It’s still likely to be a good time to buy one, though.
I wouldn’t expect any takers, considering that there’s buy orders on Spark at ~130g, and sell orders on Kudzu at ~80g.
I’m not really sure what triggered it, but all of the precursors have crashed massively in the past half-day or so.
Due to the RNG nature, it takes time for the prices of precursors to respond to changes. You can hardly justify a verdict of “still steadily increasing” with the data so far.
In any case, the increase in chances is counterbalanced by the significant jump in materials prices, which has nearly doubled the costs of making level 80 rares. With that in mind, I wouldn’t expect prices for precursors to go down.
I don’t see why you think rares, exotics and the mats should go down in price, either.
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Make sure your items aren’t sitting in an Invisible Bag (or Safe Box) – it seems that the latest patch changed it so that items in one of those no longer show up in the “Sell Your Stuff” tab.
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It would be a little more informative if the screenshot showed your inventory window as well as the trading post window.
Arbitrage doesn’t quite benefit everyone, since the more savvy consumers and farmers who put up their own buy or sell orders rather than accepting those that are already up end up making less. Arbitrage also works against arbitrageurs, in the sense that the competition between traders narrows profit margins until there are none to be had.
That said, I agree that arbitrage is a natural and useful function of the market; the resulting wealth inequality is a relatively benign side effect.
Another useful function of trading is the tendency to reduce periodic fluctuations in market price, e.g. the tendency for prices to differ on weekends and during peak U.S. hours.
I’m no economist, but I think this would only become a problem if this cartel of wealthy traders decided to try and corner the market on highly valued items, which could result in items like Charged Lodestones (just as an example) getting priced out of reach of the average player. A player could still get them by farming them himself, but that’s subject to luck and it may not be “fun”, which is ultimately the goal of what ANet seeks to achieve for its player-base.
That’s something of a possibility, though cornering markets in GW2 is much more easily said than done. The massive number of players involved in the game, combined with very low barriers to entry (such as the ease of reaching level 80, or level 400 in a craft), make it extremely difficult to genuinely corner a market.
Attempting to artificially raise prices tends to drive things to correct themselves – fewer people will want to buy those items if they are so high, and many more people will be looking to farm them. This tends to drive prices back down, often causing whoever attempted this to lose money.
Basically, in the “cartel” situation you mentioned above, it becomes very profitable for other traders to form a “counter-cartel” and benefit by selling items to the cartel attempting to buy them up. This behaviour, in essence, the kind of thing that drives markets to correct themselves. Since there aren’t really any available mechanisms for coercion in GW2, attempted monopolies should inevitably fail in the end.
Of course, markets aren’t perfect, and due to the poor spread of some important kinds of information (such as historical price trends – most people don’t look at GW2Spidy), it’s possible for people to benefit from this in the short term – the “pump and dump” scenario is a typical example.
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Those buy orders were put up before that change was made. Functionally, their presence or absence makes no difference at all; the worst it can do is be an annoyance. I expect people are gradually taking them down to get their money back; perhaps ArenaNet will automatically cancel and refund all of them at some point.
I don’t really agree with the idea that wealth inequality is harmful when taken in the context of a video game.
As for ArenaNet serving the role of a market maker, how exactly are you suggesting they would do this?
I don’t think the gem-gold exchange model would be a good fit if you applied it to every single item on the TP. It would add a lot of complexity and a lot of work for ANet in monitoring it, while having many more potential vulnerabilities due to different behaviours and trade volumes for different items (hence requiring “tuning” for each individual item). At the same time, you would lose a lot of transparency (which people already complain about on the gold-gem exchange alone).
Another alternative would be for ArenaNet to have some kind of automatic trade-bot, but then it would need to be highly robust in order to handle variable market conditions without being exploitable. They could pay humans to do it, but that seems like a wasteful expense to me.
If you have a good suggestion, I’d be happy to hear it. On the whole, my view is that ArenaNet acting as a market maker for every single item on the TP would take much more work, effort, and added complexity than it’s worth. The TP as it currently is performs its intended role very well and I see little reason to change this.
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The Godskull bug is a significant possibility, but it’s not the only way for someone to have 3800G, and many of the others are entirely legitimate.
