Guild Wars 2

CassieGold.7460:

Item duping (exploiting game code to replicate items) has been an exploit in many MMOs and other online games. Many games can trace item duping because each item created in the game has an item identifier associated with the item.
(snip)

Simpler explaination: It’s easier to track Unique Item IDs and transfer which target they’re assigned to (Player A, TP selling area, Player than it is to destroy an item when assigned to the TP, and re-create that item when it sells.

There’s a big difference between GW2 and the games with duping – the items’ characteristics aren’t randomly generated. If you get a masterwork Carrion shortbow dropped, it will have the same stats as every other masterwork carrion shortbow of the same level that drops. GW2 has finite combinations of characteristics for every single item in the game.

This is a really good thing, because it commoditizes items. I can be absolutely sure that I am buying the “best” level 35 shortbow with the stats I want on it without having to search the market for hours comparing shortbows that can’t really be directly compared because they don’t have exactly the same stats on them. It also helps with pricing items I’m selling, because folks can order specific items, and know that they exist. You can’t do that on the WoW or Diablo auction houses. They don’t have a “only show available” box, because they can’t enumerate everything that could be available.

I’m inclined to believe that when you list an item on the TP, it doesn’t preserve that particular item, it just increments the count of the item listed at the price you listed it at. When someone buys it at that price, they get a new instance of that item and the count gets decremented. That is what makes the most sense to me in terms of keeping the database size manageable. There’s no reason to keep a unique ID around for something that is not unique.

If that’s the case, I’d say it’s likely that the contents of the loot bags don’t get generated until you open them, so when you buy them, you’re actually buying the opportunity to open them, not their contents.

Pandemoniac.4739:

CassieGold.7460:

Item duping (exploiting game code to replicate items) has been an exploit in many MMOs and other online games. Many games can trace item duping because each item created in the game has an item identifier associated with the item.
(snip)

Simpler explaination: It’s easier to track Unique Item IDs and transfer which target they’re assigned to (Player A, TP selling area, Player than it is to destroy an item when assigned to the TP, and re-create that item when it sells.

There’s a big difference between GW2 and the games with duping – the items’ characteristics aren’t randomly generated. If you get a masterwork Carrion shortbow dropped, it will have the same stats as every other masterwork carrion shortbow of the same level that drops. GW2 has finite combinations of characteristics for every single item in the game.

This is a really good thing, because it commoditizes items. I can be absolutely sure that I am buying the “best” level 35 shortbow with the stats I want on it without having to search the market for hours comparing shortbows that can’t really be directly compared because they don’t have exactly the same stats on them. It also helps with pricing items I’m selling, because folks can order specific items, and know that they exist. You can’t do that on the WoW or Diablo auction houses. They don’t have a “only show available” box, because they can’t enumerate everything that could be available.

I’m inclined to believe that when you list an item on the TP, it doesn’t preserve that particular item, it just increments the count of the item listed at the price you listed it at. When someone buys it at that price, they get a new instance of that item and the count gets decremented. That is what makes the most sense to me in terms of keeping the database size manageable. There’s no reason to keep a unique ID around for something that is not unique.

If that’s the case, I’d say it’s likely that the contents of the loot bags don’t get generated until you open them, so when you buy them, you’re actually buying the opportunity to open them, not their contents.

I would 100% agree with you on the loot bags, I think it’s far more likely that the bag is coded to roll on it’s loot table when opened rather than when dropped.

Not sure about tracking items, because there’s still a need to match items to sell orders. Incrementing counters makes sense as an approach, but the flip side of managing the orders that pertain to the items that are created / destroyed via this method…. it kind of makes my brain hurt.

I guess it’s not how I would build it, it does have an advantage of database size management, but I think from a process prospective it would complicate other interactions.

Maybe we need the programmers to have another AMA to get an answer on this, I’d be interested in a purely intelectual sense.

My greater point, without getting sidetracked into implementation, is that it makes little sense for A-net to either produce more goods than occur through game play naturally (injecting goods into the market via the TP) or to buy items out of the TP (having a dummy buyer vacuuming up items.)

Only Dev comment towards this that I can point to is one made several months back when Lindsay was talking about the desire they have for people to huck things into the mystic forge to destroy items…. they don’t need to write code to do such things, they create vehicles for players to choose to do those things for them.

