Guild Wars 2

Perfect information – All consumers and producers are assumed to have perfect knowledge of price, utility, quality and production methods of products. (wikipedia)

So, players pretty much have perfect knowledge of quality, production and utility. We don’t have perfect information on price, even though the information exists, just not visible to players.

Whenever there is a cry of market manipulation, Anet may respond that either its not happening with a particular item, or that the overall manipulation of the market is small relative to the size of the market. This may very well be true – we have to take it on faith, but it may well be true.

Anet’s standard reply is that buy and sell orders are not the actual transactions occurring. This is true. But I have to ask, why don’t we have access to the real transaction information. Many games’ bazaar/market/whatever provide some form of price history – something real and tangible players can base buying and selling decisions .

Obviously, Anet can’t snap their fingers and instantly have features added to the game, but it seems like this would be a critically important feature if Anet is going to claim their TP is a good market for players to use.

For example, why not list the quantities of a item sold over the past, say, 1, 3 and 7 days, along with some kind of price summary (perhaps mean, median and mode values – if you don’t know what those are, google will tell you). With that sort of information (or something similar), wouldn’t most of the supposed market manipulation be more obviously there or not there? Wouldn’t it benefit the players to know how many and for how much the goods they want to sell or buy are actually going for?

If the buy/sell orders are not good indicators for players, why is it the only information we’re really given? The only reason I can think of is to benefit the flippers and others that see the TP as a game in and of itself, at the expense of the rest of the player base that just want fair pricing.

To do it right, they would need to have a ticker with buy and sell orders, quantities, and a number associated with said person/account.

Then you can track what is going on in game and be able to look up who is buying what.

This would tell who is the casual flipper and who is trying to push prices up in the market.

Not going to happen though.