Guild Wars 2

Did you get the official reason from a linkable source?

Here you go.

The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets.

Again, while we know that the majority of players would use a P2P system within its intended design, creating the system may place the global economy at risk, as well as some players.

We believe that between mail and the trading post the game is much safer and still contains all the functionality needed.

Basically, they are not implementing C.O.D mail “because scamming”, but the current mail system is safer and contains all the functionality needed. This is a completely bogus argument and we all know it.

The other reason is because of black markets and risk to the economy. Free trade has never been a threat to the player economy. I can only reasonably assume they are talking about the gem economy.

Remember, NCSoft is their publisher, and a major proponent of cash shops and the F2P model. Nexon is also a major stakeholder in NCSoft and does not have the best reputation when it comes to customer ethics.

Honestly I love Guild Wars 2 and I think ArenaNet has done an excellent job. I’m just weary of the slow creep of greedy publishers. I’ve seen what DLC has done to the console market. Do not want!

Mario Lemieux.9107:

I don’t agree with this though. I often send items to and receive items from my brother and other guildies through the mail system…we do it to give each other items related to our professions which are useless to us. If Anet removes this feature…many will be upset, and there will be virtually no reason to keep P2P mail in the game any longer.

Well, I guess we will see what happens. Many people are already upset over the lack of direct trade. There’s virtually no reason to not implement C.O.D, and I wonder how far they will go to protect their gem store. I’m afraid they might go so far to remove trading gold through p2p mail.

I’m starting a trading guild that will offer secure escrow for p2p trading and trade chat. If ArenaNet refuses to offer such basic features as C.O.D and trade chat, then we will have to do it ourselves. I hope this idea gets popular and many other people do the same. The lack of these basic features is a huge step backwards for MMO games, and maybe if we work hard to reverse it, ArenaNet will come to their senses and do the right thing.

There was definitely some market manipulation and insider trading when it came to nerfing cooking ingredients and making them a drop. There were 500 thousand+ sell orders for butter literally minutes after the new build went live. Even though ArenaNet screwed up the butter drop rate, the market was flooded with an incredible amount of butter within minutes of the change going live. Some group of people did a total karma dump into butter, knowing this change was going to happen.

Add to the fact that ArenaNet introduced mystic coin recipes that jacked up the price of butter, and there were a few individuals who must have made an absolute truckload worth of gold.

It seems very unlikely they will introduce CoD mail, or any other mechanic that allows people to trade outside of the TP. I’m surprised you can send items through mail as it is, and I won’t be surprised if they decide to remove that feature in the future.

The official reason is they don’t want there to be black markets competing against the TP. Their reasoning is it’s supposed to cut down on scamming, by forcing people to only use TP for secure trades. Having a CoD would “open people up for scamming” (aside from the current situation that’s left as-is).

Now as you, and any other logic and sane human being can tell, the second argument is incredibly weak and likely bogus. However, the first argument is very strong. They simply do not want black markets competing against the TP. It doesn’t take a genius to see why: Full control of the economy allows them to maintain the value of buying gems with real currency.

Basically you are not getting CoD because ArenaNet (or more likely, NCSoft) wants to make sure the market incentive for buying gems remains very strong.

Repeat this, not with 3 people but with 200 people all freely undercutting each other until the floor is met. Now, with the current system we at least take out 5% of the posting fee as a money sink each time people do this. This also stops people from radically lowering their price every time someone posts below them because eventually they will completely lose any profit by constantly canceling sell orders and reposting them for 1 copper to beat out the person that just undercut them.I thought this would be obvious but I guess I have to spell it out for some people. Allowing players to freely change their sell price will do nothing but net you less for each item and do away with a decent money sink.

It sounds like you are agreeing that the listing fee keeps prices artificially high for higher priced items. This does not make for a healthy market. Your example with copper is completely flawed, because the listing fee is nonexistant in those situations and allows healthy competition to happen. The market is much more accurate for lower value items because of this fact, which is why you see a more narrow window between buy and sell orders on commodities and lower value items. This is because the fee doesn’t prevent people from adjusting their orders competitiively. When you scale the listing fee up to higher orders, that insignificant price becomes astronomical, and it prevent players from actively competing on price.

Profit doesn’t scale linearly with price. The listing fee does. Combine this with the fact that higher value items trade more slowly at much lower volumes, and you get situations where the listing fee is completely disproportionate to any modest profit margin on the item. This leads to the prices of the item skyrocketing, and a small handful of suppliers playing a reverse game of musical chairs, where people compete to be the latest person to undercut by 1 copper. There isn’t any meaningful competition on the price of the item, prices stay artificially high, and people flock to map chat in hopes of a fairer market. This is exactly how the exotic market behaves, and how this can be seen working as intended is beyond me.

