Guild Wars 2

I’m with Ursan on this one. I don’t fancy the RNG element of the chests so I don’t purchase keys (although I do like getting the occasional key drop and trying my luck with those), but I don’t blame ANet for putting certain skins in the chests to boost key sales. In part this is because they have added other skins to the game that can be obtained by other means (e.g. SAB skins).

Sure the RNG element may be frustrating for someone who absolutely must have that particular skin, but for most people there should be reasonable alternatives they can pursue instead

The other problem that can occur with publicizing potential exploits is that it can lead people to look for similar situations that might be exploitable. And because there is no specific warning for the new exploit, people will complain if they get banned for using it.

As someone who doesn’t have a lot of disposable income atm (I’m between contracts) I’ve been buying quite a few gems with gold lately. The exchange rate can fluctuate a lot depending on sales and the introduction of new items so I started buying 100 gems every day that I play.

I began doing this at the beginning of the March sales so that I would have gems available if an item I wanted went on sale without having to worry too much about spikes in the exchange rate. At current prices, this strategy means I have to make about 2g 30s a day to buy my daily allotment of gems which is more palatable than forking out larger sums of gold whenever I want something from the gem store.

@Rez : can you give specific examples of the compromises you think have been made by developers in GW2 because of the business model? I’m not saying they don’t exist, but my gut feeling is that most of them would be similar to compromises that other MMO have to make regardless of whether they are F2P or subscription based.

@Zaxares: I’m not 100% familiar with farmville’s cash shop, but I’m pretty confident that they don’t try to get people to spend several hundred dollars in one hit for a single item. They also boast a much larger playerbase than most MMOs, so 5% would still be a substantial number of transactions.

Tondrin.7806:

However I ran into a few hiccups:

Item movement stagnating: Do you cut your losses and just sell them at buy order, or do you let them sit if the price isn’t fluctuating

Aggressive undercutters: Do you start a price war, or do you just match those guys throwing stuff below a decent profit margin if the amount of goods is huge.

If I’ve got the lowest sell listing, but the items aren’t selling I’ll let the listing sit there as I’m usually confident that there will be eventual demand for them. Note that I’m talking about low-cost items with a reasonable volume of sales over time.

With respect to undercutters, it depends largely on volume. If it’s a small volume at a lower price, I let my listing stand. If it’s a large volume, then I’ll look at relisting, but it’s a judgement call based on my experience with how well a particular item sells over time.

morrolan.9608:

Not IMHO and its why I mentioned RMT because it looks like anet is using it as a method to get people to buy gems.

I see this attitude a lot and it puzzles me that people don’t do the math and think through the consequences…

Assuming a gem → gold rate of 1.75g per 100 gems, US$10 would net you 14 gold. That means it would take at least $200 (280g) to even make a dent in the purchase price of the popular precursors.

While there are people willing to throw that sort of money at a game, I doubt there are enough of them to make it a sustainable part of ANet’s business. In addition their strategy appears to be focused more on selling things in the gem store (sales, BLC lottery, minis) than on driving the in-game prices of everything up so that people feel they need to buy gems to convert to gold.

You also need to remember that the RMT side of the TP benefits players too. Most of the gems I have bought have been with in-game gold, thereby allowing me access to goods and services (character slots, server transfers) without opening up my wallet.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Price is not decided by any community. I can log now, buy the last 5 precursors and resell them for double/triple, right now. And it will be undercut a spit maybe attempting to steal my customers. I just buy again his weapons, keeping my price. Tell me again it’s a community decided price.

Try it. You will be undercut quickly enough that you will be just throwing away gold if you try keep the competition out of the market. People will turn to the forge in greater numbers (at least until the prices of rares/exotics rise high enough to make your “new” price a more acceptable alternative).

The other thing to remember is that precursors are not the whole of the TP market. Ectos and T6 mats are traded in such high volumes that it would be impossible for you to buy up all the supply and resell at double/triple the price. You might be able to buy up enough supply to temporarily raise the price for a short while, but it wouldn’t take long for the price to return to its “normal” level.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

You lost the goal of my post. I wasn’t suggesting a better way to know market movements. I was explaining what “price written on stone” means.

This is what we need. Names of buyer and seller, and price written on stone, discussed and decided by the community, not surely by “the famous richest”

What you seem to fail to understand is that prices are decided by the community. Items sell for a price that both sellers and buyers are willing to conclude a transaction at.

