It seems a tragic fate to be an Economist called John Smith. In an already thankless job full of numbers and pinching your nose when the numbers just don’t add up, it’s a little unfair to have the most generic name a man can have. I suppose it would be a little worse if he was John Doe, but at least you’ve got some gallows humour there.
So it makes sense that this John Smith has decided to make economy a little more interesting by working for ArenaNet, developers of Guild Wars 2 (only a few hours til the headstart!). That means he gets to do all sorts of interesting things like look at which profession is most popular and profitable, and whether the price of coins and gems fluctuates in time with Facebook’s stock.
To this end, John Smith has made an infographic, detailing the various different nuggets of information that have arisen from just one of the beta weekends. Sources of money, Wealth Distribution and all sorts are explored, and apparently Tyria is currently a nicer place to live than America, with a much more even distribution of wealth.
There’s more over on the ArenaNet blog, or if you like cheating, you can go straight to the Infographic here, and marvel at all the pretty colours.