(edited by Daenji.5280)
1c Custom Offer Problem
Buyers can no longer bid below vendor price, they just haven’t cleared out previously existing unfulfillable orders.
And why should buyers be required to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit? If sellers want to make a profit, shouldn’t it be their own responsibility to avoid selling too low?
Most of the greens and nearly all of the blues that sit there with tons of sell listings 1c above vendor price don’t sell very quickly at all. If they raised the minimum, they’d move even more slowly, with the added cost of a higher listing fee for the higher price. Now you’d have an unsellable item you paid 5.75% of vendor price to list, instead of one you only paid 5% of vendor price to list.
Well the problem with these 1c bids is they lower the overall average listing price of the item.
Something should be done about this…?
Keep trying, or die trying. Never give up, never forgive. We will Desolate. – Desolation
Not A Message.
Not A Message.
Well the problem with these 1c bids is they lower the overall average listing price of the item.
How does it do that? What possible effect do unfulfillable orders have on prices 10x higher?
It’s not like anyone actually compares supply and demand directly before placing an order, they just look at where the price is currently.
You’re not arguing with me over this. The minimum listing price directly indicates the intent to require buyers to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit. Actually, it is worse than that. You would be making a profit by selling the item at any price that is higher than the listing fee plus the taxes because the item you are selling did not require (yes, you can buy it off the TP first or buy crafting mats and this would constitute that) any overhead. You can simply loot something in the world and sell it on the TP. So the intent is not only for the seller to make a profit. It is for the seller to make more of a profit than they would make selling it to a vendor instead. It is ultimately ONLY the seller’s option to not profit and you’re right that it is their responsibility to avoid a loss, not the buyer’s. I don’t disagree with this and would understand if the system were designed to encourage sales at a loss. It isn’t. I believe there is a very good reason why and it seems like you probably missed this. Any item that appears in the world and is looted by a player and then sold does one of two things depending on where it is sold. If it sold to a player then the item remains spawned. If it is sold to a vendor then it despawns after the player has elected not to buy it back. This reduces the overall availability of items of all types if selling to a vendor is the most frequent decision. So there are two things that this system has done to discourage the loss of useful items to vendor sales. One is the existence and designation of junk loot. They have even included a button for you to sell these all at once during the transaction. It is my strong belief that this is the only kind of loot that is being encouraged as a vendor sale transaction. Loot is also and will always be the main source of item transactions in the world. It is the fundamental step before you have crafting or player trades. So you notice that the game does not even give you the option to sell junk loot on the TP. Pretty much anything else but not that. On the vendor you’re encouraged to sell that and must make a conscious decision to sell anything else. Then you go to the TP and what do you get? There is a control in place to prevent listing an item at a loss versus a vendor sale. Hmmm. Why would that be there? It’s because they want it to be desirable to sell even white items on the TP. I do this. I sell everything from white up. This means that items that I loot stay in the world. They go to someone who has a use for them. From the seller’s perspective this is the more desirable course of action because you make more from selling to a player that wants the item than you do to a vendor who just eats it. From a buyer’s perspective this is also desirable because the system keeps supply higher and thereby balances out the high potential price any seller could ask for the item on the TP. That is why buyers should be and are required to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit. It lets sellers profit, it keeps the average price of items lower by increasing item supply, and it keeps useful items in the world for players to experience and enjoy. Win-win-win.
I am grateful to be informed that the 1c offer can no longer be made. Thank you. Now we simply need to have all of those 1c offers cleared out and have the minimum listing and offer process reflect including the fee/taxes and the system will have been corrected.
Most of the greens and nearly all of the blues that sit there with tons of sell listings 1c above vendor price don’t sell very quickly at all. If they raised the minimum, they’d move even more slowly, with the added cost of a higher listing fee for the higher price. Now you’d have an unsellable item you paid 5.75% of vendor price to list, instead of one you only paid 5% of vendor price to list.
