the value of copper, silver and gold

[ChartFish.1308]

From a player perspective a few coppers and silvers are usually pretty worthless. From the perspective of someone who "lives" in Tyria though, **how much is each coin worth** relative to modern day currency, just for the sake of comparison? Ignoring the TP or anything that changes based on player interaction.

Looking at different foods sold from NPC vendors I can get sort of a rough idea, ~50 copper for a bowl of soup would equal to what, perhaps $8? A bottle of rice wine is 16 copper, would perhaps become ~$3? How much coin would you need to buy, say a house, or rent a room in a tavern. How much gold would you ideally need to be set for life etc etc.

I know some stuff can't be really compared with Tyria vs IRL because different worlds, different needs etc, but I'd like to get an idea of what the copper/silver/gold currency is worth.

[Tamur.6503]

Very tough to tell. Two problems with determining this are 1) the lack of prices such as you mentioned (inn room, house), and 2) the granularity of the vendor prices. The TP is going to be worthless as far as showing what an actual Tyrian (rather than a hero out slaying things) would be able to pay.

 

A couple of examples of the problem with granularity: you can sell starter boots for the same price as a carrot (1c), or a green wood plank for the same price as an ale (2c). The ale = green plank price I can kind-of see, but I would have guessed the boots would have been the priciest of that lot.

 

Will be interested to see what info is shared here.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"ChartFish.1308" said:

> From a player perspective a few coppers and silvers are usually pretty worthless. From the perspective of someone who "lives" in Tyria though, **how much is each coin worth** relative to modern day currency, just for the sake of comparison? Ignoring the TP or anything that changes based on player interaction.

> Looking at different foods sold from NPC vendors I can get sort of a rough idea, ~50 copper for a bowl of soup would equal to what, perhaps $8? A bottle of rice wine is 16 copper, would perhaps become ~$3? How much coin would you need to buy, say a house, or rent a room in a tavern. How much gold would you ideally need to be set for life etc etc.

> I know some stuff can't be really compared with Tyria vs IRL because different worlds, different needs etc, but I'd like to get an idea of what the copper/silver/gold currency is worth.

 

The closest thing in economics to what you're trying to to do is the Big Mac Standard. That's the idea of comparing the price of a "standard" (the Mickey D's burger) across different currencies. The theory is that (a) McDonald's is as efficient as possible wherever it operates and (b) charges exactly what the market can bear for the value/competition, and thus that © the numbers give a good idea of relative purchase power across currencies, despite all the complicated factors that are needed for detailed economic analysis.

 

It's a great idea, but it has problems in our world. It's good enough for the typical traveler trying to figure out how much currency to convert before a trip and similar uses, but it tries to simplify to a single number a very complicated set of measurements, and can be misleading. (For example, some groups are more likely to be willing to pay for fast food.)

 

Comparing fantasy Tyria introduces more complications, because supply is 100% determined by our labor + chance; it's not tied to anything in nature. Similarly demand isn't tied to cost of living, because that's essentially free in Tyria. We buy soup to improve stats, not to eat We buy a single set of armor per build and that lasts as long as we need. We do not pay for room or board (we don't sleep). And outside of the player-to-player economy via the TP, there is no other economy. NPCs might talk about a siege raising prices of staples, but that's not reflected in vendor prices. There's no "Big Mac" that translates from us to them, and no McDonald's to sell it.

 

tl;dr there's no good way to compare without making huge assumptions that don't hold much weight, such as "a quick meal is $8 in RL, so a quick meal in Tyria is $8 worth of stuff."

 

Instead, we have to file it down as just another oversimplification developers make in producing a playable game, along with inventory having zero weight, no wear & tear, no need to sleep, etc.

 

[Blocki.4931]

I'm sure out of all the NPCs at least one is talking about his expenses! Time for a deep dive...

 

 

[ChartFish.1308]

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> Comparing fantasy Tyria introduces more complications, because supply is 100% determined by our labor + chance; it's not tied to anything in nature. Similarly demand isn't tied to cost of living, because that's essentially free in Tyria. We buy soup to improve stats, not to eat We buy a single set of armor per build and that lasts as long as we need. We do not pay for room or board (we don't sleep).

 

I see what you mean with the rest of it, though this part kinda goes wonky for me because i'm not talking about anything to do with the player character itself, but the people who actually "live" in this world (yes i know its a video game).

