Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Anyone that has been working on playing the trading game in Guild Wars 2 might have been running into a few frustrating problems with over-saturation of items and some other economic issues. But this week ArenaNet’s economic guru John Smith returns to serve up some good news along with some temporary fun for the Mystic Forge.

While the Black Lion Trading Post has been getting slammed with items since it opened, ArenaNet has some plans to bring things back into line with their target goals and even eliminate some of the excess crafting goods. That last bit is the fun part. Smith notes in his blog under a section titles “Supply and Demand” that the devs are adding a little something in to help decrease supply and increase demand. Temporary recipes are being added to the Mystic Forge that will allow players to combine several crafting materials that are currently flooding the economy to obtain a box that will contain random goodies such as gold or other items.

Along with the economics lesson, Smith also touches on the topic of exploiting, its impact on the economy, and one of the recent incidents ArenaNet has dealt with.

To give some perspective on our actions against exploiters, let’s discuss the karma vendor exploit, where an item was priced at 21 karma instead of 35,000 karma. In this case, we made a mistake and many players got some awesome weapons for very cheap. Does a single player buying a weapon, to use, damage the game or really hurt the players? Not terribly, but getting cheap weapons for your characters wasn’t the problem. The problem was the 1.46 million weapons purchased by 4,862 players, which averages over 300 weapons per player. There is a fundamental difference here between players who got a cheap weapon and players who found a bug in the game and took advantage of it. The latter attempted to create wealth for themselves at the expense of the other millions of players that are injured by exploiting behavior.

Source: John Smith on the State of the Guild Wars 2 Economy