Guild Wars 2

EDIT: to see the short and sweet version, just scroll to the bottom of the second part of this post. c:

OK, OK, I’ve written a few times about the taxes in this game before, but after reading the thread about Storm increasing in price by 150g overnight, I have to wonder if it would be beneficial to reaching market equilibrium for the 5% tax to be removed- at least, on very expensive items.

The problem is that, of course, the items that always seem in most disequilibrium are the ones with the fewest supply. Let’s look at, for example, the precursor Zap:

Lowest sell: 437 g 99 s 99 c
Highest buy: 366 g 2 s 65 c
Difference: sell is 19.6% higher than buy, 71g 97s 34c

On the other hand, for an item like ectos (a highly demanded, supplied item nearing/in market equilibrium):

Lowest sell: 28 s 58 c
Highest buy: 28 s 57 c
Difference: Sells are .035% more than buy, difference of 1c.

Of course, this is only a single example of two completely different items, but that’s not the point. The point is that we can expect very rare, high-demand items to be completely out of market equilibrium, and thus experience huge fluctuations when a single variable changes (i.e. supply, as in the case of Storm), and that just makes it more difficult for both suppliers and buyers.

The big problem here, then, is when prices start rising and falling, and sellers place their items on prices that are either too low or too high. With the huge tax (5% = 10g for a 200g item- that’s almost all of the money that I have :P), when prices fluctuate and you find something like Zap being +70g higher than the highest buying price, it’s difficult to have to pay the 5% tax again and get double-whammied for placing such a super-expensive item on the market again.

In summary: the 5% tax makes it more difficult for buyers and sellers to find a single price that they both like and can agree on, because it limits how many times sellers want to remove their item from the market and reprice it.

The other issue: the taxing costs are incorporated into supply, which furthermore determines the price and quantities that suppliers are going to sell their items for. When you put an item (especially a weapon or armor) on the market, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to actually sell it. Why, then, would I place a rare piece of armor I just crafted onto the TP when I think that nobody will buy it? Sure, I could wait for a few months and hope that, somewhere along the line, it’ll sell, but that comes with another cost: now, I have to consider what I could have done with the money that I would gain by vendoring or salvaging that armor piece instead, and how I would have gained from that money in the period of time that it took me to sell the item on the TP.

Here’s an example. I have, in the past, been very fond of using the disequilibrium in dye markets to make money. For example, look at the price of Blood Dye:

Sell Price: 1 g 11 s 21 c
Buy Price: 85 s 30 c
Difference: 25s 91c

If you’re online and playing right now, I’d seriously suggest that you immediately place a buy order for Blood Dye at ~85s 31c right now.

Here’s what I’ll do. First, I’ll buy at about the price previously stated. Then, as soon as I get the item (generally, most sell listing prices will stay about static within the period of time between when I place my buy order and pick up the item), I’ll sell off the Blood Dye for 1g 11s 20c (or whatever). Total profit (assuming item sells): +9s.

Not a lot, but when you repeat this with thousands and thousands of items over and over again, always pumping in as much money as you can into the TP to get extra money later, it really adds up. Plus, from a theoretical standpoint, your money grows exponentially.

So, let’s say that, for every 1s I put into the TP, I get 10% extra money back once I complete my trade. Furthermore, let’s be extremely conservative: let’s say it takes a full hour for me to get this bonus back. From a mathematical standpoint, the equation that models this is

M = 1.1^n

Where M is the amount of money I have from that 1s, and n is the number of times that I buy and sell back for my bonus money.

Thus, after 50 trades, I have a little over 117s, or 1 g 17s.

So, assuming that it would take me months to sell an item like an armor on the TP, we now have to consider two things:

1. What if the item doesn’t sell?
2. What could I do with the money that I get by vendoring or salvaging within the amount of time it would take for me to sell my item?

Long story short: this gives people less incentive to sell on the Trading Post.

