Guild Wars 2

But their actions will contribute to the health of your server, in the sense that their items and gold can move in and out of your server.

Server-specific markets would help some servers and hurt others. Prices would be much more volatile and unpredictable, which hurts casual players but is great for market players (who a lot of casual players love to complain about here on the forum). Super-rare items like precursors would almost never show up on small servers, so if/when they do, people could charge pretty much whatever they want, since there’d be no one to undercut them.

A worldwide trading system provides stability and predictability and keeps both supply and demand relatively high, and doesn’t penalize smaller servers for not having enough hardcore gamers to get the really high-end items.

Plus in the current free server transfer set up, people could just hop around servers seeking the inevitable arbitrage

The server wide TP is actually integral to the game design and a brilliant choice by the devs.

It allows all servers to be reasonably balanced in the sense that you can change servers without the problem of moving gold and imbalancing the server or having an unfair gamin or trading advantage because of that.

If it allows arbitrage, that actually helps the server in question balance out.

Why ‘should’ there be an overflow or a lack of something anywhere? That makes no sense. Healthy economy is based upon mercantile interaction, not stagnation. :/

VendettaDFA.9368:

There should be servers with a glut of a specific item and a lack of another. It helps make each server more unique and I also believe this separation of Trading Post will actually benefit the players.

Translation:
– In some servers, certain items will be very hard to buy because nobody is farming them.
– In others, they will be very hard to sell because they are overfarmed.
How does that benefit the players ?

Oh, and “make each server more unique” translates to: Make some servers better places to be than other servers. So that the better servers get more players, making them even better and the bad servers worse.

Why should my decisions on what to farm,craft,buy or sell be impacted by players who will never contribute directly to the overall health of the server I play on?

Why should my decisions on what to farm,craft,buy or sell be impacted by players who will never contribute directly to the area of the map I play on?

With the exception of Orr, people on a different map to you don’t contribute to what you’re doing. So if you and another player never meet on the same map (say, you both farm different dungeons), the only interaction between you and that player is via the economy.

So how is a player on a different server worse than a player who sticks to an area of GW2 that you don’t like ?

I suggest changing to server specific Trading Posts, or at the very least a clustered approach. Tie only 3 or 4 servers together on a TP if individual TP’s don’t fit ANETs business model.

ANET’s business model is to make the game more friendly to casuals. Which means they want to make it hard for power traders to screw over causal players. More volume in the economy means it’s harder for power traders. A global trading post gives more volume than separate ones.
A global trading post also means they can’t rely on easy money. Whenever such a scheme goes public, they face lots of competition from all server, which ruins the profit. Under separate economies, a scheme getting out is only a problem if there are a lot of power traders on your server.

ANET’s business model also involves tweaking the economy to keep it running as intended (eg lowering drop rates if an item becomes too common). Which means two things:
– They need to track the state of the economy. A global one is much easier to track than multiple separate economies.
– When there is a problem, they need to fix it. With a global economy, they apply the same fix to everyone. With local economies, some will be having different problems to others. Which means they each need a different fix. So that means ANET needs to keep track of lots of different fixes. When players identify server differences, they will switch servers to take advantage of them, which means both the source and destination server economies need tweaking in response to player shifts.

What happens when a new server starts up and other servers, in an attempt to keep that server down, decide to buy up every single ecto that gets listed in the new servers TP ?

I see no advantage, and lots of disadvantages, of separate economies. Well, unless you’re a power trader.

Garbadmur.6041:

Plus in the current free server transfer set up, people could just hop around servers seeking the inevitable arbitrage

And when free transfers end, guesting will begin. With the same effect.

Right now the global design of the TP seems like a bad idea because of the initial flooding of it with items as everyone in the first month of the game were all roughly the same level. But items that were dropped to the floor price have come up. Not anything considered trash but other stuff. Certain other items are still unstable in price as the market has not established a normal price for those items and are at the whim of either those with a lot of gold who don’t care what they spend or those who don’t care how much they get and undercut. A lack of buyers due to high pricing means that those items will remain unstable until enough people are interested in an item at a particular price range to establish a normal price. Rare items will take longer to establish than other items I would think. I have noticed a number of crafted items that were at the floor have risen and somewhat stabilized at what might be the normal value of those items.

Also think about the real world for a second. Just imagine how messed up some parts of the world would be if there was no global economy and every nation was shut off in it’s own little bubble. I don’t even think I need to go into details on that unless there is no understanding of how economies function. And even then I’m not sure I want to take the time to write up about it. Because it would either get dismissed for length or because of this is a game not the real world excuse even though the principles etc are basically the same.

