Guild Wars 2

No cries of kill stealing, no need to pug except for dungeons, most content doable soloing, every area is a challenge no matter your level, fairly quick movement if you have the cash, straight forward market, straight forward questing system, XP that falls like rain (XP from just wandering, finding points of interest, vistas, crafting).

Downsides include almost no tutorial explaining things, I’m still having “oh THAT’s what that means” moments after 3 months of playing, a crafting system that depends on you experimenting to discover recipes to level in crafting skill, difficulty in figuring out how to earn money crafting with out using external sites for guidance.

Argos armor gallery.

MMOs have time sinks/gated content and will always have time sinks/gated content because unlike single player games, their income relies on players hanging around. Some have monthly subscriptions, and item shop or both but they rely on having an active population spending real money to keep the servers up, the content fresh and the bugs patched.

Complaining about them is like complaining you have to dribble the ball in basketball or that you can’t use your hands in football/soccer.

In WvW you are a zerg. Best to travel with other zergs and hope to find groups of enemy zergs with less numbers so your band of zergs will win.

First, sell stuff that you aren’t interested in using. :p

Be aware that by selling on the TP, it costs 5% (1c minimum) to post, non refundable, and the TP takes 10% upon sale. So don’t sell anything on the TP unless you can sell it for 20% more (calculator free rule of thumb) than the vendor price. If a vendor will buy it for 50c then you would have to sell it for roughly 60c to break even or make a very small profit (60c minus 3c to post, minus 6c when it sells so you will get 51c).

Not to reiterate what others have said.

Common basic item quality, which is white, have such a low price that it’s usually better to use a salvage pack on them and sell the materials that you’ll get. Any quality salvage pack will do for whites, even crude.

Fine items which are blue will still only salvage into basic materials however the intact item is generally worth more than the materials you will get by salvaging them. But they aren’t popular on the TP so it’s best to simply sell them to a vendor.

Masterwork items, green, are a mix bag and you need to do a little research but others have gone into how to do that. If you do decide to salvage them, use the best quality salvage pack you can afford, same goes with rares and exotics.

Rares and exotics, well depending on their popularity can sell well on the TP otherwise salvage them.

As for the crafting materials you get dropped on you while playing or salvaging (note there’s a button on the inventory screen, upper right that allows you to dump crafting supplies directly to the bank no matter where you are which helps keep inventory under control), if you don’t craft then dump them on the market. The vast majority of them will sell for more than 20% above than vendor price. There are a few exceptions (Silk Scrap comes to mind) but usually it’s worth putting them up on the TP. Plus it supplies those players who are crafting a ready source of materials other than farming for them.

Vancien.1980:

I really hope you aren’t trying to follow all of my posts on these forums. But since you seem to be such an advocate of “Deal with It because Arena Net made it that way” and “The sooner you accept hardship the happier you shall be” let me enlighten you to something you seem to fail at realizing.

… (due to post length limits)

And no, I did not buy any of the resources except for the rune to make the bag.

Best,
Vancien

No I’m not following you, just certain topics.

And yes, ANet set up their market place a certain way. WoW has a traditional auction house, the late City of Heroes had a double blind Consignment House that displayed the time and price of the last 5 transactions (but not how many sold) and GW2 has a straight up Trading Post that shows the amount and price of all the items for sale. Each one of these have some fee associated to use it, usually nonrefundable and some cut of the sell amount as well to act as a gold sink.

You may not like the fees, you may think there are too many stupid players ruining the place for someone who would like to earn gold playing the market or crafting.

The crafting problem can be partially explained by the fact it’s so incredibly easy to level up to 80 in this game. EVERYTHING gives you XP. “Discover” a new area, XP. Go to a POI or vista, XP. Crafting something new, XP. Then we get to the actual whacking things in the head XP and bonus XP for whacking something that’s been around since the last time the area was rebooted. So leveling is quick.

This does two things, first it reduced demand on lower level items since players don’t stay at the level of their gear for very long. Low demand translates to low price and since crafters can’t avoid making low level items on their way to be able to craft high level items, the supply simply grows well beyond any demand.

