Guild Wars 2

Toxic spore skins (set time range to all), note the number of buy orders!
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/48905

Interesting way to try manipulating the market… Does anyone know what’s going on here?

Ahem…

John Smith.4610:

No.

Penguin, your response isn’t applicable to the data under scrutiny.

It looks to me like people stopped wanting the spore stuff once Wintersday came out and there were new things to do.

Lengradde.2967:

Penguin, your response isn’t applicable to the data under scrutiny.

It is when you have conspiracy theorists shout “manipulation” in the trade forums.

Perhaps it wasn’t attempt at manipulation, but to say that those buy orders are normal market behavior is absurd.

Lengradde.2967:

Perhaps it wasn’t attempt at manipulation, but to say that those buy orders are normal market behavior is absurd.

You underestimate the drive of Trading Post players. We buy anything and everything to make a buck. Sometimes we crash and burn. Sometimes we bank huge profits. So don’t assume it’s “manipulation”, because the market is so large and dynamic, no one is able to effectively manipulate anything. The correct term would be “speculation”.

That’s why this doesn’t make sense to me, how do buy orders correlate to speculation? Or even manipulation? You’re right that manipulation may not be the correct word, but I don’t understand the point of 1 copper buy orders increasing 1000 fold overnight.

Demand is also dynamic. With thousands upon thousands of players on the TP at any given time, anything can happen.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Lengradde.2967:

Penguin, your response isn’t applicable to the data under scrutiny.

It is when you have conspiracy theorists shout “manipulation” in the trade forums.

Manipulation/Speculation is part and parcel of the “free” market economy. I don’t understand why people find it so difficult to simply say it. Perhaps they are trying to keep a lid on the can of worms that would be opened up if they did.

I didn’t mean to cause a fluff with my wording. All I’m trying to understand is why thousands of 1 copper buy orders were placed overnight (and subsequently disappearing in the same fashion)

Also, don’t forget to turn off the ‘averages’ in the graph…use the raw data filters.

Edit: Sounded like a meanie.

Lengradde.2967:

I didn’t mean to cause a fluff with my wording. All I’m trying to understand is why thousands of 1 copper buy orders were placed overnight (and subsequently disappearing in the same fashion)

Maybe you are better at reading graphs but i dont see where thousands of 1 copper buy orders where placed, which night you mean exactly?

Wanze.8410:

Lengradde.2967:

I didn’t mean to cause a fluff with my wording. All I’m trying to understand is why thousands of 1 copper buy orders were placed overnight (and subsequently disappearing in the same fashion)

Maybe you are better at reading graphs but i dont see where thousands of 1 copper buy orders where placed, which night you mean exactly?

The TP only shows a limited amount of buy orders, starting with highest price and sorted in descending order. Cheap buy orders don’t show up (ie…buy orders for this item below 7 gold won’t appear in the listings).

Lengradde.2967:

Wanze.8410:

Lengradde.2967:

I didn’t mean to cause a fluff with my wording. All I’m trying to understand is why thousands of 1 copper buy orders were placed overnight (and subsequently disappearing in the same fashion)

Maybe you are better at reading graphs but i dont see where thousands of 1 copper buy orders where placed, which night you mean exactly?

The TP only shows a limited amount of buy orders, starting with highest price and sorted in descending order. Cheap buy orders don’t show up (ie…buy orders for this item below 7 gold won’t appear in the listings).

I know that.

What you just said is a good argument that you dont know that thousands of 1 copper buy orders were placed as you claimed in an earlier post as neither the tp nor spidy give you that information for this item. Where do you get this information from? And which night is it you are talking about?

Most of the “demand” numbers we have access to are nothing more than hog wash. To explain what I mean by that……Even though there has been a buy order placed that does not equate to actual demand. For one it ignores instant purchases, and for another it ignores erroneous orders. For example last year I placed 300 buy orders for The Colossus at it’s merchant value (don’t remember exactly something like 3s87c ea), which double the “demand” according to spidy. Was the actual demand doubled?…Nope.

