Guild Wars 2

SteepledHat.1345:

Yeah, but it was a high value/ low traffic item. Their risk was minimal. This tactic would never work on something that had a lot of movement like, say, mithril.

I agree that the risk is very low for this type of item, but it’s not negligble. If they’re able to babysit the bids constantly (in the OPs case, over several days), then they can minimize that risk even more, but it is still present.

I’m not arguing that there isn’t a problem with this sort of behaviour, but I don’t see what changes could be made to the system that would prevent it. Or more specifically, changes that can’t be easily overcome by using multiple people/accounts to place fake bid offers

anthsss.1564:

Astraea.6075:

@SteepledHat: Yes it does leave it open to manipulation, but unlike your auction example, there is the potential for other sellers to enter the process, thereby disrupting the plans of the person(s) attempting to push up the price. Admittedly, some of the high-value markets in the game won’t have a large number of potential sellers, but it’s still a possible risk faced by people employing such a strategy.

While I don’t condone this sort of behaviour, I can’t see an obvious way to restrict it from happening that can’t be easily overcome.

Actually, other sellers would only cause them to throw the price even more. The people constantly adjusted their bids so that they were higher than mine, effectively blocking me from getting the item via buy order until after somebody sold it to them. When they buy it, it only adds to their control of the market, and it would only allow them more freedom in charging what they want.

That is a possibility, but it depends on how much they are “babysitting” their buy orders. If they are immediately overcutting your bid, then yes, they are more likely to snap up the product that other sellers try to sell at the higher price, but even then, another seller could come in and list their item at a lower price after these people had done all the work in raising the buy prices to the point where you felt you might as well just buy it at the sell price.

An additional risk with this strategy is that they push the price too far beyond what the prospective buyer is prepared to pay and he loses interest. If they’ve picked up some extra product while doing this, then they’ve just sunk more of their capital into this venture at the same time as they have lost a potentially lucrative sale.

Again, I’m not sure how you could combat something like this. Placing restrictions on bidding on items you are selling, or listing names of buyers and sellers can be easily overcome by using multiple people/accounts.

anthsss.1564:

Astraea.6075:

@SteepledHat: Yes it does leave it open to manipulation, but unlike your auction example, there is the potential for other sellers to enter the process, thereby disrupting the plans of the person(s) attempting to push up the price. Admittedly, some of the high-value markets in the game won’t have a large number of potential sellers, but it’s still a possible risk faced by people employing such a strategy.

While I don’t condone this sort of behaviour, I can’t see an obvious way to restrict it from happening that can’t be easily overcome.

Actually, other sellers would only cause them to throw the price even more. The people constantly adjusted their bids so that they were higher than mine, effectively blocking me from getting the item via buy order until after somebody sold it to them. When they buy it, it only adds to their control of the market, and it would only allow them more freedom in charging what they want.

That is a possibility, but it depends on how much they are “babysitting” their buy orders. If they are immediately overcutting your bid, then yes, they are more likely to snap up the product that other sellers try to sell at the higher price, but even then, another seller could come in and list their item at a lower price after these people had done all the work in raising the buy prices to the point where you felt you might as well just buy it at the sell price.

An additional risk with this strategy is that they push the price too far beyond what the prospective buyer is prepared to pay and he loses interest. If they’ve picked up some extra product while doing this, then they’ve just sunk more of their capital into this venture at the same time as they have lost a potentially lucrative sale.

Again, I’m not sure how you could combat something like this. Placing restrictions on bidding on items you are selling, or listing names of buyers and sellers can be easily overcome by using multiple people/accounts.

@ Joiry: The quote you are using was answering a specific question about his previous statement. Nowhere is he stating that this is increasing the wealth in the game.

@SteepledHat: Yes it does leave it open to manipulation, but unlike your auction example, there is the potential for other sellers to enter the process, thereby disrupting the plans of the person(s) attempting to push up the price. Admittedly, some of the high-value markets in the game won’t have a large number of potential sellers, but it’s still a possible risk faced by people employing such a strategy.

While I don’t condone this sort of behaviour, I can’t see an obvious way to restrict it from happening that can’t be easily overcome.

