Guild Wars 2

because not everybody that wants something places a buy order and supply can come from many places besides the TP, I might be wrong tho, I haven’t taken Prof. Smith’s econ 101 class, but I’m signing up as soon as Anet U opens registration.

wildcode.5403:

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 …

I had to read your statement 3 times to makes sure I was reading it correctly. You were basically re-stating what John said. Sell orders are those that are selling items, they post the items for sell and pay the 5% listing fee. They = supply. Buy orders are those that bid on items on a price they set. They pay no fee. They = demand.

black scholes.3795:

I had to read your statement 3 times to makes sure I was reading it correctly. You were basically re-stating what John said. Sell orders are those that are selling items, they post the items for sell and pay the 5% listing fee. They = supply. Buy orders are those that bid on items on a price they set. They pay no fee. They = demand.

But John basically said sell orders are not supply, and buy orders are not demand.

wildcode.5403:

black scholes.3795:

I had to read your statement 3 times to makes sure I was reading it correctly. You were basically re-stating what John said. Sell orders are those that are selling items, they post the items for sell and pay the 5% listing fee. They = supply. Buy orders are those that bid on items on a price they set. They pay no fee. They = demand.

But John basically said sell orders are not supply, and buy orders are not demand.

I read his posts on this forum. It doesn’t sound like he inferred that at all.

black scholes.3795:

I read his posts on this forum. It doesn’t sound like he inferred that at all.

John Smith.4610:

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

“!=” means “not equal to”

Gisei.5749:

black scholes.3795:

I read his posts on this forum. It doesn’t sound like he inferred that at all.

John Smith.4610:

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

“!=” means “not equal to”

Okay, I see what you’re saying. I’ve never seen != as a term for not equal. Unfortunately the forum cannot incorporate he symbol for not-equal. Hmm. I can only guess what he might be saying. I’ve had a bit to drink tonight, but I’m going to take a shot at what he means. The bid and ask price doesn’t show an accurate picture of supply and demand. It does not show us how many people are buying at the ask price, and it does not show how many people are selling at the bid price. It only shows who’s bidding and who’s asking. Looking at the picture of the two does not give us a clear picture of supply and demand. If we had the internal market data of how many people are buying at the asking price and how many people are selling at the bid price, plus the data on who’s posting ask and who’s posting bids, then we would have a clear picture of market value. That data, for now, is internal so we don’t have the whole picture. If a website comes out, if it’s allowed, that shows the second by second volume of bids, those selling at bid price, asks, and those buying at ask price, then the public would have a clear picture of supply and demand.

This is the best I could surmise at this late an hour and in my current state of mind.

It doesn’t even show who is bidding and who is asking – it shows ONLY the people who couldn’t come to an agreement. It shows you the tiny dregs of failures left over afer all the successful deals take place. It tells you absolutely NOTHING about who is watching and the “watching and acting volume” is vastly greater than the “waiting inefectually” volume.

John Smith.4610:

My apologies, != is a programming term meaning not equal, in the future I should just say not equal and not use shorthand that everyone isn’t accustomed to.

I’m computer Engineer for 18 years now…

The equals sign, equality sign, or “=” is a mathematical symbol used to indicate equality. It was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde. The equals sign is placed between the things stated to have the same value, as in an equation. It is assigned to the Unicode and ASCII character 003D in hexadecimal, 0061 in decimal.

The symbol used to denote inequation (when items are not equal) is a slashed equals sign “?” (Unicode 2260). In LaTeX, this is done with the “\neq” command.
Most programming languages, limiting themselves to the ASCII character set, use ~=, !=, /=, =/=, or <> to represent their boolean inequality operator.

We can’t except everyone know that but not hard to guess too.

azazil.9541:

John Smith.4610:

My apologies, != is a programming term meaning not equal, in the future I should just say not equal and not use shorthand that everyone isn’t accustomed to.

We can’t except everyone know that but not hard to guess too.

….Or look up “equals sign” on wikipedia and copy pasta. XD

@azazil: I’m a lawyer for 10 years now… and we call that (copying wiki without reference) “plagiarism”.

On a more interesting note: a “crystalline dust” thread just appeared.

Buttercup.5871:

@azazil: I’m a lawyer for 10 years now… and we call that (copying wiki without reference) “plagiarism”.

