Guild Wars 2

I disagree that players behave differently in game than they do in real life. They behave exactly the same, it is simply that they face a different set of incentives in game than they do in other aspects of their lives.

There’s no exploit in having a bid/ask spread. I think it’s a really good system to have bid/ask in game, so the time value and opportunity costs cut both ways.

I think the only real issue is the asymmetry introduced by the 5% listing fee. I think putting that huge risk on the ask side (since the item might not sell after a market movement and you simply eat the listing fee as a loss) but essentially no risk other than opportunity cost on the bid side, has skewed people’s incentives. This is compounded by 1c undercutting on the ask side – and unlike the bid side, you have no reasonable recourse.

I initially thought that the 5% listing fee was a clever way to deal with trading post spam, but after some more thought I think it’s doing more harm than good and is the key distortion responsible for the biggest issues we’re seeing.

Nenthil.4312:

Moreover without a time-limited auctions prices will be only dropping

How is this the case at all? Why would prices drop if my item is listed there for weeks? The reason it stays there instead of selling is because my asking price is too high. I have no idea why a load of people asking for too much money (and then not getting it) could possibly drive prices down.

One thing that I think may drive prices down is, as Ensign explains above, there is far more risk to asking a higher price than the current going rate than there is to bidding a lower price than the current rate. There is some liquidity loss with making a bid that just sits there, but since you can remove your order at any time with no risk (well, none apart from potentially losing all your gold to a bug I suppose…), buy orders aren’t actually all that illiquid. (Would they technically be illiquid at all, given that you can pretty much instantly convert them back into cash?)

This asymmetry of risk likely makes people more willing to bid lower prices and less likely to ask higher prices than they would be without the asymmetry, which means stable prices will tend to be lower than they would be otherwise. They would still eventually stabilize, though, and well above vendor price for valuable but common items like crafting materials.

(The phenomenon of loads of mediocre gear being listed for 1c above vendor price is the result of people using the TC as a convenient way to get rid of things filling up their inventory, which many are willing to do even at some loss relative to what a vendor would give them. If the cost of waypointing to and from the nearest vendor, which gets pretty absurd as you level, is greater than the 15% loss you’ll suffer using the TC, it’s worth it to dump stuff on the TC at the cheapest possible price.)

Hippocampus.8470:

..

One thing that I think may drive prices down is, as Ensign explains above, there is far more risk to asking a higher price than the current going rate than there is to bidding a lower price than the current rate. There is some liquidity loss with making a bid that just sits there, but since you can remove your order at any time with no risk (well, none apart from potentially losing all your gold to a bug I suppose…), buy orders aren’t actually all that illiquid. (Would they technically be illiquid at all, given that you can pretty much instantly convert them back into cash?)

This asymmetry of risk likely makes people more willing to bid lower prices and less likely to ask higher prices than they would be without the asymmetry, which means stable prices will tend to be lower than they would be otherwise. They would still eventually stabilize, though, and well above vendor price for valuable but common items like crafting materials.
…

This and this again. I don’t think people fully realize just how impactful this imbalance is. Anyone willing to “camp” the TP can one copper up the next lowest bidder all day long. This gives full-time merchants a HUGE advantage as they can get their orders filled first, at the lowest price the market will bear. What should in theory move the low end rapidly toward equilibrium instead stalls it because their is little incentive to bid fairly and every incentive to bid exactly 1c over the highest bid, until the casual player simply gives up out of frustration or bids so high they can’t possibly profit.

On the other end ou have the exact oppisite problem with a monstrous profit eating listing fee, which by itself isn’t so bad, but when coupled with a bidding system and the sales tax it makes it impossible for someone who isn’t “buy order camping” to compete. Why? Because their competition can get items/item components far cheaper than they can and therefore take the greater amount of loss necessary to compete. The end result is that you can not compete on the selling price unless you are exploiting “I need to sell it now” motivated players with super low buy orders and the listing fee forces extreme competition on the selling price.

The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.

Vesuvias.9326:

The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.

There are definitely unfortunate consequences of the one-sided risk in custom orders/offers, but I don’t think this is one of them.

We’re talking about making money solely by playing the market, right? That’s not the sort of thing people without sufficient knowledge or insight should expect to be able to compete effectively in, especially when there are others whose main enjoyment in playing the game comes from using the BLTC commodities market.

Hippocampus.8470:

Vesuvias.9326:

The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.

There are definitely unfortunate consequences of the one-sided risk in custom orders/offers, but I don’t think this is one of them.

We’re talking about making money solely by playing the market, right? That’s not the sort of thing people without sufficient knowledge or insight should expect to be able to compete effectively in, especially when there are others whose main enjoyment in playing the game comes from using the BLTC commodities market.

Were the market a semi-disconnected mini-game I might agree with you. However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game. Gold in this game is hugely important (travel costs, repair costs, siege engines, exotic gear, etc). This moves slightly in the direction of a game design debate but the rewards from “winning” in the market are far better than those of say winning in WvW (on a personal level). To make matters worse there is a feedback loop exaggerated by the way in which the market works. It gets exceedingly easier to make more money, the more money that you have.

It was John I think that put out a chart before the game was released defining what a healthy economy would look like. My comments about the inability for casuals to compete were only meant in the context of a game economy designed to try and stay healthy by that definition.

Vesuvias.9326:

However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game.

Yes, but would changing the ask/bid asymmetry actually change the fact that people who don’t understand economics can’t make lots of money through the BLTC?

Hippocampus.8470:

Vesuvias.9326:

However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game.

Yes, but would changing the ask/bid asymmetry actually change the fact that people who don’t understand economics can’t make lots of money through the BLTC?

No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power. Altering some parameter might delay this situation a bit, but that’s it.

