Guild Wars 2

I would actually much rather have them do the reverse – increase the drops of gear and materials in such abundance that you never have to grind out anything to obtain your gear. All players can easily be 100% self-sufficient.

!!! Well crap. I thought this was fixed since the latest patch, but I just tested it with an order smaller than 250.. and got onions instantly when there were 25k of them demanded before me ><

I think you mean, adapt and thrive or ‘stop playing the game’ since characters are immune to death. That isn’t exactly the most sound business strategy to allow such an occurance, unless Arena net is hoping to discourage people from playing long term so they don’t have to pay server maintenance fees…

@John Smith There is no language barrier. We are simply having a game of telephone. People making stuff up cough dish cough spurn, but thanks for chiming in and offering your input ^^

Reading over the comments, I fully agree that seperate trading posts would be a poor idea, nor do I believe that limited duration sales would positively affect the market price. It would actually make the 1 copper undercutting even more damaging to the economy.

The notion that there is no differentiation bewteen wants and needs is one of the reasons that an automated economy is more sensible in a structured gaming world, but I’m tired of beating that horse. I disagree that there isn’t profit to be made on the trading post – there are tons of opportunities, it’s just that some are glaringly better than others.

Which brings me back to custom bidding. This is no longer the most profitable method of turning over coins. There was a ‘bug’ where the first person that bid or sold for an item had that transaction resolved first. This removed incentive to adjust the current market prices, creating an artificial ceiling and floor, and also allowed people camping the trading post to turn over their total assets for 10 or 20% gains multiple times a day.

This ‘bug’ or whatever it was has now been addressed, and it is the first poster that sells and recieves goods first. The way it probably should have been in the first place.

Vesuvias summarized several issues with the way the trading post is set up rather nicely. This mini-game, that affects everything a player does, is very penalizing to casual players and I see no reason why tools (a price listing range, among other things) shouldn’t be given to them to make playing the game less of a time sink.

Since Temperhoof indicated that it was 2000 items and not 1000+ (the display when you click to buy something), we can probably give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t temporarily blind.

However that said.. it might not have anything to do with botting players, but the custom bidding system. I regularily buy in chunks of 500 or so units, and I do not currently have a large pool of wealth. It would not be unusual for a player with 100 or more gold to drop a custom bid for 2k materials, and then consequently resell all those. In this case, that player did not do the farming for those materials himself.

As far as bugs are concerned, I have had the trading post eat a few gold on me already. I cry a little inside whenever it happens.

The adjustment of the sale price.. the 1 copper undercutting.

Claiming that you cannot lose money selling to a buyer assumes that the buyer knows how much that item costs to craft and has appropriately marked up his asking price by the listing fee as well as a surcharge so that the crafter makes a profit, which is much less likely than that buyer inputing a price based a random value placed by the most recent custom bid.

But whatever… that was really just addressing that the custom bids as a means of sale are a poor solution.

THE BENEFIT

First of all, it is important to note that in order to make a financial transaction appealing it must exceed the gains from efforts in other known activites. A 1 copper difference is highly unlikely to change the appeal of said transaction when it is less than 2 decimal places of a percent of that value.

However, by allowing such adjustments it drastically improves the risk of posting high value items on the trading post, that sit in queue constantly underbid by an ammount that had nothing to do with how fair, or unfair your price was.

Due to the nature if this increased risk, fewer people are willing to provide these items, and as a result the price of these goods is higher. Allowing a range illiminates the risk of being undercut by a value that does not adjust the price of goods by any significant ammount. Overall the price of goods decreases, and they become more available.

THE IMPLIMENTATION

There are two ways you could do this. The first is to make the range of the posters value visible, and the second is only to make their current price visible.

If the range is made visible, undercutting will still be possible, but the ammount that would need to be undercut would be at the bottom of the range and would be a -significant- difference to the offered price. Custom bids would often be provided at the lowest value in this range (heck you could even add an option to auto-sell if someone bids at this price). The risk of posting would then be placing the upper range so high that players would rather custom bid and wait for someone to craft. The downside is that posting the range might be misleading to buyers and an option to show or hide the range should be available.

There are a number of issues with only the current price being visible, but it allows for more free market behaviour, similar to how it works now. That is to say, everyone just keeps guessing until an equilibrium of sorts is reached.