I can see this an a valid idea, on the condition that the initial listing fee stays the same. But keep in mind that if this were allowed, it would cause problems with the marketplace. People would just constantly undercut each other over and over (even in real time with market campers), thus ruining the in-game economy. Buyers would LOVE it, but item values would plummet in a price war, and that’s never good for both sides.
My suggestion for those who don’t want to get undercut: Sell to the highest offered price. That’s instant. If you want to make more money and post on the open market, realize it’s a slight gamble once you post.

I don’t believe that allowing people to fairly compete on price will whip them up into a mindless frenzy where they will start selling everything below value. This only happens in some cases on the low-end market because the supply for certain items is stupidly high and drop rates are completely out of balance. Again, buy orders have no listing fee, and low-end sell orders have an insignificant listing fee, and competition is very healthy. It is when you scale this listing fee up to higher end items that it goes from being a minor sink to something grossly disproportionate to the item’s profit value and completely restrictive of competition on the price.

Undercutting is a legit tactic.

Absolutely. undercutting is healthy for the market. The problem is that undercutting is not allowed to happen in a meaningful way. People are undercutting at percentages less than 0.01% of the item value, because the 5% listing fee protects them from the existing competition. The high-end market runs very slow, and people are betting their competition is already locked out and they’re the “last” to post a 1c undercut before a sale finally goes through. It’s a game of reverse musical chairs and not a real competition over price. It simply doesn’t work and traders in the exotic market see this evidence clear as day.

I wish I could say more but I have to leave. Bottom line the proof is in the pudding. Buy orders are healthy without a listing fee. Sell orders on low value items are healthy with an insignificant fee. Sell orders on high value items are artifically inflated and plagued with rampant speculation and price swings because proper competition and price discovery is punished by grossly disproportionate listing fees. Sellers flock to trade chat to compete on more even ground.

Thank you for your reply John Smith, although I guess you are strapped for time and only read into the side-note of junk orders on the market. I hope you do have some time to talk about the other points, mainly how the high-end market behaves opposite to the low-end market and the absurd listing fees on higher end items.

Strzalka.9451:

I do like most the points you have made. However, I don’t feel that the thread heading is appropriate. Coming from a Customer support background in Video Games, if someone starts off in such a manner as “This sucks” I immediately lose respect for anything that follows. I did take the time to read your post though and agree with your points.

I completely agree. I was kind of in a rush and so I should have worded the title better. I changed based on your suggestion. :-D

Wazabi.1439:

If you can adjust for free, so can everyone. Doesn’t change the fact you aare second, so it doesn’t address the problem(which i don see it as a problem to begin with) you intend to solve.

It absolutely addresses the problem, and I know this from experience, because I have to deal with the exact same thing with buy orders.

On buy orders, if someone undercuts me by 1 copper, I undercut them by 10 silver. We can do battle in a bit of market PvP (which is fine) until my buy order reaches a price that my competition doesn’t want to compete with, or that I don’t want to compete with. Everyone participating figures out what they’re willing to pay, relent, or simply not compete with. From that competition, a sense of value is obtained.

This makes sense. I am completely fine with this. On the selling side of things, the above does not happen. There’s no fair competition to discover the value of selling the item, because you are penalized for relisting. What ends up happening, is the item price stays artificially inflated, and everyone is gambling on when to place their -micro-cut order to possibly steal the sale. The guys with the best chances of winning are playing closest to peak times, where their limited time as lowest seller has the most possible exposure.

Second, fees attached to posting discourage speculation, encourages careful pricing. Removing it does e opposite.

Then why is the exact opposite happening for the exotic market? The exotic market on TP is rampant with wild speculation on sell orders.

How does it encourage careful pricing? If anything, it encourages speculation even more, in the opposite direction. The high value market moves much slower than commodities and lower value items. If I want to sell my item within a reasonable time frame:

A) I play around peak time, where market activity is high and there is possibly enough demand to cut through the 1c undercutting on my order.

B) I speculate on what value I can sell the item so that nobody would bother undercutting it, which is far below what the fair value would be if I were to list my orders around peak time.

The 5% fee does not scale properly to higher valued items, and it turns into a punishment for players who list items outside peak hours. This is not how it’s supposed to work. Auction house systems work much better in achieving a fair price for the buyer and seller, regardless of timezone restrictions, but that would be a much bigger project for anet to implement.

