Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

They do add, though. Convenience. They provide to those who are willing to spend more and get less for their items in exchange to get it NOW NOW NOW.

No they don’t. You don’t need a flipper for that. Normal players put up buy orders too, normal players put up sell order too. Players that needs something NOW NOW NOW could still find it even without flippers.

Yes, normal players do put up buy and sell orders. Yes, players that need it NOW NOW NOW could still find sell listings to buy, but the question here isn’t whether or not those exist, but how many of them are there and at what prices. Now, I’m no economist, but I can guess that flippers do keep buy orders rising and sell orders dropping due to competition. So the average player might pay less for buy orders (and that’s a big might), but they will probably pay more for sell orders.

Ohoni.6057:

~snip~

We’re talking about human beings. Skill shouldn’t make a huge difference in income. Just because anyone can do something doesn’t mean that the people doing it don’t deserve compensation for time and effort spent on it. Just because you need to know more to be able to run a stock trade than to carry boxes around doesn’t mean that the former needs to pay way more than the latter.

Yes, everyone should get monetary compensation for their work, as commonly referred to as payment. Sure, the difference shouldn’t necessarily be as big as it is. What I am saying is that those executives are move valuable to the company than the average worker. There are always people looking for jobs, and would take one at the factory. Those who have the skills and know-how to run companies and stores, those people are rarer and harder to find. So, the company pays them more. SImple supply and demand type stuff. Hope it’s not too complex for you

They wouldn’t ALL vanish immediately, but you might be surprised at how much less there would be. Get a better deal my Ogden’s Hammer. Sure, buy orders might lower somewhat, but, if the average player is as dumb as your posts suggest, the sell order would raise more if flippers stopped providing competition.

Ohoni.6057:

The thing is though, there are still savvy players, and they would still get good deals on their buys and sells, because they would be paying attention, and they would still come out marginally ahead. It would just cut down in the volume of trading, you’d have people selling a few weapons per night that they looted themselves, or buying a few weapons per night that they needed, rather than buying dozens of weapons at low prices and selling them at higher.

How does removing volume of trading help at all? You have average players buying NOW at higher costs, a MUCH smaller TP gold sink, so inflation will be rampant across almost all markets, and it would take much, much longer for items to get to equilibrium after some change (i.e. Iron Ore spiking due to the new backpieces).

Ohoni.6057:

You are still comparing loot, which is created out of thin air to profit on the TP, which is given to me by other players.

Yes, yes I am doing that, because both of them are the same ingame wealth. The only difference is that the adventurers earn the loot by fighting for it while TP tycoons just work the UI all day in town.

And having the knowledge, know-how, and time dedicated to flipping earns them nothing? Other than what they actually are, what makes those any less ‘earning’ than learning how to push a series of buttons amongst others doing the same?

Ohoni.6057:

I dont get account bound mats on the tp that are earned through gameplay, i dont get dungeon tokens, guild commendations, karma or skillpoints on the tp.

No, you don’t, but you do gain gold, and almost anything worth having can be gained using gold, and very little in the game can be bought without it. I have tens of thousands of units of things like Bloodstone Dust and Dragonite Ore, [……] I also have enough Mists to make a couple of Ascended backpacks, but not the stacks of t6 mats that I’d also need, which again cost cash.

You can get a lot of stuff with money, there’s very little that you can get with the other currencies that don’t also take money. Almost every “BoA” material in this game requires an equivalent amount of cash to make it functional.

Your point? That money is useful? that you can’t always use everything you get?

Ohoni.6057:

Most of the time I ask people why they dont play the tp to make more gold, they say, they dont know how (not enough skill and knowledge) and they cant be bothered.

Both perfectly valid reasons, but not a justification for those who do know how, and do both to make nearly as much money as they do. It’s just an unbalanced system. It’s not unbalanced in the way that I believe you were denying earlier, that it’s an “unlevel playing field,” but it’s unbalanced against other activities. It’s balanced in the way that a good FPS game is balanced, in that the best player will win and the game won’t favor one player over another, but it’s unbalanced in that it favors those who play this one aspect of the game well over people who play the entire rest of the game well.

How does this affect you though? I don’t see how this directly affects you. “Prices are higher!” Prices are always going to be higher, because its a lot easier to get 10g now than at about launch. and, unless someone like Wanze or Vol or someone will tell me they made their money by doing otherwise, flippers compete, and therefore undercut each other.

Ohoni.6057:

IF they had marketed this game as an economics simulator in which you could also swing a sword around on the side, then sure, why not? But they marketed it as a grand adventure, so it’s their duty to manage the economy in such a way that the ADVENTURERS are the ones that win, not the stock brokers.

The ADVENTURERS do win, but only if they have a basic level of understanding and don’t just always sell at buy order and buy at sell order. By that I mean they get similar amounts of money for their items. Also, nice way to throw in a UI-to-win attempt, I don’t see what someone with 300g “wins” over someone with 50g, other than being able to buy more expensive skins. I wouldn’t call owning a 1500g weapon winning.

Ohoni.6057:

Anet doesnt reward players more gold for playing the tp, other players do.

Because of the way ANet designed the marketplace to favor them. Perhaps this was not a conscious choice on their part, but it was still a consequence of their design choices, to list buy and sell orders, but not the actual completed transaction prices. To allow players to buy items off the market, with no personal need for them, and instead then relist them at a more favorable price. They didn’t have to allow any of that, but they did, and they can still fix it.

The only broken thing here is that you feel like everyone should be forced to play how you want them to, just to fit into your earnings by your chosen activities.

By the way, the only reason I’m writing by now is because I find it fun. You dodge questions when directly asked how something would affect your suggestion, you ignore explanations far better researched and logical than any theory I could place, and still through it all manage to insist that everyone should be forced to play what you want them to how you want them to.

Behellagh.1468:

Where do you think the money a flipper earns come from?

Even more simply than that – given a choice of playing the game by killing monsters and looting treasure, or sitting in front of the trading post NPC babysitting your buy and sell orders (and, in all likelihood, watching items craft or rapidly clicking on items to forge or your salvage kits), which one do you think people would do if the rewards were the same?

To a large extent this is boring equilibrium pricing at work. Working at the trading post has to pay more than adventuring, because the only reason it’s fun is because of the large rewards. When the profitability goes down, people stop working the TP and go play the game until enough material piles up to make the TP profitable again.

There’s essentially no way for working the TP to not have better rewards than playing the game. It’s baked into having a game with trading.

No it isn’t. Where do you think the money a flipper earns come from? It comes from taking the risk of posting an item for sale NOT at the high bid and NOT buying items at at the current low sale price.

Which is really not that big a risk if you keep aware of market trends, which most players don’t want to bother with, and shouldn’t HAVE to bother with. That’s the fundamental disagreement here, some of you feel that the players should have to play like TP flippers if they want to make TP flipper profits, my point is that NOBODY should have to play like TP flippers in an action/adventure game.

I said this before, flippers are just player vendors willing to sell you an item for X but buy it back for much less than X. Exactly what NPC vendors do. They never buy back an item for as much as they are willing to sell it to you for. The difference is player vendors are willing to pay the player more for an item and consequently sell it for more as well.

Which would be fine, except that flippers pocket the difference and end up with more money over time than the other players. You don’t see your average Lion’s Arch vendor rocking Sunrise.

But it’s not considerably less effort. Different effort.

It’s both. It takes considerably less effort to use the market to make money than to use adventuring to make money. Sure, you could spend 24/7 working the markt like a crazy person, and you would make more than dabbling in it an hour or two per day, but dabbling an hour or two a day would make you way more money than any form of adventuring an hour or two a day, and if you do it right, more than adventuring 24/7.

And I contend that both speed runs and champ trains are a degenerated form of game play, leveraging game mechanics in ways they were never intended.

They definitely are. They’ve both been nerfed in the past and I would have no problem with them being nerfed again. There’s no particular nobility in farming anything, including the TP. If I mention farming, it’s only to note that these are the most efficient current methods of earning money via adventuring, an even they cannot keep up. Less “degenerate” methods are even further behind.

They why was it I only heard about them when I decided to check out the forums.

I don’t know, some people are just slower than others. I’ve been using some form of event timer since right after launch, it’s really the only way to play. As I said, it’d be great if they could just incorporate those features into the UI, like they added GW2LFG into the LFG tool, but they haven’t yet.

