Guild Wars 2

arkenstone.7896:

At least in this game you can wait. In LOTRO you pay a different fee based on how long you wanted to list it for before it expired after which it would be mailed back to you and you had to then relist it and pay the listing fee again.

Yeah, I played LoTRO for years. We need this system in GW2.

Amun Ra.6435:

arkenstone.7896:

At least in this game you can wait. In LOTRO you pay a different fee based on how long you wanted to list it for before it expired after which it would be mailed back to you and you had to then relist it and pay the listing fee again.

Yeah, I played LoTRO for years. We need this system in GW2.

Not possible as long as mail is limited to 10 items. Support would be absolutely flooded with angry players who think they lost all their TP items because they don’t know how to manage the mailbox. And changing it would require major changes to the system and bug fixes to correct the major changes to the system.

In other words, it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth. We’re pretty much stuck with the system as it is.

Given that the LotRO system sucked, I’m not eager to replicate it here.

LotRO’s crafting had a few elements I’d port over, but the auction hall/trading page? Heck no.

It’s inconvenient for the person who is no longer “first in line” to sell his item. For anyone else it’s a non-issue.

I’ve sold items in the last few days that I listed a couple of weeks ago and forgot about. So it’s not an issue for me, eventually the items under yours will sell and you’ll get the money.

Undercutting itself is a good process. There’s just a lot of friction in it due to the 5% listing fee.

On buy offers I’ll be very competitive with a lot of 1c overcuts, pull and relist, to stay on top when I want to have the top offer. You cannot do that on the sell side of things.

It does keep the bid/ask spread higher and lowers trade velocity. It also creates a huge asymmetry between buy strategy and sell strategy, and is pretty punishing to players who are not intimately familiar with prices.

AFAIK the 5% fee up front is to prevent the TP from being used as free storage. From a market efficiency standpoint it’s wholly negative, but something we have to live with due to the design of the TP.

I think undercutting is good because it helps us reach equilibrium faster and efficiently. If you are undercut and your item no longer sells at that price, then that price is not appropriate for that time. It’s too expensive.

Several months ago some noob bought up all the Dusks and listed his at 800g, which was probably 150-200g higher than before. And then people started to undercut him. And it went all the way down to around 550g. 800g was nowhere near the equilibrium price and he learned it the hard way. No buyer was willing to meet that price and eventually, thanks to undercutting by other sellers, settled around 550g as equilibrium.

The 5% fee actually helps avoid some of that undercut behavior. If everyone could just pull and relist without cost, or reprice without cost, prices would spiral downward even faster than they do now.

Market price based flipping is also not likely to be very profitable, if profitable at all. One, items to flip are pretty easy to spot. Their buy orders are >15% cheaper than the lowest sell. No rocket science necessary. To make any money with the items you see that do have those characteristics, you need to trade in very large quantities. The risk is high you’ll lose money and would make more spending the same amount of time farming. The best flipping likely comes from correctly predicting fluctuations in materials due to an event or widespread change in player behavior.

If I had one major complaint about the economy in GW2, it’s how useless crafting is as a revenue generator. Farming your own mats doesn’t make it any better, as you’d do just as well selling the mats you farm as combining them into an item and selling. There are items on which you can earn some revenue, but the amount of profit is so small for those that again, farming is faster and more reliable.

I think they had something great and just barely missed it. Think of ways the Mystic Forge and crafting could have been entwined…

Unleashed.6195:

If I had one major complaint about the economy in GW2, it’s how useless crafting is as a revenue generator. Farming your own mats doesn’t make it any better, as you’d do just as well selling the mats you farm as combining them into an item and selling. There are items on which you can earn some revenue, but the amount of profit is so small for those that again, farming is faster and more reliable.

This isn’t a fault of the “economy”

Well…It partially is, but it’s a combination of the fact that crafting is so easy, the fact that crafting gives exp, and the market is so efficient in terms of buyers and sellers interacting. The combination of these factors make tasks with low bar of entry like crafting unprofitable.

My problem is not undercutting it is undercutting to the point that it does not make financial sense to do so.

The market is flooded with items. With no good item sink for non-exotic crafted items not allowing the market to recover a appropriate equilibrium.

Ursan.7846:

Unleashed.6195:

If I had one major complaint about the economy in GW2, it’s how useless crafting is as a revenue generator. Farming your own mats doesn’t make it any better, as you’d do just as well selling the mats you farm as combining them into an item and selling. There are items on which you can earn some revenue, but the amount of profit is so small for those that again, farming is faster and more reliable.