This is worth a special address because it is an intelligent question. My answer is that this is the moment where it does become the seller’s responsibility not to lose money. A seller should be aware of the value of the object being listed as a practical value. In other words whether someone will buy the item at any price. If you are consistently listing items that don’t sell even though you’re listing the item at the absolute minimum price then the item is undesirable and you’re trying to move a bad product. This is not something you can fix by moving the sales numbers around. What you should do is address a complaint to the GW2 team that the item has not sold at the minimum price and this probably indicates that it is not a practically valuable item. There are really a lot of reasons why the team should take note of this. It could be a problem with the individual item or it could be a problem with a stat the item possesses not being seen as worthwhile. It definitely is something that they need to know about because they’ve spawned something into the game that is not seen as useful by any significant number of players and does not practically differ from junk loot.
Actually, I am going to go ahead and add this on as a suggestion. To avoid having unmovable items on the TP, which constitutes an item which does not tend to sell even at the minimum listing, the TP should have some kind of tracking which calls for item review after significant failure. So that a minimum listing with no sale notifies the team after a certain amount of time and can be looked at to evaluate its desirability and usefulness.
The minimum listing price directly indicates the intent to require buyers to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit.
No, all it indicates to me is the intent to prevent people from buying low on the TP and then selling to vendors for profit (though admittedly that wouldn’t justify prohibiting vendor price bids, just the ones below vendor price).
I believe there is a very good reason why and it seems like you probably missed this. Any item that appears in the world and is looted by a player and then sold does one of two things depending on where it is sold. If it sold to a player then the item remains spawned. If it is sold to a vendor then it despawns after the player has elected not to buy it back. This reduces the overall availability of items of all types if selling to a vendor is the most frequent decision. So there are two things that this system has done to discourage the loss of useful items to vendor sales.
Why would they want to discourage that? These items keep popping into the world (through crafting and loot), so presumably they think it’s a good idea for at least some fraction of them to promptly disappear back out of the world, whether that’s through salvaging, Mystic Forging, or selling to a vendor. If too many pile up in the world, they become truly worthless, and no one will buy them on the TP for any price. We’d just see more and more items with ever-increasing piles of seller listings at whatever the minimum permitted price is.
From a buyer’s perspective this is also desirable because the system keeps supply higher and thereby balances out the high potential price any seller could ask for the item on the TP. That is why buyers should be and are required to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit. It lets sellers profit, it keeps the average price of items lower by increasing item supply, and it keeps useful items in the world for players to experience and enjoy. Win-win-win.
No. The hard minimum is not a win for buyers. Keeping supply high and prices low is only a win if those prices are actually allowed to reach equilibrium. They never will when there’s a hard minimum in place. (And again, I think the reason for the minimum isn’t to guarantee seller profit, but rather to prohibit buyer profit by immediately vending anything they get on TP below vendor price.)
Actually, I am going to go ahead and add this on as a suggestion. To avoid having unmovable items on the TP, which constitutes an item which does not tend to sell even at the minimum listing, the TP should have some kind of tracking which calls for item review after significant failure. So that a minimum listing with no sale notifies the team after a certain amount of time and can be looked at to evaluate its desirability and usefulness.
None of those items are useless. They just aren’t useful enough for people to pay more than the absolute minimum for them. And that will always be the case unless they get rid of mid-level whites, blues, and greens entirely. Which seems like an incredibly stupid thing to do.
It recently occurred to me that the reason why people make a minimal bid on an item is that it basically lets them “bookmark” it so they can use their transactions tab to avoid searching for the same items repeatedly.
The minimum listing price directly indicates the intent to require buyers to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit.
No, all it indicates to me is the intent to prevent people from buying low on the TP and then selling to vendors for profit (though admittedly that wouldn’t justify prohibiting vendor price bids, just the ones below vendor price).
Why would they care about that?
It recently occurred to me that the reason why people make a minimal bid on an item is that it basically lets them “bookmark” it so they can use their transactions tab to avoid searching for the same items repeatedly.