On a more interesting note: a “crystalline dust” thread just appeared.

this is not hard to find.. lol that was open source to everyone. you just need to search from google this is all about. Hard to understand ppl sometimes.

I refered myself, and after some open source info.

Poor guys, you are always wanna troll something.

Devs, you can use your arguments, I am not saying they are not true. But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore. I would never spend 40s for 1 ecto when it takes me and hour to earn that sum (As I said, I am just average player, not some farmer with 3G per hour). These prices supports only no-lifers spending their whole day farming enough gold and then they use their wealth to “manipulate” the market.

Average players like me are more and more poor with the each passing day. I remember the time when I was able to buy ecto for 15s. It was not too much, but not too cheap either.

Why cannot you just limit prices at market? It worked well in GW1. Players were able to buy material from NPC and no player could sell their materials beyond those prices.

I am just trying to say that I am losing interest in using that awful thing called TP. I rather spend all my tokens to buy 68 rares and then salvage them, or farm every T6 material by myself, rather than support those no-lifing ugly farmers.

Mortifer.2946:

Snip

If this was true, the price wouldn’t be so high.

I wonder why some people have such a hard time grasping that player-driven economies are a pvp environment.

wait, so people actually are buying ectos at ~40s and buying lots? :O

markets are not volatile because people speculate in them. People speculate in them because they are volatile. This is a common misconception that a lot of people make, even in reality.

I am just trying to say that I am losing interest in using that awful thing called TP. I rather spend all my tokens to buy 68 rares and then salvage them, or farm every T6 material by myself, rather than support those no-lifing ugly farmers.

Welcome to the world of supply and demand. As much as I hate hearing the argument about “supply and demand intersecting at blah blah blah…,” that’s pretty much exactly what you just demonstrated. Yes, the price in coin for a single ecto is going up. You know what isn’t? The amount of time it takes to get one. Go run a dungeon, you just got 0-6 globs for the first path, another 0-6 for each new path after that. And that’s not even counting dungeon drops or the money you make. That’s literally just buying token rares and salvaging them. Nor are dungeons the only path to rares. You can go do events for loot to turn into rares to salvage, or any number of other things. These are all things I would expect a normal player to do. This isn’t a failing of the TP; there’s no need to call for price limits; there’s supply and demand.

Mortifer.2946:

Devs, you can use your arguments, I am not saying they are not true. But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore. I would never spend 40s for 1 ecto when it takes me and hour to earn that sum (As I said, I am just average player, not some farmer with 3G per hour). These prices supports only no-lifers spending their whole day farming enough gold and then they use their wealth to “manipulate” the market. .

You consider yourself and “average” player, and therefore assume that all “average” players are like you. That is a logical fallacy. Also, it is not difficult to earn a sum greater than 40s per hour. Running a fractal, which takes about an hour, will earn you more than 40s.

The rest of this argument is pure conjecture. You assume that the market only supports “no-lifers spending the whole day farming”. If this were so, it would mean that a sizable portion of player base are"no-lifers". The entire population of the game is serviced by a single market, and a very simplistic market at that. It is not possible for a minority of high wealth individuals to manipulate it in a way that would have a significant impact.

Price limits are not the answer. The problem is inelastic demand items that market manipulators take advantage of and there is nothing in place to slow them down or limit them. If my goal is a legendary, I HAVE to buy this many ores, this many orbs, etc. Sure, I can spend months farming 1000 ores off 16 (or whatever the ori node number is). I could also take a few extra hours and walk/bike 20 miles to work instead of spending the double amount in gas (as no mass transit, no one to car pool with). But the fact is, that amount of work is beyond doing for most people. I would spend $10 a gallon on gas before I would walk there and back, just like people with spend 5 times as much on ore than what natural supply/demand would dictate. While gas has limits and regulations that prevent gouging, the game market does not. I could buy the entire stock that the supply has driven the price down to (thus controlling the supply), and place it back up at my gouging price. I can take a stock and set a price floor so anyone wanting to undercut my sell price when buying has to over bid my buy price. This is called cornering the market. Now this isn’t one person doing it, but there are enough that the market is NOT balanced. The costs do not support what the average player can afford, so there would be no demand if not for another rampant issue this server has: gold sellers – and this market helps their success.

