Guild Wars 2

Arbitrage isn’t illegal afaik. You can and do place buy orders only to resell at a higher price in real life markets.

Arbitrage doesn’t change the fact that prices settle where players will be willing to buy and sell from. Should you buy a whole market and relist much higher, and people not be willing to pay that much, the price will lower naturally, and the flipper will be stuck with a stock that he can’t sell.

What’s the problem again ? Also, can I have a source on arbitrage being illegal ?

It’s funny how people seem to discover how market works and get all angry about it. Undercutting and overbidding are the whole point of a market. Otherwise you are just an individual seller completely disconnected from the rest of the economy.

If you don’t want to get undercut, do private sales with people that have no clue, set your own price. You would, again, be completely isolated from the economy hence no risk of being undercut.

Being anonymous is a choice but there are many MMOs out there where you can find the name of the person behind an order, and this is not more of a conflict issue than people insulting each other over PvP, PvE, and whatnot. Customer support will simply tell you to use your ignore list and move on.

The price of the gems is undoubtedly set by Anet. Whether or not there is an algorithm, or the rate can be manually set by Anet doesn’t change anything.

If it isn’t a bid/ask system then there is no way anyone should trust it as being player driven when by design, it isn’t.

I understand it works as a pressure valve for the inflation, and that’s not the only obvious benefit of having it controlled by Anet. However you could have the gold/gem exchange as an ask/bid and still have your pressure valve.

You have taken inspiration from the game with the very best economy in the MMO sphere these days : EVE. Let’s look further into it : PLEX (that can be bought for real life money) is traded as any other item on the market and the price is set by the players. Flipping and speculation on PLEX is common (currently PLEX prices are rising like never before because of it), hell, you can even lose PLEX permanently in the game, who cares !

What CCP controls however is the rate at which they sell plex from real life money, not the ingame price of PLEX in in game currency, which means they can open or close the plex faucets when they choose, hence influencing the price in the game. Note that when they make a PLEX discount, they also make a very substantial amount of money from it.

100% free market for anything ingame, yes please. The fact that a patch can change the supply/demand of an item doesn’t make it less of a free market btw. Other games have made it work much better than what we are seeing in Guild Wars 2.