6th Year Economist Bonus

Some of the new 6th Year tonics are 200+ ectos... What I'm wondering is, why are these tonics even tradeable? They're a 6th Year Anniversary gift to old players, but there are people who come in to the game, play for maybe 6 months, abuse the economy to become insanely rich and buy whatever they want.

The point of a video game is to play it. I'm sick of Arena Net catering to the rich. Almost every high-end or extraordinary item that has come into the game since EOTN is just a bonus for speed clearers or rich people.

...

It's the exact same as with any mini. It's a reward for having played for a long time. And in the grand scheme of things, 200e is paltry compared to what you can get just playing the game.

"It's a reward for having played for a long time."

Exactly. So why does anet give these things to the market?

Well, I feel the the price of them will drop...maybe just a bit, but they will drop. There is no use for them in the HoM like there is for minis, plus more people will slowly be getting them over time.

B-day gifts have always been tradeable from the start. If a person has a character for 4...5...6 years, and he/she wants to sell the reward for having a character that old, I say it's their call.

As for Anet catering to rich people/speed clearers...you can always do speed clears, get rich, and then be catered to by Anet. =)

You know that Anet doesn't set the price for these things and that the players do, right? It's not like they can say "You cannot sell this item for more than 100k" or anything like that.

They'll drop in price - they already are dropping from what they were at Thursday night.

I'm always a little iffy on the GW economy but ultimately it's not an item that can be purchased by a merchant, so basically is just ecto being passed from one person to another. I don't think it really affects the overall economy other than maybe taking some ecto out of some of the hoarders and putting in the hands of some people who might actually spend them on armor or even merch them.

Also, considering that every birthday they are probably less active players actually getting the "big present" every year, the overall value of the trades is probably no different then it was last year for the 5th year minis.

Prices are dropping fast...As with every new thing prices are very high at start and will drop. Do NOT buy these items at the high prices unless you have nothing else to spend on as they are only rare for a short amount of time.

Here shortly there will be ppl that will "get stuck" with paying alot for these and have considerable buyers remorse..if they had the intention of making profits off them. They will continue to try for high prices...just know not to buy at them and wait for non-idiot to sell at reg price.

as stated, prices will drop fast as they don't do anything for the HOM unlike previous minis. Anyways, it's a well-established pattern that ANet will give players a new line of gifts for each year their character has existed. It's up to other players and the economy to assign them whatever price if people want to sell them. You seem a bit butthurt for something you knew was coming and has a justification.

It's simple capitalism.

Cool new thing in limited supply.
People want cool new thing.
Limited supply forces price up.

In a year, the greens won't even be 100e. I'm fairly sure of that.

It is a Lose Lose situation for every company that rewards long term players. If the item is tradable.. people howl cause the Vets make money. If it is not tradeable.. the same people will howl that they cannot ever get one and the Vets have something they can't have.

It's FLUFF. Calm thyself.

200e is nothing compared to playing the game??? What game are you playing? Numerous people have played through the entire game HM and NM and haven't amassed nearly as much as that.

Quit trolling. Use moar facts.

Now if you had said that the tonics were given at random just like the previous gifts, and that the random odds of obtaining one that was worth 200e was still left up to chance, I'd give you more credit. However the price base for these tonics are nowhere near the value of the original oldest year/rarest minipets. But all of this can be attributed to new rares being introduced to the game, where the only way to obtain more is to wait for other characters to age and then randomly generate more. The prices of these will go down as market supply increase, but they still will be excessively expensive. Why? beacuse there is simply nothing left to buy in the game to people who have amased x000s of ectos.

I agree with your arguments , but it would be quite a pain for people who're 1-2 years old ( even 4 year in fact lol) to have to wait a very long time to get one of those tonic...
Plus , for collectors , i let you imagine the situation : poor guy got 3 times taklora tonic for example , what shall he do ??

Problem is just the months/years of abusive farms recently thanks to some skills and consumables , which lead to incredible prices , that's all....Today , i noticed that ecto is getting the only money and cash isn't really used anymore lol..... People rather merch items worth 4-5k or less , and buy high end items with only ectos...
I used to see people saying " WTS xxx 100k +15e " , now for a few weeks , i'm only seeing " WTS xxx 40e " Why ? Because 100k =14-15e and most players have storage full with 1000k ... And guess how those 1000k are used at when they want to make space.... Buying ectos...

Anything that's rare will be valuable and the people with the most money will help set the price. Are you suggesting ANet should never add any other rare items to the game? Everything else they add should always be plentiful and easy to get?

Or do you want to suggest that all rare items and such should be non-tradable? Maybe that works in some cases. But that would rather suck for these latest birthday tonics. If they were non-tradable, then it's all luck. Anyone who gets a cool tonic is lucky, anyone who gets a crappy tonic is screwed, and no one has any way to do anything about it. I can imagine there would have been numerous complaints asking for them to be tradable because people would want ways to get at the tonics weren't lucky enough to receive.

Another thing you don't seem to have considered... these tonics are initially given out without consideration of how "rich" a player is. A "poor" player could get a rare tonic and sell it off for what might be a huge sum from his perspective. So while the richest players may be buying them up, that means their wealth is being distributed a bit.

Personally, I'm not rich and I can somewhat sympathize with the disappointment that I won't be able to afford a Destroyer or Margonite tonic. But that really doesn't bother me very much and I've more than gotten over it. In fact, I've made a nice profit selling the tonic I did get, so overall the way they did things has been beneficial to me.

/thread

People will always find something to complain about.

Set a 1000 gold cap on any merchant transactions. That would make the existing gold trade cap between players actually meaningful. Problem solved.

It does seem like the trade chat is dominated by high end trades where maybe a couple years ago you would still see a lot of "WTS Totem Axe 3k" kind of stuff. I'm also seeing a lot more people wanting arms as their trading commodity which used to be kind of rare to see. And I agree, no one wants gold anymore. And that does surprise me considering that with the seven hero update, I bet a massive amount of gold got dumped into rune traders, skill traders, and weapons crafters as people outfitted heroes on multiple toons. If anything, I would think that a lot of people would be converting their ecto back into gold as they needed to spend it.

The better question is why do the people that have them, sell them? If they didn't sell them, there would be no market.

correction - if people wouldnt pay absurd amounts for them they wouldnt sell them

They aren't given to the market. People decide to sell them. It's basicly how all economy works. I got a home but not a car atm. If I would be given a second house cause I did some great, I would possibly trade it for a car (and yes some other need stuff, cause most houses are more expensive then most cars).

Same goes here, 6 year vet gets a tonic. But he actually need an obsidian armor for his HoM cause he never liked doing/farming uw over and over nor farm for the money. So he sells the tonic to get his obsidian armor.

If he couldn't sell his el tonic, he would be left with a useless tonic while he actually need something else.

Beside with non tradable el tonics I would have missed the fun having our gh filled with Vekks, wobling around the place cause one of our 6 year vets have been giving us free zips of his tonic .

too bad by the time the become fairly priced . .. gw2 will probably be out.

by then . .well who cares.

anyone wants to sell one at fair price ill be on the 16 rings workin on unlucky. if not no biggy.