Guild Wars 2

I was lucky enough to get a Mad Moon shield drop in the Mad King’s dungeon yesterday, and checked its price on the TP to see if I should equip or sell it as I’m currently a sword/warhorn warrior for melee range combat. Initially the price of the shield was around 50g, which suggested that it should be sold, but now I’ve noticed that undercutting has reduced its price to around 10g.

This is Madness!

The cost of manufacturing the shield is over 100g currently, yet people seem obsessed with selling their shield as quickly as possible, EVEN THOUGH IT WILL NOT BE OBTAINABLE VIA ANY OTHER MEANS THAN CRAFTING IN LESS THAN A WEEK! I understand that people will want to sell their ill gotten gains quickly, and so undercutting will be a factor, but the amount by which people undercut is also insane! Some drops in price were by as much as 10g in a single undercut.

Now, had I not seen this level of silliness with undercutting on other items in the game, I’d have assumed that someone was forcing the price down to buy a large stock of Halloween weapons to sell later on at a huge markup (completely missing the issue of supply vs demand with expensive gear)…

…However I think that what is far more likely, is that the Mad King himself has somehow influenced these otherwise logical and reasonable sellers to commit heinous crimes against the economy. I can only hope that in the coming weeks and months the Mad King’s hold wains, and I’m able to sell my random 10 minutes of effort chest drop for a disgustingly large profit.

Now imagine a bunch of guys in suits doing that with other people’s money, and you have Wall Street.

I love your last line… LOL

If that’s the price then it must be that it’s not worth that much anymore because the drop rate must be high enough for lots of people to obtain the shield.

So if the drop rate is too low, people complain the stuff is too expensive on the TP. If the drop rate is too high, people complain that the prices drop on the TP.

Seriously. They should have made most of this halloween stuff account bound and also less rare in general so that:
1) people wouldn’t whine so much about the drop rates
2) the RNG wouln’t make people just rich or poor based on luck
3) the people who actually did the events right here and now, would have their stuff and have it on their account for ever…

Now it’s just if you have the gold (by RNG luck, exploiting or buying your way into it with real money) you can have everything from this Halloween event even if you weren’t here in the first place.

The TP is good, but not for event items. My opinion is that all these skins and all should be account bound, same goes for the “Pact” weapons. I think it’s lame you can buy all those weapons without even completing the game. The skin doesn’t mean a thing except for it’s “gold value” when you aproach stuff this way.

I think they made an huge mistake not saying everything they were going to add and what you could get from doing events. It’s kitten somehow because some people actually spent hundreds crafting one of these rare skins to now find them for 10g+.

Imo, since they screwed it with the exploit from lab chests they went one step ahead and made it even worse giving a new chest. They should have added these drops from the beggining instead of making people craft them first to find the big surprise days later.

I also believe dropped items should be only account/soulbound where as crafted ones should be tradeable. Overall…mediocre event filled with exploits and crap.

Ethos – As I wrote, undercutting is normal and to be expected especially when dealing with the Mad King’s eager disciples. However, no sane person would ever undercut their nearest competitor by more than 1 copper, as the effect of undercutting someone by 1c and 100g is the same as far as jumping the queue of sellers is concerned. Any undercutting beyond 1c has no favourable effect on the seller, in fact it is detrimental to their profits!

Thus I once again surmise that the Mad King himself is influencing these poor budding business people to make excruciatingly poor business decisions.

Either that or someone at ArenaNet is having a laugh.

Sleepy – Someone from ArenaNet mentioned that people should bare in mind that once the event is over, crafting will be the only way to make the weapons… However, as you said, they screwed up by letting people craft them before the event was over under the impression that that would be the best way to get them.

I get the overall impression that ArenaNet are fairly savage when it comes to the economy in this game, and players should in general be extremely wary when making large purchases or decisions that cost a lot of effort, as they may be screwing themselves out of a fortune.

nosleepdemon- Don’t you think they should say these items will be earned through other ways other than crafting during the event? It was quite stupid not saying anything and making people waste hundreds of gold.

I don’t think having these items dropped was intented at all at first, but it ended with them dropping probably due to all the complains from BLC and all that. It also shows poor event management not making these drops soulbound, it just encourages farming the chests over and over.
It stopped being a matter of having a skin by the time these items dropped from lab chests…at that time it became a matter of making gold and buying/reselling them.

I completely agree Sleepy. The game does need its gold sinks, but this combined with encouraging players to purchase keys with gems to manufacture the Mad King’s chests when those chests have such a terrible drop rate makes me extremely hesitant to perform any task requiring a large investment of effort before someone else has tested the water.

They’re cheap because of perception.

When someone gets one, they’re afraid the market is being flooded by them and they just have to get rid of it before the price plummets.