Yeah, it could easily end up getting cheaper before the patch than it will be after, due to the rush to sell.
I was OK with the current system, but I don’t really see the change as “caving in to the QQ’rs”. I expect ArenaNet decided that a significant fraction of players were unhappy with the system, and that changing it would be an improvement to the game as a whole.
Yes, of course that’s going to have an effect on the economy, but I don’t think that should stand in the way of ArenaNet seeking to improve flaws in the game.
It’s not really ironic, though. The driving philosophy behind EVE is a completely different one to that of GW2, so of course they’re going to handle things differently.
In any case, with regards to the economic “minigame”, it just means that you have to think of ArenaNet as one of the factors you have to think about in every decision you make. Just as some people lose out when ArenaNet changes something, other people will gain from it.
In particular, it’s pretty ridiculous to complain about ArenaNet’s recent bot bannings and the effect on the economy. Would you really prefer it if they simply gave the bots free rein?
I can see some of the responses if the posters are from Iran or China or other countries without market economies. But, the vast majority of this games players should understand the basic law of supply and demand.
China’s economy is, in fact, a market economy (or rather a mixed economy, i.e. one with both market forces and government planning; the term “mixed economy” applies to the economies of the vast majority of countries including the United States). Although ~50% of the enterprises are state-owned they are still subject to market forces. China calls its system a “socialist market economy”, though critics often refer to it as “state capitalism”.
Iran’s economy is considered a transition economy, with something like 50% of it being centrally planned, but this is enough that it’s quite clear that anyone posting from Iran would have experience with market economics.
A better example of an almost fully planned economy would be something like that of Cuba or North Korea.
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What harm is caused by flipping?
Side note: What people call “flipping” in this game is better described by the term “scalping”, which is a form of arbitrage.
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It’s highly unlikely that they put in DR on salvaging – there’s no good reason to do it.
Yep. Those are things that are in the real world; they’re pretty cool you know. I hope to see you around here sometime.
In the meantime, you need to find better evidence for your conspiracy theory, because nothing you’ve presented so far is particularly convincing.
So the main effect of such a change would be to make the game more inconvenient for many people. Why bother?
For one thing, it would severely increase the amount of spam (especially in Lion’s Arch).
Also, the problem of having to find buyers and sellers would be trivially solved in many ways – for example, a website (this could easily be the same site that ends up being used to blacklist scammers).
I don’t really see how this would be a positive change to the game compared to the TP as it is now.
Your claim about prices on everything dropping without traders seems mostly unfounded, because traders naturally supply the same quantity of items that they demand.
The purpose of a “name and shame” strategy would be to discourage relatively normal players from the temptation of scamming others; by comparison, people who buy accounts specifically for scamming would be a small minority. A 50% tax is very easily beaten by a 0% tax with, say, a 10% chance of getting scammed.
1. A 50% tax would reduce flipping, but it wouldn’t stop it, because the gaps between buy and sell orders on many items would also widen as a result of such a high tax. Besides, I don’t see why that’s even a good reason to justify hitting everyone in the game with a big tax.
2. People will easily be trustworthy significantly more than 50% of the time, hence the risk is easily justifiable. There’s also relatively easy ways for players to minimize this through out-of-game strategies – e.g. keeping public “name and shame” blacklists of scammers so that no one will trade with them anymore.
What’s good about a 50% tax, exactly?
There doesn’t seem to be any need for that much of a gold sink; the main effect that would have is to cause a lot of people to conduct their business through mail rather than the TP.
How does allowing players to turn gold into gems “inflate the exchange ratio” in a negative way, though? People buying gems with gold causes gems to be worth more gold, not less.
I don’t think “hard work” is a good term here; it’s something that a lot of people would indeed associate with something time-consuming and boring like a grind. I don’t think hard work is something that’s generally desirable in a video game.
A better term for what some people are asking for would be “a challenge”.
Yes, it’s a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories aren’t necessarily false, of course, but there’s little reason to believe this one.
Preventing people from voluntarily trading items just so that there won’t be a price tag to complain about is not really a good approach, especially when it wouldn’t stop the complaints about RNG.
Secondarily, all can rest assured that Legendaries will remain legendary.