If I try to list an item for double the price that someone is willing to pay, then I won’t sell the item and will have forfeited my listing fee. Conversely, if I put in buy orders at a price no one is willing to sell at, then they will never be filled. Remember, the other participants in the marketplace provide competition for people who wish to engage in excessive price-gouging. With names, I could enlist my competitors to help me keep prices high for our mutual benefit.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Both website are not an auction at all. Both website are the most famous community runned website where every single WoW player would know the price of anything. To not being scammed, and not be marked as a scammer. Nor selling something worth 67g 57 s for 5g with no idea of the value of something.

“Price is written on stone”.

This is a perfect sane market, a perfect AH. Our TP is missing auctions and bids, noone knows why, but that’s an other story.

So far, most of the playerbase posting on this forum is not happy of the current system, puzzled of who is maouvring the market.

Let’s pretend names from Anet, then tell me if things are still the same
Not a surprise most are panicking now we ask names, expecially some serial-scammer sharks

With the TP, you can see the price that people are willing to sell items for and the price that people are willing to buy items for without referencing an external website. Using your example, if I want to sell an item I will see that the price of the current lowest seller is 67g 57s as well the price of the current highest bidder (likely to be higher than 5g in this case). This price information is available to everyone and not just to those who know to check a website before selling stuff.

I’m familiar with the websites but never used them when determining what price to sell things for on the AH. In fact, for some items that I traded frequently I would often price at above the current buyout price as I knew that mine would sell eventually anyway.

Other posters have given you reasons why including names may be a problem, but the biggest one for me would be the opportunity it would create for price collusion amongst sellers.

Did you ever play on a low-population server where a handful of people controlled the supply of certain required items (such as crafted gems) or worse, some items were just not available at times?

@Lucas Ashrock: I don’t know which version of the WoW AH you used, but it was never one I saw implemented in that game over many years of playing.

Prices were never “written in stone” except by people (or groups) attempting to control the various markets they were involved in. There was no blacklisting for attempting to sell stuff for 1c higher than your competitors. Although the names of serial price-gougers did get out into the server community, it was not an instant process and I’m unaware of any of them being forced to “flee” a server due to a bad reputation (as most of them used an alt to list their items).

There are potential improvements that could be made to how the TP operates in this game, but mimicking the one from WoW would be a backwards step IMO.

I think the ecto market may be just correcting after the surge in price last week now that the changes to dragon chests are in place and aren’t having as much effect on ecto production as people initially feared.

@Essence Snow: The “how to get gold” mentality affects the player base of most MMOs to greater or lesser extents. It may be more exaggerated in games where the highest level of gear is able to be traded between players, but removing this type of trade then reduces the number of avenues that players have to obtain this gear.

Interestingly enough, none of the available ascended tier pieces are available for gold so far…

Valanga.5942:

Like there isn’t already people who sells stuff out the TP in order to avoid the taxes.

And with an artificial price cap, not only would these people be avoiding taxes, but they would be selling for higher prices too. A price cap solves nothing and introduces more problems.

Skolar.4801:

You’re missing the point, the key question is "how does that make you feel when you buy something expensive (relatively speaking) and it goes for free two days later? "

That’s unfortunate, but it’s just a case of bad luck/timing. However, you got what you wanted (a server transfer to be with friends/guildmates) at the price you were willing to pay at the time.

On the plus side, now that it’s free, more people may transfer to your server thereby improving your experience there.

Valanga.5942:

Veritae.9417:

If ArenaNet tried to cap the price of the Hunter, say at 200g, then there would be way too many people willing to buy the Hunter, but not enough Hunters.

So, what? If Hunters run out of stock, there will be eventually somebody who will loot it again and sell it, i don’t see any problem in that.

Except the person who now looted a now “out-of-stock” Hunter is also just as likely to try selling it for more than 200g outside of the trading post knowing that they are obviously in short supply. Putting an artificial cap on the price for people using “legitimate” channels, just funnels people to the less “legitimate” ones.

I doubt it will be seen as gambling by any legislative body… apart from the fact that you don’t need to spend real money to participate and the fact that every chest contains something, the “prizes” have no real monetary value that can be ascribed to them.

During the Wintersday event I bought several thousand flawless snowflakes when they were at a low price of 21/22c each. I didn’t really hang on to them long term like I planned however because the price surged to over 70c within a few days of me buying them, so I off-loaded them for a quick healthy profit.

Tombprince.8179:

So here goes, being a UK player 800 gems would cost me £8.50, 1600 gems would cost £17.00 (same price so no problem) but if I jump to getting 4000 gems I would lose out on 200 gems. 1600+1600+800 = 4200 at the same cost of 4000 at £42.50.

