Showing Posts For Vesuvias.9326:
Some precursor traders in this thread. Sad.
I am one of those people that is trying to make precursors so you can have one. I just want to sell it at a profit, I don’t even need a 100% profit on my investment. Maybe 20-25% when all the risk, taxes and fees are accounted for. I am actually on your side, I think they are far far to rare.
I have thrown about 1200 exotics into the forge to make precursors as an investment. I have had about two precursors come out and sold them both for far under their value apparently. I got them early on and “thought” the odds were far better than they actually are. I am now debating whether this is a wise investment. Because to get a return I really need to be charging even more than what the TP is selling them for now.
The issue is: the pool of players with that much gold is so small that we could be over-supplied for the actual market that actually exists for them. Demand doesn’t dictate profit potential. If I can’t make a precursor for less than 200g I am not selling it for less than 250g. If there is not enough players with 250g that want it for that price then there is not enough Demand that can afford it to justify me making it.
(edited by Vesuvias.9326)
Sorry bro you are not entitled to tell Arena-net who and who isn’t entitled to a legendary. Designing an aspect of the game for a → Massively <- multiplayer game that is only relivant to a ridiculously small portion of your player base is quite simply dumb game design. Especially when put a lot of effort in playing up and advertising that aspect.
Heh, not surprised to see a passive-aggressive reply like this but you couldn’t be further from the truth. I just hit 80 the other day on my main, and I have a total of maybe 30s on my account. I have not benefited from any of the exploits nor have I profited greatly from the trading post. I’m not sure why you think my reply means I’m a gold-seller though. The point I am trying to make is that people should temper their expectations: everyone wants a legendary, but by their vary nature they are something only a small % of people will ever have. This is leading to a lot of (unnecessarily) frustrated people.
By encouraging people to simply abandon their extreme desire for a legendary in favor of more realistic goals, achievements, or activities, I’d be hurting my business if I was a gold seller. I just wish more people would enjoy the game instead of chasing an unrealistic goal simply because they are locked into the mindset that end-game is grinding for the “best” item, and nothing else. I am a concerned player and member of the community, only trying to appeal to the common sense of other players. There is no “angle” I’m trying to work here.
My only vested interest is in Arenanet not making legendary weapons easier, because I enjoy there being virtually unattainable but spectacular items that truly wow you when you see someone running around with one. This may seem bizarre to you, but I’m actually able to appreciate someone else’s achievement/luck/support/craziness rather than see something someone else has that I don’t, and going crazy with jealousy.
No this is absolutely stupid game design and against every philosophy that manifesto sold us on. Putting something completely out of reach for 99.99% of the player base and then selling it as a “if you work hard enough you too could have one of these” items is the ultimate in bait and switch compound carrot chasing tactics. We were promised the end of those with the end of subs.
No I completely disagree, stupid game design is stupid game design. If truely only 1 in 10,000 players will ever have these then they never should have been included in the first place. This game was designed for masses not the 1% of the 1%. Achievement is achievement and doesn’t have to be relative to have personal value.
For everyone calling for the forge to be removed from the equation to craft legendaries, your not getting something here. These legendary precursors are driving the market and doing a HUGE service for the economy. Namely removing the over-supply of crappy drops. This economy is very much centered around the mystic forge and its ability to remove items from the economy in order to stave off inflation. Think of the economy as a huge pyramid with these Legendary precursors at the top.
People throw blues in the forge to get Mastercrafts to throw in the forge to get rares so they can throw those rares in the forge to get exotics so they can throw exotics in to get the precursors. The precursor hunters are keeping the value of great deal of the current exotics high and there is a trickle down effect on the rest of the economy. Trust me, if precursors weren’t forge made the entire economy would change “overnight”.
That said if they changed the drop rate from the forge from 1 in 125 combines (some above mentioned 8 in 1000) to 1 in 500, then it could backfire on them. If legendaries are so rare as to be completely unheard of, then a great many people may just say screw it and never even try (further hurting what fuels item removal in the economy). There is a threshold where it can be “too” rare. If only 2% of the population are ever going to own these then the other 98% are wasting their time and shouldn’t even try. On the other hand once everyone gets one, what will fuel the economy? Personally I was expecting more “legendary” type things, like next expansion adds legendary armor pieces that also require the forge to create precursors for, etc.