Fine, eliminate the mechanisms that make speed runs doable. That train new players to level to 80 without every leaving the Queensdale Champ train. . etc..

No argument on any of that stuff, but it’s really an entirely different discussion.

1) Just because I don’t enjoy being undercut doesn’t mean that I dislike all parts of it. 2) You aren’t balancing. You are removing a method because it doesn’t suit your playstyle. You shouldn’t be able to force your playstyle on everyone, especially in a game that sold on the line “play how you want.”

Ok, I agree with that, but can’t you understand how the current TP forces that play style on anyone who wants to earn money at a reasonable rate? If they can figure out a way so that TP players can keep playing as they have, but make no more money per day than someone who spends the same amount of time champ training as they spend on the TP, then I’d be fine with that, but I just think achieving that level of balance would be a lot trickier than just eliminating the flippers entirely.

I think the better solution is to use Bind on Purchase to eliminate flippers from the PvE marketplace, and then add a PvP-only marketplace on which PvP TPers can compete with each other for kitten, without impacting the PvE economy.

No, thats nothing close to what you said. You said, “They do, they just don’t have the right for that to be the most profitable way to play.” As if you get to choose what we have the right to have or not have in this game. As if you get to control how everyone plays the game, to fit how you play and what you want.

I already explained what I meant, and it turns out that was different than what you assumed I meant. Adapt.

The TP is FAR FAR FAR less of a wealth creator than any other method. It is a gold SINK, not creator.

It may be a gold sink in a macro sense, but it’s absolutely a wealth creator for some. Pretty much everyone who has actual “wealth” in the game did so via the TP.

Your standard argument for that is Player A sells X to B, then B sells it to C for money. You seem to think that B is then stealing money from A, and/or ripping C off. Short term flipping, this isn’t true because Player A could have listed at about the prices B did, and made that money. Player C could have placed a buy order at about the prices B did, and would have gotten the item. They didn’t.

All true, but still if A priced low then C would be getting a great deal that would make him happier and leave more money in his pocket. If A priced high and C still bought then A would have gotten a great deal and would have more money in his pocket. If B steps in the middle then B makes all that money and neither A nor B benefits from it. I want A or C to be happy, I see no benefit in B being happy.

Do you think someone should be able to get that same long term money for not having done the research, forethought, etc?

Yes. The trader in that case makes money by guessing what ANet is going to be doing next. ANet knows what ANet is going to be doing next. ANet should be doing a better job of making that clear to players, and of giving players time to adapt to those changes, so that there is no reason to speculate. Alternately, ANet should be doing a better job of countering speculation with supply dumps, for example if they notice a hoarding of a given mat that is related to an upcoming recipe, then at the same time they announce the recipe they could announce a massive dump of that resource, so that everyone will have plenty without having to pay increased prices for them.

That was a problem when they added Ascended armor and the prices of cloth shot way up. If they’d simultaneously dumped cloth into the world then the prices would have remained stable.

Yes, normal players do put up buy and sell orders. Yes, players that need it NOW NOW NOW could still find sell listings to buy, but the question here isn’t whether or not those exist, but how many of them are there and at what prices. Now, I’m no economist, but I can guess that flippers do keep buy orders rising and sell orders dropping due to competition. So the average player might pay less for buy orders (and that’s a big might), but they will probably pay more for sell orders.

Maybe, but since few players would be exclusively buyers or sellers, but rather more often do both on different items, that would balance out. They might have to spend money to get things they want, but they’ve make more money offloading what they don’t need. What distorts that relationship is people working the middle, and taking that difference for themselves.

Yes, everyone should get monetary compensation for their work, as commonly referred to as payment. Sure, the difference shouldn’t necessarily be as big as it is. What I am saying is that those executives are move valuable to the company than the average worker. There are always people looking for jobs, and would take one at the factory. Those who have the skills and know-how to run companies and stores, those people are rarer and harder to find. So, the company pays them more. SImple supply and demand type stuff. Hope it’s not too complex for you

Yes, but again, these are people, human beings, not just cogs in a machine, and therefor the person’s well being should be a consideration, not just the degree to which they are disposable. This is why unchecked Capitalism is so great, until you involve humans in it.

Your point? That money is useful? that you can’t always use everything you get?

I was responding to someone saying that cash was not the only resource adventurers can earn, by pointing out that few, if any resources adventurers can earn are useful without significant cash to supplement them. I have all the Account Bound components of a Legendary, for example, but nowhere near enough money for the cash-based elements.

The ADVENTURERS do win, but only if they have a basic level of understanding and don’t just always sell at buy order and buy at sell order. By that I mean they get similar amounts of money for their items. Also, nice way to throw in a UI-to-win attempt, I don’t see what someone with 300g “wins” over someone with 50g, other than being able to buy more expensive skins. I wouldn’t call owning a 1500g weapon winning.

Fair enough, spot me a 1500g weapon then and we’ll call it even.

There’s essentially no way for working the TP to not have better rewards than playing the game. It’s baked into having a game with trading.

The TP needs to be more rewarding IF the goal is to have players working the TP professionally. I thin it’s silly to have that as a goal. If on the other hand, they could arrange for the TP to be no more profitable than any other activity, then I agree that almost nobody would “work” at it, and that would be a good thing.

Instead you’d just have the market working its core function, providing above-vendor prices for items that other players find useful, and providing a non-RNG source for RNG items you want but haven’t found. At it’s ideal, the market serves as a way of balancing out RNG, so that when players “luck” into items they have no personal interest in, or fail to luck into things they really want, they have a cash-based alternative.

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

If all excess supply that players have, was listed on the tp and Anet introduces a mat sink (like iron for the new backpacks), prices spike because the iron farmed through regular gameplay wont cover the demand. Thats where speculators and hoarders step in, who bought at lower prices and dump their supply now, while prices rise.

If nobody had iron to dumb and gathering would be the only way to get new supply, it would make the market very vulnerable to manipulation because i could just buy up thousands of gold worth of sell listings (raising the lowest listing 5 fold)and relist at the new lowest sell listing.

Wanze.8410:

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

If all excess supply that players have, was listed on the tp and Anet introduces a mat sink (like iron for the new backpacks), prices spike because the iron farmed through regular gameplay wont cover the demand. Thats where speculators and hoarders step in, who bought at lower prices and dump their supply now, while prices rise.

If nobody had iron to dumb and gathering would be the only way to get new supply, it would make the market very vulnerable to manipulation because i could just buy up thousands of gold worth of sell listings (raising the lowest listing 5 fold)and relist at the new lowest sell listing.

Think about that a bit again plz. You basically said if we didn’t have flipping we’d be in danger of flippers.

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

When the price gets high, it encourages people to sell rather then hold or craft. This helps bring the price back down.

If the price gets too low, it encourages people to buy to either hold or craft. This helps bring the price back up.

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

Essence Snow.3194:

Wanze.8410:

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve been playing a few games lately that have no market at all, and it’s a nightmare. Nobody’s asking them to remove the market entirely, just to make it all about players A and C, and cutting player B entirely out of the equation, UNLESS he’s willing to actually provide a useful function, like converting items around. No, price manipulation alone is NOT a useful function.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

If all excess supply that players have, was listed on the tp and Anet introduces a mat sink (like iron for the new backpacks), prices spike because the iron farmed through regular gameplay wont cover the demand. Thats where speculators and hoarders step in, who bought at lower prices and dump their supply now, while prices rise.

If nobody had iron to dumb and gathering would be the only way to get new supply, it would make the market very vulnerable to manipulation because i could just buy up thousands of gold worth of sell listings (raising the lowest listing 5 fold)and relist at the new lowest sell listing.

Think about that a bit again plz. You basically said if we didn’t have flipping we’d be in danger of flippers.

Flipping usually involves putting in a low bid. if demand is higher than supply generated from gameplay and no one would have spare supply to dumb (speculators), i could easier manipulate prices by buying supply up directly and relisting.

Flippers and speculators are not the same people, as speculators hold on to their supply inside their inventory and dont relist immediately after purchase.

Pretty sure they are the same people, not the same activity but most likely the same ppl who flip also speculate.