@Jia
In other words you support gamewide trading.

Kinda difficult to see which side you are on at first.

Correct I support having a global economy. At first I thought there was going to be a problem with certain items but realized that it was because of what I said in my previous post. I was concerned that everything being pegged at the floor price was going to be permanent. But it looks like the only things that will be at the floor are junk loot.

Yeh, with free transfers it’s not viable. I hate this style of auction house tho,
i prefer the traditional way.

I like how people forget that the TP is player driven. It must be the TP that is broken, not all the greedy people that are trying to manipulate the crap out of it.

Clearly it must be the TP itself. Clearly.

I only wish WoW had server wide AH. It was too easy to control the market with server based AHs.

The reason the communities are sharded when the economy is not is precisely because the drawbacks and benefits of large vs small populations for each are completely different and not at all analogous; using community as an analogy to economy in that manner makes no sense.

Having the trading post be balance globally is a good thing that allows us to play on other servers as a guest (when they turn this feature on). This way players will not have to jump to all the servers to find the best price…and people will not feel the need to bounce servers just to buy/sell to make a profit because of servers are priced differntly.

VendettaDFA.9368:

…

The casual player ,as mentioned in a post, is already complaining about the TP as are the market players. I don’t consider myself a “market” player, but I do recognize that the cost of the basic mats should not exceed the value of the finished product in an economically “brilliant” choice of how to roll out a TP. So I disagree with another poster to this thread. Ford doesn’t hypothetically spend 12,000 dollars building a Mustang to sell it for 8500 dollars and label it a success.

The finished products you mention are actually just byproducts of leveling a craft to 400, players are trying to recoup at least some of the gold they spent, but they never made the products with the expectation of profit.

If Ford had to make bicycles first in order to be able to make cars, they’d be dumping the bicycles too at any price over the scrap metal one.

I suspect that this effect will lessen some as the initial wave of people leveling their crafts along with their characters passes. People are also becoming more aware of the fact that crafts aren’t worth leveling except for legendary reqs or completionist satisfaction.
Finally, unlike that other MMO, people will not be dropping and re-leveling crafts whenever the meta says this new craft is now 0.03% better for raiding than the previous top craft. They’ll just pay 40 silver and not dump dozens of items on the market to claw back their costs.

I love the OP’s abitily to put in fancy words his discontent with the disability to control markets for personal gain.
I just love ANet’s global TP. If an analogue could exist IRL i believe we would live in a much better world.

If Ford could only expect to get $8500 for a Mustang, and it would cost them $12,000 to make it, that wouldn’t be the sign of a bad economy that needed fixing. You know what Ford would do instead of whining about inflation? They would stop trying to sell Mustangs for profit.

The fact that crafters in this game expect to be able to make a profit on certain items, despite readily available pricing information which would tell them exactly how much difference there is between current mats cost and current finished item cost, is not the fault of inflation or of the market. It’s the fault of crafters who are bad at really simple economics and also who are apparently unable to check the Internet before making crafting decisions.

Hippocampus.8470:

The fact that crafters in this game expect to be able to make a profit on certain items, despite readily available pricing information which would tell them exactly how much difference there is between current mats cost and current finished item cost, is not the fault of inflation or of the market. It’s the fault of crafters who are bad at really simple economics and also who are apparently unable to check the Internet before making crafting decisions.

In theory, this is true. Except that…

a) Alot of the stuff that you see on sale is only created to get to 400. People sell it for whatever price they can get.

b) Alot of crafters consider the materials that they gathered as ’’free’’ and do not count their costs towards the price of the end-product.
They simply fail to see that when you use a material that you can sell for 1s, costs you 1s to use, even when you mined it for free.

c) When you make 10 items that costed 10s each and sell 8 for 20s each, you might want to sell the remaining 2, even at a loss. That doesn’t mean that crafting the 10 items was a bad decision.

Well yeah, my point was that in addition to all the perfectly valid reasons someone might be willing to sell at a loss, there’s also the fact that people who aren’t willing to sell at a loss need to take some responsibility for their own business decisions.

If you want to sell something for a profit, then you need to be the one to ensure that’s possible, by first checking whether the selling price is more than it’ll cost you to make it.

Ramethzero.3785:

I like how people forget that the TP is player driven. It must be the TP that is broken, not all the greedy people that are trying to manipulate the crap out of it.

Clearly it must be the TP itself. Clearly.