@ Minos: buying and relisting materials on the TP actually removes wealth from the economy due to the 15% tax on every completed transaction.

Mahaedros.7085:

I never said all sales must last forever.

Go to a used car lot or a furniture store and witness the Take Away being practiced in all it’s glory…or just watch an informercial.

If you had your choice, would you want your MMORPG company to provide value and instill loyalty in their player base because the game they made was good and well maintained and bug free? Or would you buy a game and play it based on the sales tactics that the company uses to make a quick buck?

Just because companies use sleazy marketing techniques on a regular basis does not mean we have to settle for it and say it’s okay for our MMORPG.

Apples and Oranges. This is nothing like what happens on a car lot or in a furniture store, where the technique is being used to close a deal with a customer who may be showing reluctance.

Unlike an infomercial, this was a discount on the actual prices that items are usually sold for, and the limited duration of the offer was very real.

I would prefer my MMORPG company to provide value because the game they made was good and well maintained and bug free, but that has nothing to do with whether or not they have sales promotions in their primary source on ongoing revenue.

How much different would you feel if the items were on sale for two days instead of one? three days? a week? a month? Is there some arbitrary duration where a sales promotion is acceptable?

Colbear.6425:

Do you think the Steam flash sales over the last few weeks were “cheap, sleazy, under-handed, manipulative”? Some of them only lasted for six hours.

According to the OP, any sales promotion with a limited duration is “cheap, sleazy, under-handed, manipulative”. All sales must last forever, otherwise the seller is engaging in the “Take Away” selling technique.

Seriously, I read up on the “Take Away” technique, and the definition is extremely broad. It even includes putting expiration dates on coupons.

Mahaedros.7085:

Astraea.6075:

A retailer having a sale for a limited period is a “scumbag practice” and “cheap manipulative tactic”?

Words fail me…

Yes. Why wouldn’t you want a business to sell you something because it has value rather than using a cheap marketing tactic?

You’re just a consumer bereft of any independent ability to think and you feel the corporations are great and the actions they take are find and dandy?

And you’re suggesting that none of what was on offer during the recent sale had value?

Take character slots for example, I’m prepared to pay the full price for these (800 gems or $10), but haven’t really felt the need to purchase any as I’ve been busy enough with the 5 I started with. Along comes the sale, so I decided to purchase an additional character slot at a reduced price now, even though I might not fully utilise it straight away.

How is this a cheap marketing tactic? I got something I wanted at a discounted price. Sure, I was “induced” to purchase earlier than I may otherwise have done without the sale, but that doesn’t make me “a consumer bereft of any independent ability to think”.

The duration of any sales promotion is always at the discretion of the seller. There was no bait-and-switch on promoted items. The advertised discounts were not misleading. There was nothing “cheap”, “sleazy”, “under-handed” or “manipulative” about this sales promotion.

A retailer having a sale for a limited period is a “scumbag practice” and “cheap manipulative tactic”?

Words fail me…

Rakuren Kenshou.7689:

My guess is that it would probably be very similar to real world economics, where 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth.

If they start posting confirmations on this, we’ll end up with an “occupy wall street” movement in game. Players flooding the trading post in protest. Players refusing to buy/sell materials until changes are made to the game. Huge market crashes as the wealthy players try to offload everything they own in response. Chaos.

While there will be some superficial similarities, I seriously doubt the wealth inequality in game will mirror real world inequality as there are a number of factors that drive inequality in real economies that don’t exist in-game

For example, in the real world, having wealth enables you to create/find rent-seeking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking) opportunities that don’t exist in this virtual economy. As a result, those who have already wealth in this game are generally not able to use that wealth to prevent others from gaining wealth.

There are actually two separate fees, but the trading post UI does not adequately make this clear.

There is a (non-refundable) listing fee of 5%, which you pay when you list your items, regardless of whether they sell or not.

In addition, there is a 10% fee/tax on successful sales. The “projected profit” value displayed in the UI shows the value of the items you are selling after this 10% is deducted, but does not include the listing fee in the calculation.