The way I see it, there are two main ways to fix this issue that do not involve ANet setting a price ceiling or automatically buying out items on the TP:

1. Reduce/remove the 5% tax.
Pros:
-Gives people more incentive to place items on the TP.
-Allows people that sell on the TP to adjust their prices more easily without being slammed by the 5% tax simply for trying to reprice, thus helping get to market equilibrium.
-If deflation starts to occur across the board, and price levels start to drop, then the deflation doesn’t increase by players taking items off of the market and placing them back on for lower prices, thereby reducing the supply of gold and causing further deflation, which causes people who invest in items like ectos to lose a lot of cash.
Cons:
-How much of a gold sink is this 5% tax? Is it enough to cause major inflation if we remove it? (I honestly don’t know this; to the extent of my knowledge, only ANet does)

2. Allow people to reprice on the TP
Pros:
-Allows people selling high-end items like Zap to reach market equilibrium more easily once the item is on the market, thus helping reach market equilibrium.
-Don’t suffer the possible inflation issue that you might have with solution #1.
Cons:
-Doesn’t do anything to fix the issue of people who don’t want to put items on the market in the first place because of the tax.
-Doesn’t fix the multiplicative deflation that we saw that reducing/decreasing the 5% tax does.

So… Thoughts?

Summary
5% tax makes it harder for items (esp. high-end, expensive items) to reach market equilibrium. Also gives an incentive not to put items on the TP, which reduces the benefits that people gain from using the TP.

Ways to fix: remove 5% tax or allow people to freely adjust prices on items that are on the TP already (each comes with their pros and cons).

The 5% listing fee has been discussed multiple times here.

Now I may be fortunate, I’ve never had anything take longer than a week to sell. The 5% fee has multiple purposes besides a gold sink including encouraging sellers to price their goods at a price that will entice buyers as oppose a price to bilk buyers of as much coin as possible.

As I said it’s been talked about multiple times and I wouldn’t be surprised if this thread gets merged into the one we had last week.

No 5% sale tax:

- Encourages people to use TP as personal bank! If you find it slow now wait for when there’s a trillion listings.
- Encourages people to babysitt their orders continuously.
- Discourages people to put their items for a reasonable price as there is no penalty to re-list the item.

Behellagh.1468:

The 5% listing fee has been discussed multiple times here.

Now I may be fortunate, I’ve never had anything take longer than a week to sell. The 5% fee has multiple purposes besides a gold sink including encouraging sellers to price their goods at a price that will entice buyers as oppose a price to bilk buyers of as much coin as possible.

As I said it’s been talked about multiple times and I wouldn’t be surprised if this thread gets merged into the one we had last week.

I realize that it’s been discussed here before, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any good economic arguments for it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this got merged into the other thread, I just wanted to voice my opinion here.

Ooshi.8607:

No 5% sale tax:

- Encourages people to use TP as personal bank! If you find it slow now wait for when there’s a trillion listings.
- Encourages people to babysitt their orders continuously.
- Discourages people to put their items for a reasonable price as there is no penalty to re-list the item.

-True! Which is why it would be better to reduce the tax instead. For example, perhaps we could limit the tax to a max of 1g (1g tax on items that are priced 20+g). After that 1g limit, perhaps ANet could set the tax so that it no longer goes up the higher you price an item, or that it goes up more slowly than 5% (maybe 2.5%, for example).
-Uh… So? Is there a problem you have with people babysitting their orders? If it’s their choice…
-Not true. First of all, by keeping an item on the TP for a ridiculous price (ex the chickpeas that were priced at +600g a while ago :P), you’re sacrificing the money that you could have otherwise made if you had straight-up sold the item in the first place (see the example I showed with dyes in the second part of my post). It’s not like every person is going to suddenly be selling Cinnamon at 100g a piece, and even if they were, nobody would buy it. Eventually, sellers would have to realize that they’re wasting valuable resources by overpricing an item.

Also, this post’s point wasn’t necessarily removing the 5% tax (see the title). This problem could be fixed still if we decreased the 5% tax, as I showed in my answer to your first point.

Arganthium.5638:

EDIT: to see the short and sweet version, just scroll to the bottom of the second part of this post. c:

---

OK, OK, I’ve written a few times about the taxes in this game before, but after reading the thread about Storm increasing in price by 150g overnight, I have to wonder if it would be beneficial to reaching market equilibrium for the 5% tax to be removed- at least, on very expensive items.

The problem is that, of course, the items that always seem in most disequilibrium are the ones with the fewest supply. Let’s look at, for example, the precursor Zap:

Lowest sell: 437 g 99 s 99 c
Highest buy: 366 g 2 s 65 c
Difference: sell is 19.6% higher than buy, 71g 97s 34c

On the other hand, for an item like ectos (a highly demanded, supplied item nearing/in market equilibrium):

Lowest sell: 28 s 58 c
Highest buy: 28 s 57 c
Difference: Sells are .035% more than buy, difference of 1c.

