Guild Wars 2

People keep spamming sale offers on chat. This often leads to scamming on one, or presumably in some cases, both sides, and is annoying to everyone else. A commonly offered reason for this is because the listing fee for an item on the TP is a fraction of the final sale price, so if you get a really good item, one you know sells regularly for over 100 gold, the listing fee might be well more than you own.

Why can’t this listing fee be deferred until there is a sale?

There can be limitations to this, obviously, perhaps it would only apply to items that regularly sell at very high prices, so that people couldn’t just list copper ore at 50 gold a pop for no apparent reason, but I think it would be very useful for anything that sells for more than, say, ten gold.

Just make it so that it asks for a listing fee, but if you don’t have it then it asks if you’d like to defer the listing fee until after the purchase. If you say “yes,” then that’s what ti does, you may still need to make a nominal fixed payment of maybe a few silver or something, but the bulk of the listing fee would not need to be paid until the item sells, in which case it would just be deducted from the profits, or if you wanted to retrieve the item unsold, in which case you’d have to pay at least a portion of the original fee to recover it (although certainly not the tens of gold you’d originally need to).

Ohoni.6057:

if you wanted to retrieve the item unsold, in which case you’d have to pay at least a portion of the original fee to recover it (although certainly not the tens of gold you’d originally need to).

This is a concern. The listing fee encourages sellers to set reasonable prices, because they stand to lose a lot of money if they are forced to repeatedly relist an item at successively lower prices.

If you allow sellers to defer the fee, and reclaim/relist items without actually paying the bulk of the fee, then we’ll see prices rise on some high-demand items (e.g. precursors). We’ll probably also see increased load/stress on the Trading Post system itself, as people will be more likely to “babysit” their sell orders and make frequent changes.

I’m not saying “any change that benefits sellers is automatically bad.” I’m just trying to point out that your suggestions could have some serious unintended consequences.

This is a concern. The listing fee encourages sellers to set reasonable prices, because they stand to lose a lot of money if they are forced to repeatedly relist an item at successively lower prices.

If you allow sellers to defer the fee, and reclaim/relist items without actually paying the bulk of the fee, then we’ll see prices rise on some high-demand items (e.g. precursors). We’ll probably also see increased load/stress on the Trading Post system itself, as people will be more likely to “babysit” their sell orders and make frequent changes.

There have to be ways of fixing that though. For one thing, the system could “eat” a significant fee. I mean, I think that a 10 gold fee on trying to relist a 200 gold item is a bit ridiculously punitive. Ideally the system would involve a sliding scale that would gradually reduce the listing fee to as low as 0.5% on a 100 gold item (50s), while raising the “closing fee” at the same rate so that you’d still end up paying 15% total on the transaction. Maybe even raise the closing fee at a faster rate, to act as a sort of “high end tax.”

If relisting the item cost 50s, or even 10s each time, then it would stabilize reasonably quickly, because you wouldn’t want to relist at anything less than that large a difference, or relist it too often. If you relisted a 200 gold item ten times, then even if the fee were only 50s each time that would mean you were out 5g before you’d even sold the thing, on top of whatever the closing fee would end up being.

There’s no reason for punishing people for making a genuine pricing error or not being fully aware of the vagaries of the market.

If excessive re-listing were an issue, they could employ the same time-based caps that they use in other aspects of the game. Maybe have “DR” for trading. Your first trade of the day would have the minimal level of fee, but each successive trade raises the level of the fee. It could even cycle on a longer basis, so that if you make several relistings in a single day then it might take weeks to cool back down to the minimal level.

That feature in and of itself might be a good thing to have, to limit the effectiveness of high-volume traders in the game. If TP-players suddenly faced doubled or even trippled TP fees after making too many trades within a given period of time, it might discourage such activities.

Finally, if absolutely necessary to the health of the game, they could require full payment of the existing listing fee to retrieve the item. So if you’re a cash poor newb level 80 who lucked into a Dawn but with only a dozen or so gold to your name, your only options would be to save up for weeks or more of cash grinding to afford a 25 gold listing fee, OR trust the lawless world of chatbox trading where someone could take your item and run, OR sell off the item at less than half the gold rate, losing out on more money than you may otherwise earn in half a year.

Instead, even if it does require full eventual payment, you list the item at around 550 or so, paying nothing to do that up front, but if the item doesn’t sell at 550, and he wants to take his chances at 530, then he’d have to earn that 25 gold and pay it to the TP to get the sword back. If it does sell though, he’d just have the full 15% taken before he collects the profits.

Ohoni.6057:

People keep spamming sale offers on chat. This often leads to scamming on one, or presumably in some cases, both sides, and is annoying to everyone else. A commonly offered reason for this is because the listing fee for an item on the TP is a fraction of the final sale price, so if you get a really good item, one you know sells regularly for over 100 gold, the listing fee might be well more than you own.

So store the item until you have the money to list it . If you get scammed using the mail system its no ones fault but your own .

So store the item until you have the money to list it . If you get scammed using the mail system its no ones fault but your own .

That’s not a solution, that’s how it currently works, and how it currently works is not well enough.