Well duh! I’ve been saying that since day one.

The problem is that the TP is nothing more than a consignment house. There’s no auction involved.

The best model for an actual AH that I’ve seen in an MMO is the double blind Dutch auction. I will admit to having limited experience though.

The double blind Dutch auction hides both the buy offer prices and the item list prices. Only the sale price of the last X items is visible, along with the number offered for sale and the number of buy orders.

But getting back to how the TP is broken, the way the interface is set up the TP is primarily a buyer’s market. If someone wants to better their chances that their item will sell quickly they MUST undercut the competition, substantially. This endlessly drives the price down. Then the flippers dive in with hundreds of much lower buy orders to entice people to get an instant turnaround, and the flippers relist at a higher price to make a profit. And the flippers constantly undercut each other trying to get their items to sell until the price is driven to vendor+1. At which point the flippers move on to ruin another commodity.

Once the price is at vendor +1 there is no incentive for it to move up, and absolutely no game mechanic to allow or force it to rise again.

And yet, somehow, prices don’t always go down.

I agree that the selling interface needs to more closely match the buying interface, so sellers can also see more than just the most extreme two prices. But I get kinda sick of all the complainers declaring that the current setup will inevitably drive prices down, despite the obvious empirical fact that prices aren’t falling for everything, and the prices that do fall can be readily explained by supply exceeding demand.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Ford doesn’t hypothetically spend 12,000 dollars building a Mustang to sell it for 8500 dollars and label it a success.

Ford may not label it a success, but might the consumer who wants to buy a Mustang label it a success? And there are more consumers then Fords.

This example is actually a kind of ironic one, because it is fairly well known in the industry that auto companies have taken losses for years making and selling small, fuel efficient cars, and in particular on hybrid cars, to keep their “average fleet mileage” high enough that they were allowed to sell profitable large cars and trucks. Kind of like a crafter may be willing to take a loss selling crafted products because they place a higher value on the XPs, or on “making their own gear”, or hope to find a profitable niche once they reach 400.

Even as a crafter who has struggled to find any profitable niche, I still think the server-wide TP is a good idea, as it makes it hard for anyone to control anything but the highest end, slowest moving items. It also keeps prices low, benefiting the majority of players.

If you want to make crafting more profitable, your best bet is to persuade ANet to (1) remove XP awards for leveling it, and (2) dramatically reduce drop rates on useful gear. I doubt you will succeed, but you, like everyone else, are welcome to give it a shot.

Yes, the problem is that grinding to 80 is a pain when you have done it once or twice the normal way so, if you have the money dump it into leveling via crafting.

I don’t think taking XP away is a good thing. There are already enough nerfs going on in the game. Perhaps creating more demand for intermediate items will drive prices to nearer breakeven. ie: allow them to be used in mystic forge?

PS: my guess is that most people just want to get a new profession to 80 for WvW. If that actually worked like they suggested before launch (ie: any level could uplevel to 80 and do WvW) that wouldn’t be necessary. But as we know the upleveling of a low level char makes a very weak lvl80 WvW.

VendettaDFA.9368:

With everything else having to do with GW2 being server specific, the approach of a gamewide Trading Post is just contradictory. I think the economics of a server should be just as specific to the server as any other aspect of the game.

There should be servers with a glut of a specific item and a lack of another. It helps make each server more unique and I also believe this separation of Trading Post will actually benefit the players.

Why should my decisions on what to farm,craft,buy or sell be impacted by players who will never contribute directly to the overall health of the server I play on?

I suggest changing to server specific Trading Posts, or at the very least a clustered approach. Tie only 3 or 4 servers together on a TP if individual TP’s don’t fit ANETs business model.

A gamewide Trading Post makes sense when you consider that we currently have free server transfers and eventually will have Guesting. Without an economic model that balances that factor out, you would end up with people switching over to one server to buy cheap materials, only to jump to another to sell the finished product for the most profit. Heck, most people would then jump back to their original server, which is likely to be neither of those.

Of course, once everyone starts doing that, after a while it’ll balance out. But by skipping on the server-specific markets altogether, it’s balanced out from the start. And that’s good.

Also, having a Trading Post that has literally humongous supply of pretty much everything means that there’s very little opportunity for people to take advantage of momentary shifts in the supply and demand ends of various products.

