Guild Wars 2

Malediktus.9250:

Thanks Wanze for making an item much more expensive than before. Totally unneeded.

If you were so concerned about the price, you could have bought them yourself and then initiated your own price controls to prevent them from rising in price buy being magnanimous and selling them for the price you bought them at.

Malediktus.9250:

Wanze.8410:

Malediktus.9250:

Thanks Wanze for making an item much more expensive than before. Totally unneeded.

If you wanted one, you could have bought one for less than 1g for 18 months.

What about all those people that had a recipe listed and i finally gave them the amount they asked for during the initial buy out? Lots of happy chaps.

And what makes you think that regular demand wouldnt have depleted the initial supply on the tp by now?

I dont want one otherwise I would have bought it long ago. But there are new people joining the game every day. And some of them might be interested in collecting all recipes for whatever reason. They must now pay over 5g instead of like 75s.

Also who cares about the people who finally sold their stuff (for an overpriced amount)? They were to greedy with their asked price to begin with if it did not sell for months without your help.

Well thats how a player driven economy works. I cant do anything about the fact, that Anet decided to release some items not on a permanent basis. People value items differently and if someone wants to learn all recipes paying 4 more gold for this one will be his smallest problem because many account bound recipes arent available atm.
And how do you determine that the recipes that i bought out (and the ones on the tp now) are overpriced? They only are until the get sold.

Serophous.9085:

Hm, so what we can take from this is that if there is a limited supply of something, yes, it can be manipulated as long as you have the cash to do so from the start.

Now, while this recipe is basically limited, trying to apply this to something that can still be generated today, but perhaps at a greatly reduced rate, could also be possible, couldn’kitten For easy numbers sake, say there are 1000 of one item on the tp, with one added to the game a day. Thus, if someone(s) control those thousand, then that one won’t affect them much, thus allowing manipulation to continue.

Thats an interesting question. As mentioned before, i trade alot in recipes and also do it for the newer ones that got introduced with recent updates in season 2.
In particular the feast/pot recipes for the nopale/cactus food from DT and the bountiful/furious nourishments from SW.
Those are still farmable from chests but as most of the playerbase moved from DR to Halloween, then to SW and now to Wintersday, daily supply diminished quite alot, even though SW recipes still drop more frequently than the ones from Dry Top and their prices might fall again, coming next week as people revisit SW.
However, prices on all those recipes have risen due to several buy outs but it gets harder to manipulate those prices.
But on the flip side, it makes revisiting DT more attractive now because average loot obtained there rose in value, so I dont think its a bad thing and it all will balance out again.

Malediktus.9250:

Wanze.8410:

Malediktus.9250:

Thanks Wanze for making an item much more expensive than before. Totally unneeded.

If you wanted one, you could have bought one for less than 1g for 18 months.

What about all those people that had a recipe listed and i finally gave them the amount they asked for during the initial buy out? Lots of happy chaps.

And what makes you think that regular demand wouldnt have depleted the initial supply on the tp by now?

I dont want one otherwise I would have bought it long ago. But there are new people joining the game every day. And some of them might be interested in collecting all recipes for whatever reason. They must now pay over 5g instead of like 75s.

Also who cares about the people who finally sold their stuff (for an overpriced amount)? They were to greedy with their asked price to begin with if it did not sell for months without your help.

you probably havn’t check the price of other recipe if you think 5 gold is too much.

You should see what those flippers did this wintersday to the backpiece recipe.

They bought a few hundred and those 20 gold recipe become 70 gold.

Wanze.8410:

Serophous.9085:

Hm, so what we can take from this is that if there is a limited supply of something, yes, it can be manipulated as long as you have the cash to do so from the start.

Now, while this recipe is basically limited, trying to apply this to something that can still be generated today, but perhaps at a greatly reduced rate, could also be possible, couldn’kitten For easy numbers sake, say there are 1000 of one item on the tp, with one added to the game a day. Thus, if someone(s) control those thousand, then that one won’t affect them much, thus allowing manipulation to continue.

Thats an interesting question. As mentioned before, i trade alot in recipes and also do it for the newer ones that got introduced with recent updates in season 2.
In particular the feast/pot recipes for the nopale/cactus food from DT and the bountiful/furious nourishments from SW.
Those are still farmable from chests but as most of the playerbase moved from DR to Halloween, then to SW and now to Wintersday, daily supply diminished quite alot, even though SW recipes still drop more frequently than the ones from Dry Top and their prices might fall again, coming next week as people revisit SW.
However, prices on all those recipes have risen due to several buy outs but it gets harder to manipulate those prices.
But on the flip side, it makes revisiting DT more attractive now because average loot obtained there rose in value, so I dont think its a bad thing and it all will balance out again.

Actually, technically right now another market that could be controlled (if funds available) would be the recent bltc skins that were removed from the vendor. Course there is the thing of people holding in their banks, but I wonder if john watches those markets more closely for anything.

So an experiment showing how 1 single player can and did manipulate a market. Where is John Smith now? Would like to hear what he has to say about it.

xDudisx.5914:

So an experiment showing how 1 single player can and did manipulate a market. Where is John Smith now? Would like to hear what he has to say about it.