Also, by using the above logic, removing the fee should increase speculation and discourage careful pricing (which makes no sense to me). Except the exact opposite happens with buy orders, which are completely free to adjust. Buy orders are much more stable and better representation of demand for an item.

If the listing fee were a good thing, then people would be spamming public channels with buy orders, and using the tradepost for sell orders. The exact opposite is happening. I don’t think your logic makes sense.

Third, timed expiry affects the stock of the item, not supply source, hence only short run price increase, but in the long run price still determined by demand and supply.

Expiration dates had nothing to do with my original discussion, I merely suggested it as a possible solution to get rid of all the garbage orders on the tradepost that are sitting there for eternity. The TP is flooded with buy orders that are 1c for 50g items, buy orders on items below vendor value, and buy orders on items that aren’t even sellable. The TP is full of garbage orders and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s affecting stability.

Constructive enough?

That you try is more than enough. :-)

Edit: Cleaned up a bit.

Masterpyro.4310:

I’d say no to the free relist, yes to the expiration ( i remember disliking this idea too but i cant for the life of me remember why so il vote yay for now )

Free relist = infinitely lower prices (until the floor is hit). Thats no fun and no way for anyone to profit but grinders that dont craft or waypoint. I’d rather just delete an item than contribute to that.

Well I don’t think it would be infinitely lower prices. The prices would lower to something more stable, but aren’t they supposed to?

Truth be told, I actually benefit from the micro-cutting. It’s not the micro cutting itself that ruins the market, but the combination with the 5% fee. It suppresses the market and keeps prices artificially high. It allows myself and other to use the TP as a speculation machine, while selling the actual items off-market through trade chat. My server has constant exotic trades spammed through the map chats of Lion’s Arch, Orr, etc.

On the flip-side, buy orders are free to relist, and the exact opposite happens. Microcutting happens, but then I raise my buy orders by significant margins. Eventually the micro-cutting stops and buy orders stabilize.

So, here is a situation where buy orders are free to relist, and things work great! People are not spamming map chat with exotic buy orders. However, sell orders on TP cost 5% to relist, and everyone is spamming map chat looking to sell. The TP is obviously not working as intended for selling exotics, especially on my server. I’ll continue to spam map chat and make a killing like everyone else, but I’d rather Guild Wars 2 be a better game for everyone.

Freyar.3254:

Please stop making “yet another thread” when we’re already discussing it elsewhere.

Either way, your suggestion’s terrible as outlined in the other thread.

It wasn’t being properly discussed elsewhere. Those threads weren’t specifically discussing a solution. Also, those threads were polluted with trolls and circlejerks, which I see you are spreading here.

So, you say my suggestion is terrible. Care to elaborate?

Freyar, illgot, and Wazabi. It seems like you are having a fun circle jerk in here. While adding nothing to the discussion, I’m glad you are having fun! Please do try to post something constructive, instead of ad-hominem attacks. Thanks!

I made a comment about this in another thread, and I know there are other discussions about this. I have read through these discussions, and they are polluted with toxic amounts of ignorance. I would like to get straight to the point here.

Expensive orders being undercut by 1 copper (less than 0.01% of the order value) makes the 5% listing fee act as a punishment for being first to list. It does not encourage cheaper prices or a healthier market.

There is a simple fix for this problem: Allow sellers to lower their prices for free.

This will prevent micro-cutters from exploiting the 5% listing fee as protection and will allow sellers to retaliate by adjusting their orders down. In fact the market will be healthier, as prices on over-valued items will be driven down quickly until the market reaches an equilibrium.

Also, the trade post should enforce a minimum price difference between orders. Even something little as 1% would prevent people from exploiting micro-cutting. That is 1c on orders of 1s, and 10s on orders of 10g. I don’t think that is going to be a problem for anyone.

Just these two changes would immensely help in creating a healthier market for high-value items on the Tradepost. These changes have zero drawbacks, and will not allow people to circumvent the 15% sales tax. I’m not the first one to suggest these fixes, but I think they deserve their own thread for better discussion and visibility. Thank you for reading!

P.S: Please add a 1-2 week expiration date on orders. Expired orders should have their listing fees refunded, of course. Your Tradepost is clogged with tens of thousands of useless orders that will never be filled, and it doesn’t help on weekends to have a bunch of junk orders clogging the prices screen (and your servers).

Expensive orders being undercut by 1 copper (less than 1% of the order value) makes the 5% listing fee act as a punishment for being first to list. It does not encourage cheaper prices or a healthier market.

