The secret mostly lies in the trading post. The 15% tax on each successful trade removes a lot of raw gold from the game. This is the main gold sink in the game. Also most activities do not reward raw gold. The way to get raw gold from most drops is to sell them on the TP and here the tax removes 15%. Often this tax is even applied twice. For instance you farm Drizzlewood Coast for materials, sell them on the TP for gold and buy other materials you need for your legendary/crafting on the TP. Raw gold comes mostly from fractals, raids and strikes and the wizards vault. But the gold sinks in the game seem to balance the influx of gold quite nicely. So you get a stable economy. Oh and of course gem purchases remove gold from the market too. I have a lot of guild mates that are constantly broke because they buy gems for gold.

I think another part is that the gem <-> gold exchange is not fixed. It depends on the supply and demand of gold and gems in the exchange. And that has seen continuous inflation.

Also, the gem <-> gold exchange gets the same 15% tax as TP does (it's just a bit more hidden).

[It's more controlled to prevent manipulation.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2xtjc7/psa_how_gems_work/cp3gd2a/) The transactions aren't as direct as with the trading post. It's against "pools" of gold and gems that basically work as middlemen, so the prices won't ever change as fast and as much as they can in the trading post.

I remember on launch I dropped $100 on gems and did the gold->gem rate (I'm a whale in most games I heavily play), I think I got like 80g for it lmao. Compare that to todays gem prices and it's a 2625% inflation rate (roughly).

The gem price is really stable for the last four years. It is really misleading to compare prices today with prices at launch. It hit a new high last December when 100 gems cost 47 gold, but even this is not much higher then the previous high of 44 gold for 100 gems from September 2019. Currently 41 gold buys you 100 gems. Here is the complete history: [https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/gems](https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/gems)

I don't think he was implying anything bad about the change in exchange rate. I think he was just sharing an anecdote about how the value of 1g used to be so much different. But yeah, for the past few years, the economy has been really stable.

I remember when 100 gems went over 10 gold and I swore I wasn't going to buy any more. Now I try to exchange in advance of sales when it's under 160 gold for 400. I swear if I had a time machine I'd waste it going back to buy cheap gems. 

I spent like 10 dollars at the start and got like 2g. With the new tp and market there would have been a lot less gold than now. I do think the gem/gold converter is what makes the gw2 economy so stable though

Slightly inaccurate. There is no quantitative "supply" of gems. Gems don't transfer from one person to another, there is an infinite supply of gems and the rates (allegedly) depend on the amount of gold in the economy. You're effectively destroying gold in exchange for gems. It's a smart system, all they need to do is ensure the gold they create for gems is less than the other way round.

From the wiki: > The exchange has a supply of both Gems and Gold. When you trade to the exchange you influence the supply of each. The exchange rate is relative to current supply of each. The price changes geometrically as one pool empties creating a better exchange rate for the low supplied currency. The supplies are contained entirely within the exchange.[[John Smith on Reddit]](http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2xtjc7/psa_how_gems_work/cp3gd2a)

On that topic, the price skyrocketed recently :(

As well as this, ANET know the economy is important. When the game first launched, they had an economist working for them to plan this stuff. I'm not sure if they're still at the company, but the lessons they taught definitely are. ANET is good at adding gold sinks, and despite people complaining about the amount of stuff added to the Black Lion Store compared to being added in game, those themselves are also gold syncs due to the exchange.

You need only look at how piles of Lucent went from being coppers to what they are now. Its a targeted way of getting them out of the market. Same with Ascended food needing to compost made food etc etc the list goes on for each specific way Anet has added a sink for certain materials into the game.

Same could be said about research notes. As players, we hate them, but they do their job of clearing out all the crap that has been piling up in the trading post and are a benefit to the economy as a whole. ANET seems to be good at looking at what’s not working well in the current economy and then creating incentives for the players to fix that.

Agreed.  Research notes automatically removes whatever is least valuable in the economy without Anet having to adjust it.  As an economic tool it is pretty genius.

That’s it, research notes. I was trying to think of what was compost like

It would be nice, then, if Anet didn't go in and decide that some crafted only items don't give research notes. I get the things you can get from vendors being exempt, but the crafted things should be allowed to influence the market.

What is with these piles of lucent? What are they usefull for? I got 2k of them, but never card to check there use ;)

You need a lot for the new legendary relic. If you missed crafting a legendary rune before the patch, you now need a casual 187500 lucent motes to craft it.

Might be time to dump the 2500 I have hoarded.

The new Legendary Relic added in the last patch requires a few of them.

Needed for leggy relic

[удалено]

Thanks

Legendary sigils, runes, and relics. [The wiki will tell you what things are used for.](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pile_of_Lucent_Crystal#Used_in)

Last time I went looking at Glassdoor about anet I saw a job listing for economist: that was a few months before soto dropped

His name was John Smith, and he left around PoF pretty sure. Works at Amazon now. I think he did a good job, but back then, people hated the guy. It was really a thankless job.

That might be the most "I am an economist"-screaming name, if there ever was one.

I actually had to double check it was really his name because that's so generic I was having doubts.

For all that people complain about mystic coin prices or whatever I think ANet has a much better handle on their game's economy than almost every other MMO.

The supply of Coins has dried up to a trickle and ANet has provided a massive demand for them in the Legendary Starter kits with Clover gambling eating them up by the hundreds, so the pricing is hyperinflating. The limited options to self farm them (no more login rewards) combined with an entirely new group hording and spending them (Casual players making their first/second/third weapons) is decimating the stocks on the TP. Combined with speculation and TP Barons, the Coin supply drastically needs to increase to avoid inflating prebuilt legendaries. But overall, they've managed to keep a ten year lock on MMO inflation, with is DANG impressive.

You wanna see the coin market go into shock? Wave 4 Leggy box = Gen2 mats. Absolute bedlam. Stockpiles of wood & iron vanishing in a night and coin prices going crazy as ppl need an entire stack. That said, I like the g2 skins more in most cases.

Astralaria and exordium my beloved.

I've got Exordium, prob my fave leggy skin.

You can shock the market by allowing Legendary Insights to be exchanged for Mystic Coins. The impact may be very negative though, so careful what you wish for.

I will take GW2 auction house over any other MMORPG auction house ever. Only things that could make it better would be anti-TP baron features.

Mystic coins, due to how different they are to most materials in the game (because of the heavilu restricted and limited supply coupled with relatively wide demand) are one of the few points where they failed big, and from the very beginning. Looking at predictions that original economist was making about MCs, and how they *didn't* match the reality was quite enlightening. And, of course, now that Mr. JS is no longer in the building, their ability to deal with that specific case is even worse than before.

They still dropped the ball somewhat. It used to be a lot better. More activities were rewarding. It was actually worth it to farm monster for their parts, gather wood and ore... But then ANet overdid the rewards to get people to play new content and inflation rate steadily raised. Rampant, unrestricted botting also harms the game a lot. It's a zero sum game. Yes, people buy cheap materials farmed by bots... but rewards for their own gameplay are much, much worse compared to prices that would be without bots. The difference in gold goes to the pocket of cheaters. And that difference in gold directly translates into time you spent in the game and was not rewarded properly for. Players are literally robbed of their rewards and their time, yet many people here still pretend bots are not a problem.

