Guild Wars 2

Firelysm.4967:

Wanze.8410:

The biggest problem i see with your suggestions of account bound items after tp purchase or raising its sales tax after being traded once:
It will have huge implementation costs. They would need to make a 2nd item ID for every item to note if its tradeable or not. That will also mean, that those items wont stack anymore, so people will complain about lack of storage space.
For many item groups, this chance will have little effect anyways. Anything that can be used in crafting, forging, be salvaged or can be altered in other ways (for example a lootbag that gets opened) can just be bought on the tp, altered and sold again.

I make a great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, salvaging, crafting and forging and i guess, i would still be able to make significantly more profit than in other areas of the game, even without flipping and speculating. So your proposed change isnt really a great solution to your perceived problem, it would create unconvenience to a majority of players that have to deal with lack of storage space now and therefore in my eyes wouldnt warrant the implementation costs.

Wrong, depends how creative are you, but from my programming experience this could be done fairly easy. You just have to add one attribute to data base which doesnt even effect existing items. Once you have sold items on TP they would be flag “Been on Trading Post”, you simply stack them as usual, but once you try to sell them you can choose which to sell first, implementation can be made with one simple CHECK box, “Sell spoiled items”. As a buyer it doesn’t even matter? Why? Because once you buy it you know that item will become spoiled and will be worthless to sell again.

And this implementation would take no time to implement.
Update TP:
http://prntscr.com/8qu859
Update inventory:
http://prntscr.com/8qud5l

You make great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, u can still do that because items contained wouldn’t be marked as spoiled (been on trading post). This is in no mean flipping it’s playing a game, and if you enjoy playing crafting game, i’m fine with it, it’s part of the game, but flipping is not.

You have no authority to make that statement whatsoever. If it wasn’t intended Anet would’ve got rid of it by now. Who are you to tell what people should and should not enjoy in a game?

Firelysm.4967:

By ToT farming and SW you play the game, by flipping you don’t.
Flipping is something as side effect of bad model making of trading post.
If people want to play economy simulator, they can clearly instead of playing the game, play the “REAL GAME” go work for lets say 1 week, and use that money for real stock breaking.

wow man… i just cannot bear your completely irrational hate any more.

First:
Why do you “play a game” when you hit buttons to use a skill which kills some npc and don’t do so when you hit buttons to increase your ingame gold count?
You play the game one way or the other.

Second:
If someone buys guildwars (or plays it for free) to use it as an economy simulator whats wrong with that? Besides most people do pve/spvp/wvw AND use the auction house to increase what they got from the different aspects of the game or transmute their rewards for something they want to have.
The auction house seems to be the very definition of evil for you.
Flipping is actually is very vital for the game since it keeps inflation low.

Third:
your “REAL GAME” example is so bad in various aspects. why dont you use the term “real life”? In real life you work to live a good life. you have an income and you will have to use huge amounts of that income for food, a house, various insurances. there will be little of your income to speculate with. Your ridiculous 1week wont earn you anything of interest. the savings of years however….
and guess what…
people who have a lot of money often invest that money. Or get someone who invests it for them.

Whatever…. please let everyone play the game as he wants it to play and think of your statements before you post them.
Thanks

Flippers are not the devil. If the game had only an option to list sell prices then there might be a chance of an issue. But since the TP has the option to list buy prices, prices tend to drive back down. Its up to the player to judge the value of something, else they have the ability to go acquire the item themselves. If you think the sell prices are too high, place your own buy orders and wait for them to fill as you try and get the item yourself. Ironically there is no penalty to undervalue an item in game but there is one to try and overvalue it. If a seller or flipper makes a bad call and need to relist their items then they lose.

Short answer there is already a check and balance in place and it works. -1 here to account bounding items, actually would prefer to see less items bound. If someone has an item I would like and they are willing to sell it why not, or the inverse, if I have stuff I am not interested in why is my only option in destroying it.

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Firelysm.4967:

Wanze.8410:

The biggest problem i see with your suggestions of account bound items after tp purchase or raising its sales tax after being traded once:
It will have huge implementation costs. They would need to make a 2nd item ID for every item to note if its tradeable or not. That will also mean, that those items wont stack anymore, so people will complain about lack of storage space.
For many item groups, this chance will have little effect anyways. Anything that can be used in crafting, forging, be salvaged or can be altered in other ways (for example a lootbag that gets opened) can just be bought on the tp, altered and sold again.

I make a great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, salvaging, crafting and forging and i guess, i would still be able to make significantly more profit than in other areas of the game, even without flipping and speculating. So your proposed change isnt really a great solution to your perceived problem, it would create unconvenience to a majority of players that have to deal with lack of storage space now and therefore in my eyes wouldnt warrant the implementation costs.

Wrong, depends how creative are you, but from my programming experience this could be done fairly easy. You just have to add one attribute to data base which doesnt even effect existing items. Once you have sold items on TP they would be flag “Been on Trading Post”, you simply stack them as usual, but once you try to sell them you can choose which to sell first, implementation can be made with one simple CHECK box, “Sell spoiled items”. As a buyer it doesn’t even matter? Why? Because once you buy it you know that item will become spoiled and will be worthless to sell again.

And this implementation would take no time to implement.
Update TP:
http://prntscr.com/8qu859
Update inventory:
http://prntscr.com/8qud5l

You make great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, u can still do that because items contained wouldn’t be marked as spoiled (been on trading post). This is in no mean flipping it’s playing a game, and if you enjoy playing crafting game, i’m fine with it, it’s part of the game, but flipping is not.

You have no authority to make that statement whatsoever. If it wasn’t intended Anet would’ve got rid of it by now. Who are you to tell what people should and should not enjoy in a game?

You are just mad, because people are starting to resist the biggest money flow of flippers? Are you mad because if something changes about this, you’ll have to start actually doing something in the game in order to get your favourite things, or maybe sometimes buy gems? It’s so easy to see who’s made about changing the unintentional content.

In some way if you support flipping you should be ashamed that you let dungeon nerf happen, and support flipping, why creating such beautiful world and instances, if you sit in LA flipping the coin:)?

You can buy material, craft things, and put them back, i support you at this, but i know what you do, stock yourself, you are self centric, selfish and you don’t care about the game health to help community to grow in marketing, to support trading in general “i need this you need that, 5 this for 2 of yours, wanna trade?”.

I did got 4 mails telling or threatening me how I intentionally ruin flipping, and how i shouldn’t tell people about it because it will only get worse. But what if i want that you guys finally break TP, to see how things go then:)? What will you flip when no1 wont even try to go out there and farm the material?

“you have no authority” but who did give you authority to exploit API?
ArenaNet gave you tools to see the market, so you can easily check things that you want or need in order to craft your desired item, but what you guys did?
You did turn API for trading post into bot, that calculates maximum profit out of TP and will put other people around you in even deeper mud, they will have to play even more in order to get desired goal, while you just abuse API. You come home from work take 10 minutes, bam 200gold in your pocket in next few days by just waiting.
and who gave YOU the authority to get your virtual wealth on small people that actually play the content?

Firelysm.4967:

Wanze.8410:

The biggest problem i see with your suggestions of account bound items after tp purchase or raising its sales tax after being traded once:
It will have huge implementation costs. They would need to make a 2nd item ID for every item to note if its tradeable or not. That will also mean, that those items wont stack anymore, so people will complain about lack of storage space.
For many item groups, this chance will have little effect anyways. Anything that can be used in crafting, forging, be salvaged or can be altered in other ways (for example a lootbag that gets opened) can just be bought on the tp, altered and sold again.

I make a great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, salvaging, crafting and forging and i guess, i would still be able to make significantly more profit than in other areas of the game, even without flipping and speculating. So your proposed change isnt really a great solution to your perceived problem, it would create unconvenience to a majority of players that have to deal with lack of storage space now and therefore in my eyes wouldnt warrant the implementation costs.

