Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trading on the TP as usual since it came back up, and I can’t help but notice that the LIFO behavior for small order appears to be gone. Can anyone else corroborate?

i’ve noticed that too

I do notice it’s not LIFO-like anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s FIFO. The devs said there was a bug in their prioritization scheme that made it act like LIFO on occasion. They most likely fixed the bug to make it work as they intended, not dump it for a FIFO scheme just because some power traders on the forum think that’s what it should be.

A FIFO scheme seems the fairest scheme since it ensures that if the price stays steady, then all sell orders listed at that price will eventually sell. Any other scheme involves newer orders being sold before older ones, raising the possibility that the older ones will never sell.

So what algorithm do think is better than FIFO ?

The only one I’ve seen proposed so far is smallest quantities first, justified by saying that the less orders are on the TP, the better it performs. So get rid of the 10 orders of one item each before touching the 1 order of 10 items. The performance argument is potentially true but:
– There was no consideration of the overhead required to sort the orders by quantity.
– It gives an advantage to the people who list one item, wait till it sells, list the next, repeat till stack is empty. Bots doing that have an even greater advantage over people manually doing it, and the constant checking of current orders is bound to create overhead.
So I’m not sold on the performance argument. Even if I was, a system that gives an advantage to bots over legit players is simply unacceptable if there is an alternative. FIFO is that alternative.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

A FIFO scheme seems the fairest scheme since it ensures that if the price stays steady, then all sell orders listed at that price will eventually sell. Any other scheme involves newer orders being sold before older ones, raising the possibility that the older ones will never sell.

A random selection scheme does no such thing, instead ensuring that all orders will sell roughly at the same rate.

Also, FIFO encourages undercutting and overcutting whenever possible by anyone who wants to be sure their stuff sells first, and without small-orders-first processing, their best option is to list all of what they have at the under- or over-cut price, since FIFO guarantees that the entire thing will sell before anyone else’s orders.

Yup, I’ve noticed this as well. TP doesn’t seem to be LIFO anymore. Also, after being on TP for a while today I’ve seen quite a lot of undercutting. Can anyone confirm it is FIFO?

I agree it definitely seems to be FIFO, though I can’t say it conclusively just yet.

i did some testing putting buy/sell orders of 1 stack and it does appear to be solidly FIFO now

edit: anyone else get the feeling that tp loads slower?…

My experience is probably not statistically significant, but it seems like it’s iterating through sell orders/buy orders at a price point, and filling out parts of them before stepping to the next one.

A random selection scheme does no such thing, instead ensuring that all orders will sell roughly at the same rate.

Random number generation would have higher processing requirements that just grabbing the end of the queue. Meaning the trading post will run slower. Especially if you pick random for every item sold when someone buys a batch of them.

Random number generation is harder to debug. When newer orders are selling before older ones of the same price in a FIFO system, it means that something is definitely wrong. Under random it is less clear, so you need much more data and statistical analysis just to make sure it’s working as intended.

Also, random is no guarantee that all orders will eventually sell if prices remain constant. An indefinite order is a possibility, highly unlikely, but still possible.
Having an order up for a few days, when most are selling in hours, is much more likely and still a problem that FIFO doesn’t have. Selling speed under a FIFO system will be much more constant.

So the only advantage random would have is that the person who came second might sell first. Which means that when the price is changing, the people who came later and just copied the price, have equal standing to the people who could see the change coming and priced appropriately.
Shouldn’t the people with the foresight and understanding to act first get paid first, before the people who copy them ?

Also, FIFO encourages undercutting and overcutting whenever possible by anyone who wants to be sure their stuff sells first, and without small-orders-first processing, their best option is to list all of what they have at the under- or over-cut price, since FIFO guarantees that the entire thing will sell before anyone else’s orders.

Random ordering does nothing to discourage undercutting/overcutting. In fact, it only encourages more because FIFO guarantees that if an order of 100 times the size of yours shows up later, you sell first. Random makes it likely that a large chunk of that order will sell before yours. So when you see that order under FIFO you can ignore it, while under random you have to react.

Not that I see how undercutting/overcutting is a problem. If the market does support the first price, then the first order will be filled. You just have to be patient.
If the market won’t support the first price, then prices are going to change.

FIFO work and is fair as long as the supply and demand are reasonable levels. What happens is when supply exceeds demand greatly or continually exceeds demand so that the price drops down to the floor and remains there, the higher prices never sell. However this doesn’t stop them from being able to sell as they simply list again at the floor price and with FIFO the item eventually sells. Which leads to the biggest problem with the TP the floor price is at a loss vs selling item to the vender due to the TP fee. So the solution to that problem is to enforce (like the do with the vender floor price now) the floor price at vender +15% fee + 1c so that minimally there is a 1c profit over selling to the vender. Remember junk will still be junk and not sell but at least anything worth anything to anyone else will sell eventually and at least then we can not feel cheated just to offer up something we think others would want when the vender offers more for it. And if we list junk we should learn to not list those items or similar items in the future. If we don’t then it is our own fault we are throwing coin away on the fee.

[disclaimer] I am by NO means an economic expert. Not at all. But the TP seems to be acting very differently to me; I’m not sure if it is FIFO vs LIFO or something else completely.

I enjoy buying low and selling high on the TP. Maybe I’m doing it wrong (not my point here) but rather to give my observations so anyone more in tune than I can figure out what the TP is doing.

Now it seems if I try to buy an item, the price can change dramatically between the time I pull up a list, and click on an item to buy it. And I am talking about almost no delay in between clicks, and I am seeing this for prices going up and down.