It will be impossible to stop people from manipulating the market short of just forcing set prices, but they CAN make it harder. If they were to make items ‘one time buy’ in some manner, that would completely stop flipping (though people who overbought on accident would be stuck with it). Or if you can’t sell it for “x” time after just buying it off TP would allow some market recovery (unless someone has a gold pool deep enough to keep buying while they wait to sell, or cycle goods). Setting a resell timer is probably the most fair limit as it would stop the ‘middle class’ from flipping and driving prices… and that just may be enough to slip the supply beyond the big players hands and allow it to balance. But not sure Anet could easily implement a solution like this at all.

Side note – ectos prices are inflated beyond what they actually cost. You can get them much cheaper – 15 to 30 silver (depending on your luck levels) off the TP. How it ever got above 30, I either blame manipulators sillily buying against themselves, or there are really enough ignorant players to support them.

I’d like to give an example of what happens if a group of players try to manipulate the market.

Here’s an extreme situation. Suppose a group of wealthy players buys every ecto on the market and posts each one for 5 gold. A this point they can only continue to buy ecto’s only until they run out of money. At this point the group cannot purchase any more ecto’s on the market because they have run out of money. Nor do they have a monopoly on ecto’s and ecto’s can come from any player in the game. At this point you have thousands of ecto’s at a ridiculously high prices, so the quantity demanded will drop significantly. However, the quantity supplied will not have changed. The quantity supplied for ecto’s is high so prices will drop rapidly until the market balances and ecto’s will once again be at a price the market is willing to pay. So what happens to those manipulators? Well they now have thousands of ecto’s on the market that will never sell and the have pretty much lost all their money.

This is an extreme and simplified example, but I think it illustrates my point.

Also, the recent spike in ecto prices is not due to any manipulation, it was due to a change in quantity supplied. Earlier this month a large number of illegal suppliers (i.e. bots) were wiped from the game. Prices were artificially high due to these illegal suppliers, and once they were eliminated, ecto prices adjusted to their true market value.

The Choosen (precursor for the legendary Flameseeker Prophecies) just dissapeared today from the TP, to reaper after few hours at a double price.
Like 3 weeks ago was 190g, then start to rise up to 250g today, and … suprise ! 499 g on TP now ! If this is not market manipualtion, then I don’t know …
We are not allow to farm, we hit DR, the chest drops were stealth decreased (yeah, I’ve notes too so is useless to keep deny it) … what are we suppose to do to have the items we want ? Buy the gems-convert into gold-end of story? Whats the point of dungeons and map exploration then? Is fun, indeed, but fun also means to gather the items, gold, then craft and wear a legendary weapon. Looks like this is nearly impossible at the moment.

Folk.2093:

black scholes.3795:

Mortifer.2946:

Devs, you can use your arguments, I am not saying they are not true. But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore. I would never spend 40s for 1 ecto when it takes me and hour to earn that sum (As I said, I am just average player, not some farmer with 3G per hour). These prices supports only no-lifers spending their whole day farming enough gold and then they use their wealth to “manipulate” the market. .

You consider yourself and “average” player, and therefore assume that all “average” players are like you. That is a logical fallacy. Also, it is not difficult to earn a sum greater than 40s per hour. Running a fractal, which takes about an hour, will earn you more than 40s.

bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiit..

signed a fotm lvl 30+ player

How? Selling the blues/greens you get from that place alone nets you like 15s. If you get Dredge fractal, the mining bags themselves are like ~30-50s. Get like, ONE rare, and that’s 30-40s right there. 40s in one fractal run is easy.

Sell orders doesn’t equal demand because people will horde commodities and because some people will sell instantly instead of placing an order.

Buy orders doesn’t necessarily mean demand because a lot of people will buy instantly instead of placing buy orders and because there are also a lot of “false” buy orders at very low prices

Probably some other reasons I’m missing on each of them though.

penatbater.4710:

wait, so people actually are buying ectos at ~40s and buying lots? :O

I’m buying ectos at the current price… then use them to craft exotics which I sell for profit. I’m not a big consumer of them, but have bought around 50 in the last day or so.

Ectos aren’t being manipulated. I place buy orders for 10 to 20 ectos at a time, and they are filled within seconds (literally), so it seems to me that there’s a high volume being sold (to the highest bidder) at any given time and the buy/sell margins are too slim for casual flipping.