(edited by Vesuvias.9326)
So can you get a precursor using level 76+ Exotics or not? Must they be level 80+ now? I created 2 precursors using 76+ “Exotics”, note not rares, before. It would be really frustrating to know I have been throwing away money chasing what once worked just fine.
However, if it becomes worthwhile to put 100g into buy orders, then it will be equally worthwhile for someone else to put in an order in at the end of that very long queue. Basically, whenever you “lock” a market you’re locking out your own gold as well. Either your last stack was a reasonable investment, in which case it would still be a reasonable investment for another player to put another order at the end of that very long queue, or you’re sacrificing on better investment opportunities by doing so, and those other opportunities will remain open to other players.
It’s not that you’re being disproportionately rewarded for having that 100g; what you were rewarded for in this hypothetical scenario is finding an item with a short queue to take advantage of, and that’s something that any player would be rewarded for, regardless of how much gold they happen to have – in this regard, the system is fair. Yes, the size of the reward is roughly proportional to how much you invest, but that’s essentially an inherent aspect of how trading works anyway. In fact, this is a case that exhibits diminishing returns, because as you pump more gold into buy orders for a single item the queue gets longer and hence your rate of return decreases.
What you “buy” with the tieing up of your 100g is an exclusive “extended” period of time where you and only you can be profitable on a possible upstream item. Sure someone could throw an order for 1000 at the end of your order for 100,000. But its the block of continuous time where you can control the price point that is the problem. Controlling the only profitable price point for 20 minutes is practically pointless. Controlling it for 3-4 days is an entirely different matter, that’s enough to force the smaller players out.
I’ve had a bit of change of heart on this issue. I really think the lack of granularity as the price of items approachs 1c is more of an issue than anything else. FIFO as implemented now isn’t even FIFO. It’s FIFO with option to make it LIFO for the cost of 1c. 1c on an item that sells for 2g is practically pointless and its a no brainier to “buy” to the top of the Queue at that cost. On an item that sell for 10c its a 10% item cost to “buy” to the top of the Queue which makes for an entirely different market.
In order to obtain such a “lock”, you have to put a ridiculously large amount of money into buy orders, considering just how many participants there are in GW2’s markets. Also, while it is true that the lack of fees on the buy orders means you can do this without a direct penalty, it still remains the case that every stack of 250 units you order is less profitable than the last, because the queue is longer and hence the profit per unit time is lower.
By ordering hundreds of thousands of units of one type of item, you would be waiting for, say, a week to make a 10% profit. In doing so, you’re paying the opportunity cost of not ordering a different type of item which might easily have made you comparable profit in a much shorter timeframe.
Now, perhaps the system would be better if you introduced fees on buy orders as well as sell orders, or maybe if you allowed for increments of 0.1c instead of 1c. However, I don’t think that randomly choosing a buyer/seller for each transaction is a good solution.
Your point is valid. Liquidity is “extremely” important in this game and tieing up that much cash is detrimental at this early stage (as there are plenty of cash making opportunities). But to be truthful an order for 100,000 on an item that cost 10c is only 100g. I would guess that most of the people in this discussion have at least that much in assets plus cash. Right now I admittedly wouldn’t do it as the gold is like you said better spent elsewhere. But next month when all of us have doubled or tripled our amounts I could easily have 100g just sitting doing nothing otherwise.
As the gaps in profit start to close because of competition it will be worth it to have 100g sit in a buy order queue versus my non interest earning bank tab so I could lock an entire market even small one. And not to bang the point again, its completely risk free since I can cancel it at no penalty.
To be honest having to order in lots 250 means I would need to place 400 buy orders and that would likely prevent me (personally) from ever doing this. But it isn’t that hard to imagine someone willing to setup a Macro to gain the advantage.
I suspect this may already be occurring for some items.
(edited by Vesuvias.9326)
I have no idea what you mean by “fair in terms of encouraging competition”, but the fact is that FIFO encourages competition more than either of the alternative systems being suggested, because FIFO (more so than the other systems) encourages undercutting by 1c to sell your items more quickly. Identical products being sold at an identical price do not constitute “competition”; they have to differ in some aspects before it can be called that.
