Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Guild Wars 2, so no way to actually turn it into real currency that I’m aware of (unless you sell your account or something); I mean, you can convert “gold” (game currency) to “gems” (game store currency) but gems can’t purchase anything other than GW2 items, which are all virtual and contained within the game and your account.
But that is an interesting thought. I’d be curious to read such an analysis.
Also, it occurs to me, one area of potential interest about GW2 in terms of economic analysis is the internal design of the economy. Though I’m not real familiar with the specifics, there are players in the game who play the trading post like a game of its own, amassing in-game wealth with things like flipping, or (anecdotally I’ve heard) with organized attempts to control the market for specific items in order to make more off of them. Ultimately, GW2 devs can step in and wreck this pretty easy by adjusting how easy it is to obtain items, but a particular one I recall this happening with is the “black lion weapons”, which are uncommon or rare drops from GW2’s lootboxes. GW2 devs solution to this (as I understand it) was to have these items come back every so often on a rotation, so that supply would not become too rare. But nevertheless, you can see how certain items like this end up with fairly consistent, high cost to buy from other players on the trading post, suggesting people are actively manipulating it. As opposed to more random range of listings and availability if they weren’t.
One player on reddit even actively admitted to doing market manipulation with the essence that drops from this item: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Chest though I don’t know if they are still playing now
And there is potential analysis to be done in how people like this are probably being allowed to exist in a game economy because, in some cases, they actually make it more stable, even though their greed is not good for players; the company itself can benefit from it if it becomes harder to get certain rare items as a result while having consistent supply listed, such that players will be tempted to spend real money on gems, convert it to gold, and then buy the item off the trading post.
I hadn’t considered the relationship between high item prices, item availability and its benefit to the company, but that’s very interesting. Something similar happens in OSRS. There’s a huge price difference between mid-game, late-game and end-game gear, to the point where the average player (most of the playerbase are adults these days) really doesn’t have the time to sink into the exorbitantly long grinds to acquire either the items directly or the in-game currency needed to buy them. Buying in-game currency ends up being a no brainer for them because it’s the path of least resistance. Spend 6 months trying to get one item, or get it immediately and move on to the more interesting content.
In the case of OSRS I think the majority of actual prices aren’t so much due to market manipulation or flipping, although both do occur. There’s been some big scandals in the past involving clans and market manipulation so it’s a bannable offense. Rather, there’s a lot of item sinks that have been implemented to prevent supply getting to the point where it starts crashing the price. Regardless though the company still has the same interest, being keeping in-demand item prices reasonably high to sell in-game currency.