Manipulating to gain a profit isn’t easy, but we’ve seen here its plausible to control one. Crashing a market (like I did in WoW when I quit) can be fun, but usually temporary as other players buy up, or players see cheap and buy.

Serophous.9085:

Actually, technically right now another market that could be controlled (if funds available) would be the recent bltc skins that were removed from the vendor. Course there is the thing of people holding in their banks, but I wonder if john watches those markets more closely for anything.

well bltc skins is actually a gamble. You see what Anet did this wintersday. Those first year wintersday skin go for 1000 gold before now can be bought for 150 gold.

Anet could reintroduce and have done for a few of them.

The problem with manipulation is some people have too many gold. I probably have in the region of 25k gold and I’m not even much of a flipper. most of my gold is farmed.

I talked to a few of my guildmates and many of them have similar if not more money than me. If there are so many rich people in 1 guild, I’m sure there are many many rich people in the GW2 universe.

One of my guildmates bought 200 dwayna for 1 gold an year ago. He is an instant 15k gold club.

With all those rich people, a single one of them is enough to buy out everything and bump up the price.

Wings of dwayna and shadow of grenth are reintroduced this wintersday. The price dont’ crumble but even went up more. In a few days a few hundred supply is gone.

Im’ tempted to buy out some shadow of grenth too. But decided not to. Seriously it only cost a few hundred gold to buy out a stack of it, and I’m sure many people have that kind of money.

edit: screw it, just bought 100 grenth recipe. I dont’ think it’s a good buy because it’s not a popular back like dwayna is. But whatever. Worse case is I loss a few hundred gold.

xDudisx.5914:

So an experiment showing how 1 single player can and did manipulate a market. Where is John Smith now? Would like to hear what he has to say about it.

He would say that its working as intended. Every time some lists an item or puts up a buy order, he offers a binding contract to buy/sell that item at that price. There is no guarantee that an item will be available for a certain price and you cant argue that something player generated should be.

The supply on the tp for these recipes might as well have depleted by now without me buying them out but form demand from regular consumers.
In that case, would you have also come to forum and complain that somebody else used up all the recipes?

Serophous.9085:

Wanze.8410:

Serophous.9085:

Hm, so what we can take from this is that if there is a limited supply of something, yes, it can be manipulated as long as you have the cash to do so from the start.

Now, while this recipe is basically limited, trying to apply this to something that can still be generated today, but perhaps at a greatly reduced rate, could also be possible, couldn’kitten For easy numbers sake, say there are 1000 of one item on the tp, with one added to the game a day. Thus, if someone(s) control those thousand, then that one won’t affect them much, thus allowing manipulation to continue.

Thats an interesting question. As mentioned before, i trade alot in recipes and also do it for the newer ones that got introduced with recent updates in season 2.
In particular the feast/pot recipes for the nopale/cactus food from DT and the bountiful/furious nourishments from SW.
Those are still farmable from chests but as most of the playerbase moved from DR to Halloween, then to SW and now to Wintersday, daily supply diminished quite alot, even though SW recipes still drop more frequently than the ones from Dry Top and their prices might fall again, coming next week as people revisit SW.
However, prices on all those recipes have risen due to several buy outs but it gets harder to manipulate those prices.
But on the flip side, it makes revisiting DT more attractive now because average loot obtained there rose in value, so I dont think its a bad thing and it all will balance out again.

Actually, technically right now another market that could be controlled (if funds available) would be the recent bltc skins that were removed from the vendor. Course there is the thing of people holding in their banks, but I wonder if john watches those markets more closely for anything.

I tend to stay away from bltc skins. I think the market is oversaturated because everybody who asks in what to invest for long term profits gets the answer: BL Skins.
So alot of players who dont have much knowldge of market forces in GW2, buy one when they are cheap and in addition to that, you also have key farmers.
The problem with that is that those people tend to sell their stuff impulsively when they are in need for some gold and you are competing against alot of suppliers with a small amount of stock each.
I rather compete against a couple of traders that all have a considerate amount of supply because they are more interested in bringing the price up, so even though you are competing against each other, you are still working towards a common goal.

Wanze.8410:

xDudisx.5914:

So an experiment showing how 1 single player can and did manipulate a market. Where is John Smith now? Would like to hear what he has to say about it.

He would say that its working as intended. Every time some lists an item or puts up a buy order, he offers a binding contract to buy/sell that item at that price. There is no guarantee that an item will be available for a certain price and you cant argue that something player generated should be.

The supply on the tp for these recipes might as well have depleted by now without me buying them out but form demand from regular consumers.
In that case, would you have also come to forum and complain that somebody else used up all the recipes?

I’m not complaining I’m stating that the experiment just proved that 1 player can manipulate the TP.

xDudisx.5914:

Wanze.8410:

xDudisx.5914:

So an experiment showing how 1 single player can and did manipulate a market. Where is John Smith now? Would like to hear what he has to say about it.

He would say that its working as intended. Every time some lists an item or puts up a buy order, he offers a binding contract to buy/sell that item at that price. There is no guarantee that an item will be available for a certain price and you cant argue that something player generated should be.

The supply on the tp for these recipes might as well have depleted by now without me buying them out but form demand from regular consumers.
In that case, would you have also come to forum and complain that somebody else used up all the recipes?