@ Death Reincarnated:

ArenaNet doesn’t make any profit from people converting gold to gems during these sales except perhaps indirectly (if rising exchange rates prompts more people to buy gems to convert to gold). Their profits from these sales come from players who buy gems with real money, and that exchange rate hasn’t changed.

There was a similar thread here a while ago where John Smith posed the question of what the market would look like if there was no listing fee involved in selling to a buy order. How would this change the behaviours of buyers and sellers?

As an example, if there was an item with a lowest sell listing of 75c and no fee for meeting buy orders, then I could make more money by filling buy orders at 72c+ than I could by listing them at the current price. This effectively means that sellers who have listed at 75c have both an opportunity cost (waiting for sales to complete) and a reduced return.

Keiran.1896:

Qacino.3468:

They used to be 18-20s the piece = 50Gold for 250, Be happy

Yes, thank you a lot… bots.

But I can tell you that nobody will buy those to you for 20s, if that’s what you hope for later. Soon they won’t probably even be needed for legendaries -> Scavenger hunt. And then poof… 1s per scale.

I’ve just looked back through my records, and I was buying them for crafting back when they were at the 18-20 silver mark and I was still making a profit from my crafting.

From my perspective, the cost of materials is only relevant in terms of how it impacts my return on investment.

Your definition of a manipulator is a bit wide of the mark. There shouldn’t be any consequence from buying low and selling high in any market, and with most markets, there are alternative sources of supply as it is hard for any one person or group to control all the supply.

It’s a decent sale price on an already discounted bulk item… 5 makeover kits for the price of 3.

@ ScribeTheMad: If you look at past history, I believe there haven’t been any gem store sales for this game during an event, so I’m not sure why you expected there to be one associated with Wintersday. Events have new items added to the gem store, not discounts on existing items.

In addition, ArenaNet announced this sale (via the launcher) a day or two before the event actually ended.

Fabsm.5897:

But why? They don’t give you more orbs than the other salvage kits… Am i missing something?

100% chance of salvaging runes/sigils so they are worth using to retain the more expensive ones.

If I hadn’t recently got 2 of these for free, I would have been tempted to drop some gold on buying gems for these. I’ll be interested to see what else is offered in the next 2 days.

Esplen.3940:

Matching sets you to be the next to get the order filled, I’m quite sure of this.

Not any more. That behavior was actually a bug with the TP that was patched a couple of months ago.

Having said that, depending on the quantity listed at the lowest price, it can sometimes still be worthwhile to match the current lowest price rather than undercutting.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

During Wintersday prices are only going to drop as supply increases. After Wintersday those prices will start to rise again as the supply is exhausted. So it’s a safe, long term investment.

Catch it, it’s not the best way to invest your gold.

I’ve held on to a few items I’ve gained through drops on the expectation that the prices will rise later on, but I haven’t really spent gold buying them up.

What surprised me was that my pick for a long-term investment ended up paying off in a matter of days before the event had even finished.

There is one item I “gambled” on when the price was not much above vendor value (hence there was lower risk involved). Even before the event has ended, I’ve seen the price rise to over 4 times what I initially paid for it, so I’ve been selling and re-buying stacks of it for some decent profits.

I think there’s still potential for this item to rise higher, so I’m not going to name it yet as I’m hoping to get a few more buy orders filled, but I’m surprised that I’ve yet to see it mentioned as a potential profit maker.

plasmacutter.2709:

Iehova.9518:

I just hope precursors stealthily become account bound so the people who hoard precursors for no other reason than to manipulate the market get screwed.

I absolutely LOVE this idea

It would totally bone gold farmers and tp players who get a kick out of the misery of the vast majority of the playerbase.

ANET PLEASE DO THIS!

The problem with this idea is that it punishes those lucky few that get a precursor as a random drop if they have no intention of making the associated legendary.

BobJoeXXI.2493:

Astraea.6075:

So I read the link… it seems to be a repost of someone asking for bans for the people who used the looped recipe to create ectos.

No where do I see evidence that such bans have actually been handed out? Or am I missing something?

Their accounts are banned otherwise you would see floods of screams and whines crying about their newly banned account.

