So how do you define market manipulation?
Is it unethical to flip items within an existing price range (i.e. buying at more than highest buyer and selling at less than lowest seller) to make a profit? The people I’m buying from receive more money and the people I’m selling to get cheaper goods.
How about speculating in a holiday item that I suspect will rise significantly in price after it is discontinued. Is it unethical to buy several thousand of this item and hoard them for sale at a later date?
The TP is made up of transactions between willing sellers and buyers, and while there may be some price manipulation going on in some markets, how much of it is unethical? If I place a low-ball sell listing hoping to get other sellers to “bandwagon” to my new lower price, I’m relying on “lazy” sellers who don’t research price information. While it could be argued that I’m acting unethically by taking advantage of them, I’m not exactly forcing them to sell at the price I’ve set.
There are some trading activities that are truly unethical, such as “pump and dump” schemes, but there a number of others where traders send signals via their TP transactions that they hope have an effect on the market’s movement (e.g. setting up buy walls) that aren’t obviously unethical except as far as these signals may mislead other market participants as to the true state of the market.
They’re being very very stubborn about this topic.
Hilarious that you’re still bitter.
Hilarious that your a blind fool.
If anything I’m very very satisfied at this point.
When john dodged my question he made it clear that those lodestones aren’t meant to be that price and if they were, he could of simply said “Yes they are meant to be that price”.But he didn’t.
So when your done bullying people on the fourms, come back later.
So a dev not answering your post is confirmation that something is wrong with lodestone prices? You need to try better…
In addition, there are several posters here who have stated clearly why there isn’t a problem with the lodestone market… you may not like the prices or the implications for your goals, but the market itself is behaving as expected given the rarity of supply and the desirability of certain lodestones.
If you think lodestones should be easier to acquire, then make a solid case for why that should be so.
Lol why does some one always say thing so much better just after you post;)
There is the rub The Market works …as a market.
The game economy is not working to benifit the players in game experience.If this was called Sim Trader wo ho you got a hit.
A different Market comes to mind one that realised the fun is more important some times than the math.
The market works because players can sell goods to other players easily and efficiently and at a (usually) fair market price and obviously the same holds for buying goods from other players.
This does benefit a player’s in-game experience…
He’s probably feels threaten by me pointing something out on his blog he’s regretting.
However, I’ve been asking for an answer from the devs on this topic for months and had little to no reply.I may have been forward.
But I’m standing up for the casual players who were promised a casual game!
A game where we aren’t forced down one route.
A game where we can have an adventure and journey, not a 2013 market simulator!
And a game that rewards players who play the game and not a bunch of rich kids!And no one is gonna tell me otherwise!!!
No, you’re trying to troll him by constantly quoting his blog out of context… the blog was talking about changes being made due to oversupply of certain items driving the value down to vendor prices.
In addition, there are several posters here who have stated clearly why there isn’t a problem with the lodestone market… you may not like the prices or the implications for your goals, but the market itself is behaving as expected given the rarity of supply and the desirability of certain lodestones.
If you think lodestones should be easier to acquire, then make a solid case for why that should be so.
We shall see how much of a bonus it is when the final cost of items is released.
It’s just another gated system that funnels players into the gem store.
ArenaNet is giving us more ways to get stuff in-game so that more people will turn to the gem store?
That’s devious…
realm hopping to gather at ori nodes […] Because of this there needs to be some limit,
Because it’s impossible to make the harvested nodes’ status part of the player account, and make them stay “harvested” even if the player switches server, eh…?
Oh, wait, it isn’t. In fact, the nodes’ status already is part of the player’s account (if it was a property of the server, then nodes harvested by one player would appear as empty to other players).
In other words, if that’s the excuse they’re using, it makes no technical sense. If the player has harvested node X in zone Y at time Z, guesting on another server won’t make any difference; his account will still list that node as “harvested” until the server time is >Z+RT (last gathering time plus node respawn timer).
The only potential problem with this would be transferring between servers on different time zones, but GW2’s servers are synced worldwide, so that’s not an issue. It would be fairly easy to deal with anyway (just adjust Z when transferring between zones).
A reasonable suggestion, except for the fact that it seems that generally this type of information isn’t transferred with the rest of your character data when you are not actually on your home server (e.g. being able to “discover” more JPs by switching between overflows in LA, etc.), so now you’re also talking about changing what data is transferred when someone is “away from home”.