@John Smith There is no language barrier. We are simply having a game of telephone. People making stuff up cough dish cough spurn, but thanks for chiming in and offering your input ^^

Reading over the comments, I fully agree that seperate trading posts would be a poor idea, nor do I believe that limited duration sales would positively affect the market price. It would actually make the 1 copper undercutting even more damaging to the economy.

The notion that there is no differentiation bewteen wants and needs is one of the reasons that an automated economy is more sensible in a structured gaming world, but I’m tired of beating that horse. I disagree that there isn’t profit to be made on the trading post – there are tons of opportunities, it’s just that some are glaringly better than others.

Which brings me back to custom bidding. This is no longer the most profitable method of turning over coins. There was a ‘bug’ where the first person that bid or sold for an item had that transaction resolved first. This removed incentive to adjust the current market prices, creating an artificial ceiling and floor, and also allowed people camping the trading post to turn over their total assets for 10 or 20% gains multiple times a day.

This ‘bug’ or whatever it was has now been addressed, and it is the first poster that sells and recieves goods first. The way it probably should have been in the first place.

Vesuvias summarized several issues with the way the trading post is set up rather nicely. This mini-game, that affects everything a player does, is very penalizing to casual players and I see no reason why tools (a price listing range, among other things) shouldn’t be given to them to make playing the game less of a time sink.

I know what the creator of this thread is talking about since I’ve been monitoring a few items on TP, and in particular the small claw.
It started like 10 days ago, price was pretty much stable and between 1s40c and 1s20c give or take. Then someone intervened and started lowering the price bit by bit. Now at first this wasn’t a problem, he lowered it to around 1s and it came back up to 1s14c – small drop, not so noticeable for us that sold it in normal amounts. But then he kept pushing it down. The lowest priced item was like 1s14c he put an offer of 40 of them for 1s10c, then 32 for 1s2c then 100 for 92c etc. which made other people undercutting it.
When he stops intervening, prices go up a bit, but he is pretty much active for hours at a time. now, this might not seem like a problem to most of people, since this is only small claw and not many of you are rly interested in this particular item, but i know of many more where similar interventions happen. The problem is that he dropped a price of small claw from 1s40c to less than 60c and he is buying it for 40c or less atm. I don’t know ih he/they are planing to buy HUGE amounts and the aggresivly raise the price to like 2s or even higher, or are they just satisfied to slowly buy them for 40c or less and then selling them for 60c or higher, but i think it’s the scenario in which the price will go to 2s. Problem with this is that he/they are manipulating the price of an item, directly affecting the economy and causing problems for rest of us that just want to make money the proper way.

I honestly thought that the prices would normalize on their own in a few days once he/they are finished, but he put’s a block every 5-10c – now I might not be clear so let me explain. A “block” is what I call when he puts like 1.5 – 2k small claws up for like 65c. Then even if people raise the price back to 65c, they have to buy 1.5k of small claws (that he got for less than 40c) at 65c before the price can go higher, but there is another “block” of 2k at 70c (he probably bought them at 50-55c anyways, and he doesn’t care even if they do) and then at 80c and 86c and 93c an 99c etc. So while he is offline it is very unlikely price will return to normal, it will be a bit higher, but when it comes near a “block” people will not wait in line for 2000 of small claws to sell for 70c before it’s their turn for their items to sell, they will most likely undercut him for 1c etc. so it take like 8-12h for the prices to go up 20c and then he is back online and is pushing prices down even more.

I’ve been a witness to this for the last 10(ish) days and I’ve yet to see what he/they are planing to do, but as far as I can see, there are more and more economy manipulators out there, people who probably later sent their bots to LA to spamm “I sell gold”, while the rest of us are helpless and can only watch as prices of items we make money on go down, and Anet just stands there and watches – 15% selling fee is not enough. And they manipulate the prices of items they know will sell in huge amounts very fast – whoever is leveling any crafting profession will probably need like 30 of every tier 1 to tier 5 rare crafting materials, so manipulating their prices and the price of normal crafting materials is the easiest way to make a profit.

CdrRogdan.8907:

I disagree that there isn’t profit to be made on the trading post – there are tons of opportunities, it’s just that some are glaringly better than others.

As it should be in a free market. The partecipants each plan their trades, some win, some lose, some win little.

CdrRogdan.8907:

This mini-game, that affects everything a player does, is very penalizing to casual players and I see no reason why tools (a price listing range, among other things) shouldn’t be given to them to make playing the game casually more entertaining and less of a time sink.

I am very casual but when I log in I always get to take golds ready to take away.
Am I magic?

No. I am teaching my guildies how to search for opportunities, yesterday we had some “incursions” on certain jewelry that netted 27 to 30s a piece despite being lowly tier stuff assembled from our banks “scraps”.

Mackodlak.7961:

I honestly thought that the prices would normalize on their own in a few days once he/they are finished, but he put’s a block every 5-10c – now I might not be clear so let me explain. A “block” is what I call when he puts like 1.5 – 2k small claws up for like 65c. Then even if people raise the price back to 65c, they have to buy 1.5k of small claws (that he got for less than 40c) at 65c before the price can go higher, but there is another “block” of 2k at 70c (he probably bought them at 50-55c anyways, and he doesn’t care even if they do) and then at 80c and 86c and 93c an 99c etc. So while he is offline it is very unlikely price will return to normal, it will be a bit higher, but when it comes near a “block” people will not wait in line for 2000 of small claws to sell for 70c before it’s their turn for their items to sell, they will most likely undercut him for 1c etc. so it take like 8-12h for the prices to go up 20c and then he is back online and is pushing prices down even more.