Second, players would naturally migrate to higher and higher level zones as they level. As everyone congregates in those zones, T5 mats end up with a greater supply than lower tier mats so the cost of components for those lower level items are actually higher than higher tier mats (T6 is still rather rare however). So combine lower demand for lower level items with lower supply of raw materials with fix demand (got craft using them if you want to level your crafting skill to 400) means crafting is a losing venture until you reached a point where you can craft something that lots of players would be willing to pay a fair price while allowing you some amount of profit.

As for general undercutting/overcutting that’s going on. Well most people are terribly impatient. Few would grasp the idea it’s okay to place an order today that will get filled over time at the price they are willing to spend. No, they want to craft NOW and they need this component NOW and they are willing to either buy at whatever the going rate is. Some may be mildly patient and will just overcut hoping to get their order filled sooner than later. And the flip is true with selling.

As for flippers and dedicated crafters, an item up for sale represents their tied up capital. For someone selling a drop, they simply want to get X turned into gold so they can buy something they want. They don’t care if their undercutting is affecting someone else’s margins, they just want their cash NOW. They don’t care how the market works and they may not notice the posting fee but they do seem to notice the sales tax, noting the many grumbling threads about it.

Here’s the root of the problem, the market is being used by rational and irrational players, in terms of understand the market (not that they are crazy although an argument could be made…), and the irrational out strips the rational by a fair amount. Of course this still doesn’t prevent two rational players from PvPing each other on the market with a particular item.

Combine that with supply and demand problems due to the relatively quick leveling in the game as well as necessary requirement to produce items that are likely overstocked as is and you get what we have. Sure it sucks that other players can drive by undercut you and pulling and posting will cut into profits more so than the undercut because of the posting fee. But that’s the system we have, trying to convince the devs to alter it because you find it unfair or that it makes the market more inefficient is simply a waste of time. It is what it is and as long as it’s the means to turn loot into gold it’s going to be heavily used.

As for what that means for crafters, it means the start up cost until they can craft items players want will be high and when they do have items that they can sell for a profit, they need to be aware how the market works and price those factors into their selling price but be aware that somebody selling one of that item would upset the status quo and end up setting a new lower price point for a period of time.

One bit of information the trading post never shows us is volume. We don’t know how many trades are executed for an item in a known span of time. All we see are polled number of buy orders and number of items for sale. We have no idea how much that fluctuates between polling. Sure as the span between polls decrease we could infer more and more about volume but we still don’t see a transaction ticker of how many at what price at what time. John Smith can probably see this, maybe not in real time but it’s still more info than we have to support/debunk theories about market activity.

Then the next problem would be whether or not the 450 watt power supply is of a “modern” design or is it circa 2000 when the 12 volt supply didn’t need to be as powerful as today’s systems need.

Let me explain that. Power supplies put out a range of voltages, each one (3.3v, 5v, 12v) have a maximum amount of power that voltage can put out. Years ago power supplies didn’t need to supply a large amount of power at 12 volts so you could have a power supply that had a maximum output of 450 watts but it could only supply 200 watts at 12 volts. Flashforward to now, something like 90% of the power modern motherboards, video cards and CPUs use is pulled from the 12 volt supply while the 3.3v and 5v requirements combined hangs around 50 watts.

I’m pointing this out because video cards can use a lot of power and slapping a more power hungry video card into a system with a underpowered power supply can be disastrous. Now that manufacturer lists a lot of information about the various parts of that system, just not the power supply other than it’s maximum wattage. That sort of rings warning bells for me. They may use an alright power supply, one that could take a more powerful yet modestly power hungry card like the HD 7750 which uses 75 watts of power versus the HD 6450 which uses like 15 watts, and in both cases the vast majority of that power from 12 volts.

Okay, while I was typing this I found the specs of what I believe they are using as their power supply, a 450 watt model from a company called CIT and it is a model that doesn’t provide a lot of power at 12 volts so forget about the HD 7750, even an HD 6670 using faster GDDR5 could be too much for it (the card tops around 50 watts).

