Guild Wars 2

Greetings everyone.

Before submitting this to the suggestion forum, I wanted first to have a little topic to debate the question, see if it was worth it or not.

So here is what I thought about : Most of the time, it’s quite difficult to have a clear idea of the gold you’re gonna make when selling items to the trading post, due to the 10% hidden tax and the listing fees.
Moreover, I think that the “order” option is good, but right now its usefulness only extend to getting an idea of the price of a component before setting your own price. It’s like “Oh, so you’re asking for X copper for this item ? And the lowest seller is demanding X+10 copper ? Then I’ll put it at X+5 copper.”

This give me the impression that this order item option is underused, and you can’t know for sure if the price you set is a good one or not.
So, I thought that maybe, if you match your price with an order, you should be exempted of the listing fees. I think this would make the order option more interesting, for both buyers and sellers. Plus, it seems logical since you don’t really “list” your item, but rather sell them directly to a buyer.

I think that with this I’ve only covered a small part of the reasoning. Do you think there could be side effects to that ? Like opposite effect, with people only using the “match highest buyer” option, and thus greatly reducing the price of components. Or do you think it would be a good idea, and would encourage the offer to meet the demand, thus getting the items closest to their real price ?

Please discuss, good mood and constructive criticism strongly encouraged.

I get your point, but would like to talk about a different satement you made:

Johnson.3874:

It’s like “Oh, so you’re asking for X copper for this item ? And the lowest seller is demanding X+10 copper ? Then I’ll put it at X+5 copper.”

Are you saying this from a seller’s perspective? If so: why?
If the lowest seller is demanding X copper, why would you undercut that by 5 (which at best, when talking of coppers, is 5% but could also be consistenly more)? This “ruins” economy and prices.

Your items will get sold even if you actually ask the same as the lowest seller – actually they will sell immediately. There is no reason to undercut and there are no punishments for meeting the lowest sellers’ prices.

Well good question. I felt that I had to give an example of how people use this option to set their own prices, without using it directly. To be a bit more clear, I mean that rather than using the option directly, people only use it as some kind of referent, which somehow divert the usefulness of this option.

This example came to my mind after I read another topic where people were explaining how they set their prices, and how that negatively impact the economy. As you say yourself, just matching the lowest seller may be sufficient enough to sell your item, but I guess that sometimes people feel that they have to put it a little cheaper for it to sell fast. Thus, slowly dropping the price of the item under it’s real value.
Hence my suggestion : people try to sell their stuff as fast as possible, but in a way it has a negative influence on the economy. So I was looking for possible way to counter this phenomenon, and came up with the “free listing fees”.

But as I said, I’m sure I don’t perceive all the facts, that’s why I want a debate on the subject

I like the idea but you can’t eliminate the listing fee. It’s incentive to not “race to floor” by pulling your item off the TP and reposting. And that would be exploitive for those sellers with large volumes of product.

There is definitely an issue. But it’s largely a factor of too much supply, too few people know that there is a tax AND a listing fee and the value of each, and there is too little historical data on selling volume provided. If I knew that their were 200 Globs of echto listed and that 150 sold yesterday at X price. I could more accurately gauge how much I should list mine for and when I could expect to sell it. As it is now unless I am a huge volume trader that tracks what is selling and when with a spreadsheet external to the game’s provided systems I just don’t know if lowest bidder will get my item sold (ever). Getting the item closer to the buyout bid does give me a better “feeling” that it might.

Money is so tight for some people that they just cannot afford to have an item worth any value sit on the TP. They would rather take a loss then tie up the money (especially given the listing fee). The economy is inflating. Money is worth more now than it will be 2 weeks from now. The gem market is just further evidence that this is true.

The other issue that might be causing some pain is the fact that buy orders are cost free to cancel. So there is absolutely no incentive to bid fairly and no reason to not simply submit a buy order at 1c over the highest one, and camp the TP if someone overbids you. This disparity between buy orders rules and sell posting rules makes it a buyers market for sure.

@ Vesuvias I totally agree. It’s completely a buyers market. Especially when they have all the power because of a list of sell offers on the TP…there’s no doubt that when buying something, they will simply get the lowest price.

This in turn pushes sellers to sell just a little lower than the lowest seller, and this continues going until the price reaches a point where its vendor value, at which point selling on the TP results in loss.

In my opinion, the buyer should not see a list of offers, because why would anyone in the right mind want to buy item X from you for 51C when i’m selling for 50C? There should be some sort of average price displayed, calculated by the selling/buying prices for a particular item from the past 24hrs. That way, when buyers go on the TP for something, they will see this “guide price” and make a reasonable offers somewhere around it.

The same would be for sellers, in order to avoid the immediate “Sell to highest buyer” pitfall which can also plummet prices. I think the reason why players use this so much is because of the 10% listing fee….if they list their item a little higher, hoping to get a decent profit from their sale, they will lose that 10% if they dont sell. Some (if not most) would rather not take that chance, especially in this flimsy economy.

EDIT: forgot to comment on OP idea. I don’t see this as a solution…instead, this would be an incentive for sellers to just meet the current highest buyer (whose offer could be grossly low) instead of making their own sell offer. Buyers get the power.

I like the idea but you can’t eliminate the listing fee. It’s incentive to not “race to floor” by pulling your item off the TP and reposting. And that would be exploitive for those sellers with large volumes of product.

Maybe I should have been more precise, but I suggested that you don’t pay a listing fee if you “sell directly” (=Match the price of highest buyer), and you pay one if you decide to sell at a higher price.

But like you said, an important factor is the fact that with the hidden taxes, we don’t know for sure how much we will earn in the end. So I guess that my suggestion cannot work alone, and we need more transparency in the exchanges to get a good view of how much money we’re gonna make.

I was looking for something that would stabilize prices, and reward player that put an “honest” price for order. But I guess this is working backward, and it’s the sellers that are rewarded for selling their stuff at the price buyer ask for, which could lead prices even more downward.

But hey, that’s the point of this topic, have so new angles to think on

edit : Following your idea, maybe we should make the buyer pay some charges to his offer, as to not have ridiculous orders and more incentive to bid fairly.