Guild Wars 2

Hippocampus.8470:

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

Please see:

Hippocampus.8470:

What you (and other sky-is-falling complainers)..

I suppose your own reasoning wasn’t good enough for you at the time

Is this FIFO change the cause of the bugged prices when searching for items? The item prices shown in the initial 10-item list from a search result are all stuck at the minimum sell price from 3 days ago. If you click on the items, the actual sell price can be very different.

That problem was already around quite a while ago. However, it definitely seems to have gotten worse as of late.

Lunesta.3742:

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.

Firstly, I agree that trade volume would be a better long-term assessment tool. That being said, one thing that seems to remain constant across the entire board is the spread. Look at those top items. The spread pretty much stays the same. How is that possible if the supply/demand changes so much?

You can’t say “it’s working as it should be, but in order to overlook the serious inconsistency between increased demand on a particular item with a continued loss, let’s include a whole bunch of other items/products in there too”. Likewise, the 222.5k – 351.4k units, is -volume- (that’s why I used it). If those numbers didn’t consistently represent a stronger demand than supply, copper ore wouldn’t be at the top of the demand list. It is an important factor in the context of this conversation, whether you agree with it or not.

Lunesta.3742:

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.

What you basically just said was… “because there are so many other vehicles on the new highway, it doesn’t really matter what anyone has to say about suddenly putting diesel, in a gasoline engine.”

Bear on the job.6273:

Is this FIFO change the cause of the bugged prices when searching for items? The item prices shown in the initial 10-item list from a search result are all stuck at the minimum sell price from 3 days ago. If you click on the items, the actual sell price can be very different.

As lackofcheese said, these bugs have been around a while. However this is another negative side effect of going from LIFO-like to FIFO (nothing to do with money) and I said in a post a couple days ago that players would notice those effects very quickly.,

Because the TP is no longer dealing with smaller orders -first- to reduce the amount of pending orders quicker, it is now dealing with filling massive orders in the sequence they were placed.

This allocates a highly concentrated amount of processing to less transactions, while bottlenecking everything else up, magnifying the delays/bugs already present, and introducing new ones.

Necrollis.4372:

If those numbers didn’t consistently represent a stronger demand than supply, copper ore wouldn’t be at the top of the demand list. It is an important factor in the context of this conversation, whether you agree with it or not.

No, you’re begging the question. Copper ore is at the top of the demand list because its position on the demand list depends only on how many current orders there are for it. (Including, incidentally, unfulfillable orders below vendor price or, in the case of lemons, for account-bound items.) Therefore, with that many orders, it will be at the top of the demand list, regardless of what those numbers “consistently represent”.

Also, it’s worth noting that when real economists talk about things like supply and demand curves, they’re talking about them as functions of price. They aren’t just static numbers representing the number of people who would be abstractly interested in having a particular item. A bunch of orders for copper ore at 10c or whatever indicates, at most, that there is a high demand for copper ore at that particular price. It doesn’t mean those same people would put in the same number of buy orders at a higher price, and therefore it doesn’t mean that the current price is lower than it “should be”.

Hippocampus.8470:

Also, it’s worth noting that when real economists talk about things like supply and demand curves, they’re talking about them as functions of price. They aren’t just static numbers representing the number of people who would be abstractly interested in having a particular item.

Ugh right, totally dude, you nailed it. When “real” economists use data, they have a secret formula that separates “abstract data” from “concrete data”, which makes their analysis full-proof. This clearly explains why they are never wrong.

“Fake” economists however, see rapidly increasing stock orders on the buy wall, as a serious intent to purchase, and see rapidly closing gaps and decreasing stock orders on the buy/bid wall, as a sign the price is going to fall (they’re total amateurs).

Only the “pros” are smart enough to look through the illusions and see that contrary to what would seem mathematically sound, buy/sell walls on the spread (10,11-14,15) are “abstract” or “static”, as much as is the buy/sell orders placed at (1-9) and (16-?).

They’re probably just numbers that represent people who simply get a thrill out of placing orders and then cancelling them right when they receive a telepathic message warning them, that the order is about to be filled. They do this over and over in GW2 TP, that’s why the demand stays the same, and people aren’t actually able to sell anything on the TP based on those numbers. It’s because they’re “abstract” or “static” numbers.