I’ve been a witness to this for the last 10(ish) days and I’ve yet to see what he/they are planing to do, but as far as I can see, there are more and more economy manipulators out there, people who probably later sent their bots to LA to spamm “I sell gold”, while the rest of us are helpless and can only watch as prices of items we make money on go down, and Anet just stands there and watches – 15% selling fee is not enough. And they manipulate the prices of items they know will sell in huge amounts very fast – whoever is leveling any crafting profession will probably need like 30 of every tier 1 to tier 5 rare crafting materials, so manipulating their prices and the price of normal crafting materials is the easiest way to make a profit.

That’s how large cash station traders work in EvE. In fact they are called “blocking orders” and don’t even need to be real.
A guy can put an huge order just to scare people off.

Orders create thresolds of so called “support and resistance”.
Go read my blogs on vahrokh.com or my “RL analysis” threads on the EvE forums to see the full mechanics.

It’s harsh, but that’s how real markets work.
There will be big players everywhere, from RL to video games and you either:

- play with them (i.e. you follow their moves).
- outplay and crush them.

or you’ll be a small fish.

You can still make a nice profit as small fish but that requires smarts. Not many got smarts.

Even the “average, self believe advanced” players believe they can act with primitive buy and hold strategies and similar and compete.
No, they don’t and in about 1 year there will be deeply established basically unbeatable monopolists, market manipulators and so on.

Adapt and thrive or die.

I think you mean, adapt and thrive or ‘stop playing the game’ since characters are immune to death. That isn’t exactly the most sound business strategy to allow such an occurance, unless Arena net is hoping to discourage people from playing long term so they don’t have to pay server maintenance fees…

I still don’t like it.
I wish I was sure he would raise the price to back where it was cause he is hoarding 100k or more of the items and is planing to sell them at double, triple or even higher profit, but I can’t be sure if that’s the game he is playing or if he is simply trying to stay in the sweet spot and just resell them for 20-30% profit all the time (profit, meaning once 15% TP fee is reduced from the sale).

So for now I’m only watching what is going on and buying low selling high. I do keep some stash of few thousand of the items in case prices do go up, but again, calculating that I don’t lose on them (much) if price goes further down.

CdrRogdan

I think you mean, adapt and thrive or ‘stop playing the game’ since characters are immune to death. That isn’t exactly the most sound business strategy to allow such an occurance, unless Arena net is hoping to discourage people from playing long term so they don’t have to pay server maintenance fees…

Trading is an (almost, minus fees) zero sum game.

While GW2 is a theme park “mild” game, trading is not. Trading is like playing EvE Online or trading in RL: you win or lose and when you lose you feel it hard. In GW2 the worst a PvPer experiences is a number saying he lost. In other games he actually loses his possessions.
The huge majority of GW2 players will never “feel” they are winning or losing. They dump the 10 drops they got in the past hour and are actually happy to have an “infinite trash can” where to dump their drops, even if at lower prices.

Those who are in the trading game are those who have to adapt or “die”.
Those who are in the trading game (for real) are a minority and they are ready to risk.

Which of the two categories you are, I don’t know. But I know that you’ll face people determined to strip your wallet clean and no posting on the forums will save you.

Mackodlak

So for now I’m only watching what is going on and buying low selling high. I do keep some stash of few thousand of the items in case prices do go up, but again, calculating that I don’t lose on them (much) if price goes further down.

This is exactly the example I was talking about in my reply above. The “buy and hold”.

It’s usually a “shareholder” mentality, which is often wrong for commodities trading. Because once the market moved away, there’s no way to know IF and when it’ll come back and make your stock profitable again.

If you prefer the more tactic, more long term trading game and not the twitch “orders flipping” (aka station trading in EvE) I suggest you to switch to swing trading, expecially with the aid of the website linked in previous posts.
That’s a demanding trading style however, swing trading is simple but is not easy.

I know what you mean. The issue here is that i got them for approx 70c each and prices now vary from 50-75c (the person manipulating the market is kinda satisfied being in this range as far as i can see, for the moment at least).

So selling them now would mean that I did have some loses on them, but not so much to say I’ve RLY RLY LOST and bang my head against a wall (it’s not even the 15%, it’s more like 5-7% loss and I’ve gained that back multiple times by now buying low selling high so I would be above zero when all things would be considered).

The problem will be if he keeps pushing the price down. then again if he raises the price MUCH in the next few days/weeks, I will be making a fine deal.

As you’ve said, the problem is I don’t know IF and WHEN the prices would go up. The other thing is i don’t need the money now, and am willing to risk at this point.

I will read through your post and see what else I can do. ATM I’m not a large player, few tens of gold is not sth than could compete against someone who has thousands so I can’t go against him, only “play smart”. So far I’m not in a bad position.

Its like a poker game, the chip leader can always bully the lesser. They have alot more to spare for the time being to shift the market or item in their direction.

They will always be able to.
Look at what they did with butter though (even though I think it only helped the big fishes cause) – it cost 1c, then they changed the game and made it so you MUST put a price 1c over and in a split of a second it became 2c – people who bought loads of it made 70% profit.

Then, like that wasn’t enough, people who didn’t sell them for 2c (and/or even bought them at 1c), thinking it could only go higher, made a kill when Anet put a recipe in game for that portable mystic forge conduit and perma elixirs to transform into elementals, not to mention 20s-2G jewels etc.
Anyways within hours it went up to 15c – friend invested 2G while they were 1c thinking it could only go higher… I’m sorry he didn’t share the thoughts with me, I would’ve been 25G richer today, as he was approx.

Anyways similar recipe for items being manipulated would help the cause every now and then. and I know they have the charts that show suspiciously fast change in price of certain items. They CAN intervene!

Mackodlak.7961:

Anyways similar recipe for items being manipulated would help the cause every now and then. and I know they have the charts that show suspiciously fast change in price of certain items. They CAN intervene!