Now I can see players trying to do such a thing in an attempt to get speculative rise of an item. Place X amount of orders at insignificant price to give an item the appearance of possible spike (on spidy or other sites), make a little post (what’s going on here), and hope players bite.

Wanze.8410:

Where do you get this information from?

I’d been watching the item since it was introduced. The thousands of buy orders were never in the displayed section.

Essence Snow.3194:

Now I can see players trying to do such a thing in an attempt to get speculative rise of an item. Place X amount of orders at insignificant price to give an item the appearance of possible spike (on spidy or other sites), make a little post (what’s going on here), and hope players bite.

It never made much sense to me, and doesn’t seem like a useful tactic to place all those orders. I always remove volume of buy orders from the graphs anyway, and don’t judge demand based on that stat. That’s why I’m here, to see if there’s something I’m missing, or if someone just really enjoys watching graphs spike for the hell of it. shrug

Nothing unusual about it really, there was more inflow of the item during the event than now, it’s likely a 1 time release item (like most other back skins) and will increase in value over time, as the price of the item is increasing currently it’s unlikely the buy orders are going to be filled so that gold sitting there in the buy order is now useless.

I’ve done very similar with other limited release items, once the event is over it’s not like more supply is coming in to fill those buy orders.

Well, I just decided to put 25,000 orders on wind catcher skins to see if it even affects anything. My guess is it won’t, and I’ll be able to let my thread die.

I wasn’t wrong, it was a plain and simple attempt at market manipulation. But the main point is that it was an attempt and didn’t affect prices.

The increased demand doesn’t actually mean anything.

Demand manipulation only has an effect when someone puts in enough orders at vendor price to push the item in to the top 10 demanded in order to get exposure.

This usually isn’t worth it though as seen with Slice of Candied Dragon Candy. It’ll take several hours for the guy to cancel all those buy orders eventually and the price has barely moved.

Lengradde.2967:

Well, I just decided to put 25,000 orders on wind catcher skins to see if it even affects anything. My guess is it won’t, and I’ll be able to let my thread die.

I wasn’t wrong, it was a plain and simple attempt at market manipulation. But the main point is that it was an attempt and didn’t affect prices.

Hold up, you’re making assumptions.

The guy likely just put in orders for a few stacks of the things hoping to pick up a proportion from a downward panic. That never eventuated and they found somewhere else to put their money.

Assuming the guy’s an idiot and thought just having demand on a spidy chart would effect the price just has no basis from the facts presented.

I see that spidy has reflected the 25k buy orders…and it seems to actually had a small/temporary effect on sell listings….go figure.

Lengradde.2967:

Well, I just decided to put 25,000 orders on wind catcher skins to see if it even affects anything. My guess is it won’t, and I’ll be able to let my thread die.

I wasn’t wrong, it was a plain and simple attempt at market manipulation. But the main point is that it was an attempt and didn’t affect prices.

Wait, so you ordered 1.5million gold worth of wind catchers?

Since wind catchers do not have a vendor value, their min value is set as 1c. Thus he placed an order for 25k at 1c each, which =2g 50s

More interesting trends:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/48905
Seems after the buy orders were cancelled, prices went up a day later. Keep in mind, availability of this item has remained unchanged since the fall of kessex hills tower.

shrug

I was just about to make a post about this. This is the new form of manipulation for very rich players.

Step 1. Buy a bunch of the items in question
Step 2: Place 1million+ buy orders at 1c
Step 3: Item appears on “most demanded items” in the TP main screen
Step 4: Increased visibility of item causes increased demand
Step 5: Prices rise
Step 6: Sell off initial investment for a hefty profit
Step 7: Cancel buy orders at 0 cost to yourself.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/43952
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/42406
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/41946

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I was just about to make a post about this. This is the new form of manipulation for very rich players.

Step 1. Buy a bunch of the items in question
Step 2: Place 1million+ buy orders at 1c
Step 3: Item appears on “most demanded items” in the TP main screen
Step 4: Increased visibility of item causes increased demand
Step 5: Prices rise
Step 6: Sell off initial investment for a hefty profit
Step 7: Cancel buy orders at 0 cost to yourself.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/43952
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/42406
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/41946

I dont see anything immoral in advertising though.

