Guild Wars 2

Hello,
I am opening this topic to point out to arena net team one flaw in trading post system.

I noticed that when you are selling an item in instant (to highest offer) there is listing fee but there is also exchange fee.

Now if we look at meaning of word listing fee, we can clearly see that its fee used when you list item on trading post that will or not be sold, but it will be kept on trading post as it is listed.

Exchange fee is fee that is used as trading post fee for exchanging gold for items. Now if we are selling item directly without listing it (to highest offer) I don’t see a reason why there is listing fee, trading post is merely doing services of exchange and should ONLY apply exchange fee.

I hope we’ll be able to get clarification from arena net team why we have listing fee when selling directly through tp.

Best regards.

The answers you seek are in the Black Lion sub forum and have been provided at length therein.

edit: Oh look, the thread is there now.

Even if you sell to the highest bidder, you still list your item (at the highest bidders price) before selling it.

Two words: gold sink

There’s two fees. First is a 5% nonrefundable posting fee. That comes out of your bank. Second is a 10% sales tax that comes from the buyer’s payment assuming a sale is made.

Also you aren’t selling to the highest bidder, it just appears you are. You are actually putting in a sell order that just happens to be the current, at the time the TP looked, highest bid. Once it’s created the TP infrastructure matches it to the high bid(s) and completes the order.

It’s easier to do this because there is a total fee of 15% per transaction. If a sales order had a sales fee of 10% and filling a buy order was 15% people would be confused and every few days there would be someone on the forums ranting that Anet is ripping them off for filling buy orders.

Yep, you get taxed twice but at two separate times for two different reasons.
Think of it like the TP is trying to make money: you pay a 5% fee just to use their service to find a buyer then they charge you a commission for the sale. I just explained this to a guildy yesterday if you post an item (at the time it was frostfang) at your price you pay a 5% fee upfront, if it sells you get the 5% back with your money you just lose the 10%. It’s similar to a security deposit they hold your 5% to make sure you don’t pull the item down and leave them with nothing. ( of course it has some implications for keeping prices more stable because you lose 5% every time you alter the price.)
You actually get 90% of your selling price from the TP, but you only make 85% profit.

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

Iason Evan.3806:

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

And we’ll all get suppressed for years!!! woooooo~

Esplen.3940:

Iason Evan.3806:

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

And we’ll all get suppressed for years!!! woooooo~

Actually that would be what John Smith calls a grey market. Which isn’t “illegal” but strongly not encouraged… Plus you think we have inflation now, try it you’ll come to back to the TP in no time at all.

Iason Evan.3806:

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

Similar ideas have been brought up before, but there are several problems with the idea. Some examples:

Feedback isn’t necessarily truthful – a group of players could all give each other positive feedback so they seem to be trustworthy when there weren’t any real transactions between them.

Or a player could buy/sell several small items to build up positive feedback before scamming multiple people for expensive items like precursors. It would be very easy to abandon the account and start over with another account, especially for gold sellers who have a number of stolen accounts they can use.

Similarly, an account with good feedback can be stolen by a scammer and discarded when his victims realize they’ve been scammed.

It won’t be supported by Anet (their current TP system is far more efficient and much safer), so it will create more work for CS agents who have to explain that stolen items and gold cannot be returned, and stolen accounts used for scamming would have no way to clear their reputation after being used by a scammer.

There are other reasons, but this is just a few reasons why such a system cannot work in this environment. Over the years eBay has suffered many of these as well, I haven’t been there in years so I don’t know if they have ever solved their problems.

Dasenthal.6520:

Esplen.3940:

Iason Evan.3806:

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

And we’ll all get suppressed for years!!! woooooo~

Actually that would be what John Smith calls a grey market. Which isn’t “illegal” but strongly not encouraged… Plus you think we have inflation now, try it you’ll come to back to the TP in no time at all.

That’s not the definition of a grey market. The reason why it’s not encouraged is extremely different than the reason why it’s a grey market.