This isn’t a fault of the “economy”

Well…It partially is, but it’s a combination of the fact that crafting is so easy, the fact that crafting gives exp, and the market is so efficient in terms of buyers and sellers interacting. The combination of these factors make tasks with low bar of entry like crafting unprofitable.

Ummm crafting has always been a good way to make money. Lots of people who don’t understand the demand players have for certain items complain that they can’t craft for money. This is simple wrong. Sure there times where an item you could be making for cash goes poof because of a shift of demand but there are ALWAYS items people want. It’s the crafter’s job to find said items and find ways to get the mats to make them. It’s not hard if you know about item daily and weekly trends.

lightdruid.7689:

Ummm crafting has always been a good way to make money. Lots of people who don’t understand the demand players have for certain items complain that they can’t craft for money. This is simple wrong. Sure there times where an item you could be making for cash goes poof because of a shift of demand but there are ALWAYS items people want. It’s the crafter’s job to find said items and find ways to get the mats to make them. It’s not hard if you know about item daily and weekly trends.

Sorry, I’ll rephrase. MOST of crafting isn’t profitable because it’s incredibly easy, and due to market efficiencies profit margins are naturally decreased.

However not every market operates incredibly efficiently. Some markets are simply less known, and these, like you said, takes a bit of knowledge and research to determine. Those are where the true profits from crafting lie.

Ensign.2189:

Undercutting itself is a good process. There’s just a lot of friction in it due to the 5% listing fee.

On buy offers I’ll be very competitive with a lot of 1c overcuts, pull and relist, to stay on top when I want to have the top offer. You cannot do that on the sell side of things.

It does keep the bid/ask spread higher and lowers trade velocity. It also creates a huge asymmetry between buy strategy and sell strategy, and is pretty punishing to players who are not intimately familiar with prices.

AFAIK the 5% fee up front is to prevent the TP from being used as free storage. From a market efficiency standpoint it’s wholly negative, but something we have to live with due to the design of the TP.

Yeah, this was the argument I was making a few months ago against the 5% listing fee on the TP. It basically slows down the rate at which market transactions can occur, and, of course, the fee is, to some extent, passed on to consumers. If I’m flipping a market in which one item is highly overpriced, then I’ll reduce the price on that item with my sell orders. If others come along and realize that the market is ripe for flipping as well, however, then they begin to undercut me. It simply becomes a series of undercutting wars, where the opportunity cost of taking an item off the market and putting it back on at a lower price tends to be less (at least, in the foreseeable future for a lot of traders) than keeping the item on the market, where it will likely not sell as prices continue to fall lower and lower by other traders undercutting one another.

Since any listing fees become sunk costs, if I’m flipping an item that costs around 30s, I could either choose to take the item off the market and put it back on to make somewhere around ~25.5s, or I could keep the item on the market and make nothing (at least, not for a very long time, in which the money that I could’ve made just from selling the item to the highest bidder upright and then flipping/investing that money would have exceeded the money gained from having kept the item on the market). The issue comes in where people have to decide how far they think the price is going to fall, at which point some of them might feel tempted to simply leave their item on the market and then come back much later to reprice their item, but sometimes that’s not really an option when the later price is going to be much, much lower than what the current selling price is.

It just makes everybody paranoid, loses everybody money, and slows down how fast transactions can occur. If I knew that continuing to undercut my competitors would result, ultimately, in a total of ~30s in listing fees, I might choose not to undercut my competitors over and over again, but most sellers don’t know how far the price is going to fall, often.

lightdruid.7689:

Ummm crafting has always been a good way to make money. Lots of people who don’t understand the demand players have for certain items complain that they can’t craft for money. This is simple wrong. Sure there times where an item you could be making for cash goes poof because of a shift of demand but there are ALWAYS items people want. It’s the crafter’s job to find said items and find ways to get the mats to make them. It’s not hard if you know about item daily and weekly trends.

Not that I’ve seen. Yes, there are always items you can create to make money. But, the time it takes to make 1g compared to making 1g farming in the game elsewhere makes it pointless. There are times when some item can net you close to a gold, but it only takes one or two times having the market shift in the midst of production to eat up those profits. Having a single item with 20g invested in its construction not sell means you’ll either sell at a loss and eat a few g, or hold onto it and potentially lose that or more.

Now your crafting has to make up for that loss.

Killing/farming mobs will outpace crafting in income easily and reliably. It requires almost no homework, is something you can do with other people and has a small chance at huge gains (find a certain precursor and its worth weeks of crafting profits).

I really want crafting to be viable. In fact, there are some weeks where after long days I’d rather come home and make a little gold crafting than running out and beating down champs or running dungeons. Spidy makes it easy to look for opportunities, so long as you’re wise enough to avoid the obvious, but those opportunities provide too little gain compared to time spent.