I’m not complaining I’m stating that the experiment just proved that 1 player can manipulate the TP.

I didnt manipulate the tp, i raised the price of an item. I might have made some profit in the process but im sure there is another trader, who bought up some of my initial listings in bulk and is still far from regaining his investment.
Also keep in mind that this was a currently unattainable item that had a slow market anyways and has little use for the average player and little demand, which in my opinion, makes a mayor difference in the outcome. I might do the same for another recipe soon, that can still be obtained to compare the results.

Wanze.8410:

Thats an interesting question. As mentioned before, i trade alot in recipes and also do it for the newer ones that got introduced with recent updates in season 2.
In particular the feast/pot recipes for the nopale/cactus food from DT and the bountiful/furious nourishments from SW.
Those are still farmable from chests but as most of the playerbase moved from DR to Halloween, then to SW and now to Wintersday, daily supply diminished quite alot, even though SW recipes still drop more frequently than the ones from Dry Top and their prices might fall again, coming next week as people revisit SW.
However, prices on all those recipes have risen due to several buy outs but it gets harder to manipulate those prices.
But on the flip side, it makes revisiting DT more attractive now because average loot obtained there rose in value, so I dont think its a bad thing and it all will balance out again.

So it was YOU who kept pushing up the price of the Bountiful/Furious recipes back when I was trying to buy them!

Prices for SW recipes will almost certainly tank in the coming weeks. (The one recipe I was after, Verata’s Wand, dropped from an average of 2g to about 50s.) We can expect a flood of players back into SW when the Living Story resumes, and by this point I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people who wanted the new recipes have already got them, meaning a lot of new supply of recipes from chests will have a very small buyer’s market.

What an underwhelming thread. Big deal. You leveraged your gold and existing stock to move prices upward on an item with a limited supply. Was it ever in doubt that this could be done? If you want to prove something, prove you can move the market for a core commodity.

I applaud the effort and candidness in posting all this. The results are why I dislike unregulated markets and controlled supply chains irl. The issue as I see it are the one time dropped items and overly controlled supply chains.

Black Frog.9274:

What an underwhelming thread. Big deal. You leveraged your gold and existing stock to move prices upward on an item with a limited supply. Was it ever in doubt that this could be done? If you want to prove something, prove you can move the market for a core commodity.

What an underwhelming response.
First of all, I didnt use my existing stock once, so it cant be an argument for success.
Then I would argue that I didnt move any prices upward.
Right after i bought out all recipes, I immeditely relisted nearly half of it, with the lowest listing at the same value as it was before, 78 silver, the next 10 listings at 1g.
After that, i didnt buy any more recipes that were listed, only three on buy order, which cant be seen driving prices up. So arent in fact those people, be it regular consumers or other traders, responsible for the price hike that bought my recipes?

What if I only would have bought out half of the existing stock, which was listed between 78-80 silver, and then let regular demand take care of the rest? There would be a good chance that the price would have ended up between 5-10g that way as well, with the difference that then there would only be a couple of listings compared to the 130 that there are again now.

And I didnt neccessarily want to prove that market manipulation is possible and a common occurance. Because I actually think that its less common and less successful that my example shows.
If anything, I would say that this is merely an example of exception rather than the rule, due to the nature of the item.

I completely agree that core commodities (and most other items that still can be obtained) cant be manipulated, no matter how much gold you got and I wont try to prove it, at least for core commodities.
Because even if it was possible to move high volume markets with lots of gold, it would be impossible to prove with the tools the TP gives us.
First of all, it takes quite some time to keep book of your transactions because you cant send your transactions to an excel sheet for calculations.

Then, you would need alot of time to actually relist all the stuff you are constantly buying up. Even if someone had infinite amount of gold, I would find it hard to believe that someone could buy up enough mithril for example and at the same time relist it fast enough to beat the constant supply coming in. Maybe you would be able to raise the price by a couple of copper or % but not enough to turn a profit.

Zaxares.5419:

Wanze.8410:

Thats an interesting question. As mentioned before, i trade alot in recipes and also do it for the newer ones that got introduced with recent updates in season 2.
In particular the feast/pot recipes for the nopale/cactus food from DT and the bountiful/furious nourishments from SW.
Those are still farmable from chests but as most of the playerbase moved from DR to Halloween, then to SW and now to Wintersday, daily supply diminished quite alot, even though SW recipes still drop more frequently than the ones from Dry Top and their prices might fall again, coming next week as people revisit SW.
However, prices on all those recipes have risen due to several buy outs but it gets harder to manipulate those prices.
But on the flip side, it makes revisiting DT more attractive now because average loot obtained there rose in value, so I dont think its a bad thing and it all will balance out again.

So it was YOU who kept pushing up the price of the Bountiful/Furious recipes back when I was trying to buy them!

Prices for SW recipes will almost certainly tank in the coming weeks. (The one recipe I was after, Verata’s Wand, dropped from an average of 2g to about 50s.) We can expect a flood of players back into SW when the Living Story resumes, and by this point I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people who wanted the new recipes have already got them, meaning a lot of new supply of recipes from chests will have a very small buyer’s market.