Pandemoniac.4739:

GW2 has finite combinations of characteristics for every single item in the game.

Guild Wars 2 is not the only game that has finite combinations of characteristics. In fact every set of items in every game that has finite stats has finite combinations since finite union of finite sets is finite. Every game system has finitely many statistics in finite set of numbers.

Pandemoniac.4739:

I can be absolutely sure that I am buying the “best” level 35 shortbow with the stats I want on it

I’m not so sure about that. The stat you want might not maximize your effectiveness. Is it better to go soldier’s stat on your next piece of equipment or is it better to go for Berserk’s stat on your next piece?

You might have to take partial derivatives of a 6 variables function and set them equal to zero and solve for those variables and even then you might not get the stat that maximize your effectiveness.

CassieGold.7460:

Not sure about tracking items, because there’s still a need to match items to sell orders. Incrementing counters makes sense as an approach, but the flip side of managing the orders that pertain to the items that are created / destroyed via this method…. it kind of makes my brain hurt.

I guess it’s not how I would build it, it does have an advantage of database size management, but I think from a process prospective it would complicate other interactions.

Software development is much more of a creative endeavor than most folks think. It would make sense to me to track sell orders without associating them with a particular instance of an item, but we have no idea of the requirements and constraints of the entire system, so it’s all just speculation. It is interesting just as a thought exercise, but maybe we shouldn’t bore the non-developers

CassieGold.7460:

My greater point, without getting sidetracked into implementation, is that it makes little sense for A-net to either produce more goods than occur through game play naturally (injecting goods into the market via the TP) or to buy items out of the TP (having a dummy buyer vacuuming up items.)

Only Dev comment towards this that I can point to is one made several months back when Lindsay was talking about the desire they have for people to huck things into the mystic forge to destroy items…. they don’t need to write code to do such things, they create vehicles for players to choose to do those things for them.

I think we’re in violent agreement here. Remember the temporary forge recipes a while back during the butter boom? I’ve been very impressed with the amount of thought ANet puts into the changes they make to encourage or discourage certain player behaviors. I don’t think a ham fisted direct “take stuff off the market” would be nearly as effective as getting the player base to take care of it.

Stars.2179:

Pandemoniac.4739:

GW2 has finite combinations of characteristics for every single item in the game.

Guild Wars 2 is not the only game that has finite combinations of characteristics.(snip)

Pandemoniac.4739:

I can be absolutely sure that I am buying the “best” level 35 shortbow with the stats I want on it

I’m not so sure about that. The stat you want might not maximize your effectiveness. Is it better to go soldier’s stat on your next piece of equipment or is it better to go for Berserk’s stat on your next piece?(snip)

I think you missed my point. I didn’t say GW2 was unique in having commoditized items, just that it was different from games where items randomly get assigned their stats from a range of possible values. Because the items aren’t generated randomly, once I decide on a piece of gear I want, I don’t have to search for the version that got randomly assigned stats at the top of the possible range. I just go buy a carrion shortbow and it is exactly like every other one on the market.

There is only one possible set of stats on a masterwork level 35 carrion shortbow. You can’t have one that is better than the other. There is no carrion shortbow that dropped with magic find on it instead of condition damage. There is no version that dropped with more condition damage on it than some other version of it. If you compare that to a game like Diablo where rare items can not only have different values, they can have completely different attributes, it’s a lot more difficult to find a level 35 shortbow that has some particular stat at a particular level and feel confident that someone hasn’t listed something better at a lower price that you missed in your search.

Am I clarifying or just making things more confusing?

John Smith

It’s late so forgive me if I make any mistakes.
That is a very interesting argument. Here are my counter-points (abbreviating to EMH):
1. This is a big one, there are no efficient markets with EMH, the EMH doesn’t really hold up in reality. Ever seen the revenue a good high frequency trader makes, even in the most highly traded markets?
2. This virtual economy doesn’t work inside the same time frames as a standard financial market. It’s much more sensitive to forces like time and day than a standard market, it never closes and there are major shifts in population relative to those factors.
3. Game content changes extremely often (patches and such)

I actually have several more, but I don’t want this to be too lengthy.

Agree 100% that EMH markets only exist in the models of economic theorists. There are always frictions.

