Guild Wars 2

This is a serious discussion, cause I’m very interested in thoughts and input from others.
Who knows maybe this is something others have tried, and are willing to share their experiences.

In this case, I would consider a monopoly ingame, when you single handedly control 90% or more
of the market volume coming in on buy orders and being sold on sell older for a longer
period of time.

Plus in most perfect condition actually owning most of the supply available in the
market to begin with, outside the day to day flow.

Obviously, this is something that will always be a guess, cause you never know how many people or sitting on what where in their bank.
But when you’ve controlled an item for a longer period, testing it to its limits how far you
can push it. You get a pretty good idea what’s hanging around.

Again I’m interested if this has been done, and in experiences if so.

Please let the scam risk disccusion outside of it. We all know the risks.
I’m interested in how to value things for example.

Personally if I would sell such a thing to begin with, there’s multiple things in play :
- Active stock on the market and in the bank.
- Active buy order and sell order control.
- And last but not least, the actual value of holding a monopoly long term.

How does one value such a thing to begin with in total package?

I’m looking forward to see what you guys have to say.

-Panthura

As far as I’m aware the only things in game that you can monopolize are items that are no longer supplied. For example limited event items.

Your definition of monopoly is way off. There are hundreds of buy orders that get filled between the highest shown buy order and the lowest sell order in several goods. To have a monopoly you need to control production, which you cannot do in guild wars 2, unless the production of a product is zero. Thus a “monopoly” like you are describing cannot be sold, because the buyer of that control wouldn’t have a guarantee.

I once bought every last gold ingot on the trading post one afternoon. (500+, and then some gold ore to refine) I didn’t dare try to play god with that market since, while in the short term I may have been able to profit off the temporary low stock, in the long term it would run a very high risk since people can get gold ore just as easily anywhere in the world and on the TP. (1000+ selling!)

And I’m not a kitten.

I own a monopoly so I can give you advice me thinks.

First you have to know when the supplies will come up again like from a special event because once supplies get started again your monopoly is over. Your goal is to sell your items at the highest price so that every item you own gets sold before the supplies are available again.

To do this divide the items you have by the days till the items are available again. That is the goal of how many items you should sell per day. Wait till the price rises to where people are buying a amount per day that matches the items you need to sell per day.

I’m interested to know what item you have a monopoly on and how you handle it let me know.

Alex Behemoth.4952:

I’m interested to know what item you have a monopoly on and how you handle it let me know.

I’m guessing since ghastly shields were just done, that greatsaw would be next.

The only entity that can truly have a monopoly in this game is anet.

Ìn it’s fullest sense of the word, I agree MakersMark.

To be clear, it’s more a figure of speech then anything else. It’s simply the best word I can use for it.

Do tell me if you have any better single word to describe controlling 90% of the total flow of an item in the market. Going in and going out. I sure have none.
For around half a year or longer for that matter.

I’m not going to disclose direct information of what I’m running, for obvious reasons.
I will give some realistic examples however of my experience over the last 6 months.
Using fictional value’s but correct ratio’s.

For one, this isn’t a long term investment item, bound to any event. It’s an all day everyday item.
Which is good, cause that makes it a very consistent market.

It is an item that can be crafted, however here comes the layout :

The item in question can be crafted for say, 90 copper per unit.
Vendor value is 22 copper per unit.

You can smell what’s coming from here.
I’ve consistently owned the buyorder on the trade post on 23 copper per unit.
With about 10.000 units at that value at any given time. Owned by just me.
This is something easy to verify myself, because there’s simply no other numbers out
there besides the ones I own.
1 + 1 = 2 and all that.

On average. I have about the same amount of active stock as I have in buy orders.
So say I have around 10.000 stock, Usually most of it in the bank
Sometimes a lot of it actually supplied in the market cause i don’t feel like managing it
for a while.
And actively on a day to day basis, anywhere from 1000 to 3000 units sell, but come in
just as fast on buy orders.
Average selling price has been anywhere from 50-75 copper unit. Depending on how
far I forced it.
At unique times even selling @ 100-120 copper per unit. Above crafting costs just to see
how long it would take for the community to catch on.

However, for some reason, the small amount of units that show up in the world via random drops. Which is incredibly minimal.
Or through people crafting a few to lvl their craft.
100’s and 100’s of players end up selling those few units to the buy order.
The few that do put tiny amount of units on the market never end up influencing the market.
Cause lets face it, on 1000-3000 units of flow per day, 50-100 units aren’t going to have
an influence.

