Guild Wars 2

On BLTC the tab “Sell on Trading Post” provides potential sellers with “Meet highest buyer” and “Match lowest seller” price points / options.

Prospective sellers are to use that information to decide on if and how to make their sale.

On deciding on whether to opt for the immediate liquidity benefits and no listing fee risk of the “Meet highest buyer” option, or to instead go for a higher return but uncertain time frame and fee risk of listing at a higher price, a seller needs more than just these two price points to make an informed choice.

They also need to know the other prices above “Match lowest seller” that are currently on the market.

So as a seller in order to make an informed decision, you currently have to first check things as a buyer (“Buy more at trading post” right click on the item you want to sell). The information provided here gives you a clearer picture of the market with which to make a proper decision and you can then also spot highest buyers attempts at convincing you to take their offer.

Typically a highest buyer buying at large volumes will currently list a few units at just above his highest buyer offer so as to make them the lowest seller and encourage as many people as possible to take the immediate sale option since they are ignorant that the next lowest seller is significantly higher.

The profiteering comes from this ignorance. This ignorance is a result of the BLTC design that requires a seller to 1st search the market as a buyer to become fully informed.

It would be an easy fix to change this and in the process make the market more efficient and (and maybe even reduce some BLTC server load from those who currently feel forced to search the market twice for every sale).

Additionally, information regarding the volume of sales over given time periods would be very useful.

Yarr, when I see Meet Lowest Seller, I check how many are listed. If there are a few of an item that won’t sell a lot, I’ll list it a few copper or silvers higher. If there are a ton of an item that won’t sell a lot, I’ll it a few copper or silvers lower. If there are a an item that will sell but the price won’t fluctuate, I’ll just list with the bulk. But I almost always research the other sellers when I sell.

There may be no “listing fee risk,” but there are still listing and sales fees on every transaction, which aren’t even clearly noted. I’d really love to know where this “projected profit” number comes from. Am I to believe the game is looking at my original cost for the items? If not, it’s pure BS.

IIRC, “Projected Profit” is just the amount you would receive on the sale, minus the 10% cut the TP takes. It’s what you will actually get once you go to pick up your payment. So it isn’t a “profit” in the normal sense of the word, since it doesn’t factor in how you acquired the item. It also doesn’t account for the listing fee. But the listing fee is posted on the same screen as the “Projected Profit” so you can subtract the first from the second and figure out how much you’re making on the sale (again, disregarding any cost you may have incurred getting the item in the first place).

“Projected Profit” should really be renamed to “Projected Return” or something similar to avoid this sort of confusion.

Since Eve Online’s market is similar enough to the trading post that you could accuse ANET of copying it, lets compare how much data each gives:
– Here is the market details window in Eve. It shows all orders for that region. Ignore all the columns apart from price and quantity, as location doesn’t matter in GW2 and orders don’t expire.
Now lets blank out the bits you don’t see at various points in the trading post.
– This is what you see on the buy now screen.
– This is what you see when placing a buy order.
– This is what you see on the selling screen.

So if you want the full amount of information to sell an item, you need to look the item up on both the buy screens. Sometimes you’ll want to look at historical trends, which means pulling up gw2spidy. Eve Online has the historical data graphed in game. Even worse, GW2spidy only tracks the orders and can’t tell the difference between filled and canceled orders, while the data on Eve’s graph are calculated from the sales that took place.
Those green bars at the bottom ?
Those are the number of trades that happened for that item. The trading post doesn’t show us any data on trading volume.

There may be no “listing fee risk,” but there are still listing and sales fees on every transaction, which aren’t even clearly noted. I’d really love to know where this “projected profit” number comes from. Am I to believe the game is looking at my original cost for the items? If not, it’s pure BS.

Projected profit is the selling price you set, minus the 10% listing fee. But completely ignoring the 5% listing fee.

This would be really convenient. I bop back and forth between the buy and sell screens all the time, and I have to admit, I’d love it if they simply combined the two screens and gave us all the information on that one screen.