Ah, not a bad idea. Still, I don’t think it’s “the” reason, though some people probably do this.
The minimum listing price directly indicates the intent to require buyers to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit.
No, all it indicates to me is the intent to prevent people from buying low on the TP and then selling to vendors for profit (though admittedly that wouldn’t justify prohibiting vendor price bids, just the ones below vendor price).
Why would they care about that?
It’s not something I would have assumed they’d want ahead of time, but it certainly makes more sense than the other claim.
They want to give sellers a profit? Really? So they just, what, forgot that they charge 15% in taxes and fees?
For all we know, the true explanation may in fact be neither of the two.
Well sure. The general point still remains, though, which is that there’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that ANet must want sellers to profit, because there are tons of alternative explanations, many of which make quite a bit more sense than that one.
No, all it indicates to me is the intent to prevent people from buying low on the TP and then selling to vendors for profit (though admittedly that wouldn’t justify prohibiting vendor price bids, just the ones below vendor price).
You went a step too far beyond the origin of the event. The buyer doesn’t occur first. The seller occurs first. There has to be a reason for a seller to want to sell on the TP. You’d have to count on morons wanting to sell on the TP AND tending to sell low to be concerned with this. I don’t believe a significant number of players would do this if they can more easily profit from a vendor sale. After all, the vendors are right there and you even don’t have to travel to pick up your vendor profit.
Why would they want to discourage that? These items keep popping into the world (through crafting and loot), so presumably they think it’s a good idea for at least some fraction of them to promptly disappear back out of the world, whether that’s through salvaging, Mystic Forging, or selling to a vendor. If too many pile up in the world, they become truly worthless, and no one will buy them on the TP for any price. We’d just see more and more items with ever-increasing piles of seller listings at whatever the minimum permitted price is.
Crafting, salvage, and the mystic forge make it so that items do leave the world in meaningful ways. Unnecessary vendor sales simply trash useful items. The system allows for it but clearly is not designed to encourage it. If you take the idea that an exotic item is spawned, which should have value to someone, and a scenario results that makes it in any way desirable to prefer to sell that item to a vendor then something is wrong with the game economy. It’s better to allow for or even directly cause overstocking of those items than manage the economy in a way that encourages selling them to a vendor. The example scales down as you reduce toward white items and crosses a line when you hit gray ones. Once you hit gray the developers don’t and should not care. The items actually are intended to be junk and sold to vendors.
Items are only worthless if no one buys them at all. They aren’t worthless because there are a lot of them. They’re not worthless because their price is low. They become worthless when they become useless. This is an issue to take up with the devs over the existence of an item, or its present status, given the community’s need for that item. Having a minimum listing price as suggested guarantees that they are worth at least some profit if they are also useful and therefore desirable to buy.
No. The hard minimum is not a win for buyers. Keeping supply high and prices low is only a win if those prices are actually allowed to reach equilibrium. They never will when there’s a hard minimum in place. (And again, I think the reason for the minimum isn’t to guarantee seller profit, but rather to prohibit buyer profit by immediately vending anything they get on TP below vendor price.)
I’d still like to know where you’d get a mass of players who would list the items that would be bought up and mass sold for this exploitive profit to the vendors. Step 1 would be that a player loots the item. Step 2 would be that the player decides to sell that item on the TP instead of at a vendor. Step 3 would be that the player stupidly decides to list the item for less on the TP than they could get from selling to a vendor. Step 4 would be that another player would be watching the TP to catch this kitten decision and take advantage of it. Step 5 would be the exploitive player getting to do this multiple times. Step 6 would be that the original seller/s would never wise up.
This issue also isn’t entirely about keeping general supply high. It’s about keeping a supply of useful items higher. This is also being balanced by the fact that the more useful items are also more rare. White items are plentiful. Orange are not. The more useful the item, the more the system should encourage it to be listed with the TP rather than sold to a vendor. To encourage this action there must be some incentive and a minimum listing that constitutes at least a small profit is a decent incentive.
