I understand what Wanze is trying to do. And for those who are anti TP tycoons it makes sense. I’m just haggling over the ratio of 20c to 1 “trade Karma”.
And what strawman @DaveGan? Flippers do NOT buy items at high bid and then list them at a markup above the current low sell. You can’t make money that way. That’s not flipping, that’s speculation.
For people saying “well why don’t you use them as you get them,” you realize that you still click the same number of times, right? It doesn’t lessen the strain on your hands and wrists if you do it over time or if you do it all at once. It’s still a kittenload of clicking.
Compacting stacks of Luck through Artificing helps a tiny bit, but you’re still stuck with a pretty large stack (or multiple stacks) of the exotic (highest rarity you can craft) Essences.
We really need a “use all” function for Luck.
It is if the complaint is clicking all of them in one sitting rather than 10 every 20 minutes of play when you stop to salvage your blue/greens.
Brain fart on my part, thought he was getting the i5-4690K which is a 3.5GHz part. Yeah, the i7-4790K is even faster but I don’t use single threaded benchmarks because of Turbo boost. The game will use at least 2 cores worth of performance so Turbo isn’t as much of a factor. You are looking more at 2.5x faster CPU performance.
Doesn’t matter what we say Aidan. There will always be players who believe that flipping entails raising the price of sell orders and it’s flippers flipping each other to do so. Totally opposite to how it actually works.
Except the last two weeks in December of 2012. Or the entire month in December of 2013.
Of course it fluctuates daily, today’s low so far was 11.43g while the high was 13.25g.
Finally stocked up my gems from 5.000 to 13.000 today since the rate was 11.10g – 11.13g .. and like always i think : why the hell do i not exchange ALL my gold
So you spent about 800 gold on gems? I’m a gold cost averaging kind of guy so I buy a little everyday, more on days before Gem Store update.
Heck yes. It’s roughly 80% faster and for a game that’s so CPU dependent due to the few CPU intensive threads it has you should notice a big kick in frame rate.
So a bolt of silk flipped 1x has the same cost as a bolt of silk flipped 10x?
Exactly. The average price of an item is (buy order+sell listing)/2.
An item costs 80c/120c now and gets flipped 10 times. Now it costs 90c/110c but the average price of 1s stays the same.
I’m really not seeing this. I was trying to imply that a flip cycle should be expected to add 5-15% to an item’s value, simply because the 15% tax encourages the flipper to recoup the value.
I suppose the end result is perhaps not this simple. If we were to come up with a “flip index” (FI) , defined as the average number of flips an item should expect to get, I think FI would be between 0 and 1 for most items rather than multiple natural number values like my hypothetical implied.
On the other hand, conditions that raise the incentive to flip an item will increase FI, and I believe this could increase (average) prices by a factor of up to about 0.15*(1+FI_new)/(1+FI_old)
But a flipper doesn’t go into a market that already has a less than 15% gap and attempt to force it to be greater than 15% plus a profit. They are looking for markets where the game is already 20-30% between high bit and low sell order and work within the existing price gap.
The notion that flippers buy up all the inventory to just list it at a higher price point doesn’t work because a flipper would have to keep buying up new supply to prevent other players from constantly undercutting him. On very low supply (and I’m talking daily new supply not just the currently listed supply) highly desirable items one might be able to do that for a very short period of time but like the 2000g Dusk, it doesn’t last more than a few days before prices return to normal.
Except there are players who insist that certain rewards should only be attainable from doing certain content. Devs too. So those rewards that are only offered during for doing LS content is make account bound so players who don’t do that content can’t simply by themselves one. It would be like buying an Oscar or an Olympic Gold Medal.
Reasonable people accept that deadlines in this industry can, will, and often should be missed. It’s been my experience that unreasonable people are generally not worth fretting over, as they they’re apt be be unreasonable. So what’s to be gained by ArenaNet going dark? They’re punishing the reasonable for nature of the unreasonable, who are – as you already know – going to complain about something one way or the other.
Because the unreasonable are the most vocal. And they are vocal not just here but on every MMO site with a GW2 section. And that discourages new players from plunking down the cash for the game and maybe a gem card. By saying nothing until something in the release pipeline takes some of the wind out of the unreasonable people’s sails it also builds excitement because reasonable people will know it’s not just marketing hype and vague promises.
