… what would happen?
The TP is also quite an efficient gold sink right now, at least if go by the absolute amount of money which is taking out of the game.
Right now we have a 15% tax on every sale, yet item flipping is still very profitable because prices fluctuate far more than these 15%. I can only guess the numbers, but I expect that most items actually get sold twice before being consumed so this makes an effective tax as high as 30% of the average price on each item.
Lowering the taxtes would probably destabilize the market even further, increasing margins for TP traders and causing even larger price fluctuations.
But what would happen in the opposite direction?
I’m talking about taxes in the size of a total of 30% per transaction.
First of all, item flipping would become pointless on most items which are available in high quantities. You can’t expect to cover the price-gap of 30% between purchase and sale. Total sales would therefor go down by an significant factor.
This wouldn’t hinder the function as a goldsink though:
The supply and demand for items stay the same so sales can’t lower by more than factor 2, expecting no more than one flip per item. Therefor the total amount of gold which is taken out of the game stays essentially the same or it might even go up a little, considering that not all items are flipped because the initial price already aimed high enough.
So what else?
With item flipping reduced, market prices would stabilize. Slight fluctuations are inevitable, yet the amplitude would lower by an significant amount. This affects both daily fluctuations as well as fluctuations caused by long term speculation because both are encouraged by the fact that the expected cut would exceed the taxes.
What do I make this numbers based on?
It’s simple: Observation. A few years ago i had myself the chance to lead an online game with an community of a few thousand players over the course of 3 years. The market had the same issues as the one in GW2. It originally was limited to player2player trades only and the economy was quite stable with huge local differences, yet rather stable prices in each subeconomy. But when i decided to open the market, prices started to fluctuate heavily thanks to a small group of players who did the same as in GW2, they speculated and managed to accumulate health by an almost exponential factor (still limited by the TOTAL volume of the market, but far from any reasonable limit). A tax of 15% was my first attempt back then, but it wasn’t sufficient, players would still try speculate over longer terms. At last a tax in the range of 25-30% has shown to be sufficient to counter price fluctuations by preventing speculations by users who don’t act as a (at least potential) sink for the item.
It was not before that point, when it was finally possible to balance the game based on the REAL price of several items on the market in comparison to others without the disturbance of artificial, not necessarily intended, fluctuations.
Another side effect: Playing the market now had an natural limit on the profit you could make by doing that which lead to an much more evenly spread distribution of wealth which also lead to an stabilization of the worth of the currency. This meant, that is was actually possible to offer benefits for ingame currency without the omnipresent danger of a handful of players who would be able to abuse it big style.