Guild Wars 2

I will sometimes undercut significantly on items with a large bid-ask spread, because such a large spread (especially with only a few orders on either side) means the item isn’t moving very quickly. If the highest buy order has been roughly the same for a week or more, and there’s a big gap between that and the (wildly fluctuating) lowest sell listing, I’ll conclude that the highest buy order is actually closer to the price the market will support for the item, and sell closer to that than to the lowest existing sell listing.

Keep in mind that the only way to undercut by 5g is if there’s a gap even larger than that between the next lowest sell listing and the highest buy listing.

Deagon Droga.1637:

At the rate things are going there will very soon be market shortages as people figure out that crafting is a waste of their time, effort, and money.

This will never happen, because if items start becoming scarcer, without a simultaneous drop in demand, prices will go up. In fact, that is probably exactly what will start to happen once people have mostly leveled up their crafts and begin making things for profit instead of for XP. They will look at what’s selling for more than cost, and they will make a few more of those things to sell for profit.

But as things currently stand, people seem to expect profit from whatever they craft, and so they craft without thinking, and tend not to make money on average. Guess what: if you try to sell something without first checking whether it’ll make you a profit, chances are you won’t make a profit.

There’s quite a bit of disagreement already about how much effect bots are currently having on the economy, so I doubt this thread would be any different. Folks who think bots are ruining the economy will think removing them is going to make prices go back to how they were weeks ago. Folks who think bots are having no significant impact on the economy will think removing them is going to continue having no significant impact on the economy. Folks in between will predict something in between.

Personally, I’m one of those in between folks. I think bots are driving some prices down with oversupply, but they’re not the sole cause of declining prices over the past week or two. Supply and demand among regular completely legitimate players has also been changing over time, naturally leading to changes in the same direction as we’ve seen them going recently. They may have changed faster due to botting, but I don’t think by all that much. Players are probably having a significantly greater effect than bots still, at least for the time being.

Vicariuz.1605:

So we should completely forgo attempting to craft them ourselves, and leave our only option, MORE GRINDING, as the route required for a legendary precursor.

I never said what you should do. Slic said, “The precursor should be something you are guaranteed to get, if you have . . . enough gold.” And it is something you are guaranteed to get if you have enough gold.

zippo burntfur.9307:

When i watch video’s of people tossing 100’s of rare or exotic weapon’s into the forge for a chance at a precursor, and get nothing except maybe a named exotic or 2. I personally don’t consider that fun.

Well there’s lots of other stuff on YouTube. I’m sure you could find something to watch that you consider fun.

But more seriously, if you don’t consider gambling fun, then don’t gamble. The point is that Lindsey is 100% correct that it can be fun and exciting “at times”.

You don’t have any control over what a mob drops either, is my point. (And yes, you lose time if you kill a lot of mobs without anything nice. Which is actually pretty important, since time is the limiting factor that pretty much runs the GW2 economy.)

You missed my point about the gold, even though I thought I explained it right there in the same sentence:

It is, right now, 100% possible for you to get any precursor you want if you have enough gold, because you can buy them directly off the TP.

Incidentally, at what probability does an RNG suddenly become “Korean”?

Archer.6485:

That’s actually a genious idea! o.O

Your exotic weapon should have it’s own xp bar and achievement system. As you slay monsters with it the xp bar grows but you also need to fill up it’s achievement list by using it to slay unique monsters around the world (Shatterer, Tequatil, dungeon bosses etc.) and once you do all that your mighty weapon that has been your companion for so long through thick and thin gains the precursor status which gives you the option to turn it into a true Legendary weapon.

Make it happen Anet!

Yeah, that’s a pretty fantastic idea, actually.

Vicariuz.1605:

Hippocampus.8470:

Haha, no.

The current rate at which the forge hands over precursors is hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than the likelihood of not getting a single precursor after a billion tries.

What I don’t get about all the RNG complainers is how this is any different from the rare drops off specific bosses needed to make the best weapons in WoW.

No kitten, it’s an enormous sample size, it’s being used to show that despite however many attempts you calculate is the drop rate, its not fact, because it’s RNG, you are not going to get a precursor every exact # of swords you use, EVER. And you and your friends are simply writing it off like it doesn’t matter.

You and others seem to be complaining about the RNG as though simply being randomized is the fundamental problem. But that’s true of pretty much everything you do out in Tyria. Whether a mob has any drop is random. Whether it’s a usable drop is random. Whether it’s a profitable drop is random. You are no more guaranteed to get a drop from any given mob than you are to get a precursor from any given Mystic Forge attempt.