Devildoc.6721:

Surely there’s a way systems can make limitations to undercutting, such as making a minimum amount below the lowest priced item you can undercut by, or better, allowing people to adjust their listings to match the new lower prices.

I get screwed over every time I try to sell anything on the TP.

I stopped reading right there. Sorry. My personal solution? Check to see what list price to sell on BLTC is (y), add it to the vendor value(y). Divide by 10 (z=(x+y)/10). (This moves the decimal one place to the left.) Round up and add that number to make the price I have to sell the item in the BLTC for. (A = x+y +z). If the current offer value from players on the BLC is less than A, I decon it for mats. (If I see the item selling for 1c above vendor, I dont bother with the math.) I am deconning a LOT, LOT, LOT right now. Probably 90-95%. Even rares.

Sounds hard, is actually pretty easy and fast.

Undercutting as a concept is fine. Someone is willing to get less money and therefore they get to get theirs sold before others. The problem is the inconsequential undercut, where the amount is so miniscule that neither the buyer nor seller cares about the price difference, and yet they still can go first. Sometimes due to rounding with the fees the seller loses literally nothing instead of just an inconsequential amount.
Remember the bug months ago that would put new sell listings in the front of the line when they were listed at the same price as others, instead of in the back? That’s basically what the 1c undercut on expensive, non-bulk items is.

Amun Ra.6435:

arkenstone.7896:

At least in this game you can wait. In LOTRO you pay a different fee based on how long you wanted to list it for before it expired after which it would be mailed back to you and you had to then relist it and pay the listing fee again.

Yeah, I played LoTRO for years. We need this system in GW2.

No.. No.. NO.. NOOOOOOOO.. The current BLTC made me happier than 5 years in the Lotro relisting and 5 trader alts just to list everything rat wheel.

TERA has a system against undercutting that pleased me. People were able to see automaticaly if the lister of the item was online, and press a button to automaticaly contact the player and make a reduced offer for the item. Most would do this because people who got undercutted would gladly sell the item at a reduced price so he wouldn’t have to relist it, and the incentive to the buyer was paying no tax for the purchase.

This wouldnt work here because of the way our BLC works. It doesnt display individual listings with the name of the seller and the buyer doesnt have to pay taxes to purchase the item (both listing fee and selling fee are paid by the seller).

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Dench.5968:

The players create the price based off supply and demand.

So you’re basing your price on supply and demand when you list something 0.0005% lower than the current offer?

I don’t control the supply and demand base price. I base my price on a few things. The 1st thing is profit. If I can’t net a profit I will list at a price that will, even if it is higher than the current price. Occasionally if the buy now price is super high (say 4 times higher than the bid price) I will be very careful about putting large stacks on the market. In cases like this someone has either accidentally bought a massive amount of items via a bid mistake (for instance a person bidding on 250 items and putting in 80s5c instead of 8s5c which will clear out a lot of items and waste a lot of money for the person making that mistake), or a person or group of people have found a use for that item and bought out all of them at their normal price – either way, its a volatile price point and generally not worth throwing up large stacks since you have a high risk of a person coming in and listing at a significantly lower “more realistic” (supply and demand rate) price.

The only reason I undercut by 1c is to sell my stack faster than the stack currently listed. When I throw up a stack of crap that sits all day I am not making money. I want my items to sell ASAP so I can reinvest that money and keep flipping.

The supply and demand price is not static. It floats around all week and can even change as much as 30%-40% around new patches or weekends for popular items. People who undercut each other are apart of the process that determines the supply and demand price throughout the week.

I used to let items sit for a while and I also used to match peoples prices and not undercut. Money is made significantly slower by doing that.

Unleashed.6195:

lightdruid.7689:

Ummm crafting has always been a good way to make money. Lots of people who don’t understand the demand players have for certain items complain that they can’t craft for money. This is simple wrong. Sure there times where an item you could be making for cash goes poof because of a shift of demand but there are ALWAYS items people want. It’s the crafter’s job to find said items and find ways to get the mats to make them. It’s not hard if you know about item daily and weekly trends.

Not that I’ve seen. Yes, there are always items you can create to make money. But, the time it takes to make 1g compared to making 1g farming in the game elsewhere makes it pointless. There are times when some item can net you close to a gold, but it only takes one or two times having the market shift in the midst of production to eat up those profits. Having a single item with 20g invested in its construction not sell means you’ll either sell at a loss and eat a few g, or hold onto it and potentially lose that or more.