Finally, crafting as a trade can never make you consistent profit. That would mean that the system is flawed somewhere along the way. Because there’s very little difference between the materials that you have to buy and the finished product. The only thing that separates them from being literally equal is the necessary level of crafting. That, in turn, should not have a positive effect on the cost of the finished product, since we already get a hilarious amount of experience from crafting. Because let’s face it, if you’re willing and able to farm all of the required materials to level up your crafting, that’s going to boost your leveling speed significantly for a currently minimal cost.

The reason why the finished products are currently costing less than they’re worth in terms of materials has to do with other aspects. Everyone is crafting for experience, so there’s a massive supply of finished products to sell. With this in mind, to actually sell yours, you’re forced to undercut the others. Repeat this process across thousands of players and you have a chain of undercuts, with some major clusters of a specific price along the way to make sure that the margins you make stay minimal or that you’re making a loss by selling the product on the Trading Post rather than NPCing the item.

So yes, the massive Trading Post is currently affecting crafting in a way that makes it not profitable from a monetary point of view. Crafting will still be profitable from a time-is-money perspective: it provides pretty much the fastest and easiest source of experience in the game. However, the Trading Post is also balancing out the fact that you can currently transfer servers, plus it’s stabilizing the market much quicker than smaller Trading Posts could do. Both of these things are very much worth the loss of profit from Crafting.

Hippocampus.8470:

And yet, somehow, prices don’t always go down.

I agree that the selling interface needs to more closely match the buying interface, so sellers can also see more than just the most extreme two prices. But I get kinda sick of all the complainers declaring that the current setup will inevitably drive prices down, despite the obvious empirical fact that prices aren’t falling for everything, and the prices that do fall can be readily explained by supply exceeding demand.

Granted that supply and demand account for the majority of items bottomed out. Yet as more people play Rare items will become less rare, and as people out level the rare items demand will drop for them as well.

Changing the interface, as you say, so that the selling interface matches the buying interface would be a huge improvement.

I still say that changing the entire setup to a double blind Dutch auction would make more items viable to sell, and keep them that way for a longer period.

If scarcity is such a problem huge deal should have done something about the tens of thousands of exotics people created using the mystic forge exploit and the hundreds of thousands of exotics people farmed from the labyrinth.

Leaving those items in the economy has allowed RMT companies to take control of the entire trading post because they suffered no repercussions from mass generating these items to earn thousands of gold and controlling the prices on these items to make even more profit.

Olba.5376:

The reason why the finished products are currently costing less than they’re worth in terms of materials has to do with other aspects. Everyone is crafting for experience, so there’s a massive supply of finished products to sell.

I think one of the biggest contributing factors is that Trading Post listings never expire. Supply is far exceeding demand, so suppliers (crafters) can’t make a profit.

There are two primary issues that affect the BLTC right now:

1. Botting generates too much supply of key components.
2. Crafting is too cheap (see #1), easy and rewarding (xp).

On some servers, bots often appear to outnumber legit players. Now this is likely not true, but the fact that so many blatant bots are running around that it gives that appearance is simply pitiful and makes ANet look incompetent and/or complacent. The standard “we’re working on it” reply works great for a couple weeks—not so much for a couple months. The supply of what were supposed to be the rare crafting components (drops) is massively inflated, which lowers the barrier of entry to crafting and encourages everyone to craft for XP, which then results in crafted items selling at or near cost.

I am far from being good/informed when it comes to economics. But I kind of like the idea of an expire date.
In a different game I played you had the option to set the date to either 8 hours, 12 hours or 24 hours. (which is kind of short imo. Especially with a gamewide trading post here.)
But maybe give the option of one week or one month. Something along those lines.
I (and probably many others) tend to forget I even put things in the trading post, only to realize weeks later that my item is now way overpriced…

I think what many people are forgetting is that the differences between a real world economy and a gaming economy are not entirely the same. They share some similaries, but there are still key factors that skew the final result.

1. Anyone who has played the TP can tell you that in certain markets, you have to be on the ball because the demand is higher then the target supply. This being the case with Ectos because that is an extremely active market.

2. Crafting is something that any toon can do. In the real world, not everyone can take a bunch of bolts of cloth and make something out of it with a press of a button. Demand is higher because there is a far greater amount of players that can process the mats into desired items.

3. Anything found in its raw state has potential to help multiple crafting professions. This broadens the market demand by quit a bit.

4. Crafted items fit only a niche market by comparison. Whereas an insignia only helps armor crafters, the stuff used to make said insignia has the potential to be far more useful then the final product. This is due to the potential usefulness of the mats over a broader demand market.