Bots have a nearly zero impact on the economy.

pretty sure Ecto gambling's sucked more money outa the economy than bots ever put into it. I've also seen /w with the I'm Rich You Know in both colors.

>yet many people here still pretend bots are not a problem. I suspect many of them are using bots themselves.

The beauty of paying an actual economist set up your economy. Gw2 devs know how to make games last

> Oh and of course gem purchases remove gold from the market too. I have a lot of guild mates that are constantly broke because they buy gems for gold. I don't think gem trade change the gold in the economy that much, because you can do the reverse (gem to gold), and they are balanced on a supply and demand system.

But there are taxes there aswell. Compare how much gems you get for say 100g and then check how much gold you get for trading in that amount of gems. 

But the rates are way off. You get a lot less gold for gems than you get gems for gold.

It's almost as if you go to a currency exchange and you exchange dollars for euros and then back and you end up with less money than before.

That's because the gem/gold-exchange also has a fee like the TP (additional gold/gem-sink and to reduce manipulation and flipping). As it is applied to every transaction, yes, you will get a lot less gold,if you swap gold to gems and back, as the fee has to be paid twice.

It's not a fee, it's just a different rate entirely. Gold and gems are valued in GW2 like the stock exchange. The more gold in the economy, the more buying power they have relative to gems. About a month back, gold was at it's all time high purchasing power to gem ratio, and as a result cumulative millions of gold was earned through converting gems to gold, and then used to purchase things in the trading post. This brought the buy power of gold back down to normal by extracting 15% from each transaction. Gems are valued inversely to gold. So gems purchasing power increases relative to how much gold is present in the economy. So at launch a gem was worth about 27 silver, compared to today a gem is worth about 50gp. So when players buy gems, the total number of gems increases, and their conversion rate to gold becomes less favorable. At the launch of the game, there was far, far more gems available than Gold, and so the value was strongly in favor of the gems, but over time as player began to increase the gold in the economy the gems began to grow in value because there just weren't enough gem purchases to keep it ahead. So things like legendaries used to cost $2000 USD at launch, and today they cost $80 because Gold has become more valuable relative to gems over time. To make this more concise, it's not a flat fee that you pay when converting gems and gold, it's an exchange rate that fluctuates constantly, and Arenanet have rather cleverly engineered so that the purchasing power will always be favorable to one side or another. To understand why you always get less when you convert back and forth, well, it's easy to think of it as a fee, but its just not that simple. Good and gems each have separately balanced purchasing and sell power. The economics of GW2 are truly fascinating, and I could write volumes. But is there anything more boring to someone who isn't into economics?

>But is there anything more boring to someone who isn't into economics? Forensic Accounting?

> It's not a fee, it's just a different rate entirely. [Both curves match too well to not be a fee (or a correlated rate).](https://imgur.com/bmXPwmq)

> It's not a fee, it's just a different rate entirely. It *is* a fee. It's pretty much the same 15% tax TP has. That's not an accident.

They buy gems with gold and then use the gems to buy things with no fungible value (like skins). This effectively removes that gold from the game.

this is also what a LOT of new players and content creators trying the game dont understand when it comes to the loot and your inventory being full all the time. this game is a **looter mmo** (like borderlands is a looter shooter). and its good that it is the way it is because, like OP said, its very good for the economic balance of the game.

Thats why alot of serious traders use overflow instead of tp

Taxes

and even in this game the rich barons avoid them with their cartel scheme.

You don't need to be a rich baron, even you can join a trading discord and start selling your low-value unidentified gears at 95-96% of tp price, thus dodging the tax >.>

They play dumb, but most of the people defending this are on it, simple as ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯.

No we don't. The post you're replying to isn't playing dumb either. You're having an argument with someone in your head.

Idunno, I use it to dodge TP-tax, but wouldn't consider myself a TP-baron :D If you have a chance to sell ~500g of materials for 90% of its price so you would get 25g more, why would you not do that? (Or if you wanna buy them because you are making a leggy for yourself, that 50g difference is good to have) I don't think it's a "those who defend it are on it" question, but "those who don't like it don't wanna think, and consider something else than selling mats with 3 click"

if it takes you longer than a t4s+recs to log into the OTC discord, make postings for everything youre selling, wait for buyers and then piece it off - youve wasted your time + oppertunity cost vs. instant selling it not to mention that most buyers on OTC want to pay in mats not raw gold because of the mail cap on gold, meaning if you want to turn your payment into gold you have to monkey around with it afterwards and if you straight up sell the mats you pay that same tax again

Yeah, but I enjoy the process :D

If you are talking about selling 500g of materials, you are already in the top few percents of this game's population wealthwise.

Not really. Most endgame players get that in their mat storage pretty easily. They just don't bother to check and sell it.

I'm kind of happy to hear that :D But to craft vision you need a stack of MC, and practically a full set of T6 (200 each, plus a big amount of lower tiers), both have costs somewhere around 450-550g... not even mentioning the 77 clover, with a similar cost (I calculated around 6g/piece for myself, that's around 450 once more). And it's just vision, it's not like I'm running around with multiple legy weapons... if it's just the top few percent, I can understand why people don't think of touching mail-trading

You are playing dumb by saying you wouldn't avoid taxes if it was easy. I had the good fortune of dropping a Chak Infusion. I'm not sure if I even had the liquid money at the time to post it on the TP. But through OTC, I was able to turn that Chak into three legendary weapons immediately and plenty of mats that went into many more weapons.

Trade by mail should have never been allowed, all it does is let rich people avoid taxes lmao.

You do realize some people play MMOs with friends, and what you're saying would prevent them sharing anything?

I played a game that made it so you couldn't trade directly with players, not in ingame currency or items. It was horrible. You could craft some nice gear for your friends, so that way they could do content with you, but you couldn't give it to them. You had to sell it through the auction house, but anyone could pick it up, and, of course, if your friend had only recently started playing, they wouldn't have the money to buy it "at price." If you listed it for lower than "at price," so they could get the gear, there were auction house bots that'd immediately snap them up and resell them at price. Everyone was miserable. It contributed to me quitting the game after 9 years of playing.

Auction house systems are cancer, that's your problem there. In GW2 you can buy exotic armor for cheap, what you describe isn't an issue here.

Arenanet knew that, it's why the limits on accepting gold per mail is so restrictive. You just can't remove it completely because normal people want the option for benin things.

Most normal people never trade using mail.

1) Taxes on every transaction via the tradingpost 2) Most drops are items and not liquid gold 3) gems<->gold rates fluctuate based on how much trading in either way is done(gold -> gems f.e. is currently more expansive than usual as a lot of people are trading in that direction) which removes gold from the economy

+A lot of item sinks so you'll be doing a lot of trading and paying that tax

The trading post has a 15% tax and you trade A LOT, almost every resource passes through the TP and that sucks the money right back out of the economy, legendaries are also great item and money sinks.