So say I’m looking at available greatswords. I see a sword listed for 10 silver. I click on it immediately and boom! I can only buy it for 19 silver. Or 26 silver.

OK, fine. Somebody scooped it up faster than me. Others are also trying to quickly buy obvious good deals. My reflexes are slow or something.

Next I click on a sword listed for, say 36 silver. Between the time I clicked it and the listing is shown, suddenly there is now anywhere between 2 – 7 different price listings for the item, and the prices are something like 9 silver, 10 silver, 10.5 silver, 11 silver.

Right. So what does THAT mean? How did that happen so quickly?!? People are buying up items and selling them for a huge loss? People have been saving items over days or weeks and posting them all right now? :P

I’ve been browsing for over an hour and seen this consistently.

My theories (all of which are probably wrong!):
- an unprecedented amount of people are using the Trading Post this evening
- an unprecedented amount of people are playing and getting drops/gathering/salvaging this evening
- drop rates are suddenly significantly increased (unlikely since I see this happening in gatherables too, just not quite as extreme as armor and weapons)
- magic find effectiveness has suddenly been significantly increased (again unlikely for the same reason as above)
- performance on the Trading Post has been VASTLY improved (in other words, that amount of rapid trade was always happening in the weeks I’ve been watching the Trading Post, but the interface was too sluggish to reflect it)
- some type of protective code that was in place that honored the price you saw for a few moments after a search has been removed
- some type of new bot/TP crawler program has been released (still not sure how that would cause prices to drop that rapidly on weapons and armor)
- something is broken
- there is some complicated economic phenomenon happening that I don’t understand
- I’m going crazy
- other?

So – has anyone else noticed this? Before today, while once in a while I would get the “the item is no longer available at this price error message” it was rare that I couldn’t see a price, click on it, and buy at the displayed price. Not sure why things seem so different this evening. A pure FIFO structure would still sell the cheapest items first…wouldn’t it?

Jia Shen.4217:

FIFO work and is fair as long as the supply and demand are reasonable levels. What happens is when supply exceeds demand greatly or continually exceeds demand so that the price drops down to the floor and remains there, the higher prices never sell. However this doesn’t stop them from being able to sell as they simply list again at the floor price and with FIFO the item eventually sells. Which leads to the biggest problem with the TP the floor price is at a loss vs selling item to the vender due to the TP fee. So the solution to that problem is to enforce (like the do with the vender floor price now) the floor price at vender +15% fee + 1c so that minimally there is a 1c profit over selling to the vender. Remember junk will still be junk and not sell but at least anything worth anything to anyone else will sell eventually and at least then we can not feel cheated just to offer up something we think others would want when the vender offers more for it. And if we list junk we should learn to not list those items or similar items in the future. If we don’t then it is our own fault we are throwing coin away on the fee.

That’s not a problem with the TP or LIFO vs FIFO, that’s a problem with the design of the game and the loot distribution. Enforcing a higher floor price won’t fix anything, it will just move the floor for garbage items +15%.

The TP is really buggy with TP sales. Seems to work with gems. So personally, I will not be buying gems or giving them any-more money of any kind until they fix the TP side.

So, here’s an important question with regards to the input/output queueing:
If you add items to an existing listing, do you keep your position in the queue? What if your additional items end up creating a new listing (i.e. you go over 250)?

Yeah, they’ve definitely changed the way it functions for sure. If this is what was intended, it’s going to have several consequences, in very short order.

1.) It will kill day trading/flipping. The waiting period to fill buy orders, will be a foolish risk to take with insane fluctuating prices (and they will go insane very soon, the instability of prices is already becoming apparent). Flipping has been the primary player-controlled factor in prices. Now we have effectively no say in them whatsoever.

2.) Those people foolish enough to leave their coin in large bulk orders waiting for them to be filled, will see their gold savings disappear, and quickly. By the time they have their orders filled, the sell price will have changed drastically (and not in a good way, as people with bulk, are going to be trying to get out of this while they can).

3.) The primary in-game mechanism for making legitimate coin, is now not only pinched by a 15% cut off of profits, but also effectively “controlled” by ArenaNet. It was operating as a free market, it is no longer. A lot of players are going to lose a lot of coin in the coming days.

4.) This maneuver will force more people to buy gems for coin if they wish to experience high-end game material.

Tell your friends/guilds to get out of the market now, or they’re going to lose a lot of coin.

Just an update as of 3 hours ago:

The sell price of copper has fallen from 16-18, to 13-15. Any of you who’ve been on the market during this time of week, know that the price and demand of copper ore, typically stays stable, or increases. At first I thought it is because players are graduating to needing iron more than copper however…

The price of iron ore likewise, is showing signs of falling. With a current spread of 14-11, you would make a profit of about 25 copper on 500 iron ore units. This could take hours, or even days. Unfortunately, the shrinking orders you’d have to wait on to buy at 11 copper, means that the supply rates will continue to fall to 10. As a result, it would be foolish to buy at 11, since the next sell price will be at 13-12 very soon.

I think the price of top demanded/traded items by the weekend, is going to be shocking. Even those who manually harvest resources to sell, are going to be in for a big surprise, when they find out how much their efforts are worth. I’ve often wondered how they were going to compensate for F2P.

Welcome to GemWars2 people

I don’t know if it is FIFO now, but I can definitely say that it is no longer smaller orders first. Even a buy order for 1 item at the ‘going rate’ will not complete. My guess is that FIFO is now in full effect. I imagine there will be a lot of undercutting while people reduce inventory, as that is the only way to unload goods for capital quickly.

Now to find a new market and a new strategy… it was a fun ride while it lasted.

This ^

My only regret was not making more money/getting into the TP business earlier.