Gaile Gray
ArenaNet Support Liaison
I wonder, did you submit a ticket on this? We’d like to follow up. If you can give me the ticket number, that would help a lot.
Translation: Open up a support ticket if you want help. There’s nothing other players on the forum can do for you.
Common. Hats and helms are implemented as just a different kind of hair. Happened in City of Heroes as well. Looked really bad with the Santa Hat in that game because it shows the back and sides of your head as hair free. That’s likely the reason the Pirate’kitten here has a piece that drapes down around the side and back of your head to hide that fact.
Flipping itself increases costs the more it’s done, as every time a good gets flipped some gold leaves the economy. As a result higher costs are already being passed. Increasing taxes all around would increase costs by some, but it would also reduce the number of times items get flipped between initial seller and final user, which would decrease costs and inefficiencies at the same time.
Flipping doesn’t increase costs and less gold in the overall economy is deflationary.
We need reasonbly priced gems. They’re more than double of what they were a year ago.
Gem prices in gold is immaterial to item prices. Those prices are entirely controlled by players by their constant use of gold to gem conversions which is what raises the conversion cost.
The Gem Shop is a Cash Shop. It’s there to buy things with cash. The ability to convert in-game currency, gold, into the proxy currency the Gem Shop uses is primarily there to pay out to players wishing to buy gold with cash without creating the gold from scratch and impacting the game’s economy.
Is was never meant to allow a majority of players to acquire everything they want for free from the Cash Shop. ANet chose funding the game after launch exclusively with the Cash Shop so you can understand that they need players to spend real money once in a while. You can supplement your Gem needs with converted gold but ANet makes no money on gold, only cash.
Still. This will slow not only flippers but anyone who buys in bulk which includes salvagers and forgers which consume a lot of excess item supply and crafters who consume a large quantity and range of mats. So you end up with a market flooded with items with prices plummeting toward +1c over vending because the supply flow doesn’t stop even when players are discouraged to remove the excess.
I’m sure he knows that but one of the themes from the now closed thread on TP flipping is that they exist because players seem more often than not or just enough of them pick the highest bidder to sell to.
If you vehemently “hate” TP flippers you can try to combat them through education of players on how to use the TP to get that extra coin they were just giving to TP flippers. Probably better use of your energies than ranting about something that isn’t going to change.
Why in the name of the 6 Gods did you save them? There isn’t a booster for them. Luck is account wide. Why? Was whatever you were doing so time critical that you couldn’t click em when you got em?
That is still 2000 clicks.
One could more importantly wonder why do we have these luck essence items in the first place? Why not simply increase luck percent like karma or experience does?
But it’s not 2000 at once. It’s 5 or 6 after each boss or champ event when I salvage my blue/greens.
And if you, the seller, is concern that the current low sale price is too high you can list at 10% below like 2s. And if you are really concern there are web sites that track the buy now and sell now prices.
The first one samples every 15 minutes and also charts the running average for each over the last 24 hours. The second one samples every 5 minutes. Use either site to sanity check if the gap is normally that large or narrow.
Now a narrow gap between the two prices may be a sign that someone just sold a more items to the current high bidder than the high bidder was looking for. Using the example from Omnitek, lets say you leave and come back a few minutes later to find the high buyer price is now 71c while the low seller price is now 2@73c. What likely happened was someone tried to sell 10 the high buyer but since the high buyer only wanted 8 there’s now 2 for sale at 73c. So now there’s a gap in seller prices from 73c to 2s21c and that’s usually an indicator that the “normal” sell price is closer to the higher price bracketing the range than the lower.
You can check if a gap in sale prices currently exists buy right clicking on the item you are looking to sell and select the “Buy More from the TP” option, which will display the top 20 or so sell listings and the number of items for sale at each price.
This will also show you if someone(s) built a price wall of items at a particular price which will take time to “erode” over the course of normal trading. For instance you may find out there are 5000+ of that item is priced at 2s25c. So common sense should be telling you that setting your price below that, your item will sell quicker than selling it at that price or even higher.