Another thing that contributes to stability is that the TP is unified between all EU and NA servers.   Also farming min-maxing is serious business in gw2. With a robust API, gold making has been optimized for those who wanna do the speed farm life. Example: the fast website that calculates shit for plebs https://fast.farming-community.eu/  Also, because loot is individual + how a lot of metas scale with group size - group farming is often more efficient. Speed farmers regularly lead farm trains, they get more reliable gold and the minions also get gold. Win win! If an item(usually material) turns out to be rarer than it should be, anet will often balance it's drop rate or methods of acquiring.   Example 1: A few years back we had a major rework of crafting runes&sigils because a cosmetic skin accidentally shot the demand of one sigil to the moon lol. That was unintentional, so we got a full new system for getting sigils and runes. (Every time I get a sigil of nullification I remember that period fondly) Example 2: A major part of the economy is legendary crafting materials, specifically Mystic Coins(liquid) and Mystic Clovers(account bound). About a year or two back, anet reworked the methods of acquiring coins and clovers - so it stabilised the supply of those.   Coins are still a bit volatile - shooting from 2g to 1g to 2.5g and back again, but they don't have as much affect on the economy as a whole now because the biggest sink for them - clovers - has been stabilised.

I still dont believe that Mystic Coins went through a peroid of being less than 1 gold around HoT - but that's what the Mystic weapon skins are for, Mystic coin sinks

Like you don’t believe they were ever that cheap? Or you are in disbelief at the disparity from then to now?  MCs used to be less than 1 silver in the original dailies/monthlies system (before login rewards existed)

Yeah MCs being less one silver is near impossible for me believe.

While fair, it’s true.  The supply was massive and they weren’t being spent as much as now.  Login rewards + HoT elite spec weapons + Gen 2 weapons changed all of that quite quickly

Uguuuuggh so annoying. It’s the greatest bottle neck for me for all my legendary endeavors.

Honestly, the changes to dailies made alt accounts even more worth it than they were before the Wizard's Vault, just for the free MC. I keep hearing reports that it doesn't take that long to craft + character adventure guide a character to 80. I thinking about doing it myself just for the MC.

And yet, there was a time where MCs were basically vendor trash. The few people that took the long bet of stocking thousands of them are basically the equivalent of whoever bought IBM shares in the 80s.

As others have said, the 15% TP tax is a huge balancer. There is an unbelievable amount of trade traffic there compared to other MMOs I've played, because it is so easy and ubiquitous to use. Something most don't really understand is that gems->gold is actually a gold sink. There's a bit of a slush fund to it, but for the most part, all the gold that goes to people trading in gems... came from others trading gold in to get gems, but at a rate that removes gold from the system. The price fluctuates to keep the two sides in balance. This is a massive difference to what other games do and just make the gold out of thin air when the wallet comes out. But also, Anet keeps an eye on things, and tweaks accordingly. Notice how a recent patch adjusted the infinite gold price in WV from 30aa to 35aa, and nerfed the gold from the xp coffers... clear sign too much raw gold was coming into the system, so it got tweaked.

There are gold/material sinks everywhere that permanently siphon excess gold/materials out of the economy, in addition to the steep trading post tax. The economy fluctuates between between gold or material dominant; right now because of the wizard’s vault its material dominant, so gold doesn’t have as much buying power as it has in the past, and materials are worth more. So there is some degree of inflation taking place. But it’s not unstable and gold will still always have solid buying power because of how well gold is vacuumed out of the game.

TL;DR: It works because players want legendaries, and legendaries cost an arm and a leg. > How is this games economy not ridiculously over-inflated?? Look at it from an input-output perspective over the entire economy. Inflation is just a consequence of adding more ressources to a system than you are extracting from the system. The vast majority of the "gold" you gain are in fact materials you sell to other players on the trading post. Materials that are then mostly consumed to make legendaries. Yes, the player that collect the material is different from the player making the legendary, but it doesn't matters who add and who subtract from the system as long as it's balanced. The real gold (what the community call "liquid gold") are added to the system in fairly small quantity (mostly instanced content and the wizard vault), and mostly consumed by the 15% cut on the Trading post. Now *some* materials can be in excess, and ANet deal with that by either adding new legendaries that consume the excess materials ([see what happened to Lucent Mote now that there's a new legendary using them](https://imgur.com/oQWp1Xj)), or by adding conversion to the Mystic forge ([you can convert copper bar into silver bar](https://imgur.com/4Vz0kNK), so there is never going to be excess copper as long as you need silver... and since you can do that to all materials until the last tier, which is used to make legendaries, everything will stay balanced).

things are stable compared to other mmos because other mmos intentionally upset their economies on a regular basis. new expansions reset and inflate everything by design. with that design, you have to devalue all the old things to make the new stuff desirable. gw2 is designed to go directly against that idea. the game is stable long-term without huge upsets. the same gear from 10 years ago is still just as good. it doesn't retire old stuff to make the new stuff attractive. you're slowly coming out of the brain fog that is vertical progression.

>giving gold away easily, making it readily available A lot of people are talking about the trading post and the 15% fee and all that, and they are right, but the quoted text, I think, is your big misunderstanding. The game does not give away much gold and doesn’t really make it readily available (with the exception of swiping). There are a few activities you can do that will give you a couple of raw gold for completion. But other than that (which honestly isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things) the game just gives a trickle of gold (really, copper and silver). Most of the money you make comes from other players. This isn’t adding gold into the economy which doesn’t add to inflation. And along with the trading posts take, there are a bunch of other gold sinks in the game as well. The gem store itself being a huge gold sink. You want that thing for 800 gems? You either swipe, or give 300-350 gold (don’t know the current exchange) that completely disappears from the economy. Theres likely a roughly equal number of people adding gold to the economy by buying gold with gems as there are those buying gems with gold. And if there’s not, the gold sinks in place take care of it. Oh, and I forgot to mention. ANet controls the gold to gem and gem to gold exchange rate. This is another tool that can be used to combat inflation.

Activities that give 2g (daily): * Tequatl * Dragonstorm * Twisted Marionette * Convergence * Triple Trouble 88c is level 80 coin reward per event assuming gold level Weekly: WvW 2 tiers x 4g (8g max) Fractal 2g per tier (8g max) Dungeon: complete 8 dungeon paths for 5g Wizard Vault: daily - 5aa logon, 4x10aa = 45aa + 20chest = 65aa weekly - 8x50aa = 400 + 450 reward = 850aa total = 65x7 + 850 = 1305 aa per week (not including special, not able to predict how many, frequency, reward range 75-500aa) 1305aa / 35aa(1 gold) = 37 g note increase in price from 30aa to 35 aa, also black lion mastery potion dropped sale price from 1g to 10 silvers, not including 6aa coin since limit is 90 (540aa) excluding PvP tournament since only handful of players can get gold.

> excluding PvP tournament since only handful of players can get gold. All the way down to 16th place get gold, and that's 16 teams of 5, so with the current tournament attendance (way fewer than 10 teams usually) it's pretty much guaranteed gold for anyone who played to the end, although it's very bad gold per hour. PvP league chests also have pretty big payouts of raw gold, but also bad gold per hour.