5. People forget that active markets are not a ‘set-and-forget’ pricing standard.

6. This is one of the most heavily populated MMO’s I can think of. I don’t think people really realize the scope of how active the market really is. In a recent headline, there were over 2 billion copies of this game sold. For the sake of argument, even if 50% of that group stayed, and 50% of that group understood and actively used the TP, thats still quite a hefty amount of mercantile going on. And, since the server doesn’t matter, it directly affects your outcome.

7. I don’t enjoy being the one to say this, but botters are not the biggest part of the problem. If all the bots stopped producing mats for everyone, I garantee you that the prices will not drop significantly. In fact, the cost of mats will skyrocket due to the supply reaching a low.

8. Not everyone is a market genius, nor are they fast enough to compete. Make sure to accept your own blame if you mess up a purchase or a sale. Clicking on items you are not sure about is not the fault of the TP system. Its your own fault you weren’t paying attention. I understand not everyone has a fast machine, or has problems loading the TP, but griefing a healthy system is not going to get you what you want. And by furthering that dishonesty you just wanna grief for the sake of burning everything down.. please throw yourself down the nearest elevator shaft.

This is just 8 items that skew the current TP system, out of the few weeks I’ve been accessing it for longer then a few hours a week. I can easily project that there is quite a bit more I haven’t seen yet.

John Smith.4610:

What you’re arguing has nothing to do with the TP. It’s a simple matter of scarcity and usability. Arguing that the trading post being too large is a mistake because you can’t create imbalanced markets isn’t a good argument, and it would come at the cost of other players and a more stable economy.

I think it does have to do with the TP, its not really that simple, and its not simply scarcity and usability. I dont think it would necessarily be solved with a server based TP though.

I think summing it up its that, too many people are not fit to run businesses. There are a large amount of items that are selling for less than 15% above npc prices, this means they are being sold at a loss. Enough of the userbase doesnt know the very basics. In a system that makes selling fast, easy and have current prices instananeously, with such a large number of people using it, things get sold at ridiculously low prices.

Overall the effect is the economy is extremely top heavy, a large portion of wealth is controlled by very few people. Very little money is made from producing goods and services, most money is made from playing the market.

The only real solution i could think of, is setting up an extra minigame as requirement to sell on the TP, that sets up a mini corporation that tracks the value of goods introduced (minimal value) and the value of goods sold, and you can only sell on the TP if you maintain a profitable ratio. Too many people losing money, and setting losing prices that become the norm, or set the profit value extremely low on goods. people supplement extremely poor business practices with grinding to cover the losses.

So essentially in game you d apply for a business liscence, your corporation acts for you in the TP, the mini game of corporation is to remain in the black, and it will show you exactly how much your corporation is really making you overall (this number would include taxes paid) If you go into the red, it requires you to pay out of your own funds, your losses, and also a tax to restart the failed corporation.

for a free market to work you cannot compete with people who sell things at a loss. You assume they sell at a loss because the items have little value, but i contend that they really sell at a loss because they are foolish, and the TP encourages foolish behavior.
(it only shows the lowest prices, and only gives you information on what the rest of the prices are if you click on it)
(it doesnt clearly show the tax taken on actual sale)
(it auto lists items at buy order price if you sell to a buyer more items than they seek to buy)

the barrier of entry, and cost of failure is too low for the TP, poor business men spoil the market. and with such a large, simple market, 5% fools, and 15% just click the first options, mean the market is controled by fools at the low end

VendettaDFA.9368:

Everything in WoW that is made also comes from raw mats and applies to a broad market. Point 3 is pointless.

Point 4 is a basic discussion on a material ingredient. Not every ingredient will generate profit before used in the final item. Its not expected to either. I will call this point merely informational and not actually a discussion changing point.

Comparing the WoW market to GW2’s is not a good comparison when talking about mats. In WoW one harvest node is there for everyone. If Player A harvests it, Player B can not. Obviously in GW2 harvest nodes are instanced.

This, more than anything else, causes the glut of mats on the GW2 market.

Oh I definitely agree with that, Vendetta.

The problem here has several causes, as I outlined upthread.

1. It’s a buyer’s market, primarily due to the interface
2. I suspect that more people craft in GW2 than other games because the leveling XP is good.

And part of the problem is the vendor pricing. It’s so low that the TP price can be driven down almost to it. At this point though it’s just supply and demand.

If they’d put a cap on the number of items you can have at a given price point on the TP, and not allow any more at that price point until the price point above it sold out, that would help.

vendetta, what WOW were you playing? when I played WOW, the only crafted goods that made a profit was high level alchemy/jewelcrafting. EVERYTHING else sold for less then the cost of the mats needed to make it. thats because, in an theme-park MMO, the process of crafting is more valuable then the finished products.

