Guild Wars 2

The price of all tier 6 crafting materials and of ectoplasm spiked on january 17th:

• Vial of Powerful Blood

• Vicious Claw

• Armored Scale

• Globs of ectoplasm

And etc. This wasn’t due to an update that reduced the drop rate of those items, or added new recipes requiring them. It was a reply for ArenaNet’s statement about the updates the game would receive through the semester, as market manipulators thought said updates would increase the demand for fine crafting materials, and began artificially increasing prices.

ArenaNet should ban market manipulators. Not only they are effectively exploiting the game (by making it worse to everyone else), but they are a hole in the system designed by DR. While DR prevents grinders from quickly making a fortune and thus inflating prices, the TP manipulation not only allows people to quckly make a fortune (and thus inflate prices), but it also relies on artificially inflating prices in order to make profits. In some ways, it’s even worse than grind.

Really? You don’t think it has anything to do with, oh say the banning of bots wich decreased the supply substantially?

Meh, kitten it, lets call it market manipulation instead! HUSSAH FOR THE MANIPULATORS!

Sigh.

So anyone buying an item from the TP and relisting it for a higher price should be banned? Because you seem to be regarding speculators as “market manipulators” who are making a fortune at the expense of others.

People who make money by buying low and selling high aren’t ripping other players off. The players who sell to them were willing to sell at that low price, and the buyers are willing to buy at that higher price, and the speculator/flipper has seen that there is a sufficient difference between these two prices to make a profit if they are willing to risk their money and time to obtain it. (Speculators are working on a low price now versus higher price later basis)

@Astraea … your point is well stated, however, I don’t believe it’s that simple. If a speculator / manipulator wants to push a price up…they will take the one or two items that you and I are not willing to sell at their “low” buying price, and hold the supply…

There are many times that I see the listings for an item that seems should be in plentiful supply via the TP, yet isn’t. A commonly used item.

Now that I see that I am not the only one that believes this is going on, I will take more notes and come back here to offer a more concrete set of Cases for study.

By the way, note that selling list isn’t a clear indicator of how many items are exactly available on the market. Spidy doesn’t tell you how many goods are actually exchanged, so you have no idea how many buy orders were fulfilled at all.

So when you say “there’s only 1 dusk available” you don’t know that. It is very possible that other Dusks are available and have been sold to the buy orders.

What it comes down to, is that nobody is forcing anybody to use the TP. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. That’s assuming you don’t mind grinding for forever to get a legendary and being at the mercy of the RNG. If you don’t use the TP it can’t affect you.

I rarely use TP so it does not really affect me. I just sell whatever I find, and if I can’t sell them then I just throw it into the forge or sell it to the vendors. Only times I do buy is when I am trying to craft certain items.

Eras, you’re late to the party. The spike was due to the ban. Case closed.

What Vol said. And some of the things OP said just flout any economic sense…

If you are not enjoying trading wars 2, then why do you complain about better traders doing amazing things? It’s trade wars 2, after all.

It was the bot ban, the price of them has risen to the REAL market value rather than the bot produced value because bots farm a ridiculous amount of them and flood the market. So instead of being irrational and making wild accusations you might want to actually be informed before making nonsense posts.

Some of these changes indeed were affected by bot bans, but some have nothing to bot bans, but are purely a result of market manipulation.

A much more disconcerting manipulation that is going on right now is the pushing up of the price on crystalline dust. This mat is used for anything and everything by everyone on a daily basis. Went up in price by 300 per cent over the last 3 weeks, with constant manipulation and pushing upwards. The so blatantly obvious pushing is well reflected in the buy orders. You’ll see buy orders that are not 1, 2 or 10 copper over the last bidder, but sometimes 50 copper. And not 1 unit ordered, not 10, not even 100 but 2500. This is a very easy and guaranteed tactic to have people overbid you. Once that happens, and the price stagnates at a higher level, the price is pushed even further up using the same tactic. It’s constantly being pushed up, with large gaps in the buy order prices which shows you it’s completely artificial. On the buy end, they’ll just buy up units until the price reaches a certain price level range, namely, the level that they want it to be. Also, manipulation has been made much easier now that the triforge amulet can be upgrade to ascended, which means everybody and their mother wants one (750 crystalline dust per amulet).

The t6 mats manipulation are peanuts compared to what’s going on with crystalline dust market.

Buttercup.5871:

The t6 mats manipulation are peanuts compared to what’s going on with crystalline dust market.