My point was that there were both PVE and WvW reasons for putting time limits on transfers. Whether they could have been handled separately and in a different manner is a slightly different issue.
@ Nike: This pretty much correlates with my own experiences using the TP. Admittedly, I haven’t been buying precursors, but even with Lodestones it doesn’t take long to get my (small) buy orders filled.
Being vague isn’t rude or disrespectful.
It’s called being vague.
It’s like you saying being happy is being disrespectful.
When there are legitimate concerns and the continual response is just wait for months on end, it’s goes past just being vague, and the redundancy of the claim comes off as rude, and yes disrespectful to a player and their time.
The problem is that sometimes they just can’t give more information… e.g. they can’t talk much about the scavenger hunt for precursors because it’s still in the design stage, or in the case of Mr Smith, talking too much about specifics could trigger waves of speculation.
Even without an obvious reason for being vague, it’s not being rude or disrespectful if they don’t want to talk about specifics. It may be frustrating for those who want specific answers, but that’s not the same thing.
Again from your blog
“We’ve noticed several markets that are clearly out of sync in terms of supply and demand. It isn’t interesting or fun to have a market flooded with items that contain very little value, so we’re making adjustments to the game every day. Players can expect to see these markets even out over time.”
Just answer me this john, charged lodestones, does a.net consider this out of sync or not?
Because there have be many threads about this topic whether it stirs around manipulators, lack of supply or one lodestone being higher than the other.
I was making the point that you guys are working to balance the TP, on the topic of lodestones, I do not think they are, at all.
Your currently fixing precursors which are like 500 gold give or take,
And yet some people think that 430 gold for 100 charged lodestones is acceptable, what logic is that?!
Try to remember the context of that blog post before you start bandying it around in an attempt to prove your point… this context is reflected in the second sentence of the first paragraph (you know, the one you didn’t highlight).
It isn’t interesting or fun to have a market flooded with items that contain very little value, so we’re making adjustments to the game every day.
The blog was written at a time not long after launch when there was a massive oversupply in some of the basic crafting materials and ArenaNet were introducing temporary recipes to drain away the excess supply. It has very little to do with the reverse situation (excess demand) other than the generalised statements which you’re trying to pin your whole case on.
There is a vet spider event in the ruins in the SW of timberline falls that spawns on top of the commune skill point there that does not scale down correctly.
There is a vet spider that spawns outside of the event in the same location that does spawn correctly.
You’re right about that!! When I was finishing up world completion a few months ago ( that zone was already dead ) me, a warrior, and a random guardian fought that spider for like 35 minutes to get that skill point… What a nightmare!
I remember that… I did it on my guardian with a random thief who was nearby. It took us a while, but less than 20 minutes IIRC
I wouldn’t be surprised if the price crashes soon, but that depends on whether they are available for laurels on the 28th, and at what cost relative to other items that can also be purchased with laurels.
GW2’s TP is by a wide margin less effectively manipulated than the other games mentioned in this thread.
In WoW you can raid to get something equivalent to the best on the trading post (in a predictable way – double-digit% drop rate off a specific raid boss, or tokens that took approximately 2 weeks to acquire), and their legendaries are associated with actual player experience.
Thus, the price of endgame materials on their auction houses seldomly exceeds about 2x the average newly capped toon’s wallet. (and that’s only for exceedingly high demand items — like weapons or armor universally useful to at least half the specs in the game, and with capped stats in combinations not found on boss loot tables)
Compare this to precursors.
I believe I’ve proven this very wrong.
Reminds me of the “mission accomplished” sign back in 2003.
In WoW, some servers had cartels running sections of the market in consumables. I know of one such cartel that was running the AH market for gems on their server. You could argue that this sort of activity was detrimental to a larger proportion of the player base than the cost of what is essentially a part of the “ulimate” cosmetic items in the game.
I’m not sure you have proven him wrong…
The amount of ungrateful whining in this thread is starting to give me a headache… there are some constructive posts, but there are others who seem to just want to get a dig in at ArenaNet and spew out whatever their latest conspiracy theory is.