I’m more inclined to think that the desirable performance is rather aimed at producing a price range for TP sales. A higher supply will help push average sale prices toward the lower end of that range. This also leads me to believe that items which are more rare are therefore considered appropriate for sale at a higher price. This tends to favor the acquisition of orange items by higher level characters and scales down. These characters will also appropriately tend to have greater funds to purchase those items. This should be considered a win for buyers for two reasons. The item will tend to be affordable at a certain level range and the item will tend to be available for purchase.
This is all actually somewhat beside the point of my topic though because we actually have the minimum listing price now. My topic was aimed at helping the GW2 team notice there was something happening with these custom offers and the calculation of their minimum listing that didn’t fit. If you wish to argue for the removal of the hard minimum I would suggest you start your own topic to advocate that. I doubt your thoughts will get the right amount of attention while mixed with the other comments in this thread.
None of those items are useless. They just aren’t useful enough for people to pay more than the absolute minimum for them. And that will always be the case unless they get rid of mid-level whites, blues, and greens entirely. Which seems like an incredibly stupid thing to do.
I’m confused. You seem to have directed this comment as if you were describing specific items. Were you continuing to discuss items you described as being slow to sell from your earlier posts? I was not. I was advocating a function to be added to their tracking of items in the game. If they already have something like this that would be great. I’m only saying I can see its value to the team for evaluating whether an item needs to be updated or replaced and for watching data relative to stat usage and character builds.
I’m also not sure how things are working on your server but I am doing pretty well selling white items at 2x, 3x, or even 6x profit. Blue and green items don’t sell as well but I don’t feel like I can’t sell them for profit. A few items don’t sell well because of stat combos that few players would want. I’m imaging most of the whites, the blues, and some of the greens I sell are being salvaged. There is no way that many players are visiting the TP to buy these for outfitting their characters unless you’re talking about the lowest levels. So I think the TP is benefitting a lot from crafting in the game. It will be a thing to monitor whether such items do continue to be useful for crafting. I also don’t think I would panic if they only sold for the minimum listing price. I would become concerned when they don’t sell or the demand is very low. Then its time to ask the team to look at how useful these items are. An item no one wants either shouldn’t be in the game or should be designated as junk loot.
You seem to have directed this comment as if you were describing specific items. Were you continuing to discuss items you described as being slow to sell from your earlier posts? I was not. I was advocating a function to be added to their tracking of items in the game. If they already have something like this that would be great. I’m only saying I can see its value to the team for evaluating whether an item needs to be updated or replaced and for watching data relative to stat usage and character builds.
It doesn’t matter whether I had any specific items in mind, because the argument works equally for all slow-selling items that have a number of very similar “competing” items, between which most buyers will always just choose the cheapest.
I’m also not sure how things are working on your server
All servers use the same TP.
Blue and green items don’t sell as well but I don’t feel like I can’t sell them for profit. A few items don’t sell well because of stat combos that few players would want. I’m imaging most of the whites, the blues, and some of the greens I sell are being salvaged.
Yeah, low-level whites sell for a lot because people use them to make low-level crafting mats that still sell for quite a bit. The same is likely true of any low-level blue or green that is also selling above vendor price.
I would become concerned when they don’t sell or the demand is very low. Then its time to ask the team to look at how useful these items are. An item no one wants either shouldn’t be in the game or should be designated as junk loot.
As I said (but apparently in a confusing way?) an individual item may not be “junk” and yet will not move at the minimum allowed price so long as there’s a large enough supply of similarly useful items to keep prices low.
But to take a more specific example, consider pretty much all low-level consumables. These do not sell quickly, even at the absolute minimum possible price. Because everyone makes far more of them than they will ever need, while leveling up their crafting. Would you seriously argue that therefore low-level consumables are “junk” that should be turned grey and only sold to vendors? Could it be instead that the suppliers are severely overestimating its value and as a result are putting far too many on the TP for sale?