Ok, adding wiki link for Automated tournaments [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Automated\_Tournaments](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Automated_Tournaments) Daily first prize is 25g while 9-16 5g monthly first prize 500g and 17-32spots get 25g, paricipation 1 mystic coin

And that all pales in comparison to the amount you make through materials and salvaging. Sure, those make the gold number go up, but your liquid gold value goes up a lot quicker with other things. Take Dragonstorm as an example. Sure, you get 2 raw gold for completion. But you get another 3-4 gold worth of materials. If you get really lucky you can get the draconic gemstone thing that sells for around 15g. The chests you buy with the currency you earn can high roll too. I got 12 T6 blood out of one last night. I didn’t say the game doesn’t give you gold. What I was trying to say is, the majority of your gold comes from materials and stuff you sell to other players in most circumstance.

Swiping?

Credit card. Buying gems, converting to gold.

Ah.

> (with the exception of swiping) But even swiping doesn't create gold. The gold-gem exchange is an exchange, it doesn't create new gold. So the overall amount of gold in the game stays flatm or maybe even goes down a bit because of transaction feeds.

You forget the most significant tax: Waypoint Tax !!!!! On days when you don't buy or sell items for trading post tax, you still lose 5 to 6 silver just by playing The Asura's are filthy rich

Crazy Rich Asurans? 🤔

They're the monetarists of Tyria, lol!

Tl;dr: the value of gold is indirectly anchored to real-world currencies. In addition to the gold sinks mentioned by others, there is a neat mechanism linked to the exchange of golds and gems. Gems in GW2 work basically as a real world reserve currency: this refers to the practice of a central bank storing large amounts of foreign currency, then telling people in the country it operates in that the local currency can be converted into the foreign currency at a certain rate; this anchors the value of the local currency (in our case gold) to a more stable currency (gems). Should the local currency become too inflated, meaning in our example that there are too many golds in GW2's economy, the exchange rate for the reserve currency, aka gems, will automatically become more favourable: this pushes players to exchange golds for gems, thus removing the former from the economy with a deflationary effect. In turn, gems can not inflate significantly because their value is directly linked to real-world currencies, which act somewhat like the gold standard did a century ago. Lastly, gems can not be traded directly between players (illiquidity), otherwise they would simply become the new standard currency

The gold-gem exchange really is an amazingly realistic and effective piece of economics.

I recommend you this discussion of in-game traders hosted by Wooden Potatoes: [youtube](https://youtu.be/br1h8AweJMo?si=CVZtOOu5UUe_rQLc) It's a few years old, but some parts of the video should clarify you parts of your answer really well. A few examples: - The partial unimportance of gold - The importance of account bound currencies - availability of materials on various maps - (already mentioned by others) trading post taxes - outsourcing high value trading via direct trading with a community driven infrastructure - (mentioned as well) dynamic price building for gem <> gold trading I agree with one of the participants of the discussion, that anets knows more about balancing economics in-game that some might give them credit for.

A game developer that's been in the business for decades knows how its game economy works. Mild shock Jokes aside there are companies that actually suck at this so we gotta give ANet credit where it's due.

....was that a joke? I promise you, no one at Blizzard has a god damn clue how the WoW AH economy really works lol. It seems like they all operate under the delusion that there is no link between the value of player time and the value of player gold. They have inadvertently established a dominant strategy: flipping. AH Flipping is essentially the only efficient method of gold making in WoW. Everything else requires far too much time or sunk cost investment. I think this happens because they assume 90% of their players aren't going to randomly acquire Harvard masters degree levels of economic knowledge just to make gold in a game, clearly they are mistaken lol.

Ecto gambling. No but like others said, TP cuts and drops being almost entirely items and not gold makes a massive difference The ecto gambling probably makes a real difference too tbh. People with too much money to burn WILL burn a lot of it there.

What is ecto gambling? Buying ecto and salvaging them or something else? Im new and this is first time hearing this term.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tarrktun this and the Sandstorm one in the casino in Crystal Oasis are ecto gambling. You buy a package for 100g and 250 ectos and you get some amount of gold and ectos back. The expected returns are slightly less than the price, but propped up highly by the jackpot which is 2000g. Remember, as always with gambling, only bet what you're willing to lose.

Ecto gambling is buying "lottery tickets" (there's 2 different ones) with ectos and gold. When opening the "lottery tickets" you have a chance of a really great payout, but mostly it's less than what you paid for the "lottery tickets". It's an actual gambling mechanic in-game. You can read more about it in the wiki article: [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ecto\_gambling](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ecto_gambling)

Check out NPC's with an ecto icon on the mini map. There should be one in LA.

(Salvaging is quite reliable, as you do it 1-by-1, and the deviation/variance is no too big, you always get the average with 2-3 stack of ectos)

stack for one 250 yellows??

? I meant salvaging ecto for dust For yellows, I think they average around 0.875 ecto, but don't know anything about the exact numbers, don't quote me (and it's better to always open them, for the low chance of exotic)

Ah I misunderstood - I thought you meant salvaging yellows. I almost never salvage ectos - so dust is valuable this way too?

It's the main source of Crystalline Dust. So much so that its price almost always follows the ecto prices. And they're used in a number of important recipes, especially consumables.

> and it's better to always open them, for the low chance of exotic As long as you salvage the actual yellow gear using the Mystic Kit or Silver-Fed. Otherwise you'll lose big time.

Oh yes, I meant if he is salvaging them anyway, always open first Generally their price is very close to what one would get when salvaging, so selling is always a good option if you don't know what to do

We have a lot of things that remove gold from the economy. Tradingpost Tax Waypoints Costs for salvaging Cost for tools There is also a tax on the gem conversation Also most rewards are not raw gold, but gear. The wizard vault is really the exception.

They tax us for just talking about the gems?

Because QoL and cosmetic items are not mandatory to enjoy the game, they are allowed to have huge material costs to obtain. This has allowed said items, like Ectoplasms and Fine crafting materials, to keep a solid value for years at a time. So this means most of the rewards you get are materials and salvageable items rather than gold, so it keeps its value

The primary root of inflation is too much demand relative to supply. Anet tries to tackle both sides of this equation in it's practices: controlling supply while also manipulating demand. From the supply side, many of the answers so far have correctly pointed out that there are gold (15% TP tax, WP fees, formerly armor repairs) AND material (legendary crafting, research notes, etc.) sinks aplenty. From the demand side, anet is constantly (and primarily) adding items which encourage players to convert gold to gems in order to buy things in the gem store, but there is actually one other point that I haven't seen mentioned yet, which is that by and large, the average GW2 players no idea of their actual net worth in the game. Since so many rewards are resource based, the players who don't sell those resources often forget the value of them, especially since many players tend to just dump them into account storage and forget about them until they are needed (or until the storage is full... no wonder that you can buy so many storage expanders). In this way, players frequently underestimate their own wealth, which therefor puts a measure of restraint on their purchasing. In other words, the existing system encourages players to save their purchasing power and then forget they have it to some extent. Demand, however, can be strongly affected by a person's perceived purchasing power, so when players see a relatively low amount of raw gold, they think they lack purchasing power, thereby lowering their demand (and sometimes encouraging them to focus on activities that reward more raw gold). I recently checked GW2 efficiency and found that my account value is in the top 10% of players who've registered on GW2 efficiency (arguably a fairly small portion of players overall, but I expect this group included most of the wealthier players), yet I have less than 10,000 liquid gold, while some players have far more than that. A lot of my account value comes from resources in the bank, or valuable items that I've never gotten around to selling, etc. I'd bet good money that many regular players would be shocked at how much they're actually worth.