Essence Snow.3194:

Pretty sure they are the same people, not the same activity but most likely the same ppl who flip also speculate.

Excuse my wording then. I guess you got my point anyways.

Essence Snow.3194:

Plz elaborate on this further. How do they do this? Why is it useful?

Think about the traditional grow and harvest cycle.

During the summer and fall, food is abundant as the year’s crops mature, but in the middle of winter there isn’t much growing at all. People understand this, and since they still want to eat in the middle of winter they store food from the harvest in the fall.

It’s difficult to imagine not saving food for the winter, since it’s such an obvious thing to do, but it’s not difficult to imagine the consequences if we didn’t – winter comes around, there’s not enough food for everyone, and people riot and will pay anything to get the little that is available. But we don’t do that – we store food during the good times (building up inventory, increasing short term demand to match production), and release it during the bad times (depleting inventories, increasing short run supply to meet demand).

Many of the speculative activities in game serve a very similar function. For the past several months, globs of ectoplasm have been abundant (from lots of people doing world bosses, etc). Speculators responded to the low prices and high supply by buying up tons of ectos and storing them (speculating on them). Once the supply dried up (from masses of people abandoning world events for the LA living story), prices shot up, and speculators started selling off their inventories (cashing in), increasing the supply of ectos above what people were producing and keeping prices down during the lean time.

It is in no way as important as saving food for the winter, but the mechanism is identical – savers buy it up when it’s abundant and cheap, and sell it off when it’s scarce and expensive; the savers make money for the risk and time invested in the shift, and everyone else benefits from better prices on their crop during good times and increased access to goods during the lean.

Ohoni.6057:

Your standard argument for that is Player A sells X to B, then B sells it to C for money. You seem to think that B is then stealing money from A, and/or ripping C off. Short term flipping, this isn’t true because Player A could have listed at about the prices B did, and made that money. Player C could have placed a buy order at about the prices B did, and would have gotten the item. They didn’t.

All true, but still if A priced low then C would be getting a great deal that would make him happier and leave more money in his pocket. If A priced high and C still bought then A would have gotten a great deal and would have more money in his pocket. If B steps in the middle then B makes all that money and neither A nor B benefits from it. I want A or C to be happy, I see no benefit in B being happy.

The ENTIRE way that B makes anything is by A and C choosing speed over money, or being to dumb to know what else to do. EVERYTHING that B can make is dependent on A and C CHOOSING what to do with their goods. Also, you literally just said, “I see benefit in alienating a portion of the playerbase.”

Ohoni.6057:

Do you think someone should be able to get that same long term money for not having done the research, forethought, etc?

Yes. The trader in that case makes money by guessing what ANet is going to be doing next. ANet knows what ANet is going to be doing next. ANet should be doing a better job of making that clear to players, and of giving players time to adapt to those changes, so that there is no reason to speculate. Alternately, ANet should be doing a better job of countering speculation with supply dumps, for example if they notice a hoarding of a given mat that is related to an upcoming recipe, then at the same time they announce the recipe they could announce a massive dump of that resource, so that everyone will have plenty without having to pay increased prices for them.

That was a problem when they added Ascended armor and the prices of cloth shot way up. If they’d simultaneously dumped cloth into the world then the prices would have remained stable.

Speculators would still have reason to speculate, since I’m guessing most of their goods aren’t acquired within 2 weeks or so of the update. Part of the reason they add material sinks like ascended armor is because they DON’T want silk scraps sitting at vendor price. Silk Scraps shot up so high because Anet decided that they wanted to have tons of silk used in ascended armor, which also helped their goal of not seeing it at rock bottom.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, normal players do put up buy and sell orders. Yes, players that need it NOW NOW NOW could still find sell listings to buy, but the question here isn’t whether or not those exist, but how many of them are there and at what prices. Now, I’m no economist, but I can guess that flippers do keep buy orders rising and sell orders dropping due to competition. So the average player might pay less for buy orders (and that’s a big might), but they will probably pay more for sell orders.

Maybe, but since few players would be exclusively buyers or sellers, but rather more often do both on different items, that would balance out. They might have to spend money to get things they want, but they’ve make more money offloading what they don’t need. What distorts that relationship is people working the middle, and taking that difference for themselves.

Half of that is assuming that buy orders will drop the similarly to sell orders, and that they will magically balance out. It also assumes that adding these features will magically make A and C place sell and buy orders respectively. The other half is assuming that a flipper is stealing/taking money from A and C. That isn’t true, A and C are voluntarily giving that to them.

The ADVENTURERS do win, but only if they have a basic level of understanding and don’t just always sell at buy order and buy at sell order. By that I mean they get similar amounts of money for their items. Also, nice way to throw in a UI-to-win attempt, I don’t see what someone with 300g “wins” over someone with 50g, other than being able to buy more expensive skins. I wouldn’t call owning a 1500g weapon winning.

Fair enough, spot me a 1500g weapon then and we’ll call it even.[/quote]

The Moot, for example. There aren’t any 1500g exotics (closest is more than 1100g though – Mjolnir). Most legendaries have buy orders above 1500g.

Ohoni.6057:

I think the better solution is to use Bind on Purchase to eliminate flippers from the PvE marketplace, and then add a PvP-only marketplace on which PvP TPers can compete with each other for kitten, without impacting the PvE economy.

I’ve already made a point on this. Also, how would you distinguish flippers or whatever from everyone else?

Ohoni.6057:

No it isn’t. Where do you think the money a flipper earns come from? It comes from taking the risk of posting an item for sale NOT at the high bid and NOT buying items at at the current low sale price.

Which is really not that big a risk if you keep aware of market trends, which most players don’t want to bother with, and shouldn’t HAVE to bother with. That’s the fundamental disagreement here, some of you feel that the players should have to play like TP flippers iaf they want to make TP flipper profits, my point is that NOBODY should have to play like TP flippers in an action/adventure game.

Nobody has to. I don’t think there is a single player out there who has absolutely no choice: they HAVE to play the TP. Most people don’t have to bother with market trends if they don’t want to. Part of the point is that there is more reward because it is more complex, harder to understand, and has higher risk. Call missing a champ in the train a “risk” if you want. Call not getting that Teq kill off “risk.” I also noticed that the only examples you gave of missing something like a world boss were literally the 3 ONLY ones that were really designed to be hard and require large group coordination. Ever hear anyone saying that they didn’t managed to kill the Shadow Behemouth in time, or didn’t kill the Shatterer fast enough? I haven’t.

Ohoni.6057:

I said this before, flippers are just player vendors willing to sell you an item for X but buy it back for much less than X. Exactly what NPC vendors do. They never buy back an item for as much as they are willing to sell it to you for. The difference is player vendors are willing to pay the player more for an item and consequently sell it for more as well.

Which would be fine, except that flippers pocket the difference and end up with more money over time than the other players. You don’t see your average Lion’s Arch vendor rocking Sunrise.

That’s because they’re NPCs. I wonder though…have we given any of these merchants enough money to buy a Sunrise? Wouldn’t surprise me.

Ohoni.6057:

But it’s not considerably less effort. Different effort.

It’s both. It takes considerably less effort to use the market to make money than to use adventuring to make money. Sure, you could spend 24/7 working the markt like a crazy person, and you would make more than dabbling in it an hour or two per day, but dabbling an hour or two a day would make you way more money than any form of adventuring an hour or two a day, and if you do it right, more than adventuring 24/7.

One of them is pressing keys to kill monsters. One of them is clicking on buttons to buy and sell things. I fail to see how learning your combos takes more effort than learning your markets. I would also point out that a dungeon runner generally isn’t paying 80 silver for a chance at 105 silver or something like that. Adventuring you simply gain. Flipping, you have to put some of your money in to get anything back.

Ohoni.6057:

1) Just because I don’t enjoy being undercut doesn’t mean that I dislike all parts of it. 2) You aren’t balancing. You are removing a method because it doesn’t suit your playstyle. You shouldn’t be able to force your playstyle on everyone, especially in a game that sold on the line “play how you want.”

Ok, I agree with that, but can’t you understand how the current TP forces that play style on anyone who wants to earn money at a reasonable rate? If they can figure out a way so that TP players can keep playing as they have, but make no more money per day than someone who spends the same amount of time champ training as they spend on the TP, then I’d be fine with that, but I just think achieving that level of balance would be a lot trickier than just eliminating the flippers entirely.