If your complaints were focused on how low the probability apparently is, I could sympathize. But so many people are complaining that it’s a probability at all, thus completely disregarding all the other things that are as well.

I thought this game was supposed to be everything the other mmos weren’t, and here you are saying it’s no different than WoW.

I only brought up WoW because there were a couple people on the last page who said they preferred how WoW did legendaries. Which seemed silly to me because I can’t tell how the specific RNG aspect most people are complaining about is significantly different.

You’re never guaranteed a drop from any mob you kill no matter how many attempts you make. That doesn’t mean anything is intrinsically broken.

Rodarin.6058:

Because most of them got their seed money form exploits and cheating and now can sit back with the holier than thou attitudes because they got one over on ANET who let them all back in with the promise they would delete their ill gotten gains, which none of them did.

This is such utter crap. If you don’t want the people making money on the TP to think the rest of you are whiny morons, you should probably cut out this sour grapes nonsense where you accuse them all of being exploiters or botters or gold farmers or whatever.

And yeah, as someone responded to the same challenge in another thread: buy low, sell high. It’s up to you to figure out which items allow for that at which times, but just note that it’s almost never the highly-traded stuff that shows up on the first page of the TP.

What you probably won’t like to hear is that it actually takes a significant amount of work to do well, more or less on par with playing the game in a more “traditional” way by fighting mobs and running dungeons and suchforth.

Stuff that sits for awhile before selling at vendor+1c will just sit for a lot longer if it’s required to be higher than that. That stuff is cheap because it has more supply than demand. (Also note that vendor+15% is still a loss, because net revenue on 115% of something is 97.5% after the fee and tax.)

Slic.2406:

The precursor should be something you are guaranteed to get, if you have the right mats, enough gold or are simply l33t enough

You can get it if you have enough gold. Most (all?) of the precursors are on the TP, after all.

Slic.2406:

I’m sure if you look hard enough, you can find plenty of videos on youtube that show dumping dozens of exotics into forge and being left with 1 exotic at the end that’s not even worth 3g.

Yeah, but I’d expect the same thing even with a much higher drop rate from the Mystic Forge.

Suppose the rate for level 80 exotics was 10% per attempt (which would be absurdly high and make precursors far too easy to get, not nearly on par with the other things required for a legendary). Then we should expect about 3 people out of a million to make 120 attempts (i.e. 480 exotic weapons) and still get nothing.

These people would subsequently be far more likely to tell everyone about how extraordinarily unlucky they were than the people who had much more typical results and got it after 10 or 20 tries.

So forgive me for not finding videos of the unluckiest players to be particularly convincing.

Haha, no.

The current rate at which the forge hands over precursors is hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than the likelihood of not getting a single precursor after a billion tries.

What I don’t get about all the RNG complainers is how this is any different from the rare drops off specific bosses needed to make the best weapons in WoW.

@ Vicariuz.1605 :“It could easily be 100,000 for some people.”

No, it couldn’t. While it is technically possible to be 100k for someone, the likelihood of that happening is 3.5×10^-44. For comparison, this is about the same likelihood as shuffling a deck of 38 cards repeatedly (to completely randomize it), and then discover that it is in fact perfectly in order. Calling this “easily” possible is a ridiculous misuse of the word “easily”.

@ Paladine.6082 : “375G is the equiv of 3000 rare items not 1000 making the pre-cursors currently 3x over priced as I said to you just this morning but you failed to either read or comprehend or both.”

I read it and comprehended it just fine. I chose to ignore it because you’re wrong. The level 80 rare greatswords currently available on the TP are all between 20s and 40s, so 1000 of them are worth between 200g and 400g. Where are you getting this idea that an 80 rare is worth only 12s50c?

Actually, yeah, having a soulbound random drop required for certain high-level items would likely have the same pricing effect as a cooldown, but would make more in-game sense (this thing required literally 2 seconds to make, and it used up all the materials needed to make it. What, exactly, needs to “cool down”?).

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I don’t know why the TP doesn’t work like in every other MMO ever made…

Because the TP in a lot of other mmo’s is crap?

I think one of the biggest problems right now is that people don’t ever take items off the TP because there is NO way to recover the listing fee. This means items just sit there, and as soon as they are undercut they sit there forever and never sell.

