As we stand on the brink of Guild Wars 2’s fifth living story season – I mean, Saga – players are nervous for the launch tomorrow and how it’ll all shake out. Well, stop worrying about all that and worry about money instead!
Pretend money, that is. YouTuber Wooden Potatoes has posted a lengthy (even for him) video featuring a discussion with a couple of representatives of Guild Wars 2’s One Percent quite literally, who give a bit of advice on how to make extreme piles of Guild Wars 2 gold so that you too can become a “trading post baron.” Why would anybody do this? The lead rep says it’s to increase the overall wealth in the game and re-create the missing “middle class” in the game, which he argues is a problem in the game and the economy.
As Wooden Potatoes rightly surmises, the community response has indeed been cynical so far, as this is a community that has seen insider trading scandals among ArenaNet’s handpicked player testers. While some folks call what these players are doing a pyramid scheme, it’s not (and in fact you can read our last Lawful Neutral for a rundown on how to define that for games). What these rich folks are doing is talking players with gobs of unused soulbound currencies (like spirit shards) into swapping them for specific mats and then buying the mats from those players, ideally through places like r/GW2Exchange to avoid broker fees. The clear benefit to encouraging more “middle class” players to sell those currencies is to make the 1% even more from the additional legendaries they’ll be able to craft, yes, but everyone in the process makes money. Well, except the people buying the legendaries in the end.
Either way, it’s not really something everyone can do, but it’s certainly something folks can learn from. And we don’t just mean players; one of the points raised in the video (and on Reddit) is that ArenaNet should be doing a better job of making the exchange systems in the game (including the Mystic Toilet) significantly more transparent so that the average player understands how they work to begin with.
It’s a long watch, but something to do while you wait for the rollout of tomorrow’s update.