I hate to say this, but here goes…….
The weapons in question (pretty sure not all will agree) already have a negative stigma attached to them. The initial “legendary weapon” has become more of a “luck/exploit/donation/tp playing/credit card/grind weapon”. When seeing one with such a weapon initial reaction is not to think “wow that person did something to get that” it’s more of a “there’s another lucky player/exploiter/charity/tp player/credit card/grinder”.
If this is the “legendary” that will remain…I kindly say “no thank you”.
Most of the negative stigma is undeserved – I don’t see why there’s anything wrong with someone being lucky, a TP player, a grinder, or having bought a large quantity of gems (if anything, this does a lot to help the game, given that it supports ArenaNet).
The stigma is also not something that ArenaNet can fix promptly. No matter what change they make (short of giving everyone a precursor), it’s still going to take a fair while for lots of people to earn legendaries in whatever way you feel they’re supposed to. As such, it’s very likely the stigma will take quite some time to go away, unless players start to have better and more realistic attitudes to the game.
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lol at people wanting compensation. Here you were laughing at all the people who gambled 1000g on the MF and lost, but you were all smug because you got your pre-cursor.
Well guess what, you gambled that they wouldn’t become easier to get and YOU lost. Guess you guys know how it feels to the rest of us now.
There’s always going to be someone who is negatively affected when ArenaNet makes a change, but that’s simply not a good enough reason for them not to make changes. By the same token, though, people complaining that it’s not fair that some people bought precursors when they were 10g or 50g are similarly out of line. There’s even people now who seem to be complaining about ArenaNet’s recent bot bannings because it has brought prices up for certain materials.
The fact that some people might be worse off as a result is simply not a good enough reason to stop something that would be an improvement to the game overall. I hope that ArenaNet’s changes will actually be improvements. At the very least, it’s likely that they’ve had time to give the matter proper consideration.
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I think it would probably be better to form a guild and use a guild bank for this kind of thing.
Also, there seem to be upcoming changes to how precursors will work, so be careful:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Recent-Market-Shifts-Follow-up-Precursors/first#post682213
By making them so that almost no one wants them?
Well I only ask one question and I was hoping it wouldn’t get polluted with a ton of people with opinions on whether or not precursors are fair and what have you. I figured it would be more noticeable than having the question lost in a sea of complains on the stickied thread.
I think that’s entirely reasonable.
Setting aside the paranoia, some people do seem to be unhappy with the current system (though it’s quite difficult to tell how prevalent that sentiment is) and so I’d like to see what ArenaNet’s position is on the issue.
Possible, but more likely just someone who is mistaken. If you wanted to pump and dump convincingly, surely you would back yourself up with better evidence than getting 6 ectos from 10 exotics.
Apart from occasional spikes, prices on sell orders for Dusk have been hovering at just under 400g for quite a while now, but the recent increase in material prices due to bot bannings could potentially translate into a ~30% increase in prices.
However, the probabilistic nature of precursor production makes this rather uncertain, and it could take a while for the effects to be seen; people can continue selling at prices that would be a loss on average, while on the other hand if Mystic Forging is still profitable at current material prices, the price may stay as it is.
One thing to note about these market shifts is that they also mean that you can make more gold from farming, since the stuff you farm will sell for more.
Yeah; here’s a link:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Recent-Market-Shifts/first#post665627
Didn’t you see how one of the people got mad, when someone tried to explain how independent events works? What made you think, they know math. Or another example, It’s kinda like how when the weatherman says they might be a 80% chance of raining, when it doesn’t rain people get pissed.
The point being a lot of people did not take probability and so the concept of independent events is lost on them.
People typically don’t get a good grasp of probability, though; it seems like it’s not easy to teach, especially not in high schools.
Moreover, decision-making in the face of uncertainty is different enough from the maths that you do in class that people don’t quite make the connection.
There’s good TED talks on the issue; these in particular are solid:
http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
Decision theory is something that can and should be taught to everyone, but it’s not easy to get people to really understand it.
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It’s likely there’s multiple factors involved in this, but there is hardly enough evidence to support the cry of “market manipulation”, especially given that there are other explanations.
It’s also silly to say that “the rest of us” suffer – people farming and selling those materials are now earning much more than they were before.