Buyers are also wary because they’ve seen items start out high and drop in price already. How do I know that? Because that’s exactly what I did. They think “I’ll wait and see what the price looks like before I get one”. This reduces demand. This is the big one right here honestly. The item just needs buyers. We know people WANT the halloween weapons. Enough people want them to clear the TP 200 times over. But when people feel confident they can get a better deal, they won’t buy (yet).

Long story short, just let 2 days go by (or 3, whenever the event is over). The price is going to skyrocket. The main reason won’t even be that new ones aren’t dropping. The main reason will be that people KNOW that, and think “oh god gotta buy it now before it shoots way up in price!”. Of course when many people do that, they drive the price up anyway.

It probably won’t even take the actual end of the event. People will start buying them up more on the last day, because they know the price is about to go up by a lot.

Well for me I sold my Mad moon for 15G last night because:

1) I got it on my second run with no effort and another guildy running with me got in on the 5th and last run of the night so the supply is clearly high and I wanted to sell while the profit was decent still.

2) I’ve never enjoyed the playstyle of using a shield on my warrior (main).

3) I don’t care for the skin at all.

I looked at the Mad Moon shield as a sinking ship that I needed to price aggressively to sell given the fast price dropping due to the factors listed above I did not want to be immediately undercut before I sold and have to pay a listing fee and then re-list and try to sell for what I could have posted it for originally and sold immediately.

If you want to sell a Halloween drop, I’d ignore the undercutting, and suggest putting it up for sale based on what you ‘want’ for it, rather than based on the current price. As long as you have patience and can live without instant gratification, the limited nature means that eventually your price will be the lowest.

Minion of Vey – I think it’s fitting that such hysteria should exist around the Mad King’s event, even to the point of undercutting by several gold to give the illusion of “my my, isn’t this deal something” (that should be read in a Morgan Freeman voice by the way).

A few weeks ago I foolishly crafted an extremely ugly exotic sabre in hopes of selling it for a tidy 30 silver profit. I didn’t check supply vs demand thoroughly enough and within minutes was undercut by another seller. This continued for several days until the sword was no longer worth the materials to craft it, the sellers list window telling a sordid tale of me toos a page long. Eventually I took it off the TP and used it myself as an excuse to switch to a different build.

I’m quite fascinated with the Trading Post in this game, it’s so simple in its portrayal of economics yet so informative of human behaviour, my true opinion of which is neatly hidden under the guise of The Mad King Did It, so as to not get covered in cat fur.

Grim – Kitty

Alls I gots to stay dude is: Supply and Demand….

Hold on to the shield, sell it after the event. Infact, buy out shields that hit a low enough price and resell later if you feel so strongly that the worth is 100g. Given that there isn’t really a gear ladder in GW2, I can foresee those shields still being worth good money in 6 months. On top of that, they look cool and people will want them just for the look, so hold on to them.

Account.9832:

Now imagine a bunch of guys in suits doing that with other people’s money, and you have Wall Street.

Well said, sir.

I think the most important thing to get out of this is to be as close as possible to a rational player (in the strict economics sense) as you can.

There will be under-cutters (those that undercut by 1c) and then there will be under-cutters ( those that shoot themselves in the foot). There’s a spectrum in between the two, but I like to think of these as the extremes. Most of the time, if you can, you want to be the former. If you can’t be the former, it’s generally a red flag that it’s time to invest in another market.

It all comes down to doing your homework and although you generally never want to hold an item too long, there’s a price to pay if you consistently move without planning. Given the Mad Moon Shield example, I can definitely see how the prices will start to skyrocket* simply because you stated that the cost of manufacturing is well over 100G, OP. As soon as the Halloween event is over, the majority of options to obtain such a piece will close off and if I’m correct, will leave the mystic forge as the last and final option, thus pushing up prices to match the cost of manufacturing.

The reason I say this is because items have some sort of gold sink whether hard/soft. For example, any bag created for the market will have a hard gold sink. You need some sort of rune of holding to even create a bag. Thus, no bag created for the market will ever be priced below the cost of the rune of holding at a minimum with the exception of bags obtained outside of crafting. For example, no 20 slot bag will ever be priced below 10G simply because the cost of a superior rune of holding (only obtainable through npc) is 10G.

*I don’t want to cause speculation but given the factors involved, I think it’s fair what I said

Well, it’s true that the price of these items will eventually reach their cost of crafting, but it will take a quite a while…but no doubt they will be more expensive than their current price is. Hell, within a few years maybe they are sort of “unique” and be worth much more than their crafting cost because probably there aren’t halloween mats anymore unless they use the same on the next halloweens.

Their value will obviously be high with the time even if they are the most ugly skins because people just want the “rare” not the beautiful and over used one.
I still think they should have made looted halloween exotics account bound on pick up.