and take ANet's profits.
much respect.
Not quite. Whether a gem sells for 1 gold or 10000gold is irrelevant to Anet, it's still going to take a certain amount of gems to buy an item mall item, gems which someone else has to buy first. They don't materialize from nothing. You have it reversed, the only people that benefit from the stopping of third party sellers is the gamers.
And the difference between players trading among each other and botting gold farmers doing so should be obvious to anyone who's ever touched an online game.
?...How do you figure?
You know those "gems that someone else has to buy first?" Who do you think they buy them from. Oh that's right...ANet. And let's say I'm a player who wants to buy gold...if I buy it from a gold seller, then my gold never gets spent on gems...which means the exchange for gold in terms of gems gets pushed up. In other words, gems become worth more gold because there are people trying to buy gems with gold, but people trying to get gold, are just buying them from a third party instead.
This means that if I want say, 5000 gold, I will have to buy less gems to make that happen...thus cutting into ANet's profits.
Then we're not talking about the same thing. You're talking about purchasing gold with cash. It only sounds like that's the same thing with buying gold with gems, except it's not. It's more like a trade, one resource for another. Gems are needed for item mall things, gold is needed for ingame things. Cash is a real life exchange that's meant to be prohibitive both because yes, it cuts into Anet's profits (which considering they don't have a sub, should be an obvious negative for those that would like to play the game for a long time to come), and it also affects the economy for those that would like to play the legit way, rather than risk trading money with shady third-party vendors. With your own reply, you basically answered your own original question.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Girlfriend point gaining could be done by sending her goods to sell herself on the market right?
Yes, I absolutly want ANet to protect it's income. It's their game and I am relying on them to update the game on a regular basis. Going against the ToS is doing something wrong. It's pretty simple.
At least ANet is trying something different rather than "yeah, we'll uh, be monitoring mail and, uh, chat chat channels". Let's see how it works out.
You know those "gems that someone else has to buy first?" Who do you think they buy them from. Oh that's right...ANet. And let's say I'm a player who wants to buy gold...if I buy it from a gold seller, then my gold never gets spent on gems...which means the exchange for gold in terms of gems gets pushed up. In other words, gems become worth more gold because there are people trying to buy gems with gold, but people trying to get gold, are just buying them from a third party instead.
This means that if I want say, 5000 gold, I will have to buy less gems to make that happen...thus cutting into ANet's profits.
Then we're not talking about the same thing. You're talking about purchasing gold with cash. It only sounds like that's the same thing with buying gold with gems, except it's not. It's more like a trade, one resource for another. Gems are needed for item mall things, gold is needed for ingame things. Cash is a real life exchange that's meant to be prohibitive both because yes, it cuts into Anet's profits (which considering they don't have a sub, should be an obvious negative for those that would like to play the game for a long time to come), and it also affects the economy for those that would like to play the legit way, rather than risk trading money with shady third-party vendors. With your own reply, you basically answered your own original question.
"Hey man, can I give you $20 for 100 gold?"
WHOA WHOA WHOA buddy! That is a cash for gold transaction, and I CANNOT condone that.
"Ummm okay, how about I buy a $20 gift certificate from Starbucks for $20, and then give you that gift certificate for 100 gold?"
Okay, sounds good.
WTF?
This really does not seem that different to me...except in the second scenario Starbucks is guaranteed a payday. I also don't see gems as a "currency" that people just get to be traded...it is really just a exclusivity agreement between you and ANet to spend your money there.
The way I see it is that the only way you can get gems is either to pay money or buy them with gold. So, if you buy them with gold...you probably are not going to sell them right back for gold. And if you want to get gold, then you will probably buy the gems you need for this express purpose.
Gems are just a means to an end...there is no benefit to just "store" them. That's why I see trading gems for gold as equivalent to trading cash for gold. You will literally buy gems for $15 or whatever, and then immediately buy gold with them.
Comments
There's some issues with this system as follows:
1) Guilds cost money to get more than 50 players in. To go to 100, you need to spend coin. Because of this, very LARGE guilds will be limited in the funnel to the GM for expansion based on what quest/event gold that players get instead of Trading Post sells or Gem conversion gold.2
2) Upgrades for WvWvW will be limited the same way by the same funneling tech.
But, there are work arounds that I've found....
A) Guilds that like to stockpile siege equipment can do so by just having memebers buy the siege and then dump the blueprints into the guild bank.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
While true, farmers make more money per box they purchase than they lose. It's not a waste of time either, as these kinds of things are run like actual jobs; the person hired will be there for certain hours per day regardless of whether it's on a new account or an old one. Finally, it's not hard to buy boxes in bulk and have bots running on them while one other account is actively trading, so that when it's banned you simply switch to the next which should already have a higher gold limit due to the botting.