I actually deleted the post you are quoting because I discovered I had read the 2nd reddit link not the first one. The first one does have a couple of Anet responses confirming some bans have happened over this exploit.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Aside from price fixing scenarios, whose survivability wouldn’t be impacted too much, forcing real undercuts causes prices to drop far more rapidly than the glacial speed it drops from 1c undercuts.
And it wouldn’t be a costless LIFO system any more, which is still the whole point.

Can you point out an example where the price of an item has been consistently dropping over time by small 1c increments? I don’t believe such an item exists except as a hypothetical.

With items I’ve been selling (generally in the 2g-4g range), I see a mixture of undercutting amounts. Some people will undercut by 1c, others will undercut by 20s or more. I don’t worry about the 1c undercuts, as I know my item will still sell eventually. The larger undercuts force me to re-evaluate my original list price, especially as more sellers list around the lower price.

Cirroq.2531:

Another variable is the gold dumped on the market from gold/gem conversions and probably to a lesser extent gold sellers. This gold absolutely does cause inflation of prices.

Legendaries only appeared on the Trading Post last month. I’m wondering if gold sellers are cashing out before going on to another game?

That can only have an inflationary effect if you assume the gem → gold exchange process creates gold out of thin air and the volume of gem → gold is at least 30% larger than than the volume of gold → gem exchanges, otherwise the exchange should in fact be removing gold supply from the economy.

Gold sellers aren’t creating gold out of thin air, but could be increasing the supply of gold by the sheer amount of bot farming behind their operations. I’m not willing to hazard a guess as to how significant this increase is in comparison to the normal amount of gold the entire playing population is generating by playing the game.

In either case, my point is that this reported inflation is not being seen across the whole range of items in the TP, but rather in specific sectors where there is low supply relative to demand. While an increased supply of gold in the economy can help provide fuel for these price rises, the underlying cause is due to supply factors in the items themselves and how players value their time.

For example, charged lodestones have been selling for around 4 gold on average over the past week (http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24305). I’m not sure how long it take a player to farm a charged lodestone, but for the sake of argument, assume that a player farming them can obtain 1 per hour. This would mean that I can either spend an hour farming for a lodestone, or spend 4 gold on buying one. If I can earn 2g per hour of (non-farming) play, then I will be more likely to spend the time farming for the lodestones I require. If I can earn 5g per hour of play, then I’m more likely to be willing to spend money on the TP to buy the lodestones I require.

While there are a number of other variables in play, it seems to me that the current price of lodestones is roughly in line with what you’d expect to see given the effort farming them requires vs. the rewards players can gain from doing other activities instead. No one can monopolize the supply of Lodestones, as people can always farm for them. If the price is pushed too high by market traders (as the OP contends), then people gravitate towards farming for them (which will also increase the supply available on the TP).

OmniPotentes.4817:

Protoavis.9107:

Ermm, the prices are that high because the demand is that high and people are PAYING that. With how rare the precursors are they’d be sitting up at that price naturally just because people are willing to pay that and there’s currently not nearly enough precursors around for every 1% of people that want them…

Inflation is a natural process. However i’m suggesting curbing the rate in which it happens. If flipping and manipulation had been tempered from the start prices would never have been what they are now. There would have been no need for DR which is a huge factor in the supply issue we have nowadays.

Flipping does not cause inflation and manipulation can only affect the price of items in the short term.

OmniPotentes.4817:

The main problem with the economy is inflation which is caused by power traders that speculate and try to manipulate the market by buying stockpiles of whatever they think they can make money off. These people dont contribute one iota to the gaming community.

Your underlying premise is incorrect. Although inflation may be a problem with the economy (and I’m not convinced that it is), it is not the result of the actions of power traders.

Where is price inflation happening? From what I can see, it is with Precursors and other materials required for crafting a Legendary. It doesn’t appear to be happening across the whole economy. As someone who buys materials on the TP and sells items crafted using these materials, I’ve noticed that prices on the materials I buy is relatively stable (they fluctuate up and down of course, but usually within a certain range).