What I don’t understand is why you think there’s a ‘right’ way to play the market and an ‘unfair’ way to play the market. And that keeping the price up is right and lowering the price is unfair.

It would seem like the guy who lowered the price of goods is actually helping all the people who are leveling crafting professions. Those are the people who give the items value in the first place. Without people leveling their crafts, the value of the mats would be zero. I hope you aren’t arguing that the price of the crafting materials is based on the price of the finished product, because crafted equipment simply doesn’t sell on the market.

I dabble in the trading game and enjoy it very much. It seems to me that those people complaining are taking it too personally.

So what if a smart trader is manipulating the market on a particular good? If you can recognise it happening you can take advantage of it, or if you don’t like the risk just trade in another commodity. So what if people undercut you by 1c? If this prevents your item from selling then your price was just too high in the first place. If not just wait it out – with a market this size the fluctuations happen very quickly.

Vaerah.4907:

Hippocampus.8470:

Vesuvias.9326:

However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game.

Yes, but would changing the ask/bid asymmetry actually change the fact that people who don’t understand economics can’t make lots of money through the BLTC?

No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power. Altering some parameter might delay this situation a bit, but that’s it.

I respectfully disagree. I think you have made an incorrect assumption that a game can not be designed to avoid the “runaway” winner problem. Understand that philosophically this isn’t an issue with having a winner but an issue with having a winner that prevents all future game’s from being played on a level playing field and the degree/scale with which that occurs.

To answer Hippocampus, while changing buy/sell asymmetry may not allow a casual player to amass huge pile’s of wealth simply by playing (I certainly would never argue for that) it could prevent them from taking a loss on every transaction and forcing them out of the market.

I think its important to point out that this market isn’t “free”. While it might seem that way, there are most certainly system enforced constraints that effect the ability for small vendors to compete. And I not talking about artificially created ceilings or floors.

Specifically because of the way the purchase mechanic works only one particular vendor has a monopoly on a given sale from a specific customer at given time. That vendor is the one that has the lowest price. This “seems” logical because the items in this game are simplified in that there is no variance between two Berserker Draconic Helms other than price. One crafter didn’t use better material, or didn’t tweak them to fit larger heads versus smaller heads or didn’t use better celebrity advertising, etc. Two helms in this game are precisely the same. It is perfectly rational to believe that no player is ever going to pay more when they have the option to pay less for the “exact” same product.

So the system optimizes the choice for the player and only allows them to buy the item that is priced lowest. And more specifically it only allows them to buy the item that is the lowest price that has been listed the longest (FIFO sell order). Because of this the market isn’t free, a particular vendor gets a Monopoly on a given item at a given price point if that price is the lowest price and if they were the first to list it at that price point.

To illustrate why I think this is bad I lets say Buyer A wants to buy a widget. Seller B, Seller C, and Seller D all sell said widget. Buyer A walks into the room where Seller B, C and D are all selling their widgets. Each one is set up on a nondescript table, none of the tables are any closer to the door than any others, there is no advertising and our widget is precisely the same in every conceivable way regardless of who is selling it. Which Seller with Buyer A buy from? The one who is selling the Widget for the lowest of course but what if they are all selling it for the same price? Which one does the Seller choose? In this case I would argue that his choice would be completely random. Sometime B, sometimes C, sometimes D.

What the current system does that is artificial is that is arrays the Seller table’s in straight line. So that when the Buyer walks in the room he can only buy from the table at the front. When buyers aren’t in the room the tables are artificially moved around so that the lowest seller is at the front. This is further sorted by which Seller decided first to price the Widget lowest.

The question in terms of a free market is why? The seller doesn’t care in which order the lowest price was set before they entered the room. Does arraying the tables in a straight line encourage better competition somehow? I argue that it is completely arbitrary and that by enforcing a limited monopoly it actually hurts the system allowing wealthier individuals a chance to game it to the detriment of the entire economy. The example I used was only for selling but for bidding a similar example applies with similar artificial constraints.

I saw it mentioned that the TP is world wide and not just server? Is that true?

That is an interesting setup. On the positive it helps lower population servers from having supply issues. On the negative it can allow just a few big servers to set the costs of goods which can adversely affect smaller server economies.

I think the problem is that we are treating all items as if they are consumables. Refrigerators are sold in stores and not on markets. I think the current system works well for crafting materials and consumables like food or upgrades, but for armor and weapons it’s not so great.

I’m posting this from my phone. I’ll add more detail when I’m at a full size keyboard.

Kian.3769:

…

What I don’t understand is why you think there’s a ‘right’ way to play the market and an ‘unfair’ way to play the market. And that keeping the price up is right and lowering the price is unfair.

It would seem like the guy who lowered the price of goods is actually helping all the people who are leveling crafting professions. Those are the people who give the items value in the first place. Without people leveling their crafts, the value of the mats would be zero. I hope you aren’t arguing that the price of the crafting materials is based on the price of the finished product, because crafted equipment simply doesn’t sell on the market.

Because price determined by the players leveling crafting professions was 1.20-1.40s until he intervened. and while he is not online the price i rising to that amount, but he is using the described “blocks” to prevent it.

Today it went up from around 50c (where he lowered it to) to 74c and then he simply placed 3.8k claws at 73c to try and prevent it from going up and is still trying to lower it by placing some amount of the mentioned items for 60c while the next offer is at 72-73c.
He is actively forcing the price down. Those same people leveling their crafting professions need money to do it. destroying a certain market isn’t going to help them.

Imagine powerful blood – viable item to farm, you also get loads of potent blood in the process. It goes for around 16-20s and then som1 comes and lowers it to 5s by the method mentioned above. Who in their right mind would EVER farm it? drop tare w/o MF gear is like 1 in an hour with MF gear goes up to 10-15 pieces in an hour, mby more. But that includes omnomberry and magic find booster that also cost money.
and to make it even worse, lowers the price of potent blood to 60c – who would ever farm it?