This means upgrading the video card would require you to upgrade the power supply to one of a more modern design as the current ones are designed to provide the overwhelming majority of their power at 12 volts. A power supply like this one (yes I know you are in the UK so NewEgg isn’t a viable source for you but I don’t have any UK mail order computer parts places on bookmark) from Corsair can provide 380 of it’s 430 watts at 12 volts, which would be plenty even for much more expensive and powerful video cards.

Going back to your root question, how much would the CPU limit your gameplay if you upgraded the video card. Well the game does use more than two threads so having only two cores will hurt performance, around 25% compared to a similar speed quad core according to TomsHardware (see the link in my previous post) when running an uber top end video card. This gap should narrow some when a less powerful video card is being used.

But these are the compromises that are ultimately up to you to make when you are on a very tight budget. Sorry I can’t give you better news.

Rhaps.8540:

The thing is, Anet know this. People will hang around for months on end to have these measly stat-boosted gimmick items which are carefully gated behind time-locked currencies. And all the time they are playing the game they are potential gem store customers. That’s the bottom line here, money. Gw2 is far more a commercial enterprise than the original. The huge grinds for legendaries, the slow aquisition of currencies for ascended gear, it’s all to keep the cash flowing.

The game, once purchased, is free to play. Now I can grok coming up with ways to keep players around for a subscription based game but as long as you aren’t required to use Gems to get slightly more tricked out shinny, it’s not like they are making any money off of those players.

Of course if they release more and more armor and weapon skins for Gems, then I can see the money argument.

You can run GW2, but combining a 3 year old dual core CPU with a anemic video card isn’t a great combo.

Tomshardware did an article about looking at #of cores, overall clockspeed and video card at several different settings and resolutions.

However of couple of points before comparing what they list there to what that box has. First when they compared video cards they did it in a system with an overclocked Intel 6-core CPU, to reduce any impact caused by not “feeding” the video card as fast as the video card wants. And when they tested the impact of the CPU, cores and speed, they used a top end video card reduce performance issues caused by a slow video card.

Second, while they did test an HD 6450, it was one with much faster memory than the one that comes in that rig and graphics memory speed makes an enormous impact on performance, like 30% slower for the one in that rig.

While dual cores hurt performance at least it’s running fairly fast, the CPU isn’t going to be as much of a limiting factor as that video card.

As for performance, if you run it at 1280×720 at best performance (lowest settings), you might, might get 30fps. But I’m likely a bit overly optimistic with that estimate.

The video card is the biggest problem with that system. Sorry, you’ll need a bit more oomph for what you are asking.

The Artesian Waters and the Sea of Elon were the two I missed my fist time through as well.

To me, “engaging for hardcores” means grind for tippity top of the line shinies. But as a casual player, if I can simply play the PvE game, do all the hearts and end up with enough Karma to buy a full set of Orr armor, I’m ecstatic.

I’m just starting to play with jumping puzzles or crafting for gold. Heck I’ve only done one dungeon in story mode so far. I’m still on my original character!

Akaji.1296:

Contiguous.1345:

@CassieGold

Witness the fact that they just ‘upped’ the loot tables. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about what that might mean for this or that market – I suspect it will have no effect at all, It just makes people feel better.

…

I’m speculating of course, based on what I would do if asked to create a trading game. Maybe I’m wrong – it really doesn’t matter, but Occam’s razor makes me suspect a ‘con’.

Ecto prices have dropped by approx. 24% since the patch (1 day avg. 3665.90c/ea on Feb. 24; 1 day avg. 2787.24c/ea on March 6), but are stabilizing. Most rares have dropped in the range of 10-50+%, but are still volatile.

The trend for Ectos is a small negative slope, and I expect them to stabilize at about or slightly above 2750c/ea. Ignoring future changes that affect Ecto supply/demand, I see no reason that this new price point would change significantly beyond normal trade fluctuation.