By far the most brilliant thing I’ve read all day. Keep it coming, I’d like to learn from you. Maybe one day I can be a “real” economist, instead of a “fake” financial operator/planner. Gotta tell ya though, the money I’ve made for my own business and others, certainly does -seem- real. Meh, what do I know. It’s probably not real either.

Nice talking with ya again. Good luck in GemWars2

I’m not saying you in particular aren’t using the terms correctly, so much as that I’ve seen a lot of people discussing supply and demand on this forum as though they were just single numbers rather than multidimensional functions of other things.

In any case, it occurred to me after finishing that post why we really shouldn’t be surprised at excess buy orders for an item that has just been falling in price:

Because it has just fallen in price, every single sale listing for prices at or just above the current minimum has been posted in the past few hours or, at most, days. Some of the buy orders, on the other hand, could have been sitting there for weeks, for all we know, since there’s no time limit and no doubt many predicted that copper ore prices would eventually fall from the ridiculous level they were at before.

So what would be truly shocking would be to see an excess the other way, with more sell orders posted at, say, 12c in the past day than there have been buy orders posted at 10c in the entire time since the TP went live and copper ore first rocketed up to the rather inflated price it sat at for so long.

The excess of bids over sell orders, in other words, is a consequence of what the price just has done, rather than an indication of what the price will (or “should”) do.

Edit: When you say “rapidly increasing”, would you care to provide specific numbers over time for buy and sell orders, to verify your claim that these are new bids you’re talking about are actually predominantly recent? That would certainly suggest that my account in the preceding paragraphs is incomplete at best, but at the same time I’m skeptical that it is indeed recent, since at least with iron ore (the one I’ve bought and sold more of than copper), there have been hundreds of thousands of orders piled up on either side of the current spread since I started trading.

Hippocampus.8470:

Edit: When you say “rapidly increasing”, would you care to provide specific numbers over time for buy and sell orders, to verify your claim that these are new bids you’re talking about are actually predominantly recent? That would certainly suggest that my account in the preceding paragraphs is incomplete at best, but at the same time I’m skeptical that it is indeed recent, since at least with iron ore (the one I’ve bought and sold more of than copper), there have been hundreds of thousands of orders piled up on either side of the current spread since I started trading.

Yah know, honestly I was about to say “rapidly increasing, proven by the fact that the current buy wall is 3 points from where it was two days ago”. However, you raise a good point. If a price is falling (as is the case with copper ore), there are static orders already placed at the lower prices (partially due to people placing orders and forgetting about them, and smart investors who watch the graph and are planning for the future).

I can’t reasonably conclude as a result of what you just pointed out, that buy orders at those locations are rapidly increasing. It may well be that they’re not increasing at all. You’ve got this one lol.

BTW, a little joke an instructor told us when I was getting my MBA: Take all the economists that want to work as an adviser to you. Put them all in a room together. At the end of the day, find the ones that disagree with the larger group/s, let those few argue until only one hasn’t passed out. Then, hire him/her.

I know I am late to this thread but I wanted to comment.

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.

There is nothing “fair” about FIFO. It is predictable and orderly but it is not fair in terms of encouraging competition. It seems fair simply because we can know for sure that we have a monopoly on the next X sellers at a particular price point and everyone can get this same monopolistic assurance. It most assuredly isn’t a “free” market system. It’s free market like but it isn’t a naturally occurring system in any way. It is absolutely engineered and offers an arbitrary advantage to certain sellers based on the time they listed the product they are selling.

Why precisely should a player get a system enforced competitive advantage based on time listed? In what way does this help encourage a healthy economy?

All that said the ability to 1c up or down nearly makes this less of issue. Since most players naturally assumed it was FIFO anyway the market hasn’t changed much since this change was put in place.

But that doesn’t mean this was a healthy mechanic in the first place. I really think it causes the most damage with buy orders. Especially since there is no way to bid at fractions of a copper. And again there is no rational reason to enforce a mechanic that forces a seller to sell to one and only one seller for X number of sells at a particular price point.