And I have done/do my fair share of grey market trading.

Esplen.3940:

Dasenthal.6520:

Esplen.3940:

Iason Evan.3806:

Now if only someone would make a website where you could sell and buy items buy trading with in game mail and have a ratings system like ebay. We could cut out the TP middle man.

And we’ll all get suppressed for years!!! woooooo~

Actually that would be what John Smith calls a grey market. Which isn’t “illegal” but strongly not encouraged… Plus you think we have inflation now, try it you’ll come to back to the TP in no time at all.

That’s not the definition of a grey market. The reason why it’s not encouraged is extremely different than the reason why it’s a grey market.

And I have done/do my fair share of grey market trading.

I didn’t say it wasn’t encouraged because it was grey market. I said it was a grey market and that it was strongly not encouraged.

Seera functionally ended this topic 10 or 11 posts above.

You might feel ‘robbed’ by this system, but without it you would feel even more robbed. Basically like Seera says we need a gold sink, to prevent inflation (wich another poster) mentioned.

Every day 1000’s of people complete cof p1. 1000g gets injected into the economy out of nowhere. If that gold isn’t ‘counter sinked’, it adds to the economical pool, more and more, until you get super inflation where everything costs a lot more because there’s more money that can buy less items then it could before. TP is the ‘almost’ perfect solution to this, even though some people (even me at launch), think of it as a curse.

You think 3000 gold legendary is expensive? With no tp fees, we would be at 10k legendaries already. I speak from experience from another mmo with no money sinks.

Gold sinks are good for the health of the economy – people only get upset about it if they only focus on the effect the sinks have on themselves, rather than the effect they have on everyone.

Sure, if these fees weren’t in place, you’d get 15% more gold – however, so would everyone else. Everyone would have 15% more gold, which means everyone would be willing to spend 15% more on items, so everything would be 15% more expensive. So what would you personally gain from this fee being gone? Nothing, you’d still be able to buy exactly what you can buy now.

You would lose the long term benifits of reduced inflation, however, which has a far bigger effect than you would imagine.

Here is an article about hyperinflation and a game named Diablo 3.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-21/diablo-3-case-virtual-hyperinflation

While there were large number of farming bots and, at the end, a programing bug that made everything worse, the article does say that a large part of the inflation was caused by insufficient gold sinks.

It’s an interesting read and can make you look at the game taking your hard earned gold in quite a different light.

Astral Projections.7320:

Here is an article about hyperinflation and a game named Diablo 3.

Which is hilarious because their auction house sucked gold out of their economy just fine. Diablo 3 had a myriad of economic problems but inflation wasn’t one of them.

Ensign.2189:

Astral Projections.7320:

Here is an article about hyperinflation and a game named Diablo 3.

Which is hilarious because their auction house sucked gold out of their economy just fine. Diablo 3 had a myriad of economic problems but inflation wasn’t one of them.

This isn’t inflation? Source: Diablo 3 director regrets building an in game market.

“And what did I see when I logged in to check on some prices for this blog post? New “plans” for special items that I can have the blacksmith make. Those plans cost $1.5 million in game gold. For reference, I, now playing through the third act of the hardest difficulty level, have about 10,000 in game gold right now. That’s on the low side, of course. But 1.5 million is very, very high."

Or this, from the other post:
“I purchased most of my gear for around 5 mil [gold] early on. I’ve been farming for awhile [and] have saved around 30 million gold [but now] I can’t upgrade the gear I have … Where is all this money coming from? Why is everything so expensive?”

Someone has 30 million gold and is too poor to upgrade his gear. Most people would consider that inflation.

Astral Projections.7320:

This isn’t inflation?

Correct.

Astral Projections.7320:

Why is everything so expensive?"

Everything isn’t so expensive. Most things are in fact quite cheap, and plummeted in price.

The small handful of items that represent the very best items the game has ever dropped are indeed very expensive, and continue to climb in price.