If players want to waste money this way (by leaving it tied up as unselling items on the TP), I really don’t see why it should be ANet’s responsibility to help them out by automatically refunding them after a time limit (3 days is ridiculously too short, btw, especially for the really rare items).

If I’ve listed 1000 copper ore at 20c and notice that the price has moved below that, there is a way to recover the listing fee: cancel the listing and repost them at a price that will sell. My listing cost me 10s and 1000 copper ore. If they will never sell at this price, I will forever be out of those. If I repost them at 15c each, then I’m still out the original 10s and 1000 copper ore, but when they sell I get 127.5s after fees and taxes.

Being up 1g17s50c looks a lot better from where I’m sitting than being down 10s, but maybe that’s just me.

In other words, I’m another one of these jerks who thinks there isn’t a problem currently, apart from whatever effect bots are having (and not because this effect is necessarily bad for the economy, which has yet to be adequately demonstrated by any of the people complaining about it, but rather because bots are bad for other reasons).

It’s my understanding that throwing anything level 75 rare or below into the Mystic Forge is not a good way to get a precursor, since the drop rate for those is so low.

Fabsm.5897:

The real reason that we cannot make money on crafting is the “unlimited time posting” of the TP. People keep putting Buy orders within 1c of the vendor price because they can and is not costing anything to do it. The orders keep piling on, and price is “low”.

When “normal” sellers go see what their object is worth… they often go with the buy order price, because they (justly) think that if they put a “good” selling price they won’t sell them and they will lose even the 5% fee and have to relist.

This is only true for items sitting significantly above vendor price, and with a sizable gap between the highest buy order and the lowest sell listing. Quite a lot of the mid-level crafted items don’t have any (fulfillable) buy orders, because the only sell listings that move are the ones at vendor+1c, and so any buy order below that is meaningless.

Do you have any evidence that any of the buy orders are “fake”? Why on earth would they buy and sell just to their friends, at a 15% loss on each transaction?

The evidence we actually do have is that precursors are currently underpriced, based on the prices of what goes into making them. If it takes 100 level 80 exotics on average to get a precursor, precursors should cost about 100x as much as a level 80 exotic. If it takes 1000 or more level 80 rares, it should cost about 1000x as much as level 80 rares.

Several hundred gold, in other words.

I like the ideas of critical success (that results in higher stats instead of just giving you some mats back or whatever it apparently does now) and cooldowns on high-level stuff. Cooldowns would be a pain in the rear while you’re trying to level up crafting, but they could make sense for level 400 recipes.

The problem with most of the things I’ve thought about for reducing supply or increasing demand is that many of them would have the same effect on materials prices as on finished product prices, so profitability wouldn’t actually be improved.

teviko.6049:

I understand that awhile back that there was just so much wood and not a need for it, but you’ve skewed it too far in the other direction.

Did they change this recently? I thought it always required 4.

No one has gotten screwed by the fact that precursors used to be much cheaper. Yes, some of those earlier sales were the results of exploits, but that’s not the main reason prices were so much lower. The main reason for such low prices was that 50g was a hell of a lot of money a month and a half ago. Regardless of how hard it is to get an item, if you price it higher than the amount of money anyone has, it won’t sell.

You admit defeat, and that somehow means I need to stop posting? How does that work, exactly?

It only assumes that when we’re talking about max level items. Which only level 80 characters can use. And probably most level 80 characters do have both crafts maxed or close to it.

And VendettaDFA, who I was responding to, suggested adding profitable crafting items at low levels, anyway.

Um, no. People get paid the big bucks to try and predict beforehand what prices will do. It doesn’t take big bucks for prices to move on their own, which they will tend to do according to the principles of supply and demand regardless of whether or not anyone is sitting there counting orders.

If there are a million orders for iron at 10c, and I want my iron without waiting for a million other orders to go through, I’ll be willing to pay 11c for them and will put up an order at that price. If I’m really impatient, I’ll buy the lowest sell listing. Enough people doing that gets rid of the listings for the current lowest price and moves them up one more. Ergo, if demand outweighs supply prices will go up. The same happens in reverse and prices go down (as with copper ore).

These things happen naturally and without anyone paying attention to the bigger picture painted by the market. They happen because people who use the market do so in order to make as much profit as quickly as possible.

There’s already a thread from someone who recently got Dawn.