Newsflash: Crystalline Dust is a T6 Mat

Buttercup.5871:

The [other] t6 mats manipulation are peanuts compared to what’s going on with crystalline dust market.

I’m very aware of that mate, but thanks. Inserted a word in my previous text to fix it for you.

Funny, as I was writing the latter message, the price of crystalline dust was pushed up from 11 to 12 silver within a matter of minutes, while the supply of crystalline dust increased by more than 10 percent.

Mind you, however is controlling this market, has some real ecomonic leverage. The most current consumables that sell by the thousands every hour are Superior Sharpening Stone, Master Maintenance Oil and – although sold much less – Master Tuning Crystal. Control the Crystalline Dust, and you can control these markets as well.

People, supply and demand. As soon as people stop paying those prices, they will inevitably drop.

Buttercup.5871:

Some of these changes indeed were affected by bot bans, but some have nothing to bot bans, but are purely a result of market manipulation.

A much more disconcerting manipulation that is going on right now is the pushing up of the price on crystalline dust. This mat is used for anything and everything by everyone on a daily basis. Went up in price by 300 per cent over the last 3 weeks, with constant manipulation and pushing upwards. The so blatantly obvious pushing is well reflected in the buy orders. You’ll see buy orders that are not 1, 2 or 10 copper over the last bidder, but sometimes 50 copper. And not 1 unit ordered, not 10, not even 100 but 2500. This is a very easy and guaranteed tactic to have people overbid you. Once that happens, and the price stagnates at a higher level, the price is pushed even further up using the same tactic. It’s constantly being pushed up, with large gaps in the buy order prices which shows you it’s completely artificial. On the buy end, they’ll just buy up units until the price reaches a certain price level range, namely, the level that they want it to be. Also, manipulation has been made much easier now that the triforge amulet can be upgrade to ascended, which means everybody and their mother wants one (750 crystalline dust per amulet).

The t6 mats manipulation are peanuts compared to what’s going on with crystalline dust market.

People won’t be more inclined to buy the triforge since you can get better ascended stuff anyway.

@ Frotee: 90 % of the supply was bought up 2 weeks ago. And the demand will remain high because everyone needs it for everything on a daily basis.

For a game with some 800k players all connected to the same TP, the current average supply of 2k to 3k dusts is so low, it’s beyond silly.

The trend of people crying “market manipulation” on everything that is too expensive for them is becoming a bit boring.

As vol has stated, there was a ban wave.
I think Anet should ban all people who play the TP minigame (market manipulatior for sure all of them!), the people who grind dungeons and the people who PvP. I don’t have a reason to ban the NPCs as well…yet.

Sure. Let’s all not look at numbers anymore. Or logic, for that matter.

I think some people here can’t tell the difference between market manipulators and speculators.

Market manipulators buy up all the supply so that they can force a higher price. I.e. precursors

Market speculators buy up supply because they think it’ll go up. i.e. globs & t6

Why do you think the price of piles of putrid essence went over 1s before the update? People were speculating, with the new changes in Orr, that there would be a new use for it.

But by all means, keep blaming market speculators and manipulators for any or all problems you have with the economy. Apparently that’s an easy thing to do because it’s the easy way out.

I didn’t just say the price constantly goes up like all other mats where speculators are involved. I’m saying the price goes up constantly by illogically large increments, pushed by utterly unrealistically large buy orders. Some of these buy orders are equal in number to the entire market supply.

Buttercup.5871:

Sure. Let’s all not look at numbers anymore. Or logic, for that matter.

I didn’t mean you but the OP

I like the consistency with which people ignore other influences… like the fact that GW2’s economy is relatively young, and there is a daily increase in the amount of available wealth in the system (I’d love to see hard numbers on that, but it’s safe to assume).

The youth of the economy suggests that we will continue to see basic inflationary increases in the cost of “staple” items, probably at higher rates than you might think, until the volume of wealth generated daily represents a smaller portion of the total wealth in the system. Somebody in another thread rightly pointed out that at launch, a few gold was heaps… now 100g is not nearly so far out of reach.

There is of course some additional volatility caused by speculators, and the odd “manipulator” (which is really just monopolized speculation usually, I’d guess), but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that and it’s something that anybody can do anyway with the right capital.

The bigger concerns are false supply generated by bots, but as long as ANet continues to stay on top of that (and hopefully improve prevention), I’d hope the supply volumes would level off to a more appropriate value. The bad news is that prices will go up, but the good news is that with less volume, it’s a lot easier for regular players to impact the market.