I’d say IF they were going to release a expansion next year we would see an announcement at either SDCC or PaxPrime. SDCC is coming up this month but I don’t see them announcing it there since it’s a mostly comic convention. PaxPrime is at the end of September and the biggest show ANet attends in USA which would make it perfect time to announce 2015s plans for GW2. So my advice would be to chill until PaxPrime and then we’ll know.
What game company in their right mind would announce a game expansion at a comic book convention rather than a gaming convention? Is there a GW2 comic book tie in we don’t know about?
While cosplayers may show up as GW2 characters along with the death stare Luigi’s there isn’t a major turn out of gaming companies at SDCC unless it’s a video game tie-in to a movie some studio is pushing.
And there is that no-brainer argument again: The gold that traiding post flippers get is gold from other people, not newly created gold. And that’s the reason why traiding post flippers are allowed to get the most revenue in the whole kittening game.
That is stupid!
So if traiding post flippers get that much money because they’re not resposible for inflation, why are material farmers not as rich as traiding post flippers? They also don’t create new gold if they sell their stuff to the traiding post.
The argument isn’t even an answer to the question why traiding post flippers should get more gold than anybode else, yet it is repeated by everybody.
John should probably close this thread I can’t stand this idiocy anymore.
Volume – A flipper can aggregate the collections of multiple material farmers who CHOSE to sell to highest bidder rather than selling it themselves. The flipper can then turn around and sell it at prices that players are willing to pay for it. In the end a flipper farms farmers for the profits the farmers give up willingly.
Someone has explained this once to you already. There is money being left on the TP by sellers not willing to charge as much as they could get for their items. A flipper steps in and cashes in on some of that unclaimed money. If players are more than willing to pay 15 yet other players aren’t willing to charge more than 10, that’s 5 available for someone else because the sellers aren’t willing to make as much as they can. Flippers aren’t making 10 or 15 per item but just 5. But 5 times a much larger volume (>3x) of items that a farmer with poor or even good TP skills farms in a day. That’s why they make more money than a mat farmer.
There are many more players who simply sell to highest bidder for the quick buck than try to sell an item themselves and risk that it may take considerably longer to sell (time between play sessions). Same is true with buyers wanting an item now and are willing to pay the low sale price for it rather than put in a bid and wait. A flipper offers immediacy at a price that’s acceptable to all party’s and pockets the difference. Times a lot.
It’s not the fault of the TP but a large percentage of those using it that allows a middle man to step in and take the money being left behind if only those players were willing to take a bit of risk for that money.
The old suggestion forum probably has more threads that were moved there than started there. It was known as the place where threads went to die because once moved there the discussions mostly ceased.
They’ve been saying that since the game was released. I’m sure they are listening to NCSOFT execs who are saying what investors who are unsure about a cash shop model supporting a game want to hear and Daewoo simply repeats it.
Any expansion is on hold until it’s needed to boost ANet’s revenues.
And do you know that it’s considered rude to say no in South Korea? Usually someone will use open ended phrases like “it’s being discussed” rather than just telling someone it’s not going to happen.
And that isn’t even the most recent statement from Daewoo where they don’t mention it at all and it’s not in any of their projections.
Why in the name of the 6 Gods did you save them? There isn’t a booster for them. Luck is account wide. Why? Was whatever you were doing so time critical that you couldn’t click em when you got em?
And that’s one of the age old arguments in developing rewards.
One side want rewards tied to doing specific content thus sporting such an item is a testament of your participation in that event.
On the other are players who want all items available via secondary or tertiary paths of acquisition which does include simply buying them from other players.
The second group doesn’t want to be forced into gaming paths they either don’t enjoy or are especially difficult for them to do (JP and PvP in my case) and they will always butt heads with the exclusive reward content players. Making one group happy makes the other group unhappy so the best choice for MMO devs is to make both groups only a little unhappy.
I worked at a company whose president gave a speech to the workers that was something like, “We don’t make a little profit from each <widget> we sell. We only start to make a profit after we sell enough <widgets> to cover all of annual costs. Until we do that, we are operating at a loss everyday.”
I’m sure NCSOFT is carefully looking at cash shop metrics quarter to quarter, hence the March and June sales push, and as long as they are seasonally stable they won’t interfere with ANet’s long rage plans.
