Guild Wars 2

Economics 101 says that better information leads to more efficient markets. Of course, in a game, sometimes we want inefficient markets since you can “play” them more.

But putting that aside, I really think we need the TP to show how many units of an item were sold recently. For example, it could have a stat on how many sales were made for an item in the past hour/day/week/month.

Even better, if it could provide a historical record of previous sales and what price they went for.

As a person who makes a minor profit crafting objects and selling them, this information would be really useful to me as I can see the difference between items that have few listings because noone buys them, vs. items that have few listings because they are in great demand. Sure, you can infer a little bit from other bits of data, but having a proper stat would be better.

I know that adding new items to the UI can be much more time consuming that people would think, so maybe instead, ANet should work with websites like GW2Spidy and provide an API that those sites can access, to display that information? After all, such 3rd party websites can be far more nimble when it comes to adding new features.
Ideally this data should be available in-game, but Spidy already provides great data that the game doesnt, so it’s fine if this keeps going.

I see John Smith making a lot of terse posts trying to refute various people crying about market manipulation and so forth. Having this sort of data openly available on every item would also help calm those fears. Even better, if historical data on individual transactions, with items tracked by ID (ie. Sunrise ID#233452 sold for 1800 gold on 4:53 AM 5/2/2013), would make it clear which items are being bought and re-sold. People would have a better idea of the true extent of trading and won’t be as quick to come up with conspiracy theories then.

So anyways, need sales data! Preferably in-game, but it’s fine if ANet opens up an API for GW2Spidy to do it instead.

More data would be nice. “work with websites like GW2Spidy” is not. That would simply give an even bigger advantage to people who know about sites like spidy over those who do not. Screwing over one segment of the population for the benefit of the other is not way to go.

Ya, can’t have all them people with internet access and exclusive access to google have an unfair advantage over the rest of us…

They dont need anything like this till they fix aspects of the game that were designed to be played.

Khisanth.2948:

More data would be nice. “work with websites like GW2Spidy” is not. That would simply give an even bigger advantage to people who know about sites like spidy over those who do not. Screwing over one segment of the population for the benefit of the other is not way to go.

Wait, why is it unfair if everyone can access GW2Spidey?

If it was like a paid service, yea it’s unfair. But lack of knowledge isn’t something I call “unfair.”

Ursan.7846:

Khisanth.2948:

More data would be nice. “work with websites like GW2Spidy” is not. That would simply give an even bigger advantage to people who know about sites like spidy over those who do not. Screwing over one segment of the population for the benefit of the other is not way to go.

Wait, why is it unfair if everyone can access GW2Spidey?

If it was like a paid service, yea it’s unfair. But lack of knowledge isn’t something I call “unfair.”

There is spidy, then there is is spidy(or some other site) with exclusive information provided by ANet. That is going from “accepts its existence as something they can’t avoid due to the TP’s design”, going pass “endorsement” and heads straight to “collaboration”.

I seem to have left out something important in my post. “Alternatively ANet would need to start advertising the existence of those sites.”