It may very well be FIFO now based on this response back in September 14th https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Last-in-First-out-Please-tell-me-the-TP/104484

Yeah, guys, it’s so terrible that we can’t make a quick profit and cut in line any more by selling 5 lots of 50 faster than someone who posted a single stack of 250 long before us.

Also, I always love all the doom-and-gloom slippery-slope predictions of price movements, which a quick check of gw2spidy will show are completely false. For the past 3.5 days, iron ore has consistently had buy orders between 10c and 12c and sell orders between 12c and 14c, with very occasional drops to 11 when someone undercut to unload quickly. And sure, other items have indeed dropped, but often not to a point any lower than they already have been before. Gossamer scraps, for example, dropped from about 4s to about 3s50c. Which is pretty much exactly how much they were selling for a week ago.

I prefer weighted average cost accounting

edit: unless you’re doing a tax return and then LIFO FTW

I’ve been steadily pulling back my large investments in the trading post and favoring smaller and smaller orders. Market is too much in flux to risk large orders. When the dust settles, we’re see where things lie.

Hippocampus.8470:

Yeah, guys, it’s so terrible that we can’t make a quick profit and cut in line any more by selling 5 lots of 50 faster than someone who posted a single stack of 250 long before us.

Also, I always love all the doom-and-gloom slippery-slope predictions of price movements, which a quick check of gw2spidy will show are completely false. For the past 3.5 days, iron ore has consistently had buy orders between 10c and 12c and sell orders between 12c and 14c, with very occasional drops to 11 when someone undercut to unload quickly.

Well you obviously aren’t taking into consideration the fact that as we speak there is a huge shift from copper to iron usage. THAT is the main reason the price isn’t falling on iron ore (compare the demand of iron ore a week ago to now). If however you look at the top demanded item still on the TP (copper ore), you will notice the price has dropped 4-5 copper per unit since this time last week. That’s not a prediction, that’s the current state of affairs, hardly “completely false”.

It’s not about making a quick turnover/profit. It’s about the fact that this has taken away the rewards of those who diligently watch/trade on the TP, and put it in the hands of those who choose to gamble larger amounts of coin over lengthy periods of time. Those few who win, will actually make more coin. Gold farmers who run bots and have the capital to invest in these huge trades, now are going to make a killing with half the effort, while everyone else is going to have to wait and/or lose lots.

It has killed an entire, legitimate branch of trading. Where prices aren’t dropping, the spread is disappearing (since you brought it up, look iron ore as we speak), and with the wait times now to make a trade, you won’t stand a chance in small items against undercutting.

This was a move to significantly cut the potential profits made by players on the TP, and sway them into spending more $ on gems. Unless ArenaNet injects massive amounts of resources to the market to stabilize the prices, they will change drastically.

If you’d like a lesson in economics, let me know, it’s what I do

Also, they said the LIFO-like behavior was a bug. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.

Personally, I think the TP was functioning the way it was intended. It would fill smaller orders first (which there are more of, than 250 stacks). By filling these orders first, it would eliminate the amount of players with pending transactions rapidly, and alleviate the stress on the TP quicker.

This ‘fix’ to the ‘bug’, will create more stress on the TP system, and explains the recent ‘lag’ spike when trading, as its workload has increased exponentially.

Necrollis, most of what you’re saying is just plain wrong.

Necrollis.4372:

1.) It will kill day trading/flipping. The waiting period to fill buy orders, will be a foolish risk to take with insane fluctuating prices (and they will go insane very soon, the instability of prices is already becoming apparent). Flipping has been the primary player-controlled factor in prices. Now we have effectively no say in them whatsoever.

Hardly. The prices are controlled by supply and demand, both of which are quite clearly controlled by players, because it’s the players who are doing the supplying and demanding.

Necrollis.4372:

2.) Those people foolish enough to leave their coin in large bulk orders waiting for them to be filled, will see their gold savings disappear, and quickly. By the time they have their orders filled, the sell price will have changed drastically (and not in a good way, as people with bulk, are going to be trying to get out of this while they can).

The current system is much more amenable to bulk orders than it was before. Previously, you could have orders of 250 sit stagnant because other players could keep spamming orders of 50 up and those would get priority over yours.

Necrollis.4372:

3.) The primary in-game mechanism for making legitimate coin, is now not only pinched by a 15% cut off of profits, but also effectively “controlled” by ArenaNet. It was operating as a free market, it is no longer. A lot of players are going to lose a lot of coin in the coming days.

That’s simply ridiculous. I’d love to see how you’re justifying these conclusions. How does FIFO vs not FIFO have any effect on whether this is a free market? In what way does ArenaNet control the prices when every single order on the TP is made by players?

Necrollis.4372:

4.) This maneuver will force more people to buy gems for coin if they wish to experience high-end game material.

No, this has very little effect on people buying gems. People making significant money via trading on the TP have always been, and will always be, a small minority. It’s simply impossible for this not to be the case, because all the money on the TP is coming from other players – your profit is necessarily someone else’s loss.

This change benefits people with enough capital (like myself) and allows them to essentially become market makers in a given commodity. Actual players and small time traders will be the ones more impacted by this, not the proverbial 1%. In fact, this change reduces my workload quite a bit.

The inevitable consequence of the previous system would be a market where bots, or bot-like players, dominate by putting up buy/sell orders for 1-5 units every couple of seconds. I don’t see how that is a desirable result.

In the meantime, anyone who, not knowing the system, put up a buy/sell order for 250 of something would find that their orders would never, ever fill.