Wrong, depends how creative are you, but from my programming experience this could be done fairly easy. You just have to add one attribute to data base which doesnt even effect existing items. Once you have sold items on TP they would be flag “Been on Trading Post”, you simply stack them as usual, but once you try to sell them you can choose which to sell first, implementation can be made with one simple CHECK box, “Sell spoiled items”. As a buyer it doesn’t even matter? Why? Because once you buy it you know that item will become spoiled and will be worthless to sell again.

And this implementation would take no time to implement.
Update TP:
http://prntscr.com/8qu859
Update inventory:
http://prntscr.com/8qud5l

You make great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, u can still do that because items contained wouldn’t be marked as spoiled (been on trading post). This is in no mean flipping it’s playing a game, and if you enjoy playing crafting game, i’m fine with it, it’s part of the game, but flipping is not.

OK but would it change then on the status quo?

Lets say Anet finds a way to restrict profits on the tp via flipping. How does that positively and directly enhance your game experience if everything that a flipper did can be done by a crafter as well with the same personal profit margins?

Basically crafting is just complicated flipping, you buy ingredients on buy order and list them for a higher price. If you do speculative crafting, you use ingredients, which you think will soon rise in price or you craft items that will be in demand in the future and list them way above the lowest listing.

Firelysm.4967:

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Firelysm.4967:

Wanze.8410:

The biggest problem i see with your suggestions of account bound items after tp purchase or raising its sales tax after being traded once:
It will have huge implementation costs. They would need to make a 2nd item ID for every item to note if its tradeable or not. That will also mean, that those items wont stack anymore, so people will complain about lack of storage space.
For many item groups, this chance will have little effect anyways. Anything that can be used in crafting, forging, be salvaged or can be altered in other ways (for example a lootbag that gets opened) can just be bought on the tp, altered and sold again.

I make a great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, salvaging, crafting and forging and i guess, i would still be able to make significantly more profit than in other areas of the game, even without flipping and speculating. So your proposed change isnt really a great solution to your perceived problem, it would create unconvenience to a majority of players that have to deal with lack of storage space now and therefore in my eyes wouldnt warrant the implementation costs.

Wrong, depends how creative are you, but from my programming experience this could be done fairly easy. You just have to add one attribute to data base which doesnt even effect existing items. Once you have sold items on TP they would be flag “Been on Trading Post”, you simply stack them as usual, but once you try to sell them you can choose which to sell first, implementation can be made with one simple CHECK box, “Sell spoiled items”. As a buyer it doesn’t even matter? Why? Because once you buy it you know that item will become spoiled and will be worthless to sell again.

And this implementation would take no time to implement.
Update TP:
http://prntscr.com/8qu859
Update inventory:
http://prntscr.com/8qud5l

You make great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, u can still do that because items contained wouldn’t be marked as spoiled (been on trading post). This is in no mean flipping it’s playing a game, and if you enjoy playing crafting game, i’m fine with it, it’s part of the game, but flipping is not.

You have no authority to make that statement whatsoever. If it wasn’t intended Anet would’ve got rid of it by now. Who are you to tell what people should and should not enjoy in a game?

You are just mad, because people are starting to resist the biggest money flow of flippers? Are you mad because if something changes about this, you’ll have to start actually doing something in the game in order to get your favourite things, or maybe sometimes buy gems? It’s so easy to see who’s made about changing the unintentional content.

In some way if you support flipping you should be ashamed that you let dungeon nerf happen, and support flipping, why creating such beautiful world and instances, if you sit in LA flipping the coin:)?

You can buy material, craft things, and put them back, i support you at this, but i know what you do, stock yourself, you are self centric and even close to help community to grow in marketing.

I’ve already got 4 mails telling or threatening me how I intentionally ruin flipping, and how i shouldn’t tell people about it because it will only get worse. But what if i want that you guys finally break TP, to see how things go then:)? What will you flip when no1 wont even try to go out there and farm the material?

“you have no authority” but who did give you authority to exploit API?
ArenaNet gave you tools to see the market, so you can easily check things that you want or need in order to craft your desired item, but what you guys did?
You did turn API for trading post into bot, that calculates maximum profit out of TP and will put other people around you in even deeper mud, they will have to play even more in order to get desired goal, while you just abuse API, while working, you come home take 10 minutes, bam 200gold in your pocket in next few days by just waiting.
and who gave YOU the authority to get your virtual wealth on small people that actually play the content?

All I can see from this post are irrational assumptions. The facts are as follows
-flippers make the market work more fluently
-flippers also make buy/sell orders towards the equilibrium
-when the prices are in an equilibrium you get more money when you sell an item
-also buying items become cheaper
-we also shouldn’t forget the tax which makes money go away from the game reducing inflation and making YOUR money more valuable

example:
static market – buy order for 1 copper and sell order for 10 copper -> farmer sells for 1 copper the mats he has gathered and crafter buys mats for 10 copper.

dynamic market – buy order for 5 copper and sell offer for 5 copper -> farmer sells mats for 5 copper and crafter buys items for 5 copper.

Now you can talk all you want about being the voice of the farmers but you can’t argue for 1 copper being more than 5 copper. Your ideas would end up in the static market state.

Flipping is a service and services cost money even in real life. In gw2 that service cost is the margin they get for flipping those items.

But who really wins in the end? Does it have to be that other must lose for the other to win? For me it seems like the farmers get more money for their farmed materials and the flippers get their margins for their services. Also crafters seem to get cheaper materials for their crafting.

Now who here wins the most is irrelevant question. If everyone wins then it’s just a question of jealousy if the flipper gets 2 candies while you only get 1. The alternative would be that everyone gets no candy.

Hello Firelysm,

im a trader for more than 2 years now and like NotOverlyCheesy said Flipping is a service and you know what ? Flipping isnt destroying the economy flipping is pure balance and a win/win situation for the flippers and for the casuals. And i gona show you later how you really destroy the economy.

But how can it be balanced ? And why its a win/win situation ?

Ok so when im flipping im normaly buying items that are under lvl 80. Many people that are leveling their chars and might be new in gw2 upgrade their gear many times while they are lvling up to 80. And they dont want to wait for the equipment so they often just klick the “insta buy” button.

But on the otherside many people that are lvling drop equipment they dont need and gues what they often click the “insta sell” icon in the TP cuse they dont want to wait until they recieve their gold.

Problem: People want to “insta buy” and “insta sell” on the same time.

Solution: Flippers!

1. We place orders into the market and increase the offer price so people who press the “insta buy” button get more money cause of higher price.

2. We place our bought items into the Trading Post and gues what we decrease the price again so people who press the “insta buy” button dont have to pay so much.

—> We first increase the price and then decreace the price = balance nothing changes and as you can see Flipping is a Service. We provide players a insta button for selling and buying!

If there wouldnt be flippers you couldnt press insta buy button on these low lvl items while your lvling up you char and you couldnt just insta sell the stuff your dropping while lvl up your char.

And knew players and many other players dont want to wait. They want to get their items in time and sell their items just right in time. They dont want to wait and flippers provide this service on items that dont get farmed.

For example you cant flip items that get regulary farmed like in SW cause too many people are already placing orders and dont have to insta sell their loot cause most farmers got enough time to wait for their money.
Flipping only works on items that got not a normal balance by supply and demand. If im insta selling my dropped items im only increasing the supply if im selling the item to someone who places this item into the TP again.

And if you now compare it with the reallife: You go into the supermarket and you want to insta buy your food. You dont want to wait and placing orders to get your food. The supermarket is flipping too and you know what they are earning money with it. They are providing a service you get everything right in time thats how it works.

If the majority in Gw2 wouldnt like to get every item insta sold our insta bought flipping wouldnt works but as long as people use this service flipping wont get destroyed.

And how can you destroy the economy ? For example if i got now 15k gold and im buying with 4k gold the whole supply of a limited item. On many items you just have to increase the items price by 10-20 gold then you make profit again. So if you might increase the items price from 30 to 80 gold you already make between 30 and 40 gold per item you sell.
Thats not a win/win situation and thats how you destroy the economy if you buy the whole supply of an item and you force the players who want this limited item to buy it for a price where you make huge profit ;)

I hope you see now Flipping is a service which we provide to other players and flipping is in balance you dont destroy the economy by flipping and your not even creating new money you just get paid from players who want to press the “insta buy” button for your service.