I’m not saying playing a market is wrong, but in this game not so many people CAN actually play the market in this way, he isn’t playing it, he is deciding it. He is forming it. It’s his price, not the peoples price, not market price.

The thing with this person is he can afford to lose 5-10G on lowering the price cause he is obviously not doing this for 2-3G profit as most of us are (i’m even at times happy with less than 1G in short term).
So what he does it, as vesuvias said there is an array of tables, and not a room full of them in this economy, he just fills in the first 30 places, highest above him had a price of 1s20c which was normal market price before he started manipulating the marked. the lowest below him has 50c price. He artificially created a gap of 70c between lowest and second lowest price (he also filled in every buy request in between the two) which is “not cool” in my opinion. Now a new player comes along, has a bunch of small claws he doesn’t need, doesn’t know the market price, and ofc. he undercuts him by 1c – a normal way. Some other person comes, sees that the price is 50c and only 2 days ago way 1s40c and doesn’t sell them, cause he needs it to be 1s at least. Maybe he even bought a bunch of them while the price was first going down for 70-80c knowing it will return to 1.20-1.40 where it has been before this happened, but the price stays low and he is stuck with a bunch of items he doesn’t need.
First 2-3 days people even tried to fight him, but he obviously has HUGE resources and it become impossible.

Let me run through a few issues I see in your post.

The original price of the mats was not set by the people leveling crafting professions. With a set of players whose game is to buy low and sell high, who neither supply the market with mats nor take them away for crafting, the price climbs as high as the people leveling those professions can pay. They have no way to influence the price except by not buying, and that means not leveling your profession because farming for yourself is a waste of time. I tried, it’s simply not viable as you level up.

But you are missing the important bit in what you said. He isn’t dominating the market because of some unfair advantage or some flaw in the system. He is dominating it because he can somehow produce 4k claws on a whim.

Now, if he has an army of bots farming and giving him the stock, that’s bad. If he used an exploit to have infinite monies, spent a month buying claws and now decided to wreak havoc in your market, that’s bad.

But if this guy is getting his claws legitimately, and somehow managed to get his guild to all farm these mats just to mess with you, then what wrong with that? Do you suppose a fair game is one where you can beat an unknown number of people working together to stomp you?

At worst, the guy is squandering his resources by pushing the price of something he is supplying down. If however he has the resources to keep the supply in line with the demand, then you’ll have to learn to live in a world where the price of claws is 70c, not 1s20c. That’s just basic economics.

If you are so sure that he is doing it for some nefarious purpose, buy up all his claws then put them at the proper price. He’ll eventually break and you can enjoy the profits.

theerrantventure.9185:

I saw it mentioned that the TP is world wide and not just server? Is that true?

That is an interesting setup. On the positive it helps lower population servers from having supply issues. On the negative it can allow just a few big servers to set the costs of goods which can adversely affect smaller server economies.

No, given how everything works, it can’t affect smaller servers. Given the way the game is set up, as far as the economics side is concerned we’re all in a single huge server.

Vaerah.4907:

No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power

How is anyone consistently losing over time on the BLTC? The fun thing about the GW2 economy is that, unlike the real economy, no one will starve or lose their house or have to survive on ramen for the next two weeks if someone manipulates the market. If I find that I’m not doing well using the market, I can completely ignore it for days or weeks and just do PvE and PvP and WvW to have fun and level my characters and get the items I need for crafting. Any equipment I find that isn’t an upgrade to what I’m currently using, I can salvage or sell to vendors or drop into the mystic forge in hopes that it’ll spit out something better.

And this would be a perfectly enjoyable way to play the game, and a perfectly adequate way to make a (quite modest, admittedly) amount of money over time.

The reason I’m not worried about the “losers” in the GW2 economy the same way I care about the poor in the real world is that, in the game, it is entirely possible to 100% avoid the market and refuse to let it affect you in any way whatsoever.

Vesuvias.9326:

So the system optimizes the choice for the player and only allows them to buy the item that is priced lowest. And more specifically it only allows them to buy the item that is the lowest price that has been listed the longest (FIFO sell order). Because of this the market isn’t free, a particular vendor gets a Monopoly on a given item at a given price point if that price is the lowest price and if they were the first to list it at that price point.

No, unfortunately the market currently seems to be more of a LIFO system. And that is what allows someone to monopolize it, because they can always list more items later and continue to be guaranteed that theirs will be the ones other people are buying. If that glitch gets fixed (or is already from this morning’s update? I’ve heard mixed things about that), so that it truly is FIFO, I don’t know how monopolies will work as you claim.

Because if the first things sold are the oldest ones at that price, then eventually all of that seller’s items will be sold, and to sell any more they’ll have to wait for everything that’s been listed since they first started selling at that price. The only way to have a monopoly in FIFO is if you’re the only one selling at the lowest price, but this would monopolize a random-seller system just as effectively, since there’s only one way to choose one from a set of one.

What the current system does that is artificial is that is arrays the Seller table’s in straight line. So that when the Buyer walks in the room he can only buy from the table at the front. When buyers aren’t in the room the tables are artificially moved around so that the lowest seller is at the front. This is further sorted by which Seller decided first to price the Widget lowest.

Well, yeah. But would people actually buy the same thing for a higher price if they were able to? Sure, this technically is a restriction on the market because it prevents people from voluntarily paying too much or earning too little, but I’m unsure why actual price movements and such would be different if that restriction were removed.