To use an example I used in another thread, Seller A walks into a room with 250 items to sell and 3 Buyers are already in the room all wanting to buy his product for 17c. Buyer B got the room first with an order for 10 product, Buyer C got there second with 5000 and Buyer D got there third with 5. The FIFO system forces the Seller to sell to Buyer B and then to Buyer C. Buyer D never even gets a chance to buy and won’t until Buyer C’s order is completely filled.

This is hardly a “free” market. Why should when a particular Buyer walks into the room have any effect on whether Seller A can sell to them? Seller A only cares about price. The product isn’t somehow better because Buyer B arrived at the market first. Why should the system arbitrarily enforce such a mechanism?

Because it only causes slightly more lag than the previous small-orders-first system. There are practical considerations as well as market freedom considerations.

What system would you recommend instead, which could be implemented at anything like the same speed we’ve come to expect from the TP?

Hippocampus.8470:

What system would you recommend instead, which could be implemented at anything like the same speed we’ve come to expect from the TP?

Random thought: a checkbox option when posting non-instant deals (whether buying or selling) that decreases the sales tax or buy post amount by 1% in exchange for prioritizing your transaction below full prize transactions. The theory being that only bulk traders will be interested in using this.

Hippocampus.8470:

Because it only causes slightly more lag than the previous small-orders-first system. There are practical considerations as well as market freedom considerations.

What system would you recommend instead, which could be implemented at anything like the same speed we’ve come to expect from the TP?

I think there is a huge assumption that there is a performance issue caused by the way the system processes orders. The TP may be having performance issues but none of us has seen that code or know the precise architecture of that system. They have never said that the reason for the system processing small orders first was a performance related. In fact they instead said it was a bug.

The system I would propose for buy orders is simply random between buyers at the same price point. The assumption that this would add processing time of a non-negligible amount is just that: an assumption.

If this argument is strictly about technical performance the concept of fairness is moot anyway.

It’s not an assumption that random number generation takes processor time.

Hippocampus.8470:

It’s not an assumption that random number generation takes processor time.

It’s an assumption that taking more time in this instance would have any perceivable impact. There a plenty of algorithms out there that take far less time to pull a number than standard generator techniques. And if its a problem, pregenerate them and use a lookup table. The game probably already has a large need for randomly generated data, it may already be done this way.

From a technical standpoint the issue wouldn’t be whether it takes more processing time but if it takes enough to be a bottleneck. I seriously doubt it would.

..then you aren’t reading the same complaints I’m reading from players since the “fix” a couple days ago, both in game, and in these forums.

“From a technical standpoint”, it most certainly -would- be a processing issue. The TP does a whole lot of one thing; moving one value to another value based upon other values. That has Central Processing Unit wrote all over it. This is why institutions like NASA have some of the most powerful processors in the world. High volume numeric functions/equations demand it.

If processor performance is stressed, -everything- else, (with the exception of bandwidth) will be affected. If you concentrate the same processing power to fewer/larger transactions, you are going to increase the amount of time transactions take – plain and simple.

No, the primary bottleneck for TP performance is almost certainly the database read/write operations. In terms of database access, a FIFO system is perhaps slightly less efficient than a system that prioritises smaller transactions over larger ones, but the difference isn’t particularly large.

On the other hand, a randomized system consistently requires access to many different orders at every point in time, which would evidently result in a large performance hit.

Incidentally, I’m fairly sure real-world stock market systems typically use a FIFO system for bid/ask queues.

Vesuvias.9326:

I know I am late to this thread but I wanted to comment.

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.

There is nothing “fair” about FIFO. It is predictable and orderly but it is not fair in terms of encouraging competition.

I have no idea what you mean by “fair in terms of encouraging competition”, but the fact is that FIFO encourages competition more than either of the alternative systems being suggested, because FIFO (more so than the other systems) encourages undercutting by 1c to sell your items more quickly. Identical products being sold at an identical price do not constitute “competition”; they have to differ in some aspects before it can be called that.

Vesuvias.9326:

It seems fair simply because we can know for sure that we have a monopoly on the next X sellers at a particular price point and everyone can get this same monopolistic assurance.

That is a ridiculous usage of the term “monopoly”, because it does not prevent other sellers from providing supply at slightly different times or different prices.

Moreover, the same point can be used against your proposed system. By your logic, randomly choosing a seller for each transaction is monopolistic, because at any given instant in time, only one seller is actually being allowed to sell goods!

