Guild Wars 2

Why Anet should do its own auto-trading on the market:

Trading for profit brings significant benefits to the market:

• It makes the market more efficient
• It narrows the gap between buy and sell prices for slower traded items
• It acts as a gold sink for the game

However, there are several problems with players doing this trading:

• It is less efficient than a fully automated system would be
• It only works on items where the margin is greater than 15%
• It encourages hoarding of scarce and high demand items
• It detracts from playing content (by returning greater material rewards)
• The returns available create massive wealth inequality in the player base
• It has become a necessary activity to achieve the top end gear (for all but the most dedicated or lucky players)

Instead of relying on players to make the market more efficient, Anet should take over this role and automate it (as they’ve done for the Gem/Gold trading).

This would have the following benefits:

• The market would be more efficient because:
  • Automation would remove the lag inherent in manual trading
  • Automation would cover all items all of the time
  • The automation would have real-time access to complete market information
  • Narrower margins could be used where beneficial
  • The incentives for hoarding would be reduced
• Wealth inequality would reduce, leading to a more purchasing equality in the market
• Playing content would become best way to gain top end equipment (as the profits available from player trading would reduce significantly)
• Trading would no longer be a necessary activity to obtain top-end gear

To do this successfully, Anet would need to:

• Set up an automated system for trading on the market
• Ensure top-end gear is obtainable without playing the market
• Cope with the objections of players for whom trading is their primary source of gold and in-game status

The gem exchange merely establishes an exchange rate. This is very different than establishing a price based on the current supply, rate of supply and real demand.

And it still doesn’t affect top-end gear with very low supply rates yet very high real demand. These items will still have very high prices because any realistic system would peg the price so there are only enough buyers to balance the supply rate.

I hope you understand your opinion isn’t going to change the TP.

In-game mechanization is much more preferable though than people using third party programs to do the same. I will report this when I see this, but so far it seems Anet is unable to eradicate the use of TP bots/scripts. Partly because of this, the playing field is not level. At all.

Buttercup.5871:

… but so far it seems Anet is unable to eradicate the use of TP bots/scripts. Partly because of this, the playing field is not level. At all.

It’s difficult to get rid of TP bots simply because the TP interface is documented and as long as you aren’t dumb and add enough randomness and slow down the access so it’s within the realm of an actual player’s reaction time, it’s invisible.

Edited for clarification. I know the OP is talking about ANet automating the TP to set the price for each item.

… and there I was looking for a fantasy world …

Looks like there’s been a bit of misunderstanding of my original post – I’ve edited the first line (of the OP) to make it clear it refers to Anet running their own trading bot(s) to make the market more efficient.