Except that in this environment FIFO allows glaring obvious advantage points only allowable because of the way the “system” functions. FIFO in and of itself isn’t bad provided the concept of arriving first provides little to no advantage (and I apologize for not explaining this better). It’s use here is bad because of the way it combines with some other system constraints. The concept of arriving first “can” provide tremendous advantage. Lets iterate over some of the system constraints that we all know but possibly take for granted:
1) buy orders never expire and can sit forever waiting to be filled a certain price point. they can also be pulled off for no fee if it turns out to be a bad bid at the entirely wrong price point for the market. There is also essentially no cap on how large an order you can place. This means that with enough cash you can essentially “lock” a price point. Normally this is meaningless as the next guy can simply bid a little higher or sell for a little lower to essentially negate the lock except that in this system we have another constraint.
2) We must bid in increments of 1c. While this seems like a minor inconsequential point. It actually isn’t. What it eliminates is all of fractional price points between the “locked” price point, call it X, and X + 1c. This doesn’t really effect big items that sell one at a time for multiple gold but items that are essentially selling in lots for 1-20c this is a BIG deal. If I am buying a lot of say 1000 Iron which currently lets say has a bid order of 100592 at 10c. I can either bid 1g for my 1000 (1000 * 10c = 10000c = 1g) and go to the end of the list never to be filled or I can go to the next highest price point and bid 1g 10s for my lot of 1000 and there are NO price points in between. I can’t bid 1g 1c for my lot of 1000.
10s is easily the difference between profit and loss. In a competitive game like this it is only natural to attempt to lock you competition out of certain price points. And because the systems lack of monetary granularity the concept of getting your price on the queue first is now over emphasized. And that’s my biggest problem with FIFO.
Most players who know how it functions are already aware of this and will simply “game” this system. I imagine that some of you may not even think this is a problem as everyone has a “fair” shot at taking advantage of way the system functions. However this is a game. From a game design perspective having a runaway winner is a problem. Those who have accumulated a great deal of gold and have a tremendous amount of free time already have an innate advantage simply by having more gold and time. They don’t need any “extra” advantage innate to the way the system functions allowing them to lockout competitors more easily.
It’s not an assumption that random number generation takes processor time.
It’s an assumption that taking more time in this instance would have any perceivable impact. There a plenty of algorithms out there that take far less time to pull a number than standard generator techniques. And if its a problem, pregenerate them and use a lookup table. The game probably already has a large need for randomly generated data, it may already be done this way.
From a technical standpoint the issue wouldn’t be whether it takes more processing time but if it takes enough to be a bottleneck. I seriously doubt it would.
Because it only causes slightly more lag than the previous small-orders-first system. There are practical considerations as well as market freedom considerations.
What system would you recommend instead, which could be implemented at anything like the same speed we’ve come to expect from the TP?
I think there is a huge assumption that there is a performance issue caused by the way the system processes orders. The TP may be having performance issues but none of us has seen that code or know the precise architecture of that system. They have never said that the reason for the system processing small orders first was a performance related. In fact they instead said it was a bug.
The system I would propose for buy orders is simply random between buyers at the same price point. The assumption that this would add processing time of a non-negligible amount is just that: an assumption.
If this argument is strictly about technical performance the concept of fairness is moot anyway.
I know I am late to this thread but I wanted to comment.
A FIFO scheme seems the fairest scheme since it ensures that if the price stays steady, then all sell orders listed at that price will eventually sell. Any other scheme involves newer orders being sold before older ones, raising the possibility that the older ones will never sell.
There is nothing “fair” about FIFO. It is predictable and orderly but it is not fair in terms of encouraging competition. It seems fair simply because we can know for sure that we have a monopoly on the next X sellers at a particular price point and everyone can get this same monopolistic assurance. It most assuredly isn’t a “free” market system. It’s free market like but it isn’t a naturally occurring system in any way. It is absolutely engineered and offers an arbitrary advantage to certain sellers based on the time they listed the product they are selling.