It’s an open market, nothing is ever garanteed, I know that you all know that.

So supply of this item is existing, but very limited.
That limited supply coming out of the game naturally, goes generally through my hands.
And last but not least, and offcourse I will never know the full truth of this. But I honestly think
that at this moment and for the last 4 months, 90% of the existing units in the whole game
have been going through my hands, or are in my hands as we speak.

The most interesting part is actually, that I didn’t go into it wanting do trading with it.
I simply wanted it.
And ended up after about 3 weeks noticing that I physically had 75% of the market in my
hand without even lifting a finger.
From there on bells started ringing and I’ve been running it since. By controlling the supply going back into the market.

Obviously I can be forced out, it takes only seconds to buy out a market.
But that can only happen if I let them. And is the reason 75% of my active stock
never touches the market.
You can’t buy out what’s not in the trade post.
That and you would have to outbid a buyorder, without me competing it.
For a longer period of time actually, to get any volume in your hands to start interfering.

Fact :
At any given time, I have about 15g up in buy orders. and 30g worth of stock in sale value.
On a day to day basis, I make anywhere from 1-4g profit.
Which i know to all you mongrels seems like nothing.
But that is 200-400 gold profit in the last 4 months alone. Not counting spikes.
Which have been quite extreme at times
( Thank you A.net for that 3 days free play for new players not to long ago )

And this was going into it with 1g to begin with…

We can talk about what a monopoly is or isn’t or if it’s even possible for a long time.
But that still doesn’t answer the questions I asked.
Think with me and lets just call it monopoly for ease of the word.
How would one value such a thing?
How does one put a price tag on this?

I ask this cause the active stock doesn’t hold that much value obviously.
But long term the profit is tremendous when played right.

-Panthura

I tried playing the market for a while and take control of items, then I realized that those 1-4g daily profits is about 30m-1h of lazily doing world events while browsing at the same time, so I gave it up. It was too complicated

Hiya P :)
Re: price tag. Conservatively let’s say this monopoly yields 1g per day – call it 400g per year. But for how many years? The first unknown is the upcoming further changes to the salvaging system – they could easily force down the cost of crafting your product. But if it can be crafted for 90c it’s fairly low-tier so let’s assume no impact there. The next unknown is the time for which GW2 will last at (its) current number of active players. Maybe five years? Perhaps you could net 2000g over five years?

OK so you have 30g stock, 15g in buy orders up and 2000g expected revenue over five years. So that might put an upper limit on its value at ~2050g for those assumptions of gold/day and years to the game. Clearly if we’d said 2g/day or 750g/year that would be ~3800g over five years. So 2000-4000 over five, all things being equal.

So let’s say you were selling a proposition of 3000g over five years. How much might that sell for? There’s quite a bit of risk. The next question is what is a reasonable rate of return on investment that anyone should be able to expect? (I.e, what’s the opportunity cost?)

For example, I think a return of 5-10% per month on investment is possible – let’s call it 7% – but at 7% compound per month, 70g would become 3000g over five years.

So if I were currently a market player making 7% per month then I’d offer you 70g at the most for your “business opportunity” of 3000g over five years. If I were making only 3%, I might offer you up to 500g.

On those numbers, my first guess on the worth of such a monopoly is somewhere around a year’s revenue.

(Edited for kittens)

Some flaws:

1. 90% is not enough for a monopoly.
2. some items have daily turn overs of hundreds of thousands. That kind of storage does not exist for a single player or even a small group.
3. a monopoly requires 24/7 attention in a game with a world wide Trading Post. That’s not physically possible except for account sharing, which is legally forbidden.
4. Why would you play a game for such things if you could take such skills into the real world and really make it big?
5. It is not possible to control active orders, since other people will undercut you all the time.

So technically, you’d be selling something that does not exist, anyone who’d like to buy it knows that. Your “monopoly” is worthless.

Obviously the item I’m dealing with IS small enough to control by a single person.
Or I wouldn’t be talking about market control to begin with.

And even tho it’s a cheap item, it’s 80-120% average mark up makes it incredibly valueable long term.

Thank you for the example Daimonos, I’ve been thinking that path too.
The problem arives when I try to actually realisticly calculate a years revenue for it.
I haven’t really recorded every penny. And I don’t know how far transaction history goes back.
But the thought of recording thousands of transactions over all this time doesn’t really attract me.