Ursan.7846:

Folk.2093:

black scholes.3795:

Mortifer.2946:

Devs, you can use your arguments, I am not saying they are not true. But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore. I would never spend 40s for 1 ecto when it takes me and hour to earn that sum (As I said, I am just average player, not some farmer with 3G per hour). These prices supports only no-lifers spending their whole day farming enough gold and then they use their wealth to “manipulate” the market. .

You consider yourself and “average” player, and therefore assume that all “average” players are like you. That is a logical fallacy. Also, it is not difficult to earn a sum greater than 40s per hour. Running a fractal, which takes about an hour, will earn you more than 40s.

bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiit..

signed a fotm lvl 30+ player

How? Selling the blues/greens you get from that place alone nets you like 15s. If you get Dredge fractal, the mining bags themselves are like ~30-50s. Get like, ONE rare, and that’s 30-40s right there. 40s in one fractal run is easy.

sure, sell that one rare you get or ecto it and sell that ecto but that kind of defeats the purpose for collecting the vast amount of ecto’s a player needs now doesn’t it genius boy?

Well ok, I understand all of yours responses to my post. You are mostly right. But I still consider some prices to be too high. I rather save gold for icy runestones and precursor. Other things I can gather myself. Thank you for your advice.

Folk.2093:

sure, sell that one rare you get or ecto it and sell that ecto but that kind of defeats the purpose for collecting the vast amount of ecto’s a player needs now doesn’t it genius boy?

What the. Do you have trouble with reading comprehension?

Also, it is not difficult to earn a sum greater than 40s per hour. Running a fractal, which takes about an hour, will earn you more than 40s.

So user claimed that you can earn more than 40s in a fractal run, to which you say.

bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiit..

So you disagree to this claim that you can earn more than 40s in a fractal run. To which I reply.

How? Selling the blues/greens you get from that place alone nets you like 15s. If you get Dredge fractal, the mining bags themselves are like ~30-50s. Get like, ONE rare, and that’s 30-40s right there. 40s in one fractal run is easy.

Because I think it’s pretty easy to get 40s in one fractal run.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea of “sell ecto and buy ecto using said money.” When you get an ecto, you’re still getting 40s worth of loot from a fractal, you know.

Ok, so as an experiment I tried a round of ruthlessly selling everthing – that is as soon as it dropped, I hit “Buy more at trading post” read out where the next big hump in supply was, then sold the item at a price that joined the hump rather than matching or undercutting the lowest available price. I played for about an hour. I checked back on the total value of what had sold a couple hours later (because I wasn’t pricing for intantaneous sales)…

…I evidently made close to 60s an hour – with a 6th level character (8th by the end of it). Things like picking up 2 chili peppers obviously helped, but then again I chose to play in the Charr area specifically because I knew I might find those there.

Thing thats easily overlooked is that while 80th level characters earn vastly more, a lot of 80th level character-players are trying tuck away a wide array of the things they get. When I consider tht trying to make the gifts of Migh and Magic means I’m storing rather than selling what at a glance looks to be well over 400g of materials, then yes, I’m a lot richer than the coin I keep in my shared bank would indicate, and making a lot more per hour than it seems. Today I may have only added 50 silver or so to my character running in orr, but I also stockpiled probably 10+ T6 fine mateirals (1-1.5 gold if sold) and got 4-7 ectos out of breaking down the rares that equate to another 1.5-2.5g if I wasn’t working towards Legendary gifts.

Nike.2631:

Ok, so as an experiment I tried a round of ruthlessly selling everthing – that is as soon as it dropped, I hit “Buy more at trading post” read out where the next big hump in supply was, then sold the item at a price that joined the hump rather than matching or undercutting the lowest available price. I played for about an hour. I checked back on the total value of what had sold a couple hours later (because I wasn’t pricing for intantaneous sales)…

…I evidently made close to 60s an hour – with a 6th level character (8th by the end of it). Things like picking up 2 chili peppers obviously helped, but then again I chose to play in the Charr area specifically because I knew I might find those there.

Thing thats easily overlooked is that while 80th level characters earn vastly more, a lot of 80th level character-players are trying tuck away a wide array of the things they get. When I consider tht trying to make the gifts of Migh and Magic means I’m storing rather than selling what at a glance looks to be well over 400g of materials, then yes, I’m a lot richer than the coin I keep in my shared bank would indicate, and making a lot more per hour than it seems. Today I may have only added 50 silver or so to my character running in orr, but I also stockpiled probably 10+ T6 fine mateirals (1-1.5 gold if sold) and got 4-7 ectos out of breaking down the rares that equate to another 1.5-2.5g if I wasn’t working towards Legendary gifts.

