Guild Wars 2

This is assuming Anet would try to fix any scarcity issues. If a small number of individuals are manipulating the market, there’s nothing ANet can do without compromising the integrity of their own game.

Horheristo.3607:

Either that, or you’re a power trader yourself going in defense of your kind.
But keep the stories coming, love the good laugh.

“Your kind” that is really disturbing the way you say that. Anti-intellectualism seems to be rife in this corner of the forum.

Whenever someone posts genuine intelligent analysis people wave it off because it doesn’t match their preconceptions

Ryuujin.8236:

Horheristo.3607:

Either that, or you’re a power trader yourself going in defense of your kind.
But keep the stories coming, love the good laugh.

“Your kind” that is really disturbing the way you say that. Anti-intellectualism seems to be rife in this corner of the forum.

Whenever someone posts genuine intelligent analysis people wave it off because it doesn’t match their preconceptions

Thank you for taking that small part of what I said completely out of context.

Oh and btw, lol.

Horheristo.3607:

Thank you for taking that small part of what I said completely out of context.

Oh and btw, lol.

You’re basically accusing him of intellectual dishonesty by stating a case that makes out that traders are honest and the economic situation can be properly explained (Which is clearly a position you don’t agree with given your retort).

I don’t see what else that post contains I have “misunderstood”. I only called out the latter part because it is kind’ve disturbing seeing “othering” going on, the first part didn’t really need comment.

There are too many English/Theater majors in this thread…

Horheristo.3607:

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Twomix.5384:

I hate market resellers/manipulators they jack up the prices of items and screw over the newbies.

That’s a falsehood for the most part.

I am majoring in economics. I do understand what is going in this thread.

You are right only in the short term. Which is to say that a few of the TP speculators might gain market power to the point they can drive prices sky high. And maybe on a few select items that have relative scarcity issues. Which Anet can fix my tinkering with drop rates.

But, and this is a big but, TP speculators do drive the price to an equilibrium in a much more rapid than normal buyers and sellers of gw2 goods. The reason being is that there is a LOT of speculators and with that much competition no one person can ever gain a significant foot hold on a lot of the goods in this game. So the price plummets when speculators find a good with a large profit margin, because all the competitors have to turn over their goods or wait for a long time for those goods to be used to ever achieve profits in the heavily traded markets.

I got a co-worker who has Masters in Psychology who couldn’t get socially accepted for the life of him.

“The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot”

Either that, or you’re a power trader yourself going in defense of your kind.
But keep the stories coming, love the good laugh.

Apples and oranges argument. And if you want to remain close minded and sound like people who rage about real world economic events even though it is like miles away from any articulate answer…

You can’t just say that power trading is good or bad for the economy. There are a lot of different trading schemes, some of which increase the health of the market, and some of which do not.

Bid/Ask spread trading is a large positive for the market, as it makes it a whole lot more liquid. In a similar way, intertemporal traders (those that buy at low points during the week and resell at high points on weekends, for instance) are similarly increasing the health of the market by stabilizing supply, demand, and price throughout the day and week.

Drive-to-fundamentals trading, in response to a shift in the market, is also providing a valuable service, driving prices into line with the new fundamentals faster than they would be without heavy trading.

Blind speculation is relatively harmless, and on the whole tends to lose money; the only real downside is that it’s unsophisticated investors giving money away.

Momentum trading, on the other hand, can be toxic to a market, making it a whole lot more volatile and less efficient. Prices aren’t very representative if there’s a lot of momentum trading going on.

Generalized opportunities for market manipulation are fairly rare. It’s too easy for player’s outputs to shift around in response to market incentives for prices to be driven too far from fundamentals for any period of time. There are a handful of items that can be monopolized and manipulated (such as the Halloween skins), but again, they are rare. Most cases of ‘market manipulation’ are individuals injecting a lot of money into a market to increase volatility and uncertainty, with an end goal of profiting off of a bubble (inflated by a bunch of velocity traders jumping on the bandwagon) or through a spread trade (spreads increase with both volatility and uncertainty, so shaking up a market where you have big positions can be very profitable).

Bottom line – look at what traders are doing, blanket statements don’t apply.