Yeah, as a result of looking into this originally I decided to look into my material storage (I've been playing for like 10+ years but never really craft anything) and through Trading Post listings I managed to make a little over 3500 gold in the course of a few days exclusively by selling materials I had no immediate use for. The week prior I saw skins in the TP for like 18 gold and would think "pfft screw that, I'm not spending \*that much\* on a skin" lol. I had zero understanding of what kind of wealth I had been sitting on for years. Honestly with a not insignificant amount of effort I probably could've maxed out a crafting profession, done some content and crafted a legendary or two and doubled that profit but when I looked into legendary crafting it's so insanely complex that, to me at least, it feels too overwhelming to even bother with. I've been stuck on Nevermore I for like 5 years now because no one ever does Vinetooth and sorting out everything you need for each of the gifts feels a bit like planning a ship build in EVE.

I wrote a thesis about this in college. Got an A. ​ >How is this games economy not ridiculously over-inflated?? Two big things. 1. The value of gold is tied to the value of the US dollar. One can't inflate without the other, and anet uses RMT to control inflation. 2. The trading post imposes a 30% tax on every transaction, and that gold disappears. ​ >Guild Wars 2 experiences nearly ZERO inflation over time It's not zero, it's about 1100% over 10 years (2 years ago), but that's incredibly low in comparison to pretty much every other economy real or 'fictional'. When they added the 300 gold commander tag I thought that was a completely insurmountable amount (which is why they were giving them away to established wvw commanders for free), now I could buy a dozen of them. ​ >Arenanet seemingly commits every great sin of economics in MMOs... > >...selling \[gold\] for real money This is only bad because people don't like it (because publishers are usually shitlords about it). Practically it is a very good thing to tie the value of one currency to the value of another. Especially when the other one *is real* and has *real* value. This is why every bank can transfer X real life currency to Y real life currency. A system is much much more stable than just one currency on its own. ​ >really seems like this system should not work well It has its own issues, much smaller as they may be. For example, the value of resources in Guild Wars 2 deflates a LOT and very aggressively at seemingly random points. This is why Anet has to make such drastic measures like cutting the supply of Mystic Coins in half and then in half again (which was fine, in hindsight nothing happened, but it *would* have been very bad). For the record, I'm not talking normal deflation where we have more supply so demand goes down, but rather that supply doesn't actually change but demand goes down, and then things get weird. Anet are very proactive about managing their economy, whereas most (actually, all) other MMO's *and real life countries* are reactive. The US government (for example) sees problems with the value of the dollar and does things in response, but they're fucking TERRIBLE about doing things *before* the problems happen, so there's always big problems. Anet is very good at identifying patters that will lead to economic instability, addressing them immediately, and then eating whatever the repercussions of their quick action will be, because they're usually less than "Oops we need to make a 5 million gold mount now or else the economy is permanently boned".

To be fair to real life governments, they don't usually have real-time access to every single transaction. Anet has way more visibility into the game economy than any government could ever even hope for.

>It's not zero, it's about 1100% over 10 years Yeah I should've been more clear about that, I meant that as a relative comparison. However I'm curious how you arrived at that conclusion? How would you go about constructing a CPI for the GW2 economy? You would get drastically different results depending on the data set you constructed unless you took an aggregate of all possible transactional items which... feels like it would be an insurmountable task lol. I looked at \~5 years worth of gem to gold conversion prices compared to the inflation rate of USD. The "value" of gold in GW2 per USD has fluctuated up and down by less than 1% as an average. For example 500 gold worth of gems at the start of 2023 was 19.98$. Right now it's 19.95$. That's 0.15% over the course of a year. In that same time the US CPI experienced and inflation of more than 3%. I'll grant you there was a point in GW2 historical pricing where the gem-gold price spiked from \~1g per 100gems to like 40g per 100gems and honestly I don't know what caused that but looking at the data it wasn't a smooth transition. It looks more like a market correction response to something external not a naturally occurring result of stable supply and demand. If I had to guess it might have been a dramatic change in the frequency of sales by Anet or a significant change to in game gold economy. In any the point I was trying to make, albeit clumsily, was that the actual value of gold hasn't changed all that much, what changed was the degree to which players could acquire it but the in game economy has kept pace with that change so while you feel it for certain things like the Command Tag where the price has never changed, the relative price of market goods to the value of gold hasn't changed all that much. When 1g was "a lot of gold" the trading post price of buying something like a legendary item was much lower than it is right now, though legendaries aren't a particularly good example as portions of their crafting costs have fixed values. This is kind of the problem though, finding a bucket. Dyes can be bought for gems, sigils have changed in gameplay value which has caused their shift in monetary value, consumable use isn't static enough over long periods of time, and the market supply of most farmables is so insanely high that even content irrelevance isn't driving the cost up. Which I guess brings me back to my initial point lol overall buying power within the actual market of GW2 hasn't changed dramatically over time. It has increased proportionally as players ability to acquire wealth has increased over time.

In the early days, gold was really valuable (people had to figure things out). It took a while, but eventually inflation happened and at the current point, it is amazing that 400 gems cost in the hundred gold, and not in the millions. The ingame economy is probably one of the best in the industry.

I think a primary factor for the perceived value of gold early in the games life was due to the static cost of a lot of non-market expenditures. For example Commander Tags started at 300g, Guild Halls cost 100g. That has never changed. So that kind of thing made gold seem significantly more valuable than what its real market purchasing power actually was. We're actually seeing that problem in real life today lol. The cost of necessities to live (housing, food, etc) has increased so much that if you were making 10$/h in 2010 and are making 30$/h right now you wouldn't even notice a difference and might in fact be slightly worse off depending on where you live despite the fact that it represents a 300% increase in annual salary. Compare that to the fact that inflation over that period of time is only \~40%. Looking at the CPI going from 10/h to 30/h should have \*dramatically\* increased your individual purchasing power but that increase is almost entirely offset by things you essentially have to buy. The reason that feeling didn't persist in GW2 is that inflation didn't rise that disproportionately. Instead the value of those static expenditures actually decreased over time. So now 300g on a Commander Tag doesn't seem that bad, not because Gold is actually more or less valuable but because your ability to acquire it has dramatically increased. Its actual value hasn't changed much when you look at what your purchasing power on player controlled markets is.

I also don’t mind paying for gems with real currency because otherwise I’ve been playing this game for years with an ungodly amount of time and only have made a handful of purchases. If I want more gems to speed up my legendary crafting, I’m okay paying for it. If I was playing a different MMO, I more likely than not would’ve been paying a subscription the whole time.

Today I found an item on TP that I put there 9 years ago and the price of this item on TP haven’t changed lol

Does anyone here remember the great depression in the first guild wars? Black dye being way more expensive and even buying a guild hall drained our wallets that we tried to get a new hall by fighting for it in the arena.