The big difference between the NYSE and the GW2 market is the presence of algorithmic trading in large amounts. The NYSE has a ton of scripts pulling the autocorrelations out of the market and reacting to shocks; GW2, not so much. On the flip side, the GW2 market is a lot more transparent.

Point about patches shaking things up is well taken, though it isn’t that different from unexpected earnings reports or fraud revelations or the like mathematically; and isn’t a big part of your job keeping the market from swinging around too much with each patch?

I knew it, anet is buyin and selling ><
I think that too, but i dont think it is a bad thing.

The message to take home: market intervention is always bad, both in the real world, and in a game economy!

I cant believe tehre is still ppl saying that nowadays (<- i learnt that word today ><)

Let supply and demand balance out itself! Wherever the price ends up is the right price!

Because … the owner of true say that, and he is … ?

Ppl like to play the wall street man, good for them. Another ppl like me like to play wvw, craft, gather, dungeons, events, livestory, personal story, new characters, new builds, spvp, pve, and more, good for us. Play what make u happy.
Sry eng.

The difference still is if we’re talking about goods fulfilling basic needs or luxury goods. In the last month, the total currency required to bring all professions to 400 dropped from 65g to 55g for example.

Behellagh.1468:

@Vancien

It sounds like you are more upset that other players don’t play the game the way you do, your rant on opening Skritt bags for instance, and the inherent unfairness of the RNG.

Do you get angry when you see in map chat someone bragging they got an exotic from a dragon chest while you only got a run of the mill rare? Do you identify unidentified dyes hoping to get a rare, one of the half a dozen masterwork or one of the two fine dyes that are worth more than simply selling it a the TP? Do you play the lottery every week but get upset because you don’t win? Because that’s what you are complaining about. Random chance not being in your favor. It’s never in your favor. You might be able to improve the odds but it’s still not a certainty. If you accept that and treat a favorable roll as a happy surprise out of the ordinary rather than treat an unfavorable roll as the game out to get you, you’ll enjoy the game more.

I’m not exactly sure where you decided to determine I was upset about the loot system. In fact, I very much like the system and find it funny that you would even take that direction with my post. Apparently, you only read what you thought was fitting and decided to post long before you completely read my entire post. But what does upset me is trolls such as yourself that derail a topic so they can kitten bash someone to make themselves feel better. Do you feel better now? Would you like an award for being a tool?

Let me sum up my point since you failed to read it entirely Mr Tool.

There is not a benchmark of how often a certain item may drop off of any mob in the game (IE 1/50) because of bonuses that aren’t shared between all players or even servers. In fact, someone with higher Magic Find, likely will procure more rare items rather than Skritt Bags. Not to mention Guild Bonuses. And being as the bags only produce items used in crafting, which have moderate to low demand anyway, I don’t see how Mike’s point could be disproved that it is accorded to “the masses” or millions of players all across the world who are farming Skritt all day and just happen to sell the bags rather than open them for the resources. It’s entirely a gamble.

(And the item being discussed was Skritt Bags, was it not? Are you still with me? )

Many were saying that 1 million (millions of) players, farming Skritt for an hour will produce 1750+ bags easily justifying the sudden dump of said bags on the Trade Post. That is an illogical method of thinking based on how the game works on a such a gambling loot system. And as stated previously, a player can only further increase their odds for rare drops which in turn replaces “junk” or regular drops substantially. It does not necessarily mean they will then procure more Skritt Bags. And I find it hard to believe across millions of players there happens to be that many player farming Skritt anyway. If that is the case, they’re bots.

Most players are spending their time farming Orr or running Dungeons. No mass of players are killing Skritt for days on end, unless they are bots. And if that is the case, perhaps a bot is just sitting there monitoring the trade system and just so happens to have enormous amounts of Skritt bags ready to be sold as soon as supply runs out. Is that some logic?

And please, remain on the subject and post something of value other than displaying your nerd rage all over the page trying to lash out at me.

Vancien.1980:

Many were saying that 1 million (millions of) players, farming Skritt for an hour will produce 1750+ bags easily justifying the sudden dump of said bags on the Trade Post. That is an illogical method of thinking based on how the game works on a such a gambling loot system. And as stated previously, a player can only further increase their odds for rare drops which in turn replaces “junk” or regular drops substantially. It does not necessarily mean they will then procure more Skritt Bags. And I find it hard to believe across millions of players there happens to be that many player farming Skritt anyway. If that is the case, they’re bots.