Hmmm, okay, your comment does appear to involve something I had not calculated. You’re saying that demand could be low, supply could be very high, the price could be at the absolute minimum, and simply due to the large numbers of items the one that you are listing would take a long time to sell?
(I’ll ask this first and continue in another comment.)
I had not been aware that all servers use the same TP. This does make it a little more confusing for me and I apologize that I don’t have the right point of reference to easily understand your concern. I’d like to but what you’re saying doesn’t have much in common with my experience. Not only low level whites sell decently well for me. Rather than exchange a lot more confusing comments on it I will go look at listings for these and try to analyze the trends to see what you’re talking about.
Would you seriously argue that therefore low-level consumables are “junk” that should be turned grey and only sold to vendors? Could it be instead that the suppliers are severely overestimating its value and as a result are putting far too many on the TP for sale?
I am not sure that I would not be arguing something like this. Although I would likely actually do something else to solve it. For example, you’re citing byproducts of crafting here. Rather than turn them gray it occurs to me that you could also make a barter system to enable trading a certain number of them to crafting vendors in exchange for crafting items that would normally require karma. This is one idea anyway. You could also add a function to the TP similar to what I suggested before and via this means you could add a column to the listing process that informs the seller of estimated projected listing time. I am actually already doing this before I decide to sell something. If I think the item will sit on the TP for an unreasonably long time before it sells then I don’t list it. This is rare but I do calculate it. Adding something that notifies the seller of this consideration would make the process a little simpler for players who don’t like to think that much. The last sentence I’ve quoted actually shows a point of alignment in our thinking. I don’t consider someone who would do this to be either very clever or very aware. This sort of thing was what I had directed my earlier comments about when it is the seller’s responsibility to be smart. I do still think though that having a massive number of these items is not a problem in itself. The problem is really the low comparative usefulness of the items. This remains something for the dev team to review and determine whether those items should be replaced or another way to use them should be added. The one thing you obviously can’t easily do is lower the number of them because crafting is what is generating them. I also don’t think you can really tell people that you can’t list that now. You could provide them a tool that advises they probably shouldn’t list it now but you can’t disallow it.
Okay, here is one example…
Currently catalogued on the TP is the item Sword, level 80, rarity Basic. The TP reports in the initial catalogue window and the initial sales window that 0 of this item are available. This is not true. Selecting the “buy instantly” option reveals that 1 of these is available. It is presently listed at a price of 3s 38c. The vendor price of this item is 35c. Should the seller actually sell that item to some kitten they will make a nice profit. No kitten has yet offered to be this seller’s victim. In fact, most kittens may not even be aware the seller wants to victimize them because I doubt that many people use the “buy instantly” link to check the original statement of 0 available listed in the catalogue. In contrast, 122 kittens have offered to accommodate any seller of this item by making custom offers ranging from 36c to 38c. My projection for the sales rate of this item given those factors is “slow”. Given these factors I would vendor the item 100% of the time. I would not consider this much of a loss to anyone because you can still get the equivalent crafting supplies somewhere else and the item is of literally no significant value as a weapon. If this situation for this item continued for an extended period of time, let’s say one month, I would consider the item to function in the world most consistently as vendor trash. So now you encounter the problem that the item is marked as white. Attempting to place a bid of 1c on the item returns the comment “Unit price must be higher than vendor value”. This disallows the bid and my bid is not allowed again until I place a bid that is at least 36c. 38 of the kittens ordering this item placed that bid. 59 placed a bid of 37c. The remaining 25 were generous enough to bid 38c. What I am noticing is that the statement “Unit price must be higher than vendor value” is consistent with the thought that selling an item on the TP must be more worthwhile than selling the same item to a vendor. Maybe I am wrong about that being the actual reason for this feature but I am not wrong that the statement would be consistent with this thought. The actual listing process is not though because, as you said, there are also taxes to consider. When you say, “They want to give sellers a profit? Really? So they just, what, forgot that they charge 15% in taxes and fees?” I must concede that this conflicts with the intention I believe that they have. It does not make sense and it was half of my original post recommending that a fix be implemented to correct this inconsistency. I am giving ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt that they actually did forget that they charge X% in taxes and fees. If I do not do this then I must believe that someone at ArenaNet thinks it is funny to have the system work this way, enjoys hurting dumber players, and this situation constitutes some kind of developer on player griefing. Which is not something I think will be tolerated if this discussion is noticed.