These effects more than offset – over time, the price to achieve a particular level of power dropped steadily, indicating substantial deflation in the market.

Astral Projections.7320:

Someone has 30 million gold and is too poor to upgrade his gear. Most people would consider that inflation.

Most people would be foolish then. It simply meant that he had very good gear – and you could get some remarkably good items for way less than they were worth early on, much like how precursors sold for 20-30 gold in GW2 during the first couple weeks of the game.

Astral Projections.7320:

This isn’t inflation?

Here’s another way to think about it.

Imagine there are, say, 100 players total. Each player finds 1 sword (which has a spectrum of quality) per day, has an average income of 1 gold per day, and can only use one sword. (for this purpose there are no gold sinks).

The first 100 swords found all get a home – every player needs one! Players have an average of 1 gold each, and swords thus have an average value of 1 (times some constant reflecting people’s tendencies to horde money, etc, which we’ll neglect).

The next 100 swords are a different story. Players now have to make choices on which to use, and when combined with the 100 from the previous day only 50 of the new swords are actually useful – similarly, 50 of the swords people already had equipped are now junk. Players now trade only the 100 best swords, which have an average value of 2 – but the 100 other swords are still there, and have a value of 0, so the average value of a sword is still 1.

The next 100? Similar story, but now only 33 of the new swords are valuable. The 100 best swords from all 3 days now have an average value of 3, while the average sword is still worth 1.

Fast forward to day 100. 100 swords are found, but only 1 is useful. That one has an average value of 100 gold. The other 99 swords found that day are totally useless and worth 0. The average value of a sword is still 1 – but the value of a sword players actually use continues to climb, and is now 100 gold on average.

…and so forth. Putting in even modest gold sinks from the auction house will attenuate the price increase, and actually drive the average value of an item to 0 – but because items never go away, and people constantly bid on the very best ones that ever drop, the price of those best items continues to rise, and rise, and rise, reflecting the ability of the most hardcore players to pay.

This isn’t inflation – the average price of an item goes down over time, and the average price to get gear of a specific quality continually drops as well – but the percentage of items that are worth anything at all becomes vanishingly small as every new drop has to compare favorably to everything else ever generated.

I like to call this MUDflation. It’s a very real problem, and wrecks economies – but it’s not inflation in any way shape or form.

@Ensign

The article I linked is from 2013 and talks about a situation from mid 2012 to early 2013. The person with the 30 million gold dates to August 2012, over 2 years ago. As you said, “Everything isn’t so expensive. Most things are in fact quite cheap, and plummeted in price.” Are you talking about prices now or prices 2 years ago? You are using present tense to comment on the situation, when the article is about the past. (And your comment about plummeting in price suggests they were much higher previously).

The article also says that Blizzard had to redenominate their gold to handle increased money supply.
“The RMAH had minimum and maximum dollar amounts for in-game gold transactions: $0.25 minimum, $250 maximum. Market participants were also limited to dealing in increments of a certain size, called a “stack.” The “stack” was initially set to 100K gold. But as gold prices fell owing to rapidly building supply, the stack size was changed in August 2012 to 1 million. This practice, known as redenomination, is a fairly standard (if cosmetic) method of addressing inflation, but was viewed by some players as tacit devaluation.

These quotes were saying that gold was steadily decreasing in value:
“By early 2013, the gold price had fallen to the exchange floor set by the game managers — $0.25/million — and players began to show signs of concern”

And another quote from a player:
“[W]hy [are] certain items priced [s]o astronomically high? Many of them are not even that good yet cost 100’s of millions of gold. … I have about 45,000,000 gold saved up [and] check every few days to see if I can get any upgrades that are worth the gold, but … everything is vastly overpriced … clearly controlled by the gold sellers.”