I think that your impression of how many players it takes to generate 2000 skritt bags for the market is wrong. I don’t farm, and I don’t have a ton of magic find, and in the course of normal playing in an area like a skritt or dredge cave I can end up with 20+ bags in 30 minutes, more if a couple of events spawned. It doesn’t take a bunch of bots, or a million players to generate thousands of skritt bags a day, especially if the prices that people are paying for them are high enough to make it worth a farmer’s time to go look for them.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Vancien.1980:

Many were saying that 1 million (millions of) players, farming Skritt for an hour will produce 1750+ bags easily justifying the sudden dump of said bags on the Trade Post. That is an illogical method of thinking based on how the game works on a such a gambling loot system. And as stated previously, a player can only further increase their odds for rare drops which in turn replaces “junk” or regular drops substantially. It does not necessarily mean they will then procure more Skritt Bags. And I find it hard to believe across millions of players there happens to be that many player farming Skritt anyway. If that is the case, they’re bots.

I think that your impression of how many players it takes to generate 2000 skritt bags for the market is wrong. I don’t farm, and I don’t have a ton of magic find, and in the course of normal playing in an area like a skritt or dredge cave I can end up with 20+ bags in 30 minutes, more if a couple of events spawned. It doesn’t take a bunch of bots, or a million players to generate thousands of skritt bags a day, especially if the prices that people are paying for them are high enough to make it worth a farmer’s time to go look for them.

As an alternate explaination based on my own anecdotal experience….. Last night my guild broke down to 2 man teams to chain events for influence. We didn’t care about the nature of the event, that wasn’t the point. The point was about staying in events in pairs to maximize on influence gain. As a side effect, we followed several skritt across the map, chaining from one event to the next….. I spam open the bags for mats, but had we been of a mind to sell them all, the result of an organized guild chaining events with waves of skritt would probably create a notable blip in supply (+100-200 bags), and that’s one guild on one server….. and there were only 8 of us. So, based on time of day, and the nature of event spawns…. swings in supply of the 1k – 2k range seem pretty reasonable.

Doesn’t take millions of players, doesn’t take a manipulating bot…. may just be a coincidance of movement in the market, an event chain that runs near the same time on multiple servers….. bam, supply flood at the end of the event chain.

So this got really long…

TL;DR – you underestimate the TP. By ‘you’, I mean me, you, and everyone else. I bet even the devs most focused on the TP have trouble really grokking the scope of this beast.

You bring up a very good point, CassieGold. I think part of the issue here may be that it’s difficult to grasp just how much of an impact a server-independent marketplace has.

In WoW, it was common to see undercutting, commodity gaming, crafted items sell for less than the materials’ value, etc. Yet WoW’s Auction House was server-dependent – when I listed something for sale, only players on my server could see the item. In late 2008, WoW had about 9.1M players spread across 236 realms — an average of only 38,559 players per realm.

Contrast that with Guild Wars 2. Every single player has access to the exact same Trading Post. 3 months ago, ArenaNet announced a total sales figure of 3 million units.

Presumably that number has increased, but I will use that number for ease. Obviously, not every player is active; while the same could be true of WoW, the existence of a monthly fee for that game would seem to reduce the number of players that hold an active account but are inactive in play. For simplicity and a conservative estimate, let’s assume that only 20% of those who purchased GW2 are currently playing.

This results in 600,000 people having access to the TP at any given time. That’s 15.56x the average number of players per server in WoW. If 50% of GW2 sales have resulted in currently-active accounts, that number increases to 1,500,000 people – 38.9x WoW’s average server population! And this is using GW2 sales numbers that are 3 months old.

If an average of only 500 people (0.000833~% of 600,000) are farming Skritt bags at a rate of 1 bag/minute (low estimate?), that means that 720,000 Skritt bags enter the market per day on average. (Keep in mind that I’m talking about the average number of players – this figure doesn’t need 500 players doing this all day long, but only needs the total average to be 500, which is not very unreasonable).

Edit: I forgot to bring up another point I meant to put in here. The Trading Post in GW2 is extremely convenient.