Why precisely should a player get a system enforced competitive advantage based on time listed? In what way does this help encourage a healthy economy?
All that said the ability to 1c up or down nearly makes this less of issue. Since most players naturally assumed it was FIFO anyway the market hasn’t changed much since this change was put in place.
But that doesn’t mean this was a healthy mechanic in the first place. I really think it causes the most damage with buy orders. Especially since there is no way to bid at fractions of a copper. And again there is no rational reason to enforce a mechanic that forces a seller to sell to one and only one seller for X number of sells at a particular price point.
To use an example I used in another thread, Seller A walks into a room with 250 items to sell and 3 Buyers are already in the room all wanting to buy his product for 17c. Buyer B got the room first with an order for 10 product, Buyer C got there second with 5000 and Buyer D got there third with 5. The FIFO system forces the Seller to sell to Buyer B and then to Buyer C. Buyer D never even gets a chance to buy and won’t until Buyer C’s order is completely filled.
This is hardly a “free” market. Why should when a particular Buyer walks into the room have any effect on whether Seller A can sell to them? Seller A only cares about price. The product isn’t somehow better because Buyer B arrived at the market first. Why should the system arbitrarily enforce such a mechanism?
Interesting formula.
You can also get those salvage kits from BL chests. It may be worth it if you have any use for the other boosters.
Edit: wasn’t paying attention to parenthesis
Every-time an item changes hands on the TP it loses 15% of its value. Think about that for a second. We greatly encouraged NOT to exchange items between each other.
You save 15% on your armor by becoming your own armorsmith (or using your guild smith), you save 15% on your weapon by becoming your own weaponsmith. You also get ~10 levels per profession you take to 400. The combination of these means that it makes very little sense to use a crafter outside of your alts or your guild.
The trading post is for exchanging raw materials only. Buying materials off the TP for a combine and reposting the result will never be profitable because this tax. There is no convenience you could provide for another player that is worth a 15% markup just to break even.
Ultimately I think this tax is so high that even raw materials will eventually start to suffer as well. I really do think this tax will stifle the economy long term.
Message to Trading Post developers. Please Change LIFO system (stack) by a FIFO (queue)
Posted by: Vesuvias.9326
This is a LIFO (Last In, First Out) or “Stack” system which is not fair, because the first person to list an item on a fixed price should be the first to get his item sold on that price-range.
Why? Why should the first to list item get the monopoly on the next buyer?
Let me suggest that it simply “seems” like this should be fairest way in which to conduct business but it isn’t fair at all.
When a buyer comes to purchase they don’t care who listed first only who listed lowest. There is no “value” added to the product by listing it first. So why should the system enforce a mechanism that is completely arbitrary.
The “fairest” mechanism would be to randomize which item the buyer buys at a given price point. Both FIFO and LIFO are not as fair as random, and between the two I would pick LIFO over FIFO every time as it is much harder to game.
Remember also that Gems and Gold aren’t freely interchangeable. There is a “Tax” applied by Arenanet on this market as well. My tests show that if you convert Gold to Gems and back again immediately you lose 28% of your wealth. I don’t have a way to determine which “side” this Tax (Gems to Gold vs Gold to Gems) is applied on (as there isn’t a third commodity to compare it to) so I assume that its half (14%) on either side.
I somewhat agree with the OP but I think we need more time to evaluate exactly how this tax effects the economy. I don’t think it needs to go away altogether but I am leaning toward it being too high at the moment.
My gut reaction is that it seems like it will in the long term stifle interaction and interdependancy between players. Why would I go to a jewelry crafter who needs to offset prices by 15% just to break even when I can easily enough level jewel crafting myself.
Because the cost to trade is SO high I am better served by avoiding the market altogether on those items that I can acquire or combine on my own. There is absolutely no market for “pushing combine” and thus tradeskills are not useful to level as a money maker but only to avoid losing money from the trading post for items you may need.
Overtime I really think most players will come to the conclusion that they are better off avoiding the trading post altogether if they can. I don’t think this is apparent just yet because, as has been mentioned in this thread, a great deal of the players posting aren’t precisely aware of the tax and how high it actually is.