Different level ranges have different “same, dull and repetitive” looking armors, I think every 20 levels or so. There are more armor looks locked up as dungeon and WvW rewards as well as the personal story via factions. Also there are a lot of looks that are dropped buy players simply sell off due to unimpressive stats rather than salvage them thus getting the skin for later use. Also some pieces are available from achievement chests, craftable and rewards from specific LS meta achievements. Also Karma armors in temples in Orr.
And then of course there are the ones locked up at the gem store.
Let me consider an identical hypothetical scenario that actually works with the current economy, then: Make some dungeons really, really hard, so hard that most players can’t complete them. Create highly desired ITEMS, not NEW COIN, that players make progress towards by completing these very, very hard dungeons. (No RNG, they must make consistent progress by succeeding)
No.
As much as I hate the current TP flipper economy, I hate hardcorz raiding even more. No masochist dungeons.
Really leave dungeons out of the discussion entirely, dungeons are the least interesting part of this game. Focus on Living World and other open world content.
I’ve thought of a good solution to all of this, that would fix a lot of the problems that people claim TP tycoons solve. Add an ANet Tradebot.
Have ANet build their own bot that constantly trawls the TP, looking for the same good deals that flippers look for. Any items where the order price is more than 15% lower than the sell price, it buys some of them at the order price and offers them at 5% below the sell price, pocketing the profits. It would also stockpile items that were selling too low when supplies are unusually high, and trickle them back in when supplies lower. These functions shouldn’t be too hard for ANet to pull off, especially given how they know in advance what items will be increasing or decreasing in supply.
Using this mechanism, they could maintain a sub-15% differential on ALL buy/sell prices, maintain a relatively stable pricing on commodities, prevent skyrocketing luxury good prices by preventing people from making excessive amounts on the TP, and ALL the profits involved would be pure gold sink, rather than going into the pockets of TP flippers. It would offer all the supposed benefits of the current economy with none of the downsides.
Ah, the solution to the problem that players are too stupid to use the TP properly is solved by an autonomous agent whose sole job is to out flip the flippers by being the ultimate flipper and collapse the gaps. Of course to start you need to give it enough seed money to start and that’s “new” money flowing into the economy. Sure, it’s profits will offset it some buy with the profits decreasing on every pass as it closes the gap to 15%, that’s less and less profit, even a loss as you suggest, then it’ll be nothing more than a giant gold source. On one hand JS is carefully adjusting the gold spigots to control the growth of gold and you are suggesting unleashing Niagra Falls overnight.
This is an interesting idea but I think Wanze underestimates how often normal players sell their daily loot. If I get 300 Karma from an event I wouldn’t want to see it go up in smoke if I decided to sell 60s worth of items on the TP I also got from the event.
The proposal is for BUY orders.
My bad.
But that does affect my MF, salvage and crafting sidelines where I buy in bulk and return to the community mats and items that are in demand. We are talking 500 karma per 1g worth of orders. There were times in the past where I’ve bought 20-30g worth of items to salvage and 10-15K of karma is a pretty big tax for breaking down items into mats to make 4-6g. That’s over half a month’s of daily karma rewards for a few hours of nursing orders.
This is an interesting idea but I think Wanze underestimates how often normal players sell their daily loot. If I get 300 Karma from an event I wouldn’t want to see it go up in smoke if I decided to sell 60s worth of items on the TP I also got from the event.
The 100g or so I get from playing monthly from selling drops, salvage, forging, crafting would translate into needing 50K worth of karma I would have to burn to sell those items. While I’m acutely aware how much gold I make daily, how much karma is a mystery to me above the 600 I get from my daily.
Ok, hypothetical:
We increase rewards to dungeon running to let’s say triple what they currently are. This would make it VERY difficult for almost all players to earn better rewards anywhere but dungeon running.
