Guild Wars 2

I have been flipping a few markets for about 5-6 weeks now with great success. I have noticed a weird anomaly in one of the markets, however, that I just can’t seem to place logic behind. Allow me to explain:

These events are never separate (i.e. when they occur, they do so simultaneously and are being created by the same person (of this I’m 100% positive)).

This person will buy out every single piece of this item below a certain point, lets call it 2 silver 42 copper. Then they will re-list every single one of these items back on the market at the max they bought for (i.e. the 2 silver 42 copper). It gets weirder: In an attempt to I assume control this market they will then place buy orders for 1 copper lower than his listings. So he buys out everything below 2.42 silver, re-lists it all at 2.42 silver, and then places buy orders in the hundreds for 2.41 silver. This is being done on a scale in the hundreds upon hundreds at a time.

Can someone please explain what the hell this means or where his/her profit is in this model? It’s just such a weird way to try to manipulate an irrelevant market no one much cares about besides flippers.

-No Kitten Way
Level 80 Engineer, Tarnished Coast

TheDeparted.8013:

These events are never separate (i.e. when they occur, they do so simultaneously and are being created by the same person (of this I’m 100% positive)).

How can you be 100% positive? You don’t have the information to determine if this is one person or many. You can’t tell the difference between 1 person posting a lot of 1000 for sale and 1000 people posting a lot of 1 for sale at a given price point.

TheDeparted.8013:

Can someone please explain what the hell this means or where his/her profit is in this model? It’s just such a weird way to try to manipulate an irrelevant market no one much cares about besides flippers.

It’s weird because it’s not one person manipulating the market. It’s thousands of people acting on what is happening to the buy and sell order prices in a high volume market. Timing doesn’t tell you much at all when there are a million people participating in a market.

If it truly is a market that only flippers care about, then it’s likely that someone has told folks that they can make tons of money flipping whatever it is, and you’re going to see a huge number of folks taking irrational positions because they don’t understand what they’re doing.

_How can you be 100% positive? You don’t have the information to determine if this is one person or many. You can’t tell the difference between 1 person posting a lot of 1000 for sale and 1000 people posting a lot of 1 for sale at a given price point. _

If this is more than one person, then it makes absolutely no sense given the nature and timing of these transactions. To say that a market will behave normally 90% of the time, and then 10% of the time when it appears to be very heavily influenced by manipulation to say “Oh it’s just millions of people.” What kind of kittened up stat is that? A million people give a kitten about level 75 masterwork trinkets? Get out of here. Stop irrationally nay saying. There are maybe 100 people that work in this niche market, not 1mn. The pattern occurs for a few days once every 1-2 weeks. It lasts for a day or two and then doesn’t reappear again for another 1-2 weeks. That is NOT the random acts of 1,000,000 people. Get real.

He wants to push the buy order price of the item in order for him to profit off his earlier investments of items priced below 2.42.

Nothing wierd, illegal or interesting. Happens all the time.

even assuming you were 100% positive it was the same person.. here would be my logic behind this.. because this was just a random market you were talking about im going to give it a couple specific characteristics.. it’s something with much higher demand than there is supply… now.. it makes sense when you think about it because there is going to be many more buyers than sellers and the buyers will be a lot more willing to just buy an item outright if the buy order is already currently at such an artificially high price. it’s not to attract more people to sell the item vs list it. its so people will buy his items as opposed to putting in a buy order and waiting…. but that would have to be under fairly specific circumstances for it to be profitable of course.

He dont want anyone undercutting him, he probably has come to the conclusion that the item is in such demand that anything he buys below the price will sell over time anyway.

Wouldnt surprise me if he has a number of specific items that he does the same with.

Thanks for the real answers here at the end – I really don’t think this guy is making any money off this strategy give my depth of knowledge on the market. My gut tells me he thinks he makes a few copper per off it and so he wastes the other 99 people in that market’s time every now and again. I guess that’s what happens when you have more money than you know what to do with and a compulsive desire to invest.

It’s not improbable that he’s used to trading on other MMO’s where there is no tax and hasn’t done his maths. I frequently see people undercutting markets to such a point they are making a loss (And they arn’t the kind’ve markets you can ‘force’)

well, if that market were going up, then his sale listings would sell before his buy listings were filled. in that scenario, he makes money. by driving the price up so suddenly, anyone else checking it would see the spike, possibly think that a craze was going on, everyone would buy more hoping for a huge payout, and he would sell all his.