And if it is indeed a thousand rares on average before getting a precursor, then I’d say 300g is just about exactly right. Anything lower means it’s underpriced.

Yeah, it’s not the TP that makes crafting unprofitable, it’s crafting.

Everyone can do every craft if they want (it’s not like anything is preventing anyone from rolling alts, after all), and there are reasons to level crafting apart from the items you create (namely xp). This means that every item discovered up to mastering the craft is worth a slight monetary loss, because that money is essentially exchanged for xp. Giving xp also provides an incentive for everyone to level up crafting, even if they don’t plan on using it heavily after they hit 400. Adding to that the fact that no recipe is particularly difficult to get, and you end up with way more supply than demand together with a large portion of suppliers willing to sell at a loss because they got non-monetary benefit from making the item in the first place.

How is the price of the precursors related to people who exploited earlier in the game?

You might have a point about revamping how precursors are made, but your suggestion wouldn’t lower the prices at all. Ectos have fallen to 15s now, and even supposing they fall further to 10s, a precursor for 10k of them would reasonably cost 1000g. And if it was a guaranteed way to make a precursor, the price probably wouldn’t fall that far.

As it is, several hundred gold makes sense, because by some accounts it seems you need to throw about 1000 level 80 rares into the Mystic Forge to get a precursor, and several hundred gold is about 1000 times the current price of most level 80 rares on the TP.

Rodarin.6058:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Buying gems with in-game gold is a good inflationary hedge.

Not if youre spending real life cash through Anet.

I’m pretty sure that’s not what “buying gems with in-game gold” means…

So having in game gold be worthless or next to it isnt anything new. But with a different crafting system, a trading post, and all the talk about an economy one would expect it to hold value for more than 6 weeks.

It still does have value. Just not as much as it started with, because there’s more gold in the game now. And if the amount of gold in the game didn’t increase over time, something would be seriously wrong. Would anyone even continue playing if they didn’t see their wealth gradually increasing?

Nerelith.7360:

Any discussion about " the real affects of botting in MMO economies" totally disregards that what is being discussed is a violation of the rules we agreed to follow when we signed on to the game.

Um… I don’t know if you’re reading the same thread I am, but the link at the top of the page I’m typing this in says the current forum is “Black Lion Trading Co” and the current thread is “Economy? What Economy?” I took this to mean that what is being discussed is the economy of the BLTC, perhaps including the real effects of botting in this particular economy.

Maybe that was just me, though? Please let me know if I’m in the wrong thread.

(Seriously, though, it’s like you came into a discussion on the economic impacts of counterfeiting and then loudly refused to discuss the economic impacts of counterfeiting because that’s beside “the point”, which is that counterfeiting is against the rules.)

Tolodine.6748:

The main point is that when this kind of stuff happens you will NEVER see it go down. It always just gets worse. The prices are set now and it will just keep going up. It will never cap. These are the people that ruin every in game sell and buy system I have ever seen (I refuse to call it an economy because it is the players setting the prices and not supply and demand).

Um, that is exactly how supply and demand work. It’s always just people setting prices (except for gold-gems, which ANet sets). And when the supply is higher, those people will be willing to sell cheaper. And when demand is higher, they’ll be willing to pay more.

Also, if prices do in fact keep going up, it’ll be because that’s how inflation works in an economy where gold gets added to the economy faster than the items to buy with it (which I suspect is what happens since items likely go to vendors or salvaging or the Mystic Forge faster than gold goes into sinks like waypoints and TP taxes). But I do find it pretty funny that your doom and gloom prediction is that all prices will rise indefinitely while on this same forum other people are predicting that all prices will eventually collapse to the bare minimum.

Especially when in reality neither of these things are actually happening.

I keep seeing people say that they are legendary items so they are suppose to be hard to get. If they are so hard to get then why do some people have 5 and 6 of them at a time? If it is so legendary you should only be allowed to have 1 of them at a time and it should actually be soulbound on pickup.

Would that make a difference? Does anyone sell the legendaries once they’ve made one? I’ve only ever seen the precursors up on the TP.

200 from using your entire harvesting tool on raspberries. But there are actually only 50 uses on a sickle, so 2 per plant would mean 100 per sickle. Which is still a profit!

Heck, even if you only get 1 per plant, 1.6s for the tool to get 50 raspberries. If they sell at 15c each, that’s 7.5s. Minus fees and it’s 6.45s. So at minimum, you’ve made 4.85s profit. Which isn’t terrible.