For reference, Ectos previously had a stable price point at around 3900c from Feb. 2 to ~Feb. 18, when news of improved drop rates for Rares created a rush to sell. The real trauma hit on Feb. 27-28 (the 2 days after the patch; note that the patch was late on Feb. 26, so Feb. 27 was the first full day for people to experience the new drop rates), when there was a so-far-permanent drop of 500c/ea.

Looking at Etco’s since the start of the year it appears to me that they are just returning to the price they were at the start of January when they was 50k of them for sale on the market. They peaked in February when the supply dropped below 10K for several weeks. Now supply is back up over 30K.

I’m not sure, since I wasn’t paying attention to the TP forum until recently but it sounds like at some point players decided that Ectos were a “safe” currency to hold their wealth. Much like the “economy is going to tank, buy gold (actually gold coins so we can gouge you on collector’s price)” commercials I keep hearing on talk radio. Enough people believed it and started to hoard Ectos by breaking down every rare they got or crafted themselves. This may have also elevated the price of some rares as they were salvaged rather than sold on the market.

Now that rare/exotics are guaranteed (but only once a day) from a chest from any of the major events, the idea that ecto’s being a safe haven went out of the window and the price and supply is simply returning back to normal.

The items aren’t in an invisible bag/pack or a safe box are they? If so they won’t appear on any sell screen.

It may be technical. Dungeons may be instances than can only contain 5 players and the server load to run that would be significantly less than 50-60 players hitting a world event every few hours.

@Vancien

It sounds like you are more upset that other players don’t play the game the way you do, your rant on opening Skritt bags for instance, and the inherent unfairness of the RNG.

Do you get angry when you see in map chat someone bragging they got an exotic from a dragon chest while you only got a run of the mill rare? Do you identify unidentified dyes hoping to get a rare, one of the half a dozen masterwork or one of the two fine dyes that are worth more than simply selling it a the TP? Do you play the lottery every week but get upset because you don’t win? Because that’s what you are complaining about. Random chance not being in your favor. It’s never in your favor. You might be able to improve the odds but it’s still not a certainty. If you accept that and treat a favorable roll as a happy surprise out of the ordinary rather than treat an unfavorable roll as the game out to get you, you’ll enjoy the game more.

True but the amount of gems haven’t changed. And if more players convert gold to gems than the other way around the amount of gems at the exchange shrinks and the exchange rate moves up.

Gems that players buy with cash aren’t part of the exchange until they sell them to the exchange. Gems that are used to buy an item at the store are destroyed.

Yes, if Sir Stupid put an item up for 10Kg and paid a 500g listing fee (it’s 5%, 10% more upon sale) it’s his own kitten fault if he then pulls it and repost at 10g (and then pays 50s).

Undercutting is a fact of life with this system, learn to accept that than shout on the rooftops how unfair that other players undercut your asking price and the market will penalize you for pulling and relist it at a lower price. This is how the market works in the game, ANet isn’t going to change it to satisfy players who can’t adapt to it no matter how much noise they make.

So price wisely first and learn to be patient Ed Gruberman (how long will that take?) for your item to sell. I’ve had items take over a week to sell because I priced poorly on an item with more supply than demand but it eventually sold.

As for your 20 slot box, yes it looks as if it’s only profitable, and not by a lot, if you gathered your own Orichalcum orr rather than vend it from TP. The only other explanation for the current price is excepting small loss is better than tying up you money indefinitely waiting for it to sell.

MMOs that start out not grindy become grindy once a player runs out of existing content to run. They start to focus on a set group of tasks or area to farm until new content comes along, aka grind. Dailies just provide a set of shifting goals to provide a bit a variety to the grind. On the flip side putting timers on chests also force people to NOT hit the same content repeatedly.

The biggest problem with new content is it takes months to design and days, if, to exhaust. Then back to the grind.

Yes but I believe a lot of first time players don’t even look at crafting until they hit 80 and are looking at something to do. Currently my 80 only has one crafting skill and it’s just below 270 IIRC. I’m simply hitting dead ends, not figuring out what I could craft simply to raise my level, forgot about actually making money on the action.