Crafting sub-400 items is profitable, just typically not in terms of coin. The XP from leveling is a big deal. Quite a few players I know, myself included, have been thrilled to sink a couple gold into maxing a crafting profession simply for the 10 levels doing so gives. There’s no way crafting is going to be profitable, coin-wise, when the real value extracted from low level crafting is XP, not coin.

I do agree wholeheartedly that the crafting disciplines are not particularly well designed, and in particular suffer from forcing you to generate a lot of vendor trash in order to level up. Recipes like the bags were really good and it’s a pity there aren’t more utility items like that available that would be valuable to players of all levels, instead of crafting being a tiered leveling blue generator.

VendettaDFA.9368:

The instanced nodes that cause an overall glut of mats in GW2 in theory should make them cheaper to buy than the product they are used to make

In what theory?

High supply of mats means those mats should be cheap. They are. High supply of finished products means finished products should be cheap. They are too.

But why should increased supply of mats lead to increased product-to-mats prices?

Not every product sells for a profit in WoW either but its still better than GW2 where almost no pre-capped crafted items sell for more than the overall cost of the materials it takes to make them.

Sure, because people craft a lot more than they would if it were just for personal items and gold profit. They also get XP, so they get crafting levels by making whatever is cheapest. Which is the same for everyone with that craft, thus resulting in oversupply of those items (and no chance of profit).

None of which has even a teensy bit to do with whether the TP is server-wide or worldwide.

I shouldn’t theoretically be able to sell 10 pounds of mud and a bale of straw for more than the bricks that could be made by the man running the oven that manufactures them. Thats whats wrong here.

And again it has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the trading post market(s).

And if said man wants to make bricks for some reason other than monetary profit, he’d be willing to sell them at a loss. If enough other people are also willing to do this, it means the supply at low prices will match demand at those prices, and no one will have any need to pay more for items someone else lists above materials cost.

It is not complicated. So many folks are going out of their way to farm because they are crafting in mass to level the craft and the character.

Its not any overly complicated economic concept like your pretending to make it VendettaDFA. The shorted way from A to B is a straight line, and your talking in swirls, circles, and zig zags.

Bots auto farming and non-bot players farming for themselves and mass crafting flood the market. It always happens early in new MMOs. It doesn’t make a sliver of sense to compare WoWs server based economy after it is several years old to GW2 game based economy that is barely weeks old.

It is not a complicated situation grasp at all.

VendettaDFA.9368:

1. Do you actually believe a Trading Post economy where the cost of materials exceeds the selling price of the resulting product is balanced?

This actually has absolutely nothing to do with the trading post at all. This has everything to do with the crafting system in general.

There is NO (zip, zilch, zero) MMO on the market today where the selling price of the product of a base recipe sells for more than the materials once a decent time period after the introduction of said recipe into the game. Product rarity is what is to blame here and not the rarity of the materials.

Other games have solved this problem in a few ways.

1) They have given all crafts a chance to “critical” and producing a “+1” or “High Quality” version of the base product.
This actually works negatively to the price of the base product and the economy becomes based around the rarity of the critical proc rate. Yet, even this only works for a “short” time. (see Final Fantasy XI, Aion, most asian MMOs)

2) Create a shortage of the high sought after recipes.
By creating an extremely small number of players who are capable of crafting a product you decrease its rarity and the prices stay high and stable. Until there is enough of the crafting base that is capable to push the price back down. (see Everquest, early WoW, Final Fantasy XI, Aion)

3) Create recipes with a chance to break.
Having recipes with a chance to break expensive materials causes the products worth more because it often costs more than a single set of materials to craft it. This does nothing but create a sense of negative feeling RNG on most crafting and while used in most Asian mmos, hasn’t been a staple in any successful worldwide MMO since FFXI.

4) Create recipes that use only super rare materials that drop off long cooldown or hard to spawn enemies.

Notice I mention FFXI and Aion under multiple examples. Because using the first two of the examples can keep prices of the HQ results higher for longer periods. It took nearly 7 years to see most prices of gear plummet on HQ products. Add in the use of all 4 and you have an economy that will last longer. Yet every MMO economy is subject to pure numbers. When you have a large number of players and a long time for them to reach the pinnacle of crafting, prices go down. With the ease of crafting in GW2, prices will always tend on the low side.