Now, everyone’s earning money and items all over the place, but we haven’t changed their original preferences for trading. This means a week later, they make the same trade preferences they previous made, just with more money, the more money makes flipping equivalently more profitable and you’re back in the same place. Unless players decide that they want to play the game differently, and there’s no reason they should, or we force them to play differently, and we shouldn’t definitely not, or we fundamentally change the way the game works, then you will have a problem. The profit from “flipping” items is a natural byproduct of people’s preferences inside a game. In my many, many years studying virtual economies I’ve never read or heard of an option that solves your personal dilemma without making the economy, the game and the players much worse off. The point of this hypothetical is the explain that even if I did think this was a problem (which I don’t) fixing it is much more complex than you may realize and you should incorporate that into your suggestions.
So you saying that just bumping up dungeon rewards wouldn’t solve the problem because everything would stay the same, just on a higher level.
But we do have already that kind of revenue in the game. The traiding post flipping can offer the amount of gold you say would be unhealthy to the economy. It does affect less people because less people take the time to get good at flipping the traiding post, but the problem is already there. As I’ve said, I don’t want to stop traiding post flipping in general, even if I disagree with the stated “benefits” flippers offer to the economy, but I want to bring the revenue you can obtain through traiding post flipping on the same level as, lets say the rewards you get through dungeon running, just higher to make up for that great “risk” you take playing the traiding post.
I think Wanze’s idea is a good way to cap the revenue flippers can make, since they have to gather the karma first on order to get gold.
You keep missing the point. Unhealthy flow of gold in the economy is only, ONLY applicable when you are talking about new gold flowing into the game from rewards. The TP only redistributes that once it’s in the game. The fact that a few who understands that a lot of players aren’t willing to post bids and sell orders and profit on them, skimming a bit of that trading range difference is immaterial to a healthy economy because the damage is already done by opening up the gold spigots to those “playing the game”. It’s not Player A’s fault that Players B through Z aren’t willing to use the TP to maximize the sales of the items they don’t want or minimize the costs of the items they want to buy. Player A simply provides the service Players B through Z want, immediacy and if it costs more or pay less they obviously don’t care. So they are willingly giving that money to Player A.
And it doesn’t matter how much money or items Players B through Z get, a little, a lot, because as long as they continue to use the TP the way they are, Player A will be there getting a cut simply because he chose to use the TP as designed.
You want a “fix”? Eliminate the radio button selection between high bid and low sell order prices with a list of top/bottom 5 of each along with quantity at those prices and force every player to manually enter a price. And you know what, it probably won’t “fix” anything, just annoy players who want to dump their loot quickly on the TP.
No it gets booked through ANet first. Eventually it ends up in NCSOFT’s pockets but ANet is a subsidiary so the money has to go through them first. Carbine on the other hand isn’t, it’s studio under NCSOFT directly.
Well there was a big downturn in EU revenue 1st quarter. Maybe they decided to bolster the EU ranks.
Well gamescom is Aug 13-17 and Pax Prime is Aug 29-Sep 1. Now Pax Prime is in there backyard so no big costs there but if they are going to gamescom, just maybe there will be an announcement about something interesting?
Ok, hypothetical:
We increase rewards to dungeon running to let’s say triple what they currently are. This would make it VERY difficult for almost all players to earn better rewards anywhere but dungeon running.
Now, everyone’s earning money and items all over the place, but we haven’t changed their original preferences for trading. This means a week later, they make the same trade preferences they previous made, just with more money, the more money makes flipping equivalently more profitable and you’re back in the same place. Unless players decide that they want to play the game differently, and there’s no reason they should, or we force them to play differently, and we shouldn’t definitely not, or we fundamentally change the way the game works, then you will have a problem. The profit from “flipping” items is a natural byproduct of people’s preferences inside a game. In my many, many years studying virtual economies I’ve never read or heard of an option that solves your personal dilemma without making the economy, the game and the players much worse off. The point of this hypothetical is the explain that even if I did think this was a problem (which I don’t) fixing it is much more complex than you may realize and you should incorporate that into your suggestions.
The OP’s point is the TP should be altered so players can’t earn more money than, in your case, Dungeon Runners, because players playing the TP aren’t playing the same game everyone is.
He seems to have a difficult time grasping that the TP doesn’t care if 10,000 transactions an hour is going on between 10,000 different pairs or are first being funneled though 100 players from an item’s original player it was dropped on to the player seeking it for personal use (which includes using it as raw materials). To it, both cases are legitimate transactions where one party got the item they want while the other got paid for it, minus the 15%. Except now the item is sold twice and more than twice as much coin is removed from the global economy.