Most of my stock of the furious/bountiful recipes i bought on buy order, i think I only bought out a couple of dozen.
The buy outs that happened over the weekend werent from me but i certainly sold some recipes during those.
I initially bought some verata recipes but then mostly stayed away from them due to their nature of obtaining through recipe books, which lets you choose which armor/wepon/trinket recipe you want. I think that was a smart move by Anet to counter price inflation for ascended recipes and we wont see anything like prices for keeper gear recipes anymore because it stabilizes prices across recipes obtained through the same book, which counters being able to buy out only one recipe and raise its price, and their continous availability.

I’m not much of a trading post person, but this was an interesting read. Thanks for posting your process and results in such detail, Wanze.

25000 Gold …

seriously oO omg

I feel like in those 2,5 years I’ve played together maybe just 10% of that and I’m most of the time only around 300 to lately for once 450 Gold.

RNGesus, heck what did I just do wrong all this time or how extremly must have luck forgotten me, that people get instant rich just from buying luckily the right items when they are whyever at that moment so extrmely cheap and a few months later their pürices explode into gigantic heights and give players like the 1000x of what they invested back as profit >.>

Can I ask you 25k Gold Giants that have so many gold, that you will never ever have any gold problems anymore kindly for a little peanut donation of like 130 G, so that i could by me that dagger from Komalie for the colelction from TP, need it still for Exotic Hunter xD.
Sure, I could buy it self, but I’m also hardly collecting gold for my first Ascended Armor set whose costs are insane also, so that help would be greatly appreciated ^^
Need that frigging karma thing that turns karma into useful stuff and the title hehe

Then i’d had to go still only for those two karka style bows >.>

Orpheal.8263:

25000 Gold …

seriously oO omg

I feel like in those 2,5 years I’ve played together maybe just 10% of that and I’m most of the time only around 300 to lately for once 450 Gold.

RNGesus, heck what did I just do wrong all this time or how extremly must have luck forgotten me, that people get instant rich just from buying luckily the right items when they are whyever at that moment so extrmely cheap and a few months later their pürices explode into gigantic heights and give players like the 1000x of what they invested back as profit >.>

Can I ask you 25k Gold Giants that have so many gold, that you will never ever have any gold problems anymore kindly for a little peanut donation of like 130 G, so that i could by me that dagger from Komalie for the colelction from TP, need it still for Exotic Hunter xD.
Sure, I could buy it self, but I’m also hardly collecting gold for my first Ascended Armor set whose costs are insane also, so that help would be greatly appreciated ^^
Need that frigging karma thing that turns karma into useful stuff and the title hehe

Then i’d had to go still only for those two karka style bows >.>

Those people that accumulated 25k gold did so because they dont spend as much as you do.

You want to say me, that someone, who has so much gold has never spend anything of it over the last 2 years ?
For why do they then hoard so much gold, if they don’t spend it, not even for Gems or so?
Just to feel like being Dagobert Duck ??? gg
Yeah, I spent my gold, that I had, thats also the reason why I have never so much Gold, because i spent it, before it can grow so super high, but as said, if I would add all my spent Gold togeher over the past 2 years, I would never ever get near at that reach of 25000 gold lol.

If I had so much gold right now, I could easily buy with it all the things that are left for me with my personal goals in an instant and could start farming gold just also only for the feeling of being rich and for gem conversion xD

Orpheal.8263:

You want to say me, that someone, who has so much gold has never spend anything of it over the last 2 years ?
For why do they then hoard so much gold, if they don’t spend it, not even for Gems or so?
Just to feel like being Dagobert Duck ??? gg
Yeah, I spent my gold, that I had, thats also the reason why I have never so much Gold, because i spent it, before it can grow so super high, but as said, if I would add all my spent Gold togeher over the past 2 years, I would never ever get near at that reach of 25000 gold lol.

If I had so much gold right now, I could easily buy with it all the things that are left for me with my personal goals in an instant and could start farming gold just also only for the feeling of being rich and for gem conversion xD

IF you want to know what people who own lots of gold do with, feel free to open a new thread about it as its off topic here.

OT

Zaxares.5419:

As a side note, Wintersday has been quite a profitable experience for me so far too, as I’ve been selling any Gifts that I get instead of opening them. It was especially delightful during the initial 24 hours.

I miss the BlTP forum.

Trying to figure out the true value of a Wintersday gift is difficult. Yeah, you can open the gifts and look at the current values of the contents, but the long term value may be different.

For example: the only buyers of minor runes are mystic forgers, regular minor runes do sell with decent velocity at 19 copper, which is the low bid, which means that there is some price point higher than 19 copper where you can sell your minor snowball runes. At six copper, I guarantee somebody was trying to make big $$ relisting at 20 copper. That money should come few weeks after the event ends, and for big % returns like that, you can wait.

Ditto Snowflakes. there is a glut of kitten, T3 snowflakes, more than the crafting market can absorb. Will a Wanze type try to manipulate that market to a new normal of 30s? The crafters will pay that. Also mega market gluts have been resolved by Anet with new sinks in the past (new recipes, new MF recipes, new collections, the Zephyrite traders). So is a kitten snowflake really worth 2 copper? Or is it worth much more (or is it worth less, unlikely to sell anytime soon even at 2 copper).

