User:Quizzical/No Economy

As you know, Obsidian armor is insanely hard to get, and should be made much cheaper. Or maybe it's far too easily obtainable to be the ultimate prestige armor, and should be made much more expensive. Vendor prices on black dye are ridiculously high, and it desperately needs a higher drop rate. This is because there are so many people running around in all black armor that it's not much of a status symbol anymore. This or that sword is way too hard to get, but it isn't worth much anymore because it's been overfarmed.

While critics can't agree on the cause, they do all seem to agree that ArenaNet has spoiled the game economy. You can find a plethora of mutually contradictory explanations of how the economy is in depression or worse.

There is only one reasonable rebuttal to such claims: what economy? Guild Wars has an economy?

Sure, you need a bit of gold to buy skills and max armor. You get all of the gold you need for that and more in the normal course of playing through the game. Just playing the game will likewise get you enough to buy runes, insignias, and perfect weapons, equip heroes, and so forth. It may take a little trading to get the weapons you want, but only a little. It certainly doesn't take any farming at all.

So what is this economy that people are so worried about? It's all a bunch of vanity items. Sure, our armors may be functionally identical, but mine is better than yours because it was more expensive. Even though yours looks nice and mine looks kind of dumb. And my weapon is likewise better than yours, because I paid 100k for it, and you didn't. Never mind that yours has better mods than mine, and you don't even know what weapon I have because it doesn't display in towns. (Of course, the reason why you don't know that I have such a fancy weapon is that I don't.)

And, umm, so what? If it's too easy or too hard to get obsidian armor, who cares? It doesn't matter a bit to gameplay.

This irrelevance to gameplay is a good thing. It means that ArenaNet can balance skills without having to worry that they'll tweak farming in unpredictable ways and destroy the economy. Instead, they can tweak skills while only having to worry about how it will affect gameplay. Well, at least they pay attention to how it affects pvp play-balance, even if they long ago abandoned any facade of caring about pve play-balance.

In order to have a meaningful economy, a game has to be entirely built around the economy. In a game based around combat, that puts heavy restrictions on what the company can do in missions and quests. Every little detail must be heavily scrutinized to avoid unbalanced farming opportunities. If they slip up, the company has to constantly be watching to revert changes and contain the damage promptly. In short, if the game were based around the economy, we wouldn't have nearly the variety of missions or skills--and the gameplay would suffer greatly for it.

Indeed, when ArenaNet does blunder and make something too easy to get, in a game without much of an economy, it's just an inconsequential blip. Instead of requiring large rollbacks or forever spoiling the game, economic catastrophes come and go with hardly a notice. Anyone recall the great duping bug scandal of last fall? I'll bet that many players who actively played the game then never knew that there was a problem to begin with.

But isn't there much to be gained by having a deep economy? Perhaps, but it's a different sort of game, targetting a different sort of player. Most of the type of players that Guild Wars is targetted towards wouldn't like such a game. An economic game gives players the opportunity to gain much by smart management of their resources, but it also gives them the chance to lose much. Most people don't have that strong of a grasp of basic economics (see, for example, politicians proposing increasing taxes on oil companies as the solution to high gas prices--and without promptly being laughed out of office), and would tend to be in the latter category. And they would scream to ArenaNet about it, and demand that the game be changed to protect them from themselves. That is, they would demand that the economy be neutered.

ArenaNet chose instead to avoid all of that fuss. The game would be built around combat, rather than being built around an economy.

So no, this or that proposal to fix the game economy won't work. It's not merely trying to cure a disease that the patient doesn't have. It's trying to cure a disease when the patient doesn't exist.