Mackodlak.7961:

I know what the creator of this thread is talking about since I’ve been monitoring a few items on TP, and in particular the small claw.
It started like 10 days ago, price was pretty much stable and between 1s40c and 1s20c give or take. Then someone intervened and started lowering the price bit by bit. Now at first this wasn’t a problem, he lowered it to around 1s and it came back up to 1s14c – small drop, not so noticeable for us that sold it in normal amounts. But then he kept pushing it down. The lowest priced item was like 1s14c he put an offer of 40 of them for 1s10c, then 32 for 1s2c then 100 for 92c etc. which made other people undercutting it.

Why is it that you think this is just one person, and why do you think he’s specifically manipulating the small claw market? As far as I can tell, most crafting materials have experienced similar price movements over the past week. Everything took a hit after the last serious BLTC glitch, then prices were high for a few days, and now they’re falling.

Silk Scraps
Bolts of Gossamer
Large Claws
Vials of Blood

The list could continue, I just don’t feel like checking every crafting material. Pretty much everything I have checked has a similar curve. Do you suppose this one guy is trying to corner all the crafting mat markets? Or might it be more reasonable to suppose that supply and/or demand are changing in such a way as to result in lower prices?

I mentioned 1 item as to not go into 30 different items every time I wanna make an example.
This item is however also the one I know had this price for some time.
And one more thing I’m sure of is that it’s either a single person (representing his guild) or even 2-3 persons representing 2-3 guilds that have the same goal.

the thing is, no “normal” player would undercut the price by 10-20c. Example, lowed offer is 1s22c, his offer is 73 items for 1s02c. Then when no1¸undercuts him he does the following – random amount of items (lets say between 63 and 180) every 5 copper.

example:
1s22c 738
1s02c 73

his 73 is bougth off
1s22c 738
1s18c 63
1s12c 112
1s07c 81
1s01c 92

(last 3 offers come within seconds)
at the same time he is selling off the highest orders (so if the highest order was 1s12c when he started, he would sell claws to every order that is above 80c)

within 10 minutes, people stop buying his offers cause they see a price drop, new players just undercut his prices and the market is quasi stable at claws being at 95c offer and 75c order – to an average Joe it looks like an actual price.
What he does then is place a “block” – 3.5k claws at 95c and starts undercutting himself again.

withing 1h price is 70c with 3 blocks of 1.5-3k claws at certain thresholds and every order satisfied that is above 50c

That was day one.

Day 3: price is 50c – lowest ordered is 35c – here is where he is buying EVERYTHING.

he goes to sleep. prices goes up to 75c – but then he puts another “block” of 3.5k claws and another of 2k claws at 70c – he started pushing price down again.

Every day, at approximately same time (to me it is afternoon/night) he starts pushing the price down, every morning i wake up, prices start going up, but he doesn’t let them, cause a few blocks, as soon as he comes online, prices go down again, drastically, and kinda fast.

another thing I know for sure, he doesn’t farm them, he just manipulates the prices as low as he can, buys wast amounts of them, let’s the prices go up a bit (2-3 blocks, but everything people buy off from him comes to him with a profit) and then next day he lowers it again.

That’s clear manipulation. You can say people can’t afford them while leveling? They could., I’ve seen amounts of 500-1k of claws I would put on TP sold within seconds/minutes at 1.20-1.40s
I just don’t know what he is planning to do with them- keep the price here, or will he let it normalize on its own eventually!?

I have other items i deal in, it’s not like this is the only item i trade with and all my assets are in it and if price doesn’t go up I’m ruined. It’s just that this kind of manipulation sucks.

My advice would be to Anet not let put 1 item in 20 different offers by 20 different prices for 1 account. – You get to put it at 1 price. If you have milion to sell, you can, but only at a single price. That should make this kind of manipulation harder if not too boring for them.

Are you actually sure all that is happening? With all the items that have nearly identical curves for daily average? You claim there’s a daily cycle to it, but I don’t notice any such thing in the raw bid/ask data.

Also, why does this kind of manipulation suck? It keeps prices manageable for everyone who actually uses the item, and people trying to profit from selling it will just have to work a bit harder or deal more exclusively in other things.

Even if it really is manipulation, which I continue to doubt, I’m unwilling to say it “sucks” for anyone but other people trying to play the market, and even for them it doesn’t really suck all that badly.

Hippocampus.8470:

Are you actually sure all that is happening? With all the items that have nearly identical curves for daily average? You claim there’s a daily cycle to it, but I don’t notice any such thing in the raw bid/ask data.

Also, why does this kind of manipulation suck? It keeps prices manageable for everyone who actually uses the item, and people trying to profit from selling it will just have to work a bit harder or deal more exclusively in other things.

Even if it really is manipulation, which I continue to doubt, I’m unwilling to say it “sucks” for anyone but other people trying to play the market, and even for them it doesn’t really suck all that badly.

Well I have noticed some markets tanking as of recently, will they bounce back? Maybe. But to be honest, I think the biggest reason they are tanking is because people don’t understand there is a 10% additional sales tax involved and thus keep undercutting each other without realizing they are in fact losing money.

The problem with the economy is multi-fold and each small individual problem is affecting the entire equation in it’s own unique way. In order to fix the economy, you need to fix these small problems much like an algebra equation. You need to rid of the problem elements to get the desired equation you want.

with this mainly open market gw2 has a huge opportunity to get a deep economy (others than most mmorpg compatitives).
the role model have to be eve-online.
gw2 has a lot of gold shrink (high travel cost, repair, wvw, high prices for rare armor sets etc.). the high tax rate and other limits (low stacks are sold with higher priority than larger once) really distracting the option to play the market.

the argue, that trading is a minigame for lazy people, cant count as a real argue. the benefits from trading today are really behind other options to get gold (farming ressources in orrr with a thief gives you an annoying amount of gold/hour, which 99% of the traders cant get even close).

more market options are really a huge point making gw2 the best mmog out there. there so much ppl playing eve for market and enocomy, give them a goal here and dont let them join the rivals again.

to keep a gold shrink i really see an option for a buying tax instead of a selling tax. on this way you can still limit massive daytrading, but give some more space to breath.