The items you see price inflation occuring tend to be those with limited supply relative to demand, and it is perfectly normal for prices to rise in those circumstances. The higher prices will encourage producers to supply more of the affected items to the market (if possible) and encourage consumers to look at possible substitutions for the original item.

What you are proposing will actually limit the high volume trading activity that helps stabilise the prices of the most commonly bought items such as basic crafting materials and will not change the underlying reasons behind price inflation on the items with low supply relative to demand.

Predator.1398:

Kacigarka.5176:

20g a day in price increase, what precursor are you talking about, they are relatively stable in prices …
Dusk … http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185

So no … the prices are NOT increasing by 20 gold in a day stop making up stuff please

Oh come on… Dusk was ~500g a week ago and it was ~600g today. It’s +20% per week.

Looking at Dusk, where for the past week the number of buy orders have been sitting around the 5k mark, do you think that the price movements would be much different if the supply wasn’t controlled by one person? Or if there were 5 or 10 times the numbers available for sale? I personally doubt there would be a significant difference.

The item is in low supply yet has high demand, this may allow one person to capture the majority of supply, but if you look at the daily view of the chart, the price rises and falls over the course of 24 hours, indicating that if this person/cartel exists, they don’t control all of the supply.

Also note that the highest buy prices are also moving, indicating that people are prepared to pay large sums for this item. Again, in the last 24 hours, these prices have been moving up and down, so it’s likely that some of these orders are being filled.

kiba.2768:

first off, i want to say i don’t powertrade…i’m not good enough.

so with that aside, when i get rares/exotics i want to tp, i sell them with a certain scaling % from the highest sell order in order to get my coin back to me faster. i figure the faster i get my coin, the faster i can get it to make more money for me(niche crafting markets- i buy raw mats and craft for 100-200% roi while i dungeon)

I wish I could get that sort of ROI from the items I craft, but I guess I’’ll just have to be happy with getting 25-30% (after fees).

What I try to do when I undercut is to find a value that has some “appeal” to potential buyers. I figure that if someone is on the fence about whether to buy a particular piece or not, then using the old retail trick of ending the price in 95 or 99 may help swing them towards making the purchase.

Gibson.4036:

I get the importance of a gold sink, but I can only figure that the fees, and players ignorance of them, are what is causing crafted items to sell for less than their component parts.

There are many recipes where I can sell the mats and buy the crafted item and make a profit over just crafting the item for myself. It’s kinda ridiculous.

I can only figure that this is happening because people aren’t paying attention to how much their mats are worth and (more likely) how much the house is skimming off the top.

People continue to craft and offer the items on the TP at a loss. That could make sense if you’re just trying to level your craft quickly, but they are doing it with level 400 items!

I suspect that it happens mostly because people aren’t valuing materials that they have gathered themselves at market rates. They are making a profit in that the transaction gains them gold, but don’t necessarily realize that they could be making more money by considering the market value of their gathered materials.

If I’m attempting to sell 1000 of a particular item, then undercutting by 1c costs me 10s out of my potential returns.

While I will occasionally undercut by more than 1c on more expensive items, I don’t think there should be a minimum undercut value for high value or low demand items.

Dreamslayer.7659:

Mystic.5934:

I want to see someone corner the ecto market
spend 100,000 gold to buy every ecto in the game, raising the price to 3g each, then eventually sell for 1,000,000 gold.
man, that would puppy up the economy. every high level rare and exotic would also sky rocket in price.

Not possible.

Ecto can be manufactured from items that anyone can gather.

Agreed. Ectos are being created (salvaged) and consumed (crafting) constantly, and the market is very liquid.

Cornering the ecto market could not happen unless you also cornered the markets for the materials required to make rares that salvage into ectos.

IMO, ectos would be one of the worst commodities to attempt to manipulate as the market is very active. What I mean is that there is a high volume of ectos traded by a large number of players. As a crafter, I can generally get buy orders for 10-20 ectos filled within a minute, so there seems to be plenty of people willing to sell them.

The OP’s point about using them to transfer wealth might have merit, however I’d hesitate to draw that conclusion without some more evidence of how this process might work.

There is still a large supply in the marketplace, especially if you count the numbers held by speculators. I’m predicting it will take a while for that oversupply to be worked through.