That depends on your opinion of reasonable. If you think 700 gold per month is reasonable then of course a bunch of activities aren’t going to fit into that. Of course balancing is harder than nuking! In this case especially though, since you’re not just playing with skill coefficients and things like that, but also player demand and supply. It might also be hard to calculate average profit for champ trainers or something like that, given how much RNG and MF is involved.

Ohoni.6057:

The TP is FAR FAR FAR less of a wealth creator than any other method. It is a gold SINK, not creator.

It may be a gold sink in a macro sense, but it’s absolutely a wealth creator for some. Pretty much everyone who has actual “wealth” in the game did so via the TP.

The TP doesn’t create wealth, it destroys some in the process of moving it. Nothing is created, only destroyed. Also, please define what actual “wealth” is in Gw2.

Speculators actually have a useful function because they help level out sudden demand spikes.

They level them out by taking advantage of the situation and making their profits, I don’t see any reason to thank them for that. If they were losing money on the deal, then fair enough, golf claps all around. I’m fine with the prices remaining a little volatile for slightly longer if it means that all the profits go to producers or consumers rather than middlemen. Like I said though, ideally ANet would pair spikes in demand with spikes in supply so that the two would mostly balance out, rather than just adding a demand spike out of nowhere that causes a run on existing supplies.

If nobody had iron to dumb and gathering would be the only way to get new supply, it would make the market very vulnerable to manipulation because i could just buy up thousands of gold worth of sell listings (raising the lowest listing 5 fold)and relist at the new lowest sell listing.

But that examples is having it both ways, “what if there were no flippers, except me, I get to be a flipper.” It’s nonsense. If you bought up thousands of gold worth of sell listings in a system with Bind on Purchase, then you’d be stuck with tens of thousands of units of iron, which you’d be completely unable to sell, and would instead have to craft into something. It would take you crafting into the better part of the next year just to break even on that deal.

It is in no way as important as saving food for the winter, but the mechanism is identical – savers buy it up when it’s abundant and cheap, and sell it off when it’s scarce and expensive; the savers make money for the risk and time invested in the shift, and everyone else benefits from better prices on their crop during good times and increased access to goods during the lean.

Except that, to borrow your example, ANet has total control over the “seasons” and what “grows” in them. If they want to grow ripe corn in the dead of winter, they can. If there is ever scarcity in a resource, it’s because of a deliberate choice ANet made, and it’s within their power to balance those effects from there end, raising both demand AND supply simultaneously. For example, the recent alliance bags increased the supplies of cloth, which reduced prices. If they’d paired these bags with the release of the Ascended armors, the prices of cloths would not have risen nearly as sharply.

Ohoni.6057:

But that examples is having it both ways, “what if there were no flippers, except me, I get to be a flipper.” It’s nonsense. If you bought up thousands of gold worth of sell listings in a system with Bind on Purchase, then you’d be stuck with tens of thousands of units of iron, which you’d be completely unable to sell, and would instead have to craft into something. It would take you crafting into the better part of the next year just to break even on that deal.

It would have taken me not more than refining iron ore into steel and iron ingots.
Bind on purchase will change nothing on that because there will still be people that have a far greater deal of knowledge about salvaging and crafting to make gold.

Would you then call for a limit on items to craft per account per day to bring their profit more in line with dungeon running?

The ENTIRE way that B makes anything is by A and C choosing speed over money, or being to dumb to know what else to do. EVERYTHING that B can make is dependent on A and C CHOOSING what to do with their goods. Also, you literally just said, “I see benefit in alienating a portion of the playerbase.”

I see benefit in alienating play Bs so long as they continue to engage in predatory behavior, just as I would see the benefit in alienating PK gankers so long as they continue to PK people. I don’t begrudge them wanting to play how they want to play, I just don’t want them doing it in the same economy I have to use.

Speculators would still have reason to speculate, since I’m guessing most of their goods aren’t acquired within 2 weeks or so of the update. Part of the reason they add material sinks like ascended armor is because they DON’T want silk scraps sitting at vendor price. Silk Scraps shot up so high because Anet decided that they wanted to have tons of silk used in ascended armor, which also helped their goal of not seeing it at rock bottom.

They could have balanced it better though. If they’d added a spike in cloth supplies at the same time as the Ascended release, but on a temporary basis, then demand would have spiked, supply would have spiked, price would remain relatively stable, but then as demand reduced (from people using all the cloth they needed for the new items), supply would also reduce (from the end of the temporary supply-boosting content), and prices would stabilize again, maybe to a slightly higher point, but not so much higher that speculators would stand to make a huge fortune on it, and it would occur slowly enough that even the average player could see it happening and maybe stock up. ANet could even give direct guidance to the players, “you’d better stock u on copper, because it’s going to go up soon!” rather than being coy about it and leaving it to third parties to figure out.

And again, Bind on Purchase would fix it entirely, since you might “speculate” by stocking up all the pieces you’d need, but there would be no point in buying any more than that, since you couldn’t move it.

Half of that is assuming that buy orders will drop the similarly to sell orders, and that they will magically balance out. It also assumes that adding these features will magically make A and C place sell and buy orders respectively. The other half is assuming that a flipper is stealing/taking money from A and C. That isn’t true, A and C are voluntarily giving that to them.

A and C are the same person though, essentially. There are very few players that ONLY sell things or ONLY buy things, The same people who get a sword, and don’t need a sword, are the people who need a hat, and don’t have a hat. So my point is, even if the cost rises, so long as flippers are not a part of the equation, it’s ok because while the cost to buy things might rise, the amount they get from their own sales would also rise, and so they’d have more money to buy things with. The problem is when a third party snakes that profit difference, leaving the eventual customer with less money to buy with.

I’ve already made a point on this. Also, how would you distinguish flippers or whatever from everyone else?

You couldn’t, but if you made systems that made the behavior of flipping inherently unworkable, it would sort itself out. I don’t mind if flippers are in the game, so long as they’re incapable of flipping.

Nobody has to. I don’t think there is a single player out there who has absolutely no choice: they HAVE to play the TP. Most people don’t have to bother with market trends if they don’t want to. Part of the point is that there is more reward because it is more complex, harder to understand, and has higher risk. Call missing a champ in the train a “risk” if you want. Call not getting that Teq kill off “risk.” I also noticed that the only examples you gave of missing something like a world boss were literally the 3 ONLY ones that were really designed to be hard and require large group coordination. Ever hear anyone saying that they didn’t managed to kill the Shadow Behemouth in time, or didn’t kill the Shatterer fast enough? I haven’t.

I’ve been part of several failed Shatterer and Claw of Jormag runs, since they added timers to it. Claw almost never gets completed on my server since the recent patch dropped. I’ve also been part of Temple runs in Orr where people were just dying enough that everyone gave up and left. There is plenty of risk involved in PvE content.

That’s because they’re NPCs. I wonder though…have we given any of these merchants enough money to buy a Sunrise? Wouldn’t surprise me.

Most NPCs probably don’t have a ton of cash on hand, because the only things they really sell are harvesting tools and salvage bags, but they buy tons of random junk off of players.

One of them is pressing keys to kill monsters. One of them is clicking on buttons to buy and sell things. I fail to see how learning your combos takes more effort than learning your markets.

Learning to play the game might not take more skill, but actually playing it is a lot more work. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing, avoiding incoming damage, dealing outgoing damage, following the other players to the next objective in an orderly manner.

I would also point out that a dungeon runner generally isn’t paying 80 silver for a chance at 105 silver or something like that. Adventuring you simply gain. Flipping, you have to put some of your money in to get anything back.

Time is money. Time spent running content that results in a fail and no reward is time wasted. They could have been doing some other activity, one with lower returns, and been guaranteed a return. Likewise in TP, there are some methods that are almost guaranteed to turn a modest profit, and there are others that have a higher risk of losing money or breaking even, but you can still be highly profitable overall. The “risk” of making less money than a PvE player off of the TP is very minimal once you learn how to do it.

That depends on your opinion of reasonable. If you think 700 gold per month is reasonable then of course a bunch of activities aren’t going to fit into that.