Vendetta,

I have an important question for you, concerning milkshakes. Chocolate or Strawberry?

I look forward to your response sir.

VendettaDFA.9368:

The are no swirls, circles or zig-zags in my premise … which is simply this system is not working. I am however, entitled to defend my position in this thread.

Since I haven’t mentioned it before, I categorically disagree with your base premise.

One of the thing I always push for in a new MMO is for a cross-server market. The larger number of people using a cross-server market means (as has been stated above) that it is less likely for a person or consortium to take control of any significant portion of the market. It means that the market is more stable, and therefore more useful to the majority of the player base.

It also means that there are no shortages localized to one server due to either market manipulation or a fluke of the PRNG.

TL;DR

From my understanding of this whole conversation, OP is:
1) A casual player
2) Doesn’t like a player driven market.
3) Doesn’t like how individual Mats to produce a crafted product exceeds the value of said product.
4) Prefers separate TPs on each server, thus creating mini markets, allowing OP to find a server the benefits him the greatest, while completely disregarding how it affects other players.

Let me explain to you why the TP works the way it does, from a person whom you will probably detest. Crafting mats are high in demand for a couple reasons. One would be that people WANT to max their selected disciplines (most likely for Legendaries). Two would be that people are willing to pay a premium to get mats quicker, rather than mine/farm.

Then there are different types of players. There are market players who want to profit by reselling crafted products. Then you have the player who don’t care that they are losing money, and are willing to sell cheap just to recover part of their costs. I fall into the latter. I craft for character XP and crafting XP. I spend buckets of Gold to buy materials needed for the higher level crafts. After I use all my mats to make the item, I’ll either sell to the Merchant, or I’ll jump into TP and sell at a price that I know will sell fast (sometimes up to 40% below what all the mats cost together). Why do I do these things? Because I’m lazy. I want to get money back, and if a Buy-Order is higher than the Merchat, I’ll fill it. I buy mat A, B, and C for 10 Gold, use it to craft an item worth 8-9 Gold, and then sell that item for 6 Gold. I just lost 4 Gold right? Wrong. Because that 4 Gold helped to max my crafting to lv 400, and that’s what I care about.

I’m not alone. I’m sure there are a LOT of players with my mindset. AND, with the TP being player driven, we’ll pretty much screw with common sense, and create an imbalanced market with our actions. So as long as there are players willing to pay outrageous prices, and willing to sell crafted products for dirt cheap, the market will reflect this.

VendettaDFA.9368:

*In a real economy .which this should at least attempt to follow, you shouldnt lose money on the finished item

You’re using “shouldn’t” here in some kind of moral sense, as in you personally believe all finished products ought to sell for more than the price of materials. You’re not applying supply and demand at all in this reasoning, because as I said increased supply should make materials and finished goods cheaper. But you have yet to provide any reasoning whatsoever about why we should expect (in the logical conclusion sense rather than the moral one) it to decrease material prices more than item prices. And that is the only thing that would make crafting those items profitable.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Still no valid reason to craft or to believe the economy is good. I can farm ,get xp for that and dump the mats for coin.

Then you should go do that. Hundreds of thousands of the rest of us, meanwhile, will continue using crafting as the perfectly valid method for gaining XP that it was intended to be. It may not be how you want to play, but I see nothing wrong with getting 10 quick levels for a gold or two. Therefore, I am one of these “stupid” people perfectly willing to sell to the price others have offered to pay, even if it’s below materials cost. (I won’t sell crafted items so low as to lose money compared to vendors, because there’s a vendor standing right there at the crafting station. But I do occasionally sell drops this way if I’m not near a vendor and/or right in the middle of an event.)

None of what you bring to the table shows me a proper working economy

My goal wasn’t to prove that the economy is running like a perfectly well-oiled machine or whatever. My goal was to point out that the connection you’ve drawn between low finished product prices and a broken economy does not really exist.

Earlier you mentioned supply and demand, claiming that they would make selling for profit possible. But in fact, they are exactly what makes it *un*profitable. There is high supply and not such high demand for finished crafting products, so their prices are low. This is exactly what we should expect. If it weren’t the case, that would signify a broken economy.

No valid reason other than stupidity … you go craft em and lose money when you sell. I will skip the broken economy,farm the basics and have good xp and more coin than you ….. and thats a flat out shame.

Fine. You do that. As I said, I and others are willing to spend some gold on 10 easy character levels. If the best retort you can come up with is to call all of us stupid, fine. I will continue to regard you as a player who doesn’t understand economics well enough to come up with real arguments, and so has to resort to name-calling and baseless proclamations of how the economy “should” be, for no reason other than that’s how you wish it would be.