Also, while posting 4k buy orders for a stack of 250 does not take more than 5-10 minutes, removing those from the trading post will definately take a while. You will also lock 100g in the tp, along with your initial costs for the items you stocked, so there is quite some time and money involved.

And in all three of those cases we are talking about low availablity, high price “luxury” items to begin with. These are all items that I have no interest in what so ever and I can’t believe any significant part of the player population cares about either. You’re upset over someone trying to manipulate the Rolex, Gucci and Ferrari market and all I can say is “so what if the rich pay more”.

Wanze.8410:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I was just about to make a post about this. This is the new form of manipulation for very rich players.

Step 1. Buy a bunch of the items in question
Step 2: Place 1million+ buy orders at 1c
Step 3: Item appears on “most demanded items” in the TP main screen
Step 4: Increased visibility of item causes increased demand
Step 5: Prices rise
Step 6: Sell off initial investment for a hefty profit
Step 7: Cancel buy orders at 0 cost to yourself.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/43952
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/42406
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/41946

I dont see anything immoral in advertising though.

Also, while posting 4k buy orders for a stack of 250 does not take more than 5-10 minutes, removing those from the trading post will definately take a while. You will also lock 100g in the tp, along with your initial costs for the items you stocked, so there is quite some time and money involved.

The immoral part is this guyz do it with bots using the api

no normal player could ever do 1-2 million buyorders or cancel them in this short time
not even in long time – trie to put buyorders for only 100k – it need ages and is boring as hell

this per api bidding/canceling need to stop – its botting and i dont understand why arenanet dont do anything bout

Romek.4201:

Wanze.8410:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I was just about to make a post about this. This is the new form of manipulation for very rich players.

Step 1. Buy a bunch of the items in question
Step 2: Place 1million+ buy orders at 1c
Step 3: Item appears on “most demanded items” in the TP main screen
Step 4: Increased visibility of item causes increased demand
Step 5: Prices rise
Step 6: Sell off initial investment for a hefty profit
Step 7: Cancel buy orders at 0 cost to yourself.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/43952
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/42406
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/41946

I dont see anything immoral in advertising though.

Also, while posting 4k buy orders for a stack of 250 does not take more than 5-10 minutes, removing those from the trading post will definately take a while. You will also lock 100g in the tp, along with your initial costs for the items you stocked, so there is quite some time and money involved.

The immoral part is this guyz do it with bots using the api

no normal player could ever do 1-2 million buyorders or cancel them in this short time
not even in long time – trie to put buyorders for only 100k – it need ages and is boring as hell

this per api bidding/canceling need to stop – its botting and i dont understand why arenanet dont do anything bout

You can actually order multiple stacks at once, if you click fast enough, before the amount resets. With manually clicking, i usually get 10 stacks at a time, binding left click to my mousewheel around 50 stacks.

Using a macro with an doubleclick every ms would place 250k buy orders in one go, so no API bots needed here.

But as i said before, removing those will take some time and i dont see how a bot is helpful there as you can only remove 10 at a time.

Romek.4201:

The immoral part is this guyz do it with bots using the api

no normal player could ever do 1-2 million buyorders or cancel them in this short time
not even in long time – trie to put buyorders for only 100k – it need ages and is boring as hell

this per api bidding/canceling need to stop – its botting and i dont understand why arenanet dont do anything bout

No it doesn’t. Looking at the Desert Rose Skin on GW2TP, which has a more frequent polling of the TP, the first 1/2 million orders were put in within 23 minutes. That’s 2000 stacks in 1400 seconds. That doesn’t need a bot, just a keyboard/mouse macro.

Next 24 minutes added another 230,000 or 900ish stacks in 1400 seconds. Spinning that mouse wheel must be getting tiresome.

Next 23 minutes, 170K or 700ish stacks. Still slowing. Must have to let the mouse wheel to cool down.

Last big push, new record, 600K or 2400 stacks in 23 minutes.