I do know that the example I’ve given is very minimal, cause the spikes on certain weeks
have had an incredible effect on the revenue.
Where at some point, in the free weekend for example. I was moving volume wise in a day
what I normally moved in a week, and because of a push the day before at roughly double the regular sale price.
While barely raising the buy price, it was to much volume to fast for anybody but me
to deal with out of buy orders.
So a lot of the volume of it kept getting filled at the lowest possible price.
But sales were so fast, I actually had to burn 75% of my active stock that weekend even
on top of the non-stop active buying.
At peaks that weekend, I was selling per hour what I normally sold in a day. At 4x the buy price.

Marnick, there is some undercutting sometimes, offcourse there is.
But when you own 90% of the physical existence of product, at lower price then anybody else.
I can always cut lower then anybody else while sacrificing the least profit.
That usually ends up with said trader moving out cause it’s not worth it for them.
Leaving me yet again with the long term profit.

An idea I’ve have been spinning as well, is rather then trying to value to total thing for sale.
Is uhmm ‘contract’ basis.
Give over the control of the buy orders, the sell orders. But hold on to 50% of the physical extra stock.
And then sell the right to run it to somebody else.
At a buy in of say 100g, plus 25% of profit on a monthly basis. Which would make the
buy in into it much much lower.
Lowering the risk of whoever wants to run it. in the short term.

Trust is another discussion offcourse, but even if I would sell the total package, that would be true.
Nobody but the devs could check if I’ve given up everything , or if I sit on another 10.000 units.

marnick.4305:

Some flaws:

1. 90% is not enough for a monopoly.
2. some items have daily turn overs of hundreds of thousands. That kind of storage does not exist for a single player or even a small group.
3. a monopoly requires 24/7 attention in a game with a world wide Trading Post. That’s not physically possible except for account sharing, which is legally forbidden.
4. Why would you play a game for such things if you could take such skills into the real world and really make it big?
5. It is not possible to control active orders, since other people will undercut you all the time.

So technically, you’d be selling something that does not exist, anyone who’d like to buy it knows that. Your “monopoly” is worthless.

There are items in game that are possible to monpolize. They include items such as holiday skins, precursors, or even giant eyes.

And when it comes to rare skins such as the Ghastly shield, all the power is in the seller.

you found an item that you can make a profit flipping. abuse it while you can, because once someone else finds it, you’ll be pushed out.
all it takes is one other person to outbid you at 24c, then undercut you at 89c, to drive you out. Sure, you can outbid and undercut them, but at some point profits will be reduced to 1c.
that is not a monopoly, that is an opportunity.
A monopoly can only exist in GW2 by buying all of something that can’t enter the game anymore, such as holiday items. If you own all of the super greatsword skins, you can get away with selling them for 1000g each, because no one can undercut you. that is the power of a monopoly.

I recommend it’s best to do what you’re doing – buy as much as you can as cheaply as you can, then sell for as much as you can.
I’m most curious how there is an item that people buy sell listings by the truck load, but not one buy order is placed besides you. You would think that at least some people out there are not lazy and are stingy.

You need a working understanding of multivariable calculus to truly optimize a monopoly — and if there are other players in the market, even a few, a working understanding of game theory.

If not (which I’m assuming since you’re asking for economics advice on a game forum), then just sell the crap off before you believe there is a risk of the item being re-introduced into the game or a competing item is introduced into the game. Realize if there are no barriers of entry or collusion of parties then a monopoly, and monopoly profits, cannot exist indefinitely.

Vol.5241:

There are items in game that are possible to monpolize. They include items such as holiday skins, precursors, or even giant eyes.

And when it comes to rare skins such as the Ghastly shield, all the power is in the seller.

Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that someone has 90% of a limited commodity.
1/ for holiday skins that only goes as long as those skins exist. Every skin used is gone. That means your monopoly really has to make a ton of money, which will be difficult by undercutting.

2/ most people assume the Ghastly shield will return in November, which isn’t a long time from now.

3/ precursors drop all the time. It’s impossible to keep a monopoly on stuff that drops often. All you can do is give other people higher profits on their drops.

With drops “all the time” I mean millions of players times 0.01% droprate from chests, is still several precursors a day.

Also realize that market cornering is not the same as a monopoly. What the OP is doing is market cornering. Monopolies are when a single entity has the sole ability to produce and sell a good. Market cornering is when an entity attempts to gain sufficient supply of a commodity in order to manipulate the price of said commodity.