Of course, this is only a single example of two completely different items, but that’s not the point. The point is that we can expect very rare, high-demand items to be completely out of market equilibrium, and thus experience huge fluctuations when a single variable changes (i.e. supply, as in the case of Storm), and that just makes it more difficult for both suppliers and buyers.

The big problem here, then, is when prices start rising and falling, and sellers place their items on prices that are either too low or too high. With the huge tax (5% = 10g for a 200g item- that’s almost all of the money that I have :P), when prices fluctuate and you find something like Zap being +70g higher than the highest buying price, it’s difficult to have to pay the 5% tax again and get double-whammied for placing such a super-expensive item on the market again.

In summary: the 5% tax makes it more difficult for buyers and sellers to find a single price that they both like and can agree on, because it limits how many times sellers want to remove their item from the market and reprice it.

The other issue: the taxing costs are incorporated into supply, which furthermore determines the price and quantities that suppliers are going to sell their items for. When you put an item (especially a weapon or armor) on the market, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to actually sell it. Why, then, would I place a rare piece of armor I just crafted onto the TP when I think that nobody will buy it? Sure, I could wait for a few months and hope that, somewhere along the line, it’ll sell, but that comes with another cost: now, I have to consider what I could have done with the money that I would gain by vendoring or salvaging that armor piece instead, and how I would have gained from that money in the period of time that it took me to sell the item on the TP.

Here’s an example. I have, in the past, been very fond of using the disequilibrium in dye markets to make money. For example, look at the price of Blood Dye:

Sell Price: 1 g 11 s 21 c
Buy Price: 85 s 30 c
Difference: 25s 91c

If you’re online and playing right now, I’d seriously suggest that you immediately place a buy order for Blood Dye at ~85s 31c right now.

Here’s what I’ll do. First, I’ll buy at about the price previously stated. Then, as soon as I get the item (generally, most sell listing prices will stay about static within the period of time between when I place my buy order and pick up the item), I’ll sell off the Blood Dye for 1g 11s 20c (or whatever). Total profit (assuming item sells): +9s.

Not a lot, but when you repeat this with thousands and thousands of items over and over again, always pumping in as much money as you can into the TP to get extra money later, it really adds up. Plus, from a theoretical standpoint, your money grows exponentially.

So, let’s say that, for every 1s I put into the TP, I get 10% extra money back once I complete my trade. Furthermore, let’s be extremely conservative: let’s say it takes a full hour for me to get this bonus back. From a mathematical standpoint, the equation that models this is

M = 1.1^n

Where M is the amount of money I have from that 1s, and n is the number of times that I buy and sell back for my bonus money.

Thus, after 50 trades, I have a little over 117s, or 1 g 17s.

Removing tax in my opinion will cause even higher prices since now sellers are free to price however they please WITHOUT being taxed for it. I would put up storm for 1000g just for fun because I by no needs am obligated to sell it.
Putting a cap or reducing tax will not do anything. 1g is nothing for those who are putting a precursor up on the market. 5 % is little already.

Sorry for double posting but it wouldn’t let me edit my post.

I reckon the sale and sell price should have their taxes swapped. I.e the sell price should be 10 % tax while the sale tax should be 5 %. This way, people who sell their items will put up realistic prices so they don’t risk losing out on 10 % of their items total worth.

This change will benefit the market in general and there will be no change in the amount of tax as well.

Arganthium.5638:

#True! Which is why it would be better to reduce the tax instead. For example, perhaps we could limit the tax to a max of 1g (1g tax on items that are priced 20+g). After that 1g limit, perhaps ANet could set the tax so that it no longer goes up the higher you price an item, or that it goes up more slowly than 5% (maybe 2.5%, for example).
#Uh… So? Is there a problem you have with people babysitting their orders? If it’s their choice…
#Not true. First of all, by keeping an item on the TP for a ridiculous price (ex the chickpeas that were priced at +600g a while ago :P), you’re sacrificing the money that you could have otherwise made if you had straight-up sold the item in the first place (see the example I showed with dyes in the second part of my post). It’s not like every person is going to suddenly be selling Cinnamon at 100g a piece, and even if they were, nobody would buy it. Eventually, sellers would have to realize that they’re wasting valuable resources by overpricing an item.