This chart from that article is of interest: (sorry, the forum won’t allow me to display it in a clear manner, but it’s on that page in yellow near the end). The last 2 sets of numbers shows price for items for the first week of May 2013.
2013 avg prices/ 1-6 May/ 7-8 May price
radiant star amethyst 17.4M/ 41.2M/ 85.8M
radiant square ruby 187K/ 260K/ 337K
flawless square topaz 491/ 5,170/ 8,700
star emerald 764K/ 1.1M/ 1.6M
tome of jewelcrafting 694/ 3,400/ 3,100

Imo, if people have 30 or 45 million gold, when that much gold isn’t considered a remarkable amount, when items are selling for millions or hundreds of millions of gold, then there is inflation going on.

Edit: grammar.

Just think of it this way, nerevar: By paying the tax, you help the community/economy as a whole. Or if you want to look at it a bit more selfishly, you help the community/economy, so that it will help you by continuing to run smoothly. In essence, your short-term losses are long-term gains (albeit gains that are difficult to quantify).

Not unlike paying taxes in RL.

Astral Projections.7320:

Are you talking about prices now or prices 2 years ago?

2 years ago. I played a lot of Diablo 3 right before GW2 came out, and that’s the period I’m mostly commenting on.

At the time making 5+ million gold an hour was commonplace, and a non-insubstantial portion of that was from raw gold drops. Yes that’s a big number but this is a game that’s all about big numbers – skills dealing damage in the hundreds of thousands at the time, mobs with tens of millions of HP. 30 million gold in August 2012 represented around 5 hours of farming A3 Inferno. This was back before they added Paragon levels, and with it ready access to +300% gold find – which would unquestionably drive up aggregate gold supplies.

Astral Projections.7320:

The article also says that Blizzard had to redenominate their gold to handle increased money supply.

The article says a lot of silly things. They had to change the stack size because the dollar value of gold dropped precipitously. Basically their cash shop had a minimum price of $0.25 per million gold, and it wasn’t worth even close to that (after the initial surge at the start of a game it’s rare for in game wealth to sustain at much more than $1 an hour).

This reflects changing preferences of the players and what they’re spending their money on. It has little to do with inflation.

Astral Projections.7320:

“[W]hy [are] certain items priced [s]o astronomically high?

Nearly every item was unique and sellers could set whatever prices they felt like. A huge percentage of the really high priced items on the auction house never sold.

Astral Projections.7320:

The last 2 sets of numbers shows price for items for the first week of May 2013.

Blizzard released a patch on May 8th that, among other things, introduced a gold dupe exploit into the game. As you can imagine, the ability to duplicate gold would lead to extreme inflation and throw all the markets into chaos – and that is, in fact, exactly what happened.

Astral Projections.7320:

Imo, if people have 30 or 45 million gold, when that much gold isn’t considered a remarkable amount, when items are selling for millions or hundreds of millions of gold, then there is inflation going on..

Prices are just a number – you can call it 1 gold, or 10,000 copper, it really doesn’t matter and the granularity is arbitrary. What matters is how that number changes over time – whether what used to cost 1 now costs 2, or whether what used to cost 1 million now costs 2 million.

Diablo 3 is all about big numbers. Prices were always in the millions of gold. So in that sense nothing changed. They did make several changes that would spike up prices on a wide level, but in the background was a grinding deflation moving prices downward.

Their economy failed because they had quite literally no idea what they were doing. Anyone with some experience with game economies and, say, undergraduate macro could have told them that their design was fundamentally flawed and was going to eat itself – but they didn’t have anyone like that, and their ongoing patches reflected a complete lack of understanding of how their economy worked. It’s surprising it even worked at all given that they were blindly firing darts.

An economy can fail in a lot of different ways; inflation is just one of them. People have an unfortunate tendency to lump all forms of economic malaise together and call it inflation (human beings have invented a remarkable propaganda machine to that end); but, in the case of Diablo 3, it was anything but.

(Diablo 3 is kind of a litmus test now. If you talk about the horrid inflation in that game, it’s very clear that you have a very minimal understanding of economics.)

death and taxes my friend, death and taxes