 

Basically thinking of Tyria as an alternate reality. Regular people who need to eat, sleep and drink to survive. They need a home to live in, which will cost coin as someone needs to be paid for the property. Where armor wears and tears and needs repairs and replacement etc, where travelers come from far away and need a place to stay overnight.

 

Just strike us and the player character out of it fully, ignore the fact that they are NPCs and not real people.

[zionophir.6845]

they are not merely NPCs. they can be made "digital totems" which can pass you information in what they say, where they live, what's the adjacent/periphery locations where they are programmed to move, the colors of their outfit, their features, the designs in their outfit and what things are they holding, etc.

 

NPCs could also be like a "beacon communication tower" between you and the programmer/artist who made that npc. you might decode what message the programmer inserted in the NPC or what he/she wishes to tell to the you and other players.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"ChartFish.1308" said:

> Just strike us and the player character out of it fully, ignore the fact that they are NPCs and not real people.

Your scenario assumes that they are real people, but they aren't. The are proxies for real people used to give a game a sense of population; they have no connection to their own world.

 

Let's rephrase your question to make it easier to ignore our world:

> Can we estimate the cost of living in Tyria by looking at the costs we know about and extrapolating to other spending?

Answer: no, we can't even do that, for a variety of reasons.

 

In no particular order:

* We don't know what NPCs pay for anything. We only know what the game charges us.

* In an imagined economy, there would still be supply & demand and we don't see those effects in game. Div Reach merchants should be charging more due to the siege; if they are, that data isn't available to us.

* Similarly, in the NPC's world, transportation is a major expense (as we hear from Portal Gate operators), but we don't know what those costs are.

* Housing is a major cost of living line item and it varies considerably in any world (real or imagined), but we have no clue what people pay. We know Minister Caudecus lives in a mansion and there are 'slum' areas of DR, but without any sense of the difference in costs.

 

The surest indicator that there's no "economy" for the NPCs is that the cost of alcohol is the same everywhere. Special ale has the same price at the Monastery in Queensdale where it's made as it does wherever we find it in Tyria. There's simply no way that would be true in the type of semi-agrarian world the "average" NPC lives in. Or we could say, "sure, that's just what we pay; the Tyrians would pay differently." Which is plausible (for a variety of reasons), but... we don't have any data about what they pay. We only know what we pay.

 

****

An entirely different way of looking at it is: since we have no data and ANet's spend no time fleshing out a Tyrian economy, you can actually make up any plausible "head canon" you like and there's nothing in the game to gainsay the theory.

 

 

[Tamur.6503]

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> An entirely different way of looking at it is: since we have no data and ANet's spend no time fleshing out a Tyrian economy, you can actually make up any plausible "head canon" you like and there's nothing in the game to gainsay the theory.

 

If you need this for RP, or written fiction, this is totally plausible. You could look at a well-established renaissance/medieval price list (like the official or fan-made ones for the RPG Hârnworld) and make an equation that translates prices. It would be as canon as anything else.

[Aaron Ansari.1604]

A long, long time ago, [a dev actually addressed this question.](https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/New-lore-interview-to-Anet-lore-team) Their answer was:

A.) It doesn't work; for all the reasons already listed here, there's just no basis of comparison.

B.) If you really must go ahead, take the least expensive item in the game- they picked an egg, at one copper- and compare it to prices at your local stores.

 

When I looked at that comparison, I found the average price of a dozen eggs in the US at the time that the game launched was $1.85. That would make:

1 copper= about 15 cents.

1 silver= about $15.42

1 gold= about $1,541.67

 

It does paint an interesting problem, though, one I've yet to see in-game RP really get a good grip on. US currency is built on factors of ten, but Tyrian currency is built on factors of 100. That means one end or the other of the spectrum needs to be pushed to the extreme; either copper is completely worthless, or gold is extremely valuable. If you take the above numbers- where one copper is worth the absolute cheapest thing- then just 34 gold is roughly equivalent to the 2012 US median household income.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

the biggest problem: the prices the player is charged are probably not the prices a npc would have to pay.

 

There was a nice comic years ago.... heroe closes in to a town, all prices increase by at least 1000%. Because PC = rich&stupid.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

> @"Aaron Ansari.1604" said:

> A long, long time ago, [a dev actually addressed this question.](https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/New-lore-interview-to-Anet-lore-team) Their answer was:

> A.) It doesn't work; for all the reasons already listed here, there's just no basis of comparison.

> B.) If you really must go ahead, take the least expensive item in the game- they picked an egg, at one copper- and compare it to prices at your local stores.