The long term value of the contents of a Wintersday gift might be greater than the current prices. If you are investing low in cheap stuff like snowflakes or bottles or minor sigils and want to keep prices low while maximizing profits, you might also want to snap up gifts at the same time.

nekretaal.6485:

OT

Zaxares.5419:

As a side note, Wintersday has been quite a profitable experience for me so far too, as I’ve been selling any Gifts that I get instead of opening them. It was especially delightful during the initial 24 hours.

I miss the BlTP forum.

Trying to figure out the true value of a Wintersday gift is difficult. Yeah, you can open the gifts and look at the current values of the contents, but the long term value may be different.

For example: the only buyers of minor runes are mystic forgers, regular minor runes do sell with decent velocity at 19 copper, which is the low bid, which means that there is some price point higher than 19 copper where you can sell your minor snowball runes. At six copper, I guarantee somebody was trying to make big $$ relisting at 20 copper. That money should come few weeks after the event ends, and for big % returns like that, you can wait.

Ditto Snowflakes. there is a glut of kitten, T3 snowflakes, more than the crafting market can absorb. Will a Wanze type try to manipulate that market to a new normal of 30s? The crafters will pay that. Also mega market gluts have been resolved by Anet with new sinks in the past (new recipes, new MF recipes, new collections, the Zephyrite traders). So is a kitten snowflake really worth 2 copper? Or is it worth much more (or is it worth less, unlikely to sell anytime soon even at 2 copper).

The long term value of the contents of a Wintersday gift might be greater than the current prices. If you are investing low in cheap stuff like snowflakes or bottles or minor sigils and want to keep prices low while maximizing profits, you might also want to snap up gifts at the same time.

I bought hundreds of thousands of snowflakes when their droprate from gifts got buffed. Of course i have no way to store them all so i had to relist them, which, due to the sales limit per minute, took 5+ hours in which my TP pick up was completely full.
As crafting greatswords became rather profitable in the short term at the same time and that also takes up alot of inventory space, if you craft a couple of hundred at once, i stopped buying up snowflakes.

OK, lets go for round 2.

The next recipe is one that still drops from chests in DR, so there is still supply coming in.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/66449-recipe-feast-of-black-pepper-cactus-salad

I bought our the remaining 22 recipes for 90 gold, so for an average of 4.1 gold per recipe.
In order to break even, i need to sell 22 recipes at 5 gold.
Lowest listing was 2.4 gold and highest bid was 80 silver.
I raised the highest bid to 2 gold and relisted 1 recipe at 20 gold.

Um, I might be misremembering, but I don’t think those actually drop from chests. Those are bought from the Zephyrite merchants for Geodes.

Oh wait, this is the FEAST recipe. But still, all it would take is someone with the base recipe to go create one in the MF and sell it.

As before, I’m eager to see the results of what happens, especially since this is an item now where new supply can still be created.

As an aside, I do think that the loot tables for Wintersday got seriously messed up this year. The Gifts had too broad a range, with the result that tons of unwanted goods got created in the process of players attempting to get the rare stuff they really wanted. It would have been better if the Gifts had a much tighter loot table, dropping a combination of Beautiful/Ugly Clothes, along with a second wrapped gift (Bottle-Shaped Present, Unsafe Gift, a box containing snowflakes, or rarely one of the Exotic Gifts).

Next, ANet should have expanded the offerings of the Wintersday merchants so that a lot of the rare goodies (including the Grenth/Dwayna recipes) could be exchanged for a ton of the unwanted stuff. (If ANet wants to avoid flooding the market with the Exotic stuff, the traded versions can be made account bound.) This was the approach they used back in Halloween 2014, and it worked EXTREMELY well. I’m honestly surprised (and a bit disappointed) that they disregarded the lessons they learnt from that.

The feast recipe cant be forged.

so it is only that particular feast that can’t be forged? wiki says it only drop from DT.

wonder why Anet make most feast mystic forge but decided not for that one.

Anyone test it?

Wanze.8410:

snip

You managed to miss the point. Whether you used existing stock or not is irrelevant. The point is, you bought stuff up and relisted it. You made a profit. So what? There were a limited number of things to buy, you bought them, you marked them up, there was no or little further incoming stock, so of course you made a profit relisting them. Again, so what?

I’m not making the point that it’s not possible to manipulate core commodities. It’s TOTALLY possible, provided you have the capital necessary to do it. I’m making the point that if you want to post threads about market manipulation, choose a worthy target! Move the Iron market or move the Linen market. THAT would be impressive. It’s not clear what your initial premise was. Was it that you could make money by trading? Was it that this particular product was difficult to make a profit from? What? What was it that you were out to prove? What are we supposed to take away from this thread?

^ I think part of the reason his posting it is to advertise things he want to sell.

Like I probably purposely mention the word sclerite weapon a few times. That being said, it haven’t turn out good for me. I’m tracking a weapon for 4 month and only 1 have been sold.

