Guild Wars 2

Would the OP like a stick to beat the dead horse with?

Without trolling:
I know who, how and why – manipulating the TP.
Its all about $$$ – Never support the Goldsellers, because they use your $ to force you buy even more from them.

AN has nothing to do with it. I don’t see any sign that they manipulate the prices.
For me, Gem prices are untrackable.

No.

The first cry of the amateur who loses money on any type of market is: “Someone must be cheating.”

There’s risk on any trading market of this type. There are too many people involved for anybody to know exactly what’s going to happen next. We can all make guesses, some may even be educated. One thing for sure though is that the majority will get burned so that the minority, who have spent enough time and effort to understand and control their risk, can profit.

If you can’t cope with the risk, don’t try to play.

Someone on the first page already mentioned this, but I’ll mention it again. It’s possible that someone with enough gold to burn simply amused himself by buying up lots of Platinum Ore and then dumping it back onto the TP for a loss, simply to mess with the TP PvP. We’ve had anecdotes in the past here from various players who do this when they’re bored.

Zaxares.5419:

We’ve had anecdotes in the past here from various players who do this when they’re bored.

I have done this with… Bronze Chain Linings IIRC… out of boredom and to see what would happen if a “stimulus package” hit a market. Bought from sellers up to a high-water point and sold that stock to all the buyers up to a low-water point, then watched the graphs on gw2spidy. Was very amusing, but ultimately disheartening. Probably some of the “most fun” gold I have spent in this game though, and I’m by no means a TP tycoon.

Manipulation in the “conspiracy” sense is just that: “theory”

KyreneZA.8617:

Zaxares.5419:

We’ve had anecdotes in the past here from various players who do this when they’re bored.

I have done this with… Bronze Chain Linings IIRC… out of boredom and to see what would happen if a “stimulus package” hit a market. Bought from sellers up to a high-water point and sold that stock to all the buyers up to a low-water point, then watched the graphs on gw2spidy. Was very amusing, but ultimately disheartening. Probably some of the “most fun” gold I have spent in this game though, and I’m by no means a TP tycoon.

Manipulation in the “conspiracy” sense is just that: “theory”

LOL I did the same once with a crafting item , It is funny watching the graphs, though it stuffed the market up on the item for a few weeks.

There’s always someone who’s going to look at the TP and at his gold supply and go Hmmmmm…

Why a few months ago someone bought the entire supply of potato’s out… I’d love to know who did that one, there had to have been millions of the things up there.

That potato thing was hilarious. All my low level alts could farm potatoes for a day or two, and I had a stack already to sell.

Perhaps someone was just making a charity donation to all the lowbies.

edit: and I too would consider the NO! finisher.

aww, the profits were even better before I got there
a few days ago, I was crafting like I normally do. I noticed darksteel ingots were selling really high (~3.8s) compared to the price in platinum it takes to make them (1.2s), so much more that it was actually profitable to buy platinum and sell darksteel at a profit after taxes
so I bought some platinum and made darksteel then sold them at 1c undercut.
they sold within 5 minutes
so I bought more platinum.
in the end, I bought about 4,000 platinum within a few hours and made 2,000 darksteel ingots at about 30c profit each ingot = 6g. I decided to stop pressing my luck.

Hyper.6374:

tolunart.2095:

Hyper.6374:

TLDR:- is anet manipulating the trading post that’s supposed to be player driven?

No.

Awesome and your source?

The fact that a while ago, Plat ore was ~25c 8c each =P
…and there was actually a glut of it even before that

If you looked closely, you’d see Mithril is doing the same thing more or less right now.
(It used to be one of the pricier metals before we got this “Everything that drops for upper levels in level 50 or lower zones is inexplicably a level 80 item” which I personally think should be throttled or somewhat rolled back so Mithril can regain some value)

Every market kind that has any opportunity for real money (eg: Gold/Item Selling)
will be assaulted. BLTP isn’t an exception. Use bots to instant node-farm, then autokill-autosell, then they will use the non-sold golds to buy up a lot of a material meanwhile increasing its base price, then load up the bought ones on the same price.
They can re-order the prices without you noticing it, then when you try to sell that stuff, of corse, you’ll stay on the price they wanted. But they’re smarter a bit.

• They won’t upload a million of that item. They’ll keep most of it to after-fill, and they upload the stacks with 1c price differences, so you won’t see a huge spike on the price-amount curve
• With gold, they make more gold by investing as said above.
• They have a nice trade-web to wash those golds clean.

tweeve.3782:

Getting no net profit on the trade post is a common problem.

More than half the time when I craft something if I were to put it on the Trade Post the item there would be for less money than what the resources cost. Also the going price is less than if I were to vendor the item. Yes I know there is a check for vendor prices but that check it before the TP takes its cut not after. So you can still end up loosing money. Where if you vendor’d the item you actually make a bit of money.

Before you craft, check gw2spidy. They have the mat costs – tp fees so you can see your potential profits/losses if you craft and sell.