A slight change within the Chinese model of Guild Wars 2 triggered a bug that deleted all of the potatoes on the planet. ArenaNet was conducting a “little revamp” in one of many game’s opening areas once they unintentionally worn out the staple meals, game director Crystin Cox revealed at Pax West’s game economies panel this weekend.
When the Guild Wars 2 world group came upon there was widespread potato panic, gamers began to purchase enormous portions of potatoes in concern that AreaNet would quickly take away them from the worldwide model of the game.
In the three days it took for the bug to be eliminated, the value of potatoes sky rocketed. Some economically savvy gamers purchased up potato shares within the hope of promoting them for a excessive worth as a soon-to-be-rare merchandise.
Potatoes within the Guild Wars 2 universe are used to create, unsurprisingly, quite a few culinary dishes together with leek and potato soup and a humble cup of potato fries. More outlandishly, 25 potatoes are wanted to make unidentified brown dye and 1,000 potatoes are used to improve the vital harvesting guild enchantment. That’s loads of potatoes.
During the panel, Cox defined how this potato inflation was an instance of how digital economies may be reflections of real-world financial actions. She defined that there’s “really interesting, really valid stuff we can learn by watching people interact this way”. She went on to say that games ought to have open economies the place gamers and builders can have an area to experiment with financial techniques.
If you need to observe the Guild Wars 2 potato market and look at it’s riveting historical past, here’s the page for that.
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