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Firelysm.4967:

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Firelysm.4967:

Wanze.8410:

The biggest problem i see with your suggestions of account bound items after tp purchase or raising its sales tax after being traded once:
It will have huge implementation costs. They would need to make a 2nd item ID for every item to note if its tradeable or not. That will also mean, that those items wont stack anymore, so people will complain about lack of storage space.
For many item groups, this chance will have little effect anyways. Anything that can be used in crafting, forging, be salvaged or can be altered in other ways (for example a lootbag that gets opened) can just be bought on the tp, altered and sold again.

I make a great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, salvaging, crafting and forging and i guess, i would still be able to make significantly more profit than in other areas of the game, even without flipping and speculating. So your proposed change isnt really a great solution to your perceived problem, it would create unconvenience to a majority of players that have to deal with lack of storage space now and therefore in my eyes wouldnt warrant the implementation costs.

Wrong, depends how creative are you, but from my programming experience this could be done fairly easy. You just have to add one attribute to data base which doesnt even effect existing items. Once you have sold items on TP they would be flag “Been on Trading Post”, you simply stack them as usual, but once you try to sell them you can choose which to sell first, implementation can be made with one simple CHECK box, “Sell spoiled items”. As a buyer it doesn’t even matter? Why? Because once you buy it you know that item will become spoiled and will be worthless to sell again.

And this implementation would take no time to implement.
Update TP:
http://prntscr.com/8qu859
Update inventory:
http://prntscr.com/8qud5l

You make great deal of profit just by opening lootbags, u can still do that because items contained wouldn’t be marked as spoiled (been on trading post). This is in no mean flipping it’s playing a game, and if you enjoy playing crafting game, i’m fine with it, it’s part of the game, but flipping is not.

You have no authority to make that statement whatsoever. If it wasn’t intended Anet would’ve got rid of it by now. Who are you to tell what people should and should not enjoy in a game?

You are just mad, because people are starting to resist the biggest money flow of flippers? Are you mad because if something changes about this, you’ll have to start actually doing something in the game in order to get your favourite things, or maybe sometimes buy gems? It’s so easy to see who’s made about changing the unintentional content.

In some way if you support flipping you should be ashamed that you let dungeon nerf happen, and support flipping, why creating such beautiful world and instances, if you sit in LA flipping the coin:)?

You can buy material, craft things, and put them back, i support you at this, but i know what you do, stock yourself, you are self centric and even close to help community to grow in marketing.

I’ve already got 4 mails telling or threatening me how I intentionally ruin flipping, and how i shouldn’t tell people about it because it will only get worse. But what if i want that you guys finally break TP, to see how things go then:)? What will you flip when no1 wont even try to go out there and farm the material?

“you have no authority” but who did give you authority to exploit API?
ArenaNet gave you tools to see the market, so you can easily check things that you want or need in order to craft your desired item, but what you guys did?
You did turn API for trading post into bot, that calculates maximum profit out of TP and will put other people around you in even deeper mud, they will have to play even more in order to get desired goal, while you just abuse API, while working, you come home take 10 minutes, bam 200gold in your pocket in next few days by just waiting.
and who gave YOU the authority to get your virtual wealth on small people that actually play the content?

All I can see from this post are irrational assumptions. The facts are as follows
-flippers make the market work more fluently
-flippers also make buy/sell orders towards the equilibrium
-when the prices are in an equilibrium you get more money when you sell an item
-also buying items become cheaper
-we also shouldn’t forget the tax which makes money go away from the game reducing inflation and making YOUR money more valuable

example:
static market – buy order for 1 copper and sell order for 10 copper -> farmer sells for 1 copper the mats he has gathered and crafter buys mats for 10 copper.

dynamic market – buy order for 5 copper and sell offer for 5 copper -> farmer sells mats for 5 copper and crafter buys items for 5 copper.

Now you can talk all you want about being the voice of the farmers but you can’t argue for 1 copper being more than 5 copper. Your ideas would end up in the static market state.

Flipping is a service and services cost money even in real life. In gw2 that service cost is the margin they get for flipping those items.

But who really wins in the end? Does it have to be that other must lose for the other to win? For me it seems like the farmers get more money for their farmed materials and the flippers get their margins for their services. Also crafters seem to get cheaper materials for their crafting.

Now who here wins the most is irrelevant question. If everyone wins then it’s just a question of jealousy if the flipper gets 2 candies while you only get 1. The alternative would be that everyone gets no candy.

Flipping is a Service its like when you go into a supermarket and you dont want to place your orders to buy your food. You want to insta buy everything and thats how flipping works in gw2. Its a win/win situation and flipping isnt destroying the economy flipping is balanced you increase the price for people who press the “insta sell” button and decrease the price for people who press the “insta buy” button.

Flipping = Service but some people will just understand it when they cant buy their loved items per “insta buy” button anymore or they have to pay a lot more for clicking on it.

Thanks Cheesy, at least someone understood that flipping is just a service.

Trinnitty.8256:

I think I kinda agree. I get tired of TP flippers buying up things just to resell them at higher prices. I’m talking the buying up large quantities of item to make them rarer and thus driving up the price by slowly releasing their stock back into the tp.

Your are talking about buying up large quantities of items but thats not Flipping. Thats market manipulation. If i got now 15 k gold and im buying for 4k all skins of a rare limited item and increasing the price by 50 % thats not flipping.

Flipping:

1. Making a offer on a item and increasing the prices for 1 copper so people get more money if they sell their items on insta sell to.
Then im waiting for people to insta sell on your offer = win/win situation they get their money fast you get your item for low price

2. You place this item into the Trading Post for 1 copper less so your decreasing the price to be the first. You not increasing the prices like you said. Now you wait for people to insta buy your items.
Again Win/Win situation you get your Item fast and the Flipper gets a bit more money. Just a few silver profit on the most items but if you make this with many items you get some profit.

And i need per day 1-2 hours its like farming just in a economy way cause im giving the people a service they can insta buy and insta sell their stuff from or for me and i get some silver profit. Im not breaking the economy cause im first increasing the prices so people get more money for selling their items on insta sell and then im decreasing the prices again for people who want to insta buy my items = balance

hey OP

just stop complaining about people who can make more money than you because you fail at it … nerf this nerf that .. stop the TP flippers yadayadayda …

when everything will be nerfed to the ground because of complaints like yours , then i hope you will remember this and enjoy hours of grinding for a blue/green items and a few coppers.

You know how you stop TP flipping?

You randomly introduce extremely rare (note, very uncommonly seen or used) materials or skins back into the content. Examples can be as easy as BLTC skins or rare historical (Ghastly Grinning Shield) in events. ANet chooses not to do it. If ANet could keep this under wraps (hello, internal testing team), this would work.

Note, Dungeon reward nerfing has -0- to do with TP flipping so it’s all apples-and-oranges.

I’m wondering why so many veterans get angry on these changes.

We the veterans have already thousands of materials stockpiled and some thousand gold. We probably all did every dungeon for some hundred times during the last 3 years.

Dungeon nerf or every nerf focused on the current gw2 areas is totally awesome! That just means that we the veterans will stay forever richer/further than newbies or f2p. So while we can get awesome loot and new expensive stuff playing HoT, casuals and f2p’s can grind like forever for us.

Just to add tp flipping is awesome. It’s the core basic part in the whole gw2 eonomy. One thing is for sure: Whatever happens, tp flipping will be there until the gw2 servers all shutdown.

IronPhoenix.2045:

Trinnitty.8256:

I think I kinda agree. I get tired of TP flippers buying up things just to resell them at higher prices. I’m talking the buying up large quantities of item to make them rarer and thus driving up the price by slowly releasing their stock back into the tp.