Of course this assumes a single player and not a guild of players are behind this. Putting in identical bids at 10 stacks a minute (easily doable manually) for 1 1/2 hours (but boring as hell) needs only 7 people with 22.5g each to add 1.575 million at 1c bids.

Why is it always the assumption that it’s a single player running a bot. Now if all 1.5 million appeared within a GW2TP polling rate I would be more inclined to a bot theory but to me it looks like a guild of players that grew tiered that their skins haven’t been selling at the price they want and it trying to draw attention to the item.

Wanze.8410:

Romek.4201:

Wanze.8410:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I was just about to make a post about this. This is the new form of manipulation for very rich players.

Step 1. Buy a bunch of the items in question
Step 2: Place 1million+ buy orders at 1c
Step 3: Item appears on “most demanded items” in the TP main screen
Step 4: Increased visibility of item causes increased demand
Step 5: Prices rise
Step 6: Sell off initial investment for a hefty profit
Step 7: Cancel buy orders at 0 cost to yourself.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/43952
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/42406
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/41946

I dont see anything immoral in advertising though.

Also, while posting 4k buy orders for a stack of 250 does not take more than 5-10 minutes, removing those from the trading post will definately take a while. You will also lock 100g in the tp, along with your initial costs for the items you stocked, so there is quite some time and money involved.

The immoral part is this guyz do it with bots using the api

no normal player could ever do 1-2 million buyorders or cancel them in this short time
not even in long time – trie to put buyorders for only 100k – it need ages and is boring as hell

this per api bidding/canceling need to stop – its botting and i dont understand why arenanet dont do anything bout

You can actually order multiple stacks at once, if you click fast enough, before the amount resets. With manually clicking, i usually get 10 stacks at a time, binding left click to my mousewheel around 50 stacks.

Using a macro with an doubleclick every ms would place 250k buy orders in one go, so no API bots needed here.

But as i said before, removing those will take some time and i dont see how a bot is helpful there as you can only remove 10 at a time.

Might want to delete this…..A few threads were made about this very thing….clicking fast to bypass…they were removed and infracted for discussing an exploit.

Big question: what does ANet think of someone falsifying demand for personal gain? Placing millions of buy-orders at 1c would be difficult to dispute.

Barfoi.9537:

Big question: what does ANet think of someone falsifying demand for personal gain? Placing millions of buy-orders at 1c would be difficult to dispute.

A long time ago they changed the way the TP works, so that a player cannot place a buy/sell order at or below vendor price for an item. If there is no vendor price, then the item has an official minimum secondary market value of 1c.

The software as written specifically allows players to place buy/sell orders of these items at 1c. There is no legitimate reason to declare that these orders are against the rules in some way because Anet allows them to be placed in the first place. If they did not want buy orders for item X to be placed at a specific value, all they have to do is give the item a vendor price.

Business ethics.

If I can get away with it without being banned, and profit, it must be good.
If everyone can do it without being banned, and mostly profit, it must be the meta.
If anyone complains about it, because of any reason, John Smith said “no.”

I love you guys.

@tolunart

Just because something can can be done, it doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable (by ANet). The majority of the “exploits” since release are an example. Buying karma-items, forging (certain) rares, or just farming quick-spawning mobs have come under heavy scrutiny, and it’s because of why people were conducting those activities.

But why does it matter so much? So what if there’s 1-2 million 1c orders on an item that normally go for 10s if not 100s of gold? It’s not going to shift that price. What shifted those prices was supply dropping, either being sold or more likely removed exposing previous higher sell prices.

Exactly, the sun catcher skin and zephyr rucksack skin are still at about 90 orders, but got up to 40g as well.

I think we need a statement from ArenaNet about this quickly. Yesterday I made a thread about those massive buy orders and it got deleted because it discusses exploits.

Does this mean this is an exploit? Please Anet give a statement so people would stop doing this.

Dont just ignore everything and then ban everybody because you did not want to comment.

zanzoken.7698:

I think we need a statement from ArenaNet about this quickly. Yesterday I made a thread about those massive buy orders and it got deleted because it discusses exploits.

