Guild Wars 2

If you’re doing trades via mail and the other person scams you, do you get the item back if you report them for scamming? I’m asking this because some of the higher priced items are ridiculous to sell on the Trading Post as the tax and posting price take a bunch of gold off the actual sale.

The tax pays for a secure trading method though.

Personally, I hope you cannot because I can’t see how “going back on your word” should be something that devs involve themselves in.

However, I expect they will set something up if it becomes a frequent issue to stop people complaining.

No you do not get them back

Can anyone explain why there’s a tax in this game?

Agent Mulder.4531:

Can anyone explain why there’s a tax in this game?

Cash sink.

Same reason that level 80’s are forced to spend their currency on repairs and waypoints cost more as you level up, to try to stop people (especially level 80s) accumulating millions of gold.

Agent Mulder.4531:

Can anyone explain why there’s a tax in this game?

goldsink.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_sink

Agent Mulder.4531:

Can anyone explain why there’s a tax in this game?

Death and taxes

Yes, but some of the higher end items are just ridiculous to sell on the TP. Take destroyer weapons as an example. Put it up for 30g it costs around 1.5g. The 15% tax on actually selling it ends up being 4.5g. That’s a total of 6 gold lost.

I don’t think that you get anything back. It would create a huge workload for game masters if you would.

If trading via mail would be zero risk, everybody would trust everyone. Scammers would notice that people always trusts them and the number of scammers would skyrocket.

Suddenly reports of scamming would rise from 5/day to 50.000/day.

Just don’t trust anyone you don’t know :P

Part of the reason for a listing fee is so that you don’t park things on the TP at very high prices in the hope of catching a fish or just to store.

High end items will always be high priced, because the small items used to make them cost a lot in total. Take the Exotics used to make Legendary weapons. I see one going for 188g, which is understandable considering the extremely small chance of getting one and the fact that exotics cost several gold each. Just to list it, it would cost you over 5g. You will also lose about 28g if you do end up selling it. They really need a trading system like they had in the original Guild Wars.

In fact the listing fee will force people to overprice said items just to break even or make a profit from getting them. An item costs 25g to make? Just to break even, you would need to list it for over 30g. This screws over the buyer as they have to dish out a lot more for items.

you cant get kitten from anet.. not even from a bugged box that wasnt working as intended..

No. But you learned a valuable lesson. Pay the tax and get a bit less but at least get it.

Lelouch Lamperouge.3716:

Yes, but some of the higher end items are just ridiculous to sell on the TP. Take destroyer weapons as an example. Put it up for 30g it costs around 1.5g. The 15% tax on actually selling it ends up being 4.5g. That’s a total of 6 gold lost.

The 15% actually includes the listing fee (the sales tax is 10%), so you’d lose 4.5g in total. That’s still a lot, but it’s a lot less than 100% which you’d lose to a scammer.

ANet has repeatedly stated that they don’t have the technical ability in the game to restore single items, and account-wide rollbacks won’t be used for this purpose.

What they could do is alter the mail slightly.

If you could choose to send or ask for cash then you could mail an item while asking for 100g. If the person accepts he gets the item and automatically sends 100g via another mail.

COD (Cash On Delivery) has been in other MMO mail systems and worked well. For the user it just means 1 extra control allowing them to change “send gold” to “request gold” (or whatever they choose to call the options).

Stop selling stuff for a steal and maybe the trading posts fees will go down to acceptable values.

TP = safety, at a price.

Be glad, in EvE you can pay the price (if you so choose) but still don’t get the safety, so GW2 is quite kind with the players.

caveat emptor – you have to take at least some responsibility for what you do. The fact that a face to face trading system doesn’t exist should tell you that you aren’t meant to trade that way. If you choose to ignore that, then you do so at your own risk and shouldn’t expect someone else to sort it out for you. I am sure that Arenanet support have enough things to do without following you around and recovering any money that you drop on the pavement.

roqoco.4053:

caveat emptor – you have to take at least some responsibility for what you do. The fact that a face to face trading system doesn’t exist should tell you that you aren’t meant to trade that way. If you choose to ignore that, then you do so at your own risk and shouldn’t expect someone else to sort it out for you. I am sure that Arenanet support have enough things to do without following you around and recovering any money that you drop on the pavement.

Except, isn’t the mail system specifically designed to let you mail items / gold to other people but not to yourself? I recall having to send gold to a 3rd party who would then send it back to me so I could get the gold on my alt.

Jestunhi.7429:

Except, isn’t the mail system specifically designed to let you mail items / gold to other people but not to yourself? I recall having to send gold to a 3rd party who would then send it back to me so I could get the gold on my alt.

You just deposit it in your bank tab and then your alt can withdraw it. That’s been possible since the first BWE at least.