Frankly, the main reason I believe ArenaNet must want sellers to make a profit is because if they don’t I consider this an antagonistic attitude toward their players. You can think of this less as a wish and more as a demand. I won’t be very happy if I figure out they are trying to make their players look like fools and setting them up to make a mistake in the game market. I don’t consider this funny or clever. Therefore I will prefer to think for the present that the problems with the listing price and the custom offer price constitute an accidental oversight. My reaction will not be positive if the management of the situation ends up convincing me otherwise.
Hmmm, okay, your comment does appear to involve something I had not calculated. You’re saying that demand could be low, supply could be very high, the price could be at the absolute minimum, and simply due to the large numbers of items the one that you are listing would take a long time to sell?
Yes, exactly. A lot of mid-level stuff has hundreds or a few thousand sell orders sitting at vendor+1c. At the rate I suspect many of those things sell, stuff has the potential to sit there for quite some time, simply because all those other sell listings have to be gotten through first.
I agree that an “estimated time to sell” notification would be nice, but would be hard to compute if you aren’t posting an order at a price that has been stable for awhile. More useful, I think, would simply be to know how many have sold in the past hour or day or week (depending on the item). Because knowing that 100,000 copper ore have sold in the past hour doesn’t mean your listing behind 600,000 others at 16c will sell in anything like 6 hours, if suddenly people start posting at 15c because copper is in higher supply than demand and has been slowly falling in price for awhile now. So I’d prefer to just be told the bare fact that 100,000 have sold in the past hour and be left to make my own estimates of how long my listing will take to sell.
I think your alternative is also intelligent. I’m not certain the projection estimate would be that much harder to implement but I do think your thought is a good idea. I do also prefer, as you do, to make my own estimates and would continue to do so even if projections were offered to me.
(edited by Daenji.5280)
It’s not harder to implement from a programming standpoint. It’s just a lot harder to ensure that it tells you reliable information. The number bought/sold in a given amount of time is unlikely to change very quickly, whereas the price at which those transactions happen can go up or down by 1c in an instant. Sure, if you put up your listing while that price is the lowest (or make your custom bid while that’s the highest price), it’ll probably swing back to that point before it goes away forever, but there’s no real way to predict how long that would take.
Making the system more dynamic and tying it to the market’s condition at that moment is a better predictor than relying only on history from past sales. I updated my original topic to actually recommend both of these strategies because I think people can use both. They would both fail to predict actual market results some of the time but you can’t avoid that. When someone invents a way to accurately predict the future 100% of the time we’ll have to look at migrating that to economics. Until then you just have to use the smartest strategies available to you. This is, unfortunately, an issue of what would be the best presently available system rather than perfecting the system.
The main reason I am favoring the prediction system, despite its imperfections in action, is because the process for listing and buying right now uses the basis for such a notice. You get dynamic reports on what the cheapest current listing is or the highest current offer. This depends on the accuracy of those reports but if those reports aren’t accurate I am not inclined to believe a sales log suddenly would be. What would be nice would be to get this data reported to you when you’re making a listing something in the form of X% chance to sell by X hour on X date. I’m personally predicting this will be wrong a certain percentage of the time but it would be valuable for anyone not inclined to do the math to produce the estimate. It’s at least better than just crossing your fingers and hoping to be right.
If this prediction system will be included I think it should also be shown on the Transactions tab in the TP and report updates to the prediction at reasonable intervals. I’d extend this to include item sales history when the item is selected and its information is expanded.