Now your crafting has to make up for that loss.

Killing/farming mobs will outpace crafting in income easily and reliably. It requires almost no homework, is something you can do with other people and has a small chance at huge gains (find a certain precursor and its worth weeks of crafting profits).

I really want crafting to be viable. In fact, there are some weeks where after long days I’d rather come home and make a little gold crafting than running out and beating down champs or running dungeons. Spidy makes it easy to look for opportunities, so long as you’re wise enough to avoid the obvious, but those opportunities provide too little gain compared to time spent.

This is where experience in the market and consumer demands comes into play. At the moment, there are a few dozen items that can be crafted to make a profit. A lot of people can’t seem to realize what items are in demand and what items no one wants. Every item made/sold has a cycle when mats become cheap and then be sold when the item sells for highest. It’s up to us to figure out when those cycles are and to take advantage of it. I hammer this to my guildies who want to make easy gold in the game and a few have gotten good enough at cycle prediction to make money doing nothing but crafting and flipping on the tp.

lightdruid.7689:

This is where experience in the market and consumer demands comes into play. At the moment, there are a few dozen items that can be crafted to make a profit.

No one disagrees that there on items which make a profit. The disagreement is that the profit is worthwhile compared to say, farming champions or QP.

Unleashed.6195:

lightdruid.7689:

This is where experience in the market and consumer demands comes into play. At the moment, there are a few dozen items that can be crafted to make a profit.

No one disagrees that there on items which make a profit. The disagreement is that the profit is worthwhile compared to say, farming champions or QP.

For me its worth it :P farming champa and stuff isnt really my thing. I do occasionally kill some though.

Just like with flipping, you can make your time more worthwhile by opimisig your strategy. Ive heard people in my guild complain they spend 8 hours flipping for 20g profit >_<. Im pretty sure it traumatised them, and they wont be touching the TP for a while :P.

The only thing rhat really takes time in crafting is waiting for those 750 green planks to be crafted… While those craft you can look for the next item and compare prices etc.
ok, 750 green wood planks is a bad example, maybe 50 blades or something.
anyway, theres usually enough time to look for more items to craft while youre actually waiting for the crafting to finish :P. assuming my tp doesnt gt a weird error and makes me relog D :

edit: i spend 20-30 minutes buying mats, selling products, updating lists etc per day. It really doesnt have to take a lot of time : D

If I want to undercut you I should be able to. This should not be “fixed”.

Undercutting makes the trading post too irritating for most to bother with.

The current system allows stupid people to prevent smart people from selling (ie selling big stacks for less than the price of the mats).

If I had it my way, you’d only be allowed to undercut if you had a smaller quantity than the current lowest poster. It would be like a grocery store express lane for 1-8 items, so the the people who post 250 don’t clog up the drain.

John Smith.4610:

The trading post is a set of offers. When you state to sell or buy something you state you’re willing to trade or buy at that price. Economically, I see no fault with the current system and how well it functions, I see no market failures and no effect on velocity of trading.

That being said, is the argument that undercutting is negative because it’s inconvenient and the value people are undercutting as a % is inconsequential?

Or is the argument that undercutting is a side effect of some other issue?

Or both or neither?

Anything that forces people with too much wealth to have to relist for a lower price, is a good thing I’d argue. And not just because it’s a gold sink. There’s some economic & pseudo-ethical psychology to it as well. (just like when I carelessly use Ranger’s Sword #2 a little too close to a Ledge…)

Unleashed.6195:

The 5% fee actually helps avoid some of that undercut behavior. If everyone could just pull and relist without cost, or reprice without cost, prices would spiral downward even faster than they do now.

Market price based flipping is also not likely to be very profitable, if profitable at all. One, items to flip are pretty easy to spot. Their buy orders are >15% cheaper than the lowest sell. No rocket science necessary. To make any money with the items you see that do have those characteristics, you need to trade in very large quantities. The risk is high you’ll lose money and would make more spending the same amount of time farming. The best flipping likely comes from correctly predicting fluctuations in materials due to an event or widespread change in player behavior.

If I had one major complaint about the economy in GW2, it’s how useless crafting is as a revenue generator. Farming your own mats doesn’t make it any better, as you’d do just as well selling the mats you farm as combining them into an item and selling. There are items on which you can earn some revenue, but the amount of profit is so small for those that again, farming is faster and more reliable.

I think they had something great and just barely missed it. Think of ways the Mystic Forge and crafting could have been entwined…

Go to gw2spidey, click crafting. Check the market fluctuation of whatever you’re going to sell (they have graphs there for you). Craft, sell, and profit. You’re welcome.