The mail system allows to attach money and items so you can give things to friends. For instance, we used it to send money to a guild officer to expand the guild. Sometimes when in a group we send each other things that might be useful etc. It’s when you start using it for trading, particularly with strangers, that you are subverting a game mechanism – that’s what the TP is for.

I’m not saying there is no way to transfer between alts (guild bank would also cover it), just pointing out that a mail system which stops you from mailing yourself must logically be designed to send mail to other people.

So it must be designed to send mail, potentially with attachments, to other people. I have yet to see anything even remotely official stating that it should not be used for trading, and if you claim that it would be “subverting a game mechanism” I’d be eager to know where you get your info from.

Please provide a link to official confirmation that you should not trade via the mail system.

Jestunhi.7429:

I’m not saying there is no way to transfer between alts (guild bank would also cover it), just pointing out that a mail system which stops you from mailing yourself must logically be designed to send mail to other people.

So it must be designed to send mail, potentially with attachments, to other people. I have yet to see anything even remotely official stating that it should not be used for trading, and if you claim that it would be “subverting a game mechanism” I’d be eager to know where you get your info from.

Please provide a link to official confirmation that you should not trade via the mail system.

Simply put…because you get scammed.

Until a CoD feature is implemented.

I for one would like to see it added. I personally like to trade things at a more reasonable cost, but doing so on the market means, with taxes, I get even less. At least if I sell my stuff at a reasonable price, people will buy it, I will get full money, and they can get a good deal.

The system should allow for this, seeing as I can’t really do it cross server (except in overflow).

teviko.6049:

Until a CoD feature is implemented.

So you imagine that Arenanet will implement a system which bypasses the necessity to pay taxes, a very important and useful gold sink (and as a byproduct allow chat to be spammed with trade messages). Do you expect the inland revenue to encourage tax avoidance too perhaps?

This is one feature you are going to have a wait a very long time for, is my guess.

Jestunhi.7429:

Please provide a link to official confirmation that you should not trade via the mail system.

During Beta, people complained about this type of thing and the Devs did make some response posts (which have been wiped since the Beta forums were closed). Basically ArenaNet got tired of Trade Window scamming where people would use multiple windows popping up and quick reaction times (to close windows and/or remove items from windows) that they wanted to create a system where their Customer Service didn’t have to deal with resolving this kind of junk.

The result was the BLTC auction system. This was supposed to be the replacement for Trading windows since there was a 0% chance of being scammed through this item transfer system. (However it is highly ironic that their trading solution was out of commision for the early weeks of the game.) In various posts (which were even carried over into the early days of the live game on these forums), ArenaNet responded to threads by saying that they were not responsible for a what a player does with the Mail system. They stressed that you should only Mail with people you completely trust, but you should still expect to get potentially scammed. If you wanted to avoid getting scammed, then you should use their BLTC system.

Jestunhi.7429, I’m not going to hunt through a month’s worth of forum junk to provide you with a Dev quote. That’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack. If you want to see it in hard writing for yourself, then you’ll need to do that on your own.

Wiser with Age.3714:

Jestunhi.7429, I’m not going to hunt through a month’s worth of forum junk to provide you with a Dev quote. That’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack. If you want to see it in hard writing for yourself, then you’ll need to do that on your own.

No No, that’s not how it works. The player isn’t required to spend hours reading through every post on the forum to find out what he is allowed to do.

I’m not making any claims about whether it’s allowed. I never have. However if I did and if I wanted to be taken seriously instead of just dismissed I would certainly have something to back my claims up.

Then ignore our collective reponses, lose something in a Mail scam, and complain to Customer Support. Plenty of people have gone that route, then posted angry threads on these forums because Customer Support said that there wasn’t anything that they could do. We’re just trying to save you some time and aggravation.

Wiser with Age.3714:

Then ignore our collective reponses, lose something in a Mail scam, and complain to Customer Support. Plenty of people have gone that route, then posted angry threads on these forums because Customer Support said that there wasn’t anything that they could do. We’re just trying to save you some time and aggravation.

No need. I’m fairly sure I never said I use it for trading (other than between alts where I mail them via my brother or a guildie – or could use my own or the guild bank instead).

There was a very early thread about scamming of some sort and a dev responded to someones question asking if this can be reported in the report feature as ‘scamming’ and he replied with a solid ‘yes’ that that is in fact scamming. Whether they chase it up or not i don’t know.

All the gold accumulated through taxes should be pooled as a jackpot for a lottery. Players can get lottery tickets from the black lion chests.

At least then the money would feed back into the community and it would help promote buying keys. Win/Win

The devs made a deliberate choice to not include trading outside of the trading post. As far as the game is concerned, it doesn’t exist. Everything outside of the TP is gifting. If you try to treat the mail gifting system like a trade system, your only saftey net is the other person’s good word. You can report them for scamming, because they lied to you, but you won’t get anything back, and Anet has bigger issues to work on than undoing your bad decision.