Guild Wars 2

So I buy a lot of ectos and always am on the TP watching them. Many times in the past week I have been seeing some weird activity. Someone in the matter of seconds will buy thousands of ectos from all the buy now orders, and minutes later someone will sell thousands of ectos to the buy orders. Been happening a few times a day and has led to big gaps in ecto prices, though they don’t last long as the market adjusts.

The only thing I could think of to explain the activity was that gold sellers are buying lots of ectos, sending them to their multiple accounts and reselling them to turn back into gold. Yeah they are losing gold that way but trying to avoid Anet’s watching gold transfer more than anything else. I am only bringing it up so that Anet might look into such activity and I don’t condone gold sellers.

I could be wrong but anyone else have a good explanation for this?

BTW I know there will always be ups and downs on ectos but its recent history has been really erratic even after they fixed that ecto exploit days ago.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19721

Hey u do realise Ectos are one of the most used items, you use it to craft every single exotic in the game-weapons, jewellery, armour, ascended backpieces, legendaries, mystic clovers. And the GW2 playerbase is probably MILLIONS? So maybe the fast flow of a few thousand in a day is just-NORMAL And I dont think illegal people would wanna lose 15% gold to the BLTP

Ectos are used as a reserve currency of sorts by more than just gold farmers. Diversifying your in game wealth, just like diversifying your RL wealth is a great insurance against inflation or other things that might hit your wealth you are holding.

Since ectos are used to hold wealth, when the buyer wants to purchase something, they need to liquidate their ectos into gold. This was very apparent during the Great Precursor Lottery during the Lost Shores event. During that event, many precursors were hitting the Trading Post. During this scramble of buying up cheap precursors from those lottery winners, those holding large amounts of wealth in ectos were liquidating their ectos, which could be seen by the falling ecto prices during that turbulent time on the Trading Post immediately following the Lost Shores event.

This analysis would probably have to be more in depth. Maybe it is due to gold farmers using the expensive method of transferring wealth over the Trading Post… however it very well could have been the case that people simply wished to liquidate their ectos to acquire gold for other means. Perhaps these people were purchasing Holiday related crafting mats, or wishing to purchase gems, or other non malicious reasons.

bro, i need 500 ecto for my infused back piece. 500 or more for legendary. During my game play for the paste few months, i bought about 800 ectos. And that’s only me. we have thousands of players here.

so they’re…. laundering gold with ectos now? :O

I think it’s more likely just a concerted effort to make large buys of ecto at artifically low prices through use of brute force pricing walls.

Usually, multiple buyers will undercut each other and you will see staggered tiers of sell listings. When 10 people post 1500+ ecto at an extremely low price and they all use the exact same price and another person has a large buy order just 1c less – that looks like some sort of collusion:

http://i.imgur.com/yB0pz.jpg

It didn’t happen just once, this was a pattern through out the day and the pricing walls would be disolved and moved downward well before they were consumed.

The OP has a point, I also keep a close watch on ectos and the past week ive seen multiple gaps as he explained, I even tried “flipping” ectos that way but as the OP stated, the gaps dont last long. And as most other people here say, that its just someone buying alot, we are not talking about 500 mere ectos, just go and check how much y ou need to buy to let the prise rise from 27s to 35s …

And @Dreamslayer, I wouldn’t call 169 “high”

IMO, ectos would be one of the worst commodities to attempt to manipulate as the market is very active. What I mean is that there is a high volume of ectos traded by a large number of players. As a crafter, I can generally get buy orders for 10-20 ectos filled within a minute, so there seems to be plenty of people willing to sell them.

The OP’s point about using them to transfer wealth might have merit, however I’d hesitate to draw that conclusion without some more evidence of how this process might work.

It’s a dangerous kind of logic to use.

I’m not saying the original post is wrong. In fact, there’s a great chance it’s correct, given how liquid the ectoplasms are.

Unfortunately using that kind of logic to catch laundering by gold sellers will also catch a great number of legitimate traders on the market as well, me included.

The volumes of a single item i’ve moved in a day can be between 10,000 and 100,000 units, if the admins use volume as a search criteria.

I have moved cores and lodestones (which are valuable enough to be used as currency also) by the hundreds and thousands as well, assuming raw value is used as a search criteria.

From a personal perspective, I don’t like the idea of being constantly flagged for this.

There’s definitely something weird going on with the ecto market. A few of my guildies and I pay quite close attention to it, and a few nights ago, we were commenting because one of them had put a bunch of ectos up for ~30s, and there were over 8000 up priced lower than him. I opened the broker to count them. Then about thirty seconds later, he told me they’d sold. I refreshed, and the price had gone from ~25s to ~34s. Over 8000 had sold in less than a minute.