Sales would be in order of the first person that placed that item within the given range. When you want to set a range for an item, you click a toggle (to prevent new players from accidently selling everything at 1 to x) and input a lower and upper range. The 5% fee is based on the upper range. If someone posts lower than you, but within your range, your price automatically lowers to that ammount and the sales fee is 10% of that new value. If someone posts underneath your lowest range, that price takes priority of sale, and your price is unaffected.

Even if the listing fee was insignificant or non-existant it would still encourage people to camp the auction house to constantly repost their wares, and the majority of people have lives that would not allow this behaviour.

Reducing the value of an item by .01% to jump the queue is not market competition, it is gaming the system. Also your gas example serves to indicate that there are other factors involved besides price, because it costs gas to travel, and you may have actually lost money traveling to the further station.

The highest buyer for most equipment is typically not set to cover costs after the 15% fee, and you would only serve to lose money attempting to trade that way.

In all seriousness, what would be the disadvantage to allowing people to post a range of sale for their items?

Prioritizing could either be done randomly (not recommended) or the order of sale would go to the first person that posted it within that range.

I also don’t understand how botting would affect anything, since the 5% listing fee would still apply and the range would be unchangable after posting. That is to say you tell it to sell between 2.4 gold and 2.6 gold and if you want to later change that range, you must remove the sale and pay the listing fee again.

As far as a massive drop is concerned.. I suppose this could be exclusive to equipment and other post-craft goods or you could add a button that you have to click first to post the item with a range.

Shannae, I read over your post, I really appreciate the logic you used, and I agree with the majority of your conclusions, however there is a point of contention: I did not recommend a floor or ceiling in a player run economy. I recommended a price floor and ceiling in an automated economy.

There actually wouldn’t be any need for vendors in the automated economy and so the floor was supposed to represent the vendor price, while the ceiling was suppose to act as a failsafe to items skyrocking beyond new player purchasing means, due to later players not having any reason to produce or sell.

Time is not a limiting factor in the sense that the product becomes unavailabe and the price hits a temporary high while people run around seeking a new source. Because this cannot occur, it is easy to automate the value.

The above was recommendation 1

Recommendations 2 and 3 are meant to address the same issue, that people can custom bid 1 copper below your sale price (a difference that is potentially meaningless) and have their goods sold first.

For products that sell in high quantities, this is basically a non-issue (though it can be annoying), but for products like exotic gear that takes a great deal of material to produce and has a long wait time, it is a death sentence to equipment sales. My propositions were 2: Require a 10% drop in sale price to undercut, or 3: Give sellers the ability to list a range they are willing to sell that will automatically adjust when someone undercuts them.

As far as the removal of custom bidding is concerned, it is creating an artifical floor to product value, based on what people want to earn as a profit from this type of transaction and only loosely based on the supply and demand of the product. The second (and much more important) issue is that people are using it to increase their wealth by an exponential ammount. And gold sellers are no doubt having a hay day with this while other players don’t even realize it is such easy money.

While this is possible, and you could perhaps keep a pool of coin aside to perform such trades, I believe most us are discussing custom bidding within the span of a single day.

Find an item with a fast turnover – less than an hour for a stack of 100 lets say, and put a custom bid for the same value as the highest person (or 1 extra copper if you are testing the product), and then sell at the lowest sell value. Make sure this value takes the 15% fee into account!

Over the course of the day, the custom bids may become more or less expensive, just as the lowest sell value will alter. The more attention you can spare to remove buy orders and replace with new ones, and alter your sell price with newly acquired goods, the more money you can make, but if you want a more relaxed approach, you can just buy, sell and be done with it for the day.

Leaving buy orders pending when you go to bed can result in a nasty surprise. I don’t recommend this for anything but heavily traded items.

@Maxster Good Call. Testing the waters is important. I probably should have mentioned that. Keeping a safety cushion of wealth is also a good idea, and never drop all your earnings into a single product. You can lose money this way, although it is rare, and investing all your resources into a single product could cost you big time.

As another note, be wary of locking yourself into butter and other high demand mystic forge recipe items, as on the 24th these temporary recipes will be removed.

A price ceiling is a ‘government’ enforced value on a good that is different than the equalibrium price. This can be above OR below the equalibrium value. I fail to see how anything I have written would imply I don’t understand this concept.

Perhaps where you are being confused is the belief that a governing body is required to impose this restriction, or perhaps you thiink that a price ceiling needs to be below the market equilibrium.

