I just read a great post over at game developer Psychochild’s blog. In it, he addresses various issues plaguing Guild Wars 2’s economy. Guildwar 2’s failed economy is part of why I didn’t stick around there – I love being able to be a crafter and merchant and make money. When I was playing, however, crafting was a straight gold sink and the trading post was a clusterfudge.
Here are my impressions on what went wrong with the GW2 trading post:
– Worldwide Trading Post: by not limiting this to smaller markets of individual servers, it becomes very hard for individuals or groups of people to change the market prices. This may seem good, but what it means is that the greater common denominator of clueless sellers wins out, as you can see in the Trading Post, to the point where they had to implement a feature so you couldn’t sell items below their freaking vendor price! Attempting to tweak market prices is simply not possible on a scale this large without the coordination of a LOT of players with a LOT of gold.
– Anywhere access to the Trading Post: This is a huge problem. While it seems great to a questing player to be able to toss up junk on the TP without having to go there in person, what it means is that people are using the TP as a mobile vendor to sell whatever is in their inventory. There is no thought or strategy to the postings, and people don’t care if the items are sold far below market value; they just want them out of their inventory. Items then bypass a basic auction house price floor – without the mobile trading post, people would have to decide if it is worth selling an item to a vendor or on the trading post. Convenience overrules this type of decision. ANet’s later addition of a “minimum price” on the TP didn’t really fix this. It just bumped the price floor up.
– Deceptive/Unwieldly UI: The trading post has a high chunk of hidden costs built into it, which seem designed to actually discourage people from using it to build up a healthy server economy. In addition to the cost you are told about, there is also another chunk of money taken out if you sell the item (I think it’s 15%; it’s been a while since I read ANet forums). These fees also scale really badly, especially at the low end of price ranges. The lack of expiry time on auctions and the hidden additional costs for using the TP combine with an awkward UI to make it a headache to really use beyond casually. It’s hard to make money by buying out and relisting (and thus bumping prices up) due to the heavy listing costs. Sure, you lose money by doing this normally – but when the listing fee costs nearly half as much as the item, it’s not worth it.
There might be further problems with the ease of gathering and drop rates for items, however I think limiting TP access would actually go a decent ways towards addressing that. When players actually have to make decisions about inventory, gathering becomes a more specialized job. As is, everyone can just gather as they go and post raw mats up when their inventory gets full. If that was disallowed and you had to plan how to unload your collected mats, many players would drop out of the gathering market, deeming the time:profit ratio not worth it. Supply would go down and prices would naturally rise.
In short, I get the feeling that the whole thing was designed by someone who hates auction house players and wanted to make a system to “prevent” them from playing the market. It’s expensive to use the market as a merchant, the market is far too easy to use to just unthinkingly slap up items and the lack of an expiry date means that the low priced auctions just keep building up – and it’s not worth it financially to buy them out, since you can’t hope to control a global market. The problem is…we need auction house players. These players keep the economy vibrant and help ensure items retain value.
Many people probably intensely dislike reading that, but auction house players can actually be an asset to a healthy economy. Yes, some of them are jerks and drive out others from the market – but without pressure to push prices upwards, we see situations where constant undercuts drive prices down. There needs to be a counterbalance pushing upwards as well and auction house players provide a stable one.
a little bit of everything all of the time 
Your first two points agree with my premise: there’s no meaningful scarcity. As you say, if you can post from anywhere people will, just to get it out of inventory. The game was just designed to focus on convenience, so it’s unlikely those elements will change.
I’ve been trying out a bit of speculation by “flipping” materials on the trading post. It’s very profitable when it works, but markets don’t last long before someone is moving in on your territory, it seems. I think it really appeals to the gambler element, though, which is something I’m not overly fond of on a personal level. But, there are some fans out there.
Thanks for the link and comment on my blog!
One trick I can suggest for playing the market is bag buying. Certain bags of stuff, like the “Bag of Experimental Materials” and whatnot, ON AVERAGE yield contents worth more than the bag’s purchase. You can put out buy orders for huge chunks of those and make profit just by opening them and reposting. That’s really the most fun I’ve had on the market; I’m not a big fan of it otherwise, unlike in WoW where I have every profession at max and spend hours each week doing all my profession stuff! GW2 really seems to lack that exciting factor of a fun economy, like you mentioned. I remember the first time I used the WoW auction house, I was like, “OH WOW! I can make money by finding certain things!” (I then spent the rest of vanilla fishing up deviate fish to make deviate delights to sell on the neutral AH…. >_>) GW2’s trading post really lacks that feeling of there being potential markets for merchants willing to work at it.
Maybe when they sort out the whole server situation (servers still bounce between absolutely full and then back open to free transfers) and set up guesting, they will be able to establish local, server-based versions of the trading post. Doing that before they cement server “home bases” and shut off the free transfers will just open up TONS of room for exploitation across servers of local values. However, while the economy is global, it’s simply not gonna fix. It’s way too big for a fun GAME economy – as you mentioned, the success for a game economy relies on it being fun. For many people who are serious about playing the merchant role, fun means that you feel able to help shape it.
As a fellow goblin I have to agree the Auction House in GW2 is a little clunky but I’m personally okay with this. I’ve spent a lot of years leveling alts and professions, keeping up with the gold bloggers, and addons in WoW. When I first hit the gold cap, somewhere around the beginning of WoTLK it was exciting, but I found each time I hit it, and even after they bumped it up I was just doing so because I had fallen into a habit.
Okay addiction really. Because even to this day I have to give away gold because I have no use for it outside of helping our poorer raiders get geared up a little quicker.
I’m really enjoying GW2 because of the ways it’s different from WoW. I’m just running around killing things and socializing, without all the micromanagement that comes with playing the economy and raiding. It’s refreshing.
That’s a good point – I actually caught myself the other day starting down the road to true goldmaking ruin. I started getting into an undercutting war with another player over glyph prices. I sat back and realized I had just spent an hour to earn 50 gold – the competition itself was heady and I got lost in the buzz! – and I admonished myself. Casual goldmaking, Kaliy! I still enjoy seeing my account go up gradually, but I’m happy enough to have that happen around my other gameplay, instead of it being a main focus. Props to you and your coinage! I have yet to reach that mark myself.
I think with GW2 it’s partially frustrating because it feels like you can’t make a profit as a casual. You really can only eke out a few silver here and there unless you put a lot of effort in, and I know that kills the fun for many people. My boyfriend, for example, likes harvesting stuff and selling it. He’s amassed about 30k gold for himself in WoW and gets excited every time someone buys a new batch of ore. He doesn’t get that kind of feeling in GW2.