I suspect that one of the most significant reasons (but likely not the only reason) is that during the Halloween period more people were playing, and spending disproportionately more time killing mobs as compared to crafting, than they were pre- and post-Halloween – this would have temporarily forced the prices for those materials down.
I’ll give you 20g if you’ll pay me back 40g when it sells, ^_~
Quick question here: how much money do you need to fund the initial search for good combines? I’m guessing you need a pretty high amount of tries just to compile that spreadsheet in the first place…
As majorkong says, you shouldn’t need to spend anything to find out what to combine; it’s mostly just research. However, I’d recommend having a reasonable amount of money so that you’re not at significant risk of losing it all due to bad luck. Also, note that the kind of amount you ought to have will depend on the specific gamble you choose to make.
If you want to be especially mathsy about it, you could use the Kelly criterion.
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I can vouch for the general idea the OP is putting forth. I used to do it with sigils; I made a couple of hundred gold or so doing that before I got bored of it.
This was over tens of thousands of trials, too, so variance shouldn’t have played too large a role in it.
Expected Value.. Yes it can work playing texas poker. Not so much playing roulette and slot machines. Which is the behaviour of the mystic forge.
The idea of expected value is just as applicable (and easier to apply) to roulette and slot machines as it is to poker – it simply tells you that the EV is negative, and so you don’t play those.
On the other hand, while quite a lot of Mystic Forge gambles may be negative EV, there are some that are not. Of course, you need three things to do this properly:
1) Knowledge of which items to buy and combine, and at what prices.
2) Knowledge of which items to sell, and at what prices.
3) A large enough bankroll to weather the variance.
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Your ability to make a profit does not constitute “balance in the economy”.
So why have ecto prices risen, then?
I think the OP is suggesting that they’re a good investment due to the price being so low, though it’s not particularly convincing.
Granted, if someone does “post on reddit” as the OP suggests, they may have a small window to make a decent profit.
I’d say the best explanation is simply that there was an influx of players for Halloween; since these players would have overwhelmingly been wanting to play and not craft, this would have driven supply of those materials up without a corresponding increase in demand, forcing the prices down.
If you look at those prices, the dip down corresponds strongly to the Halloween period, so I think my explanation is a good one.
The TP most definitely does remove gold; it’s quite possibly the biggest gold sink in the game – the 15% tax, remember?
The “stock market” effect is not part of the intended role, but it’s a natural side-effect of a market system, and in a number of ways the effect is a positive one.
Let’s not derail the discussion with examples; case studies don’t really help in reaching general conclusions.
When the only evidence being presented that market manipulation is a serious problem consists of case studies, clearly case studies are relevant. However, I haven’t yet seen decent evidence of significant issues with manipulation, and I think that kind of evidence is needed to give this discussion actual meaning.
When the thread is titled “Suggestions to reduce market manipulation”, I would think that establishing how much market manipulation is going on is a completely relevant issue to the thread, no?
And if a party is able to buy out all competition, there are no others sources for obtaining the items. This is the definition of a monopoly and that monopolies are a threat to a free market is something I don’t think needs much explanation… Whether you want to call it manipulation or not is a matter of definition. Fact remains that you don’t want monopolies in (sections of) your market.
Sure, monopolies are undesirable (except of course to the party doing the monopolizing). Where are these monopolies you’re talking about, though?
For example, you cannot monopolize precursors in this game, because no matter how many of them you buy people will always have the ability to put more items into the forge and make more precursors.
The Halloween items are theoretically vulnerable to monopolization since they rely on Candy Corn to craft, and it’s a limited resource, but given that there’s over 2 million units of candy corn currently on the TP, I think the concern is far from being a serious one at all.
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If I had bought hundreds of units of an item that isn’t traded in large quantities, like this one, I’d put up listings for 1 or 2 units at a time so that I could respond much better to being undercut, especially if I get undercut again and again. You might say that it’s not a problem because it will sell eventually, but you’re missing an obvious downside – not having that money earlier means you don’t get to reinvest it.