As an additional note, I haven’t worked out if 2800 gems is more of less 9they cost £29.75

I can see the problem. 1600+1600+800 = 4000 gems not 4200 gems, so the cost of the larger package is in fact the same as buying the same number of gems in smaller packages.

Also the 2800 gem package is 3.5 times the cost of the 800 gem package which fits because 800 × 3.5 = 2800.

Amun Ra.6435:

I have no reason to believe that given time, if I am correct…that it can not be manipulated again.

At least you’re admitting the possibility that you might not be correct. The data that John provided upthread should however indicate to you that the volume of ectos sold in 24 hours (pre-announcement) make it impossible to manipulate the market for any significant length of time.

The volume sold is greater than 5000 ectos per hour… you need some very deep pockets to keep any sort of “buy wall” up for any length of time, and there is a huge risk that you would end up with a lot of ectos that you will be unable to sell for a profit.

@Charismatic Harm: Yep, that describes the situation I was thinking of. It’s not an unsolvable problem (e.g. change it so that you can no longer oversell (overlist?) to the current highest buy offer) but it does complicate any potential implementation of the changes some of the posters here would like to see made.

One potential problem occurred to me with regards to the suggestion of paying the 5% listing fee out of sales revenue when filling buy orders.

As the TP currently operates, if I try to sell a larger quantity of goods to a buy order than is ordered at that price, the remainder of my goods get listed at that price. So if I didn’t have to pay a listing fee up front for filling buy orders, then what stops me from creating a small buy order at my desired price point and then overfilling it to get my items listed for potentially zero fees (i.e. I only pay if they sell, otherwise I can remove them without incurring a loss of fees).

I know there are a few methods that could be used to fix such a problem, but it does add another layer of complexity to implementing such a change.

Dixa.6017:

those of us who played eve online can actually think yes, two guys could be doing this

or one, who spent a couple hundred bucks converting gems to gold as an initial investment.

The question I have to ask is why would they? There is no profit from them doing this even if they had the resources to do it.

Keras.2876:

Do you seriously believe a nerf to ecto drop rate would have such drastic consequences? It would take most people quite some time to realise the rate was nerfed and the price would rise slowly.

Except when ArenaNet announces the upcoming change to the mega-boss chests right in the News and Announcements section of the forum. I found out about it shortly afterwards when it started being discussed in LA map chat on my server, so it is no surprise that word has spread quickly.

Keras.2876:

The spike you noticed a few hours ago was because people got their 40 laurels and everyone was dumb enough to just instantly buy their 50 ectos for an ascended accessory. I would guesss there were at least twice as many ectos sold yesterday than on that day John showed us.

I was really amazed that people just kept buying so I sold my whole stack of ectos for around 33s and will just buy them again next week when they are back to 25s

Except people could easily have reached 40 laurels a couple of days ago… I’m sitting on 32 after missing a few dailies and I haven’t even finished the monthly yet, so what’s so special about today?

@Zaraxes: My apologies, the way you phrased it made it seem like you believed the change had already been implemented.

If I had to bet, I’d guess prices will stabilise somewhere around the 30s mark, but ultimately I’m not too concerned. As someone who crafts exotics for profit, cheaper ectos are nice to have, but I was still making profits when I was buying them near the 40s mark, and I’m sure I’ll still be making gold wherever the price of ectos finally settles.

Zaxares.5419:

The next step is for somebody to come in and argue that speculating is “evil, predatory market behaviour” and should be banned.

Drop rates WERE sort-of nerfed too. It’s now once per account per day instead of once per character per day. As a result, I do expect supply to fall, resulting in an increase in the price of Ectos, but not as much as prices are now. Ultimately I expect it will stabilise around the 28 – 30s mark.

Except the nerf hasn’t actually happened yet… this behaviour is being driven by the anticipation of the nerf.

SilverThorn.5047:

however, why would someone put up a small bunch priced @ 24.73s when there was already a highest offer of 25s for 80 pieces?

Looking at the attached screenshots, it could easily be explained by a seller having ectos left over after filling a buy order at 24.73s.

But more generally, there are people who act differently in the marketplace than either you or I would. I’ve seen this sort of behaviour in a number of other markets and I’m not surprised to see it in the ecto market given the high volume of transactions that take place.

Even if someone is attempting to control the price of ectos (and I’m not sure why they would – there’s no profit in it), then they are going to be losing a lot of gold doing so.

The daily resets at 1pm for me (in about 17 minutes time). The reset time is 0:00 GMT/UTC, and not pegged to any local or server time.