ArsenTiger.6218:

From what I’ve seen on the websites that actually track the asking prices and the requested prices, it actually does throw off the metrics. If there’s an item that goes for more than an hour or so with a requested price of 1 copper, then it bottoms out that graph for the day and could artificially reduce the price of an object. But it’s still highly annoying to see people trying to undercut Merchant’s Prices because you lose a few copper to sell to someone asking for 1 copper above the Merchant’s Price. While I understand that people should be more cognizant of what they are doing when selling on the TP… it does kinda rob the ones who don’t recognize that even selling at Merchant’s Prices, will make them lose money.

It’s just a thought however.

The point I was making was that if those items had any reasonable demand for them, then the offers below vendor price would be buried by valid orders. In the situation you cite, the graphs would still bottom out without those invalid orders, because there would be no buy orders listed for that item.

While it would be nice if these offers had been removed by now, they shouldn’t really be throwing off the metrics of any item that actually has some demand.

@ plasmacutter

That’s possible. I recall there was a bug with dungeon DR staying on for some people despite the length of time since they’d last run a dungeon. Perhaps something similar is occurring here.

Kainazzo.5847:

Juggernaut has been around the entire time the game has been online. So with that in mind, why then did the price shoot up suddenly one day instead of a natural organic growth as the population all started getting closer to getting ready to go for Legendaries?

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24502

Look at the volume of listings around 11/10/2012 and then again after that. The stock was bought out and relisted at a higher price several days later. Manipulation.

I see the drop in sell listing volume that you mention, but don’t see them being relisted. After the number of listings dropped, supply seemed to stay low for quite a while.

plasmacutter.2709:

Astraea.6075:

Avan.1540:

Likely not when a very large number of people started recording these issues; there’s a thread with well over 1000 posts on it in the general forum.

Look up the phrase “confirmation bias”. I’m not saying there isn’t an issue with drop rates, but citing numbers of posts that support your view doesn’t actually prove it.

It does when you’re trying to confirm people are not delusional.

Generally you can confirm something is “real” when a significant number of people observe it.

when was the last time over 2000 people were kitten enough to go post in a thread?

Was it a real in-game issue then?

And what about people not having an issue? They won’t post at going “omg… drops are unchanged”.

Again, not saying there isn’t an issue, but citing post count isn’t evidence.

Avan.1540:

Likely not when a very large number of people started recording these issues; there’s a thread with well over 1000 posts on it in the general forum.

Look up the phrase “confirmation bias”. I’m not saying there isn’t an issue with drop rates, but citing numbers of posts that support your view doesn’t actually prove it.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Imperatora.7654:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Imperatora.7654:

if your listing is constantly getting undercut, then your listing is overpriced for the demand.

And the 1c undercut is completely negligibly less overpriced.

but, if they are not listed faster than they are being bought, you will still sell. If they ARE being listed faster than they are being bought, you will not sell, and your price is too high.

Whether it is 1c or 100g, if the demand curve doesn’t intersect your price point, your price point is too high.

That doesn’t justify someone getting to sell theirs first for what is effectively the same price.
If the demand isn’t enough to keep up with the listings that first person should still be going first when someone DOES buy rather than ending up behind people who are listing at basically the same price.

Why should this be so? It doesn’t happen in other MMO auction houses, where I’ve often seen people undercut by the minimum amount. Those MMOs also had listing fees for putting items up on the auction house, so like the TP here, there was a cost involved in relisting an item.

When demand can’t keep up with the number of listings then the process of undercutting (even if by only 1c) should eventually bring the price down to a point where the two are balanced (i.e. demand increases and supply decreases). This is normal market behaviour.

ezd.6359:

Astraea.6075:

Read the details of the link, and check gw2spidy… there is a huge oversupply of these right now so the price is low when compared to historic levels. The source of this extra supply has been closed off, so once the market works through these extras, the price will rise again.

There may be a speculative bubble as a result of this post, and the price may surge then crash again as people try to jump on for short term profit, but I believe the OP was looking at it as a longer term investment.