I do think it’s kind of shady. I live in Taiwan. And recently a person have been arrested for manipulation penny stock, bumping up the price by using multiple stock account. All he does is bought a bunch of stock, and release it when other people chase high. That being said the penalty is so small, he only need to do like 50 hours of community service.

laokoko.7403:

so it is only that particular feast that can’t be forged? wiki says it only drop from DT.

wonder why Anet make most feast mystic forge but decided not for that one.

Anyone test it?

As far as i know, items that are learned through recipe sheets cant be used to make feast recipes in the forge. Only if learned through discovery.

Same goes for armor boxes. You cant make a celestial or zealot armor box in the forge.

Black Frog.9274:

Wanze.8410:

snip

You managed to miss the point. Whether you used existing stock or not is irrelevant. The point is, you bought stuff up and relisted it. You made a profit. So what? There were a limited number of things to buy, you bought them, you marked them up, there was no or little further incoming stock, so of course you made a profit relisting them. Again, so what?

I’m not making the point that it’s not possible to manipulate core commodities. It’s TOTALLY possible, provided you have the capital necessary to do it. I’m making the point that if you want to post threads about market manipulation, choose a worthy target! Move the Iron market or move the Linen market. THAT would be impressive. It’s not clear what your initial premise was. Was it that you could make money by trading? Was it that this particular product was difficult to make a profit from? What? What was it that you were out to prove? What are we supposed to take away from this thread?

Exactly, it was irrelevant that i had prior stock but it wasnt me, it was you that brought that up.
And right now there are 177 frostgorge clam recipes available on the tp compared to the 130 that i bought out, while i also still have 30 more in my inventory that i didnt have before.

So supply rose by over 50%. Can you really say this item had limited supply?
I always was the opinion that in most cases, attempts of market manipulation are bound to fail unless you pick the right market.
If you think core commodies like iron or linen are able to be manipulated, feel free to try it and post your results.
You wont be able to because its not a matter of simply buying up existing stock and relisting (with a limit of listings you can post per minute).
You would also have to buy out all other sources of iron and linen, for example copper ore and bronze ingots, any gear or salvage items that produce iron or linen or lootbags with those ressources on the loot table.

I wont throw gold into a scheme that I know is bound to fail. If someone else claims this is possible, they can try it out and post their results.

Alright,

i got another recipe on buy order for 2g and sold 1 for 10g.

3 out of 5 listings are mine atm and i have the highest bid.

Attached the gw2tp graphs and info:

Same business today as well, got 1 more recipe on buy order for 2g, 1 sold for 10g.

Thats 24 bought for 94g and 2 sold for 20g total.

Lowest listing is down to 7.5g and 5/8 are my listings atm for a total of 57g.

17 recipes left in inventory, until now its going as expected for me.
I think i will have a hard time to recoup my investments until the end of the month and I wouldnt be surprised to run out of recipes to undercut the competition before that.

Wanze.8410:

Same business today as well, got 1 more recipe on buy order for 2g, 1 sold for 10g.

Thats 24 bought for 94g and 2 sold for 20g total.

Lowest listing is down to 7.5g and 5/8 are my listings atm for a total of 57g.

17 recipes left in inventory, until now its going as expected for me.
I think i will have a hard time to recoup my investments until the end of the month and I wouldnt be surprised to run out of recipes to undercut the competition before that.

Translation: Dont get too comfortable if you are playing along. He may crash it at any point after he recoups his investment because at that point it will all be profit.

eithinan.9841:

Wanze.8410:

Same business today as well, got 1 more recipe on buy order for 2g, 1 sold for 10g.

Thats 24 bought for 94g and 2 sold for 20g total.

Lowest listing is down to 7.5g and 5/8 are my listings atm for a total of 57g.

17 recipes left in inventory, until now its going as expected for me.
I think i will have a hard time to recoup my investments until the end of the month and I wouldnt be surprised to run out of recipes to undercut the competition before that.

Translation: Dont get too comfortable if you are playing along. He may crash it at any point after he recoups his investment because at that point it will all be profit.

I am actually not sure what you by “crash the market” mean. Even if manage to break even, i will still have listings up that didnt sell yet and I also have more stock that i acquired before starting this buy out. I wont use that old supply of mine for this experiment though for 2 reasons:
First of all, its irellevant as the first round showed.
Second of all, I am not sure, at which prices I bought them. Of course i could look up my purchase history but i think i crafted over 50k greatswords since christmas. And purchasing all that mithril, elder wood and t5 mats makes a long purchase history pretty quick. I needed about 3 min of spamming the “load more” button until the recipes i bought 2 days ago showed up. I started buying those recipes when they came out so it would propably take me hours of spamming the load more button to view my purchases form the start of Season 2.

Its the same reason i couldnt put a value behind my old stock of frostgorge clam recipes.

What I feared has happened and 3 more recipes got listed over night dropping the lowest listing to 3.75g.

At that price i cant even undercut without making a loss so i decided to buy them for 13g bringing my total investment up 107g for 27 recipes.

I also put a buy order in for 10 recipes at my average purchase value of 4g in order to encourage consumers to buy a listing rather than putting in a buy order, which also slumped to 80 silver over night again.
It was half expected as the weekend brings spikes in player activity with it, so more recipes drop.

When new recipes come out I usually start flipping them first. As they are new, supply limited and demand high, this yields a good profit as value can vary up to 100% depending on the time of the day.