VendettaDFA.9368:

niwaar.5631:

VendettaDFA.9368:

1. Do you actually believe a Trading Post economy where the cost of materials exceeds the selling price of the resulting product is balanced?

This actually has absolutely nothing to do with the trading post at all. This has everything to do with the crafting system in general.
…

Im sorry but I didnt realize you were John Smith’s appointed spokesperson. That question as well as the next 2 were directed at him. The rest of your post could have easily stood on its own but then you wouldn’t be able to appear smart at someone elses cost, not that I think you managed to succeed.

What the actual kitten? All but one sentence of your reply is to dismiss a perfectly valid response because you don’t like how it looked like it was at your “cost”?

It was at your expense because you are wrong about the economy, plain and simple.

It doesn’t matter who your question was directed at. This is a forum, and not a series of private messages between you and John Smith. Therefore, when you ask an obviously rhetorical question demonstrating that you believe the trading system is broken based on the inability to sell every crafted item for profit, it is completely reasonable for someone else to come along and explain why your reasoning is flawed.

There are different kinds of servers. Those who are playing on either PvP/WvW/roleplay one would get hurt pretty much. As they participate in many events, they don’t really grind open world or dungeons, so they’re lacking on mats and some specific items. On the other hand, they got pretty much gold, which becomes worthless when market is empty
What comes to my mind is Poland in 1950-1989, everyone had pretty much money, but there were no wares people could buy. Market was closed, there were no imported goods and the government was performing really poor at establishing strong agriculture. When there was a fresh delivery to any shop, the queues of potential clients were huge, everyone was camping at shops to get any stuff, because they knew it’s a pretty rare occasion. If prices weren’t be set by government, the shopkeepers would for sure raise the prices

Now look at the other servers. Those where people are mostly farming mats and gear, yet some of them don’t have that much money (they’re skipping many events etc). Everyone has much more goods than they would ever need (especially that the most of people are not even crafting), so who would like to buy this stuff? Noone, completely noone. TP would get flooded, people would use that as second storage, because they can’t keep so many mats, yet trashing them/selling to NPC is still a waste

Both situations are really bad. Add precursors and other rare stuff to this. What if your server has low population and you need something rare or just got something rare for sale? How can you make sure that it would result in successful transaction in fairly short time period? What if you wouldn’t find desired item/sell your loot for weeks?

And in the real economy, people (potentially) lose money on finished products all the kitten time. That’s why certain products are discontinued.

Instead of bringing up a fictional example, consider the real example of the Edsel. It cost Ford more to produce and market the car than people were willing to pay in the same numbers, and as a result Ford lost millions of dollars during the three years it was produced.

Then they stopped making them.

This last step is the one most often missed by everyone thinking they ought to be able to profit from crafting. Just as Ford would have been stupid to continue making Edsels and expecting to sell them for profit, players have to be stupid to continue making oversupplied items and expecting to sell them for profit. In this way, the game is exactly like the real economy, which Vendetta asserts “this should at least attempt to follow”: If you want to make a profit, you need to do some market research first to estimate whether you’ll be able to sell it for more than it cost to produce.

If you are unwilling to do this, then just like any company in the real world that refused to do any such research, you have no logical reason to expect to make a profit.

Yeah I’m getting the sense here that Vendetta just wants to argue for the sake of arguing. The amount of butthurt hypocrisy being stated is just beyond my willingness to address.

“The game economy should be like a real-world economy. Except when my personal preferred style of play wouldn’t make me money in a real-world economy. Then we need to change the game economy!”

Hi Phys, economist here by training and I have to agree with John Smith. You haven’t demonstrated effective knowledge of how a free market works.

In a free market, we have perfect competition. What this means is that the “fools” at the low end are just outcompeting on price. The fool is the person who expects prices to be higher because he wants them to be. In other words, while you complain about them making a loss, money is actually coming into their accounts while your higher-priced items remain unsold. In a perfectly competitive market, economic profit (including opportunity costs) should be 0 and there should be no opportunities to “play the market” through arbitrage at market equilibrium. You are right that this system creates high income inequality, but this is working as intended for a perfectly competitive free market as the TP is intended to closely resemble.

Maybe to help with the economy, communities like China and other extremely high percentage of botters should be locking into their own ecosystem. This could help reduce the large inflation due to the large amounts of gold farmers.