Guild Wars 2

Hello, i’m just the average guy that lurks the trading post, to sell and buy some stuff when waiting friends and such.
Yesterday, i found an item that was listed for like 30s buy, and over 80s sell.
I sold it and then bought like 2 more for 30s hoping to sell them aswell.
When i came back like 2 hours later the selling price was dropped, which is normal and part of the economy i guess, BUT…
Checking the selling list i saw that 1 guy, dropped the price from those 80s to like 45, and that with more than 10 items.
The first thing i tought was that this guy must have been completely nuts so i moved along to similiar items and noticed that it’s a pretty common practice, especially for people that sells high amount of items.
So the question is, is there any possible reason for this to happen, or are just some dumb players/bots that love to downprice items that SELLS WELL even @ double the price?

Perhaps they knew that the selling price was ridiculous and it’s better to significantly undercut so that your fee is not wasted.

I did the exact same thing when I came across to selling a lvl 80 rare dagger. It was listed at 80S, which is ridiculous for lvl 80 rares. The most they go up to (at that time) was 45s and usually around 30s. So I listed mine at 30s because I knew that the price was temporary and no one else in their mind would buy at 80s.

That makes sense.
Also answers why they ususally do that with 10+ items of a kind.

They can be doing it to try to force swings in the market. For example, buy 50 at a low price, use buy orders to drive up the price, sell all but 10 of your supply at a high price. Pull your buy orders.

Post 10 for sale at a low price. Wait for other sellers to come in at the low price, buy lower, then pull your 10.

Repeat.

However, this would only work on a slow moving item. In general, I think the TP would absorb the persons supply rather quickly

Business is war… likely this person has some idea of the market swing depending on the time of day and is looking to build a stockpile of lower priced inventory to dump later or perhaps on a weekday/weekend when they predict the price will be higher.

Of course as I say business is war, if I see someone doing this with a category of items I am looking to short sell for profit… I will go to war with them and buy there supply holder and return the pricing. In most cases you can do this with out loosing any capital… However sometimes taking a small loss of a few coppers per item to stick it to your enemy is worth it. I have fixed a few people trying to build inventory this way a few times and when I do it always makes me laugh picturing them pounding there keyboards… with the small margins on most items in this game they will mostly back away rather then continue to loose future profit.

The other option is to list for 5-10% under the high gap price, if you know what I mean… like if the highest order is 20s… the sell is 30 (there dropped one) and the next highest is 60…. list all yours at 50-55… and destroy there hopes for profits before yours sell anyway.

When there’s a wide gap like that the best thing to do is sell piece-by-piece. The market is somewhat self-correcting for wide margins of profit. You do not want to be caught with a stock of items in your sell window when the “Others” come and join the party…