^^

Mortifer.2946:

But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore

What makes you think that Anet WANTS these items available for normal players like you and me?

To get these insane high-prices items, people have to buy gems with $$$ and convert them to gold. Anet makes money (real life money) from these extreem high prices.

I am not very rich atm, mostly cause I only mildly play the game. I have 20 gold, from just selling random drops that I get. I would classify myself as a ‘casual’ gamer. Do you think that I should be able to easily obtain those ‘leet mad lootz’ that some people save/spend tear soaked hours obtaining (I’m thinking of legendary weapons)?

Absolutely not. Why should I be able to easily obtain stuff, where other people that do play this game intensely have to spend hours/days to make/find them.

Are average Jane’s supposed to be able to afford Prada bags? Is Prada manipulating the market to their advantage to make average Jane’s buy their Prada bag? In a lot of peoples minds that think this market is being manipulated, yes. Prada is manipulating the price of the bag and thus should be banned from making/selling their bags. It is not the fact that the people BUYING the bag believe that that bag is WORTH the price, it is the the people NOT BUYING the bag believe that the people SELLING the bag is being manipulative and CHARGING too much.

The fact is, if Ecto’s (don’t even know what they are btw) are so valuable that they are being BOUGHT for 40s (which me, being a relatively poor noob, don’t see why 40s is that big of a deal) then they are WORTH 40s.

Products are not WORTH what people SELL them for. They are WORTH what people are willing to BUY it for. Just like the food/gas even gold prices. In a closed system, the price is destined to go up. It is called inflation. Only when there are true gold sinks, like we have in real life (yay taxes, where that money goes, no one knows) will Guild Wars 2 be able to handle inflation. GW2 does have some gold sinks in place, like repair costs, way-point costs and the like, but gold is still being generated faster than it is being destroyed. The trading post just shuffles gold around. No one CREATES wealth in the trading post. Until ANet has some really cool stuff in the Gem store, where people delete gold for gems will the inflation be able to be controlled, imo.

My 2 cents.

Tallis.5607:

Mortifer.2946:

But there is one problem – no normal players has enough money to buy those ectos anymore

What makes you think that Anet WANTS these items available for normal players like you and me?

To get these insane high-prices items, people have to buy gems with $$$ and convert them to gold. Anet makes money (real life money) from these extreem high prices.

You know, right now $10 gets you 800 Gems, which gets you about 11.5G.

If you do the math, to basically get 1500 G, you need to spend $1304.

I somehow highly doubt many people spend $1300 on pixels. And I highly doubt Anet actually counts on this to make money.

What makes you think that Anet WANTS these items available for normal players like you and me?

To get these insane high-prices items, people have to buy gems with $$$ and convert them to gold. Anet makes money (real life money) from these extreem high prices.

Or, y’know, you can go do anything to make money. Almost literally anything. I mean, if you have very little time in your day, you can still run CoF path 1 in 15 minutes or less to get about 50 silver from events. That’s about 2 gold an hour without counting tokens, drops, or anything else.

Even if you only run it once, you get between 40 and 50 silver just from events. Then you add in the 9 silver from the three chests (assuming 3 blues each). Then the 0-6 Ectos from salvaging your 60 tokens, as well as 0-6 Gossamer Scraps. . . So, yeah, you get between 49 and 300 silver for probably less than 15 minutes of playing. It’s not even 15 minutes of difficult content. . .

Alternately, you can run around farming nodes like Orichalcum and Omnomberries. At 2.5s each, that can be as fast as 15 silver in about three minutes, depending on where they are. And that’s not counting the chance for, say, Ruby Orbs or Unidentified Dyes. . .

Note that at no point does this require buying gems to convert for money.

Ursan.7846:

You know, right now $10 gets you 800 Gems, which gets you about 11.5G.

If you do the math, to basically get 1500 G, you need to spend $1304.

I somehow highly doubt many people spend $1300 on pixels. And I highly doubt Anet actually counts on this to make money.

I’m utterly shocked that this point isn’t brought up more often. Why ruin a good conspiracy theory, though?

