I should imagine that Spidy bins values that are wildly outside the expected when working out the average.
Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Last I checked, Spidy quite accurately reports only the lowest sell and highest buy price, and does exactly nothing with any of the other listings above or below those.
Yeah, anything legitimate players can use to send gold to each other, gold sellers can use to send gold to players. Gold sellers are, after all, using player accounts to run their business.
Therefore, any attempt to curb gold selling by cutting down what players are allowed to send to each other will amount to punishing all legitimate players for the actions of a few, and would thus be one of the worst ways they could “solve” this problem.
Is there video of the claimed phenomenon where you get more rares if you click faster? If not, I’d suspect this is mostly an attempt to drive unidentified dye prices up.
Curious about method ANet would say is efficient for some unique weapons, etc
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Hah, that’s actually pretty cool of them. (I mean, once you get past the fact that they’ve decided to protect the children from bad words or whatever.)
Curious about method ANet would say is efficient for some unique weapons, etc
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Ok, offtopic, but wtf does kitteny mean? Same thing as carebear? I haven’t seen that word until these forums. It sounds silly.
“Bad” words on this forum get censored to “kitten”. Lots of people just skip the automatic filtering and use “kitten” directly in place of the intended epithet, which leads to different grammatical forms like “kitteny” and “kittening” and “kittened”. (Though I suppose the last two might result from simply changing only the offending part of a longer word, “kitteny” would most likely end up as “kittenty” if the forum software only changes the specific 4-letter offending bit and not the whole word.)
Because each character is supposed to have a maximum of 2 usable crafts at any given time, and lowering the cost of changing by too much would effectively remove that intended limit. And evidently 40s is what ANet decided on as a reasonable balance.
If you want other crafts, either be willing to spend the 40s, or learn them on an alt.
IIRC, back around the 10th or 11th it was in the low 20s for silver to 100 Gems conversion.
I don’t think you RC. That may have once been the amount you got from gems → gold, but I have a really hard time believing gold → gems shot up from low 20s to the low 50s in only two days, considering it has never grown by that much in any other 2-day period since the game came out.
And in fact Guild Wars Trade never has it falling below 35s for 100 gems any time in the past month.
ANet obviously believes playing the market is one of many valid ways to enjoy the game, else they wouldn’t have included it alongside all the things you can kill or craft or whatever else you’re “supposed” to be doing.
This does not explain the 300% increase in price over a 4 day period around when I started this thread.
Which 300% increase would that be, exactly?
Looks there like the most recent maximum for coin → gems was about 80s for 100 gems. A 300% increase would require that it was ever 20s for 100 gems. Which I’m pretty sure has never been the case.
Curious about method ANet would say is efficient for some unique weapons, etc
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
It’s my understanding that what ANet kept promising was no need to grind. Which as far as I’ve been able to tell so far is absolutely true. You can progress in level and crafting and armor quality quite effectively without grinding. If you additionally want the absolute best (or at least best-looking) equipment in the game, then yes, there’s grinding involved. That’s not the same thing as their giving you false information about gameplay.
This thread really isn’t needed to unload chests at 1000% profit. They went up by that much anyway, and I strongly doubt posts in the trading company subforum had much impact on that.
If it was true that butter only sells at 2c due to inability to sell at 1c, then there would be sell orders up at 2c, not buy orders.
If there are buy orders at 2, it’s gone up in price since I last bothered checking.
The second problem has already been fixed, in that you can no longer post buy orders lower than vendor price. They just haven’t cleared out all the old unfulfillable orders yet.
The first problem isn’t a problem because the TP doesn’t owe you a profit. If something isn’t profitable to sell there, simply don’t sell it there. (Vendor it or salvage it or throw it into the Mystic Forge or whatever. If it’s a crafted good, don’t craft that good in the first place if it’s not selling for a profit and you want to craft for a profit.)
You can see prices (and I believe volumes) in 15 minute increments.
Throwing around words like punishment, is not constructive nor a viable argument.
You know what also is not a constructive nor a viable argument? Repeatedly ignoring or dismissing every criticism of your suggestion because you don’t like the word “punishment”.
Is it punishment to remove 41 karma weapons for the people who didn’t buy them? Is it punishment to expect players to level to 80 before having access to all the game’s content? is it punishment to expect players to work for things in game period?
Is it punishment to expect you to pay money before playing the game? Is it punishment to cut off your hand if you undercut me by 1c on the trading post?