I do think ArenaNet needs to get the server transfer pricing information out as soon as possible, even if it’s just confirming the rates that were publicised earlier (pre-launch, beta?), but to suggest that they’ll lower server population caps in order to milk gems from people when history shows that they have been generally raising these caps is bordering on the absurd.
When transfers were unlimited, they were exploited in both WvW and PVE… spying on or sabotaging “enemy” servers as well as realm hopping to gather at ori nodes were both common. Because of this there needs to be some limit, and two guest worlds per 24 hour period seems to me a good compromise.
Now I understand how people are frustrated that they will be forced to choose between friends/family in different regions, but I doubt that ArenaNet are implementing it this way just to annoy a portion of their player base. Those who have more technical expertise that I do are better able to comment on why they may be limited in implementing guesting on an international scale, but I think it’s safe to assume that if there was an easy solution, then ArenaNet would have implemented it.
Another reason that this is a bad idea is that people will be more likely to start trying to trade higher value items outside of the TP to avoid the regressive tax. This will inevitably lead to more support tickets for ArenaNet as the number of potential scammers will increase.
Because of the global nature of the TP, any market manipulation in this game is usually of short term duration.
A good example of this is the “pump and dump” threads that pop up every now and then, where a poster tries to convince people to buy a commodity in anticipation of a future price rise while already holding a large stock of that commodity ready to dump on the market once people start trying to get in on “the next best thing”.
Price-fixing on low-supply/high demand items is slightly different, and probably not as widespread as people seem to believe it is. A precursor does not have better stats than any other exotic, so no one is actually forced to pay the higher prices that are being asked for a precursor. If precursors are still selling at the higher price, it means there are people willing to pay the asking price even if you aren’t. You also have the option of putting in a buy offer for the value that you are prepared to pay, maybe someone will decide to sell you one for that price, or maybe someone else will offer more than you are offering.
I don’t know of any other markets where price fixing may be occuring… possibly in some of the rarer exotics with desirable skins, but from my experience it’s not happening with crafting materials (including T6 mats and lodestones).
I’d laugh if there were a large number of these stashed away on people’s accounts that suddenly flooded into the market.
And that’s the risk with trying to speculate on items like this, you don’t know how many other people are holding onto them waiting for the price to rise…
The difference is once it’s removed from the market players can set their own price and even if more show up they’ll fall in line with the new prices. It can take a very long time to adjust back and it normally never settles back the same.
I expect the same thing to happen with the Halloween shoulder skins.
Except that’s not how it works in reality.
If I was the sole holder of these skins, I could decide to sell them for 500g each, but unless there are people willing to buy them at that price, then I’m not going to sell them.
And new entrants to the market may fall in line with any prices I set, but there will be some who will decide to discount by a large margin to “guarantee a quick sale”. If there is a large enough group of players holding these skins, the price will quickly plunge down again.
I’m not saying that this is the case with these skins, but there is a risk that there is enough people out there holding on to these skins that trying to buy up the available supply in order to control prices could end up losing you a lot of money.
Well a couple very rich people apparently saw this thread and capitalized on it. In the last 48 hours every Lost Shores weapon skin has been bought out.
These are now the rarest skin in the game, there are less of them on the TP then legendaries and there is no possible way to get more since Lost Shores was a 1 time in history event.
I’d laugh if there were a large number of these stashed away on people’s accounts that suddenly flooded into the market.
And that’s the risk with trying to speculate on items like this, you don’t know how many other people are holding onto them waiting for the price to rise…
@ The Blue Ace: I’m not disputing that… but that’s part of a much wider discussion around balancing supply and demand for rare items in the game’s economy.
My biggest gripe about threads like these is the tendency to blame the “evil power traders/market manipulators” first for “high” prices, when in reality both buyers and sellers are responsible for setting the market price for every item on the TP. Yes, that includes precursors.
I am positive a lot of power-traders will not agree with this matter since they are the “smart” ones that control the market and buy stacks and dictate prices on a regular basis (also the high demand vs availability increases the price so much to a unfordable level for casual and also for players that stay up to 4 hours a day playing this game.)
I don’t think there’d be many “power traders” in the lodestone market, as there really doesn’t seem to be a clear margin for them to make profit from. There may be some cyclical movement (daily, weekly) that some traders may be taking advantage of, but given the amount of capital this would tie up, I suspect that most would steer clear of this as well.
