Guild Wars 2

Many commodities are being manipulated by people with plentiful of gold for the sole purpose of scalping. Players that legitimately need to use the items are forced to buy it at a very jacked up prices.

I’m proposing that some items (trophies and consumables; mystic coins, globs, cooking ingredients) are changed to be account bound upon retrieval from the trading post. This will stop people from scalping/hoarding items.

When there’s more demand than supply, it’ll be open to speculation. It is harder to speculate in GW2 due to the 15% cost to sell and huge market. Speculators take on a risk for hording. Try timing your buy, or farming for mats and sell when it’s expansive. It’s normal.

More power to them… i’ve tried and failed 3 times and succeeded once. It’s very difficult due to the global nature of the market.

Baron Alfred.2348:

Many commodities are being manipulated by people with plentiful of gold for the sole purpose of scalping. Players that legitimately need to use the items are forced to buy it at a very jacked up prices.

I’m proposing that some items (trophies and consumables; mystic coins, globs, cooking ingredients) are changed to be account bound upon retrieval from the trading post. This will stop people from scalping/hoarding items.

Which commodities?

I would like an example of where people have manipulated the price of a commodity such that they managed to create a wider than 15% spread between the highest purchase order and the lowest sell order.

If you cannot provide said data then I cannot see any reason why your concern is valid in terms of scalping.

Beyond that, people are always going to hoard items so your suggestion to change that is going to fail. I only see it benefiting you because you want those items to be lower in price.

My suggestion is find a way to cut your costs or make more gold versus trying to have the design team alter the economy for you.

The easiest example being Mystic Coin. Someone posted a thread in reddit about mystic forge recipes and incited people to try the recipes. Coins prices jumped twenty-fold in under 8 hours from 53c to more than 11s in its peak.

The most recent example is Stick of Butter and other t1 ingredients as discussed here .

Those practices only benefit the most hardcore (with 0day information) or wealthy (enough money to buy all the things) players and only leave the rest of the populace with a ridiculously inflated price.

>I only see it benefiting you because you want those items to be lower in price.
How would that benefit me? Items would not be lower in price. The real market or demand would dictate the price, not some scalpers/hoarders with enough capital to sway the price.

>My suggestion is find a way to cut your costs or make more gold versus trying to have the design team alter the economy for you.

This makes you look like one of those scalpers. The game already have too much gold sinks and the design team already brutally altered the economy around cooking ingredients.

How do you know the price increase is due to people cornering the market and not demand raising? You do know the market have 2 million participants right? They can move the market for a while, but not for too long, and not without taking a great risk. Do you know dev just released a recipe to drain butter out of the market because the are too many of them? The information is available to all at the same time… You fail to extract value out from the info or too late…that’s your problem. Your own failure to play the market is your own problem. People spend time to devise trading strategy to make money off the market and taking risk. Maybe you can learn something from warren buffet instead of demanding changes to suit you.

The easiest example being Mystic Coin. Someone posted a thread in reddit about mystic forge recipes and incited people to try the recipes. Coins prices jumped twenty-fold in under 8 hours from 53c to more than 11s in its peak.

It’s convenient the only reason you see for this is to get people to buy up the coins is to profit off of their ignorance. It’s entirely possible that person simply shared in their excitement of being able to do something different in the game. I agree with your data, however.

The most recent example is Stick of Butter and other t1 ingredients as discussed here .

Haha, that was done by the development team, not by greedy scalpers looking for profit. Oh, and by humans creating demand by something new/exciting.

Those practices only benefit the most hardcore (with 0day information) or wealthy (enough money to buy all the things) players and only leave the rest of the populace with a ridiculously inflated price.

Wrong. The now ridiculously inflated price becomes a price whereby the lower-level players can get more gold to level their way up. This is ultimately going to cause inflation so it has to be counter-balanced by destroying even more currency, thus the “lottery system” with the jewels you could sell to the vendors.

How would that benefit me? Items would not be lower in price. The real market or demand would dictate the price, not some scalpers/hoarders with enough capital to sway the price.