Vesuvias.9326:

It most assuredly isn’t a “free” market system.

Essentially any sensible TP system would not constitute a 100% free market. There are at least two reasons for this, but the most obvious one is the 15% tax. By definition, the TP is not a free market if it forces you to pay 15% tax.

Moreover, the TP forces you to buy items at lower prices before you can buy them at higher ones. Unless the TP allows you to buy 1 unit of copper ore from the person trying to sell it for 10 gold, it’s not free.

By comparison to the above points, side arguments about FIFO vs randomization are pretty much irrelevant. Neither system results in a truly free market.

However, I think we both agree that a 100% free market in this regard is hardly a necessity. For one thing, buyers and sellers can still agree to trade via mail, although in that case they’re forced to rely on trust.

Vesuvias.9326:

It’s free market like but it isn’t a naturally occurring system in any way. It is absolutely engineered and offers an arbitrary advantage to certain sellers based on the time they listed the product they are selling.

The concept of a “naturally occurring system” here is ridiculous; any system ArenaNet happens to choose will be equally “engineered”. As for the “arbitrary advantage”, your proposed system similarly offers an arbitrary advantage; in this case, it offers an arbitrary advantage to whichever seller happens to get lucky and be picked by the random draw. In terms of these “advantages”, I see little reason to prefer a randomized system to FIFO, or vice versa.

Ultimately, the only way to have a system satisfying your requirements is a system without the 15% tax, and one in which every single order is listed with the name of the seller/buyer and can be individually selected.

lackofcheese.5617:

I have no idea what you mean by “fair in terms of encouraging competition”, but the fact is that FIFO encourages competition more than either of the alternative systems being suggested, because FIFO (more so than the other systems) encourages undercutting by 1c to sell your items more quickly. Identical products being sold at an identical price do not constitute “competition”; they have to differ in some aspects before it can be called that.

Except that in this environment FIFO allows glaring obvious advantage points only allowable because of the way the “system” functions. FIFO in and of itself isn’t bad provided the concept of arriving first provides little to no advantage (and I apologize for not explaining this better). It’s use here is bad because of the way it combines with some other system constraints. The concept of arriving first “can” provide tremendous advantage. Lets iterate over some of the system constraints that we all know but possibly take for granted:

1) buy orders never expire and can sit forever waiting to be filled a certain price point. they can also be pulled off for no fee if it turns out to be a bad bid at the entirely wrong price point for the market. There is also essentially no cap on how large an order you can place. This means that with enough cash you can essentially “lock” a price point. Normally this is meaningless as the next guy can simply bid a little higher or sell for a little lower to essentially negate the lock except that in this system we have another constraint.

2) We must bid in increments of 1c. While this seems like a minor inconsequential point. It actually isn’t. What it eliminates is all of fractional price points between the “locked” price point, call it X, and X + 1c. This doesn’t really effect big items that sell one at a time for multiple gold but items that are essentially selling in lots for 1-20c this is a BIG deal. If I am buying a lot of say 1000 Iron which currently lets say has a bid order of 100592 at 10c. I can either bid 1g for my 1000 (1000 * 10c = 10000c = 1g) and go to the end of the list never to be filled or I can go to the next highest price point and bid 1g 10s for my lot of 1000 and there are NO price points in between. I can’t bid 1g 1c for my lot of 1000.

10s is easily the difference between profit and loss. In a competitive game like this it is only natural to attempt to lock you competition out of certain price points. And because the systems lack of monetary granularity the concept of getting your price on the queue first is now over emphasized. And that’s my biggest problem with FIFO.

Most players who know how it functions are already aware of this and will simply “game” this system. I imagine that some of you may not even think this is a problem as everyone has a “fair” shot at taking advantage of way the system functions. However this is a game. From a game design perspective having a runaway winner is a problem. Those who have accumulated a great deal of gold and have a tremendous amount of free time already have an innate advantage simply by having more gold and time. They don’t need any “extra” advantage innate to the way the system functions allowing them to lockout competitors more easily.

