TP: EBay bid system VS stock market system.
The stock market system is more beneficial to flippers because it makes flipping easy. But that means more people flipping for profit, which brings the buy and sell prices closer, meaning less profit on each item flipped.
There are two big things that help a market resist manipulation, neither of which are exclusive to either system:
– Easy access to historical data that would show evidence of manipulation. For example, Eve Online has graphs of the quantity and price items sold for. Those graphs show a price spike when someone’s manipulating an item. GW2 doesn’t have those graphs, despite both games using a stock market system.
– Volume traded. The more an item is traded, the more gold you need to manipulate its price. So a global trade system is more resilient than a server based one.
A flipper will make more trades at a smaller margin on a GW2 style exchange than they would on auction. Which is more beneficial depends on how you want to work it – do you want to enforce market discipline at higher margins, or do you want to skim off of very high volumes?
In general it’s pretty tricky to throw false flags within a market itself, and most manipulation is done external to the market. In general the term is thrown around as this vague, amorphous notion that someone is cheating somehow without any particulars – do you have something in mind?
Basically 2 different trading post system. The Ebay system which most mmorpg use. And the stock market system GW2 use.
In the ebay system, the seller set a minimum bid, an optional buyout price, and an expire date. If your item don’t sell before the expire date, you’ll loss your deposit fee.
There is also the stock market system GW2 use. Basically the buy order and sell order system.
My question is “in a mmorpg setting”, which system is more beneficial to flippers? And which system is more susceptible to market manipulation?
In general, i would say the stockmarket system that GW2 has, has more potential for flippers to make profit than an auction system but that is not because of the difference in system but the volume of trades that are possible in a stock market system.
The sheer size of the economy in GW2 is responsible for prices finding equilibrium quite fast. With a auction house system, it would be harder to invest huge amounts of money at the same time but i think the profits margins would be way higher. An auction house limits trading and therefore is more susceptible to people trying to influence prices with huge amounts of gold.
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There areONE big things that help a market resist manipulation
that is balancing developers action on supply scarcity and oversupply rather than just tutelate flippers by never helping supply scarcity and create it from oversupply.
That screams “try to manipulate everything you can….John won t do anything about it and you won t risk anything”.
GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
I think obviously if people are dealing with real life money, they will be more careful. But since people are only dealing with virtual goods, the end results is this:
Which lead me to believe people complain more about flipping in GW2 is because of the stock market trading system they use. Which is much more beneficial to flippers.
But some one also point out the ebay system is more susceptible to manipulation. Since when sellers are trying to manipulate the price by bumping price. The buyers have a higher chance to pay the manipulated price, since they dont’ want to “wait for their auction to end”.
I think obviously, GW2 might use the stock market system for technical reason. Since with the sheer volume of listing when all server using the same exchange, it’s probably better to use the stock market system.
(edited by laokoko.7403)
It’s used for more than a technical reason. If GW2 had an AH system, there would be nothing to stop users from manipulating price points higher and higher. With the GW2 system, which is not technically a stock market system (the gem <→ gold conversion is more alike to one), is an AH system that is not restricted to purely “sell orders.” Instead of fighting other buyers, and even the sellers at times, over an item, a player merely needs to list their “bid” on the market, and wait for a seller to come along who will accept that “bid” for their item and sell at that price.
That being said, a one-sided AH (sell only) is open to manipulation because I can simply buy out orders below XYZ price point and amass them onto MY sell order that’s at XYZ+A. Such a system is hard to moderate without developer influence because there’s no driving force for prices to come down, it’s all influenced and run by sell orders. As those sell orders creep higher and higher, the less likely it is for those prices to ever come down to historical levels. It’s also highly beneficial for flippers because of buying out low point offers and relisting at their own “wall” price.
A two-sided market system is far more robust because of players being able to directly counteract price creep with buy orders influencing prices downwards. A good example of this are the runes you drop from teq (Sunless). They slowly climbed to roughly 10s in value, and 24 hours later they were just above merchant value on sales with no buy orders left. It’s price wont creep back up to previous values until players decide to buy up low offers. Additionally, this means items with even a moderately low supply (runes/sigils for example), cannot be manipulated easily.
Also, dont mistake, willingly or otherwise, speculation as manipulation. Manipulation would be taking runes of strength, and pushing their value from the ~10g they’re at now, and influencing their price up to 15-20g, ignoring all other market factors. What the runes of strength did as a result of the April 15th patch was a healthy market responding to increased demand.