These measures by Anet aren't really going to help anything. But, they also aren't going to hurt anything. People aren't going to hit that limit trading to friends and themselves, chances are the larger majority of players will never even notice it's there. Bottom line though, is there are going to be gold sellers, and people are just going to have to accept that reality and take responsibility for their own actions. If the gold isn't being sold, the sellers won't exist anymore.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Hehe you could definitely try that, but honestly, I think that gems are just going to be more and more expensive as time goes on.
I mean, think about it. The total amount of gold circulating through GW2 will be drastically incresaing as players level up, play the game, and just pump more and more gold in the system. But the value of gems is static and tied to real money. Real money will probably not inflate very much at all.
So you have one side of this equation (gold) inflating at an extreme rate, and the other side (real money) staying relatively constant. To me, this is good reason to believe that gems will just get more and more expensive as time goes on.
If you really wanted to profiteer, I would try buying some gems for gold very early on, and just holding on to your investment for a month or two, then selling it for a much larger amount of gold
.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Oh no, I think being able to buy things in the CS with in-game gold is a great idea. I just am not too fond of being able to sell gems for gold.
The thing you have to realize is that it is not necessary to have the gem/gold exchange to let people buy things in the CS for gold. ANet could very easily just make every item in the CS have a gem price, and a gold price...kind of like how LoL works.
This would be better for the game on a couple of levels. First, there would be no RMT for gold transactions, which I and many others dislike. Second, the CS would be huge gold sink...whenever someone would buy a CS item with gold, that gold would be out of the economy. Right now, whenever someone buys gems for gold, that gold goes right back into the economy...it's not a gold sink, you're just moving it around. But if you bought CS stuff, or even gems, for a flat gold fee, that gold is gone from the economy all together.
Really, there is one reason the gem/gold exchange works the way it does...profit for ANet. I'm not saying that they shouldn't make money, I just don't think they should resort to "paid easy mode" to do so.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
So walk your character over to hers and hand her the cash or items you want her to have.... You don't need the mail system or guild bank to do that.
All I heard was... "Well aren't you just a little lolly pop triple dipped in psycho."
Didn't do WoW any good.
Sweet, another GW2 ecnomics seminar.
*raises hand*
No face-to-face trading in GW, as far as I know. I suppose you can drop items on the ground, not sure about gold though.
There is no person-to-person trading in GW2, everything is done by mail. You also cannot drop things on the ground, pulling something out of your inventory only gives you the option to destroy it.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
1. 30 days is a big deal when the themepark ends in less than that
2. No face to face trading or item dropping. LOLOLOL
much respect.
Personally I think this measure is genius. Yea, its a slight annoyance in the first month for some.. but down the line this will impact on the gold sellers much more.
Smart to keep track of overall "profit". This is extremely important.
For those of you who have not followed some of the Gold Seller practices they basically use money laundering techniques so that the GM's are basically in a losing battle of whack-a-mole. The farming toons themselves can be banned all day long, its the money laundering you need to find or prevent.
Not quite. Whether a gem sells for 1 gold or 10000gold is irrelevant to Anet, it's still going to take a certain amount of gems to buy an item mall item, gems which someone else has to buy first. They don't materialize from nothing. You have it reversed, the only people that benefit from the stopping of third party sellers is the gamers.
And the difference between players trading among each other and botting gold farmers doing so should be obvious to anyone who's ever touched an online game.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
I don't get this. I hate the gold spam as much as the next person but in a game with a legitimate money farm there will be poor people trying to cut corners. The punishment should fit the crime. Somebody buys from a farmer means a victimless crime unless you are trying to protect Guild war's profit margin or are one of the people hacked off with gold spam. If the former then employ more moderaters. If the latter then I am with you but can we keep it real?
If, like me, you are one of the latter group then I agree with sanctions but a perma-ban does not teach people to learn. To borrow a boring analogy the death sentence in the UK was never linked to a reduction in crime but proportionate sentencing has been. So a first time offender/eejit gets a month's ban.
They come back to the game older and wiser and rejoin the community. If they'd just been kicked NCSoft would have lost a customer and they'd have learnt they do not like NCSoft. While the Guildwars 2 model apears to mean the developers need cash from the store to develop future content (if i have understood it correctly) it also neds to foster a community. I fail to see how perma-bans can foster anything but anger if used as an initial response to buying currency.