Oh, I have no qualms about the change. It’s understandable and ostensibly fair. I’m just saying that this shifts the advantage to those with a good bankroll, and there’s probably a decent overlap with those who benefited from the previous system. So as long as they adapt they’ll continue making quite a bit of gold, a bit slower than before but now also less labor and reaction intensive.

People who dealt in lower quantities will be the most affected, as they will have to undercut/outbid, or sell/buy to/from the market makers (those with the patience and gold to become so). The vast majority of said people weren’t day traders, however, they were regular players.

Yes, the current system means you need to be able to handle having large amounts of capital sitting in buy/sell orders if you want to profit from trading. Still, I’d expect that anyone trading for profit should already have a decent bankroll at this point in the game anyway.

However, normal players aren’t really hurt that much by this. For a start, a large portion of normal players buy from sell orders and sell to buy orders, and those players are helped by narrow buy/sell gaps.

Granted, the regular players who are smart enough to put up orders now have to be willing to wait a long time or undercut/outbid, but regular players aren’t really hurt that much by doing this anyway.

After all, while to a trader the difference between selling at 30c and selling at 29c could easily be the difference between a profit and a loss, if you’re a farmer farming and selling that particular item, that’s only a ~3% difference in how much money you make.

lackofcheese.5617:

Hardly. The prices are controlled by supply and demand, both of which are quite clearly controlled by players, because it’s the players who are doing the supplying and demanding.

Wrong. Supply & Demand control ‘most’ real world markets. In GW2, the price of most top-demand items are governed by spread-walls. A single individual with enough purchasing power can alter the price of any given item in just a few hours. Said individual is not operating on a supply/demand basis, but on a profit margin. This type of individual makes up for more market commerce than does the average player looking to buy or sell something they have a few hundred units of (ie buy orders totaling “576385 units of product X”, being placed by “247 individuals”).

lackofcheese.5617:

The current system is much more amenable to bulk orders than it was before. Previously, you could have orders of 250 sit stagnant because other players could keep spamming orders of 50 up and those would get priority over yours.

I actually said, that would be the case now, and it would favor those traders with massive amounts of capital who could afford huge amounts of bulk orders. This is what I meant by less control of the price being in the hands of a larger number of players, and more now, in the hands of a wealthy few.

lackofcheese.5617:

That’s simply ridiculous. I’d love to see how you’re justifying these conclusions. How does FIFO vs not FIFO have any effect on whether this is a free market? In what way does ArenaNet control the prices when every single order on the TP is made by players?

I justify these conclusions by pointing to my above statement. When you buy/sell at real time current prices in the market as a trader, you don’t have to wait on everyone else first. When a company issues stock, it’s out there to be bought. If a secondary entity were to say “You can buy/sell in the order ‘we’ tell you we can”, the stockmarket would crash in 24 hours. It’s a huge risk. The control part comes in as a result of this severe, sneaky modification to the way the TP function. Most people who control bulk on the TP have spotted what’s coming and pulled out. This is why copper ore prices have fallen 5 points in the last week. If the players were actually in control, they’d be buying massive amounts of ore at the new cheep rates, and flipping, causing the price to stabilize. But they aren’t doing that, because they know the prices are being driven down.

lackofcheese.5617:

No, this has very little effect on people buying gems. People making significant money via trading on the TP have always been, and will always be, a small minority. It’s simply impossible for this not to be the case, because all the money on the TP is coming from other players – your profit is necessarily someone else’s loss.

Oh really? What do -you- consider significant? While they may not make as much money as say day traders, those people who level/farm resources to sell and save up are also going to take a serious hit, as prices fall. When what they’ve harvested to sell is worth more at a vender than the TP, I think that will have tremendous effect on the amount of players being swayed to buy gems. Additionally, all the money on the TP is effectively -not- coming from the players, but rather from a constantly regenerating “return of goods” on the game, of which there is an infinite supply. The -only- control the players have in that kind of economy, is removed when the amount of goods we can buy/sell in a certain amount of time is prioritized by a third party, the same party who charges 15% on the sale, AND supplies all those nodes people are harvesting

You say I’m wrong. Well, back it up with facts instead of opinions.

Silvard.3469:

Oh, I have no qualms about the change. It’s understandable and ostensibly fair. I’m just saying that this shifts the advantage to those with a good bankroll, and there’s probably a decent overlap with those who benefited from the previous system. So as long as they adapt they’ll continue making quite a bit of gold, a bit slower than before but now also less labor and reaction intensive.

People who dealt in lower quantities will be the most affected, as they will have to undercut/outbid, or sell/buy to/from the market makers (those with the patience and gold to become so). The vast majority of said people weren’t day traders, however, they were regular players.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. And unfortunately, the people with the largest bankrolls are botters and gold sellers. They will exchange massive amounts of bulk, even at the smallest increments of profit, thereby closing the spreads and driving the prices down.

lackofcheese.5617:

Granted, the regular players who are smart enough to put up orders now have to be willing to wait a long time or undercut/outbid, but regular players aren’t really hurt that much by doing this anyway.

Right, but who is going to invest that kind of money with the stability of prices going all over the place? I get what you’re saying, but my claim is that the previous ability of players to trade bulk very quickly, contributed a LOT to the stability of prices.

All my banter aside, I simply feel that with that stability gone, the spread between buy sell prices on high demand items, is going to disappear (as it already has begun) making it almost impossible to make a profit on them, and it’s leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

The next top demand item will likely be iron ore, and right now the spread is roughly 13-11. The longer people trade on that, the closer we get to a sell wall of 12, gradually forcing the buy orders to 10. It is systematically driving the price down.

Necrollis.4372:

That’s exactly what I’m saying. And unfortunately, the people with the largest bankrolls are botters and gold sellers. They will exchange massive amounts of bulk, even at the smallest increments of profit, thereby closing the spreads and driving the prices down.