You have yet to create an argument whereby the scalpers/hoarders with enough capital have actually swayed any prices. Therefore this continues to remain a baseless assertion that isn’t being taken seriously. Opinions do not equal facts.

This makes you look like one of those scalpers. The game already have too much gold sinks and the design team already brutally altered the economy around cooking ingredients.

Your opinion of me doesn’t sway my actions. I absolutely benefitted from this. People that were lucky enough to hoard butter? They made even more gold than I did.

To me it seems incredibly clear they are trying to squeeze the value of gold into thinner margins by increasing the revenue stream of lower-level players while simultaneously creating opportunities for currency destruction vis-a-vis “richer players” chasing pots of gold at the end of a rainbow [at least for a short while].

Actually I don’t think the comodities are being manipulated by pepole with a lot of gold. I think they are being manipulated by those that took the time to gather/find the data on on the buy/sell order history.

There is still some wild speculation.The players who are watching the economy are taking advantage of that when they see items rise that were stagnent before. There is a huge risk cost when it comes to speculation. If the guess right more power too them as they did their research. That is part of how a economy works.

A solution to this problem is provide market data. A sparkline chart that show the buy/sell orders(thus supply and demand) as well as a chart to show volume.I hope this is one of the things that are going to be comming to the trading post. There is already room for it.(I think it was even there in the 1st beta but was taken out for preformance reasons). That way it is easier to jump on the speculation wagon. The charts tend to be intiutive enough to see that there is a floor and a celing on some items. Some of those commotiies that you think are being manipulatied may actually be following normal market patterns.

The butter case is a special one. That is due to the governeing body of the economy took corrective action. This happens all the time in the real world market. Things like that normally do not happen usually the speculation is much harder. If you look closely enough at the requirments you will see that demand actually is part of the increase in price. Ecto’s are required to take advantage of the butter mystic forge recipe making it extreamly hard to take advantage of. The fact pepole are still saying too much butter is a indication that taking butter out of the market was needed.

Commodities aren’t being manipulated by anyone to a substantial degree unless the manipulation is causing realized profit. It may have happened in Mystic Coins yesterday and it may have happened in some of the mystic components that dropped but NOBODY has that much capital to move the markets for long so I wouldn’t worry about it long-term.

Wazabi.1439:

How do you know the price increase is due to people cornering the market and not demand raising? You do know the market have 2 million participants right?

With my proposed system, you will know for sure that a price increase WILL be because of demand raising and not people cornering the market.

Normal people will have nothing to lose with the proposed system. If anyone will be hurt with the system, it’s those traders/scalpers.

Baron Alfred.2348:

Wazabi.1439:

How do you know the price increase is due to people cornering the market and not demand raising? You do know the market have 2 million participants right?

With my proposed system, you will know for sure that a price increase WILL be because of demand raising and not people cornering the market.

Normal people will have nothing to lose with the proposed system. If anyone will be hurt with the system, it’s those traders/scalpers.

On a long enough time scale this is not a concern and therefore doesn’t need to be addressed by ANet because the TP has a self-clearing mechanism called desire. Nobody can corner a market here for very long because there is very little information asymmetry – in other worlds, all knowledge is available to all people. Some might get ahead of the curve and profit before the masses join in but it won’t be long before the market takes over control.

@Baron,
You proposed system is naive and unrefined. Before you even propose a system, think of not just the good that it will bring, but also the bads. The whole point of TP is for trading, and now you want a system that you can’t trade a certain thing? Normal people won’t be affected….but anyone who wants to trade is. If you can’t think of the repercussion of this proposal, I really don’t have much to say.

As anzenketh.3759 and Dishconnected.8360 has pointed out, the phenomenon you are seeing are not due to speculation. The premise that you’ve build your whole argument is invalid. From your statements, it is obvious that you do not understand how the market works, and these good people are filling in the information for your benefit. Heck, you can’t even tell if the price increase now is due to scalping or demand.

