Hey economy fiends. Got a fun one for you over in Guild Wars 2 this week. You’ll recall that last week’s living world update including beautiful Requiem and Elegy armor sets, the former highly prized with its animated glow. Yay, cool cosmetic gear, right? Well, the Guild Wars 2 community is definitely happy about that part – but less happy about how it’s crafted, or more specifically, how rare some of its component bits turn out to be.
The component in question is called the Superior Sigil of Nullification. As one of the more detailed Reddit posts on this topic lays out in clear detail, while there are plenty of other expensive materials going into the crafting of this armor, the sigil is so much rarer and used at such a high rate in this armor that its going rate on the market has skyrocketed to 400 times its pre-patch value. It basically went from being vendor trash for mid-level characters to being something that only a very small number of folks can afford – making this new armor set more expensive than some legendary armor itself.
A second thread estimates that only around 1250 people have managed to unlock the armor so far, based on the number of sigils sold throughout the game in the last week, which again seems a bit weird for armor that is 1) not legendary, 2) fashion wars fodder, and 3) kind of a headline feature of a living story episode intended for everyone to play. It’s simply not clear whether the decision to use this particular sigil for crafting was an oversight or an intentional attempt to limit the armor’s circulation (or get people to farm level 67 gear again? maybe? but probably not?).
Not everyone is grumpily whipping out phone calculators to point out how Guild Wars 2’s economy is broken once again; other folks are noting that given a year’s time, the economy for sigils should sort itself out; claiming that people are just being lazy and cheap (yes, it literally devolved into a “no-lifer” fight); and insisting it’s a justified gold sink (though sigils are actually a bad gold sink, being indirect through AH fees at best). One person even points out that ArenaNet may wind up scrapping future episodic sets like this if people shy away from the grind and the expense. Either way, it’s not clear what if anything ArenaNet means to do it about it, and it’s unlikely to do anything for at least another week.
Remember back when all we had to argue about was the price of butter? Good times.