For those saying that this is how true competition works: Your ignorance is astounding and you need to exit yourself from this conversation.

The simple fix for this is to allow sellers to lower their prices for free. This will prevent micro-cutters from exploiting the 5% listing fee as protection and it will allow other sellers to retaliate by adjusting their orders down. In fact the market will become healthier, as prices on over-valued items will be driven down quickly.

Also, there should be a minimum price difference between orders. Something little as 1% would prevent people from exploiting micro-cutting.

I would like to confirm that there is an anti-farm code in the game, however I don’t think it modifies the drop tables. I also don’t think it’s based on a fixed amount of time you spend in an area. It appears to be based on how many mobs you kill within a certain area and timeframe. Once I reach a certain threshold, the game nerfs my chance for a mob to drop anything. It goes from a 50% drop to maybe 10 or 20%. This becomes very apparent in areas where I can kill 12 mobs a minute or more.

Credentials: I am 400 Leatherworking and working on 400 Huntsman. I also have 400 cooking, if that matters. I’m part of a network of crafters, and together represent all professions at 400. I’ve made most of my wealth in the past few days, and I’m currently around 40g and counting. Before that, I spent weeks learning what’s profitable in this game. It is not crafting.

So why am I (and may others) saying that crafting sucks? Here’s why:

• You can only craft one set of items per tier. There are dozens of unique looking item sets at every level tier, from drops, dungeons, and vendors. People have many different tastes. Crafting is having a restaurant that only serves a single dish, while the joint next door has a whole buffet. How do you expect to get any business? This is broken.

• The cost of crafted items are completely out of balance with drop rates. This makes crafted items much more expensive than looted items of the same stats. This wouldn’t be an issue if crafted items had something unique about them to compensate. They don’t.

• I feel like crafting is designed as a leveling gimmick, and players are meant to buy themselves experience, not make anything of value. This is why the market is filled with crafted items selling at major losses. The fact that exotic recipes are duct-taped onto the end of crafting does not justify it as a profession for making things.

I don’t know why crafting was designed this way. It’s great for leveling your character and wasting time/money. In some very small corners of the market, crafting can actually be profitable. But those minor victories do not paint over the worst attribute of crafting, and that is making something of value. This is where crafting fails horribly, and this is why crafting is broken.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix crafting. Here’s how:

• Give us more sets to craft. We need to be able to craft more than a singe set per tier. Allow us to discover new sets, or reverse engineer sets from dropped loot. Crafting needs more eye candy.

• Give crafted items more perks, to make up for being more expensive. I believe some crafted items have a lower level requirement for their stats, which is a start. It would be nice to craft coats with two upgrade slots, or possibly give crafted items slightly better stats than dropped ones. Even a small increase would help immensely.

• Give us pre-400 recipes that do not grant discovery or experience, so you can justify giving us better recipes. I understand the imbalance in giving recipes that are valuable in both gold and experience, so remove one and allow us to make marketable recipes at lower levels.

• Allow us to sell upgraded items. I can craft both the items and upgrades, and sell them separately. But if I want to put them together, I can’t sell them anymore? Everyone is allowed to sell dropped items with upgrades, but not crafters? That does not make any sense! Please remove this silly restriction!

• Allow us to transmute items, or upgrade items to a higher class/level, so that crafters can recycle visually appealing low level items into something useful. I don’t know if this is technically possible with your item database, but this would add such a level of depth to crafting, that other games would pale in comparison.

• Give us an auction house and trade chat. I could make an entire thread on how much of a mistake it was to not include these two things. The tradepost was designed for commodities and low value items, not high-end items. This is the reason why exotics are an incredible pain to sell at decent value, including crafted ones. I’m tired of babysitting buy orders every 5 minutes, or losing 5% on a listing fee because someone undercut me by 1 copper. There’s a much better way, we invented it a long time ago, it’s called an auction house.

• At the very least, please give us trade chat and C.O.D mail. These are very basic features and there’s absolutely no excuse for it to be missing in GW2 . I don’t want to hawk my expensive wares in map chat, but the tradepost is awful and there’s no other alternatives. Please fix this!*

I want to close this post by saying thank you to Arenanet for making such a wonderful game. There are a few things that need some more TLC from you guys, especially crafting, but overall the game is wonderful and I have enjoyed it very much. Thank you for reading!

Edit: Based on Strzalka’s advice, I changed the thread title to something less offensive. Thanks!

Edit2: Based on the moderator rules, I changed the post title again. ^^