Sanctions are a good idea to rid us of the spam we hate and solely targeting suppliers is ineffective as they have effectively circumnavigated the restrictions blizzard allegedly employ so they'll probably do the same with this game. However it would appear moderated servers with sanctions that punish transgressors without forcing them out of the game forever appears a sensible and strategic approach. Plus perma-bans for all sellers' accounts obviously.
and why you think that? aion failed just because of the reason that there were alot of gold sellers and bots .
?...How do you figure?
You know those "gems that someone else has to buy first?" Who do you think they buy them from. Oh that's right...ANet. And let's say I'm a player who wants to buy gold...if I buy it from a gold seller, then my gold never gets spent on gems...which means the exchange for gold in terms of gems gets pushed up. In other words, gems become worth more gold because there are people trying to buy gems with gold, but people trying to get gold, are just buying them from a third party instead.
This means that if I want say, 5000 gold, I will have to buy less gems to make that happen...thus cutting into ANet's profits.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
in wow you can just make a lame excuse that it was the hacker and not you who traded gold . my brother did it three times and each time he gave blizzard the same answer and everytime his perma ban was lifted .
ANETs reasoning
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/44139-why-is-there-not-a-trading-function/page__st__30
Hey guys,
The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets. Let’s run through some quick examples.
1) Give something to my friend. – As several of you noted, target your friend, right click the item and select ‘mail-to…’. Done, this works in contact list, guild list, or in world anywhere without having to ‘meet’ them or ‘catch’ them.
2) Get a fair price for an item (anti-scam). – Because ALL trading goes through the trading post we can guarantee that highest bidder meets lowest seller and we can give every player the benefit of current market information.
3) Barter item-for-item. This is the grey area and also the most risky kind of trade because even with UI many items look alike in icon and many social engineering scams take place in this kind of system. It’s a risky trade environment which is why when you support it you have to have these multi-stage UI’s where everyone double-checks everything, and then eventually get’s lazy and stops double-checking and gets scammed anyways.
In the end we decided with super easy access to mail for trusted trades and trading post for untrusted trades that such a system wasn’t worth the risk, complication, and fragmenting the player market off of the trading post..
In testing we’ve found that mail is easier 90% of the time we’d want trade and the other 10% trading post is far safer and avoids drama and thing like random trade windows being thrown at you and lots of other unsavory hawking in game.
Hope that all makes sense.
EQ2 fan sites
You are assuming so much. People don't come back "wiser" to the game, it's obvious you shouldn't be buying gold in the first place. It's not about wisdom, and it's the idea that buying gold is a "victimless crime" that makes it easy to become a repeat offender. It's not victimless, and there's plenty of reading and research out there to show you why. Economies are destroyed overnight by gold sellers, and they are only emboldened by the people that buy the gold. I'd do more than ban them if I could, I'd run their IP and notify GMs of any and every game they play that they're yet another one of the locusts.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Then we're not talking about the same thing. You're talking about purchasing gold with cash. It only sounds like that's the same thing with buying gold with gems, except it's not. It's more like a trade, one resource for another. Gems are needed for item mall things, gold is needed for ingame things. Cash is a real life exchange that's meant to be prohibitive both because yes, it cuts into Anet's profits (which considering they don't have a sub, should be an obvious negative for those that would like to play the game for a long time to come), and it also affects the economy for those that would like to play the legit way, rather than risk trading money with shady third-party vendors. With your own reply, you basically answered your own original question.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Yes, I absolutly want ANet to protect it's income. It's their game and I am relying on them to update the game on a regular basis. Going against the ToS is doing something wrong. It's pretty simple.
At least ANet is trying something different rather than "yeah, we'll uh, be monitoring mail and, uh, chat chat channels". Let's see how it works out.
"Hey man, can I give you $20 for 100 gold?"
WHOA WHOA WHOA buddy! That is a cash for gold transaction, and I CANNOT condone that.
"Ummm okay, how about I buy a $20 gift certificate from Starbucks for $20, and then give you that gift certificate for 100 gold?"
Okay, sounds good.
WTF?
This really does not seem that different to me...except in the second scenario Starbucks is guaranteed a payday. I also don't see gems as a "currency" that people just get to be traded...it is really just a exclusivity agreement between you and ANet to spend your money there.
The way I see it is that the only way you can get gems is either to pay money or buy them with gold. So, if you buy them with gold...you probably are not going to sell them right back for gold. And if you want to get gold, then you will probably buy the gems you need for this express purpose.
Gems are just a means to an end...there is no benefit to just "store" them. That's why I see trading gems for gold as equivalent to trading cash for gold. You will literally buy gems for $15 or whatever, and then immediately buy gold with them.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?