My opinion on this is that the economy would be healthiest if it were completely random. I don’t presently know how it works admittedly though. I thought it was FIFO, but there are plenty of reports otherwise.
However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game.
Yes, but would changing the ask/bid asymmetry actually change the fact that people who don’t understand economics can’t make lots of money through the BLTC?
No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power. Altering some parameter might delay this situation a bit, but that’s it.
I respectfully disagree. I think you have made an incorrect assumption that a game can not be designed to avoid the “runaway” winner problem. Understand that philosophically this isn’t an issue with having a winner but an issue with having a winner that prevents all future game’s from being played on a level playing field and the degree/scale with which that occurs.
To answer Hippocampus, while changing buy/sell asymmetry may not allow a casual player to amass huge pile’s of wealth simply by playing (I certainly would never argue for that) it could prevent them from taking a loss on every transaction and forcing them out of the market.
I think its important to point out that this market isn’t “free”. While it might seem that way, there are most certainly system enforced constraints that effect the ability for small vendors to compete. And I not talking about artificially created ceilings or floors.
Specifically because of the way the purchase mechanic works only one particular vendor has a monopoly on a given sale from a specific customer at given time. That vendor is the one that has the lowest price. This “seems” logical because the items in this game are simplified in that there is no variance between two Berserker Draconic Helms other than price. One crafter didn’t use better material, or didn’t tweak them to fit larger heads versus smaller heads or didn’t use better celebrity advertising, etc. Two helms in this game are precisely the same. It is perfectly rational to believe that no player is ever going to pay more when they have the option to pay less for the “exact” same product.
So the system optimizes the choice for the player and only allows them to buy the item that is priced lowest. And more specifically it only allows them to buy the item that is the lowest price that has been listed the longest (FIFO sell order). Because of this the market isn’t free, a particular vendor gets a Monopoly on a given item at a given price point if that price is the lowest price and if they were the first to list it at that price point.
To illustrate why I think this is bad I lets say Buyer A wants to buy a widget. Seller B, Seller C, and Seller D all sell said widget. Buyer A walks into the room where Seller B, C and D are all selling their widgets. Each one is set up on a nondescript table, none of the tables are any closer to the door than any others, there is no advertising and our widget is precisely the same in every conceivable way regardless of who is selling it. Which Seller with Buyer A buy from? The one who is selling the Widget for the lowest of course but what if they are all selling it for the same price? Which one does the Seller choose? In this case I would argue that his choice would be completely random. Sometime B, sometimes C, sometimes D.
What the current system does that is artificial is that is arrays the Seller table’s in straight line. So that when the Buyer walks in the room he can only buy from the table at the front. When buyers aren’t in the room the tables are artificially moved around so that the lowest seller is at the front. This is further sorted by which Seller decided first to price the Widget lowest.
The question in terms of a free market is why? The seller doesn’t care in which order the lowest price was set before they entered the room. Does arraying the tables in a straight line encourage better competition somehow? I argue that it is completely arbitrary and that by enforcing a limited monopoly it actually hurts the system allowing wealthier individuals a chance to game it to the detriment of the entire economy. The example I used was only for selling but for bidding a similar example applies with similar artificial constraints.
The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.
There are definitely unfortunate consequences of the one-sided risk in custom orders/offers, but I don’t think this is one of them.
We’re talking about making money solely by playing the market, right? That’s not the sort of thing people without sufficient knowledge or insight should expect to be able to compete effectively in, especially when there are others whose main enjoyment in playing the game comes from using the BLTC commodities market.
Were the market a semi-disconnected mini-game I might agree with you. However we all know that “winning” in the market has an huge impact on how you can play the rest of the game. Gold in this game is hugely important (travel costs, repair costs, siege engines, exotic gear, etc). This moves slightly in the direction of a game design debate but the rewards from “winning” in the market are far better than those of say winning in WvW (on a personal level). To make matters worse there is a feedback loop exaggerated by the way in which the market works. It gets exceedingly easier to make more money, the more money that you have.
It was John I think that put out a chart before the game was released defining what a healthy economy would look like. My comments about the inability for casuals to compete were only meant in the context of a game economy designed to try and stay healthy by that definition.
(edited by Vesuvias.9326)
..