1. This would lead to issues, as it causes items priced at or just below 20 gold, such as 18-20g to benefit unnaturally from bumping up the price to 21g+. For example, an item sold at 20 gold would net you 17 gold on sale, whereas an item sold for 21 gold would get you 18.9g, instead of 17.85. So you just increased your price by 1 gold, whereas your profits increased by 1.9 gold. Reduced taxing would cause similar issues, but to a lesser extent.
2. It would be a problem for people who spend most of their time trading.
3. In fact, since removing tax at a certain point causes higher prices to be more profitable, the prices of tons of items would gravitate up from the 15g region to 20g+.

So, to summarize:

• Removing taxes would cause people to use TP as a storage, thus resulting it in being unusable.
• Making the tax dynamic would cause prices to go up

Neither of these are desired results. So we’re left with the third option and that is all items getting a fixed tax. The only thing left to discuss is the amount of tax to make it reasonable.

Lafiel.9372:

Removing tax in my opinion will cause even higher prices since now sellers are free to price however they please WITHOUT being taxed for it. I would put up storm for 1000g just for fun because I by no needs am obligated to sell it.
Putting a cap or reducing tax will not do anything. 1g is nothing for those who are putting a precursor up on the market. 5 % is little already.

Yes, a 5% tax on a 1000g item is nothing- a mere 50g! /sarcasm

Look, I don’t know about you, but no matter how rich you are, 50g just to put something on the TP that may or may not ever sell is ridiculous.

And sure, you could put Storm for 1000g, but why would you? Why not just sell as soon as physically possible so that you can use the new money that you get to flip items on the TP, or spend part of it on investment (i.e. better gear, food, magic find for farming PvE)? Basically, you’re just wasting time that you could be using to expand your wallet exponentially. Maybe you didn’t read that part of my post, though.

If it causes higher prices, it would be because of inflation (which is something I stated in my original post), not because “LOL SELLERS CAN SET WHATEVER PRICES THEY WANT”. In the real world, do you see people selling toilet paper for $1,000,000 just cuz they can? No, of course not. People are intelligent enough to realize that the costs (in time, labor, or whatever) of taking an item off the shelf over and over again to reprice for the entertainment value is ridiculous, and just a loss of money. Eventually, they’ll have to realize that they’re losing money by wasting time.

Lafiel.9372:

1g is nothing for those who are putting a precursor up on the market. 5 % is little already.

I run an event and get a precursor that sells for 600g. 5% of 600g is 30g. I have about 11g, currently.

But then- what’s the guarantee that I’ll ever be able to sell the precursor in the first place? What happens if supply of the precursor starts to rise, and prices fall? Then I’ve put a precursor on the TP for 600g when it might only cost, say, 500g. So, according to you, I would then have to take my item off of the TP, and then put it back okitten00g. That’s another 25g tax. 55g total so far.

If there’s deflation occurring within the economy, too, then this causes a multiplicative effect on that deflation. Now, more money is taxed out of the system, decreasing the money supply and thus increasing deflation (which is good for players who have tons of pure money, but bad for players who invest in things like mats, dyes, armors, weapons, etc).

Oh, and by the way…

Lafiel.9372:

1g is nothing for those who are putting a precursor up on the market. 5 % is little already.

Lafiel.9372:

I would put up storm for 1000g just for fun because I by no needs am obligated to sell it.

If 5% is “nothing” why not just do that now?

Olba.5376:

1. This would lead to issues, as it causes items priced at or just below 20 gold, such as 18-20g to benefit unnaturally from bumping up the price to 21g+. For example, an item sold at 20 gold would net you 17 gold on sale, whereas an item sold for 21 gold would get you 18.9g, instead of 17.85. So you just increased your price by 1 gold, whereas your profits increased by 1.9 gold. Reduced taxing would cause similar issues, but to a lesser extent.
2. It would be a problem for people who spend most of their time trading.
3. In fact, since removing tax at a certain point causes higher prices to be more profitable, the prices of tons of items would gravitate up from the 15g region to 20g+.

So, to summarize:

• Removing taxes would cause people to use TP as a storage, thus resulting it in being unusable.
• Making the tax dynamic would cause prices to go up

Neither of these are desired results. So we’re left with the third option and that is all items getting a fixed tax. The only thing left to discuss is the amount of tax to make it reasonable.

