There’s a good chance that anyone who cares is already aware, but it looks like someone bought up all the molten jetpacks to try and raise the price. There were six available at around 250g, then 0, then 3 at 750g. I don’t really care about the manipulation; I was just wondering what’s the best course of action for the people who still do have supply left?
-Should you try and undercut him knowing that the buyer still has up to 3 left?
-Should you price it a couple hundred gold lower but still above the previous price in the hope that he buys yours too?
-Should you just wait until that price becomes the new standard and sit on yours a little longer?
-Or something else entirely?
I don’t have the power to affect anything that’s going on here. I just wanted to open this up as a case study and get some advice from the trading post gurus here.
UPDATE: looks like someone already made the first move and undercut him at 725g
Price manipulation is such a hard word often used by people for this kind of actions.
I think price stimulation is a better description because a single person can never fully monopolize a market and the jetpack is a good example.
Whoever bought those up can fully claim that he bought all available supply at that point and thats about it. That person has no control over people actually buying for his asking price and has no idea about the supply of the item that is currently not listed on the TP so he is prone to undercutting by people like you that still have it in their bank. So takes a huge risk to actually never sell any of his skins at his desired price and paying fees for relisting them at lower prices.
Usually those manipulations or stimulations yield profit for the initiator more often than not but he also takes the biggest gamble compared to people like you, who have one item in their bank and just wait for an opportunity like this to make a good profit.
Concerning Skins we learned one think during Halloween, as it was the first reoccuring event in GW2: Old Skins (like the ones from Halloween 2013) arent likely to be reintroduced again and i doubt that the jetpack will come back.
We have all seen how far some of the weapon skins from last Halloween rose in price (~1000G) and even some of the Shoulder Skins went between 50-100G.
I already mentioned that the supply on the TP doesnt factor in the supply in peoples bank or inventory. I suspect more than 90% of the supplyof all items that have less than 100 listings on the TP still be hoarded by people to sell for profit.
Concerning the Jetpack for example, I would really like to know how many actually got introduced during the Molten Facility LS and how much of those have been soulbound already and how much are still tradeable. I am sure that John Smith has ways to look that up and would never publish those numbers as it is inside information.
It would also be interesting to see how often a jetpack was sold on the TP before it actually got used by someone.
But in general reply to your OP, I would suggest to observe the market for a bit longer, maybe one or 2 weeks.
While opening this topic, you made alot of people aware of the issue and can expect more people to undercut. If you can spare the 25g to list at 500g, go for it, its 250g more than last week.
). puts you in front and if your really lucky they might feel threaten by you and buy you out rather then take down 3 peices and undercut you in return.