TheDeparted.8013:

If this is more than one person, then it makes absolutely no sense given the nature and timing of these transactions. To say that a market will behave normally 90% of the time, and then 10% of the time when it appears to be very heavily influenced by manipulation to say “Oh it’s just millions of people.” What kind of kittened up stat is that? A million people give a kitten about level 75 masterwork trinkets? Get out of here. Stop irrationally nay saying. There are maybe 100 people that work in this niche market, not 1mn. The pattern occurs for a few days once every 1-2 weeks. It lasts for a day or two and then doesn’t reappear again for another 1-2 weeks. That is NOT the random acts of 1,000,000 people. Get real.

I asked a very innocuous question and instead of just saying “I’m certain because…” you get hostile. Why? Nevermind, I don’t particularly care, but I will leave with a few parting thoughts:

I meant that there were a million people in the market as a whole, and I phrased it badly which lead you to think I was saying there was a million people in your niche. I also didn’t say a million people were behaving randomly. There’s nothing random about the way folks participate in the market, it’s just impossible to know what is motivating each of them to choose the prices they choose at a particular instant.

You are very certain about things that you can’t possibly know, which will probably lead you to incorrect conclusions because you’re unwilling to entertain alternate explanations.

It’s possible there are two groups of flippers involved and one is filling the buy orders at one threshold and the other is placing the sell orders at a their threshold, each acting according to their own strategy and it just looks like one person being really dumb. Once the pattern starts, it probably goes on for a while while different folks execute their strategy. Or maybe the buy orders aren’t getting filled at all, maybe someone is cancelling them and setting them lower. Maybe the sell orders aren’t getting filled, and are just going away when someone cancels them.

You can’t tell from the information that’s available.

True one can never be certain but with enough data points to analyze one can eliminate the risk of being wrong, this is after all the core of working the Trading Post.

I assume since the OP deemed it necessary to post a question on the forum that this is a consistent enough behavior that he feels it eliminates the “risk” of being wrong.

From the OP I gather this is a niche market that he has been working for some time and with no or minimal competition, if such a market sees an external presence with some regular interval then its likely to be a very small set of traders involved. Especially if you end up in bidding wars for specific items then you know from the feel/reaction/bid how many are involved or committed to this niche.

Anyway, the professional TP traders community are a lot smaller than we like to think.

Is it just me, or if he bought for 2s41c and sold for 2s42c, wouldn’t he be losing money due to taxes? He’s not even making 1c off that exchange.

This happens with t6 mats quite frequently and I’m speculating that he’s making a profit by controlling the market for a certain item. This is achieved by abusing other ppl’s laziness, the awkward market controls and rapidly fluctuating prices.

First off, like you said, he (let’s call him player A) buys off every low order, to get decent enough stock of that particular item. Then player A relists them for 2s42c, like in your example and then places a large buy order for 2s41c.

When other players check the selling price for the item they see only 2 things, 1 huge buy order for 2s41c and 1 huge sell order for 2s42c. Let’s say player B has 10 units of that particular item he just farmed at Orr.

If player B isn’t familiar with the market or is familiar with the market, but doesn’t just care for the opportunity cost and/or is too lazy to the check the other sell orders for manipulations, then I’d wage he’s going to just sell for the 2s41c buy order, for instant cash. (in this hypothetical situation “the real” lowest or in other words the next best sell order could be like 2s60c-3s)

Later on player A has accumulated lots of materials through buy orders, and this far has effectively lost some cash during the process. Now all he has to do is to relist all the materials with higher prices and wait for the profits slowly to come in.

IMO, this manipulation ensures that he doesn’t have to compete with other people setting buy orders and he’ll get the buy order filled quicklier than normally.

On another note, back when I started checking the market for such anomalies, not to manipulate myself, but to get the price for the items I wanted, I was amazed to see how busy the market actually is. I saw this kind of manipulation attempt on vial of potent blood, about 4k units on sell order at something like 1s25c, the next best order was like 1s35c with low quantity at the time.

I noticed there was only one, what i considered large, order with quantity of 3k units between 1s35c and 1s50c. The 1s50c sell order was like 13k units, so I deciced that I’ll try to sell mine at 1s49c, even though there’s like 8k units in front of me. I figured it may take days or even a week for them to sell. It actually took 40 minutes.

I have to say, while I have no interest in playing the TP or flipping, watching the strategies and counter-strategies flippers adopt when trying to make profit or control their corner of the market is quite entertaining and sometimes enlightening.