The problem is “many bots farming scales” not “one additional summoned mob had a chance to drop something”.

So NO, prices will continue go down, may be not so fast.

I looked at the sell listings in gw2spidy, and noticed that the quantity listed peaked a lot higher than it did before the bot ban waves in early November. It’s also worth noting that bots have been reportedly seen farming barracuda (which was the mob summoning additional numbers that could drop scales).

Having said this, I could be wrong and scales could keep dropping in price, but I’m still willing to put money on the price rising despite the presence of bots. At the end of the day, we’re both making judgements about what we think might happen to price of an individual item based on what we observe happening in the wider game environment.

I’m not sure the gifts are actually meant to contain much other than the ugly items which are acting as a currency for other items (such as recipes and weapon skins). They might occasionally reward something nice, but I think the primary purpose is to give you the currency to save up for the specific items you want.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Yeah, manipulate that market! I love this forum!

Read the details of the link, and check gw2spidy… there is a huge oversupply of these right now so the price is low when compared to historic levels. The source of this extra supply has been closed off, so once the market works through these extras, the price will rise again.

There may be a speculative bubble as a result of this post, and the price may surge then crash again as people try to jump on for short term profit, but I believe the OP was looking at it as a longer term investment.

A quick look at gw2spidy does show that there is a huge supply to be worked through, but these do look to be worth picking up as long as you are prepared to wait for a return.

Shame I’m at work right now, otherwise I’d probably pick up a few stacks myself.

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

This is no manipulation, it is demand and supply.

People who stocked items and release them while the demand goes up slow down the price increase, therefore are good for the fellow player to save some coin.

While in general this is true, in this specific instance it appears the OP was hoping to ramp up demand by encouraging others to engage in momentum trading. If successful, this actually speeds up the price increase.

tluv.5821:

My problem isn’t the undercutting. My problem is the people who sell their items on the trading post, AFTER they craft said item, and it creates a loss. Like today, an item was going for over 2 gold. Then in a day went to 1 gold, I was fine with that. Till someone decided to go and shoot for 40 silver. That is a loss of profit if anyone sells that low.

Ouch. I see similar behaviour in the types of items I craft, but not quite to that extent. My general strategy if my items are undercut by a large amount is to wait a short while to see if demand will help remove some of the lower priced items, then maybe look at relisting it if the price rises back into profitability (or a small loss depending on how long I’ve had the item listed for).

But that’s where having a spread of items is useful to me. About 75% of the items I list sell within a few hours, so that helps keep me liquid while I wait for a return from the other 25%.

tluv.5821:

Well here is the biggest problem with Undercutting. Because the people who are undercutting don’t know anything and ARE just looking to make the quick buck, when the price is driven down to below the actual cost of something, that’s it. That item is done permanently. That item will NEVER again be able to make profit or break even. I personally think that items should be allowed to be sold if (and including tax), you are setting yourself up for a loss. This will drive the price up for all items depend upon the sale of base crafting materials, which is how a real market works.

Because lets face it, I was looking over gw2spidy to see which items the Artificer would be able to make a profit off of based off of purchasing crafting materials and then the said crafted item. Barely ANY yielded a profit. And most the profit was very small, that it wasn’t worth it. This is because of undercutting. So I made a few ravaging bandit focus. I made 10. I’ve sold 3 of those 10 in 5 days. Why? Because the cost of relisting the item was more than what I was making. In the beginning, I should have been reeling in 20s per item. Now I believe it is a negative profit.

This market is broken. Sure what I suggest would take some complex coding, but it would fix the system.

As someone who makes money from crafting, I’ll give you some advice.

Finding a profitable item using gw2spidy is a great start, but remember that everyone else can do this too, so don’t expect to have the market for a particular item all to yourself.

Because of this, crafting multiples of the same item isn’t really advisable, as you do better in the long run by crafting different items depending on which items are profitable at the time. You may still end up being undercut on some of them, but I have found that enough of my items are selling within a few hours that I can wait for the rest to sell.

I do relist a few items every now and then, usually when the market price is staying well below what my item is listed at, but even then I usually make a small profit once the extra listing fees are taken into account.