I’ve sold a lot of ectos since the game has started, and they’ve never moved at that rate before. They move in blocks of a few hundred a minute at most.

Surbrus.6942:

Ectos are used as a reserve currency of sorts by more than just gold farmers. Diversifying your in game wealth, just like diversifying your RL wealth is a great insurance against inflation or other things that might hit your wealth you are holding.

Since ectos are used to hold wealth, when the buyer wants to purchase something, they need to liquidate their ectos into gold. This was very apparent during the Great Precursor Lottery during the Lost Shores event. During that event, many precursors were hitting the Trading Post. During this scramble of buying up cheap precursors from those lottery winners, those holding large amounts of wealth in ectos were liquidating their ectos, which could be seen by the falling ecto prices during that turbulent time on the Trading Post immediately following the Lost Shores event.

This analysis would probably have to be more in depth. Maybe it is due to gold farmers using the expensive method of transferring wealth over the Trading Post… however it very well could have been the case that people simply wished to liquidate their ectos to acquire gold for other means. Perhaps these people were purchasing Holiday related crafting mats, or wishing to purchase gems, or other non malicious reasons.

Perhaps there was a greater influx of ectos because a lot of people got fresh exotics and rares from the event? ;p

ectos are easy to get now. lvl 80 rare medium armor is the cheapest source of rare if you’re crafting to gamble for ectos. also my guildies tell me you can easily get rares in fractals now. so ectos are flooding the market now, and they may just be an element of currency for anyone.

azizul.8469:

ectos are easy to get now. lvl 80 rare medium armor is the cheapest source of rare if you’re crafting to gamble for ectos. also my guildies tell me you can easily get rares in fractals now. so ectos are flooding the market now, and they may just be an element of currency for anyone.

This is not untrue, but it’s also not new and does not explain the recent, unusual activity.

Look at the level of trade listings (blue and red vertical bars) since about December 24 – it’s been increasing substantially and yet the price has not been coming down much – if at all.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19721

There are about 4000 ectos for sale between the 27s and 27.50s range and many of the listings are in sequence with 1c between them.

In my opinion, if there were simply a lot of sellers trying to undercut each other in a rush to sell (which we would expect if the market was in a real decline) we would see the listings being pulled and added at a lower price. Instead, we have a well built sell wall trying to funnel people into the 26.80s range

It’s easy enough to spot this – just try to buy some ecto and put a check in all the listings between the lowest price and the 27.50s listing. It’s been very stable for the last few hours and the volume is only growing at the low end – none of the interim offers are being pulled.

Of course the people who deal in volume and know how to make money will usually leave their listings up for a while and wait for it to work out, but you would think that a certain number of people with sell orders in that range would panic or lose patience and pull their orders – but this isn’t happening.

I want to see someone corner the ecto market
spend 100,000 gold to buy every ecto in the game, raising the price to 3g each, then eventually sell for 1,000,000 gold.
man, that would puppy up the economy. every high level rare and exotic would also sky rocket in price.

Mystic.5934:

I want to see someone corner the ecto market
spend 100,000 gold to buy every ecto in the game, raising the price to 3g each, then eventually sell for 1,000,000 gold.
man, that would puppy up the economy. every high level rare and exotic would also sky rocket in price.

Not possible.

Ecto can be manufactured from items that anyone can gather.

Dreamslayer.7659:

Mystic.5934:

I want to see someone corner the ecto market
spend 100,000 gold to buy every ecto in the game, raising the price to 3g each, then eventually sell for 1,000,000 gold.
man, that would puppy up the economy. every high level rare and exotic would also sky rocket in price.

Not possible.

Ecto can be manufactured from items that anyone can gather.

Agreed. Ectos are being created (salvaged) and consumed (crafting) constantly, and the market is very liquid.

Cornering the ecto market could not happen unless you also cornered the markets for the materials required to make rares that salvage into ectos.

penatbater.4710:

so they’re…. laundering gold with ectos now? :O

Ectos get the stains out make your gold whiter than white

15% to launder cash is probably a pretty good return if you get away with it but with all the ways of tracking transactions you can bet they know who is trading what not just who is transfering gold. A guildy got flagged just from breaking down large numbers of items for the ectos when the price was over 30.
Its not paranoia they are watching you

More likley what your seeing is people loosing thier shirts trying to keep the ecto price up, look at spidy when prices peaked there were 3000 for sale now there are 500,000 and the price has only droped 20%. There will be a break, some one will dupm the 1000’s of ectos they have been hording waiting for the price to hit the high 30’s again and accept better to get 25 than 5. At the moment there are just too many people making ectos and too few buying for the price to stay where it is.
Perhaps when they are some where in the 15-20 range things might stabalise.