In WoW (and other MMOs), you generally had to go to an Auction House person, do a fair bit of legwork to figure out current prices – in the beginning, you even had to calculate the price-per-unit from a stack (e.g. a stack of 20 items at 20c/ea. would list its price as “4s” and not give you the per-unit price).

In GW2, however, not only can all players access the TP from anywhere in the world and list items despite being nowhere near a Black Lion representative, the interface itself provides a lot of very useful information. First off, all items are ‘known’ quantities: the TP itself acts as a sort of visual database of all tradeable items in the game – you don’t have to do much guesswork.

On top of that, when looking at an item you can get a quick view of all buy orders and sell orders (in WoW, there were no buy orders, and it could take minutes to walk through the pages of sales for a single item to figure out where the ‘true’ market price point was).

All of this convenience almost definitely drives a lot more people to interact with the TP. I know I certainly do – in WoW I played the AH, but it was a pain and I didn’t do it much. In GW2, I struggle to get away from the TP some days because it’s easy and fascinating for me – as well as profitable. While it certainly could be even more intuitive (I’d like to see a full buy/sell list when you’re in the “list item” interface, and I think it’s imperative that the listing fee be deducted from the “expected profit” total – so many people don’t realize that it isn’t, and are screwed over as a result!), it’s an excellent system that draws people in.

tl;dr - the TP is craaaaaazy. Playing the TP really makes you realize this; you can leave an item alone for half a day and find that you’ve been undercut (or outbid) by hundreds or thousands of other players!

(P.S. if any ANet staff reads this comment, I’d love to see some real numbers if you’re able to share them! I’d really be interested in the overall TP trade volume per day – my guess is it’s in the tens or hundreds of millions.)

John Smith.4610:

It’s late so forgive me if I make any mistakes.
That is a very interesting argument. Here are my counter-points (abbreviating to EMH):
1. This is a big one, there are no efficient markets with EMH, the EMH doesn’t really hold up in reality. Ever seen the revenue a good high frequency trader makes, even in the most highly traded markets?

Seconding this. My father has spent >30 years working as an ORMS professor and business consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and rejects almost the entirety of the efficient-market hypothesis due to its premise that people can be rational (optimal) actors.

All of the research and consulting he has done has led him to conclude that not only are people not rational actors on average, but people are overwhelmingly and exceedingly irrational (suboptimal) actors on average – and that the standard deviation on most measures of irrationality across a population is very small (i.e. almost everyone acts irrationally almost all of the time).

John Smith.4610:

My job isn’t necessarily to prevent swings, it’s to know what they will be ahead of time, and make sure the swings will be predictable and understandable.

Are there multiple people in charge of that, or that dedicate a significant amount of their work effort towards it? It seems like a lot to handle for a single individual (and IIRC you have many other responsibilities as well) given the market size and the relative difficulty of predicting human (i.e. usually irrational/sub-optimal, but sometimes brilliant) behavior.

learn to farm cof p1
also do fotm for dredge bags or go to cursed shore for heavy moldys and sell
why are ppl complaining about not being able to make gold? just look around i make about 5-10 g a day just doing this. stop complaining and look up tips

One bit of information the trading post never shows us is volume. We don’t know how many trades are executed for an item in a known span of time. All we see are polled number of buy orders and number of items for sale. We have no idea how much that fluctuates between polling. Sure as the span between polls decrease we could infer more and more about volume but we still don’t see a transaction ticker of how many at what price at what time. John Smith can probably see this, maybe not in real time but it’s still more info than we have to support/debunk theories about market activity.

John Smith.4610:

Akaji.1296:

John Smith.4610:

My job isn’t necessarily to prevent swings, it’s to know what they will be ahead of time, and make sure the swings will be predictable and understandable.

Are there multiple people in charge of that, or that dedicate a significant amount of their work effort towards it? It seems like a lot to handle for a single individual (and IIRC you have many other responsibilities as well) given the market size and the relative difficulty of predicting human (i.e. usually irrational/sub-optimal, but sometimes brilliant) behavior.

I work with several designers whom I would consider experts in mmo economies, so we can sit and chat and make sure we’re all on the same page.

Was there anything (that you will tell us about) that was a really big swing that was unexpected (whether totally or was larger than anticipated)?