Does this mean this is an exploit? Please Anet give a statement so people would stop doing this.

Dont just ignore everything and then ban everybody because you did not want to comment.

Your topic got deleted because you called it an exploit, not neccessarily because Anet thinks it is one as well.

If you think it is an exploit and breaks the EULA in any way, report it as such and dont post about it on the forums.

Wanze.8410:

zanzoken.7698:

I think we need a statement from ArenaNet about this quickly. Yesterday I made a thread about those massive buy orders and it got deleted because it discusses exploits.

Does this mean this is an exploit? Please Anet give a statement so people would stop doing this.

Dont just ignore everything and then ban everybody because you did not want to comment.

Your topic got deleted because you called it an exploit, not neccessarily because Anet thinks it is one as well.

If you think it is an exploit and breaks the EULA in any way, report it as such and dont post about it on the forums.

I never used the word Exploit in my thread. Because I did not see it a such but wanted an opinion from anet which they refuse to state.

If you also talked about any kind of bots or methods that would allow a player to quickly submit bids, would be cause for them to pull the thread.

I’m behind the notion that a small number of players, perhaps a guide, using nothing but ordinary means can flood an item with that many buy orders in the time allocated. Too many players don’t look at the relatively slow polling rates of GW2Spidy or GW2TP and wrongly believe all the orders were placed within minutes and not hours.

Either ANet needs to remove the “Top Demanded Items” from the TP as it’s completely irrelevant and misleading…..or they need to fix the spamming of buy orders.

SOOooo maybe we should come up with ideas for how they would fix it.

Lengradde.2967:

Either ANet needs to remove the “Top Demanded Items” from the TP as it’s completely irrelevant and misleading…..or they need to fix the spamming of buy orders.

SOOooo maybe we should come up with ideas for how they would fix it.

I think adding a vendor value of 1s to all rare/exotic skins and gear is the best solution.

Honestly I never paid much attention to those lists on the TP other than as a short cut to get to an item I was after to begin with, like ectos. It was simply a weird curiosity.

Saying they are actually useful in terms of driving the market is like saying you use Google’s Zeitgeist to be socially current.

Lengradde.2967:

Either ANet needs to remove the “Top Demanded Items” from the TP as it’s completely irrelevant and misleading…..or they need to fix the spamming of buy orders.

SOOooo maybe we should come up with ideas for how they would fix it.

Perhaps anet could make it so that the minimum price you can buy a skin could be something like 2 silver? That way you can’t put a buy order for said item anything under 2 silver, and at 2 silver each, if you put in an order for 250, that would be 5g per stack rather than 2.5 silver per stack. Impossible to get millions of buy orders for skins that way (unless you’re uber, uber rich) :-P although the next thing to tackle would be other items as well, because although most of the manipulation is with skins, it’s not just skins that you can place millions of 1 copper buy orders with.

I honestly don’t know how it could be fixed. Perhaps a buy order limit of 20,000 of ANY item? That way if someone were to try and manipulate any item, they’d have to have a pretty large guild putting buy orders on the same item in order to do it, and I think that would put off most hoarders/merchants/manipulators/whatever you want to call them.

Wanze.8410:

Lengradde.2967:

Either ANet needs to remove the “Top Demanded Items” from the TP as it’s completely irrelevant and misleading…..or they need to fix the spamming of buy orders.

SOOooo maybe we should come up with ideas for how they would fix it.

I think adding a vendor value of 1s to all rare/exotic skins and gear is the best solution.

This wouldn’t help, rich people would still be able to do it. It would just cost more.

Behellagh.1468:

Honestly I never paid much attention to those lists on the TP other than as a short cut to get to an item I was after to begin with, like ectos. It was simply a weird curiosity.

Saying they are actually useful in terms of driving the market is like saying you use Google’s Zeitgeist to be socially current.

They are useful for just that. When it comes on the “top demand list” people will click on it, because they’re curious on why it’s there. Then they see the new price and think: “Wow, I remember when this item was only like 1g.. and it’s already 3g now… I should probably buy some”. Thus, driving up the price.