One thing that I think may drive prices down is, as Ensign explains above, there is far more risk to asking a higher price than the current going rate than there is to bidding a lower price than the current rate. There is some liquidity loss with making a bid that just sits there, but since you can remove your order at any time with no risk (well, none apart from potentially losing all your gold to a bug I suppose…), buy orders aren’t actually all that illiquid. (Would they technically be illiquid at all, given that you can pretty much instantly convert them back into cash?)
This asymmetry of risk likely makes people more willing to bid lower prices and less likely to ask higher prices than they would be without the asymmetry, which means stable prices will tend to be lower than they would be otherwise. They would still eventually stabilize, though, and well above vendor price for valuable but common items like crafting materials.
…
This and this again. I don’t think people fully realize just how impactful this imbalance is. Anyone willing to “camp” the TP can one copper up the next lowest bidder all day long. This gives full-time merchants a HUGE advantage as they can get their orders filled first, at the lowest price the market will bear. What should in theory move the low end rapidly toward equilibrium instead stalls it because their is little incentive to bid fairly and every incentive to bid exactly 1c over the highest bid, until the casual player simply gives up out of frustration or bids so high they can’t possibly profit.
On the other end ou have the exact oppisite problem with a monstrous profit eating listing fee, which by itself isn’t so bad, but when coupled with a bidding system and the sales tax it makes it impossible for someone who isn’t “buy order camping” to compete. Why? Because their competition can get items/item components far cheaper than they can and therefore take the greater amount of loss necessary to compete. The end result is that you can not compete on the selling price unless you are exploiting “I need to sell it now” motivated players with super low buy orders and the listing fee forces extreme competition on the selling price.
The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.
The difference being that the lottery clearly and concisely gives out the odds information. Knowledge it seems in the case of the GW2 economy is a critical component as there are a great many items produced “randomly”. If everyone knew that there was a 1/1000 chance of getting the rare item out of the chest very few would try. If it was 1 in 5 nearly everyone would give it a go and basically “buy” the item with attempts.
I really hate this type of re balance. It gives entirely too much advantage to those that already have their conduits and those that have a great deal of money to exploit this information. It just reiterates that those who play a great deal have “extra” advantage over those that play very little, on top of just the time invested. It becomes exceedingly important to invest time early and often to take advantage of situations like this.
Conduits were 7g last night they will be 10g tommorrow and 20g-30g next week as supply drops to nothing. This is an artificial barrier to entry for new players and completely arbitrary and controlled by Anet.
Conduits are a tremendous convenience but not necessary. However the time they save is certainly very concrete and will give tremendous advantage to those playing on the TP.
I like the idea but you can’t eliminate the listing fee. It’s incentive to not “race to floor” by pulling your item off the TP and reposting. And that would be exploitive for those sellers with large volumes of product.
There is definitely an issue. But it’s largely a factor of too much supply, too few people know that there is a tax AND a listing fee and the value of each, and there is too little historical data on selling volume provided. If I knew that their were 200 Globs of echto listed and that 150 sold yesterday at X price. I could more accurately gauge how much I should list mine for and when I could expect to sell it. As it is now unless I am a huge volume trader that tracks what is selling and when with a spreadsheet external to the game’s provided systems I just don’t know if lowest bidder will get my item sold (ever). Getting the item closer to the buyout bid does give me a better “feeling” that it might.
Money is so tight for some people that they just cannot afford to have an item worth any value sit on the TP. They would rather take a loss then tie up the money (especially given the listing fee). The economy is inflating. Money is worth more now than it will be 2 weeks from now. The gem market is just further evidence that this is true.
The other issue that might be causing some pain is the fact that buy orders are cost free to cancel. So there is absolutely no incentive to bid fairly and no reason to not simply submit a buy order at 1c over the highest one, and camp the TP if someone overbids you. This disparity between buy orders rules and sell posting rules makes it a buyers market for sure.
There is a little locked icon in the lower right hand corner of your bank tab. When you click on it, it asks if you want to spend 600 gems on a new tab. Once you do this you get a whole new tab (30 slots). I have added 3 so far so I don’t know what the limit is or if there is one. hope this helps.