Despite the massive price dumps on some fine crafting materials they are not really moving like they used to. While manipulations influence the sell orders, the demand part seemingly vanished a few days after the outage. Bots that were selling off massive stocks – since they could not continuously trickle in sell orders – might have had something to do with it (see ecto prices for this trend). However, power-crafting guides and terrible options for secondary use of crafting materials have most likely also contributed to this problem.

whiran.1473:

frOst.2198:

I’ll reiterate: The TP will never offer anyone any profit due to the design of the rest of the game.

And yet many people make a lot of profit by using the Trading Post. I think you are really trying to say that crafting won’t make a profit?

But, that too is incorrect. There are -some- items that are profitable to craft. The majority though are not.

Profits in games like this come solely from ‘having something other people can’t get.’ And that simply doesn’t exist.

No. Profits in economies are from providing goods that people need and / or want. There are many items in GW 2 that are wanted from crafting items to interesting looking models to good stat items.

The solution, imo, is to create a slew of rare recipes that are randomly found, at a low drop rate.

This is why I think you are really writing about crafting and not the trading post as such.

Yes, i was writing predominantly about crafting. You can completely ignore anything else on the TP because its essentially a translation of time to money, which is what I said at the end of my post.

To your first point about people ‘making a profit’ using the TP. ‘Technically’ yes..they are ‘making gold’. But in reality, they are making the same amount of money as everyone else based on the amount of time invested in the game. So therefore no ‘profits’ are truly being made through playing it.

The TP translates to a dynamic vendor. That is ALL it is. There is no ‘playing the TP’, especially back when the ‘tax’ was 15%.

Regarding your second point. You are just saying what i said in a different way. Your definition of ‘profits’ strongly differs from my own, as you can see in the above paragraph. Profits, for me, are when you actually come out ahead of what you put into the system.

Selling gossamer scraps that you find isn’t a profit. It just converts items you already own into the appropriate gold value…You already found that item…so it is NOT profit.

Profit would be investing 10 g in materials you bought from the TP to craft a RARE item that only you have found, then selling it on the TP for 15g. That IS profit.

If you look at it that way, go back and reread my post to get a true understanding of what I was trying to say.

frOst.2198:

Selling gossamer scraps that you find isn’t a profit. It just converts items you already own into the appropriate gold value…You already found that item…so it is NOT profit. ¹

Profit would be investing 10 g in materials you bought from the TP to craft a RARE item that only you have found, then selling it on the TP for 15g. That IS profit. ²

¹ This way of thinking boggles my mind. Yes, the items that you find in game have both a market value and an intrinsic vendor value. Whichever one is higher is the one you should aim to get (taking into account taxes etc.).

You seem to be saying something like “I already own it, thus I already own the value of it – so when I convert the item into gold, nothing was gained”. Ok, yes, in some philosophical sense. But you profited when you got the item in the first place.

Additionally, there are many items whose market value is greater than their vendor value (because of pressure from demand) – and without the TP in place to make transactions, you would not have had the opportunity to make that gold in the first place. The TP’s mere existence allows demand to affect the market value of items in a clear and accessible way.

² First off, you can already put 10g into the TP and get out 15g without any crafting or intermediate process involved. It’s simply a matter of knowledge, research, and sometimes luck.

Secondly, let’s assume this process existed where you can buy 10g worth of items, then click a button on your crafting UI, then sell the resulting item for 15g. The more that people find out about this, the more the resulting price is going to be driven down from 15g to 14g to 13g etc. In addition, the 10g worth of recipe items would be driven up to 11g, 12g, 13g etc. That is simply how this kind of market works. Whenever some profitable transaction exists, people jump on it until it is no longer profitable. When people say efficient markets, this is precisely what they mean – smoothing out the prices of items until there is no profitability left in the pure transaction.

frOst.2198:

The TP translates to a dynamic vendor. That is ALL it is. There is no ‘playing the TP’, especially back when the ‘tax’ was 15%.

Those of us who’ve made profits playing the TP would beg to differ.

Sure, not many are playing it by buying materials and selling the finished product for huge profits, since that tends to work poorly. But buying something at a low price and then selling that same thing later at a higher price looks a lot like profit to me, anyway. I don’t have an economics degree, though, so I guess I could be mistaken.

I have to say, it is fairly easy to make a profit on the TP, however if you are expecting fields of gold that is easy to get – then your dead wrong. The market usually hovers 5-10% profit per 250 stack for a lot of the items I deal in. Sometimes I can score a 15, 20 or 30% percent profit on a stack, but that is very rare. You only score maybe 5-10 silver profit per stack. It takes time to be frankly honest and farming is a lot faster than buying/selling on the TP unless the market is in busy mode.

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

I have to say, it is fairly easy to make a profit on the TP, however if you are expecting fields of gold that is easy to get – then your dead wrong. The market usually hovers 5-10% profit per 250 stack for a lot of the items I deal in. Sometimes I can score a 15, 20 or 30% percent profit on a stack, but that is very rare. You only score maybe 5-10 silver profit per stack. It takes time to be frankly honest and farming is a lot faster than buying/selling on the TP unless the market is in busy mode.

That depends on sell rate of a position, how you’re playing(slower with higher price faster with lower) and your overall money reserve. Especially by last. At some point, you’ll just forget about gathering.

Maxster.4521:

That depends on sell rate of a position, how you’re playing(slower with higher price faster with lower) and your overall money reserve. Especially by last. At some point, you’ll just forget about gathering.

true enough. Once you get sufficient gold reserve and enough goods moving around on the market – even now with my relatively low money supply (lost quite a bit of gold last week due to the rapid decline of some items within mere hours) – I don’t really focus on gathering that much. Then again, I don’t have very much time to play guild wars 2. I tend to login 5-6 times a day for 5-6 minutes, do buy orders, sell things, then log off. Been very busy lately and not able to play for long periods of time except on the weekends.