It’s clear enough from looking at the current listings ingame that there are no listings of tens or hundreds of units of any of these three items at the exact same price point. Moreover, there is clear evidence of a lot of undercutting going on. For example, there’s almost 30 different listings of “The Crossing” in the 45-65g range, mostly consisting of 1 or 2 units in each listing.
As such, I see very little reason to think that there is any one person who has bought anywhere near 100% of available stock. Yes, it’s possible for one person to put up lots of listings at different prices, but it’s silly to suggest this when the situation is far better explained by the actions of multiple people.
A larger number of players probably wouldn’t buy all the items in the same time frame. In addition, this doesn’t explain a similar number items posted back to the trading post shortly afterwards. If the supply was eliminated, it would not be possible for a large number of new items to re-enter the market so quickly.
There are quite a lot of reasons for this kind of thing happening in a small time frame; it’s not surprising for this to happen in the slightest.Typically, it’s the result of many players being exposed to the same announcement, or circumstances.
Considering that these game-wide events, and the announcements on the Internet, happen at the same time for everyone, it’s hardly surprising for players to react in similar ways at similar times. I think going to the TP to look at prices is a pretty natural reaction to the end of an event like this, don’t you?
Most of the items put up after the price jumped up were probably put up by players who had already had one drop for them, but were waiting a little while to sell it.
I’ve been playing GW2 from launch — and there’s no feasible way I can have 1000+ gp right now from legitimate play. With that in mind, ANet should have software in place to limit the effects of those cash cows on the economy.
As for having over 1000gp, a good number of players have legitimately gotten that kind of amount from buying and selling on the TP, typically without anything that could reasonably called “manipulation”. The fact that you don’t have that much is not a good reason to penalize those who do.
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It would be a mistake for a single player to buy a large quantity and post up most of those items at once, due to the risk of being forced to relist. If anything, that’s evidence of it being done by a larger number of players, and not just one.
Also, an increase in price for an item which is no longer being dropped from a dungeon is an obvious occurrence – I don’t see why this constitutes manipulation.
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The drop in sell listings was quite steep as you can see from the data. It happened pretty much at the exact same time.
I looked at the examples you brought up, and the data seems to indicate that these spikes actually took place over an hour or two, which makes it unlikely to be the actions of a single actor.
The relisting is slower indeed, but still rather fast for indepent actors in my opinion.
Please explain what you mean by speed of relisting, and how you can gather this data from GW2Spidy’s data.
Only if they saw that post all at the exact same time and responded at the exact same time. I find that highly unlikely, but I guess opinions differ.
I think you’re missing a few important things here, the foremost of which is simply the enormous scale of GW2’s trade system. When you have a system with hundreds of thousands of players playing the same game, concurrent actions are much more likely than you think. Hundreds, or even thousands, of people reading a post or announcement and reacting to it within an hour is far from surprising. In fact, in many cases I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen.
We simply do not have the data to reach any definite conclusions, so my bet is as good as anyone else’s bet.
Hence the most sensible position is to assume that the market is functioning OK and isn’t something to be especially worried about at the moment.
I’m not claiming to know the truth, but when you consider the alternative (thousands of bots with zero influence on the market) I find it quite unlikely.
That’s an obvious false dichotomy. No one is saying that bots have zero influence on the economy. Influencing the economyis quite different to controlling or manipulating it, however – everyone who uses the TP at all has an influence on the economy.
First off, the data is from a crawler that runs every now and then so the half hour isn’t exact. But to buy and relist over a hundred items, I think you’ll need that time given the kitteny UI of the Trading Post.
That’s wrong for several reasons.
First and foremost, if you were buying up a large amount to resell, you would buy them all up first instead of doing it a little bit at a time, because that minimizes the risk of other people buying them up. It’s also quite easy to buy hundreds of items with the current UI, because you can select them or type in a number and buy them up all at once.
Also, if you were intending to resell them, it would typically be a bad idea to put up a large amount all at once, because it would be expensive to relist them if you got undercut.
The connection is obvious, but the pattern is so similar especially in time and magnitude.
If the timing coincides with an official announcement, or a post on a popular website like Reddit (e.g. this one), it could easily have been simultaneous action by a significant number of people.
In any case, even if this was the actions of one person and not many, it still doesn’t constitute manipulation unless there is an element of deception involved.
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