Vol.5241:

I think some people here can’t tell the difference between market manipulators and speculators.

Market manipulators buy up all the supply so that they can force a higher price. I.e. precursors

Market speculators buy up supply because they think it’ll go up. i.e. globs & t6

I did both at the same time. What am I? A manculator? A spenipulator?

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

True, especially given that flippers show up as buy and sell orders and aren’t really indicative of demand.

But since we don’t have access to actual trade data they are the best indicator we have of supply and an indicator of demand/

TooBz.3065:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

True, but since we don’t have access to actual trade data they are an indicator of supply and an indicator of demand.

I really don’t think they are.

From one of John Smith’s earlier comments we have evidence that thousands of lodestones trade hands every day, often without touching the appearant “Supply” at all. Highest by 1c orders get placed and filled constantly without ever registering on trackers like GWSpidy.

All we ever see are the deals that are FAILING to happen.

Or by way of another example, I have over 1,000 mithril ore (nothing to a trader, but a tidy pile to a harvester). Due to the risk mechanics on the seller side, I’m unlikely to ever post more than 50 ore at a time. You see my 50 supply, but that’s less than 5% of the actuall supply waiting to be sold.

So if you’re seeing less than 5% of the supply, and a negligable percentage of the sales, how much of the data we think we have about supply and demand is nothing more than the illusion of presumption?

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

Yeah and you control the supply. It’s funny isn’t it.

Gasoline.2570:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

Yeah and you control the supply. It’s funny isn’t it.

No, they control the potential supply. People still have to mine/harvest/open crap up to get the items.

Erasculio.2914:

The price of all tier 6 crafting materials and of ectoplasm spiked on january 17th

Hmmm …. a sudden shift in the market prizes in the wake of ANet releasing their agenda for the next quarterly period …

Nah, this cannot be related. Who has ever heard of a market that jumps the gun or is acting unexpected just because of some news item. This must clearly be the vile deeds of the scary market-manipulating boogie man, there is no other explanation.

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

John, as you are well aware, usually the person putting down the buy order IS the main seller of said product.

If a wealthy seller of a high-paced market product – who heavily invested in this product, and thus wants his product to sell high – puts down a buy order of 2500 units of the SAME product (that he himself is selling), the current market system will heavily awards him for his manipulation. Why? Because the market is not going for his buy order to get filled; people need this product, and they need it today. So, they overbid. The person placing the ludicrous buy order knows this, it was his intention for this to happen. So the price is pushed up. Again, and again, and again. At utterly illogical increments (why would a person drive up the buy order price by large increments, if that person was genuinely interested in buying a product at the lowest possible price?). Ultimately, when the price is REALLY high, the market becomes slower (because hey, it’s a darn big investment for the average player to buy this product in quantities above 10 units). This is actually a good thing for the seller. He can kick back and relax, sell his product and start investing in the next product to manipulate.

Supply = sell offer
Demand = buy offer

Yes, in practice these are two different things. Yet both figures are often controlled by the same person(s). If the seller is rich enough, practice has learned that there IS no risk for the seller to put down ludicrous buy offers to drive up the price.

This leads me to the next proposal, geared at protecting markets vulnerable to large scale market manipulation:

Per account, you can only place X gold in buy offers without paying taxes.
Beyond that, you start paying taxes.

I suspect X should probably be somewhere in the range of 150g or lower, but that’s just guestimating. It’s certainly not a perfect system, but I would argue it is – at the very least – better than what we have right now.

Buttercup.5871:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

John, as you are well aware, usually the person putting down the buy order IS the main seller of said product.

You know, if you want to propose something, you probably shouldn’t base it on a huge assumption like this.

You are right. Please replace the word “usually” with “often”.

As mentioned, this was due to a big ban wave. It would be near impossible to manipulate all Tier 6 items as well as ectoplasms, do you realize how many thousands of gold that would cost?

Yes, I am. But let me bounce the question back to you. Are you aware that there are at least a dozen of players that have over 5 to 10k gold? And that some have even come on this very forum with the idea of forming a market guild (minimum wealth requirement 250g), which is no doubt active by now?

I spent some time (and real world dollars) exploring manipulating Mystic Coins- er, I mean accelerating the pace at which they reached a sensible equilibrium.

The experience told me a lot about how ridiculously deep supply runs versus what is visible in the TP window.

Thank you John. That’s either very comforting or very discomforting. At least now I know that I know nothing

Buttercup.5871:

You are right. Please replace the word “usually” with “often”.