Since there are no true barriers of entry in the crafting system (either traditional or MF), or to farming, a monopoly cannot exist in this game.

Mystic, you hit the nail on the head. It’s something me and some of my friends have been
trying to figure out for months and months.
Specially under those extreme spike conditions.

I’ve agreed multiple posts ago, that monopoly is a bit far fetched perhaps.
But again , it’s a figure of speech.

In this case I’ve got this market so far cornered, that I can work it like a monopoly.

Here’s another example.

Last week friday, I pulled out my existing sales, but letting my buy orders roll.
To let the little supply available dry up a bit, and get some more active stock
Obviously to let price rise naturally without me further investing by buying out
the little supply available.

Within 24hours, sell price went up , it took 2+ days for buy orders to start going up.
All the way to what I was selling at last friday.
This offcourse by my own hand as well, cause I kept competing on the buy order to make sure the majority of units ends in my hands.
Only to the point where I know I might crash the market on that price.
The cool thing with that, is that usually the people that were competing at that moment.
End up dumping what little they have to my buy orders to cut there losses.

This accumalated into last night everybody letting go. And me sitting on as good as the
lowest possible price buy order again.
But selling @ 27.5% higher sale value then last week. By almost doing nothing.
Current sale value is now running at 75 c/per buying @ 30 c/per. ( fictive but true ratio )
In the last 2 hours alone I’ve made 2g profit.
Sometimes the situation doesn’t change for days on end.

You guys all speak about monopoly isnt possible, but then seem to think it is possible on event items.
You will never know how many are hanging around in the game, no matter what item.
Does it really matter if it’s a very common item or a rare limited time based items?

If anything limited time items are more obvious, and everybody with the money will jump on it.
I know I will once I have enough spare gold hanging around.
It seems however, because this is a cheap item, not very special at all. That people seem
to think it’s simply not worth putting the effort into.
Even though by any standard. Less then 50g investment, being turned into 100’s of gold
in
the first few months alone, is probably the least risky investment you could probably consider.

The first thing I and some around thought when we ran into it months ago. Was OMG…
how can we be this lucky to run into a gap this big.
Lets take it and see where it goes.
Now 5 months later. Still own it, still run it. And nobody has been able to even slightly
force me out of it.
Be it because they don’t want to, or because they don’t see the long term value in it.
I don’t know, but I’m loving it.

Still looking for more answers on my questions like Daimonos made a good example.
Would love to know feedback on my sale contract idea.

Mystic I agree and it’s what I’ve been doing all this time offcourse. And I don’t plan on
letting go any time soon.
I just like playing with ideas tho.
To stay honest with myself. I’d probably consider if somebody came up to me and offered
me a good solid amount of gold. Cause it would mean a lot of liquid that I could use to try my
hand at more expensive markets.

Still I think control like this is usually very expensive, for example limited time items for instance.
Or most actively used cheap items are incredibly contested in the market.
Finding something like the item I’m working with atm, I think might be hard if not impossible.
But because it’s so unique I think justifies indeed valueing this at numbers that Daimonos gave
as example.

-Panthura

deathTouch.9706:

Also realize that market cornering is not the same as a monopoly. What the OP is doing is market cornering. Monopolies are when a single entity has the sole ability to produce and sell a good. Market cornering is when an entity attempts to gain sufficient supply of a commodity in order to manipulate the price of said commodity.

Since there are no true barriers of entry in the crafting system (either traditional or MF), or to farming, a monopoly cannot exist in this game.

Aye, this. Per investopedia:

Definition of ‘Corner A Market’
To acquire enough shares of a particular security type, such as those of a firm in a niche industry, or to hold a significant commodity position to be able to manipulate its price. An investor needs deep pockets to be able to corner a market.

Mystic.5934:

If you own all of the super greatsword skins, you can get away with selling them for 1000g each, because no one can undercut you. that is the power of a monopoly.

While this is true, it’s also worthwhile considering that ANet has the power to break monopolies at any time just by making something available again. (As they did for the Southsun Lost Shore skins.) I suspect that if John Smith learned that monopolies were actively taking shape and pricing something, even a luxury item, beyond the range of what the designers deemed as their “original vision”, they would take steps to intervene. This isn’t EVE Online; I don’t think it would be in ANet’s best interests for the player base to realise that certain players are cornering the market and then gouging other players for all they’re worth, because that would be undermine trust in the trading system.