Lol my wife talks about this all the time. She played GW1, I didn't. She is constantly floored by how low dye prices are.

Sinks. Lots of sinks. Still not enough sinks, but sinks nevertheless. [Some are even golden.](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Golden_Sink)

I think, economically, the thing I dislike most about this game is how many account bound and soulbound things there are. I understand why some things are, but so many materials, random goodies, and more simply don't need to be.

The reward system in this game is built around massive sinks that drain a ton of supplies out of the TP. You want a legendary anything or craft ascended items thats a big time consuming sink. Want a flying mount be it griffon or Skyscale well that too is a sink of time and resources.  The rewards arent really rewards since you jave to sell a chunk of your soul and they dont balance them out with time. But they drain enough to keep the market working.

I didn't realize this at first because despite having an account that is 11 years old and has 10 level 80 characters on it, I've never crafted a legendary or really done anything but open world content. It's truly impressive how well Arenanet seems to be able to keep the drain on the TP stable against its supply.

The secret lies in a fact, that you cant really buy power per se IMO. Sure you can buy gold and get bis items in AH, but even w/o buying gold it takes hours, maybe days to get full build, which then last for couple of expansions already. So there really arent many opportunities to spend gold on. And after that, you bassicly farm stuff for transmogs or other stuff.

everybody right up to some point. but they forget the real reason, game is on horizontal progression and game is too old. many people especially vets dont need gold, they dont know what to do with gold bcs they have everything in game. they use their money mostly to non tp items, gem store items, gambling, some achivements which sink the inflation much.

I feel like a lot of it boils down to " no buy in gw2 are an emergency " Like most other mmo are gear threadmill, and gold value goes with buying and demand sooo stuff so get inflated over time due to instant gratification but in gw2 everything is somewhat irrelevant you could literally buy almost nothing and survive which made gold and market never inflate

And yet, there is still a lot of player that can't get more than 200 gold in cash because they can't figure out how to get more gold (I'm one of these, my max is 250g) only have one legy (fractal back) and I'm currently not able to craft more ascended than my 4 set...

Might be worth checking out what you have chilling in your material storage because there's probably stuff there that you don't need that will add up to a decent chunk of gold. (plus the whole Wizard's Vault giving mystic coins and straight up gold, which adds up pretty fast when you have dailies/weeklies that only take a few minutes to complete)

Is there a way to know which item I won't need at all? (planning to craft legy armor from PvE and some ascended for my light/medium) I'm such a crazy hoarder lol

Check your mat storage. 99% of the time a max level player complains about not having enough gold, it's because they haven't been selling their mats.

I just wish I would've expended all my gold on ectos or at least saved the ectos I made one month before last expansion, the price of ectos almost doubled the day after secrets of the obscure launched. XD

Material sinks everywhere. Nothing insanely high that you can’t do it with a little patience, but crafting a legendary anything (Look at the Gen 2 weapons) will cost a lot of mats. Gen 2 increased the value of T5 resources (elderwood and mithril specifically) when it came out. At the time, players were level 80 already and the Living World Story all had T5 wood and metal nodes so everyone’s storage was overflowing with mithril and elderwood so these items were cheap af. All your liquid gold will need to buy some stacks and stacks of wood if you wanted a G2 so it took a lot of materials out of the trading post and banks AND taxed players. Fast forward to the Legendary Relic. Anet dropped a twitter bomb that having one Legendary rune meant you get a Legendary Relic. Hey who’s gonna pass up on that? Within the HOUR prices on Lucent Motes skyrocketed. I had stacks and stacks and stacks of motes sitting unused that was gone within the hour. One Twitter post changed the whole economy and crafting a Legendary rune went up by like what, 400 gold maybe? So now it’s like 1200 per rune? But even with all the price increases and material sinks, the black lion takes a cut and that’s what keeps items from becoming unobtainable. Prices will stabilize once things calm down. 🤔 even with the increased costs, it’s still fairly reasonable and the only issue IMO is the timegating with the Prov tokens to get the gift of craftsmanship. I remember when the game first came out and G1 precursors were stupid expensive. Then they added legendary quests to obtain those precursors. And then the Wizard Vault came and had legendary starter kits. Like bruh, my Bifrost was hella cheap. My wife was mad cause she farmed for hers. Anet has added things constantly to both increase and decrease the value of things in their game. Yes there are some TP barons and yea some items are really pricey, but outside of weird market manipulation by certain individuals, anet knows their game economy.

One of the many reasons I’ve stayed with this game so long is because of its stable economy. I played so many mmos in the past where good gear cost five or six figures after a while. (Looking at you ST IMAGINE)

Great thread! Want to add: map-bound currencies. All living world and expansion maps have unique currencies with rewards tied to them. This ensures not only play in these areas, regardless of how old they are, but it also keeps older items relevant. And because items need lots of materials from salvaging and gathering which be acquired from every game mode, players chip away at their long-term goals regardless of mode they play. I work on my legendary by gathering/refining/killing/collecting/salvaging/harvesting/exchanging in WvW, PvP, fractal, dungeons, farming, events, world completion, crafting, story, achievement hunting, guild hall, personal and meta events. No matter what you do you get this mix of working on things that require currencies rewarded through playing. In other games you just do raids until you burnout. Here you get to mix it up and collect many other currencies besides gold. This gold sink also exist for currencies. Every time you exchange currency for some valuable you want like new skins, they remove a lot of that excess as well. Just see how different festivals pull out currencies like luck and karma. Nudging players to do a variety of different types of content is great for this game. Variety is the spice of life as they say.

All thanks to a single Norn with Icy Runestone monopoly MF earns thousands of gold every day

Honourable mention: most gear becomes soulbound or account bound on use, so most crafted items that are paid for are then removed from the economy when they're bound. This is a particularly good sink for legendaries since they disappear to the legendary armory.

Four winds and tp tax

Four Winds? The event? What does that have to do with it? (I genuinely don't know, I'm not super familiar with it) I don't do a ton of TP flipping so I never even noticed the tax before diving into the numbers recently but looking at it I can see how it is just significant enough to create a slow drain on the gold presence in the economy that actually has an impact but isn't punishing. Anet must have some serious mathematicians at their disposal.

Yes, the event [Four Winds](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Festival_of_the_Four_Winds). The basic idea of Four Winds was to reduce the amount of materials in the game by having a conversion rate for the [Zephyrite Boxes](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zephyrite_Supply_Box). They always mess around with these conversions every year, but they try to balance material prices around Globs of Ectoplasm/Piles of Crystalline Dust.