Once demand starts to die down, i usually change my modus operandi, only listing about half of the recipes i get on buy order, the other half goes into my bank as investment. That investment is usually covered by the profit i make flipping the other half. That way I “act” as a regular consumer for 50% of my purchases, meaning half of them dont re enter the market again as a listing. That tactic seemed to work pretty well for me as long as I can maintain the highest bid for a considerable amount of time.

And i got another tip for that:

Having the highest bid on an item is the number one secret to make lots of dosh on the TP. Many times you get outbid by a copper, which of course is very frustrating but part of the game. To counter that, you have to double check your listings as often as possible because if youre outbid by a copper, your buy listing is basically inactive gold.
This is propably something that alot of people discourages from playing the tp because it “involves too much clicking”.

I just to not bid for over 50 different items at once because it became too hard to maintain the highest bid. Most of the time you could just click on the item in your current purchase tab but if all your bids filled, you had to look for the item again.

So i basically set up my Current Transactions/Buying Tab as a shopping list.

To do that you ideally start out with no active buy orders. Then you start looking for the items you want to trade in on a regular basis and put in the minimum bid (15% over vendor value). Unless the item you want to trade in has no demand, this bid will propably never fill and therefore stay at the bottom of your transactions tab forever.

I would like to show you a screenshot but that would give you an idea in which items im trading and i dont want you to know for all of them.
But i already mentioned that i trade in the recipes from DT and crafting rare greatswords atm.

The recipes are actually hard to filter out with the search option, so they are a good example. Now i have i bid for each of them for 39 copper on the bottom of my purchase tab.
For crafting greatswords, i want to cross compare the prices for t5 fine mats, elder wood logs and planks, mithril ore, ingots, gs hilts and blades and dowels. So mininum buy orders for 1 each of them is also on the bottom of my purchase tab.

When i get online, i usually cancel all my active (real) buy orders, so only my shopping list remains. Then i just work it from top to bottom and place new orders without having to use the search function, which saves me a great deal of time.

Its also a good way for fast access to items you just like to watch, how the market is changing.

Hope that helps!

After my bids at 4g were outbid for a couple of days they were the highest ones for 2 days now and i bought 4 more for 4g each, so i have bought 31 recipes for 123g now.

I have a hard time selling these recipes, with the frotgorge clam recipes i had the luck that other investors bought some up in bulk (and propably regret it now because they have a hard time selling those). But thats not the case with the Feast of Black Pepper Cactus Salad.

I sold 4 recipes for a total of 33g since my buy out, which isnt much.
I have 16 listings left on the tp (I got undercut frequently) and 11 in inventory.

Short update on the clam recipes:

Since the beginning of the year i sold 24 more recipes between 2.75-5.5g for an additional profit of 60g after taxes and investment costs, so that buy out keeps being profitable for me.
I still have plenty of those recipes left, so i hope Anet doesnt re release them too soon but lowest listing is down to 2.75g already.
Supply on those has doubled btw, from 131 before my buy out to 262 now. SO even if buy outs like these usually bring the price up (lowest listing mostly, highest bid not so much) they do result in higher supply on the tp, which is in my opinion a positive side effect.

Attached an updated graph from gw2tp. I just pulled my buy orders for 4g because at this moment i dont want to invest any more gold into this experiment until i sell more recipes.

Got a little busy IRL this month, so didnt post much updates but by now I can officially label my attempt of manipulating the price of this recipe as failure.

I didnt calculate my losses yet but i will check my listings, sales history etc later today and post results.

But from the Infographics attached you will see that not only is the highest bid and lowest listing lower than before I made my buy out, supply also nearly quadrupled as well and i propably own more than 30% of all listings atm.

Even before my attempt to manipulate its price, i thought that this might not be as successful as the Frostgorge Clam recipe and if im lucky, I break even within a month with a couple of listings/supply to spare that will generate some profit in the future.
However, I didn´t break even yet and I could either cut my losses now, reinvest or wait until my listings actually sell (I will do the latter), which might be a very long time investment until I see an ROI.

Thanks for this Wanze. So what would you say the “moral of the story” is? Did you underestimate the amount of recipes lying on people’s and guilds’ banks, or was it something else that went wrong?

Tom Gore.4035:

Thanks for this Wanze. So what would you say the “moral of the story” is? Did you underestimate the amount of recipes lying on people’s and guilds’ banks, or was it something else that went wrong?

First of all, i think its indeed very hard to manipulate a market and most prices are set by regular supply and demand from the player base. Sometimes it might look like a buy out sparked a continous price spike but if the price stays high, its not because someone bought them out, its because general demand is higher than new supply after the buy out.

What went wrong in this particular case? In my opinion the most plausible cause would be that the demand before my buy out wasnt real demand (by consumers) but from other investors, who started putting their supplies on the tp after the buy out, while they stop putting in new buy orders.

Both attempts show that its usually more profitable to list your assets on the tp, rather then hoarding them in your bank. I think the main reason why my first attempt was successful is because i sold alot of recipes to other investors, which wasnt the case in the second attempt.
So if you list your items at a high price compared to its current value, you might be better off than hoarding them and wait for the price to rise. Because once someones buys the item out, you profit right away, if you hoard the item with no listings, there is a chance that you dont realize that its price spiked due to a buy out at all or only once its too late and other investors are already engaging in a listing competition.