Still an assumption~

When you assume, you make a butt out of you and me.

Buttercup.5871:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

John, as you are well aware, usually the person putting down the buy order IS the main seller of said product.

If a wealthy seller of a high-paced market product – who heavily invested in this product, and thus wants his product to sell high – puts down a buy order of 2500 units of the SAME product (that he himself is selling), the current market system will heavily awards him for his manipulation. Why? Because the market is not going for his buy order to get filled; people need this product, and they need it today. So, they overbid. The person placing the ludicrous buy order knows this, it was his intention for this to happen. So the price is pushed up. Again, and again, and again. At utterly illogical increments (why would a person drive up the buy order price by large increments, if that person was genuinely interested in buying a product at the lowest possible price?). Ultimately, when the price is REALLY high, the market becomes slower (because hey, it’s a darn big investment for the average player to buy this product in quantities above 10 units). This is actually a good thing for the seller. He can kick back and relax, sell his product and start investing in the next product to manipulate.

Supply = sell offer
Demand = buy offer

Yes, in practice these are two different things. Yet both figures are often controlled by the same person(s). If the seller is rich enough, practice has learned that there IS no risk for the seller to put down ludicrous buy offers to drive up the price.

This leads me to the next proposal, geared at protecting markets vulnerable to large scale market manipulation:

Per account, you can only place X gold in buy offers without paying taxes.
Beyond that, you start paying taxes.

I suspect X should probably be somewhere in the range of 150g or lower, but that’s just guestimating. It’s certainly not a perfect system, but I would argue it is – at the very least – better than what we have right now.

Just saw a video of this tactic online. And you wonder why mats went sky high. I understand that bot banning was part of this, but how do you stop these people that have this much wealth to inflate the TP?

As I said again in another post, it is not a bot that is doing this stuff. But people that spend all day on the TP inflating the buy/sell orders in their favor. It also just causes more manipulation now that everyone in the world has Spidy and can see when it is also profitable for them to start flipping said item if the range is big enough.

I think there are some factors that many people seem to miss.

I’m going to use GW2Spidy as the reference point because I would guess that many in this conversation use that site to get their information, or at least are well aware of that site.

While GW2Spidy provides a great deal of information, they do NOT provide the entire picture. They provide us with 4, very simple, pieces of information that many people misunderstand as being a complete picture: Current Buy Price, Current Sell Price, Current Demand and Current Supply.

While these 4 pieces of information supply us with some data to make assumptions and predictions, they are NOT the entire picture.

Let’s break it down….

Current Buy Price: This is one price point. It happens to be the highest price that someone has put in as a buy order to buy this item.

Current Sell Price: This is one price point. It happens to be the lowest price at which a seller created a sell listing for this item.

Current Supply: This is the total number of sell listing for this item encompassing all sell listings at all prices.

Current Demand: This is the total number of buy orders for this item encompassing all buy orders at all prices.

There is SO much missing information though. What about the distribution of those sell listings? How many are placed at all the price points from lowest to highest? How many of those sell listings will NEVER be sold….yet still count toward the total number of “supply”?

That information can be acquired, but it has to be done manually. You can go into each item and see the distribution of sell listings at the various prices as well as the buy orders at the various prices.

Even with that information, it still doesn’t paint a true picture of supply and demand. There is supply that’s being held based on any number of reasons: the current sell price is too low, the player may be saving them for some reason, some people just like to hoard things. The same goes for buyers. Maybe the price of this item is too high right now, but if the price was to fall, there are players that would buy this item, even though they don’t have a current buy order in place.

These are what I like to call Hidden Supply and Hidden Demand. Those, in combination with the visible supply and demand from buy orders and sell listings would allow us to create a fairly representative supply and demand curve.

The problem here is that that data isn’t available anywhere….at least not publicly, nor could it every really be attained. Hidden Supply and Demand are just that….hidden. An assumption, or best fit curve, could be made to explain it, but it’s really just an estimation.

Another thing that seems to always be left out, but was mentioned about by another poster, is the traffic of sales that isn’t displayed on GW2Spidy. This traffic is more representative of the actual supply of and demand for an item.

I’m sure that ArenaNet tracks every sale of every item live as it happens. They are the only ones with this data. I’m sure it’s THIS data that John is referring to. I highly doubt that ArenaNet will make this data public….but if they do, that would be awesome. Until then, we have to take the word of the ArenaNet employee that’s participating in this forum. I, for one, am willing to do that. He has the information. I do not.