So if 700g per month isn’t “reasonable” for PvE content, why should it be “reasonable” for a TP player? I’m just saying, balance the two, whether that’s to both making ~700 per month or ~30 per month, doesn’t really matter, so long as it’s roughly the same amount, balanced. It’s the same as any other element of the game, it doesn’t matter whether a Warrior can do 40K damage with an attack or 10K damage with the attack, all that matters is that the other classes can do about the same. If the Warrior is doing 40K and the other classes can only manage 10K, then there’s probably a balance issue there that needs addressing.

The TP doesn’t create wealth, it destroys some in the process of moving it. Nothing is created, only destroyed. Also, please define what actual “wealth” is in Gw2.

You clearly did not understand the point I was making. I was agreeing with you that the TP does not create “wealth” in the macro sense, more money enters the TP than ever comes back out of it, I get that. But the TP does create wealth in the personal sense, as those are are “wealthy” in the game (let’s define that as "rich enough that buying a Legendary for gold is an option), are wealthy exclusively due to the actions of the TP. There are plenty of individuals who have made considerably more gold off the TP than they’ve put into it. So yes, on the individual level the TP is very much a personal wealth generator.

It would have taken me not more than refining iron ore into steel and iron ingots.

There would still then be a glut on ingots, and a low supply of ore, and at least in that scenario you would have to put some small effort into it.

Ohoni.6057:

It would have taken me not more than refining iron ore into steel and iron ingots.

There would still then be a glut on ingots, and a low supply of ore, and at least in that scenario you would have to put some small effort into it.[/quote]

Well, if you are ok with clicking the “craft all” button once and go afk until the crafting process is finished to make 5 times more profit than you normally do with pve, i dont see why you take so much offense in flippers/speculators making more gold.

During the first night of the new patch, i made over 1000g profit in a couple of hours by promoting bronze to iron in the forge (only players that dont know what they are doing call it the toilet).

Bind on Purchase wouldnt have prevented that and it doesnt matter how much walls of text you post here, it will never be implemented because:

1: It will not change the fact that some people will make more gold via the TP than others (by salvaging, crafting and forging)

2: It will take a great deal of quality of life from the mayority of the playerbase

3: John Smith said “No!”

Ohoni.6057:

Which is really not that big a risk if you keep aware of market trends, which most players don’t want to bother with, and shouldn’t HAVE to bother with. That’s the fundamental disagreement here, some of you feel that the players should have to play like TP flippers if they want to make TP flipper profits, my point is that NOBODY should have to play like TP flippers in an action/adventure game.

Not if they simply bother undercut the current low sale price for an item they want to sell or overcut the current high bid for an item they want or even match those prices. They don’t need to research, they just need to bother to “haggle” with player vendors and be willing to wait. I watch every copper. I use WPs sparingly. I don’t buy new gear frequently while leveling. And I never just sell on the TP to the current high bidder or buy from the current low seller. All that extra copper and silver adds up.

I can’t imagine in a game where people are bemoaning how cash poor they are aren’t willing to do the simplest thing to earn or save more cash if only they are willing to wait.

Which would be fine, except that flippers pocket the difference and end up with more money over time than the other players. You don’t see your average Lion’s Arch vendor rocking Sunrise.

How do you know that don’t have one at home and are playing poor.

I’ve only been playing the TP as a minigame for a few weeks now. I have to say I love it. It can be tedious and a time sink but it helped keep me in the game as I reached my PvE goals and now that I can afford an actual set of gear and runes, I actually feel like getting into WvW. These are things I think Anet wants. If it wasn’t for the TP the grind of relying on rng would have killed the game for me.

I have to ask if you complain about the TP have you tried to play it? In my experience it is flippers and farmers who drive prices down, there are a lot of videos on Youtube that suggest you should always sell for one copper less and I have seen early markets I thought to exploit completely destroyed of any profit making by this “tactic”.

If anything manipulates prices blame new items that are introduced requiring crafting by Anet. The new Spinal Blades backpack has driven material prices up like crazy.

Well, if you are ok with clicking the “craft all” button once and go afk until the crafting process is finished to make 5 times more profit than you normally do with pve, i dont see why you take so much offense in flippers/speculators making more gold.

It shouldn’t give returns that high, but you’re right, if you can make a ton of profit off of converting iron ore to steel then they would need to do something about that as well. In any case, it’s only a significant problem with direct crafting mats, which is only a fraction of the market.

During the first night of the new patch, i made over 1000g profit in a couple of hours by promoting bronze to iron in the forge (only players that dont know what they are doing call it the toilet).

And in over nine months of playing the game daily I have not made 1000g IN TOTAL. Do you not understand how that might be considered an unbalanced system?

Not if they simply bother undercut the current low sale price for an item they want to sell or overcut the current high bid for an item they want or even match those prices. They don’t need to research, they just need to bother to “haggle” with player vendors and be willing to wait

And that fact that so many don’t indicates a problem in the system. Again, I ask you, if you were to tell every player in the game that they could make around 50% more money on their goods if they were willing to wait 24 hours to collect on it, do you really, truly, honestly believe the majority of them, the majority of the time, would say “nah, I’d rather a lot less money right this second?”

If you truly, honestly believe that, I’ve got a pumpkin pie to sell you for 500 gold.

If it wasn’t for the TP the grind of relying on rng would have killed the game for me.

The TP is good. The ability to bypass RNG on it is good. The way it’s abused to turn money into more money so efficiently is not good. Nobody is talking about harming the core function of the TP, just in removing the ability to make such obscene profit from it.

While I also have misgivings over the consolidation of such large amounts of wealth in the hands of a few, I don’t think it’s a serious problem. Unlike real life, you can’t really buy political or legal influence with in-game gold (since ANet is the one that calls the shots, not the players), and given that any player in the game can go out and generate new supply of gold/items at any time, it’s downright impossible to control even sections of the market. (Especially now that ANet has given us signs that even previously exclusive skins could come back at any time, so even buying up very limited supplies of rare items is no guarantee that you now have a monopoly.)

Theoretically an extremely wealthy player, or a cartel of players, COULD seize control of a niche portion of the market, but I think that if even if they successfully pulled it off, ANet would step in and intervene. This isn’t EVE Online, where such tactics are an accepted, even celebrated, part of the gameplay. I think if the player base became aware that some players were able to control the economy to such an extent, it would harm player trust in the TP, which would be detrimental to the game as players start to use one-to-one trading or off-site markets.

I’m not worried about the wealthy controlling portions of the market. I’m worried about the wealthy controlling portions of the wealth. There are so many things in this game that cost hundreds or even thousands of gold in total, including legendaries, anything ascended, Commander tags, and of course anything that can be purchased using gems. These are nothing to people that bring in 1000 gold in a single day, but are out of range for the average player who is just trying to enjoy the game as it was designed. If money is to be the value by which many of the games features are accessed, then it needs to be distributed fairly. If they’re going to accept that gold is just going to flow to the top, then they have to stop making gold a condition for players to earn things, and just have them be pure content rewards. Instead of needing 250 heirlooms and 10g for a halo, it would just be 250 heirlooms even. Instead of a handful of account bound mats and a ton of market value mats to make Ascended armor, make them take ALL account bound, content-provided mats.

Ohoni.6057:

It shouldn’t give returns that high, but you’re right, if you can make a ton of profit off of converting iron ore to steel then they would need to do something about that as well. In any case, it’s only a significant problem with direct crafting mats, which is only a fraction of the market.

And in over nine months of playing the game daily I have not made 1000g IN TOTAL. Do you not understand how that might be considered an unbalanced system?

And that fact that so many don’t indicates a problem in the system. Again, I ask you, if you were to tell every player in the game that they could make around 50% more money on their goods if they were willing to wait 24 hours to collect on it, do you really, truly, honestly believe the majority of them, the majority of the time, would say “nah, I’d rather a lot less money right this second?”

Anet didnt enable me to earn 1000g within a night, other players did because they felt the desperate need for 60 iron ore at 8s a pop to forge a blue backpiece and then asked for 60 more ore to upgrade it to masterwork.

It doesnt indicate a problem in the system but indicates a point of view of the general player base:

Most of them simply dont care as much as you that some people make more gold on the tp then them while they have fun doing other stuff. Gold isnt everything and me earning more than you shouldnt influence your gaming experience because it has no direct influence on it. If you want to earn more gold, why dont you play the tp for an hour a day and then do 3 hours of what you enjoy in the game instead of doing 4 hours of degenerative gameplay?