Zyk.3597:

Ursan.7846:

You know, right now $10 gets you 800 Gems, which gets you about 11.5G.

If you do the math, to basically get 1500 G, you need to spend $1304.

I somehow highly doubt many people spend $1300 on pixels. And I highly doubt Anet actually counts on this to make money.

I’m utterly shocked that this point isn’t brought up more often. Why ruin a good conspiracy theory, though?

Some people are incredibly wealthy – this amount of money wouldn’t make a dent in their budgets.

Also, wouldn’t $10 get you much more gold from the I LOVE YOU people?

grave of hearts.7830:

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.

buying 30 celestial dyes off the TP in any of the last 2 weeks and re-listing them for 2g higher would have resulted in a loss of 10+g. So either you are dealing with the worlds dumbest market manipulators of all time, or the market you are referring to is not in fact being manipulated.

wildcode.5403:

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 …

The problem is that items you see on the market are the ones that are NOT selling. If you look at the ecto supply from data sites like gw2spidy you will see an almost constant supply, yet that is only a very small portion of the ectos that are actually being traded. If I had to guess I would say that even though the ecto supply on the TP is around 8000 at any given time that there are probably close to 20,000 traded on a daily basis.

The sell and buy orders aren’t indicative of the actual amount of the item being bought and sold in a day. Most of them are listed and sold within seconds, so you don’t see them on sites like gw2spidy which only takes a data sample every 15 minutes.

Just to clarify what John’s post meant (see below)

John Smith.4610:

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

Not everyone who has a specific item will want to sell it – i.e. Sell orders != supply
Not every item that is bought is highly demanded – i.e. buy order != demand

In the general case and interms of numbers – sell order > supply & buy order < demand.

Furthermore, sell & buy orders are (should be) within the supply & demand numbers. If they are not then this causes inflation and possibly breakdown portion of the economy that is trading and involves that particular item.

Svarty.8019:

Zyk.3597:

Ursan.7846:

You know, right now $10 gets you 800 Gems, which gets you about 11.5G.

If you do the math, to basically get 1500 G, you need to spend $1304.

I somehow highly doubt many people spend $1300 on pixels. And I highly doubt Anet actually counts on this to make money.

I’m utterly shocked that this point isn’t brought up more often. Why ruin a good conspiracy theory, though?

Some people are incredibly wealthy – this amount of money wouldn’t make a dent in their budgets.

Also, wouldn’t $10 get you much more gold from the I LOVE YOU people?

Hmm. Can’t figure out if you’re serious. I think this forum is ruining my sarcasm detector. The number of people that play GW2 that are wealthy enough (and willing!) to make it rain like that has gotta be a tiny percentage. I can’t quite see why ANet would cater the entire game economy towards squeezing out a tiny bit of real world money out of them (in the grand scheme of the budget of this game).

Enderr.5416:

The Choosen (precursor for the legendary Flameseeker Prophecies) just dissapeared today from the TP, to reaper after few hours at a double price.
Like 3 weeks ago was 190g, then start to rise up to 250g today, and … suprise ! 499 g on TP now ! If this is not market manipualtion, then I don’t know …

The original seller probably didn’t have enough gold to pay the fee for a higher price. So somebody who did bought and readded it. How’s that manipulation? Precursors, like all other luxury goods, are the worst example to begin with. Nobody really needs them. If somebody pays those 499g, well then the price seems to be justified since the item’s worth it. Otherwise it wouldn’t sell for that amount.

It is not a player-driven economy if any of the price-fixing is being done in conjunction with botting. Kudos to the savvy players who invested their time farming (before the November 15th nerf) or otherwise became self-made wealthy players.

Someone can bot for gold or exploit to get gold and then manipulate the market. I’m not crazy bout that. I am sure that as they remove bots this is addressed at the micro level, but I still see bots, and there are plenty of people still selling gold (I even get spam from them on my forum account).

Enderr.5416:

The Choosen (precursor for the legendary Flameseeker Prophecies) just dissapeared today from the TP, to reaper after few hours at a double price.
Like 3 weeks ago was 190g, then start to rise up to 250g today, and … suprise ! 499 g on TP now ! If this is not market manipualtion, then I don’t know …

Or, the one at 190 sold to someone who used it, the next person who put one up put it up at a higher price in hopes of getting that higher price, it was bought, and the next person who put one up put it up at a still higher price. It could have even been the same person who had three in storage, and wanted to see what priced it could sell at before posting all three. Or someone was generating one a day, sold it each day for 190 and replaced it, then ran out and another person got one and put it up for 250 GP. The point is there are a lot of possible explanations other than that being a single item which was bought and flipped twice.