I’d also like to thank the OP and others who have contributed to this research with additional data and/or calculations.

Mystic.5934:

a better word instead of “Projected Profit” is “Projected Return”, meaning how much you will be delivered when the item sells.

Agreed. I stopped thinking about it as “profit” a long time ago. It is just the projected net return if your item sells.

I don’t know whether character slots will be offered during the March sales, but if they are, it would be reasonable expect the discount to be about the same as the last time they were on sale (25% – reduced from 800 to 600 gems).

This is an international game.

Where I live, we’ve been on local DST for the past 5 months or so, but I don’t expect the game’s servers to change time based on my local time. In fact, I’m impressed that the reset time appears to be pegged to GMT/UTC as otherwise I’d get hit by a double-whammy of server adjusting for US DST followed by my local DST ending sometime soon. This would effectively shift the reset time 2 hours forward for me.

roamzero.9486:

It’s still a completely arbitrary system. And it’s easy to see why too, when there is a shock to the market it largely favors gem demand and Anet’s bottom line (for example a sale for a popular items screws over anyone that doesn’t pay $ for gems).

A fair(er) system would place a % of gem’s spent in the shop back into the exchange (I assume it doesn’t do this, correct me if Im wrong), or just throw the exchange concept out the window and fix the the gold cost of gems to an average trade post value of a basket of commodities (T6 mats, ectos, etc).

Fairer for whom? While your suggestions might help those players who obtain gems using gold instead of money, it could negatively affect the exchange rate for those who wish to exchange gems for gold.

happyjedi.1372:

Again, you don’t understand the point: we are charged 50 cents more than the supposed price+VAT.
Will USA players be happy about the fact that 800 gems are no longer 10$ but 10,5$ without any explainable reason while others still pay the same?

And in some states, US players are charged $10 plus tax (as denoted in the UI screenshot earlier).

There wasn’t a large quantity listed for sale in the first place (300+) and it doesn’t appear as if the quantity purchased has been relisted so far (over an hour later), so it’s possible someone actually bought them to use and not for speculative purposes.

Only the actual purchaser(s) know for sure however.

While I can see why some people may believe they’re paying more than they should, it’s completely within ArenaNet’s rights to set gem prices at whatever they want, even including discriminatory pricing based on region.

Others have posted explanations as to why the discrepancy exists and isn’t as large as it appears to be. Ultimately though, if you don’t like the price, don’t pay it.

penatbater.4710:

wait, so people actually are buying ectos at ~40s and buying lots? :O

I’m buying ectos at the current price… then use them to craft exotics which I sell for profit. I’m not a big consumer of them, but have bought around 50 in the last day or so.

Ectos aren’t being manipulated. I place buy orders for 10 to 20 ectos at a time, and they are filled within seconds (literally), so it seems to me that there’s a high volume being sold (to the highest bidder) at any given time and the buy/sell margins are too slim for casual flipping.

@Leablo: I believe it was stated a long time ago that if the amount of gold entered is above what is actually needed to pay for the number of gems displayed, you will only be charged the amount required not the amount entered.

I’ll see if I can find a link to it somewhere…

Edit: found it… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Currency-Exchange-Ripping-people-off/first#post142700

There’s a few factors in play when trying to work out what might happen with ore prices, but the main thing is not to confuse short term movements with what may happen in the longer term.

The nerfing of the rich ori node is likely to have an effect on supply in the long term, but possibly only to the extent of bringing prices back to near where they were prior to the Lost Shores patch. I’m not sure how long this may take to occur, but (absent external factors) it will depend on how long it takes for players to work through the excess ore supply.

In the short term however, we are seeing the market reaction to the nerf affecting prices more than actual change itself. About 80% of the supply disappeared from the market in a few hours (roughly 200k ore), but I doubt that particular rich node was responsible for 80% of the supply that was reaching the market, so the more obvious explanation is that most of it was bought up by speculators. That means there’s a whole lot of ore out there sitting in people’s banks/bags/alts/etc.

It is interesting to note that the price is already slowly sliding downwards and supply is increasing. Whether this is related to early profit-taking or people going out of their way to mine ori (or sell off stock they were holding) now the price is higher is hard to tell. It is more likely that it’s a combination of these factors.

My prediction is that in the short term there won’t be a significant price rise (other than some very short-lived spikes) as the hoarded supply will trickle back in when it rises and apply downwards pressure on the price. I’m hesitant to put out a prediction for the long term price, but (absent external factors) I personally doubt the price of ore will reach 4 silver, and if I had to guess, I’d say it may end up stabilising around the 3.5 silver mark

Those evil market manipulators really get everywhere…

There is no evidence that the lodestone markets have fallen prey to market manipulation, the prices are high because they are rare drops which are in demand.