On the few occasions I’ve bought lodestones (for crafting purposes, not for trading) I’ve found that if I make sure to keep my buy offer on the top, I get the lodestones I want after a small wait (around 5 mins to buy half a dozen usually). This is slow compared to a lot of other crafting materials I buy, but I understand that lodestones aren’t as common.
It seems to me that people forget that there are two sides to the Trading Post, both sellers and buyers. Prices are determined by a combination of what sellers are willing to sell for and what buyers are prepared to pay. In the case of lodestones, the difficulty in obtaining them through normal play or farming, means that a lot of people are prepared to pay more them.
Yes, you can guest to servers that are marked as full. Obviously, you will stand a greater chance of being put into overflow for some zones compared to non-full servers, but you can still guest there.
If people would all boycott and stop buying precursors at so called overpriced rates then it’ll be fine. Obviously, these precursor prices are still considered acceptable to some people.
And rightly or wrongly, that’s what happens with items that have such limited supply compared to the demand for them. Any price-fixing happening with precursors only works when there are buyers who will pay the higher price for them.
Confirmation windows can be a double-edged sword. Yes, they can be helpful for stopping accidental purchases, but they are an annoyance when you want to buy lots of a particular item (e.g. crafting reagents from the vendor).
If you applied a rune to the armor (or sigil to the weapon) it becomes soulbound and can’t be sold… (no matter how erotic it may be)
I am almost sure gold sellers controling Precursor’s market. Today my guildie got from MF The Colossus. he was hoping to get it cuz actually only one precu Hammer was posted on TP with price 550g. He was very lucky and got one! Set the price 499g to sell it fast. Withing few hours hammer was sold and in few minutes later someone listed another Colossus with price 530g. You don’t have to be Einstein to find it was the same item reposted with higher price. The question is – Is there enough rich and stupid player to buy it for 499 and repost it for price 530g ( 450g income)?
As you point out, if someone bought out your friend’s Colossus for 499g and relisted for 530g, they are making a net loss (list fee of 26.5g plus sales tax of 53g). I don’t see why a gold-seller (or anyone else trying to manipulate the precursor market) would do this, especially as they would be undercutting their existing listing at 550g. This makes me think that it is unlikely to have been the same Colossus that your friend sold.
It’s possible that they could have been items that have been bought by mistake, so they have been listed to recoup the money spent on them…
Given the NPC you speak to when you learn a particular craft is also the source of the supplies I’m not sure what can be done to make it easier for people to buy them from the vendor.
I disagree with this opinion. I think you should buy karma gear and stuff the market. As the real stocks markets are, it’s full of manipulators and speculators.
It could also be filled with people attempting to make profits from their crafting skills…
It could be, but it isn’t.
It’s all speculators and manipulators.
And yet as a crafter, I’m able to make profits by buying mats from the TP, turn them into finished level 80 exotic items, and sell those on the TP.
Which part of this is speculation or manipulation?
It doesn’t take a lot of collusion when supply is as limited as it is (2 listed on the TP), but they technically don’t control supply as new precursors can enter the market at any time. It’s the rarity of this item that makes this sort of behavior possible (if this is what has occurred in this specific case), but that’s something ArenaNet are intending to address.
Looking at http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29178 (using 3 day view, and displaying volume of actual sales listings) it seems to me that if there is 1 person/group doing this, it’s only with the last 2 that were left for sale after supply ran down from 6 listings three days ago.
I’m basing this on the length of time that it took between “sales” for the last few listed items and the fact that only 2 were relisted at the higher price (a third has been relisted at a lower price in the last hour and a half as at time of writing this).
I’m still not certain that this is an example of someone attempting to control the price, as there was a large time gap between the last 2 disappearing and the same number “reappearing” (approx. 38 hours). Enough time that someone was able to list and (presumably) sell one at a marginally higher than normal price while they were off the market.
Massively are describing the supply and demand balance in the GW2 economy as, “an epic trainwreck” – whilst harsh, I tend to agree. I think that most market activity is speculation/manipulation.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/01/18/the-daily-grind-whats-the-absolute-worst-mmo-economy/
It’s a short opinion piece from one of their columnists who doesn’t even provide a further explanation of what she means by her statement. Skimming the comments, it seems that her main complaint stems from the lack of demand for items she’s created while leveling crafting skills (specifically cooking, where she is unable to even vendor some of those items and therefore faces a glut of supply on the market when she tries to sell there).