John Smith.4610:

I work with several designers whom I would consider experts in mmo economies, so we can sit and chat and make sure we’re all on the same page.

Are they as lovable as you are?
Do you guys run dungeons together as the economists party?

In all honesty ANET needs to look to successful MMO’s that have a real working economy and Eve Online is a great place to start.

What drives the Eve Online Economy? Adequate supply & demand. What does not work is excess supply & limited demand.

Right now ANET is trying to get people to do the “Living Story” events because they want to people to go to the low levels zones. Well a person has to ask, what keeps people in Eve Online in high-sec mining Tritanium? Material sinks, not gold sinks.
Why do people mine these low level ores? Because everything are destructible and cannot be insta-replaced for free by respawning. Does that mean that GW2 must be like that? Absolutely not, but there are ways to do it.

These are some simple ideas that would make the economy work:

1. Remove all repair stations from the game.
2. Create Repair Kits from Tier 1-5 materials from all crafting except for cooking, Tier 6 has enough demand the way it is and this would only worsen the problem. These repair kits are exactly the same, but would have tiers based on the tier of materials used that would allow more charges. Why? Because people don’t want to be carrying around 3+ repair kits.
3. Can upgrade tiers using mystic forge by combining like 3 repair kits to go to the next tier.
4. Remove BLTP repair canister

Results:
-Now people have the ability to repair on the spot and don’t have to be wasting their time going to a vendor or having to go leave a dungeon or fractal to repair. People will pay for this convenience.
-This will be slow the amount of gold pumped into the economy that is created from selling to the vendor. It will now be salvaged and used for making repair kits.
-People will start going to low level zones – Maybe reward those who are higher level who are down leveled with increased drop rates of the lower tier materials.
-The average player will now be able to make some money from other players (switching hands) vs. getting gold from the vendor (creating gold).
-This would greatly distribute the wealth in the game without taking from those that have already accumulated it because every person has skin in the game. Sure the wealthy are going to get richer, but the average person can have a dependable income source from participating in whatever they like.
-Reducing the supply of gold will increase the amount of gems needed (devalue) to be purchased for the previous amount of gold. This is great for in-game economies and will actually help ANET make more money from people willing to buy stuff will real dollars. Don’t get me wrong demand will have some blowback because some people will now see buying gems as not as viable of an option, but there will be many people still out there that will see working IRL cheaper than playing the game for hours for in-game cash.

Also another suggestion would be:
What ANET needs to do is just get rid of all these other gold/skill sinks and just worry about removing supply from the game so that it balances out.

What do they need to do? They need to make it so that people can just throw in a set number of items into the mystic forge from tiers 1-5 and the item is promoted to the next tier WITHOUT DUST or other materials. For example does this mean that we will probably see orichalcum ore tank, in the short-run yes, but it will pick back up after the initial shock. Keep in mind that even though orichalcum ore is going to go down the price of ores tier 1-5 are going to go up. This will actually help the economy and game as a whole. ANET wants people in all different zones whether it’s zone 1-10 or 70-80 and this would help achieve this.

I know people are probably thinking that if Tier 6 mats drop because people are now off-loading a lot of tier 5 materials that crafted items are going to drop in price they are correct. Then again, the best items in the game aren’t all craftable, just the backpiece. This would also make some of the extreme crafting requirements for these materials actually logical.

The biggest problem with this games economy is the excess supply and until ANET takes a serious look at limiting the supply of materials we’re going to see it sluggish. I think that a wise decision would be to implement the repair kit idea first and the the mystic forge – promoting tiers idea.

Anyway that is some of my suggestions.

I think that’s the right track … consumable items from all Teirs useful at all levels. Repair kits is a great example. Guild influence and karma consumables would be good too.

@Cassie @Pandem

Again, I think many of you have missed the point from previous points and my post. Is it possible within an hour for several masses of groups, guilds and random players to accumulate a vast amount of Skritt Bags in a duration of an hour? Of course it is possible.

However, due to the numbers of what Mike said… That he within an hour can wipe the entire market clean of any bags being sold period, a few trickle in each time by several hundred ( making your points valid) and then all of the sudden, 1750 seem to hit the trade post. And by his claim this has happened plenty of times over the course of several hours.