I’m not disagreeing with you. It’s just that I’ve seen some people, mostly those who clamored for it in the first place, reacting to this change as if it were some egalitarian measure against “rich TP fat cats” and pro “the people”, so to speak. But it isn’t. It’s fair alright, but fair is not the same thing as egalitarian. This actually skews things towards the rich and will help them get richer, and they’ll have an even easier time accomplishing this now. Daily trading and/or being a TP savvy regular player had no barrier of entry, now they’ve been effectively neutralized as that income has shifted to much richer players.

Silvard.3469:

I’m not disagreeing with you. It’s just that I’ve seen some people, mostly those who clamored for it in the first place, reacting to this change as if it were some egalitarian measure against “rich TP fat cats” and pro “the people”, so to speak. But it isn’t. It’s fair alright, but fair is not the same thing as egalitarian. This actually skews things towards the rich and will help them get richer, and they’ll have an even easier time accomplishing this now. Daily trading and/or being a TP savvy regular player had no barrier of entry, now they’ve been effectively neutralized as that income has shifted to much richer players.

No doubt about it. It -highly- favors the rich and screws over the average player. Believe me, I’ve already figured out how one could invest 10-15 gold flipping, and make 4-5 gold off of it in an hour or so. But, how many players have that?

Necrollis.4372:

You say I’m wrong. Well, back it up with facts instead of opinions.

It’s funny you should say this, when you haven’t got a factual basis for many of your own claims, and you’re the one with the burden of proof. You’re claiming that the fix to make the market FIFO has all these massive impacts, and you’re basing this on the price of copper. However, as you can clearly see on the GW2Spidy page for copper, the price of copper had already been falling for the past couple of weeks, whereas this change was only made a day or two ago. I see little reason to think that FIFO has much to do with this at all.

You haven’t shown any data demonstrating crazy consequences from switching to FIFO, and until you do so you’re mostly just making baseless claims.

lackofcheese.5617:

You haven’t shown any data demonstrating crazy consequences from switching to FIFO, and until you do so you’re mostly just making baseless claims.

LoL! Please tell me this is not your career. Using the very graph you are linking, Sept 28 – Oct 2 shows a stable price on copper, which ends swiftly with a 2-copper drop of sale price in a single day (a rate decrease that up until yesterday, required 3-4 days to occur).

If you’re going to use a graph to accuse someone of baseless claims, I strongly advise learning how to read it first. Also, since you don’t seem to be able to see what’s right in front of you, in the days to come, keep an eye on what has been a 2-copper spread between buy and sell prices for over a month.

That’s all the proof anyone with a modicum of economic sense would need to see. Latuh!

Necrollis.4372:

LoL! Please tell me this is not your career. Using the very graph you are linking, Sept 28 – Oct 2 shows a stable price on copper, which ends swiftly with a 2-copper drop of sale price in a single day (a rate decrease that up until yesterday, required 3-4 days to occur).

Oh, right, my career is to look at prices of items in Guild Wars 2, I’m sorry for doing such a bad job of it…

There has been a predictable downward trend in the price of copper for a long time now. Sure, the actual price drops happen suddenly, but that’s mostly because the minimum price increment is 1c – the overall curve would be much smoother if you could buy and sell at prices like 13.42c instead.

According to the graph, the drop from Oct 2 – Oct 3 was 1c, not 2c – buy/sell from an average of 14.16/16.26 to 13.21/15.28. Comparable drops have happened many times before, e.g. 16.35/19.1 -> 15.67/18.19 on Sep 25-26.

As such, the copper graph simply does not provide any statistically significant evidence for your conclusion, and considering that that’s the only example you seem to have, the ball lies squarely in your court.

The fact that you brought up iron ore and seem to be claiming that it’s going down in price is quite amusing, considering it has actually been going up in price in the past couple of days. Granted, I’d expect it to fall back down again in the long-term, just like copper, but either way this has very little to do with FIFO.

Still, setting those things aside, I do agree that a small price drop around now is to be expected, as the inability to quickly buy/sell small orders has lowered liquidity and made flipping less desirable. In the short term, this would mean less new flipping-minded buy orders and more stacks of 250 being put up for sale. However, I see little reason to expect any kind of catastrophic consequences.

Necrollis.4372:

Right, but who is going to invest that kind of money with the stability of prices going all over the place? I get what you’re saying, but my claim is that the previous ability of players to trade bulk very quickly, contributed a LOT to the stability of prices.
All my banter aside, I simply feel that with that stability gone, the spread between buy sell prices on high demand items, is going to disappear (as it already has begun) making it almost impossible to make a profit on them, and it’s leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

This claim of yours I find hard to make sense of. Instability would mean prices wildly fluctuating up and down, which is something that I would welcome as a trader as it would mean more opportunities to buy low and sell high. Moreover, price fluctuations tend to widen the buy/sell spread, not narrow it.

Either way, I don’t think that a FIFO system would lead to lower stability – in fact, I would expect the opposite. Since a FIFO system encourages placing lots of 250-unit orders, you would expect more large orders in the current system, and as lots of bulk orders build up that makes prices more stable, not less.

lackofcheese.5617:

This claim of yours I find hard to make sense of. Instability would mean prices wildly fluctuating up and down, which is something that I would welcome as a trader as it would mean more opportunities to buy low and sell high. Moreover, price fluctuations tend to widen the buy/sell spread, not narrow it.

Either way, I don’t think that a FIFO system would lead to lower stability – in fact, I would expect the opposite. Since a FIFO system encourages placing lots of 250-unit orders, you would expect more large orders in the current system, and as lots of bulk orders build up that makes prices more stable, not less.