I would think scalping is possible at a great risk. They can move the market, but due to the volume of trade from 2 million other people, they have only a very small window to make their profit before the market corrects itself. This is very hard to do and requires a huge amount of capital.

What Dishconnected.8360 propose, now that’s a proposal. Still, the people that benefits the most are traders that understands how the market works with or without that information.

I did see some dude were trying to scalping the market.
Think about it, how is it possible a normal player could use up to 40 same type of sigils?
If you are wondering how do I see that data, well, in sell your stuff tab, TP will tell you X ordered by Y buyer.

I think AN should limit buyer buy no more than X amount of same items per order if this item is not crafting material.

The increase in cheap mats and mystic coin prices is from the new mystic forge recipes they posted to artificially increase the price, nothing else.

Speculation is a good thing. To control the majority of those markets would take a whole collective of players working together to f* up trade and even then that’s pretty much capitalism at work. The fact that the most used goods are all common drops (even globs of ecto are common considering each player needs only 75 for their first full set of exotics) keeps players from being able to jack the market up. If a whole collective managed to for even a few days to jack up the price on ecto’s, you’d see it return quickly to the amount a player considers an ecto worth for his time. I.e. with current amounts of money that can be made from dungeoning and other forms, would you pay say 1g for a glob of ecto? No, you’d probably assume it’ll go back down to a price everyone else is willing to pay. If it never goes back down, then that’s because players have found out a new way to make money that justifies that price.

Specifically, you use the word “speculation”, to use a personal example, why is it a bad thing that I bought 756 mystic coins when they were a silver and then sold at 1.8s? players on mass drove this price up to 2.8s on friday because of mystic chests and settled at 2s? It was alotta fun recognising mystic coins are probably the most limited resource in this entire game and taking a chance that ArenaNet had plans for these things.

Lastly, are you suggesting they code the whole game to recognise the difference between TP bought items and loot just because you have a hunch people are making money by trading goods that everyone has equal chance to buy, sell and gather for themself?

There was definitely some market manipulation and insider trading when it came to nerfing cooking ingredients and making them a drop. There were 500 thousand+ sell orders for butter literally minutes after the new build went live. Even though ArenaNet screwed up the butter drop rate, the market was flooded with an incredible amount of butter within minutes of the change going live. Some group of people did a total karma dump into butter, knowing this change was going to happen.

Add to the fact that ArenaNet introduced mystic coin recipes that jacked up the price of butter, and there were a few individuals who must have made an absolute truckload worth of gold.

As far as I am concerned this is just the Trading Post operating as intended. Speculation will happen. Someone will try to buy out an item and then resell for a profit. Someone will overpay and try to resell only to see their items value has crashed and they get stuck. It mimics what can happen in an actual commodities or stock market. Get used to it and play your game your way.

The market is a game too – some people enjoy manipulating it and getting an advantage, just like some people enjoy manipulating combat mechanics to get an advantage. It’s a part of the gameplay, as legitimate as any other.

As for “legitimate players wanting to buy for their own use”… well, it’s a video game. You’re not going to end up homeless or be unable to send your kids to school or starve. And you can always farm & craft the items yourself. Or join a like-minded guild and craft stuff for each other.

Pixie.2740:

I did see some dude were trying to scalping the market.
Think about it, how is it possible a normal player could use up to 40 same type of sigils?
If you are wondering how do I see that data, well, in sell your stuff tab, TP will tell you X ordered by Y buyer.

I think AN should limit buyer buy no more than X amount of same items per order if this item is not crafting material.

You either don’t know what market manipulation is or this is a troll.

Buying 40 of a specific item on a global economy wouldn’t even begin to put a scratch in the economy enough to manipulate anything.

Manipulation on a global economy with a 15% sales tax is near impossible because the amount of capital you would need to move it even short term.

Obviously some items move faster then others but even the rarest of items wouldn’t get moved by buying 40.

Try to run Guild Wars as “Run as Administrator” , it worked for me, hopes it work for others.