And yes I picked artificer so on paper I could make items that I could use but even when i was low level, the drops of items I got or bought at a weaponsmith merchant was cheaper than either crafting or buying at TP. I barely was able to afford what I did buy.

Heck I rocked blues until I was in the 60s simply because I was afraid to spend a lot on armor and weapons that would soul bind and I didn’t know if that would prevent me from selling it even the NPC merchants or to recoup at least a little bit of the money I spent.

While looking at world map with all the existing areas boxed off, it shows that there are loads of places where we could go next without the need of an expansion.

Unlock the rest of Orr. Add maps following the Dragonbrand south (not all at once). Or the area south of the Black Citadel and east of Timberland falls. There’s just loads of area they can add to the existing game as part of their “living story” concept.

As long as they keep the player population high and have a relatively small percentage of them buying Gems for cash, no need for an expansion.

But honestly, they really need more attractive merchandise at the Gem store. Unique armor and weapon skins for instance.

Oops, wrong thread.

Here, a link to GW2Spidy. Select your crafting profession from the crafting pull down, enter your current crafting level as maximum under rating, click filter and then sort by profit (it might do that automatically now).

Look for profitable items with lower supply than demand and then click on the item. It will then display the best way to make that item based on the last time the site sampled the TP prices for the materials required. Sometimes it’ll tell you to build some part totally from scratch, other times tell you to buy the sub-assembly since it’s cheaper. Then craft it, post it on the market and wait. As long as your price isn’t historically to high, it’ll sell. Maybe in 10 minutes, maybe in a day or two, but it’ll generally sell sooner than later.

Also don’t try to flood the market with any one item. Other people will notice and then you will find your items undercut by a dozen copies at lower selling prices. Don’t fret, don’t give into the temptation to pull and post at a lower rate (it’s 5% each time you post, it can wipe out your profits in no time if you do it to offten).

And sometimes, some attractive items have recipes that aren’t discoverable, you will need to find the NPC that’ll sell it for Karma. So it’s a good habit if you want to craft to check what NPCs with filled heart icons are selling, if it’s a recipe for your craft, buy it or make a note who has it.

It wasn’t as much leaked as reported on. It wasn’t like what they said was a secret. It was just wrong.

Makes you wonder what else they’ve said is also wrong.

This is only surprising if you believed what NCsoft told said in their Investors Conference call, where they said to expect an expansion this fall.

I’ve noticed that since the patch it takes something in the order of 15 or more seconds before various ambient/effect sounds (foot falls, NPC dialog, environment sounds) are mixed in after use a gate/waypoint. I’ve also noticed that my attack sounds are also missing during large events. Before I always heard my weapon attacks going off, now I hear everyone else over me.

Is anyone else noticing this?

I’m running a “short” norn and have camera problems often with JP. It’s quite annoying.

The rule of supply and demand is only affected by what supply is in the market and not how much a particular item is currently in the game world. It doesn’t make one iota of difference if the entire player base is sitting on one or a billion of some item in inventory. If the market only has 10 for sale and 1000 orders for it, the price will likely be higher than if those two numbers were reversed.

There isn’t necessarily a scarcity of supply in the world (beyond the % on the drop tables) that affect the price, it’s the scarcity of it at the TP. If the item isn’t valued by the players due to it’s stats or it’s required in a popular crafting recipe it makes no difference if it’s scarce or not.

Or an alternative explanation, someone who had been stockpiling them, dumping them into their mats storage during play find their mat storage for that item is now full. So the next time they can access mat storage they pull out that item and dump it at or near the buy price looking to convert it into quick cash.

Now others in the same time period note that the price suddenly takes a nose dive and decide to follow suit, afraid the rumors of high tier salvage is going to plummet is true. So you get;

Mar 4 21:50-21:59
Buy Price – 1s44c Demand – 9,775
Sell Price – 2s8c Supply – 52,405

Mar 4 22:00- 22:09
Buy Price – 1s14c Demand – 8,352
Sell Price – 1s29c Supply – 53,739

This is over a 10-20 minute span. Demand dropping 1,423 and supply increasing 1,334 isn’t really all that much. Of course these numbers are simply snapshots of the current state.