What I mean by instability, is not primarily a drop in price (which yes, has gradually occurred, but copper ore has been a lot of people’s bread and butter, and it seems to have sped up it’s decline as of yesterday), but also the spreads closing in. With a FIFO based system, two things are going to happen (let’s stick to the top demanded items for reference, as obviously what I’m about to say won’t apply to everything in the same amount of time). Let’s just say, product “x”, with a spread of 17-14c:

1.) The day traders, botters, & gold sellers are going to stack up bulk buy/sells on the profit margins (17-14c). This will as you say, give the appearance of a stabilized wall on the spread.

2.) The average players who simply wish to sell or buy and don’t feel like waiting days for their cue in a pile of 500,000 units, are going to place them in the next shortest price cues (buying at 15c, selling at 16c). This kills the spread very quickly.

3.) Day traders, botters & gold sellers, realize their ability to make even a marginal profit is being eaten away at, since the amount of time required to fill a buy order in a FIFO system means they will have to wait. If they see the price of product “x” is falling, the opportunity to flip in a reasonable amount of time is removed, and the spread (14-17) is closing, they will pull their bulk orders out of 14c-buy, and place them in 13c-buy preparing for the next spread.

4.) Average non-day trader/botter/gold seller-player who wishes to buy quickly will place their orders in the 14c-buy slot.

5.) When bulk orders for day traders/botter/gold sellers begin to fill for 13c, they will flip the product for profits at 16c-sell.

6.) Average non-day trader/botter gold seller-player who wish to sell quickly, will place their product in the 15c-sell slot.

Rinse & Repeat. The price falls by one copper, and the spread closes in hours, perhaps even minutes. While stationary large bulk orders -can- hold the market steady if profitable trading is taking place on those margins, closing spreads will cause bulk traders to move to a lower buy-price in order to turn a profit, as it would be foolish to wait such a lengthy period of time for a buy order to be filled, with the spread closing in.

Two days ago, you could flip 7 of the 8 top demanded items on the TP and make a couple silver every 30-45 minutes. Today, those same profits will take you hours, and if you try to speed up the process by moving in one increment on the spread, you will take a loss. There will be more people cancelling buy orders at say 14c, and placing them in 13c slots, since buy orders don’t cost anything to cancel. There is, in my opinion, only one logical string of events to follow.

And also, IF by some slim chance the prices were to stay stable on a high demand item as a result of FIFO, that result would be just as ridiculous at this point. The orders at those spread walls, would go from hundreds of thousands of units, to millions of units. Can you imagine how long it would take to make transactions?

Bottom line, you can’t change a system from LIFO-like operations, to FIFO at the snap of a finger, without there being drastic consequences.

Silvard.3469:

Enforcing a higher floor price won’t fix anything, it will just move the floor for garbage items +15%.

Sure it will, it will fix items that people actually want to buy that are forced to the floor price due to over supply. Garbage listed for 15% more is still garbage and right now I see no solution to keep the TP free of tons of garbage sitting in it and never getting sold. Unless a demand is created for that stuff. So that is no justification for not making a change in floor price so that items worth something to others actually can be sold for a profit rather than players resorting to the vender because the vender pays them better for the item they would prefer to sell to someone else. I have no problem with people tossing everything that drops on the TP as long as the continual increase of garbage listings doesn’t have a negative impact on TP performance so that it gets laggy or worse goes down for maintenance as a result. My problem is with items that people actually want to buy but are at the floor price so that selling them to others nets players less than selling to the vender.

Can you name a specific item to illustrate your point? As far as I can see, the only items sitting at vendor+1c are worthless junk anyway.

Necrollis.4372:

The next top demand item will likely be iron ore, and right now the spread is roughly 13-11. The longer people trade on that, the closer we get to a sell wall of 12, gradually forcing the buy orders to 10. It is systematically driving the price down.

Again with the nonsense claims about iron.

It was 13-11 a week ago when I first started using iron ore as my primary flipping good. That doesn’t actually net a profit, but it would sometimes go down to 13-10, which gives 1.05c per unit profit, or up to 11-14, which gives 0.9c per unit profit. When I was about to log off for the night, I’d put in buy orders at 10 and sell orders at 14, and by the next time I played both would have gone through, for a profit of 1.9c per unit.

Yesterday, I did the same thing, because prices are hovering about the same place. There was a point where it was 15-11, but basically prices were what they were before.

And once again, I don’t understand the logic behind your claim that sales at 12c will force buys down to 10c, but somehow buys at 12c wouldn’t push sells up to 14c. Yes, of course the new system incentivizes reducing the spread, but I have yet to see a reasonable argument from you or anyone else for how it pushes prices preferentially in a downward direction.

Necrollis.4372:

2.) The average players who simply wish to sell or buy and don’t feel like waiting days for their cue in a pile of 500,000 units, are going to place them in the next shortest price cues (buying at 15c, selling at 16c). This kills the spread very quickly.

If they really don’t want to wait, they’ll just buy/sell at the price of the asks/bids that are already there. After all, obviously lots of people do that, else your custom orders would never go through. Flipping has always depended on the existence of people unwilling to wait for their own custom orders to go through, and instead choosing to buy and sell according to the custom orders other people have already made.

3.) Day traders, botters & gold sellers, realize their ability to make even a marginal profit is being eaten away at, since the amount of time required to fill a buy order in a FIFO system means they will have to wait. If they see the price of product “x” is falling, the opportunity to flip in a reasonable amount of time is removed, and the spread (14-17) is closing, they will pull their bulk orders out of 14c-buy, and place them in 13c-buy preparing for the next spread.