IMO, her complaint may be valid, but she really hasn’t made a case to back up such a sweeping statement.
I’m not sure how the definition of gambling (in the context in which the subject was first broached) applies to Diminishing Returns or Trading Post speculation. And equating RNG to gambling is a bit of a stretch IMO.
Ok, gambling within the following aspects:
Diminishing Returns – We are not certain what controls this and this is the first indication that its outcome has more than one result. What we do know, however, is that spending too much time in a certain area can potentially reduce loot quality. Therefore you are gambling time for loot quality.
Trading Post – This is a simple one. Flipping! Using the TP is like a stock exchange – you are gambling by flipping between items.
RNG – Speaks for itself – RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR.
Mystic Forge – You put in 4 items to obtain something else. That something else, although has several predetermined results, varies with probability. Therefore you are gambling items to get something you want but may not get it every single time with all combinations.
You see guys, you are always gambling in GW2. You are using some thing(s) to obtain some thing(s) better, however, it (outcome) may not always work in your favour. This is why it is called gambling.
So you’re using the broadest definiton of gambling (i.e. anything with an uncertain outcome, or risk) to make your point. In that case, crossing a busy highway could be considered gambling, running dungeons – gambling, flying to another city – gambling.
I’ll concede that the Trading Post could be considered gambling, but I feel it’s a bit more complex than that… e.g. if I craft an item and attempt to sell it on the TP for profit, there is a risk that I won’t sell it for the price I’ve listed it at, but that’s a risk I took when I crafted the item not because of the TP (i.e. I still might not manage to sell the item at my desired price if the game favored face-to-face trading over a TP).
Diminishing Returns – gambling time for loot quality? I’m sorry, that actually sounds like most of what happens in this and other games of the genre. If I spend time playing (or farming) the game, I’m gambling that the monsters will drop valuable loot? This is where I feel you are definitely using an overly broad definition of gambling.
RNG – where I have a problem with calling this gambling is that if seems like calling a deck of cards “gambling”. A deck of cards can enable games of chance, but aren’t gambling in and of themselves.
Again, your definition (“using some thing(s) to obtain some thing(s) better, however, it (outcome) may not always work in your favour”) could be applied to almost every situation in life as almost nothing is ever certain despite our beliefs otherwise. (I go to work in order to obtain money to pay my bills, but I’m “gambling” that the company doesn’t go bust before I get my next paycheck…)
I’m no legal expert, but I think goldi has it right… the WoW botting case is a great example, because the legal arguments went beyond the EULA and into the rights of the IP holder to control who can profit from their IP.
In addition, I don’t like the fact that someone is trying to use a community provided tool such as gw2spidy, and put their improvements/refinements behind some kind of paywall. The creator of gw2spidy has been running it out of his own pocket (minus whatever ad revenue and donations he has received) and if feels to me that someone is now trying to take advantage of his goodwill.
I disagree with this opinion. I think you should buy karma gear and stuff the market. As the real stocks markets are, it’s full of manipulators and speculators.
It could also be filled with people attempting to make profits from their crafting skills… While I don’t doubt that there may be speculators in the exotic armor markets, there’s also people like myself who craft these items and offer them up for sale at a modest profit.
Regardless of which method (or mixture of methods) the OP decides to use, he doesn’t need to be fully geared in exotics to enjoy playing the game.
For those comparing guesting to free server transfers, there is a difference between being able to guest on 2 different servers per 24 hour period and changing your home server once every 7 days.
Now I can understand the frustration that guesting isn’t cross-region, and that for those with friends in both regions that guesting feels like a backwards step over what is currently available, but don’t deny that a lot of people will find this an improvement over the current situation.
Hopefully, ArenaNet will be able to eventually overcome the technical limitations, so everyone is happy.
Edit: is =/= isn’t
In addition, there’s really no content in the game that requires you to be in full exotics in order to start doing it (higher level fractals may be an exception to this, but you can still complete lower level fractals without having full exotics).