Drawing too much of a conclusion from this is like stopping at your grocer twice in the same week and drawing conclusions of a product’s popularity by the change of what’s on the shelf. You have no idea how often that item has been restocked in between or how recently it’s been restocked. We don’t see volume, either in the number of transactions or the amount of items those transactions move.

John Smith has repeatedly stated that ArenaNet hasn’t adjusted the amount of Gems or Gold reserves at the exchange since it was initialized when the game went live. Only player actions at the exchange, buying or selling Gems and how it adjusts the exchanges reserve of Gold and Gems, is used to determine the exchange rate.

The sticky thread is at the top about it is empty as well.

Honestly I love the Asura NPC background dialog. It’s an entire race of evil Walter Bishops from Fringe.

Considering we all were waiting for nearly 30 minutes for the dragon to show up last night it’s only natural that boredom leads to silliness. Since I have no idea who started it or where they were, I simply assumed they were other players waiting for the dragon so I joined in. As for lag when the event started, guess what it happens when a ton of players firing off effects left and right in a very small area. It certainly wasn’t caused be a bit of map spam.

A bigger question is does anybody actually chat with each other on a party or is it simply everyone is on headsets? I’ve been on parties for hours and nobody says nothing on the party or local channels. It’s just follow the leader and kill whatever they lead us to.

There are two exchange rates. Gems->Gold and Gold->Gems.

When you first select on the exchange tab it shows you the Gems->Gold rate. They had to show one of them and it makes sense to show that one because GW2 stays open because of players buying Gems with actual money so the rate shown is for players who have Gems and are looking to convert some/all of it into gold.

Edit: Ninja’d

I go to Mount Maelstrom and use one of the portals to get to Dierdre’s Steps where I hunt vet earth elementals.

rgrwng.4072:

jumping should be considered a free evade/dodge.

Just what the game needs, bunny hoppers. Also that would circumvent the whole endurance mechanic that limits your dodging.

Play the game, sell your drops. Use sites like GW2Spidy and GW2 Trader to find profitable items you can craft that are in short supply.

Now if you are looking at wanting 1000g, my level 80 only has 40g (I’ve been slowly converting some of it to Gems toward future purchases so I’ve probably made 60g so far in it’s lifetime) then I don’t know other than spending actual money for Gems and then get them converted to gold but that’s an expensive proposition.

Looking at it’s price history it appears that what’s happening is there is a large amount of sacs in the 11-12s range and periodically it gets undercut down to near where the current bids are. When the cheaper supply is bought out the price spikes back up to the 11-12s range and the process starts all over again.

Also supply has exceeded demand over the last week. So it’s a buyers market, they are setting the strike price not the sellers.

Yes but now it’s 5 out of … what 8 possible dailies. Sure one targets one of the 5 race lands just as one deals with the mists or WvW area. For me today the area was Shiverpeak. So I did the dome, the maw (chest) and the wurm attack on the inn. Bam! 40 kills. Throw in the vets defeated for that daily, it was a lower level area so the events counted toward that daily and I healed some fallen comrades during the events. 4 dailies done, 1/2 an hour tops. All that was left was gathering which took another 10 minutes somewhere there were T5 mats. Tada, daily done and had a blast doing it. It took less time than waiting around for the two dragons I did later.

Emissary Vex.5690:

Mercucial.6759:

This community is seriously the biggest collection of cry babies ever.

It took me all of about 45 minutes to finish my daily yesterday, and the only one I had to actively seek out was the Kryta Slayer one. If 45 min is too much time for you to invest in something, then don’t play an MMO.

You have literally ignored the entire point. The point is many players have completed all the overland content and want to enjoy other aspects of the game; but there is no point in playing the rest of the game and doing the things that we want to do Fractals, Dungeons, Spvp; because we have to magically control time and add 45 minutes to our day to do the daily. You obviously didn’t even read anything. Like where dozen or so times I have already said is what I want to do is spend 2 hours doing dungeons; but there is no point in spending 2 hours doing dungeons if I have to spend an additional 45 minutes doing dailys.