You have the choice to make more gold but you choose to complain that your preferred style of play doesnt reward as much as mine and want mine nerfed

I feel inclined to open a new topic asking Anet to please reward me with a choice of karma, skillpoints or ascended mats, everytime i make 10g profit on the tp because i have trouble crafting my ascended armor without dragonite.

And while we are at it, either nerf dungeon token rewards for speedrunners or make 60 of them purchaseable for gold, once i bought or sold 1000 items on the TP per day.

Still, it boils down to the volume at which one can purchase is way too high. Trading volume per account should be reduced drastically. There’s never been a requirement in game that requires such volumes as one can purchase on the TP with a few clicks, in under a minute. If trading actually began to require a large volume of time, flipping and subsequent manipulation would be lessened. Hey, farming mats in zones get nerfed all the time. It’s not like Anet doesn’t discourage generating wealth in some area’s.

And yes, for the one person whom mentioned it, I’d rather deal with an NPC. Because I’d much rather sacrifice some gold than make a few whales richer. Which is a problem with the TP, the anonymity. Just like in the real world, I’d like to choose whom I do business with.

Wanze.8410:

Anet didnt enable me to earn 1000g within a night, other players did because they felt the desperate need for 60 iron ore at 8s a pop to forge a blue backpiece and then asked for 60 more ore to upgrade it to masterwork.

Anet created the systems which boils everything in the game down to making gold, so the fault is clearly at their door.

As Ohoni has noted they are looking at the game economy only on a macro scale, nothing else. This excellent post from bombsaway in the previous thread we had on this topic dealt with the problems of this approach but never received a reply:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/The-game-relies-too-much-in-the-TP/page/6#post3536464

Zaxares.5419:

Theoretically an extremely wealthy player, or a cartel of players, COULD seize control of a niche portion of the market, but I think that if even if they successfully pulled it off, ANet would step in and intervene. This isn’t EVE Online, where such tactics are an accepted, even celebrated, part of the gameplay. I think if the player base became aware that some players were able to control the economy to such an extent, it would harm player trust in the TP, which would be detrimental to the game as players start to use one-to-one trading or off-site markets.

JS has already said that he monitors TP activity and is both willing and able to step in and make corrections if something goes wrong. This kind of authority and ability to change the rules of the game is not something to be taken lightly, however. And he will not step in on behalf of an individual or group with a “feeling” that something is wrong.

He has access to a lot more information than we do, and can find such things as how many precursors sell within a certain time period and who is selling/buying them. The bottom line here is that a lot of players with very little information about what goes on in the TP make great leaps to erroneous assumptions and see dirty dealings where there are none. JS has the information to make such determinations, and thus far there have not been manipulations on the scale that people think is happening.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m not worried about the wealthy controlling portions of the market. I’m worried about the wealthy controlling portions of the wealth. There are so many things in this game that cost hundreds or even thousands of gold in total, including legendaries, anything ascended, Commander tags, and of course anything that can be purchased using gems. These are nothing to people that bring in 1000 gold in a single day, but are out of range for the average player who is just trying to enjoy the game as it was designed. If money is to be the value by which many of the games features are accessed, then it needs to be distributed fairly. If they’re going to accept that gold is just going to flow to the top, then they have to stop making gold a condition for players to earn things, and just have them be pure content rewards. Instead of needing 250 heirlooms and 10g for a halo, it would just be 250 heirlooms even. Instead of a handful of account bound mats and a ton of market value mats to make Ascended armor, make them take ALL account bound, content-provided mats.

I understand where you’re coming from, although I still have to disagree with you on that it’s a problem. Yes, I dislike the trend of requiring “gold + event tokens” that’s been the case for all recent Living Story rewards, but it’s likely that this is because there is a vast amount of player wealth now floating in the economy, and this is part of ANet’s attempt to ensure that adequate gold sinks exist so it doesn’t cause inflation.

The prices for some of the end-game luxury goods are indeed very steep, but in terms of real inflation, I don’t think it’s actually increased by much since launch in terms of actual player purchasing power. 10g for the Selfless/Selfish potion may seem like a lot, but you could run a couple of dungeon paths (earning about 3g), go farm some iron ore nodes in Brisban Wildlands (earn another 1 – 2g or so, depending on how many nodes you hit), and then do the LA invasion and potentially get another 1g depending on your luck with drops. The average player is likely to be capable of earning that 10g within the 2 weeks of the Living Story. (Acquiring the Heirlooms is likely a more painful grind.)

Prices have gone up, yes, but the ability for players to earn money has also gone up a fair bit.

As for the ultra-wealthy traders who have thousands of gold and simply buy whatever they want when new stuff comes out, well, that’s their prerogative. To be honest though, I think they probably will not value that purchase as much as a player who set out to deliberately grind/earn/farm the item. You feel much more attached to an item that you sweated and bled for than if you just dumped gold on it.

As an example, back in GW1, when the Icy Dragon Sword was first released, I farmed Ice Imps in Mineral Springs for hours before one dropped for me. (Looking back on it now, I was actually extremely lucky.) To this day, I still have that Icy Dragon Sword on my Warrior, because of the special sentimental value I have for it. If I’d simply bought it from some trader, I probably would have dumped it long before now.

You think that there are actually a large number of players, as in hundreds or thousands, that bring in 1000g a day? Easy for people to claim they make that much flipping. Just like it’s easy to suggest they got Dusk in a boss drop by typing out the tag [&AgEBcgAA] in map chat.

Yes, someone with a lot of coin can try to control supply of a historically low drop rate item or material and then try to demand an even higher amount of coin for them. That only works if they keep seizing new supply at an increasing cost and have the inventory space to hoard it just so they can play De Beers.

And while legionaries and precursors prices are out there, there are only 61 exotic weapons that the low sell price is over 100g, 70 over 50g and 216 over 25g. You don’t need to be insanely wealthy to own great gear.

Sure the starting price for the cheapest of the 21 legionaries is over 1500g, but considering all the items you need to craft one, shouldn’t the person who crafted it not get a windfall if they choose to sell it?

Anet didnt enable me to earn 1000g within a night, other players did because they felt the desperate need for 60 iron ore at 8s a pop to forge a blue backpiece and then asked for 60 more ore to upgrade it to masterwork.

But ANet created those conditions, by announcing overnight that payers would be needing 120 iron ore to make some new gizmo, without dumping an extra 120 iron ore per player into the market first. They created demand, they left it to the market to provide supply, which the market did, at a premium. I’m not saying that what you did was an unreasonable response to the situation presented, I’m saying the situation should never have been presented to you.

10g for the Selfless/Selfish potion may seem like a lot, but you could run a couple of dungeon paths (earning about 3g), go farm some iron ore nodes in Brisban Wildlands (earn another 1 – 2g or so, depending on how many nodes you hit), and then do the LA invasion and potentially get another 1g depending on your luck with drops.

Yeah, or you could spend 1/100th of what you made in a single day. You see my point, for a certain class of players, everything in the game that can be bought for gold may as well be priced in coppers, again it’s a matter of balance. If the Warrior could deal a thousand times as much damage as any other class, you can bet they’d be working hard to nerf them. If a TP flipper can make a thoussand times as much money as any other method in the game, then why do you believe they should not take that seriously?

The average player is likely to be capable of earning that 10g within the 2 weeks of the Living Story. (Acquiring the Heirlooms is likely a more painful grind.)

Meh, I managed enough to get both potions and have some left over, but it did take putting in the time, running a route of herilooms each day. I probably spent more time collecting them than a successful TP Flipper would spend making 100 gold or more.

Prices have gone up, yes, but the ability for players to earn money has also gone up a fair bit.

Some, but it’s still in the single digits per day for most players, and that’s only if they really try at making gold by using the more efficient methods. “Just playing around” would likely only earn you a gold or two per week.

You feel much more attached to an item that you sweated and bled for than if you just dumped gold on it.

Which only devalues it when some other player uses it to light their cigars. Every player should have to sweat and bleed to make money.

You think that there are actually a large number of players, as in hundreds or thousands, that bring in 1000g a day?