John Smith.4610:

A dozen players with 10k gold wouldn’t even scrape one of those markets.

Well i understand supply and demand quite well.
And you dont need a dozen players to manipulate one item that the majority of players cant afford.
A good example was seeing myself 30 celestial dyes vanishing from the tp to reappear a minute later at an increased price.
Thats far more than what i would call scrapeing for that particular item since it did set the base price 2 gold higher.
That is the thing players dont like to see,and perhaps a hard cap on price should had been introduced.

As others have said, market manipulation is rampant. Countless times I’ve seen entire stacks flipped, people over placing buys. Just watch the market – some people fake the jump by placing 1-10 items to their new inflated price point. Some just jump that 10-50 silver. If a supply run is small, I’ve seen it completely swept instantly (I click “buy” and get an error and see 1000+ items bought and now sitting much higher at a price. As long as people keep overbidding their fake buy stock, they can feed them the items they bought at less than their new buy floor. As long as supply doesn’t go past their control faster than they can profit off of the control, profit!

This is compounded by the fact that many items in this game (crafting, mystic forge, legendaries) surpass what a single person can farm in a respectable amount of time thus creating an inelastic demand. Inelastic demands are easy to manipulate,

Sadly my thought of limiting overbid buy reqeusts limited to by 1 copper is broken by those that I’ve seen small step their new price floors. This basically makes me think of back to price flipping that happened with housing, especially in my state where house prices nearly doubled in just one year… they ended up placing a restriction where you could not sell a recently purchased house for “x” months or face a heavy heavy tax. I’m not sure that is possible here, but I would like to see a timer placed on items purchased off the AH – you can’t sell an item you just bought for 24 hours. This would slow down flipping and give time for it to catch a breath after a buyout… making market manipulation more risky. Make it more risky, less people will do it, and we actually might see the market settle better.

Of course then there is the whole side thing that gold sellers are playing the market too – they profit, sell their profits to people for real money so they can then afford their inflated prices on TP to make more profit to sell back to them. Awesome, right?

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

I’m no economist, but I’d reckon the turnover rates (buy rates or sell rates) better indicate supply and demand. Now that’s a statistic I wanna see, what items sell fast and hot (and what sells slow).

John Smith.4610:

A dozen players with 10k gold wouldn’t even scrape one of those markets.

you mean 10k gold each or 10k gold aggregate? :o

I know I’m a little late to this but here’s my take.

First, the resent spike in tier 5, tier 6 and ecto prices is not due to manipulation, it is due to a massive bot ban. These illegal suppliers were removed from the game. When supply drops, and demand remains the same and prices go up. This is basic economics.

Second, this market it too large to be manipulated by a small hand full of players. The wealth and time necessary to manipulate a 2MM player market it just not feasible.

Third, prices are driven by demand. If the market, which just happens to be the entire collection of every single player in the game, thought prices were currently too high, they would go down because no one would be buying items at their current prices. Even legendary weapons and precursors are not over priced. If they were the demand would drop until price matched demand.

Forth, and I think this is John’s favorite comment, the prices of luxury goods do not determine inflation. In the U.S. the CPI determines inflation, and this is taken from a basket of goods and services consumed by urban consumers. Now I don’t know exactly what is used to determine inflation, but lets assume it is every single good on the market. If this is true then luxury goods make a very small impact on overall inflation. So it is absolutely fallacious to look at them to judge the overall level of inflation on the market. Luxury goods, however, bring the most attention because people want them and can’t have them.

Finally, just because there are a number of intelligent people out there who know how to forecast trends, speculate, or know where the most profitable flips are, does not make them “market manipulators”. Remember, trends and profitable flips change all the time, and speculation doesn’t always work out. People who play these areas do not do so without risk. There is always a strong possibility that the trend has changed or they were wrong in speculation, if this is so they will lose a lot of money. Good traders know how to estimate which trends are just fads and which ones have a longer life span. So, no they are not manipulating the market, they are just good at what they do.

Economics is one of the greatest social sciences because it really shows how the world works.

And remember, entitlement attitudes lead to socialism, and socialism leads to Greece.

Stop blaming market manipulators. They only make a profit because there is a demand for it. It is YOU the people who support these guys.

John Smith.4610:

Remember that Sell orders != supply and buy order != demand

As a market noob, please explain why this statement is true … I would of thought sell orders = items available on the market, therefore = supply and buy orders = items people want to buy, therefore = demand …