Though that spurs a question – are traders people who have less time to invest in the game and this is their solution to be involved in the game in an meaningful way? (rather than leveling, exploring, gathering, crafting etc).

THE ONLY THING you should be concerned about is Gold Sellers. If you implement an “overly free” market system that allows Gold Sellers to use bots and “buy low, sell high” tactics to corner market on popular/necessary items, then the price will skyrocket, and the only way progress is to buy gold from the very people ruining the economy.

Seen it happen in a previous MMO, in the sequel, they decided to combat this by having a “true free market” where there was no AH (everything was done through trading) and player equipment was almost completely depended on player crafting. Long story short, made the problem much worse.

I’m not saying the current econ is perfect, but I will say that the less people are allowed to “exploit” the market, the better.

Hippocampus.8470:

frOst.2198:

The TP translates to a dynamic vendor. That is ALL it is. There is no ‘playing the TP’, especially back when the ‘tax’ was 15%.

Those of us who’ve made profits playing the TP would beg to differ.

Sure, not many are playing it by buying materials and selling the finished product for huge profits, since that tends to work poorly. But buying something at a low price and then selling that same thing later at a higher price looks a lot like profit to me, anyway. I don’t have an economics degree, though, so I guess I could be mistaken.

the fact that it is dynamic, makes it so you can buy low sell high…of course. Thats is the only place there are profits..and i SAID that already. With the 15% tax it made it incredibly difficult to do however..because you needed to not only make up for the listing fee…but then sell the item for higher than 15% of what you purchased it for.

And im not tlaking about things like mystic conduits..thats clearly a money maker due to the fact that you can’t get it anymore. I invested everything i had to get as much of them as possible.

But normal items that can be found off monsters will NEVER yield a profit unless they are intentionally manipulated by forcing the price higher or lower with individual purchases.

Even then…it will eventually even out (and go down in price). There is no stopping the inflation. Even with the mystic conduits..butter is already back down to 3 copper.

In addition, you have things like the anti-farm code. I had the genius idea to buy discarded garments and salvage for gossamer. Made 20 silver in 1 minute. cool. I’ll do it again. Made 12 silver. Did it again, lost 12 silver. Did it again, lost 20 silver.

That goes without saying that everytime YOU luck out on a mystic forge craft, someone else misses.

Again, its all about equilibrium. You will not sustain any kind of profit, it will always go back to 0. Its just how this game is laid out.

Vaerah.4907:

Hippocampus.8470:

Vesuvias.9326:

However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game.

Yes, but would changing the ask/bid asymmetry actually change the fact that people who don’t understand economics can’t make lots of money through the BLTC?

No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power. Altering some parameter might delay this situation a bit, but that’s it.

This is complete nonsense in terms of a video game. You are completely disregarding the fact that "casuals’ and in fact, every player out there is constantly finding ‘more gold’ and constantly finding more items.

frOst.2198:

But normal items that can be found off monsters will NEVER yield a profit unless they are intentionally manipulated by forcing the price higher or lower with individual purchases.

No, sufficiently rare items from monsters yield a TC profit over what can be made from a vendor, because they are rare and high quality.

Even then…it will eventually even out (and go down in price). There is no stopping the inflation. Even with the mystic conduits..butter is already back down to 3 copper.

It’s back down to 3 copper because the mystic recipes don’t work any more.

Made 20 silver in 1 minute. cool. I’ll do it again. Made 12 silver. Did it again, lost 12 silver. Did it again, lost 20 silver.

That goes without saying that everytime YOU luck out on a mystic forge craft, someone else misses.

You missed because you kept trying even as the price went down (likely due to other people doing the same thing). Paying closer attention to prices would have avoided this. Don’t offer to buy or sell at prices that you know will lose you money, and you’ll lose less money!

You will not sustain any kind of profit, it will always go back to 0. Its just how this game is laid out.

Except that people who continue making money would continue to disagree with you.

Hippocampus.8470:

frOst.2198:

The TP translates to a dynamic vendor. That is ALL it is. There is no ‘playing the TP’, especially back when the ‘tax’ was 15%.

Those of us who’ve made profits playing the TP would beg to differ.

Sure, not many are playing it by buying materials and selling the finished product for huge profits, since that tends to work poorly. But buying something at a low price and then selling that same thing later at a higher price looks a lot like profit to me, anyway. I don’t have an economics degree, though, so I guess I could be mistaken.

I think he’s trying to talk about economic vs accounting profits. Economic profits are always zero in a competitive market, as they include both gold cost and time cost. The only way to get economic profits out of guild wars would be to lobby ArenaNet for a special recipe that only you can craft and is highly valuable, AND the value of that recipe must be greater than the effort you put into lobbying ArenaNet. Economists call this “rent seeking”. Perhaps there are a few other examples of rent seeking in game, but that’s the best one I can think of. You could even argue that people looking to change the TP are attempting to engage in rent seeking…

Accounting profits means the gold in your tab is going up. It doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost of your actions, and is probably the better measure in this case. Especially since we enjoy playing the game and don’t behave as if it is a job.

Though that spurs a question – are traders people who have less time to invest in the game and this is their solution to be involved in the game in an meaningful way? (rather than leveling, exploring, gathering, crafting etc).

I personally just hate grinding. And like to have some game money, without investing too much rl money, or time. So i just seek most profitable activity with less risk and spent time.
But i’m not “shark” and not motivated enough for constant trading and making gold. GW2 is a very easy game, in all aspects, so there is no real reason for me to make something like 1000 and more gold.