Asking a series of rhetorical questions about completely different things is also not a constructive or viable argument. Sure, none of those things is punishment, but that doesn’t in any way imply that removing mailed gold wouldn’t be an undue burden.
But we are not in the real world, we are in the matrix, where Anet CAN remove the ability of people to circumvent their ability to make profit.
And the government CAN stop the postal service which would cut down on the amount of illegal things sent through the mail. Does that make it a good idea?
For a different example, shutting down the Internet would remove the ability of people to view and send child pornography over the Internet. Does that make it a good idea?
It takes no genius to calculate this “correct price” in the case of crafted items. It’s the sum of all the crafting materials used to craft the item + TP fees.
You’re right that it takes no genius, but you’re wrong about what the correct price is. The correct price is what people are willing to pay. If it costs you more to make something than people will pay you for the finished product, you shouldn’t have made it and expected a product.
If the price of a commodity falls below the price it costs you to produce it, the correct response is to stop producing that commodity, not to complain about people undercutting you.
It so happens that nobody is buying the gem, and there is a bit of a queue of people selling.
So there’s no demand and a lot of supply?
Yep, price will (and absolutely should) go down in that case. And this has nothing to do with access from anywhere, since people can place buy orders from anywhere as well, so a complete lack of them means no one particularly wants this item. And they wouldn’t suddenly start wanting it in droves just because sellers have to walk all the way to a BLTC NPC to list it.
And if they don’t want to shift things as dramatically as 10 butter = 1 vanilla, I think many people would be content even if it were something like 25 or 50 or even 100, considering how ridiculously abundant butter is. (The only reason it sells for 2c on the trading post is the inability to sell it for 1c, which means the perceived value of 100 of them is likely around 1s, which is considerably cheaper than current vanilla prices have gotten to.)
It’s over 9000!!!
back to all seriousness, I’m pretty sure you’re better off using exotics to start with, rares can result in rares, exotic weapons will always be exotics when you forge them. Or am I the only one thinking this and is there some math behind using rares over exotics?
The reason people use rares is because 4x rares are generally cheaper than 4x exotics. Rares have a roughly .5% chance though whereas exotics are 3.3% per forge. I guess using rares still have a better chance:cost ratio.
I would suspect that if you end up throwing every non-precursor back into the forge, starting with rares and starting with exotics probably give you about the same cost per likely precursor created.
The benefit of starting with rares is if you turn around and sell all non-precursor exotics, because then you still have some chance of getting a precursor, but you can also make back some of your initial gold investment selling off the exotics.
People should probably stop complaining about how the price of precursors “keeps increasing” faster than you can save money, seeing as most of them have largely stabilized now…
Economics 101: The less regulation and taxation the better. Let the market find it’s own equilibrium.
While I disagree in real life, I agree completely regarding the toy economy in GW2. No one goes hungry or has their power shut off or has to sleep on a park bench if the economy crashes, and anyone who doesn’t like the TP market can play a perfectly enjoyable game while avoiding it entirely.
As such, all the appeals to how hard it is for the “casual” player to make money playing the TP fall on pretty deaf ears with me. If you want to make money without doing research on which items to move at what price on the TP, don’t try to make money by buying and selling on the TP. It’s as simple as that.
The fact is, if you can’t make a profit in a free market, you’ll certainly never be able to make one that has even more controls and/or fees.
Yeah, I think people don’t realize that, regardless of how the market is set up, folks willing to put in extra work researching prices and profits will always be the ones making more money, so long as anyone is making any money at all. (And if no one was, there’d obviously be complaints about that as well, rightly so.)
Even if the asymmetry does by itself put a universally negative pressure on prices, it quite clearly isn’t the only or even the dominant force in the market. The simple fact that some things go up in price means that this negative pressure must sometimes be countered by other market forces. As such, I suspect the most it can do is result in a lower stable equilibrium price for things than would exist if the buying and selling positions were more symmetrical.
Eliminating the ability to mail gold would severely hinder the ease of buying gold. That much is not in doubt. The problem is that it also severely hinders lots of other things legitimate players like to do, such as mail gold to their friends (not everyone is in the same guilds as every single one of their friends, after all).
They need to strike a balance between hindering gold selling and botting on the one hand, and allowing legitimate players to continue enjoying the game legitimately on the other. Severe DR, greatly increasing the proportion of soulbound or account bound items, eliminating the ability to mail gold: all of these things can reduce gold selling, but they also reduce the enjoyment for most players, and as such they are really stupid “solutions” that I hope are never seriously considered by the cooler heads at ANet.