In order to obtain such a “lock”, you have to put a ridiculously large amount of money into buy orders, considering just how many participants there are in GW2’s markets. Also, while it is true that the lack of fees on the buy orders means you can do this without a direct penalty, it still remains the case that every stack of 250 units you order is less profitable than the last, because the queue is longer and hence the profit per unit time is lower.

By ordering hundreds of thousands of units of one type of item, you would be waiting for, say, a week to make a 10% profit. In doing so, you’re paying the opportunity cost of not ordering a different type of item which might easily have made you comparable profit in a much shorter timeframe.

Now, perhaps the system would be better if you introduced fees on buy orders as well as sell orders, or maybe if you allowed for increments of 0.1c instead of 1c. However, I don’t think that randomly choosing a buyer/seller for each transaction is a good solution.

lackofcheese.5617:

Incidentally, I’m fairly sure real-world stock market systems typically use a FIFO system for bid/ask queues.
.

Mmmmm yes and no. The biggest non FIFO-like demonstration on real-world markets, is actually -on- bid cues. In the real-world markets when options become available to purchase, you’re looking at hundreds of millions of orders, that are all filled relatively quick. In GW2, it could take days for a few thousand people to do the same thing.

At some point, the amount of time it takes to fill an order, overrules the ability to turn a profit. The more players you have, the more time it takes to process orders, and the more people get screwed over.

Ultimately, how long people have to wait on a transaction, will mean greater risk. When that time is increased (predominantly because more people buy the game and use the TP), it is -not- a fair system. In real world markets, brokers know almost exactly how much time it will take to buy, are relatively clear on how long it will take to sell (especially on quick moving stock), calculate that time into market trends, and THEN decide whether or not they’re going to trade on that item. The current operations on GW2 TP, operate -nothing- like that. Firstly, the main trends we see on graphs (ie gw2Spidy) do not accurately record spreads. Secondly, how long transactions will take, is a -complete- unknown.

Real-world traders would laugh at this scenario (and you can take my word on that).

lackofcheese.5617:

In order to obtain such a “lock”, you have to put a ridiculously large amount of money into buy orders, considering just how many participants there are in GW2’s markets. Also, while it is true that the lack of fees on the buy orders means you can do this without a direct penalty, it still remains the case that every stack of 250 units you order is less profitable than the last, because the queue is longer and hence the profit per unit time is lower.

By ordering hundreds of thousands of units of one type of item, you would be waiting for, say, a week to make a 10% profit. In doing so, you’re paying the opportunity cost of not ordering a different type of item which might easily have made you comparable profit in a much shorter timeframe.

Now, perhaps the system would be better if you introduced fees on buy orders as well as sell orders, or maybe if you allowed for increments of 0.1c instead of 1c. However, I don’t think that randomly choosing a buyer/seller for each transaction is a good solution.

Your point is valid. Liquidity is “extremely” important in this game and tieing up that much cash is detrimental at this early stage (as there are plenty of cash making opportunities). But to be truthful an order for 100,000 on an item that cost 10c is only 100g. I would guess that most of the people in this discussion have at least that much in assets plus cash. Right now I admittedly wouldn’t do it as the gold is like you said better spent elsewhere. But next month when all of us have doubled or tripled our amounts I could easily have 100g just sitting doing nothing otherwise.

As the gaps in profit start to close because of competition it will be worth it to have 100g sit in a buy order queue versus my non interest earning bank tab so I could lock an entire market even small one. And not to bang the point again, its completely risk free since I can cancel it at no penalty.

To be honest having to order in lots 250 means I would need to place 400 buy orders and that would likely prevent me (personally) from ever doing this. But it isn’t that hard to imagine someone willing to setup a Macro to gain the advantage.

I suspect this may already be occurring for some items.

Vesuvias.9326:

Your point is valid. Liquidity is “extremely” important in this game and tieing up that much cash is detrimental at this early stage (as there are plenty of cash making opportunities). But to be truthful an order for 100,000 on an item that cost 10c is only 100g.

For the types of items at ~10c prices, 100k units probably wouldn’t be that long a queue anyway, though.

Vesuvias.9326:

I would guess that most of the people in this discussion have at least that much in assets plus cash.

I do, but I’m not sure about the other participants.

Vesuvias.9326:

As the gaps in profit start to close because of competition it will be worth it to have 100g sit in a buy order queue versus my non interest earning bank tab so I could lock an entire market even small one. And not to bang the point again, its completely risk free since I can cancel it at no penalty.