Your are talking about buying up large quantities of items but thats not Flipping. Thats market manipulation. If i got now 15 k gold and im buying for 4k all skins of a rare limited item and increasing the price by 50 % thats not flipping.

Sadly that’s what some people think flipping is about. Buying cheap and then repost not at the current instant buy price but at some point above that. Intercept the cheap sellers to force players to buy at an inflated price. That’s speculating.

They really don’t understand it’s about quick turnaround, the “flip”, of items so capital isn’t tied up for some unspecified period of time. They think flippers are “stealing” items from buyers who would use it or “conning” sellers into accepting a low ball amount. And then prey on buyers with inflated prices. You can’t change their minds. you can’t educate them.

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

Change the biased part, “Instead of buying something for honest purposes…” to, “Instead of buying items for their personal use…” and the description is accurate.

Essentially, these players are trying to “buy low” and “sell high.” They make money (profit) as long as the difference between what they paid and what they received is larger than the TP tax (15%).

The thread was started because the Op believes that flipping is a negative factor in the game’s economy. The counters to this belief are that flipping is beneficial because it promotes equilibrium, which is an economic term for market stability (prices for a given item remain in the same range). This is accurate for most items because the flipper has to stay within the range for buy and sell prices. Supply (how many of a given item will appear on the TP) and demand (how many people want the item, and in what quantity) determine that range.

Finally, if flippers are “taking advantage of anyone,” that would be players who want to buy and sell instantly. However, while these players are paying a little more than they might when buying, chances are that they are receiving a little more than they might when selling.

Funny because in real world we have problems of market manipulators and monopolies and rich people being real jerks (they just don’t pay their taxes and regular people suffer because of that).

But in GW2 there is no tax avoidance (well, you can send items via mail, but I don’t know anyone making a killing by trading via mail) so we all pay taxes equally. If you are trading with more expensive items you are paying more money. Hey maybe we should increase taxes and Anet could provide some public goods so that an average player has an easier life (free waypoints anyone ? ). I’m not sure if there is a way to introduce a progressive tax in GW2 …. how would you even determine someone’s wealth. Most wealthy people don’t keep a lot of gold. Would it be fair to introduce larger tax on more expensive items? I don’t know how wealthy people make their money…it might be just through large quantities of cheap times. I do it through expensive ones…

Not every person has the same opportunities as the next one. It is very circumstantial if you will be well off or not (place of birth, your parents, your neighborhood, your race…). It is not really your hard work that makes you so great or better off than others. I bet the same applies also to GW2 just on a much smaller scale. People who can keep more up to date are better off or they might be online just in the right time to buy certain items. They might have access to better spreadsheets and data….and so on. I think that accusing someone of just being jealous of other’s wealth is not very cool thing to do. I was just lucky to come across some cool spreadsheets and scripts which I can now use in my own spreadsheets. I had to be on Reddit at the right day to see the threads about those things. Now good luck for anyone trying to dig those up. I don’t think the situation really fair and that everyone has equal chances…you might just came across a player who will give you a really cool tip on how to make money, other people might not be that lucky.

Market manipulation is not nice….of course. Funny thing is that in real life people can manipulate markets because they might have monopoly in that market or because there is not enough supply of certain good coming in (after a disaster or just because the demand has increased so much that the supply didn’t have chance to adjust), but this is a game and all this scarcity has been introduced by the developers. So they probably want this to happen….otherwise they could just increase the supply of those items. Just make those skins to be obtainable all year round.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure if market manipulation influences anyone that much. Not sure if anyone is controlling any important items. Basically all important items are farmable or obtainable. There might be few skins that have very low supply but even Ghastly Shields are not being really manipulated by few very rich people. There are still a lot of people who have them in their banks, so as soon as someone tries to control that market and increase the price by buying up the stock, someone who has one in their bank will be motivated to sell theirs because the price is now more attractive to them. So we won’t have Ghastly Shields selling at max possible price of 10k gold any time soon.

You can’t nerf those who flip without nerfing everyone. The simple reason is that it’s a core element of how this economy works. The listing tax of 5%, is a heavy enough penalty that one has to pay up front, then another 10% of the list price is removed from the economy at the point of sale. So, on a 100g item, the seller pays a 5g listing fee up front out of their existing wallet. The buyer pays 100g and only 90 is delivered to the seller with a 10% sales tax, effectively removing 15g+ from the economy.

So…for that 100g item, if one where to buy it from the TP with the intent to flip, you would have to sell it for 117g64s71c just to break even….123g52s94c to make only 5% profit….so 105g. There’s a lot of risk that, yes, a few people can make good money on, but it is very time consuming and takes a crapload of gold out of the economy, which is ultimately a good thing to help keep inflation under control, more or less.

Without the ability to flip items, things would cost more than they already do simply because there would be that much more money in the economy. The largest money-making potential in the game, is not actually flipping on the TP, it is in long term investment. If you can predict what will increase in value, buy some and sit on it for a few months. I’ve known people who will buy up stacks Halloween bags at the end of the event for next to nothing and sit on them for a year because they always start quite high at the start of the event. People who could predict the market made TONS on linen when ascended crafting was announced.

McJAC.4739:

Would it be fair to introduce larger tax on more expensive items?

Likely not. Those who have lots of gold would have the option to raise the item’s price, passing the added tax on to the buyer. Meanwhile, someone with very little gold who, say, gets a lucky drop, might be unable to afford the fee to list the item at its current value.

Something like this happened to me in CoV. I got a respec token whose value was in excess of 50M Infamy. I only had enough to list it for 15M. Luckily for me, the CoX exchange used a blind bidding system, so I ended up selling for nearly the item’s value. That would not happen in GW2. If I get an item worth 1K gold and can only afford to list it for 500, I’m just out of luck.

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

dolphins???

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

are you implying that buying and reselling isn’t honest?

Farming Flats.5370:

hey OP

just stop complaining about people who can make more money than you because you fail at it … nerf this nerf that .. stop the TP flippers yadayadayda …

when everything will be nerfed to the ground because of complaints like yours , then i hope you will remember this and enjoy hours of grinding for a blue/green items and a few coppers.

+1 finally someone who realizes what this complaint is all about. i’m in no means rich in game. honestly, no legendary and 1 piece of ascended armor with no more 20g. you don’t see me complain about others making money and having more than me. if they can find a way to make money in game without exploit or cheat, it’s ok.

dragon.8071:

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

are you implying that buying and reselling isn’t honest?

Did you seriously not know that zombie farming Silverwastes is the only legit/respectable way to take other peoples gold?

Stabilizing TP prices and keeping inflation in check for a small profit is a dispicaple practice. Surely most of this sentiment comes from complete ignorance on the subject, Or, just maybe, from jealous people who actually tried playing the TP and failed miserably and are now bitter. Lord knows we put no work into a craft and what we call “understanding markets, playing smart, and taking silvers and golds that people are literally GIVING AWAY!”, is really just that we’re the ‘chosen ones’ who J. Smith provides with insider info.

Wtb Recipe:Tinfoil Hat! Pretty sure it’ll make me richer for sure.

Firelysm.4967:

But i wonder, why are Trading Post flippers still allowed to flip without punishment? Those people control the economy, and those people don’t even play the game for real. I’m not saying how people should play the game, but this type of playing is killing the game economy and gaming experience is suffering because ArenaNet is allowing this!

Flippers don’t control the economy. They influence the economy, sure, as do the players who go out and loot thousands of items. They don’t control it.

TP flippers are more or less like the guys who play the stock market in RL. They are playing a game of analysis and prediction more than anything, and sometimes they lose. The way they profit is by winning more often than they lose.

I like how a person can think they have figured out the answer to the ‘flipping’ problem after 3 years to make another thread about it, like the other 50 threads on the topic were failures.

Sorry, no. This thread adds nothing more to the discussion and life will continue with flipping. Get used to it … it’s been around for 3 years. Can’t be that bad.