And if they see the price is going up, they’ll put their bulk offers higher than the current rate. This still isn’t justification for why the prices will be driven ever downwards.

The only difference is that they’d lose money moving their current orders, but I don’t think anyone playing the market spends much time with all of their capital continuously sitting in sell listings. What I’ve personally done when it looks like a price is going up is leave remaining things at the current lowest sell price, but put in buy orders 1c above what they already are, and then when I start getting those items, I’ll sell them 1c higher than the current minimum sale listings.

So I remain completely unconvinced that narrowing spreads will lead preferentially to falling prices. At most, the asymmetry in cost for custom listings results in a lower equilibrium point than there would be if it were symmetrical.

What you (and other sky-is-falling complainers) seem to consistently miss is the fact that, for casual players not looking to turn a profit by flipping items, a lower price means an increased willingness to just buy immediately at the current lowest sell offer. And the more people who do that, the faster items will move at that price, and the more likely they are to disappear entirely, moving the lowest sell price up to the next slot.

Two days ago, you could flip 7 of the 8 top demanded items on the TP and make a couple silver every 30-45 minutes. Today, those same profits will take you hours, and if you try to speed up the process by moving in one increment on the spread, you will take a loss.

The other way to speed up the process is to move to items that aren’t traded in such bulk. I made quite a bit more than “a couple silver” in about that time frame last night, fiddling around with the new system. I just had to look at different things than iron and copper.

(And for the record, the total net worth of all five of my characters is only on the order of 5-6g, so I’m not one of the 1% by any means.)

I didn’t know the FIFO system was bugged! I’ve been operating on FIFO this whole time… Guess I will keep doing the same but It will work better for me because they fixed it.

lackofcheese.5617:

Can you name a specific item to illustrate your point? As far as I can see, the only items sitting at vendor+1c are worthless junk anyway.

All crafted jewellery that isn’t of rare quality. I know it sells because you can watch as the numbers change and look at the TP data to see that the prices dropped rapidly to the floor went up a tiny bit but remains almost always at the floor. The crafted jewellery, at least as far as I have gone in content (upper 30s content) is superior to anything else you can obtain by any other means. Thus it has a demand regardless of quality level. Obviously the higher the quality the higher the demand. Yet I have green level crafted jewellery listed for marginally more than the vender +15% fee and it still sits weeks later not sold because the items maintain at floor price to less than floor price +15%. The items continually sell because there is demand for them but there is continual over supply. Thus anyone who doesn’t want to get less than what the vender gives won’t list them. And that is contrary to the intended player to player sales market. We are expected to vender garbage loot since nobody buys the garbage loot. But everything else should be fair to everyone who desires to sell to others. The current floor price is not because it expects you to take a loss over what the vender will give you. Never mind the fact that if you don’t bother to make the item at all; and just vender the ingredients needed to make the items; you would get even more coin than you would selling it to others even if you get more than the item’s vender price from the best possible price based on history of sales (after the first couple of days the game was live when demand was higher than supply).

Hippocampus.8470:

And once again, I don’t understand the logic behind your claim that sales at 12c will force buys down to 10c, but somehow buys at 12c wouldn’t push sells up to 14c.

Because genius, bulk flippers aren’t going to look at a spread wall and say "hmmm, I could “maybe” make a profit now, or, I could work extra extra hard over the next week and raise the sell price". They’re going to flip when they can, and when the time to wait for a transaction allows the spread to close and stay closed, they will pull out their large buy orders at one price and go to the next lowest buy increment (because it’s free to do, whereas listing a sell order is not). I know this is challenging for you, but it’s really not that hard, I promise lol.

You keep accusing me of not making an argument, giving proof, or showing logic, when I’ve given you darn near a book on it. Just because you -choose- to disagree with it, doesn’t make it a “sky-is-falling” conspiracy.

Also as a result of this ‘fix’ you can no longer buy chocolate bars and cinnamon sticks on the TP for 1c. As a result, way less people are buying it on the TP, and both of these items have left the top demanded items list in the last 48 hours. People are already talking about just bypassing the TP altogether and trading amongst themselves.

So sure, keep playing dumb about what’s happening. When it becomes so obvious even you won’t deny, you’ll just find a million other reasons to justify why it happened other than a sudden switch from LIFO to FIFO.

I’m also not one of those 1%. The extended wait time for me is not the problem. It’s the fact that this switch has effectively closed the spread on top demand items I’ve been flipping in small quantities every day for about two weeks now. It was a legitimate way to make coin for myself and my guild, and now it’s gone.

Plain and simple. Less people flipping, means more price fluctuation and less opportunity to invest responsibly. The TP now is acting like a warehouse exchange, with the bulk of high demand items readily available for those who wish to craft, not a market place. Where players once could semi-hold the price in one area, that ability is gone. Now you just have to throw your stuff on there and hope for the best while you wait days for other people to undercut you.

One last point, and then I’m done trying to explain -my- logic to individuals who use flawed logic to disagree with me. You (“and people like you”) say that supply and demand is governing the prices now, as it should be. Looking at copper, which has gradually gone down since its listing (with a big downward spike in the last couple of days (lackofcheese said that other occurrences were “comparable”, but this however is subjective. “Comparible” and “took 2-3 times as long” don’t mean the same thing to me).

At any rate, as has been the case for nearly a week now, the units ordered on the spread wall of copper ore (currently 10c+11c), outnumber the units being sold on the spread wall (currently 14c+15c). Approximately 351.4 – 222.5k units. Now I want you to read the following, verrry slowly, and verrry carefully, so I don’t have to explain myself again. Mmm-k?