What do dailies buy you that you feel compelled to do them? An up to level 79 transmutation stone, a jug of Karma, a bit of silver and a laurel. If you want Karma by the bulk or laurels for something then you have to decide that the daily/monthly is worth the time, otherwise just continue on with how you currently play.

Decisions, decisions deary. (Sorry, catching up on Once Upon a Time on Hulu).

What? You don’t sell the drops you get?

I simply play. After an hour or two I check to see what I need for the daily (if I hadn’t gotten it yet) and quickly do that, most times it’s not a lot since I enjoy doing dynamic events, gather, heal fallen players and NPCs and generally kill anything that highlights red I come across while doing the aforementioned activities.

However I can understand you may think it’s a pain if you only do WvW or grind dungeons as oppose to embracing the whole game.

I don’t believe they are available at the website. You can buy them in game at the TP in the Gem store (first tab, upper left corner) or buy a Gem card at a retailer and apply the code, again at the Gem Store.

Revolution.6301:

CrockD.8257:

Revolution.6301:

Look if you stop undercutting you’ll make more money. Thats the point.

People will see somtimes 2 to 3000 of an item and panick and and cut a price from 35 to 36. But think about it, if there are SO MANY of an item then logically its liquid enough so there is no need to undercut.

On a side note: I’ve found that the ‘last’ price poster gets his/her stuff sold first. (I’ve tested this many times). So actually you should just repost your orders instead of undercutting.

You really don’t get markets do you? People are “undercutting” (fancy word for selling at the lowest price) in order to beat their competition (you) so that they can turn their profit and immediately move on to the next profitable market. In the TP game “churn” is important. People who are looking to make money trading in the markets want to see an opportunity and flip it fast so that their money isn’t tied up in an asset for days while they wait for the price to come back. If your money is stuck in an asset you can’t use it for the next big trade. Choosing to not undercut you is in no way a profitable activity for me what so ever. If it bothers you that the markets move fast then you might want to think about not playing them. Finally for all those folks who will give the “why don’t you actually play the game” comment. We all play a game that has an open and functional marketplace, that marketplace is free for actors to participate in however they want. The actions of those individuals helps to make markets more liquid (because they are ‘market makers’) and if you still have a problem with it, it’s the way ArenaNet made the game. It is what it is.

Actually I do buddy. Talking down to me is a logical fallacy and is rude of you. Oh and I’m not sure if you know this but this isn’t real life. So encouraging people to make more money so I make more money at the same time is doing the community a favor. Again stop the undercutting and overcutting since it really does kills many markets. I’ve seen entire markets killed for weeks because someone undercut or overcutt just to sell faster even though they would probably sell at the same speed had they just priced it normally. Since the last buyer/orderer is sold/bought first!!

I don’t think he was talking down to you or being rude. He currently chooses to play this game as a market trader. To him a constant stream of quick, low profit trades is better than a single higher profit trade that takes longer to turn around. And it sounds like he’s good at it. Do you begrudge players who are better at PvP than you are? This is no difference, he’s simply better at working the market, PvPing there so to speak.

RiKShaw.8795:

But people are greedy.

And their greed will cost them. If it’s not a lesson they are willing to learn, too bad. Many thanks for removing your excess money from circulation and help to keep overall inflation in check. Have a nice day.

If they are willing to wait, why would they undercut? You only undercut when you want to sell quickly.

If the highest buy is set at 50s then why would you ask for 2g? Because you’re being greedy. Someone might come along eventually and pay 2g but it’s more likely one or more other sellers would say "well I need to sell it for more than about 60s to break even on a 50s flip, and I don’t want too long for my payday and around 10s (20%) profit on each isn’t asking too much so I’ll post it for 70s.

The posting fee is an incentive to post your item only once for a price that’s affordable for buyers while still being able to make a profit, not a killing. If you are going to hunt downwards it will cut into your profit every time you pull and post.