As a final point here, you do not know my profession, my education or what I have researched. I contend that the similarities of this game world economy with those of the real world are slim, because they are. I, like you, am getting richer every day from the rediculous custom bidding oversight, but unlike you, I care that soon no other player will be able to afford end game items.

Top demanded items sometimes have a slow move time due to the monstrous number of orders. Additionally some of these dont’ apply to the custom bid ordering, like dyes that are used as a form of gambling.

I discovered what was valuable partially because I have 400 cooking and I know what recipes are in high demand and what ingredients they require. Additionally there are some ingredients that are very good to level with – blackberries for example.

Then you have to consider other factors, such as what type of player cares so much about time that they would lose their left foot for the deal. That should lead you to post crafted items. Ingots, bolts, squares. There are other less obvious quickly traded items that you may have to do some hunting for (and I have yet to find myself) but the list I gave you is a good start.

Time is not a true limiting factor on resources, as you will never actually run out. And as new players can enter the market they provide a greater quantity of those same resources, something that wouldn’t be possible if those resources were limited.

So to explain how the market is being manipulated rather than the actual value based on supply and demand, lets look at our onion example. We have a metric ton of orders out at a given rate of 9 copper and another metric ton of sell orders at 13. A single person (unless they have an excessive ammount of wealth) would not change anything by selling at 12, but the minute that someone sells at less than that, those same people with buy orders, purchase and resell at 13, both turning a profit and preserving the current market value. The only way these values change is if this group of people manipulating the market decides to make such a change and while this is plausible the actual value has little to do with supply and demand.

It’s interesting that you are against a ceiling or floor, when there is one already in place set by the players. Perhaps using the term floor and ceiling is misleading though. I’m merely indicating that a range of value should be put in place. This does not mean that this range would be immutable, it could be soft and adjust slower after reaching a certain value. It is functional without a ceiling or floor, the notion was to prevent items from selling below vendor or acquire costs, and to prevent long vacant lists from becoming astronomical in value.

As another point, the agricultural program problems are related to subsidies that are provided to farmers to cover expenses for unforseen occurances, some of which would have a lesser effect on not as profitable items, that encourage these expenses because they are not incurred by the farmer. It shouldn’t need to be explained that random occurances don’t exist in a pre-structured game world. Nor will there ever be any variable costs that are different between players.

Ahem, the gem store does not allow players to set prices. The exchange rates are simply based on how many people are selling, and how many people are buying gems. I don’t know where you got that people agreed to anything.

As far as compound interest is concerned, the custom bid form of earning cash is based on your current wealth. Every time you increase your total wealth the ammount you can earn increases up to the point the market can handle the vast quantities of goods you are moving. The wealth disparity causes massive inflation on end game items and allows gold sellers to drastically undervalue the gem exchange rate.

Finally custom bidding does =not= place goods into the hands of those that need them. It takes goods from those who don’t. Those same people would still be capable of supplying the market by placing them for sale, and the value of goods would be much more accurate than it is now, as there wouldn’t be an artifical floor set by the players. And if the system was pregenerated and adjusted automatically for supply and demand, sales would already be instantaneous and this would be a non-issue.

@Dishconnected unless you can tell me when I said that the problem was that post-product traders couldn’t guarantee a sale, when the ‘enterprise’ was manipulating anything or that I proposed ‘overbidding’ (I don’t even remotely understand where you got this from) there is no reason to discuss anything with you.

People can have multiple accounts.. but the reason I asked Wazabi for his reponse was because he claimed to have an understanding of economics, and your example was incredibly pathetic. If that is the best answer Wazabi has available he needs to recinde his claim to be an economist.

There is -already- a system in place that does what I described – the gem trading post, and you do not see anything crazy like the 20 silver to mysterious 1 silver drop. The ceiling and floor are not -set prices- they move with supply and demand. They are simply not controlled by the players.

For that matter you claim that goods are based on supply and demand. Really? Are onions really worth 9 copper based on supply and demand, or are they worth 9 copper because 200,000 people have bids up for them and sell them for 12 and 13, turning capital into incredibly easy money. Chances are there will not be any market adjustments up or down in this regard because people are inherently greedy. Why fix something to some arbritrary ‘supply and demand’ value when you’ve already got a trade that earns you buttloads of money.

Many other materials are likely under this influence as well.

Undercutting by 1 copper is an issue because it creates an excessive risk for factors that have nothing to do with your pricing. Though I already proposed a range system that automatically adjusts to account for people undercutting you, that will illiminate this problem.