Logos.1306:

Is this troll thread? Its really hard to read all that bull(youknowwhat)

It’s impossible to distinguish between a clever troll and a sincerely passionate but utterly ignorant post. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, though sometimes it’s not clear which way that really means…

Firelysm.4967:

I’m not even dungeon runner, but i feel sorry for those that love doing dungeons, and still getting rewarded for it, but now they will be left out. What is happening right now is, that dungeons will get a decent nerf so that HoT content(NEW)¸will be more rewarded then Core (OLD) content.

But i wonder, why are Trading Post flippers still allowed to flip without punishment?

…

I just started skimming from there. Last I checked, trade is good for everyone because it is a positive sum game, flipping is beneficial for everyone, investors give money to the poor,, speculation is a fun but practical thought experiment, capital gains are a gamble, there is no inherent evil in buying low and selling high, and merchers don’t deserve punishment of any kind.

So, is there actually a point to be made here, or is the anti-trade stuff just the same ole’ paranoid tripe?

It’s the classic “some people are doing something I can’t or won’t do and are being successful at it so it has to stop because it’s evil and I don’t like it”.

Classic.

Harper.4173:

It’s the classic “some people are doing something I can’t or won’t do and are being successful at it so it has to stop because it’s evil and I don’t like it”.

Classic.

Worst part is, people mind the inflation of prices, then blame flipping, but without flipping the prices would be much higher since more gold would be stagnant in the economy, raising the luxury goods price baseline.

Labjax.2465:

Firelysm.4967:

But i wonder, why are Trading Post flippers still allowed to flip without punishment? Those people control the economy, and those people don’t even play the game for real. I’m not saying how people should play the game, but this type of playing is killing the game economy and gaming experience is suffering because ArenaNet is allowing this!

Flippers don’t control the economy. They influence the economy, sure, as do the players who go out and loot thousands of items. They don’t control it.

TP flippers are more or less like the guys who play the stock market in RL. They are playing a game of analysis and prediction more than anything, and sometimes they lose. The way they profit is by winning more often than they lose.

Exactly, since I started playing this game over 3 years ago, the single largest influence on the economy, other than ANet manipulating messing with it, was the bots. Flipping was there before the bots, it was there after the bots, but when the bots were removed from the picture, that’s when we really started to see prices skyrocket. The first time I bought T6 they were all under 5s. Within a week or two of the mass bot killing (Over 35000 accounts according to ANet at the time), T6 prices were over 20s and precursors increased more than that. Bots are bad for a whole host of reasons, but if one likens them to robotic miners, they’re good for consumers because they keep stock high and prices low, well, they’re not good for ANet or the poor fellows whose accounts got hacked.

Unlike bots, which keep prices down by keeping stock high, flipping, on the other hand, works on the opposite principle. It helps keep prices down by reducing the amount of available money in the economy, hence reducing the buying/selling power of the individual. Because of the taxes, you can’t just pick any item and expect to make money. Remember, in order to break even on an item purchased for flipping, it has to be sold for approximately 17.5% higher than what you paid for it it for due to the way the taxes work, that 17.5% is permanently removed from the economy. There is money to be made of course: high end dyes, vanity items like skins and some high end recipes can sometimes turn as much as 50% profit, if you’re lucky and patient and wait for the right time to list. Sometimes you lose and take a huge loss, that’s just how it is. If one were to speculate, and had the money to gamble and sit on things, items required for ascended crafting will likely increase somewhat after HoT comes out due to the ascended requirement for raids.

Firelysm.4967:

Every item should become account bound once you purchase them, lets kill trade post flipping and fix the economy and with that GAMING EXPERIENCE!!!*

This won’t have the result you expect. Instead, it will cause the prices of things to go up more quickly. Flipping is only possible when you have impatient buyers and sellers, who want immediate fulfillment of their orders. If there’s no flipping, you’ll still have impatient traders and very quickly, the prices will rise as there will not be enough unbound supply to satisfy the demand. → flipping helps drive the buy offers closer to sell offers.

In addition, flipping removes an extra fraction of gold from the economy (as Wanze explained above). Oversimplifying: low-ball seller pays 15% and the flipper pays 15% (given the margins, this probably means about 5% more gold removed than without flipping). This adds up — the GW2 economy has one of the best gold sinks of any MMO.

tl;dr removing flipping will hurt everyone this suggestion is designed to help

As a side note, it will also give power traders an advantage: I guarantee that the most effective flippers in the game already know several ways they can make money if those goes through, thus giving more power to those who understand the economy and taking away the power of the vast majority of people who could care less.

Leamas.5803:

Exactly, since I started playing this game over 3 years ago, the single largest influence on the economy, other than ANet manipulating messing with it, was the bots. Flipping was there before the bots, it was there after the bots, but when the bots were removed from the picture, that’s when we really started to see prices skyrocket. The first time I bought T6 they were all under 5s. Within a week or two of the mass bot killing (Over 35000 accounts according to ANet at the time), T6 prices were over 20s and precursors increased more than that. Bots are bad for a whole host of reasons, but if one likens them to robotic miners, they’re good for consumers because they keep stock high and prices low, well, they’re not good for ANet or the poor fellows whose accounts got hacked.

Unlike bots, which keep prices down by keeping stock high, flipping, on the other hand, works on the opposite principle. It helps keep prices down by reducing the amount of available money in the economy, hence reducing the buying/selling power of the individual. Because of the taxes, you can’t just pick any item and expect to make money. Remember, in order to break even on an item purchased for flipping, it has to be sold for approximately 17.5% higher than what you paid for it it for due to the way the taxes work, that 17.5% is permanently removed from the economy. There is money to be made of course: high end dyes, vanity items like skins and some high end recipes can sometimes turn as much as 50% profit, if you’re lucky and patient and wait for the right time to list. Sometimes you lose and take a huge loss, that’s just how it is. If one were to speculate, and had the money to gamble and sit on things, items required for ascended crafting will likely increase somewhat after HoT comes out due to the ascended requirement for raids.

+1 sir. Well said.

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about selling something that you bought.

It is outrageous that you would suggest that there is.

wolfpaq.7354:

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about selling something that you bought.

It is outrageous that you would suggest that there is.

It’s a very old philosophical idea, merchants have the lowest “moral purity” because they create wealth while not creating anything for society.

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/japan/p/ShogJapanClass.htm

wolfpaq.7354:

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about selling something that you bought.

It is outrageous that you would suggest that there is.

Agreed. It’s smart to do so if you can afford to sit on items for a while. It’s certainly better than grinding out new gold and adding MORE money to the economy. But, what Agemnon is describing is not flipping par se, this is investing. I’ve done both and flipping typically involves buying items low then relisting them essentially immediately for what is usually a low-marginal, but quick, profit. You typically need to buy and move a lot to make any real coin and it is typically time consuming at the keyboard. Investing typically is less effort for the player, but requires much more wait time and money to turn any real profit, months or longer before you can resell, but there is the potential for much higher returns, sometimes in the 400-500% range, or more. For long term items, I choose items I expect to see at least 100% return on within 3-6 months. Sometimes I take a loss on a bad investment as prices on certain things tank (Certain enameled dyes), sometimes one has to wait longer than expected for prices to recover after tanking, such as unidentified dyes after the wardrobe was released, other times, if things go as expected, I can make some good coin. That said, this ties up a lot of coin, typically for many months.

Mostly what I see when people complain about those who play the TP are people who don’t understand how the economy works and/or don’t understand how to flip items or invest their money. To me it seems to be mostly jealousy. It’s kind of like zerkers whining, ever since day one, that condi builds are OP when they refuse to spec anything to cleanse conditions.

People complaining about problems that don’t exist because they really don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Behellagh.1468:

wolfpaq.7354:

Agemnon.4608:

Eddie Mo.7169:

What exactly are flippers

Instead of buying something for honest purposes they buy stuff with the purpose of reselling it later.

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about selling something that you bought.

It is outrageous that you would suggest that there is.

It’s a very old philosophical idea, merchants have the lowest “moral purity” because they create wealth while not creating anything for society.