However, if it becomes worthwhile to put 100g into buy orders, then it will be equally worthwhile for someone else to put in an order in at the end of that very long queue. Basically, whenever you “lock” a market you’re locking out your own gold as well. Either your last stack was a reasonable investment, in which case it would still be a reasonable investment for another player to put another order at the end of that very long queue, or you’re sacrificing on better investment opportunities by doing so, and those other opportunities will remain open to other players.

It’s not that you’re being disproportionately rewarded for having that 100g; what you were rewarded for in this hypothetical scenario is finding an item with a short queue to take advantage of, and that’s something that any player would be rewarded for, regardless of how much gold they happen to have – in this regard, the system is fair. Yes, the size of the reward is roughly proportional to how much you invest, but that’s essentially an inherent aspect of how trading works anyway. In fact, this is a case that exhibits diminishing returns, because as you pump more gold into buy orders for a single item the queue gets longer and hence your rate of return decreases.

lackofcheese.5617:

However, if it becomes worthwhile to put 100g into buy orders, then it will be equally worthwhile for someone else to put in an order in at the end of that very long queue. Basically, whenever you “lock” a market you’re locking out your own gold as well. Either your last stack was a reasonable investment, in which case it would still be a reasonable investment for another player to put another order at the end of that very long queue, or you’re sacrificing on better investment opportunities by doing so, and those other opportunities will remain open to other players.

It’s not that you’re being disproportionately rewarded for having that 100g; what you were rewarded for in this hypothetical scenario is finding an item with a short queue to take advantage of, and that’s something that any player would be rewarded for, regardless of how much gold they happen to have – in this regard, the system is fair. Yes, the size of the reward is roughly proportional to how much you invest, but that’s essentially an inherent aspect of how trading works anyway. In fact, this is a case that exhibits diminishing returns, because as you pump more gold into buy orders for a single item the queue gets longer and hence your rate of return decreases.

What you “buy” with the tieing up of your 100g is an exclusive “extended” period of time where you and only you can be profitable on a possible upstream item. Sure someone could throw an order for 1000 at the end of your order for 100,000. But its the block of continuous time where you can control the price point that is the problem. Controlling the only profitable price point for 20 minutes is practically pointless. Controlling it for 3-4 days is an entirely different matter, that’s enough to force the smaller players out.

I’ve had a bit of change of heart on this issue. I really think the lack of granularity as the price of items approachs 1c is more of an issue than anything else. FIFO as implemented now isn’t even FIFO. It’s FIFO with option to make it LIFO for the cost of 1c. 1c on an item that sells for 2g is practically pointless and its a no brainier to “buy” to the top of the Queue at that cost. On an item that sell for 10c its a 10% item cost to “buy” to the top of the Queue which makes for an entirely different market.

As far as I know, aren’t orders still stored in chunks of 250? As in, the only way to monopolize 100k consecutive items is to get all 400 listings in without a single other person making an order.

Vesuvias.9326:

What you “buy” with the tieing up of your 100g is an exclusive “extended” period of time where you and only you can be profitable on a possible upstream item. Sure someone could throw an order for 1000 at the end of your order for 100,000. But its the block of continuous time where you can control the price point that is the problem. Controlling the only profitable price point for 20 minutes is practically pointless. Controlling it for 3-4 days is an entirely different matter, that’s enough to force the smaller players out.

“Controlling the price point” (which, I’d say, is a poor choice of words) for 20 minutes is far from pointless. It lets you make a good profit later from the items you buy for that 20 minutes. Putting 1000x as much into buy orders lets you make 1000x the profit over 1000x the amount of time. What, exactly, is the problem with that?

Vesuvias.9326:

I’ve had a bit of change of heart on this issue. I really think the lack of granularity as the price of items approachs 1c is more of an issue than anything else.

I do have some agreement with you here, but there are disadvantages to having excessive granularity as well. If the granularity is very high, the result is a game where you have to continuously increase your prices in jumps of 0.02c to see who “wins”, and this is a game that, as many who have tried their hands at EVE trading would be happy to tell you,
1) Is not much fun.
and
2) Gets won by trade bots.