Arganthium.5638:

…And sure, you could put Storm for 1000g, but why would you? Why not just sell as soon as physically possible so that you can use the new money that you get to flip items on the TP, or spend part of it on investment (i.e. better gear, food, magic find for farming PvE)? Basically, you’re just wasting time that you could be using to expand your wallet exponentially. Maybe you didn’t read that part of my post, though.

If it causes higher prices, it would be because of inflation (which is something I stated in my original post), not because “LOL SELLERS CAN SET WHATEVER PRICES THEY WANT”. In the real world, do you see people selling toilet paper for $1,000,000 just cuz they can? No, of course not. People are intelligent enough to realize that the costs (in time, labor, or whatever) of taking an item off the shelf over and over again to reprice for the entertainment value is ridiculous, and just a loss of money. Eventually, they’ll have to realize that they’re losing money by wasting time.

-Again- it’s their choice. It also helps people reach market equilibrium, as previously stated. This is what happens in the real world, y’know.
-Read Reply to 1.

Arganthium.5638:

-Again- it’s their choice. It also helps people reach market equilibrium, as previously stated. This is what happens in the real world, y’know.
-Read Reply to 1.

The thing is, if you put in any cap for taxing, such as the suggested 20g, the “equilibrium” that the items that are currently priced within the cap region will be artificial.

Yes, everything that is priced higher than the cap and has significant supply would indeed reach an equilibrium. In turn, the items that are priced below but near the cap would be stuck with an artificial bump in prices and items with high prices and low supply would be even more volatile than they are right now.

And the cap being artificial is kinda bad, because it means that ANet literally has to pick the “perfect” zone for the cap. And since they should expect prices just below the cap to rise, picking the gap is kinda like ANet saying “Yeah, we think certain items in this price range were not priced high enough”. And that’s bad, really, really bad.

On the other hand, 100% dynamic pricing, e.g. “higher means less taxes” would result in prices hiking up, which is obviously bad.

So again, we’re stuck with everything having the same tax, which is the situation we’re already in.

Not sure what you mean by an “artificial” cap.

That’s not an artificial equilibrium, that’s just an equilibrium, brought about by the supply and demand curves.
Prices would only be volatile if supply and demand were volatile.

Here would be the criterion for the cap:
-By capping taxes, any items that are placed above the cap cannot have a significant effect on inflation by reducing the tax.
-Cap is low enough to benefit people by allowing them to be flexible with prices, but high enough that it doesn’t remove the gold sink.

I believe ANet could very well possess the data required to determine what cap fits these criteria.

Again, capping taxes will not increase prices. Again, look at my real-world example, which shows that not having a tax on putting an item on the market does not make toilet paper cost $1,000,000.

Arganthium.5638:

That’s not an artificial equilibrium, that’s just an equilibrium, brought about by the supply and demand curves.

Artificial in the sense that by capping taxes, the items currently priced just below the cap would increase. But not because of supply or demand, but because it would benefit the sellers. That’s an artificial price hike, caused by “gods” who interfered with the system.

Prices would only be volatile if supply and demand were volatile.

Supply and demand for every single high priced item is volatile.

-By capping taxes, any items that are placed above the cap cannot have a significant effect on inflation by reducing the tax.
-Cap is low enough to benefit people by allowing them to be flexible with prices, but high enough that it doesn’t remove the gold sink.

I don’t quite get you. What’s your goal with this? First I thought that you wanted for it to be easier to sell high-priced items, but now you want the cap to be “low enough”. So is it stable prices that you want? Because prices will stabilize naturally if there is enough supply.

And low supply for certain items is expected. It’s even desired. It’s called rarity and with it comes certain social prestige that people want.

Again, capping taxes will not increase prices. Again, look at my real-world example, which shows that not having a tax on putting an item on the market does not make toilet paper cost $1,000,000.

Then again in real world you don’t get toilet paper every time you do your homework or finish an assignment nor do you get paid in toilet paper for doing anything productive. And in real world, we do have taxes, and we have even worse measures taken when prices are out of control.

I don’t want to quote your entire post but let me try answer you as clearly as I can since there seems to be something that you aren’t figuring out right.

First statement I want you to make clear in your head is, There are difference in real life and virtual. You can’t always compare both. Most logical people in the world don’t spend thousands of their own money to grief others while in game, that happens more than necessary.