So anyone buying an item from the TP and relisting it for a higher price should be banned? Because you seem to be regarding speculators as “market manipulators” who are making a fortune at the expense of others.

People who make money by buying low and selling high aren’t ripping other players off. The players who sell to them were willing to sell at that low price, and the buyers are willing to buy at that higher price, and the speculator/flipper has seen that there is a sufficient difference between these two prices to make a profit if they are willing to risk their money and time to obtain it. (Speculators are working on a low price now versus higher price later basis)

Looks like about 200k of ore disappeared over the course of an hour… I’m guessing that most of it is being hoarded in expectation of further price rises.

I’m not sure that the price will rise much more without further external factors coming into effect. While a lot of supply has left the market, it seems to have evened out at roughly the same level as demand (or rather, demand as measured by buy offers), and given the sheer amount of supply that (I’m assuming) has been hoarded, it won’t take long before the more impatient speculators start trickling it back into circulation.

My fiancee doesn’t even play the game and she wants one…

Ensign’s point isn’t just about the gold sink of the TP, it’s also the fact that new goods are introduced by the same mechanism that is introducing the additional gold. The introduction of this extra supply has a deflationary effect on the economy that may or may not counter the inflationary effect of the extra money that has been added.

critickitten.1498:

Let’s try this again, since certain individuals are incapable of reading.

My suggestion is for a player to have the option of running the daily up to X times per day, where X is the number of characters they have.

This is not a character restriction. You may use as many characters as you like to complete the daily achievement, just as you do now. The only change would be that players who own more than one character would have the option of running the daily again if they so chose, to a maximum of X times.

So for example, I have 6 characters. That means I can run the daily once, using all six of my characters in the process if I wish. Then once I have finished it, I have the option of running it again up to 5 more times. This means that I could obtain a maximum of six laurels for my ranger per day, if I wanted, or I could spread them across all six of my characters however I wanted….in exchange for having to complete the daily achievements six times.

So those of you who want to run dailies once and be done with it can still do so. All we’re asking is the ability to redo them enough times that we could potentially equip all of our characters instead of just focusing on one. Our request in no way affects the way you play.

So why would you block it? We’re willing to put in the extra work to obtain those laurels, we’re not “asking for free stuff”. If you’re seriously going to argue that you are somehow affected by other people having the option of running dailies repeatedly, then I’m sorry, but you are not being reasonable at all.

I don’t have a lot of time to write my full thoughts on this, but this seems like a bad idea to me.

I have 6 characters, but only one of them is level 80. Can I do the daily six times or once? If 6 times, can I potentially earn unlimited laurels by starting new characters? If only once, what is the threshold my characters have to be at to be able to earn laurels?

It’s not as simple as it appears on the face of it, and there could be potential for abuse…

Cathbadb.6079:

Because they need to debug the new patched content before they release the event by throwing their customers to the Wolves of Disconnection Errors and the Clan of the Bugged Events.

Two great guild names right there!

While I don’t wholly disagree with your suggestion, I would note that making this change will mean people won’t be able to use contributions from alts to complete their dailies and monthlies. People will then complain that they are “forced” to use one character exclusively so they can complete these achievements.

It may be very hard to design a reward system for dailies and monthlies that satisfies both groups.

@cargan: No, flippers don’t care about rising prices as much as they care about margins. He’s referring to investors/speculators who buy up supply in anticipation of a future price rise.

Celeras.4980:

The mining pick has been nerfed, and now requires level 45 to use.

Right decision by A.net for sure, but I can’t help but roll my eyes here. This went from getting dev endorsement to being completely nerfed in the span of 3 days. Pretty dysfunctional communication if you ask me.

I’m not sure it was actually endorsed by John… he did say he didn’t see it as an exploit, (and he joked about buying extra character slots in order to maximise gains) but that doesn’t mean that this wasn’t a loophole or that ArenaNet weren’t going to introduce a fix.

grandjudge.4129:

I couldn’t get my laurel because of it. :<

I know it’s just a daily but it killed my excitement about the new content after I spent almost an hour trying to get this achievement and failing at 9/10 right before reset.

And I couldn’t get my laurel because I was at work between the time the new patch came out and the daily reset time…. it sucks that you missed out after being so close to getting it, but some of us never even had a chance at getting this first laurel.