Custom bidding apparently isn’t going to change, so I will simply make it my duty to tell everyone I encounter how to do it and what they are missing out. I should probably point out that a secondary benefit of removing custom bids and that the number of gold sellers will plumit drastically. Compound interest is the largest cause of the current disportionate distribution of wealth.

Items that are good to trade (and I recommend doing more than one at a time, to reduce risk) are:

Strawberries, Raspberries, Chili Peppers, Onions, Oranges, Vanilla Beans, Cotton Scraps, Peppercorn, Copper Ore, Darksteel Ingots, any (non-exotic) bolts.

The turn around for these items is different and the risk in losing money on the trade varies between products (vanilla beans are risky right now because a-net did something to the supply). I may have missed a few, but those are the ones off the top of my head. Have fun!

Let people list items with a range, that automatically adjusts when someone undercuts them. Problem solved.

If you want to make money just custom bid for less than the going rate, and sell back at the going rate. I increase my networth by 20% everyday with a single rotation of this, that I can often do while off adventuring.

That post of 100k copper by 1 person.. will be a reality pretty soon.

graceangel.3618:

But, I do not like AT ALL the suggestion to fix the pricing available to be seen. If I wanna buy a new shoulder piece, and I look on the market. Why should I be forced to buy the most expensive one?

???? What suggestion is this?

@ Disconnected I was actually asking Wazabi about his explanation not yours (sorry about the confusion), unless you are Wazabi.. in which case that explanation assumed both a completely poorly generated value, and that for some reason one that I proposed, nor did it provide any sort of theory..

The purpose of setting prices that move with supply and demand automatically, is to remove the ability to manipulate or exploit the market. Custom bidding as a result would be removed, but I propose this regardless. It is also important to mention that the new recipes were only created due to the lack of means to sell items that are no longer in demand. That is to say if the market already used a system simlar to gem trades there would have been no need for this. As I said the price could be soft rather than hard allowing for strange scenarios such as with the super butter bags bug.

Also don’t be a kitten please. You were shoving words into my sentences. There is no way to have a civil or educated discussion when you refuse to read my posts. If you want to address the issues I posted, first read them before replying, otherwise you are just attempting to highjack this thread, to which I reply: go make your own about how the trading post is awesome and perfect the way it is.

@Dishconnected How can you post pretty much everything that I posted and then misread it?!

Seriously when did I say you needed to guarantee a sale?
How is the ‘Enterprise’ doing any manipulation?
Where did you get that I was proposing overcutting?

Please actually read my posts before reposting them with replies.

It doesn’t matter if fig newtons played the game, without limited supply of resources, difficult to calculate costs or unexpected events, a game economy does not mimic a real world economy. People that play The Game of Life, Monopoly, or Stratego don’t claim them to use real world economics, because they don’t, and some of them might even do a better job than this game does! Real people influencing the game does not determine whether it mimics a real world economy.

Consider that the gem trading system uses a controlled method of exchange. You cannot set prices, they are simply determined by supply and demand. It both works fine and is devoid of complaints, most probably because people wouldn’t want their -real money- affected by such horsemanure as 1copper (or gem) undercutting.

This is the way the trading post should work.

However, seeing as this will get a large number of players’ panties in a bunch, I have proposed a couple alternatives. I think the range thing should be implimented at the very least. Though I really want to see custom bidding removed. A 25% gain in an hour or two of total wealth, while introducing nothing new into the game world is incredibly broken.

Ahemm.. But I actually do want to hear your explanation on how price ceilings or floors would negatively impact the economy of this game. If that is not possible, you could use a real world example, and we can determine what aspects of that actually roll over to this game. I’m admitedly skeptical there would be any negative impact..

Currency is being gradually devalued because it can be acquired through other sources – dungeons, quests, map completion etc – and I don’t really consider this a bad thing. My expectation is that items in high demand will gradually become worth more as the game continues it’s life cycle.

That wasn’t what my post was referring to. I was addressing the issue that one of the fastest ways to earn coin is to custom bid and unequally distributes the wealth as the more coin you have, the faster you can earn. The second issue is that slow to sell items run the risk of never being sold due to 1c undercutting. There is very little information on how many items of that type are actually available since it only lists the cheapest item, preventing informed decisions on what to craft.

To address the arguments against this… that I thought I already clearly did..