Get some level 80 masterwork and/or rare gear and you’ll be good to go for most anything in the game…
Technically it is.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling
- http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamble
- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gamble
- http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gambleAll of the following have the gambling factor in it:
- Random Number Generator (RNG)
- Diminishing Returns (DR)
- Trading Post (TP)
- Mystic Forge (MF)The people who have gotten wealthy (rich) within this game know how to “play the odds”, especially on a larger scale. They didn’t have a streak of luck, while now can take more risks to potentially gain even more profit.
IMO, it is too late for ANet to add sinks to stop this and sooner or later these people will (if not already) control the market. ANet is playing a catchup game now. The only solution would be to omit being just another statistical number of a power-trader – which would effectively mean not using the TP.
I’m not sure how the definition of gambling (in the context in which the subject was first broached) applies to Diminishing Returns or Trading Post speculation. And equating RNG to gambling is a bit of a stretch IMO.
I suspect the true volume of the market, combined with the fact that these wealthy traders are likely to be in competition with each other in quite a few markets, means that the likelihood of anyone controlling the market is within the realms of the absurd.
Players can actually measure inflation for themselves.
I got bored in my Public Speaking class today and was determining the Elasticity of certain GW2 items, heh.
With Spidy you could easily track data and determine inflation based on a decent sample size of goods.
I’ve thought about doing something similar, but I’m not sure about the methodology I’d use to apply weightings to different goods. An “official” index might be able to draw on data we players don’t see, such as volumes traded to help determine such a weighting.
To make up for my last couple of off-topic posts, here’s a couple of things I’d like to see in terms of statistics:
1) Some kind of index to measure inflation – there may need to be more than one index to cover different groups of items, but it would be useful to have some solid data to prove or disprove claims about how inflation is affecting the economy.
2) Wealth distribution – this may be tricky because it should not just be focused purely on gold held by an account (in real life a person’s wealth isn’t measured solely by their cash assets), but it won’t necessarily be easy to assign values to some items that people are holding onto.
3) Trading volumes/values – As well as the raw figures, I’d be interested in seeing this broken down in a similar manner to a Lorentz curve for buyers and sellers (e.g. percentage of players by both volume and value of activity)
I was going to reply to Tallis, but I realised there wasn’t much point… people believe all sorts of crazy things despite evidence to the contrary.
Do you really think that a company doesn’t try to maximise their profit? Read a job description for any marketing person and you’ll see. Just because Anet is a gaming company doesn’t mean that they would do their marketing different than other companies.
But I understand that alot of people do not want to think about that kind of things because they see it as manipulation and no one likes to see themselves as being manipulated.
(Apologies to everybody else for the derail…)
Maximising profits is one thing…
I bet that there is someone atanet who’s job it is to ensure that the prices in the TP are set in such a way that it generates extra income in $$$ for Anet. They say it’s ‘player driven’, but if Anet can make -say- 3 million a month extra by selling gems because of the high prices on TP, you can be pretty sure they will intervene on the TP.
but the above accusation is another thing entirely, especially when you offer absolutely no evidence of such “price setting” occurring and all my experience with the TP indicates that it is in fact player driven.
Wow, human nature, really… I never knew. Urge to buy and resell rising! Guess I missed the memo that everyone is a greedy kitten or did I sleep over the indoctrination classes that said money>anything else. Who knows.
As for benefits, yeah sure. You’re (all flippers/power traders combined) benefiting exactly less than 0 (omg, it’s negative). Tax, posting fee, your profit = how much less money other players have, it’s pretty simple. You’re not creating, just distributing from others to yourself (in nature such organisms are known as parasites I believe).
I never said it was part of everyone’s nature to do this, but in any economy (real or virtual) you will find that people engage in this sort of activity. It’s not about greed either, people may do this for any number of reasons in the real world (i.e. store owners may do this to earn a living, or it could be that they have an interest in the goods they sell).
As for benefits, I was talking about the benefits of a global TP system, not power traders, flippers, manipulators, or parasites (pick whichever term you prefer). The system means that if I pick up a rune I don’t want to use, I can look and see how much it is currently valued at by the “market”. I can then make my pricing decisions based on this information and when I list it, I know that my item is available to be seen by the entire player base of the game.