I would think even one such player would be too many, but I would guess there are at least a dozen, and probably dozens of more that average 100g or more per day.

Sure the starting price for the cheapest of the 21 legionaries is over 1500g, but considering all the items you need to craft one, shouldn’t the person who crafted it not get a windfall if they choose to sell it?

A large chunk of that though is the price of precursors, which is also astronomical. The only two things currently separating me from a couple of legendaries is the price of precursors and the price of t6 mats. Everything else, all the “personal achievement” stuff, I’ve got plenty of, but the game has a money gate, a gate that is entirely pointless to the successful TP flipper.

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

I just thought of a wild idea. What if they implemented a system of taxation that worked like magic find in reverse? Basically, each time you withdrew gold from the TP, it applied a miniscule fraction of that money to a rising tax rate attached to your account? Like withdraw one gold, it only adds like 0.001% tax or something, but after you’ve withdrawn a thousand gold it would be applying a 1% tax to every sale, and after 10k gold it would be 10%, and so on. Probably diminishing returns at some point, or maybe more of a bell curve, cap out at maybe 50% tops, and I’m just spitballing those numbers, I’m not sure what exactly the balance points should be, but it’s an interesting thought.

Of course the workaround to this would be to just jump from account to account each time the tax gets too high, and the tax would also have to be levied on account-to-account gold transfers so that they couldn’t transfer their wealth without taxation, but it would at the very least apply a real money tax to TP tycooning if people had to keep buying new boxes. If they’re going to be wealthy in the game then they may as well do more to keep the game running (as opposed to the current state, where they can turn gold into gems to buy off the store rather than spending cash money for them).

There are many ways to “balance” flipping without damaging the economy.

The only thing missing is the will and that is why we are here discussing….

As i said many time the best way would even be the simplest.
Just enforce actions like the one happened during the crystalline dust scarcity…..

That just makes economy better and puts real risk in flipping….
As you can see that was the only exception while instead the development goes in the opposite direction addressing only cheap items and pushing flipping warning on forum…….

Notice how sigil of generosity wasn t reintroduced in the same amount of previous halloween?
Notice this?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Is-this-really-ok-anet-Seems-wrong/first#post3707620

The issue is someone is pushing the flipping part as central to the game disregarding other players…..

Zaxares.5419:

Theoretically an extremely wealthy player, or a cartel of players, COULD seize control of a niche portion of the market

Nah. Control of the means of production is a necessary condition to establish a cartel. There’s no way to control the means of production in this game – anyone can go out and farm anything, there’s no competition for mobs, and if enough people start doing it the game even generates overflows so everyone can get in.

The only thing you can really do profitably is drive a market in disequilibrium towards equilibrium. Anything else, and you’re burning money to maintain a disequilibrium – without a financial system to work with there’s not much else you can do.

Behellagh.1468:

You think that there are actually a large number of players, as in hundreds or thousands, that bring in 1000g a day?

Bringing in 1000g on any given day is extraordinarily difficult (I’d hesitate to say impossible, but it’s pushing it). People with a lot of market expertise can and do make that much when there are big, big market disruptions from content patches, profiting off of driving prices to their new equilibrium. But that’s a pretty special situation; outside of patch days and the days before and after them, the big market movements that the big profits come from just aren’t happening.

Behellagh.1468:

And while legionaries and precursors prices are out there

I’ve been following precursor prices very closely for the past year or so. If you measure the price of, say, Dusk in a weighted average of Mithril Ore, Elder Wood, and Intricate Totems, you’d find that it doesn’t move around very much, regardless of what patches have done. Fundamentally, a precursor is just a lot of Mithril, Elder Wood, and Totems, mixed with several hours of crafting and forging. Regardless of what the value of money is doing, the price of precursors reflect that.

Behellagh.1468:

Easy for people to claim they make that much flipping. Just like it’s easy to suggest they got Dusk in a boss drop by typing out the tag [&AgEBcgAA] in map chat.

Indeed. It costs you nothing and gets you a ton of attention; how much of map chat or in game forums are basically people yelling ‘look at me!’ over and over again?

There absolutely are big pockets of wealth out there, and people taking advantage of market shifts to make huge profits. It’s not anywhere near as widespread as people think, though, and it’s mere drops compared to the raw output of thousands of players just playing the game.

Bringing in 1000g on any given day is extraordinarily difficult (I’d hesitate to say impossible, but it’s pushing it). People with a lot of market expertise can and do make that much when there are big, big market disruptions from content patches, profiting off of driving prices to their new equilibrium. But that’s a pretty special situation; outside of patch days and the days before and after them, the big market movements that the big profits come from just aren’t happening.

It’s obscene if a player manages it even once outside of getting lucky on a precursor drop. If a player can average even 1000g per month it’s far far too much.

I’ve been following precursor prices very closely for the past year or so. If you measure the price of, say, Dusk in a weighted average of Mithril Ore, Elder Wood, and Intricate Totems, you’d find that it doesn’t move around very much, regardless of what patches have done. Fundamentally, a precursor is just a lot of Mithril, Elder Wood, and Totems, mixed with several hours of crafting and forging. Regardless of what the value of money is doing, the price of precursors reflect that.

As someone who follows the markets, what do you think would happen to the prices of precursors if they made the following tweaks to supply:

1. Remove them from the Mystic Forge tables entirely.

2. Increase their drop rates from level 50+ content significantly, such that the exact same number of them enter the world, on average, as do under the current systems (and make it clear that they were doing this so that there wouldn’t need to be weeks of testing to find this out).

Would that cause a price increase, decrease, or stay the same? What if they then increased the drop rates slightly higher?

LordByron.8369:

There are many ways to “balance” flipping without damaging the economy.

The only thing missing is the will and that is why we are here discussing….

As i said many time the best way would even be the simplest.
Just enforce actions like the one happened during the crystalline dust scarcity…..

That just makes economy better and puts real risk in flipping….
As you can see that was the only exception while instead the development goes in the opposite direction addressing only cheap items and pushing flipping warning on forum…….

Notice how sigil of generosity wasn t reintroduced in the same amount of previous halloween?
Notice this?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Is-this-really-ok-anet-Seems-wrong/first#post3707620

The issue is someone is pushing the flipping part as central to the game disregarding other players…..

I have trouble making sense of your ramblings. The Sigil of Generosity had the same droprate last Halloween as during Halloween the year before: 0.00%, as it is a Wintersday item.

I also have trouble connecting my post that you linked to what you seem to claim here. I was just stating that Items from the Bazaar had nothing to do with Scarlet and how people seem to buy up the items again that were reintroduced in the Ultimate Citizens Rescue Bag, thinking the bag will discontinue to be awarded next patch.

LordByron.8369:

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

If you would multiply dungeon rewards by 10, it would lead to inflation in general, thats all. It doesnt matter, if that gold is created out of thin air or taken from the tp tax gold sink.

Ohoni.6057:

I just thought of a wild idea. What if they implemented a system of taxation that worked like magic find in reverse? Basically, each time you withdrew gold from the TP, it applied a miniscule fraction of that money to a rising tax rate attached to your account? Like withdraw one gold, it only adds like 0.001% tax or something, but after you’ve withdrawn a thousand gold it would be applying a 1% tax to every sale, and after 10k gold it would be 10%, and so on. Probably diminishing returns at some point, or maybe more of a bell curve, cap out at maybe 50% tops, and I’m just spitballing those numbers, I’m not sure what exactly the balance points should be, but it’s an interesting thought.

Of course the workaround to this would be to just jump from account to account each time the tax gets too high, and the tax would also have to be levied on account-to-account gold transfers so that they couldn’t transfer their wealth without taxation, but it would at the very least apply a real money tax to TP tycooning if people had to keep buying new boxes. If they’re going to be wealthy in the game then they may as well do more to keep the game running (as opposed to the current state, where they can turn gold into gems to buy off the store rather than spending cash money for them).

I had to think a little bit longer to find the flaws in this proposal, i give you that much.

This would of course cripple profits for high volume/high value traders.10% more tax would be hardly noticable for me and wouldnt serve your purpose as i would only make 9 times more gold than you instead of 10 times. A 50% cap on taxes would half my profits, meaning i have to work twice as much as before. But in the long run, it would also cripple profits for everybody else while creating a gold sink that would be hard to balance. Over a couple of years, more and more players, who simply sell their loot to the highest bidder, would reach the cap wondering why they got penalized for simply playing the game.