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/japan/p/ShogJapanClass.htm

I didnt read the link but i disagree with your statement. I think a merchant contributes alot towards society because he centralizes the acquisition of goods. Whoever pays for his services, does so because it saves him labour or offers convenience.
So he contributes to overall efficiency.

Its the same in Guild Wars 2. I only make profit because I offer a service to players.
Flippers give players the opportunity to sell and buy directly and with that take over the risk from those players that the payout isnt instant.

Speculators, which i do most, offer a different kind of service, which has alot to do with logistics and storage space. If there is an item that has zero demand, people only sell it to the vendor, which destroys the item and greates gold, which leads to inflation.

If i step in and offer more than the vendor, three good things happen. The seller gets more gold, gold is destroyed via taxes rather than created and the item is not destroyed.

Once demand sets in, I am able to add to the supply which counters the price inflation.

If I wouldnt have paid a premium compared to the vendor in times of oversupply, the price of the item would have inflated even more because there is more gold in the economy from the vendor and twice 15% taxes.

One market, which might seem unethical to “exploit” to some, illustrates the centralisation of a service pretty well, which is selling items that you buy for gold from a vendor and sell it on the tp for a profit.

Some people might be surprised how huge the demand for vendor purchased items actually is.

Just have a look at cloth spool threads on gw2tp, how fast their supply diminishes from the tp until someone (not me) puts new supply on it and sells them for 1-2c profit per spool.

Depending on the day of the week, up to 30k gossamer spools get bought and replenished per day.

While it can still be argued that people who buy this do so because they dont know that they can buy it cheaper at every crafting station and the big bad trader is exploiting that lack of knowledge. But maybe it just gets bought by people out of convenience because they rather pay a couple more copper per spool to buy a stack on the tp rather than having to click buy 25 times at the vendor.

Another great example is beverages, which are needed to complete collections.
They usually even have a bigger profit margin than the couple of copper than the vendor mats from the crafting merchant.

I sold plenty of stacks of steins of ale for twice, 5 or 10 times the vendor value.
The high profit margins usually come from other wannabe traders, who think they can manipulate the prices of those items by buying out all stock. I gladly take their money.
But even sales to regular consumers for 1s more than vendor value make alot of sense to me, even as a consumer. I can either waypoint to a bartender who sells that beverage and pay 2s waypoint costs or pay 1s more on the tp.
Most players usually try to finish those collections in bulk, they use guide and see where they get all items. I guess most people would chose to pay 1s more on the tp for 10 different items, rather than having to travel to 10 different merchants.

Wanze.8410:

One market, which might seem unethical to “exploit” to some, illustrates the centralisation of a service pretty well, which is selling items that you buy for gold from a vendor and sell it on the tp for a profit.

Not really an exploit, more providing a service people are willing to pay for. Overall, as you say, many buyers, knowingly or not, may ultimately save money when it comes down to what they need vs. the cost of the WP fees.

@Wanze

To summarize it’s a take on Confucius philosophy that those that contribute directly to society are more worthy than those that don’t. In the Edo era the order was Samurai, Peasants, Artisans, and lastly Merchants.

• Samurai are willing to die for society.
• Peasants grow the food for society and also fight.
• Artisans create the goods for society but aren’t needed for basic survival.
• And lastly Merchants who make their living on the backs of peasants and artisans and were looked at as parasites, profiting on the work of others.

And while peasants and artisans were relatively poor, some merchants became rich which reinforced the idea that they were merely parasites.

Behellagh.1468:

It’s a very old philosophical idea, merchants have the lowest “moral purity” because they create wealth while not creating anything for society.

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/japan/p/ShogJapanClass.htm

This is quite interesting; it glorifies the roles that are crucial to the survival of a feudal agrarian society, while denigrating the roles that are essential to development beyond subsistence agriculture. It basically matches up perfectly with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; those that produce value towards the bottom of the pyramid are seen as the most morally pure, while those who produce at the top of the pyramid are seen as the least.

Even in contemporary society you can see this playing out, with a lot of lip service given to those on the bottom of the pyramid (soldiers and farmers), while most of the value in modern society is produced by those ‘low status’ roles. How surprising it would have been to them that the difference between the 21st century superpowers and the nations fading into obscurity is the quality of those on the bottom rung.

If there were no buy orders everyone would have to use sell orders. Thus sell orders would be cheaper and more affordable to the masses. There are also people who probably accidently click to sell to buy orders accidently since it defaults there when you go to sell items.

We are talking about a video game with kids that aren’t even teenagers yet playing this game and have no real world of understanding. Flippers are literally taking candy from babies(young people and new players with no clue).

Are we talking about inflation as in an abundance of gold that people have with nothing to spend it on. So people have to flip/speculate and create demand artificially? Its like pickers and a pawn shop mentality here. You come in my shop I buy items from you for less money and sell it to a buyer who wants it. Most people I see in game aren’t complaining they have so much gold with nothing to spend it on. Yet I see this we are fighting inflation talk of dungeons ring and people like this are creating too much gold.

Item prices only go higher if anet wants it to. If there is abundance of supply the price remains low. Even speculators can’t help it. If some item is being rare and there is demand for it then that’s where gold is going to be taken out of the economy from all by itself. The game doesn’t need flippers at all. It needs anet to have better control of supply and demand. This game needs more merchants that sells things that are account bound as a gold sink. Theres already too much stuff that needs to be traded between players in order to get because its to cumbersome to farm in this game actual items. Money is just changing hands mostly with a small tax from TP. GW1 didn’t have a TP. It had merchants that sold materials and runes/ dyes and prices would go up and down depending on sales.

This argument always bugs me and it always boils down to a few players coming into the topic assuming everyone who dislikes people who make lots of money for not participating in game content, are just either “jealous” idiots or people who don’t really understand what flippers are.

Flippers are only needed because of the system ANet has in place. Drops are notoriously awful and if any player is even remotely interested in aesthetic items (and most will be, since there isn’t a gear grind in the game the only thing you can really aim for is something thats cool looking), they then have to look into buying them or in some cases buying materials to craft it.

If ANet wanted to, they could just increase the drop rate of most items, and make all items either craftable with enough materials or droppable from certain monsters, you wouldn’t have this debate. But ANet knows that they can still get money from whales who get bored with trying to make money and are willing to shell out real money for Gems and then buy some off the store or turn it into enough gold to outright buy what they want.

I’ve always hated the system and hated how little reward you actually get from playing content, but thats how GW2 works and its not going to change so you might as well just try and find the best way for you to make in game money while still having fun. Although with some examples in recent past, ANet might be moving to less tradeable items and more earned items through tokens, which would eventually end the debate as well if they make a majority of items in game actually earnable, instead of RNG based.

I pray for the day game companies quit banking on making money off RNG.

Firelysm.4967:

By ToT farming and SW you play the game, by flipping you don’t.
Flipping is something as side effect of bad model making of trading post.
If people want to play economy simulator, they can clearly instead of playing the game, play the “REAL GAME” go work for lets say 1 week, and use that money for real stock breaking.

The Black Lion Trading Post is a central part of this game. Therefore, if you’re sitting by it all day long flipping items, you are essentially playing this game.

The strategies in game work for real life too. I made a 60% return on one of my mutual fund investments. And that made me feel as good as when I made a return of 300% on my Elaborate Totems. Those weren’t instant flipping as much as longer term investments, but the fact remains the TP is a good place to make money.

By the way, I’m sure others have mentioned this to you, but if more people learned to play the TP, the less profits there are to be shared. So if you’re so against TP players, become one yourself. And when you get good at it, you become competition for others, thus ruining their returns.

There’s a saying: You gotta fight fire with fire. If you can’t stop a wild fire from spreading, you burn the path yourself.

Behellagh.1468:

@Wanze

To summarize it’s a take on Confucius philosophy that those that contribute directly to society are more worthy than those that don’t. In the Edo era the order was Samurai, Peasants, Artisans, and lastly Merchants.

• Samurai are willing to die for society.
• Peasants grow the food for society and also fight.
• Artisans create the goods for society but aren’t needed for basic survival.
• And lastly Merchants who make their living on the backs of peasants and artisans and were looked at as parasites, profiting on the work of others.

