Guild Wars 2

TooBz.3065:

I don’t think anyone is saying that flippers are marking items up. That’s a strawman.

There are two discussions going more of less simultaneously. First is about flipping itself. Is it good or bad for the economy. The second is about the concentration of wealth and the effect that this has on the game.

The reason they are related is that flipping is the way that the wealth gets concentrated.

Speaking only for myself. I don’t do it because it’s not fun. There are lots of activities in this game that I refuse to do because I don’t enjoy them. Flipping is one of them. I play this game to enjoy myself – period. If I don’t enjoy it I don’t do it. Honestly, you don’t need money in this game at all if you don’t buy into the grind, grind, grind, bullkitten that ANet keeps pushing.

I won’t try to argue that flipping is good for the economy but it certainly isn’t bad. It’s a non-issue. I will say that an increase in the number of flippers is better for the average farmer—assuming that, as most people, that the average farmer sells his items right away at the highest buy order price.

If you look at an item that is lightly traded with few flippers, the spread between the buy and sell prices is much larger. If a lot of flippers are trading an item, the buy orders keep creeping higher as people try to outbid other buyers. As a result, the farmer gets a much better price if he elects to just sell his loot for an instant profit.

As far as the concentration of wealth…well, I suppose a flipper has a much larger potential for wealth than the average player. But why does that even matter? A dedicated flipper isn’t even really playing the same game as you. There is only so much you can even buy and at the high end it’s almost all superfluous crap related to appearance.

It was already mentioned earlier in the thread, but it bears repeating: Items are worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.

If you think that a flipper is buying an item and “marking it up” you are wrong—plain and simple. They are simply buying an underpriced item and relisting it closer to this “actual” item price. If the flipper relists that item at a price that is too high, it won’t sell and they are still out the TP tax.

To the folks that are complaining about an across-the-board nerf to farming, why are you worried? The majority of players could not be considered “flippers” and if every farmer is suddenly making a lot less gold, the price of items has no choice but to fall as well. And you still get the sweet sweet schadenfreude of seeing someone eat the TP tax on 1k+ gold items that will likely never sell at the price that is completely out of reach.

If flipping is truly the absolute best and fastest way to make gold, then why aren’t you doing it? You don’t deserve any sympathy for not learning how to do it because there are at least a dozen articles explaining it all over the internet. Complaining about something that has exactly zero physical barrier to entry is simply ludicrous.