It’s worth noting, though, that 1c over vendor is still profitable for bulk orders at 6c or less, because when you sell a bunch at a time the listing fee and (more or less) tax are computed on the whole order.
Yes, overcutting closes the gap at first (just like undercutting), after which point anyone trying to flip things starts posting their sell listings at a higher price because they can’t make a profit at the existing one.
How exactly do prices for some things go up, if the typical market practices of undercutting and outbidding can only ever drive them down?
How many threads, exactly, are needed just for complaining about how hard it is to get precursors?
It’s kinda hard to feel sorry for you wasting money when you don’t think things through before you do them.
It’s also hard when their wasted money is now in your bank account, I suspect. :-)
@displaceTitan – /sigh. I took an AP Stats class in high school and as a Computer Science major at Virginia Tech, I am required to take a course called STAT 4705 Statistics for Engineers in order to graduate. So I’d like to think I know a thing or two about “basic statistics” and “critical thinking.” Am I saying that I actually performed a test of significance and that my resulting p-value was lower than the significance level alpha, and therefore my null hypothesis was rejected? No… frankly I’m not because I do not have access to the data that allows me to use the word “significant” in the sense that he is supposedly using it.
Excellent job proving displaceTitan’s point that you don’t understand “significant” in the sense I’m using it, because the sense I’m using it isn’t the statistical one. I’m using the more basic sense of “large or important”. As in, evidence or proof that bots and gold sellers exist does not constitute evidence that they are having a large or important effect on the economy of the game.
Admittedly, this sense of “significant” doesn’t have any precise numerical values we could attach to it, so it is a bit harder to pin down. So I’ll make my statement more precise and say that evidence for the existence of bots isn’t evidence one way or the other for the actual magnitude of the impact they’re having on the economy.
If you’re more comfortable falling back on your engineering stats class, I could pick a (completely arbitrary) precise value that I’d call “significant”, and work from there:
Bots have a significant impact on the economy if their activities can explain more than 25% of the variation in the prices of at least half of the 100 most-traded items on the TP.
What I’m saying is that no one has yet provided any justification for the claim that their impact is significant, and has instead felt much more comfortable just repeatedly asserting that it is so. Many times (though fortunately not in your case, GreyInsomniak, which I appreciate), people further retreat from useful discussion by going on to accuse everyone who disagrees with their baseless assertions of running bots themselves.
No, you missed the point. I didn’t mean to imply that all gold selling is a scam, merely that spamming people about it doesn’t indicate how many people take them up on their offers.
Yes, clearly it works sometimes, else there wouldn’t be such spam. But one part of the explanation for the decreasing price of black market gold is that not enough people were willing to buy it at the old price, even though that was also clearly much lower than ANet’s price.
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
No, it wasn’t clear, at least not to me.
I’m still not at all sure what he’s getting at, either.
I guess we’re both trolls?
If you’re counting attempts, make it clear that you’re counting attempts (where each attempt is 4 items into the MF). If you’re counting items, then make that clear, and make sure the number you state is divisible by 4, because otherwise we know you’re counting or reporting something wrong.
Not when I’m clearly using it to mean exactly the opposite of undercutting, where one person puts up a buy order for 1c greater than the next one, in an effort to get those items faster.
To those who say that the bots do not have significant impact on the economy, here is my two cents
Your two cents only provide plausibility for that claim. They aren’t actually evidence for it.
Yes, bots exist, and they farm and buy and sell things. That is not the same as having a significant impact on the economy. That would require evidence for the volume that they trade, both of in-game goods on the TP and of RMT gold on their websites. Spam doesn’t give any indication of how many people buy it, any more than getting emails from some alleged deposed Nigerian leader, who wants to give me $22,000,000 (twenty-two million US dollars) in exchange for my bank information, actually means a significant number of people fall for that sort of spam.
(And incidentally, gold spamming in LA seems far less common now than it was when I first started noticing it.)
Oh yeah, one more thing.
Checking Gem prices I find that I can sell 100 gems for 44g70s.
However buying Gems I find that if I spend 44g70s I get 72 gems.
They already gouged us for 800 Gems for $10, now they have to gouge us on the gold exchange as well?
Tell me this economy is not fouled up.
Having a different rate depending on which direction you’re exchanging currency really isn’t that strange or fouled up, considering that every currency exchange in the world does things the same way.