And while peasants and artisans were relatively poor, some merchants became rich which reinforced the idea that they were merely parasites.

I suppose that’s why I’m not a confuscist… confucist… conflagarama whatever it is called. I’m going to paraphrase firefly here: Half the world are middle men.

The more technical term for it is entrepreneurship. The ideas and management that bring together and move all other resources are as important as any other job. To use feudal Japan as a reference: while farmers grow rice and samurai need the rice to fight wars, the rice has to get from point A to point B. Someone has to gather the rice, gather the means of transporting it, plan the transport, do logistics on how much rice can move how far and support how many soldiers. For that, you need someone who can do the math (and make no mistake, math is not an easy skill), someone who can talk to the farmers, woodsmen, craftsman, guides, governments generals,, whomever tends to the horses, someone who can see the big picture and has the wit to know what to do. Without them, the samurai don’t get their rice, and the whole system falls apart.

Separate section, not in response to Behellagh

Lets take the in-game example. What does the flipper do? Well, it depends on the kind of trade:

A)A straight flip: buy low and sell high. First the flipper has to compete with other flippers and non-merchants when placing a buy order, which establishes the low end value of any good. This places an offer: “Give me this good, and I will give you this much gold for it”. Here, the tradesman is giving money to other people. who are willing to sell. If the flipper has bought the good, then the flipper places the good at a higher price. This is often based on future speculation, since the flipper has to compete with other flippers and the taxes. Unlike buy orders, changing your mind here is punishing. Then, after the flipper has placed their good for sale, if the value of the good rises, then the non-merchants (or in cases of high swings, other merchants) will buy these now appropriately valued goods. Here, all the flipper is doing is providing: he gives gold to people who are willing to part with their item, and then he gives the item to people who are willing to part with their gold. In order for this to work, the price of the item has to rise on its own. So at the start of the flip it is a fair exchange, and at the end of the flip it is a fair exchange for the now more valuable item.

B)A crafting or conversion flip. This is my personal favorite, since it works under current market assumptions and isn’t based on speculation. In this case, the flipper will either buy low or high the base goods needed to craft a product, and then sell the crafted product later. While a straight flip just gambles on future price, a crafting/conversion flip creates an influx of new goods to meet the high demand of players. They create thin leather from rawhide, soft planks from green planks, small scales from tiny scales, and precursors from random exotics. Here, there is nothing taken. The demand of players is already proportional higher for these goods, and the tradesman is just giving players goods at prices they are already willing to pay.

For straight up flipping, several things happen. The flipper provides large influxes of gold into the economy for regular players, making most goods highly liquid. Competition drives the buy prices up, making most goods have at least some value. Competition also keeps sell prices low, so low that the range between highest bidder and lowest seller is often less than 15%, making same-day flipping impossible. The flipper makes a profit only if the market shifts their way. If it doesn’t, then the flipper loses money, and the people they buy from gain. So, take away type “A” flippers, and you are taking away large influx of gold that keeps the market moving, the high liquidity of most goods, the possibility to benefit from a downturn in a good’s value, the competition that both raises the buy price and lowers the sell price, and the game’s largest gold sink.

Getting rid of type “B” flippers is worse. Due to the differing demands in goods, the prices for things will swing wildly out of proportion, ending up with some goods that are so common no one will bother to buy them, and other goods that are so rare that no one will bother to sell them (at least at a reasonable price anyway). This also removes influxes of gold, high liquidity, convenience, competition, the possibility of non-flipper benefit from downturns, and the gold sink.

The gold sink thing can’t be said enough. It grows in proportion and is ever present. It is ironic that, the more flipping is done, the more valuable non-flipping methods of moneymaking become. “Grinding” has a linear growth in wealth, whereas flipping is geometric. The deflation of gold means that grinding becomes proportionally more valuable.

So my question is this: Who is being robbed? Who is being taken advantage of? What is “unfair” about this system? In type “A” things are being bought at a fair price, things are being sold at later fair price. It is a gamble: if the market turns up the flipper makes theoretical money, if the market turns down the non-flipper makes theoretical money. Heck, that technically isn’t even true for all cases, because if the price changes due to inflation/deflation of gold alone, then technically the item has the same value as all other goods. In type “B”, a flipper buys goods at a fair price then converts and sells them at another fair price immediately. Is the player who buys the finished good somehow being robbed, even though it is the player themselves who didn’t take the time to craft the material themselves?

I used to merch triforge pendants for a profit. I would buy 1,500 gold ore to make the pendant, usually at seller’s price due to how cheap it was. Did I rip them off? I would buy 250 of each orb, usually placing my own buy order, and adjusting the buy order higher and higher as other people tried to outbid me. Did I rip off the orb sellers then? Or about the mystic coins and crystaline dust, which I would also enter into bidding wars over. Did I rip those people off? How about the person who eventually bought the pendant after a week+ of waiting. Did I deceive this person in some way? Who, exactly, do I owe money to after doing this whole ordeal? Is the fact that I would earn 90 gold after waiting a week an unfair amount of cash?

Flipping isn’t a “free money” button. It is a gamble, and I’ve lost money on the markets personally. Flipping isn’t a deal with the devil, where money magically coagulates from the tears of naive children. It takes planning and work, and if you don’t work smart enough you don’t get money. Flipping doesn’t “take” money from people, or even take away from gaming experiences. In fact, the opposite is true: it adds to the gaming experience and gives people money. I fail to see any sort of inherent evil to buying low and then selling high.

Tp flipping is a huge gold sink. If you don’t want massive item costs and inflation then keep TP flippers,

Dear comrades, I have a solution. 100% tax on everything. No coin, no gear, no crafting materials, no gathering, nothing. Remove all current currency. Set up merchants to sell basic needed goods and give players 3-4 tokens every week that can be used at the merchants. Allow only 1 token to be saved per week, and with a max of 3 saved tokens per account. There you go comrades, problem solved.

And to those who don’t get it, I’m being sarcastic. We deal with basic economy every day in our life. We work or have some other type of income, to be able to survive and fullfill our basic needs. Most of us normal people look for the best deals we can find when it comes to more expensive purchases. If we cant afford it, we dont get it until we can. While the game economy isn’t exactly like real life, a lot of the basics apply. Use them.

It’s like a lot of people say. There needs to be gold sinks. Flippers and the TP in general are a gold sink. We cant all be filthy rich. Even if we are, it doesnt matter in the end because prices will “adjust” to that. Just look at that other now quite old and quite successful MMO. It’s not uncommon to see a piece of low level green armor, which is like our blue, cost between 750-1000 gold.

Thats only because there is a ton of gold in that game, that has been generated out of thin air. That money is farmable in an hour by running old raids. Old armor skins can cost easily around 60-100K gold a piece. There are people who easily farm together 50-60K gold in a month in that game, to be able to purchase their 30 day tokens for in-game money.

Also, you can’t really claim that those who play only the TP are not playing the game. Simply because my definition of playing this game does not include grinding dungeons or farming Silver Wastes. If we used my definition of playing the game, we would all be even more poor. Running around solo in WvW, scouting a tower or two, or small group roaming pretty much makes me lose money.

TLDR; TP and flippers are needed. We don’t want super inflation. Every game mode counts as playing the game. Relax, enjoy a tasty dinner and enjoy your favorite part of the game.

Behellagh.1468:

@Wanze

To summarize it’s a take on Confucius philosophy that those that contribute directly to society are more worthy than those that don’t. In the Edo era the order was Samurai, Peasants, Artisans, and lastly Merchants.

• Samurai are willing to die for society.
• Peasants grow the food for society and also fight.
• Artisans create the goods for society but aren’t needed for basic survival.
• And lastly Merchants who make their living on the backs of peasants and artisans and were looked at as parasites, profiting on the work of others.

And while peasants and artisans were relatively poor, some merchants became rich which reinforced the idea that they were merely parasites.