The Trading Post in Guild Wars 2 is just like a market. If people “speculate” and take educated guesses as to what will happen in the market to turn a profit, that’s no different than real life. It’s like stocks.

1. The people who play the Trading Post are going to have more money anyway (because they frequently make use of it)
2. If they get on after a patch that has announced a new change to whatever will raise prices and they take that money and buy everything as cheap as they can to resell, that’s their prerogative.
3. They very probably earned that money on the trading post, and have every right to use it to earn more money. It’s the way economy’s work.

I’m not one of the people who made a load of cash off the item price increases either. Much to my dismay, I decided to sell all my mats the days before the big price changing patches, and missed out on a LOT of profit as a result. That doesn’t mean they are cheating the market, it just means they were smarter/luckier than I was.

The economist has spoken….

John Smith.4610:

I don’t see much evidence of people controlling markets entirely, nor do I see any evidence people are having trouble making money on the TP with some time and effort.

Do you have any specific items you think are being manipulated?

I asked this previously and did not receive a response.

I’ll make this easy:

The answer is “No, I do not have any data.”

It still spawned an interesting discussion, one in which I hope people learned something about this game!

Most people sees something disadvantages to them, then thinks of a reason to justify that it is the mechanism or something else that result in their failure to achieve a goal. This is often accompanied by an observation and a qualitative judgement.

Difference of a research minded person is that they will take this qualitative judgement, and run it through theories and see if it holds. In addition, they will also see if it holds quantitatively. This often requires critical analysis and some math skills.

Most started of with the wrong definition. Everyone speculates when they buy something. Controlling the market is the issue here. Examples of someone is controlling the market raise are invalid as it’s either the person misunderstood the mechanism (seeing 2000k buy/sell orders as being from 1 person), or simply don’t understand what causes the fluctuation in price.

VendettaDFA.9368:

As far as I am concerned this is just the Trading Post operating as intended. Speculation will happen. Someone will try to buy out an item and then resell for a profit. Someone will overpay and try to resell only to see their items value has crashed and they get stuck. It mimics what can happen in an actual commodities or stock market. Get used to it and play your game your way.

You’ve correctly identified the “greater fool” methodology that is the basis for much of the modern stock market. Bravo!

The economy of a game is part of the fun for some players, like me.
When I found out about Black Lion kits from a friend I went from 1½ gold to 120 in 5 days, and if I had more money to begin with I would probably have ended up around 300 before everyone got in on the deal and profits started going down.
Now the competition is very high so the profit has gone down by a lot so I don’t even bother any longer, so I’d say the market is pretty stable.
There’s one thing though, less than a week ago some players with lots of money started pushing up the prices of level 74 to 80 rares by bidding several silver over the next highest bid, I don’t know if this was due to ignorance or if they had saved up loads of globs and wanted to sell them at a higher profit but of course it affected the global economy a lot.
But there you go. I’ve never played an MMO where the economy remained stagnant from day 1. In a while everything will be stable, and you will probably have years to farm for whatever items it is that you want.

I think it is pretty stable now. There will be macroeconomic shocks that we can’t predict or prevent…but overall it’s pretty good. Also, I’m surprised at the speed which the market digest new information.

Yea as far as the ecto market I found it to be quite profitable at first. I could easily pull 40g/day casually. I knew it wouldn’t last long but I really don’t understand why people need to come on the boards here (and @ guru) and say stupid kitten like, oh hai gais lolz do this and make lotz of money! Makes me /facepalm repeatedly. I die inside when I see someone throw up 50+ globs of ecto with a 2 silver cut too… like this is one of the most valuable consumables why are you driving prices down when they’d sell just as fast cutting 1 copper…

I’ve definitely noticed some price manipulation in the exotics market by what I assume to be a group of people, given that literally hundreds of gold was needed to move prices the way they did. As someone who has been profiting off the exotics market, I was peeved as they were severely cutting into my profits, but in this particular instance I can’t honestly say it was hurting the overall game. The manipulations only affected the market for a single day, so even seemingly low-volume markets seem to correct themselves relatively quickly.