So is it possible for millions of players to contribute? Yes, of course it is. But do you honestly think out of how many servers that millions of players just so happen to be farming Skritt, hourly to contribute to that kind of mass dump onto the trade post? I don’t. Call me stupid and irrational but I just don’t think that is plausible on a consistent basis. Not to mention as also previously stated, people are actually selling their bags rather than open the contents, knowing the contents are more valuable?

I could see this on a daily, over 24 hour period maybe but not on a consistent sudden dump in a matter of hours.

Vancien.1980:

millions of players just so happen to be farming Skritt,

Note that you seem to have misunderstood Cassie’s post. He’s not saying a million players just happen to be farming Skritt.

Mike.7236:

Maylojager.1307:

Imo the op is trying to drive the mentioned product’s price up, since he is stocked on it, so that he could dump his supply after “omg how to manipulate market,plz” auditory from this forum swarms the fore mentioned product with buy offers. Nice try.

Nah, I used to worry when I saw other crowding in to take advantage of this market, now I just put my buy order where I want it, no matter if there are buy orders for 10000 bags above me. It doesn’t seem to matter how many others I’m competing with, my buy order will still be filled soon enough. It’s this strange market behavior that made me wonder about the whole thing.

Not at all, for the past 4-5 months i estimate that i have bought 130k-170k bags of filched goods and while i made a 20-30% profit from that, i observed that if someone put a buyorder of 10000 above my buy order, it took 7 to 10 days to get the buyorder filled substantially enough to reach my buy order. Sometimes when i placed buy orders under the next it wouldnt sell at all because people kept making buy orders above mine.

Now you`re saying this didnt make any change cause you`d sell them anyways. From my observations i do not agree and i think Anet has no direct influence with the TP.

Vancien.1980:

However, due to the numbers of what Mike said… That he within an hour can wipe the entire market clean of any bags being sold period, a few trickle in each time by several hundred ( making your points valid) and then all of the sudden, 1750 seem to hit the trade post. And by his claim this has happened plenty of times over the course of several hours.

How many bags do you have to buy to clear the market? Once you’ve bought all those bags, are you going to list them one at a time? It doesn’t sound nefarious to me, it just sounds like there are traders speculating on bags. One trader starts buying them, and another trader decides to liquidate his stock at a profit. It makes sense to me that it would be a predictable number that gets liquidated if the bags were bought and not gathered.

I also think it’s likely that there are a number of traders waiting on the price to cross the same threshold, and that there are also pulses of bags listed when an event that generates lots of bags ends and people stop to clear out their inventory.

I honestly don’t think you grasp the scope of how many folks are participating the in market. Being able to list items from anywhere in the game world and having the market across all servers will cause patterns that might look like they have some intelligent agent behind them even though they don’t.

The vast majority of folks listing items on the market aren’t listing them because they’ve analyzed the trends and they see an opportunity to profit. They’re buying or selling skritt bags because someone told them they gave a good return, or they don’t care, they just want them out of their inventory and can’t be bothered to double click them all.

Vancien.1980:

@Cassie @Pandem

Again, I think many of you have missed the point from previous points and my post. Is it possible within an hour for several masses of groups, guilds and random players to accumulate a vast amount of Skritt Bags in a duration of an hour? Of course it is possible.

However, due to the numbers of what Mike said… That he within an hour can wipe the entire market clean of any bags being sold period, a few trickle in each time by several hundred ( making your points valid) and then all of the sudden, 1750 seem to hit the trade post. And by his claim this has happened plenty of times over the course of several hours.

So is it possible for millions of players to contribute? Yes, of course it is. But do you honestly think out of how many servers that millions of players just so happen to be farming Skritt, hourly to contribute to that kind of mass dump onto the trade post? I don’t. Call me stupid and irrational but I just don’t think that is plausible on a consistent basis. Not to mention as also previously stated, people are actually selling their bags rather than open the contents, knowing the contents are more valuable?

I could see this on a daily, over 24 hour period maybe but not on a consistent sudden dump in a matter of hours.

1 trader with a buy order priced low enough could explain this behavior….. you’re talking about 1750 like it’s a big number, but in terms of inventory, that’s 7 slots in someone’s bags……

I think, ultimately, the point several people are making here in several different ways is that there are numerous logical explanations for the behavior you’re seeing, without assuming that A-net is manipulating a market.