>

> When I looked at that comparison, I found the average price of a dozen eggs in the US at the time that the game launched was $1.85. That would make:

> 1 copper= about 15 cents.

> 1 silver= about $15.42

> 1 gold= about $1,541.67

>

> It does paint an interesting problem, though, one I've yet to see in-game RP really get a good grip on. US currency is built on factors of ten, but Tyrian currency is built on factors of 100. That means one end or the other of the spectrum needs to be pushed to the extreme; either copper is completely worthless, or gold is extremely valuable. If you take the above numbers- where one copper is worth the absolute cheapest thing- then just 34 gold is roughly equivalent to the 2012 US median household income.

 

But what about platinum coins??? While players no longer have access to platinum currency unlike GW1 which only had gold and plat for players, just as GW1 has lore about copper and silver coins, GW2 does have lore about platinum currencies/coins still in use.

 

(To answer my own question, per the above exchanges: 1 platinum ~ 1,541,666.67 as 1 platinum = 1,000 gold)

 

> @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

> There was a nice comic years ago.... heroe closes in to a town, all prices increase by at least 1000%. Because PC = rich&stupid.

 

Are you referring to [this strip from Order of the Stick](http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0122.html)?

[ChartFish.1308]

> @"Aaron Ansari.1604" said:

 

While it does help get an idea of what could be the value that's... as you put it, very much an extreme. Doesn't seem to fit either, as I've been reading the official GW2 books where Eir charges 20g for a statue made out of rock (vs 20s for one made out of wood, huge price difference tbh).

Considering what has been said it really does seem impossible to get a good grasp of coin value when we have so little to go on :(

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

Artists have a much greater skewing of pricing than anything else, imo; especially famous (and those who believe themselves as good as famous) artists. So Eir's probably the least reliable source.

 

In pre-destroyed LA there was dialogue at the trading post about a centaur spear head costing 20g though. However, I think there was some "adventurer price increase" like what @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" talked about.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

 

> > @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

> > There was a nice comic years ago.... heroe closes in to a town, all prices increase by at least 1000%. Because PC = rich&stupid.

>

> Are you referring to [this strip from Order of the Stick](http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0122.html)?

 

YES!

[Biff.5312]

> @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

> the biggest problem: the prices the player is charged are probably not the prices a npc would have to pay.

>

> There was a nice comic years ago.... heroe closes in to a town, all prices increase by at least 1000%. Because PC = rich&stupid.

 

I agree - also we don't know whether the economy the NPCs participate in principally even uses coin. There's a lot of farmer types who seem to provide for their own sustenance, and barter could be very common. It's perfectly possible that the average NPC only sees a few coins a year. Not to mention the fact that there reasonably must be a population beyond that which we see and interact with... somewhere.

 

 

[norbes.3620]

Not to mention that Said Farmer is FORCED to Charge the PC with a higher Price since ist those Heros and adventurers who Keep looting his farm.

 

just be honest here. did anyone ever stopped harvesting something just cuz it is on the field of some mere farmer?

[mauried.5608]

The Tyria economy doesnt obey normal economic rules like the real world does.

NPCs produce goods out of thin air and the prices are always the same regardless of the demand for them.

Likewise NPCs will always buy all your junk items for the same price regardless of how many you want to sell.

All of the resources in the game never run out.

The economy and the values of the currency is essentially totally arbitrary, and its only the TP that has a semblance of the real world economy as the prices are based on supply / demand economics and thats because only players can sell and buy stuff on the TP , NPCs cant .

If you look at the NPC based economy on the game , there is no competition at all, and the economy functions like a gigantic cartel, which would be illegal in the real world.

 

[Sir Vincent III.1286]

> @"mauried.5608" said:

> The Tyria economy doesnt obey normal economic rules like the real world does.

>

 

On the contrary, the game's NPC economy is following a communism type of economy where farmers are only allowed to sell their good or services at a fixed price. They are not allowed to capitalize or profit from their goods or services.

 

If you mean to say that it doesn't follow a capitalist economic rule like in the real world, then you'd be correct.

[Aaron Ansari.1604]

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

> Artists have a much greater skewing of pricing than anything else, imo; especially famous (and those who believe themselves as good as famous) artists. So Eir's probably the least reliable source.

>

> In pre-destroyed LA there was dialogue at the trading post about a centaur spear head costing 20g though. However, I think there was some "adventurer price increase" like what @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" talked about.

 

To be fair, though, I believe that price was provided by a skritt out on their own- and what's more, a skritt that sounded like she was just trying to get the customer to go away.