Well, someone has to bring the food and materials from the peasants to the artisans and samurai and the goods from the artisans to the peasants and samurai.
A samurai isnt worth much, if he isnt present in the village he has sworn to protect, while it gets attacked because he had to go to the next village in order to buy a new sword or pick up some food.

Trinnitty.8256:

We are talking about a video game with kids that aren’t even teenagers yet playing this game and have no real world of understanding. Flippers are literally taking candy from babies(young people and new players with no clue).

Considering the game itself is rate T for teen, this should not be a consideration in the game design. By the time a kid hits teenage years they should have some basic understanding of how to save and spend their money.

Trinnitty.8256:

Are we talking about inflation as in an abundance of gold that people have with nothing to spend it on. So people have to flip/speculate and create demand artificially? Its like pickers and a pawn shop mentality here. You come in my shop I buy items from you for less money and sell it to a buyer who wants it. Most people I see in game aren’t complaining they have so much gold with nothing to spend it on. Yet I see this we are fighting inflation talk of dungeons ring and people like this are creating too much gold.

There is always something to spend it on, some people have self control and save their money for when it’s needed or for something they truly want. If you want to talk about people creating too much gold in the economy, dungeon runners, champ trains of old, chest trains in SW, world boss trains, etc. Dungeon reward is free money and most people vendor the low end items they get from these events rather than putting them on the TP simply because it’s more convenient and often more profitable. Then there is vendor trash. It’s all free money, all “new” money in to the economy. Is causes inflation because it’s essentially a license to print your own money. In a real, working economy, the amount of money is somewhat limited, so as to control inflation. Due to extreme capitalism and trickle-down-effect, many economies these days are as broken as the one in GW2, or even worse. The mystic forge and TP flipping (due to the sheer volume of transactions) are probably the two largest gold sinks in the game. Remove either and you’ll have a time of runaway inflation, much like we saw way back when the bots were removed…prices will skyrocket as the amount of gold in the economy increases.

Trinnitty.8256:

Item prices only go higher if anet wants it to. If there is abundance of supply the price remains low. Even speculators can’t help it. If some item is being rare and there is demand for it then that’s where gold is going to be taken out of the economy from all by itself. The game doesn’t need flippers at all. It needs anet to have better control of supply and demand. This game needs more merchants that sells things that are account bound as a gold sink. Theres already too much stuff that needs to be traded between players in order to get because its to cumbersome to farm in this game actual items. Money is just changing hands mostly with a small tax from TP. GW1 didn’t have a TP. It had merchants that sold materials and runes/ dyes and prices would go up and down depending on sales.

ANet controls the supply, yes, but players essentially decide on what something is worth and basically control the TP. Other than guaranteed rewards like dungeons, the TP is the most effective way, using the least amount of RNG, to make money in the game. You will have speculators who might try to high-ball or low-ball prices based on some rumor or announcement, but it always settles out. We saw this happen a few months ago with precursors, when The Legend dropped to about 800g then quickly recovered. Someone made a lot of money on this. It’s been as high as ~1600g, but it simply couldn’t sustain that value. The biggest problem with account bound on acquire is that it simply isn’t worth as much and I don’t think it would get the uptake you think. Be careful what you wish for. Such items are typically priced well beyond their worth in effort to attain them. We’ve always seen this with dungeon and temple armors. While some people do pursue them, most people simply cannot be bothered due to the massive effort required to attain a full set.

The new gold sink will be ascended crafting, of course, as more and more people start working toward raid-worthy gear. This will largely be driven by the TP.

Back when the wardrobe was released (April 2014), the massive influx of dyes caused by the refunds when dyes went account bound caused a crash in prices. Unidentified dyes dropped to well under 20s. However, at the same time unidentified dyes were removed as a world drop and not available outside the laurel vendor, I speculated the low prices would not last forever and I bought 500 unidentified dyes, at an overall average of probably 30s. I spend about 150g, and should have bought a lot more. They’re still sitting in my bank and with an asking price of about 90s the last time I looked, I’m looking at about a 200% profit, but it took the better part of 5 months for the prices to recover to the point were I could even break even on selling them. It did take A LOT longer for the prices to recover than I expected as I underestimated the sheer number of refunded dyes out there.

Some people would consider this manipulation of the TP. The question is, why? To my mind, this is just smart market analysis and prediction. Really not that smart TBH. With the change in how they’re acquired, the prices simply could not stay that low…it was just a matter of time and patience.

Wanze.8410:

Behellagh.1468:

@Wanze

To summarize it’s a take on Confucius philosophy that those that contribute directly to society are more worthy than those that don’t. In the Edo era the order was Samurai, Peasants, Artisans, and lastly Merchants.

• Samurai are willing to die for society.
• Peasants grow the food for society and also fight.
• Artisans create the goods for society but aren’t needed for basic survival.
• And lastly Merchants who make their living on the backs of peasants and artisans and were looked at as parasites, profiting on the work of others.

And while peasants and artisans were relatively poor, some merchants became rich which reinforced the idea that they were merely parasites.

Well, someone has to bring the food and materials from the peasants to the artisans and samurai and the goods from the artisans to the peasants and samurai.
A samurai isnt worth much, if he isnt present in the village he has sworn to protect, while it gets attacked because he had to go to the next village in order to buy a new sword or pick up some food.

This was during an agrarian, feudal, pre-industrial society.

Everything was made local and if you wanted something made from a notable artisan you sent someone to commission it or take a journey yourself to get one or you convince them to move to your fiefdom or you send someone to apprentice under them and wait 20 years. It’s a sign of how much you respected their work that you would make such an effort. Otherwise everyone had their own local artisans, locally grown, local transports, etc. Wealth was measured by how much rice your peasants could produce. It was the primary currency between areas.

Trade existed but like I said it was done by commission, not “independent contractors” who travel from local to local selling wares from one place to another. But I digress.

Don’t get my wrong Wanze, I’m not saying the merchants are wrong, I was just giving a perspective on why some may think that. I myself prefer to use the term “player trader” than flipper. It’s just a variation on a craftsman in my book and I see no issue in it.

Some of the frustration of so called flippers happens when a so called “legit” buyer wants one of something, a particular weapon say, so they put in a bid for one, even overcutting by more than 1c to attract a seller quicker. And when they check back an hour or a day later and find someone ordered 250 at 1c more. Can’t let me get one could you you 1 bidder of 250, sorry for infringing on your niche.

This is such a ridiculous and jealousness-driven post that it is actually more sad than amusing to read. And the absolute climax being this claim:

Firelysm.4967:

By ToT farming and SW you play the game, by flipping you don’t. Flipping is something as side effect of bad model making of trading post.

Wow. Just wow. Because running around like a lobotomite, spamming F key, is really a compelling gameplay, certainly intended to augment the enjoyment one gets from the other, more interactive game modes.

I’m sorry, but if you really think that by taking my time to research the current market, just to make profit from the impulsiveness and impatience of other people, altogether while pushing the prices into equilibrium and getting rid of excess gold from the economy, is worse than you role playing a bot, then I just can’t take anything you say seriously.

I’ll just add that while you claim, that people who flip do not play the game and just amass gold, I myself probably play the game many times more than you do, as I’m primarily a pvp/wvw player, and in the 2-3h I get to play daily, I can easily enjoy the gamemodes I like, while maintaining some listings in the TP.

tl;dr Not a single thing said by the OP is truthful, informed, relevant or god forbid reasonable.

I can only advice you to try flipping TP. You’ll see that it requires a lot of time, energy and knowledge about market to make good profits.
I don’t really understand your point of view actually. You think that peoples following a blue tag and pressing F every “x” seconds are playing the game more than TP traders ? I don’t really agree with that, it requires so much more effort to flip than to do chestfarm…

Firelysm.4967:

By ToT farming and SW you play the game, by flipping you don’t.

so mindlessly following a tag in sw opening chests after chests is really playing the game? buying and reselling isn’t? i don’t see how you are enjoying any beautiful parts of the game if you run circles round and round the same map 1000x is playing the game mode as intended. you still might be in violation of the game mode.