This means that there is a 58% greater demand then there is a supply (and this particular percentage has been the case for about three days now, when prices have fallen drastically).

YES I’m continuously using copper ore as an example, BECAUSE it has been the #1 TOP DEMANDED ITEM, while RARELY the #1 TOP SUPPLIED on the TP, for weeks, while the price has continued to fall. Seriously, would you like me to use colored blocks to prove my point?

If —anything-- you said were true, the sell price of copper would be climbing, not falling. I honestly wish I was wrong about this, but I’m not. Prices are being driven down to reduce the amount of money we can make on the TP, and the players are not the ones doing it.

The chocolate/cinnamon situation is the result of the TP not allowing you to buy/sell at the vendor price or lower. Whether that’s a good thing or not is disputable, but it has nothing to do with FIFO.

Also, I would love it if this resulted in price fluctuation, because price fluctuation means more money-making opportunities, not less. Yes, such investments involve more risk, but they also tend to be more profitable. However, as much as I’d love it if they did, I don’t see much reason to expect prices to start fluctuating more than usual.

As for your estimate of supply and demand of copper, it’s simply not valid, for two reasons. First and foremost, a very large proportion of the supply and demand is represented by people who don’t place their own orders; instead, it’s the players who buy from sell orders and sell to buy orders (who, as mentioned previously, are the ones who you get to profit off when you’re flipping). You can’t measure the supply and demand of those players because they don’t have orders sitting on the TP, and so your claim that there is more demand than supply of copper at current prices is false. The thing that’s keeping prices down is the supply of copper at 11c, which is something that isn’t shown just by looking at a single snapshot of the TP listings. You would have to look at how many orders are being filled over time to get a good picture of the real supply and demand. Moreover, you can’t just combine the units demanded at 10c and those at 11c, because they represent different things. Demand for copper at 10c is simply not the same as demand for copper at 11c, and you can’t just add them together.

Side note: There is quite a lot of inelasticity in supply and demand in this game, especially for certain kinds of goods, so it is true that prices can do strange things at times.

Also, I do agree that the buy/sell asymmetry does put some downward pressure on prices – the lack of fees on buy orders vs fees on sell orders tends to result in lower buy orders, since there is no risk associated with a buy order not being filled. However, this downward pressure is one that is present with or without a FIFO system.

Ultimately, the main result of a system where small quantities take priority would be an obvious and undesirable one – eventually, as more and more players found out how the system worked, and some of them started making/adapting market bots, it would reach a situation where in order to buy any quantity of anything, you would have to do it a single unit at a time (maybe 5 at a time for items that get traded a lot). Frankly, I don’t see why anyone would want this final result, unless they’re a marketbotter.

Necrollis.4372:

Because genius, bulk flippers aren’t going to look at a spread wall and say "hmmm, I could “maybe” make a profit now, or, I could work extra extra hard over the next week and raise the sell price". They’re going to flip when they can, and when the time to wait for a transaction allows the spread to close and stay closed, they will pull out their large buy orders at one price and go to the next lowest buy increment (because it’s free to do, whereas listing a sell order is not). I know this is challenging for you, but it’s really not that hard, I promise lol.

Being a condescending kittenhole doesn’t make you look smarter, fyi.

I flip items in bulk, and for currently marginless items I do so by placing sell and buy orders outside the current range and waiting. After all, with FIFO, everyone has to wait for the previous orders to go through, at every price point. So since there are already thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of buy orders at that lower point, and because by your own account this is greater for copper than the number of sell listings at points at or above the current minimum, you’re actually more likely to have your transaction go through quickly by placing sell orders above that minimum than by placing buy orders below the maximum.

You keep accusing me of not making an argument, giving proof, or showing logic, when I’ve given you darn near a book on it. Just because you -choose- to disagree with it, doesn’t make it a “sky-is-falling” conspiracy.

A book filled with repetitions of the same flawed logic is not the same as proof or a sound argument.

Also as a result of this ‘fix’ you can no longer buy chocolate bars and cinnamon sticks on the TP for 1c. As a result, way less people are buying it on the TP

You never could, because you can’t sell at or below vendor price. This isn’t a new development unless the fix changed the vendor price of some items.

YES I’m continuously using copper ore as an example, BECAUSE it has been the #1 TOP DEMANDED ITEM, while RARELY the #1 TOP SUPPLIED on the TP, for weeks, while the price has continued to fall. Seriously, would you like me to use colored blocks to prove my point?

If using colored blocks also signals your moving away from the same flawed reasoning you’ve been using, I welcome it.

Copper prices are falling because they’d previously been inflated since the start of the game by all the demand among low-level crafters. It is the easiest ore to get and the least useful once you’re out of the bottom level bracket, so it’s really not a surprise that the price would fall. Sure, the recent increase in the rate at which it’s falling may be the result of properly enacting FIFO, as all the people with giant bulk orders sitting there finally had those go through fairly quickly, but people have expected this drop for weeks.

And yeah, counting custom orders only gives you have the picture, because most people don’t sit at the market flipping copper, but instead just one-click buy or sell at the prices already listed. Every single transaction on the trading post involves one party that sets a custom price and another party that accepts that price. So looking only at the custom prices and not the rate at which they’re accepted cannot possibly give you the complete picture.

I skimmed most of this thread (entertaining!) but I had to chime in because this is categorically wrong:

“This means that there is a 58% greater demand then there is a supply”

Point #2, if you’re interested in true demand I would look at trade volume, not “top demanded item.” This is highly skewed towards items people are trying to flip.

All of the information people are throwing out matter very little because there are so many external variables causing flux at this stage in the game’s life. It’s impossible to say that LIFO to FIFO has any impact.