Compare this to GW1, unless I took an active interest in what runes people wanted, I would have very little idea how much I could possibly sell it for. To sell it, I’d have to take time out from the game and stand around spamming trade channel in a city till I found a buyer willing to pay the price I was asking (or who could offer me a price I felt was reasonable).
I hope this makes clear the sort of benefits I was talking about. I’ll try to refrain from derailing this thread any further, as I am enjoying the conversation that’s taking place here.
My Norn guardian firmly believes that the gold standard is not an appropriate choice for the current economy, we should instead move immediately to adopt the ale standard instead.
I think my Norn guardian would agree too, though I think that all Norn would end up in debt and with nothing but a belly full of ale.
True, but the effect of such a massive ale-sink (also known as a moot) would reverse the rampant inflation currently ravaging the economy.
My Norn guardian firmly believes that the gold standard is not an appropriate choice for the current economy, we should instead move immediately to adopt the ale standard instead.
@EssenceSnow: While your point has some validity, I feel that blaming the trading post for this is a bit misguided.
In any game that allows players to trade items (whether face-to-face or indirectly via some kind of auction system), you will find people who making profits from buying and reselling items. The existence of a global TP may make this process more efficient for these people, but the process is driven by human nature not by the game system.
It can be argued that the global TP brings many benefits for the average player who doesn’t care about accumulating wealth through trading, not least of which is easy availability of market price information for items they want to buy or sell. Another benefit is the scale of the market increases the amount of competition for both buyers and sellers (meaning item values quickly adjust to appropriate levels despite attempts at market manipulation) and makes it easier to find people to buy your goods or who are selling items you want.
Do these benefits outweigh the “negatives” of easier wealth accumulation for traders? I may be biased, but I think they do for the great majority of items being traded on the market. Items with limited supply such as precursors/legendaries are a bit of an outlier from how the rest of the system works in my view, but they are also a highly visible aspect of the market that everyone seems to focus on.
I don’t always realise my profits that quickly, it can still be pretty quick at times, but at other times I may end up having to wait for the undercutters to sell out before my items finally sell… or worse, relist at a lower price to get my capital back so I can invest elsewhere (I still usually make a slight profit if I relist, but it’s really just to salvage my pride).
What attracted me to it at first was the almost instant returns. The first time I did this I crafted a level 80 exotic and it sold within 30 seconds for something like a 50 silver profit. I think the first 3 or 4 I crafted sold in a similar amount of time.
I do need to diversify a bit more, as it does seem that there’s more competition in the field I’m in, but I’m happy with the profits I’ve made. They’ve paid for my character’s armor, weapons, runes and sigils, and it means I don’t need to worry about how much money I’m making when I’m out in the game world doing stuff.
Astraea, what percentage gains are you getting on the items you’re crafting and selling? I’d given up on crafting, and I’d be curious to know if it’d be worth going back in to search for profitable crafting opportunities.
As I mentioned, it can be a bit inconsistent and there seems to have been more competition over the past month that has lowered the profitability. I was getting between a 20-30% return (after fees) prior to the increased competition, it’s more like a 15-20% return currently. This is from crafting level 80 exotics, I understand there are higher profit margins possible from crafting lower level items, but I haven’t really done any research into this.
No, because there are 2 fees that are applied separately, and the rounding will not work in your favor.
List item @ 13c -> Listing fee 5% = 1c (rounded up to the minimum amount)
Item sold @ 13c -> Sales tax 10% = 1c (rounded down from 1.3c)
So you would receive 12c back, but have paid 11c for the item and 1c for the listing fee, effective breaking even.
Edit: see also http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trading_Post#Fees
(edited by Astraea.6075)
There is respectable profit to be made out of crafting, but it’s not always consistent…
Sometimes, I’m selling crafted items as fast as I can churn them out (literally within seconds of posting them), and at other times, the amount of competition pushes the prices far below the point of profitability… I try to mix up the types of items I’m crafting to make sure I don’t get stuck holding lots of particular type if the price crashes.
BTW, I’m buying my crafting mats so “you could make more profit by selling the materials” does not apply.
I was going to reply to Tallis, but I realised there wasn’t much point… people believe all sorts of crazy things despite evidence to the contrary.
“Projected Profit” should really be renamed to “Projected Return” or something similar to avoid this sort of confusion.