Guild Wars 2 To Basically Sell Gold

[Confucius]

Today a new developer article was posted on the Guild Wars 2 site. The article talked about micro transactions and how they work in Guild Wars 2. The main thing that you get out of the article is that Guild Wars 2 will have three types of currency, the classic tradeable gold, untradeable karma (think honor or justice points), and tradeable gems that you buy from the store. Now these gems are not an item, they are an actual currency that is tradeable to other players and can be bought directly from Guild Wars 2.

It seems like an okay platform, until you realize that these gems will most likely be traded for gold; in fact Arena Net hopes that is what players will do.

This will greatly affect the game in many ways, for example the RMT industry for the game will most likely be non existent, or very cheap. And gold will have a lot less value as players can basically just buy it straight from Arena Net themselves.

Here is the full article by Mike O'brien.

In this month’s closed beta event, we’ll do some early testing of the Guild Wars 2 microtransactions system. Our microtransaction content isn’t nailed down yet, but we have a good framework in place to support it. So, I’d like to take a moment to explain our goals and the system we have developed to meet them.


We believe in microtransactions because they fund ongoing development of the game in a very straightforward and open way. You, the customer, get to decide how much money you spend on the game after launch, based on how compelling it is to you. You get a complete and playable game no matter what, but we think we can provide additional content and services that you’d be happy to pay for. And when you pay for them, you help fund our support of Guild Wars 2 in a way that benefits all players of the game.


Here’s our philosophy on microtransactions: We think players should have the opportunity to spend money on items that provide visual distinction and offer more ways to express themselves. They should also be able to spend money on account services and on time-saving convenience items. But it’s never OK for players to buy a game and not be able to enjoy what they paid for without additional purchases, and it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who spend time.
I know none of this is new; the original Guild Wars also had microtransactions. But microtransactions were an afterthought in Guild Wars, whereas with Guild Wars 2, we had an opportunity to integrate the microtransaction system from the ground up, giving players more options and more convenience without sacrificing our design principles. So, here’s what we’re doing differently this time.


In Guild Wars 2 we have three currencies: gold, karma, and gems. Gold is the common in-game currency. Karma, which players earn in-game but cannot trade, is used for unique rewards. And gems are the currency that’s bought and used to purchase microtransactions.


We have a new player-driven market that allows players to trade gold for gems and gems for gold. If you want something, whether it’s an in-game item or a microtransaction, you ultimately have two ways to get it: you can play to earn gold or you can use money to buy gems. We think that’s important, because it lets more players participate on a level playing field, whether they use their free time or their disposable income to do it.


MMO veterans will note the similarities of our system to EVE Online’s PLEX system. As in that case, our system takes gold trading out of the hands of real-money trading (RMT) companies and puts it directly in the hands of players.



We think that’s a great thing.



From a player’s perspective, RMT companies have all the wrong motivations: the more money they make from selling gold, the more they spam ads in the game, run bot networks to farm gold, and hack accounts to loot them for gold. Conversely, under our system, players have all the right motivations. If a player buys gold from another player, he gets the gold he wants, the selling player gets gems she can use for microtransactions, and ArenaNet generates revenue from the sale of gems that we can use to keep supporting and updating the game. Everyone wins.


We also like the tradability of gems and gold because it makes the rest of the game’s economy more compelling. We’ll have a player-to-player Trading Post in the game—it’s like an auction house but better—which we’ll discuss in an upcoming blog post. Because gems can be traded for gold and vice versa, we don’t need two different trading systems, one for gold and one for gems. In Guild Wars 2, everything on the Trading Post is traded for gold, but of course, somebody who wants to earn gems can just sell items for gold, and then convert the gold to gems.


We have always taken our responsibility to players seriously with the original Guild Wars, and we will continue to do so with Guild Wars 2. We believe the foundation I’ve described here is the right foundation for us to build upon, and we look forward to sharing more details with you in the future as we nail down our microtransaction content.

-Mike O’Brien

What do you guys think about this?

[TehVoyager]

i think that ArenaNet and NcSoft were going to do it
Or someone else was going to do it.

this way, NcSoft can control it, and protect the markets.

[naxxgor]

Not very sure yet, but it seems OK. We'll see when it goes live.

[menacelol]

You guys should read this Guild Wars 2 - TheTyrianOrder - Home - Guild Wars 2 - Understanding the gem system - Community website

You dont buy the gold from ArenaNet themselves but rather from other players.

Quoted from the article

Doesn't this system allow players to sell a ton of gems and become rich - very fast?

To put it simply, no. As anyone with any knowledge about economies knows, there is something called supply and demand. Basically, if people rush out and buy a ton of gems and try to sell them as soon as possible - it will flood the market. Consequently, the price of gems will go down as the market is saturated with gems and sellers will have to lower their prices - to compete with other sellers.

[pushedx]

That's a good read, thanks for sharing. I'm not too worried about the system as a whole myself until it's finalized and we can see it implemented first hand. From a gaming perspective, I love micro-transactions. Even on a P2P game, not being able to buy various vanity items or cosmetic things just doesn't feel as good as being able to.

The only real issue with it that I see so far is that you should never, ever, ever allow game currency purchasable with money to be traded with in game currency that can be freely obtained. There's no way they could stop fraud or realistically regulate the market for it. People will find ways to exploit it and for a game as high profile as GW2 will be, you can be sure there will be people who don't make the classic mistake of telling everyone of their exploits and getting it patched.

I've yet to see many games that this actually worked in without having problems in one form or another. Eve's problem is a lot different in nature than most other games, but is an inherent problem non-the-less. Mostly, I've seen this in F2P games that didn't quite have the staffing or resources as ArenaNet does, so if anyone could possibly pull it off, besides Blizzard with Diablo 3, I'd not bet against ArenaNet being able to eventually do it, but it will take time.

However, I'd still be cautious because of how fast things can spiral out of control with such systems unless a lot of safe guards are put into place to begin with. Since this is ArenaNet's first go at this type of system, I'd be surprised if they won't hit all the necessary bases at first. Just because they model their system around EvE's, that doesn't mean it'll actually work the same way. EvE has been around a long time and has done a lot of growing, so GW2 will have to as well.