Read the thread I’ve said it numerous of times…
Fine, just for you:
Normal earning formula: Set amount of gold * time spend = reward.
Traiding post flipping formula: Variable amount of gold * time spent = reward.
This means: No matter how much gold a dungeon runner has, if he runs an ADAP run, he gets around 50g per day.
The traiding post flipper however can get revenues based on the gold he has initially spent. Even if a flipper just starts with 2 gold and just gets 5% more gold every day, he will soon get more gold per day than a dungeon runner.
And please don’t say that’s not how it is because I can assure you that all those guys who have 10k+ gold haven’t done an ADAP run yet.
Let me try to simply my response to this, as you clearly still don’t understand certain things. It might be that American isn’t your primary language, so bear with me.
1) Profits are not rewards. Rewards are newly generated wealth that never existed in the game. Profits are “existing” wealth that’s being transferred between players, and the TP takes away 15% of the value, acting as a sink. Your example fails because you’re comparing two completely different things.
2) 5% of 2 Gold is 10 Silver. Dungeon runners make more money per hour than that. In fact, I can make that money simply by mining Mithril ore, and selling it to a merchant.
3) You have yet to provide a valid argument that’s based on facts. All your points are opinion based, and get trumped by the fact that the economy is working fine.
1) You get gold. Gold is all that matters. People who do other activites on a ragular basis do also get gold, just way less.
2) Next day he has 5 gold, 10 silver to spend, the day after 5 gold 35 silver. Sonner than later he will make more gold than the one getting 50g per day.
3) It’s pretty hard to provide valid facts if you can’t look up how much gold players have made by flipping the traiding post, but you can take it as granted that the ones having multiple thousands of gold didn’t got them through doing ADAP runs.
At last, it’s not about the economy. It’s about how much one can earn through one activity.
1) But it does mater. Event rewards represent new coin and items entering the game. New coin is more destabilizing to the economy than existing coin exchanged between players.
2) But it can’t be grown infinitely. Daily profits as you describe is limited not only by the gap between bids and sell orders but the number of each item they can flip in a day. While basic and fine materials have a fairly high supply and consumption rate, the profit on each is relatively small so a lot has to be moved. It’s never as easy as I will flip one stack until I can afford to flip two until I can afford to flip three, etc.
3) And your arguments are overflowing with facts? The only person with hard facts is the person who oversees the entire economy and trading post and that’s John Smith who you dismiss. So where do you find your facts?
Alright, I basically skipped the last 3 pages because it was all garbage. HHR, you need to get one thing through your understanding. The only reason the TP “provides the most gold for invested time” is because other players are more impatient than an ADHD kid on crack wanting a videogame. Their impatience means they sell to buy orders and buy from sell orders. It’s NOT because there’s something wrong with the TP, it’s that there’s something wrong with the PLAYERS.
You want to change the profitability of the TP? Educate the players instead. Clueless players will always complain. Informed players make the money. It’s just as easy as that to reduce the money you can make off the TP without touching the TP itself. Wanting the TP touched because you dont see fit to educate yourself and others on how to make the money work for you is dumb.
The problem with peoples solution, is not exactly that you are wrong, its that you are missing the point. Your solution is, get better at the TP, or get people to stop being fools on the TP.
The problem is, he doesnt want to feel like the only way he can achieve his endgame goals effeciently, is to play the TP.
If he can achieve endgame goals effeciently, without playing the TP, he wont really have a problem with people being super rich.
IE, the solution to the problem of wanting to be able to get things in game in an effecient manner without having to play the tp, cannot be to learn to play the TP,
So it’s a rewards problem and not a TP problem. But this goes back to the point that rewards are “new” money and items coming into the system where as profits from the TP is simply taking advantage of player’s need for immediate gratification.
I think the point being is gw2.exe doesn’t download as fast on high speed broadband as say torrenting the latest Transformers movie so the OP is looking for an FTP source of the dat file, thinking that it’ll be faster instead of realizing that it’ll be just as fast because that’s the share of the total bandwidth NCSOFT/ANet is paying for, devoted to patching.
Never ever.