A point John has made at least once, and an earlier poster made about Mystic Coins, is that there is a LOT of turnover in markets which is not visible because there is nothing on the TP or any monitoring site which tells you how many things have sold in any period of time, only how many are for sale at one moment.

Iruwen.3164:

Precursors, like all other luxury goods, are the worst example to begin with. Nobody really needs them.

I see this a lot, and I have to wonder…

What in this game do you NEED?

Its a meaningless distinction.

Every single player has a hollow seal on the character select page tapping them on the shoulder saying “hey, you haven’t done this yet…” Not 1%. Not 5%. All of us. Its on everyone’s to-do list.

Nike.2631:

Iruwen.3164:

Precursors, like all other luxury goods, are the worst example to begin with. Nobody really needs them.

I see this a lot, and I have to wonder…

What in this game do you NEED?

From a gameplay perspective, you need exotics/ascended to access gated content (fractals) and gain max stats available in game.

Legendaries offer you no additional content, nor any power increase. So from a gameplay perspective, it’s not needed.

Nike.2631:

Iruwen.3164:

Precursors, like all other luxury goods, are the worst example to begin with. Nobody really needs them.

I see this a lot, and I have to wonder…

What in this game do you NEED?

Its a meaningless distinction.

Every single player has a hollow seal on the character select page tapping them on the shoulder saying “hey, you haven’t done this yet…” Not 1%. Not 5%. All of us. Its on everyone’s to-do list.

I share this contention.

Ursan.7846:

From a gameplay perspective, you need exotics/ascended to access gated content (fractals) and gain max stats available in game.

Legendaries offer you no additional content, nor any power increase. So from a gameplay perspective, it’s not needed.

You seem to have misplaced the last of my paragraphs – from a “gameplay perspective” they are absolutely necessessary – filling in those seals is the top teir of all gameplay objectives, and only a legendary will do it.

I dont’ even think of them cosmetically – most of them would look like goat-butt on my characters, but filling in those seals? Yeah, I’m putting in some hours for THAT goal. I finished getting apex stats quite a while ago. If that was all there was to do, I’d be banging down the door of ESO, not hanging out doing stuff here .

Nike.2631:

Ursan.7846:

From a gameplay perspective, you need exotics/ascended to access gated content (fractals) and gain max stats available in game.

Legendaries offer you no additional content, nor any power increase. So from a gameplay perspective, it’s not needed.

You seem to have misplaced the last of my paragraphs – from a “gameplay perspective” they are absolutely necessessary – filling in those seals is the top teir of all gameplay objectives, and only a legendary will do it.

I dont’ even think of them cosmetically – most of them would look like goat-butt on my characters, but filling in those seals? Yeah, I’m putting in some hours for THAT goal. I finished getting apex stats quite a while ago. If that was all there was to do, I’d be banging down the door of ESO, not hanging out doing stuff here .

You’re misunderstanding something here. You don’t “need” to fill all those seals. You “want” to.

There’s a difference between being Required to do something, and the Desire to do it.

Nike.2631:

You seem to have misplaced the last of my paragraphs – from a “gameplay perspective” they are absolutely necessessary – filling in those seals is the top teir of all gameplay objectives, and only a legendary will do it.

I dont’ even think of them cosmetically – most of them would look like goat-butt on my characters, but filling in those seals? Yeah, I’m putting in some hours for THAT goal. I finished getting apex stats quite a while ago. If that was all there was to do, I’d be banging down the door of ESO, not hanging out doing stuff here .

Not sure if you’re joking or not. I wasn’t aware those seals in the log-in screen affected your gameplay in anyway at all. I specifically didn’t quote that portion because those seals have nothing to do with gameplay.

If you yourself have an OCD need to fill it in, more power to you. Realize however, that you’re making a conscious choice to chase after a luxury item.

And in an envirement that is a GAME, that’s again a meaningless distinction.

I think the only people that require anything in relation to Guild Wars 2 are the RMT and bot folks. They work here. The rest of us are just on vacation.