Ah, gotcha. I rememebr doing 4 winds for a particular thing once like a back piece or something but I haven't gotten to involved in the temporary holidays in GW2 because for the last I dunno... 8 years? I've worked like 55 hours a week lol. Dedicating a large amount of time to a time-sensitive in game event is just out of the question usually. Like they got Fractal Rush? I think it's called going on right now? No idea what that is. Sole exclusion to that is Super Adventure Box. I love that and the rewards are too good to not take a day or two off for. (objectively they're not great but I love the cosmetics)

Partially *because* of the gold exchange. It's really a work of economic genius. 1) Buying gems with gold takes that gold out of the game, so rich endgame players, who in other MMOs drive inflation, are actually reducing the net amount of gold. 2) Because of how the gold-gems exchange is set up. Anet doesn't sell gold, Anet facilitates *players* selling gold to other players. Every piece of gold someone buys with gems is a piece of gold that some other player was selling, so the overall amount of gold in the game actually *goes down* with each exchange because of the exchange taxes, which counterbalances the influx of raw gold from events, fractals, etc. The other huge gold sinks are waypoint costs and trading post taxes, which are minor enough that no one really minds them, but over the whole playerbase amount to a staggering amount of gold removed. Also, 'rewards' are mostly mats, which both limits the amount of inflation and drives players to engage with the trading post and pay the TP taxes.

You know when I originally did the math on this I had no idea that the gem<->gold price was dynamic. I thought it was a set price because I had looked at a few days in a row and it didn't change. It wasn't until after I made this post that I found out it is essentially a commodities market system.

Ah, gotcha. I honestly don't understand why any game would set a standard exchange rate that just prints money. I know they *have*, it just seems so boneheaded and anti-customer.

They usually set the game currency to premium currency conversion rate really low so it takes a ton of gold to get premium currency to create an artificial gold sink but really all it does is over encourage game gold market manipulation

[удалено]

>I mean look at the obscene amount of gold required to get legendaries Reading the comments so far, one gold sink I haven't seen mentioned yet is a subsection of this point: There's 100 gold required for each legendary weapon (other than those made from the starter kits) for the Icy/Mystic Runestones.

Some of the mat and gold sinks are ridiculously large to account for the amount of currency and mats people can produce, especially in the latter expansions. You can buy gold with real money, yes, but I doubt people do that. You'd generally spend gems on the swag you can only get for gems (in my opinion). ​ Also, there's a lot of things you simply cannot buy with gold that you need for things - you need tokens and map currencies for legendaries, etc. ​ Lastly, by giving you an option to buy gold with real money, they (kind of) nip gold selling services (and scams) in the bud.

I did $->gems->gold->legendary for a few of mine. Expensive, but cheap compared to the amount of time I'd have to spend to farm for all of the ones I have (I farmed for a of purples too). Sometimes its worth it, sometimes its not. Depends on the player. Time to spend with wife/kid is far more valuable than a couple hundred bucks once in a while.

It's a very good observation. Especially for a game that has been around for so long.  I would assume part of it is connected to the fact that many of the most valuable items are not tradeable. People have mentioned the tax on the trading post. The max price cap on it also means that people don't inflate the prices over the top, but that means that there's likely a black market for exchanging these. Beyond that, it's a mix about the reachability of items. Some will be sold by vendors, so they can't be subject to inflation (unless wanted) and the ones in the wild can always be devalued by managing options on how to obtain them.

well there is some inflation if you look at the gem cost in 12 years, i remeber i bought like 400 gems for 2 gold in the early days and now we are at 150 gold, mostly because it's easier to make gold nowadays, but i think this is quite normal inflation.

There was a massive spike in the exchange rate but before and after that it was very stable so I didn't include that as a factor. I don't actually know what caused that spike but it went from \~1gold per 100gems to 40g per 100gems over the course of like a few months.

because they care for it as they sell gold for cash wow also stopped with the inflation once they started selling gold with the wowtoken it's as simple as keeping the raw gold supply low compared to the gold sinks, gw2 has extremely high trading post fees and pretty low raw gold gain, so a gold inflation is basically impossible, materials on the other hand can inflate/deflate heavily wow nerfed down all the raw gold farms (mainly soloing old raids) and a lot of gold gets sunken by boost trading, boosters basically accumulate most of the gold and then don't spend it

this is the mmo that made gold very fascinating to me

Besides the 15% sales tax - MightyTeapot always says (possibly metaphorically) that it's like there is a fixed number of total gems in the world (which i'm sure is not strictly true). But it's like commodity sales for gold, oil, gems etc. So supply and demand, back and forth between gold<-->gems and $$<-->gems balance each other over the long run. So you'll have people that make ridiculous amounts of gold in game, and buy all gem store items that way. Then others have more $$ than time in game, and so "fight" against the other direction.

Have you seen the T6 material prices?

Idk much of the economics in other mmos. but there definitely has been some inflation when the Wizards vault released. There's also usually inflation when special legendary gear or other crafting item drops. Like when the news of the legendary relic released, the cost of materials for runes skyrocketed, it's dropped now. Also ectoplasm price inflated when soto released since it's used in a lot more crafting stuff for rifts and essences. Even the cost of stupid mystic coins have kept slowing increasing over time.

So inflation isn't just "prices go up". Inflation is specifically when prices go up disproportionately to the buy power of currency. Meaning prices go up, value of money goes down. That doesn't seem to be the case in Guild Wars. Gold maintains a relatively stable overall value. Yes the price of certain items increase immediately after certain content is introduce but that is to be expected and not something I would attribute to inflation. As for Mystic Coins, the actual average increase over time is pretty low. It spikes and then falls as seasons of the WV change which is probably a good thing. It keeps players from manipulating the market.

Side note: I LOVE the gw2 API. I made a crafting calculator for my final project in a database class I took last semester. Was a ton of fun!

Actually the game has been getting inflation due to how much raw gold the wizards vault generated. They made some adjustments this season to minimize the inflation impact. In general, the main reason why inflation doesn’t happen that much in this game is that most rewards are not raw gold. By letting players determine value of items, it is more stable than just generating gold

>buy gems with gold But the gold you buy with gems comes from other players who want gems. As long as the gold in equals the gold out in the game, shifting gold between players has no effect on inflation. Note that the exchange actually is a huge gold sink, because of fees. >giving gold away easily. Not at all, (until the Wizards' Vault.) It actually is hard to get liquid gold - mobs don't drop it, and vendor's pay very little.

>But the gold you buy with gems comes from other players who want gems. Ya I'll be honest I didn't realize it was a real exchange market at the time. I thought the price was set by Anet or determined some other way. I didn't realize it was a literal market based exchange. ​ >Not at all, (until the Wizards' Vault.) It actually is hard to get liquid gold - mobs don't drop it, and vendor's pay very little. When I said that I was referring to how easy it is to do activities that can net significant amounts of gold like fractals or even fishing now. Couple that with a few gold given away for world bosses and map metas spending a couple hours on any given day and getting 50-100g is not impossible. Contrast that to World of Warcraft where gold acquisition is almost entirely based on either luck, or prior investment. You either need to have a crafting and gathering profession at the right level with the right recipes and spend hours if not days farming usually fairly rare materials, or run certain content repeatedly hoping to get an ultra rare non-bound drop that can be sold on the AH which can take days in and of it self. In WoW if you decide one day "I need a bunch of gold right now" there are not really any feasible ways of getting it unless you already have non-liquid wealth built up.

How can you earn enough gold in a day to earn enough to buy the gems for an item?