1. Custom bidding is not risk free.

• Custom bidding itself -is- risk free. If someone doesn’t sell you that item, you simply remove your bid at no loss. Reselling the item comes at the risk that people post lower, preventing your sale. You stand to lose 5% (not 15%) each time due to this issue. The spread is typically in the area of 30-40% and is likely one of the primary methods of gold gathering by our korean farmers (are you a korean farmer Wazabi?) :P

2. Crafting is not supposed to be profitable.

• I never said that it was supposed to be profitable. I said it provides subpar returns, and in comparison to custom bidding, there is no reason to supply other players with gear. The idea with using a craft to make money is to turn your inability to craft a piece of gear into a monetary means to purchase it. Whether you profit is not the issue. The issue is that your attempt to sell an item can easily be circumvented with 1 copper uncercutting. It then becomes random chance on if you happen to post when someone is buying. And sadly there is no information to tell you that 100 of those items are already up for sale.

3. A ceiling/floor hurts the economy

• This is only true in cases where there is a depression of the value of an item, or a sudden lack of supply. This is not a posibility in a video game where all items are always available at all times in the same quantities. However, the ceiling and floor could be made soft rather than hard to account for any major discrepencies.

4. Transparency is better for the market.

• First of all, the proposed solution would still work while listing both the floor and ceiling, and you picked on a very minor point. The only reason I indicated that other players would see the higher price is because the display would otherwise be misleading. The purpose of the third solution was to allow players to actively adjust the price of their items without actually needing to be present to do so. Heck the trading post fees could be justified then!

5. I just described the stock market! What’s the problem?

• The problem is that I’m playing Guild Wars 2, not Economy Wars 2. Becoming a day trader in order to afford a legendary was not listed as one of the features on the box.

6. These are real people, therefore it functions like a real economy.

• A real economy involves things like advertising, location, limited resources, production schedules, terrifs, shipping expenses, quality of goods, and numerous other things that a game world economy does not! The only truth about people being in control of the economy, is that people are kitten.

The economic model of a video game is nothing like the economy of the real world. There are unlimited resources, no consequences for failure (starvation, lack of housing, etc), and everything is equal in terms of time to acquire, quality and service.

My understanding of the economy is deeper than you assert, and I fully recognize where my suggestions are in contrast with how the real world works. This isn’t the real world though, and simulations with fewer uncontrolled variables tend to work much smoother than those with more.

However, after reading over a few posts I did find another solution that I really liked, and will edit the main post with it.

THE ISSUE

So for those of you that are not yet aware, you can use ‘custom bid’ to purchase items for less than the going rate, and then sell them back at the going rate. This is for the most part, risk free, assuming you don’t log out with purchases pending before going to bed, and increases your total assets by a percentage ammount.

Before you claim this is an exploit, it is providing a service – players that want instaneous purchases or sales rely on this type of trader. In addition Arena Net took down the trading post to look at just such things as this and did not make any change..

In any case, the issue here isn’t the exponential growth of one’s assets – although it is a part of it. The issue is that this form of trading is the best method of making money via trading. Crafting gear provides subpar returns and runs the extreme risk that people will continue to underbid your item by 1 copper and it will never be sold.

THE SOLUTION

There are however one of three fixes that I would like to propose:

The first proposes a removal of custom bidding, and all player control from the economy. Instead items are provided a value with both a ceiling and a floor, that should be obtainable with the current market data. Sales exceeding demand reduce the value of this commodity, while purchases exeeding supply increase its value. The economy would become a living organism, rather than a manipulated enterprise, and exponential growth based on assets would be curbed.

The second proposes an enforced 10% reduction on all sales lower than the going rate. That is to say if you post an item for 2.6 gold, that next person would either have to post it at 2.6 gold or 2.34gold. The market for items that are usuable by the community (other than consumables) will undoubtedly see an increase in supply, as the risk of being indefinately undercut would no longer be present.

The third would be to offer a range of prices on all sales, where the product is sold for the highest of any available range, and only the highest value is made puplic. To explain, if an item is put up for bid at 2.2 gold to 2.6 gold the player base will see an item available at 2.6 gold. If a second person puts an item up for 2.3 gold to 2.5 gold, the original poster’s item sale price will drop to 2.5 and the player base will see two items for 2.5 gold. If someone then puts that same item up for 2 gold to 2.2 gold, the original posters sale price will drop to 2.2 gold and the second posters item will return to it’s original maximum value. The player base will see 2 items for 2.2 gold and one item for 2.5. This might slow down sales a little though, and if possible I would recommend only offering a range to end products.