Lets say you’re flipping. Your profit can be expressed by the following equation.

P = 0.90Sf – C – 0.05(Sf + S1 + S2 … + Sn)

where

P is profit
Sf is final selling price
C is cost of item
S1 to Sn are the other sell prices you tried along the way

Realize that depending on the gap between Sf and C, it won’t take too many times pulling and posting to completely wipe out your profit.

So choose wisely, don’t try to make a killing. You will make more flipping 250 items at 10s a piece profit a day than hoping that other sellers would leave you alone long enough to make 1g20s a piece and sell your stack eventually.

Gems don’t come from a “store”, they are created when you buy them with cash or transferred from a preexisting large reserve of Gems (that was created when the game went live) for gold. They are destroyed when spent on items at the Gem store. They are not “recycled” back into the game.

As the Gem reserve at the exchange shrinks, the exchange rate goes up. This makes it more attractive to sell Gems to the exchange for gold, thereby help to replenish the reserve as well as make buying Gems with cash the more attractive alternative than spending the additional time it’ll take to earn additional gold needed.

However the gap between the Gold→Gem and Gem→Gold exchange rates are such that it’s only practical to sell Gems for gold with Gems purchased with cash. Sure you could buy Gems with gold and hold onto them waiting for the Gem→Gold exchange rate to rise past the point where it would be profitable to sell them back to the exchange but that may take months if at all. That’s tying up your gold for an unknown period of time.

RiKShaw.8795:

Behellagh.1468:

This listing fee is there so when someone offers something up for sale they are more likely to price it reasonably first rather than offer it for something high and then keep pulling it and posting it at a lower price, repeating until it sells.

If someone undercuts you, to bad, maybe your offering price should have been less so it would sell before someone came along and undercut you.

But if I was able to take something down immediatly then the price would follow the exact same pattern just slower. I mean if you see an item where the buy/sell difference is 10 silver, someone is going to be making profit. But if 5 people are all undercutting each other constantly they price is going to stabilize in a matter of minutes.

It’s not about stabilizing prices or preventing inflation. (Inflation happens when the growth of money circulating in the economy grows unchecked). It’s about requiring the seller to think about what is a fair price for the item they are selling while trading off between size of profit and speed of sale. If you don’t care if it takes a week to sell so you can get your 10% profit on the flip then price it and check back in a week. If you want to sell it ASAP, they you may have to set the price to provide a much smaller profit with the benefit that you will get your profit quicker. If you measure cash flow as in g/day, selling often with a small profit may net you more in the long term than a large profit infrequently.

roamzero.9486:

John Smith.4610:

Think of it this way. The government can print as much money as they want, that doesn’t mean your bank account has access to that money. The currency exchange does not have access to gem creation. It has a limited stock that players add and subtract from.

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

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

Why is that fairer? Cash sale of Gems is what keeps this game going. ANet needs the cash flow since this isn’t a subscription game like WoW. Servers aren’t going to stay up or pay devs to develop content and fix bugs on rainbows and sunshine.

The fact they provided a mechanism for players who don’t have the money to spend on Gems at all is a plus. They didn’t need to do that. Also providing a way to convert cash into gold via Gems and the exchange helps provide a legitimate way for players who have cash but not time acquire gold. Black market gold sellers bring nothing but hacked accounts and credit card fraud.

The only player that isn’t helped by the exchange are players who don’t have either the money to spend on Gems or the time to play the game to earn gold.

The exchange makes sure that the pendulum doesn’t swing to far to fast either way. If there was a flat rate for Gems to gold, inflation would happen way faster as gold floods the game. With the exchange rate dropping as more Gems are converted to gold acts as a brake because when it drops too far it loses it’s appeal. On the other side of the equation as the cost of Gems go up as more players convert gold to Gems, it encourages players who really want something at the Gem store to pony up actual cash.

Bottom line, if you really want something in the Gem store right now, spend the money. If you are willing to wait, convert a little gold every week and save up.