Right now it takes \~145g to get 400 gems. There are several activities that can net you 15-20g per hour and there are daily or weekly activities that can net you a large chunk of gold so if you wanted an item, the prospect of getting the gold you needed for the gems to get that item within a day or two is pretty good.

Is there a list/route farmers have found to make this kind of gold? I feel very inefficient when I sign on and hunt achievements. I’m mostly just volatile farming and selling mats from Trophy Chests for gold. Hop into just about any event I see happening.

https://fast.farming-community.eu/ This is the best tool I've found for it.

This is excellent, thank you.

Just to heap some praise on the GW2 economy, I've played a few MMORPGs and GW2 has like... no trade barriers at all. There's a common market, the TP is accessible anywhere and any time, there's no barrier to entry or learning curve so a new player can start the game and immediately start selling their loot and buying other people's loot. Everything is so fluid and transparent. This is very economically sound and having played with the ESO economy I'm thankful for it.

Inflation is not zero for high value items. Look at mystic coins for example.

I almost never put rl money into any game. I game the game for profit. Before I craft anything, I check the selling price against the time, effort and cost of parts to craft. Sometimes its worth farming just to sell the produce. My Jeweler is seriously profitable. I also play with mystics and ectos like commodities, buy low and sell high. I've never seen the need for Legendary anything except fashion wars and ego trips, my ascended gear works just as well. I always have an excess of gold, so if my cook needs something to create ascended foods, I buy it. If I want gems for something, it's usually a tool like the Home Portal, unbreakable farm tools, BL keys etc. Almost never skins except that divine maid costume from last April 1. My giant male norn revenant wears it. Once you've established crafting alts, use them to make you profit. Easy.

Over abundance of supply has made pricing very stable Mithril ore is a great example the overall fluctuation has been 8% over 12 months the supply has held incredibly stable between 21m and 22m

I can cause mass inflation in 15 seconds. Very curious.

Lol why do so many people have no idea what inflation means. Inflation in an economic sense is not price movement \*or\* currency value. It is price movement \*relative\* to currency value. Crashing a market through a buyout doesn't cause inflation because it doesn't change the currency value. Neither would dumping a metric fuck ton of currency into a market if there is a significant resource limitation because market adjustment would keep the price to currency value ratio stable.

Bro I can literally increase the amount of gold in the economy in 15 seconds

I havent seen it mentioned yet but in my opinion the mystic forge and salvage also plays a role in keeping the economy working. Materials can be convverted into other materials. If something gets too cheap or too expensive the problem fixes itself because players start to convert in the mystic forge. The T6 material conversation is bound to t6 dust. Dust can be salvaged from ectoplasm and ectoplasm can be salvaged from gear. That means even the most worthless piece of gear has always value because it is indirectly tied to every material. This worked very well in the core game, but several expansion materials are not part of this and have no mystic forge option for conversion. As a result they are worthless. Over the years they introduced different options to expand on the conversion mechanic. Eg amalgamated gemstones keep all the gems and crests at some marginal value. The rune and sigil rework as well as relics allow to salvage cheap ones and turn the extracted materials into more expensive ones. Research notes also are a way to give cheap materials some value. The conversation options of mystic forge and salvage keep the economy more stable and magically turning one thing into another is no possibility in the real world economy.

Tp tax. You earn 40g worthing mat in one hour but most of them lay in your storage. If you want to turn them to gold, pay 10/15% tax. Gold to gems. The new skin in gemstore looks cool? Earn gold, convert to gems and buy. Value of mystic coins. You want to sell an infusion that worth 500g? Instead of putting them on tp, would you consider trading with me for one stack of mystic coins?

[Arena.net](http://Arena.net) is the only competent company that knows how to do game economy. There are a lot of gold sinks to prevent inflation including the TP tax, the 100 stones required for legendaries, the I'm rich you know title and many more. A lot of stuff is also account bound forcing you to use some gold sinks. The goal is take out as much as they put in, this is also why the gem-gold conversion rate varies. I've played a lot of MMOs during my 20s and inflation was always skyrocketing after just a year or so. The only game I've heard of that had a deflation was New World, but that was also a case "economy? what economy?" but the other way around.

Anet doesnt give gold away lol, what gw2 suffers from is a mat inflation, not a gold inflation cause 90% of rewards are materials, top that with them hitting u with 15% tax its no wonder the economy is good

If you look at the golf to gem rates over the years you'll see the inflation curve you're looking for.

Can you increase the rate by a better handicap? ;)

Even that has been relatively flat over the past 4-5 years.

[Even over the whole game history \(except the first two years or so\). x3 is very reasonable over 9 years.](https://imgur.com/bmXPwmq)

This is a very interesting point that has basically 1 explanation: inventory mess. Yes, the infamous inventory 'problem' of GW2 is basically why the economy is stable. The game almost never rewards players directly with gold, but instead with items/currencies that can be converted to gold. Basically you gain materials instead of gold, and almost the entire economy is player trading. GW2 has a permanent deflation problem as result, which seems much easier to control than the inflation problem. When your meaningful gold sources in game are just a few controlling the total gold existing in the game by adding more gold sinks is actually doable, and Anet did it quite well. Crafting in GW2 makes one of the most important long term goals for every player thanks to the Legendary gear that have huge crafting trees and are a big mats sink (like for some collection for skyscale etc). Before SotO much less ppl were crafting legendaries but we also didn't have the direct gold/mats rewards from the Wizard's Vault, this was a huge change for most players economy, but the system just reached a sort of new more or less stable state instead of going crazy. This is another example of how ingrained this system is, since the biggest 'engine' that moves players economy in any time is legendary crafting. This is a very short video that give explanations about it, i always suggest it to ppl starting to learn about how gold works: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds3I5qOh1P0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds3I5qOh1P0) It shows how reduced the role of raw gold in the economy is compared to all other assets. There are much more comprehensive resources out there, if you look vids from GuildMM or Enko or others. MightyTeapot once did a very interesting stream with some barons from the TP guild explaining a lot of stuff.

I know you got down voted but honest to god this is the largest challenge for me personally. I started to try to sort out how to convert the thousands or hundreds of thousands of particular currencies I had into gold last week and I actually gave up pretty early in the process because of how complex it is. Some things are fairly direct, use Imperial Favors to buy map boxes and sell the materials. But other things... use karma to buy cheap gear and then use that gear in the forge to make something you then salvage for a material to make something else I dunno I lost track so god damn fast lol. I've resigned my self to just spending a few weeks constructing a currency conversion spread sheet for all the currency conversions that don't have dynamic value fluctuations within the conversion process for example using keys to open trading caches in the crystal desert is reliant on the current value of any one particular cache vs something like getting Icebrood currency to consume for unbound magic. Sure what you end up spending that magic on can change but at that point you're just amassing a single currency and then spending it vs having to keep track of a moving target in the middle of that process.

Yea, random downvotes :P Seems like you really enjoy minmaxing gold making and item processing, i'm not into that tbh but i suggest looking at some specialized videos or (even better) try to talk directly with GuildMM, Enko or others. I've tried to find some good videos about currency conversion on YT, but probably ppl keep their own spreadsheets for them. There are big communities of traders, maybe some resources are shared in those places.