Right now, a market in equilibrium usually has a price spread close to 15%. Once the average tax each player has to pay has reach 20%, that price spread will be resembling 20% in equilibrium, subsequently reducing my relative tax penalty of 50% by 5%.

In the end, it will not change the fact that i will make more profits on the tp than other players through regular rewards, while introducing a huge gold sink.

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

If you would multiply dungeon rewards by 10, it would lead to inflation in general, thats all. It doesnt matter, if that gold is created out of thin air or taken from the tp tax gold sink.

Read the tax part..

Because you would pay it back in taxes…impacting not only YOUR game mode but even Others…

Exactly as happens with TP flipping….

Now the amount of gold generated by the community in dungeon is tied to market taxes…so the more gold is generated, the higher the taxes….

You don t like it?
Well i don t like current system doing the same….

Let’s not forget that Traders would just buy more shell accounts with 4 extra bank guilds instead of paying a premium tax rate. Even my idea of lowering trading volume per account would just motivate traders to buy more accounts. But, more accounts are at least generating income for Anet. Buying gems with gold off the TP doesn’t support the game in the long run.

For cornering markets, I think we’re getting close to this becoming a possibility. That’s why I firmly believe there should never be one shot items. Everything should be available to drop on no more than a 6 month rotation. Annually is a bit long in between for low volume items.

LordByron.8369:

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

If you would multiply dungeon rewards by 10, it would lead to inflation in general, thats all. It doesnt matter, if that gold is created out of thin air or taken from the tp tax gold sink.

Read the tax part..

Because you would pay it back in taxes…impacting not only YOUR game mode but even Others…

Exactly as happens with TP flipping….

Now the amount of gold generated by the community in dungeon is tied to market taxes…so the more gold is generated, the higher the taxes….

You don t like it?
Well i don t like current system doing the same….

It would change absolutely nothing to the fact that i would still be able to make more gold than you. You are suggesting to flood the economy with gold and then suck it out again through tp taxes. But as taxes would still be the same for everybody, i dont have a disadvantage because the trading post doesnt inject gold into the economy. All my profits come from other players giving me gold for convenience of filling my buy order for instant cash and buying my listings for instant purchases.

All it would do is to establish a new spread between buy orders and sell listings that resembles the new tax.

DeWolfe.2174:

Let’s not forget that Traders would just buy more shell accounts with 4 extra bank guilds instead of paying a premium tax rate. Even my idea of lowering trading volume per account would just motivate traders to buy more accounts. But, more accounts are at least generating income for Anet. Buying gems with gold off the TP doesn’t support the game in the long run.

For cornering markets, I think we’re getting close to this becoming a possibility. That’s why I firmly believe there should never be one shot items. Everything should be available to drop on no more than a 6 month rotation. Annually is a bit long in between for low volume items.

Lowering trade volumes is a 2 edged sword because it would greatly impact high volume markets while not doing anything about high value/low volume markets. If you set the limit to 250 sales/purchases per day, you wouldnt be able to buy enough mats on the tp to craft a bolt of damask but i would still be able to purchase 250 items each worth 4 gold and have a trade volume of 1000g.
Again, a change like this wouldnt hurt TP traders but the general player base.

I also disagree with your opinion that buying gems with gold doesnt support the game in the long run. The more gems are bought with gold, the higher the exchange rate gets and the more gold you receive for the gems you purchase with real money adding more in game value to gems.

Its also incredibly hard to corner or manipulate markets, no matter how much gold you have. I tried and i failed. Its definately possible to manipulate prices upwards but its impossible to sell all your stock you had to buy on the inflated price because the real demand (to consume/use the item) would usually still be the same as before you started manipulating its price.

Buying up all supply of one item usually results in people, who had it in their bank, to list it and undercut each other, making it impossible for you to sell all the stock you bought to manipulate the price and in the end, most of the time, you will have more items listed on the tp than before you started, while you still have half your stock in your bank, a quarter listed on the tp between the actual price and the price it was when you bought them out and a quarter sold.

The Mystic Forge Conduit is a good example. Someone bought out all of them before last patch and prices skyrocketed. Now there are nearly double as much listed on the tp than before and buy listings are the same again.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/35728

People who think that they can corner markets underestimate the supply that sits in peoples inventory and banks compared to the supply listed on the tp.

Even if someone should pull it off to break even on market manipulation or make a little profit, that profit is marginal to what you could have earned in the same time by pure flipping or speculating on items which demand will actually rise due to game meta changes.

ok so in gw2 looking at gem prices in the last year gems were about 100gems=2gold, this year 100gems=8gold, similarly the US economy took about 55 years to reach a similar rise in inflation effective to buying power, meaning that at the speed GW2 economy moves a single day in GW2 economy would be comparable to nearly two months in the US economy (DISCLAIMER: I used the time period between 1914 and 1969 to show this increase as getting closer to the 2000s inflation is shown to be much higher, but while looking back to 1775 to 1875 would have been equally ridiculous as it showed only about 14 percent inflation over 100 years http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php) but to get to the point of this, I believe this shows that flippers are indeed selling time as if a loan or for speculators maybe it would look more like buying futures.

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

If you would multiply dungeon rewards by 10, it would lead to inflation in general, thats all. It doesnt matter, if that gold is created out of thin air or taken from the tp tax gold sink.

Read the tax part..

Because you would pay it back in taxes…impacting not only YOUR game mode but even Others…

Exactly as happens with TP flipping….

Now the amount of gold generated by the community in dungeon is tied to market taxes…so the more gold is generated, the higher the taxes….

You don t like it?
Well i don t like current system doing the same….

It would change absolutely nothing to the fact that i would still be able to make more gold than you. You are suggesting to flood the economy with gold and then suck it out again through tp taxes. But as taxes would still be the same for everybody, i dont have a disadvantage because the trading post doesnt inject gold into the economy. All my profits come from other players giving me gold for convenience of filling my buy order for instant cash and buying my listings for instant purchases.

All it would do is to establish a new spread between buy orders and sell listings that resembles the new tax.

Its an example…if applied to current sales would be the same as its happening now for other players.

I ll try to explain better

1) boost the current rewards of dungeons 10X
2) apply dynamic sale taxes to items already listed…..

Totally unfair…as much as people see their gold devalue and inlfate for all but tp flippers.

LordByron.8369:

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

Wanze.8410:

LordByron.8369:

as people said its not an issue if YOU profit the TP….

Its a reason if:
-every other farm get nerfed constantly but the TP
-TP has a profit so high (with non existent risk) that you can impact OTHER PLAYERS economy…and it never get nerfed in any way. (on the opposite its favoured a lot).

What would you say if dungeon rewards instead of coming out of nowhere, were multyplied by 10 and got from taxes on the TP resulting in their increment?
And same for champion farming

That is exactly the opposite scenario of how other players are treated…

Lets have dynamic taxation and balance rewards….

If you would multiply dungeon rewards by 10, it would lead to inflation in general, thats all. It doesnt matter, if that gold is created out of thin air or taken from the tp tax gold sink.

Read the tax part..

Because you would pay it back in taxes…impacting not only YOUR game mode but even Others…

Exactly as happens with TP flipping….

Now the amount of gold generated by the community in dungeon is tied to market taxes…so the more gold is generated, the higher the taxes….

You don t like it?
Well i don t like current system doing the same….

It would change absolutely nothing to the fact that i would still be able to make more gold than you. You are suggesting to flood the economy with gold and then suck it out again through tp taxes. But as taxes would still be the same for everybody, i dont have a disadvantage because the trading post doesnt inject gold into the economy. All my profits come from other players giving me gold for convenience of filling my buy order for instant cash and buying my listings for instant purchases.

All it would do is to establish a new spread between buy orders and sell listings that resembles the new tax.

Its an example…if applied to current sales would be the same as its happening now for other players.

I ll try to explain better

1) boost the current rewards of dungeons 10X
2) apply dynamic sale taxes to items already listed…..

Totally unfair…as much as people see their gold devalue and inlfate for all but tp flippers.

So how exactly would this not hurt the general player base more than some people earning lots of gold through the tp?