Firstly in my post I said if there was NO tax I would put a storm as an example up for 1000g and I wouldn’t really care if it sold because i wouldn’t be taxed for it. (then you went on to give an example of how TAX does give an incentive (which is my point) for people to sell i.e. 1000g item has 50g tax (who would put up an item except the obscenely rich just for fun)

Now onto the point, if tax didn’t exist, people would put up items at obscene prices just so they can use it as one of the following things:

Put it up there just for fun
Use it as an unofficial bank
Manipulate the prices of low supply items.

Sure, some people will put up an item with the intention of selling it while many others may not. The biggest issue is if you have no tax fee. There will an undercut war going on constantly. People will always be undercutting each other by 1c at a time on the sale post and it will be highly unproductive. Imagine yourself never being able to sell an item because you’re constantly being undercut by someone else who is 1c cheaper thanks to there being no 5 % tax to minimise that from happening to you. I assure you, if there was no tax, there would be so much undercut going on that the people who actually get to sell their items are the guys who spend 24/7 on TP watching every trade and undercutting it by 1c at a time.

Now you can say that what if I apply my 1g concept, that way tax fee still acts to control it. Oh ho no it doesn’t. As I will go on to say, 1g is nothing in comparison to a precursor price. I will gladly pay that 1g just to undercut someone else selling it for slightly lower. I’m losing out on 1g in order to make a profit of 598.99 minus trading fee. Thus again another undercut war where the most active guy wins.

Now onto a situation where someone picks up a precursor worth 600g but cant sell because he only has 11g. Let me outline to you that is a USER problem.

If the person doesn’t have the money to pay the initial trading post cost, then he will have to gather it up in order to post it up. It is by no means Anet or the trading posts fault if the player cannot sum up the amount of money to make the sale. 30g isn’t even that hard to earn. 1 (2 weeks at most) for most average players.

As I have also mentioned, that is why tax gives an incentive of putting up realistically sell able prices. I.E. if this user wanted to make sure he made the sale without losing out on his tax, he would hae to put it lower. Like 550g? if he puts it at 600g and the price drops, he can either, wait it out for the price to rise again OR take it out and fork out the tax again. That is what keeps the price from fluctuating excessively. People actually have CONSEQUENCE for putting up unrealistic sale prices.

1g is nothing compared to a precursor worth 600g.

I didn’t say 5 % was nothing. I said it was little already. I would up it to 10 % maybe, just to bring the prices down to a more realistic degree.

“If it causes higher prices, it would be because of inflation (which is something I stated in my original post), not because “LOL SELLERS CAN SET WHATEVER PRICES THEY WANT”. In the real world, do you see people selling toilet paper for $1,000,000 just cuz they can? No, of course not. People are intelligent enough to realize that the costs (in time, labor, or whatever) of taking an item off the shelf over and over again to reprice for the entertainment value is ridiculous, and just a loss of money. Eventually, they’ll have to realize that they’re losing money by wasting time.”

Lastly, to quote you here. You can’t compare the real world with the virtual world. In the virtual world, no matter what you do, you’re not taking any real risk towards your real money i.e it’s not a real money auction house. It’s a game. Some people will set whatever the price they want with the above reasons I have mentioned further above. Do you remember when the first twilight was put on TP? I think it was at about 5000 gold. Do you think anyone bought it? Even now, the precursors are all put at somewhere between 2-4k g. I doubt many of them sell but people just put it up there.

I think the arguments I would’ve made have been more or less made already.

I’ll add a short comment, though: I support anything that creates a gold sink. 5% of the entire traded supply game-wide is enormous.

I’m aware people think that concepts that ‘destroy’ gold are making them poorer. Taxes, listing fees, and even more laughably, the mystic forge (people complain when gambles fail, even though the choice to operate the forge was voluntary).

The reality of the situation is that without exits for gold, it just accumulates, which is not a healthy cycle for any game economy. The 5% listing fee is a big, big exit. Unless something compensates for it upon removal, it needs to be there.

on the other hand, it challenges you to actually list the item at a fair price so that a potential buyer will buy it.
too high = not a fair price = you’ll have to eat that 5% listing fee and relist it = you should of listed it lower to begin with = your fault.
I’m only surprised that buy orders don’t have listing fees.

Mystic.5934:

I’m only surprised that buy orders don’t have listing fees.

I’m not. Buyers have the gold. You want them to buy stuff from other players to siphon some of that gold into the void. But you don’t want to remind them of that so you take the sales fee in transit to the seller. This way on the surface it’s no different to the buyer than buying from a vendor. Pay money get stuff.