A 20% named exotic chance could mean named exotics are a higher tier, but couldn’t it also simply mean that 20% of all possible level 80 exotics are named?
There’s also the fact that, since gems-to-gold is still not a good rate, most of the people who are buying gems aren’t doing so to get gold, but rather simply to get things in the gem store (extra slots, boosters, etc.) Their purchases therefore don’t have an impact on the gem/gold rates, because their gems aren’t really part of the supply available to buy with gold.
No, it can’t ever just be demand, because if sellers refused to supply it at a loss, there wouldn’t be any for sale at a loss and buyers would have to either buy for a higher price than they want, or put up a price the sellers do not wish to accept.
The situations are exactly symmetrical, in other words (apart from taxes, but that just means sellers shouldn’t accept prices as low as they sometimes do).
10 levels per craft is the ideal situation, but in practice it will be a bit less because whatever item pushes you to a new player level has its xp calculated as a percentage of the previous level, which is therefore a smaller percentage of the next level. It is also possible to get more than 10 levels either (I think) by using crafting boosters or (definitely) by starting below level 15, because you level faster through the first 15 than you do afterwards.
Actually, yes, plenty of people are doing that. They’re just doing it slowly and meticulously.
And overcutting drives them up.
I know I could try this myself, but I’m lazy so I’ll just suggest it instead: If you have multiples of something in your bag, you can split up the stack to fill your inventory and then the TP will only give you one of the items for pickup (though I have no idea whether it’d be top or bottom on the list). This is a lot of trouble, of course, and it would be nice if the TP just let you pick up selected items instead of all or nothing.
For cash, I doubt they’d bother changing the options, since if you want other characters to have it just deposit the excess in your bank and then withdraw it when you’re on with a different toon.
Icarium.586360 attempts now with lvl 80 rare staffs. 12 total exotics, 2 of which were named, and 0 precursors. So far I’ve been able to support all of it by selling the exotics I get, but it sounds like I should maybe be putting them in the forge, too.
Think of it this way:
If you sell instead of putting them in the forge, you only have a net loss of your time, with some very small chance of getting a precursor.
If you put them in the forge, you have a slightly higher chance of getting a precursor, but you also have a much higher chance of losing all the money you invested instead of just the time.
That could still mean the top 5% most dedicated rather than the top 0.01%.
When have I or anyone else ever said that? I think I saw the number 5% thrown about a bit, which in case you’re bad at math is fully 500 times more people than 0.01%.
I already explained to you how such anecdotes are irrelevant, because dozens or even hundreds of examples still only account for 0.01% or less of the total user base.
Every time someone tries to get a precursor from the forge, it’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UeWUd6ldBo
Every time? Uh, no. The fact that precursors definitely exist mean it can’t possibly be something that happens every time. People might take you a smidge more seriously if you stopped with that sort of ridiculous exaggeration in every single post you make about this topic.
Anecdotes can’t cover the “significant numbers” part of my question, since with a couple million players, even hundreds would only be about 0.01%, which isn’t what I’d generally consider “significant”. (Nor, I suspect, would a problem that led some hundredths of a percent of players to quit be enough to move an issue right to the top of ANet’s priority list.)
Do you have evidence to back up your claim that bad luck is making players quit the game permanently? In any kind of significant numbers?
Here's the thing about "getting" a legendary, give or take 3 years.
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
I have gotten a royal flush at least 5 times during my lifetime, 4 of which were for money stakes, and 1 of which put me under physical threat. And I still refuse to gamble on the Mystic Forge’s stupid Korean RNG of a precursor recipe. That should tell you everything you need to know about how obnoxiously insulting the current system is to the user’s time and dignity.
No, that just tells us all we need to know about your ability to understand odds.
And we already knew how you felt about the “Korean” random number generator, since you post about it in every single thread about legendary precursors.
Yeah, no external force would need to tell us how to set prices in order to avoid inflation. They could change gold sink prices quite easily, raising them if inflation is too high, lowering them if we start to see deflation. Price ceilings and floors may make sense when we’re talking about essential goods and services like (real-world) drinking water, but they definitely don’t apply to anything in the fictional world of GW2.
And it’s not like gold farmers just magic their gold into the game from nowhere. That gold is already in the game, whether they then sell it to someone else for real money or not.
Finally, you can’t call it hyperinflation unless/until we see precursor prices continue rising past the point where they probably should be, given the costs that go into making them.