Hoarding only makes sense, if you expect your item to rise in price due to sudden real demand from the player base. Because if its demand from the player base, you are more likely to know that demand is rising because you need more for yourself. In that case, the value of the item rises more gradually compared to a buy out and gives you more time to react.

I think the quality of items really matter.

Take for example, I’ve been hording some sclerite weapons but hardly anyone wear them, so almost no one buy them every month. While some of the more popular ones you see people wear have spiked to near 1000.

Thanks again for this interesting read Wanze. If/when there is a round 3 could you possibly not announce at the beginning that you are doing it? I really would like to see what would happen without it being revealed to people here who may try jumping in on the action.

I didnt hop on either of these trains simply for the fact that when its common knowledge that something like this is going on you will be getting other hangers on.

Do you think the other investors who may or may not have been burned by the clam recipe experiment not doing there own buyouuts of your initial buyout and relist had an impact on your success? Like the old saying “burn me once shame on you, burn me twice shame on me?”

laokoko.7403:

I think the quality of items really matter.

Take for example, I’ve been hording some sclerite weapons but hardly anyone wear them, so almost no one buy them every month. While some of the more popular ones you see people wear have spiked to near 1000.

I wouldnt throw cosmetics like sclerite weapons in the same drawer as recipe sheets though, if I want to estimate their value. Cosmetic value is mostly determined by personal opinion, while the value of recipes mostly is determined by the value of its outcome, which can either generate profit for you, allow access to certain stats, buffs or cosmetics. So the quality of a recipe sheet can change, for example when it becomes highly profitable to craft the item or if it allows access to in demand stats/buffs after a balance update.
The quality of cosmetics usually stays the same as they hardly get any updates.

eithinan.9841:

Thanks again for this interesting read Wanze. If/when there is a round 3 could you possibly not announce at the beginning that you are doing it? I really would like to see what would happen without it being revealed to people here who may try jumping in on the action.

I didnt hop on either of these trains simply for the fact that when its common knowledge that something like this is going on you will be getting other hangers on.

Do you think the other investors who may or may not have been burned by the clam recipe experiment not doing there own buyouuts of your initial buyout and relist had an impact on your success? Like the old saying “burn me once shame on you, burn me twice shame on me?”

Well, I do stuff like this all the time. I think i have over 200 different kinds of recipe sheets either listed on the tp or stored in the bank, and most of them I bought out at some point. So im not sure, what you want me to post about them.

I could just take recipe X, check when i bought it out, how prices, supply and demand developed and how much i sold until now.
But with the TP UI, its rather tedious to gather all that info. Within the last 6 weeks I crafted quite a bit of rare greatswords, buying up millions of raw mats, besides my regular trading activities. If I wanted to get some info on the prices I bought out recipe x for a couple of months ago, it might take me 30-60 minutes clicking the Load More button.

I just meant if you were planning a round 3 and were starting a project from scratch.

OK, here are some final numbers:

I bought 49 recipes overall for a combined investment of 122g.
I sold 13 recipes for 53g (before fees and taxes).
36 recipes still listed between 1.5g and 20g.

To be honest, this has to be in the top 5 of my worst investments so far in terms percentage-loss.
One was when i was buying up recipes of exotic givers insignias/inscriptions in the thousands at vendor price of 1.33s right before wintersday 2013 because i thought they might decrease the drop rate significantly compared to wintersday 2012, just like they did for celestial inscriptions/insignias, when the bazaar was arround a little earlier that year. But Anet not only kept their droprate, they also scratched their vendor value, so I lost at least 95% on that investment.

Another one was, when i tried to buy out Tarragon. I bought tens of thousands of that stuff but new supply kept coming in way faster than I anticipated. I kept buying more in order to break even but when i finally called it quits, it wasnt because i was running low on gold, it was because i was running low on time and space. I think many people underestimate the time, logistics and dedication it actually takes trying to manipulate high velocity markets.

You have to check and update your buy orders every 10-15 minutes and inbetween, you are relisting stuff, which is capped at a slow pace, your inventory and pick up tab is almost always full, so sitting in front of the tp, running to your bank and guild vault is everything you will be able to do, no regular gameplay, no other trading. You need to have at least EU/US prime time covered, thats a good 10 hours straight. Then you have to check back in every couple of hours at least. After 1 week, i called it because it wsnt fun anymore.
If I would have kept all my tarragon listings on the tp, I would actually hade made a 30% profit by now but I took all listings down and sold to highest bids because i couldnt stand to see all those pages full of tarragon listings in my current listings anymore.
That was propably the only time I “rage-quit” an investment and sold everything to buy orders.

eithinan.9841:

I just meant if you were planning a round 3 and were starting a project from scratch.

Well, as I already said, I am doing this all the time but it gets very hard to document with the tools i have. Also, if I just post “Hey I bought out recipe x a month ago and now i made that much profit”, it might come across a little gloaty.

Its also time to do a little spring cleaning in my storage, which usually takes q couple of days and start focussing my trading on the HoT release.

So i probably wont.