Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, so I’ve noticed something extremely peculiar in the past few days with an item on the TP. The item I speak of is the tier 4 totem, engraved totems. For the past couple of days, the price for these things have dropped significantly.

While price fluctuations isn’t out of the ordinary, what alarmed me is the way this price change occurred. Just 20-30 minutes before, this item went from 2.08 silver (having already dropped by more than 1 silver yesterday) to 1.01 silver in a couple of minutes.

There were stacks and stacks of this item being put onto the TP at prices 1c above the highest buy order price, and at the same time, buy orders were being filled at a ridiculous rate. In fact, if I’m correct and the demand is measured by buy orders on guild wars trade, then 4000 buy orders were filled in about a minute, while the supply went up by more than 2000. (take this with a grain of salt, i don’t actually completely understand how demand/supply are measured but this seems to make sense from what I know)

here’s the url to the item, you’ll probably have to copy and paste it:

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/24363

I really don’t think this change is normal. Players who farm and sell items don’t usually sell stacks at a time, neither do they fill buy orders with such amazing speed. And players who are flipping will usually only undercut by 1c each time, as they want profit. So is this bots at work again on the TP?

urrmm you do know there are people like me out there who place thousands of buy and sell orders every day?

It’s called playing the TP?

I’m aware. I place thousands of buy/sell orders in an hour. I also still understand it could very well have just been player not paying attention to actual item price, but like I said, having been observing it for a while and this was the most drastic change I’ve seen in a while. I’d like to believe that it was something else, but for me at the time, the only thing I can think of is the presence of someone with way too much supply and who didn’t care about profit.

I say this because the stacks of engraved totems were being sold by one single seller (as in, when I looked at the sell orders, it said something like 250 by one seller), at 1.30 silver when the next highest sell order was at about 2s, and buy orders were at about 1.4 only 30 seconds prior. TP players may have a large amount of supply but they don’t sell when there isn’t a profit margin. And people who farmed the items and also sell at such a low price probably wouldn’t sell in such large volume.

Maybe I just overestimated the average seller’s knowledge of price fluctuation.

Or an alternative explanation, someone who had been stockpiling them, dumping them into their mats storage during play find their mat storage for that item is now full. So the next time they can access mat storage they pull out that item and dump it at or near the buy price looking to convert it into quick cash.

Now others in the same time period note that the price suddenly takes a nose dive and decide to follow suit, afraid the rumors of high tier salvage is going to plummet is true. So you get;

Mar 4 21:50-21:59
Buy Price – 1s44c Demand – 9,775
Sell Price – 2s8c Supply – 52,405

Mar 4 22:00- 22:09
Buy Price – 1s14c Demand – 8,352
Sell Price – 1s29c Supply – 53,739

This is over a 10-20 minute span. Demand dropping 1,423 and supply increasing 1,334 isn’t really all that much. Of course these numbers are simply snapshots of the current state.

Drawing too much of a conclusion from this is like stopping at your grocer twice in the same week and drawing conclusions of a product’s popularity by the change of what’s on the shelf. You have no idea how often that item has been restocked in between or how recently it’s been restocked. We don’t see volume, either in the number of transactions or the amount of items those transactions move.

Could be someone cashing out and causing other folks to jump on the band wagon, it doesn’t have to be a bot. Totem farming was really hot for a while and I think but don’t know for certain the items you can make with totems are not as demanded after the latest patch.

I have also noticed this strange behavior and it seems very bot-like. I have seen this 5 times in a half hour when a material seller will undercut the lowest seller by 30 percent ( a percentile that wouldn’t in a million years be logical in “playing the TP”) and it was always 1k+ stacks sold by one person. The undercut would almost always be 1 copper above the highest buyer, which in itself is odd.

Of course I observed this because I was the one buying them out. Profit to be made there.

^If you were buying them, wouldn’t it make sense for him to keep listing more of the item like that?

But anyway, while it’s definitely someone playing TP or manipulating or whatever you want to call their business tactics, this type of behavior is more likely to be human. After all, a bot is far from necessary to use for such simple and small amount of transactions. And the undercut amount has little to do with it being bot or human here imo, seeing as bots would be more useful for rapid 1c undercuts than large ones.

And while 1c undercuts are most common, large ones aren’t that odd either, since they encourage faster sales by flippers or some other opportunistic buyer. Though I’ve only done it when I wanted to unload a large amount of cheap mats quickly.