As I just posted in the crafting forum, if an item became profitable, the characters who can make it (which is 25% or so for most items, even without switching, with 8 crafts and 2 per character) would do so. This would drive up the demand for relevant materials, and drive up supply of finished items. Materials would therefore become more expensive, and the finished items would become cheaper, until eventually there’d be no more profit to be had.

(And really, while 25% of characters can craft a given thing, much closer to 100% of players can do the same, since presumably anyone who’s learned crafting on an alt learned a different one than their main has.)

Yeah, I suppose if people were willing to pay around $60 for keys in an attempt to get this, they should have just bought a second account and stored items in the mail when inventory fills up.

There is no such thing as “Account Soulbound”. There is “Account Bound”, which means any of the characters on your account can use it, and there is “Soulbound”, which means only that character can use it. It would be a lot easier to understand your descriptions if you kept these things clear.

As I’ve posted elsewhere, making markets server-only will reduce demand approximately as much as it reduces supply, so it won’t have any overall average effect on prices. They might go up on some servers and down on others, but the average would likely be the same as it is now.

And crafting will not be profitable as long as such a large portion of the players can craft any given item, even without switching crafts. If 25% of real-world people could buy the materials needed for a Ferrari, press a few buttons, and suddenly have a finished Ferrari, making Ferraris would stop being profitable, too.

If a particular item became consistently profitable, it would soon stop being so. This is because people would learn that craft or make that item in order to make money, creating a higher demand for the relevant materials and a higher supply of the relevant item(s). They would undercut each other on sale listings, because that’s what happens when there’s a lot of supply. They would overcut each other on buy offers, because that’s what happens when there’s a lot of demand. And pretty soon, no more profit.

Welcome to economics!

Nerelith.7360:

Anyone that tries to say " There is zero proof that bots are affecting the economy negatively" just make me question if maybe they themselves DEFEND bots because they themselves USE bots.

Kind of Like the guy that argues " Counterfeit Rolexes are so few, they do not affect the real Rolex market" may not be selling fake rolexes, but he may be wearing one.

This is completely ridiculous.

I’m a guy who would argue that counterfeit Rolexes do not significantly affect the real Rolex market, and I’ve never bought a nice wristwatch in my life. The reason I’d argue that has nothing to do with being defensive of my own actions, and everything to do with valuing logic and critical thinking. For example, my logic and critical thinking tells me that the vast majority of people who buy a “Rolex” for a few hundred bucks are not the same people who would ever pay full price even if the counterfeits didn’t exist.

Are you seriously going to try to silence anyone who disagrees with you about the impact of botting by accusing every one of them of running bots themselves? Are you seriously going to ignore the simple possibility that, thus far, we still haven’t seen any well-reasoned justification for the belief that bots are “ruining” the economy?

I mean, sure, it’s probably easier for you to engage in this sort of character assassination than it is for you to engage in some actual thinking, but it’s also a lot more kitteny of you.

Drunken Mad King.8193:

Actually, here is a system in which bots can make a huge impact on the game. Bots amass gold quickly and easily. Now even the exotic market is difficult to control… but where the control can happen quickly and easily is the Precursor weapons area. Buying up the limited amount of precursors and jacking up prices will then create demand for buying gold. Bots can be highly destructive by creating false pricing and market sways that create a demand for their services.

Yes, that is a way they could affect the market. However, as things currently sit a lot of precursors are still quite a bit too cheap given what goes into them. If it takes an average of a thousand rare weapons to get a precursor (which is a figure I’ve seen some people throw about, having thrown that many in and still seen nothing), we should expect the precursor to cost about a thousand times more than an average level 80 rare. Which means around 200-400g.

There is a known bug where the prices shown when you search for something often don’t match up at all to the actual current prices of that thing.

Even if the price really did change very quickly, there are reasons runs happen apart from “manipulation”.

Even if it is manipulation, that doesn’t mean it’s an exploit or a bot. A medium-sized guild could fairly rapidly change the price of some items just by buying up existing offers or, if they’ve stockpiled it, by selling quickly to the existing orders.

It’s not harder to implement from a programming standpoint. It’s just a lot harder to ensure that it tells you reliable information. The number bought/sold in a given amount of time is unlikely to change very quickly, whereas the price at which those transactions happen can go up or down by 1c in an instant. Sure, if you put up your listing while that price is the lowest (or make your custom bid while that’s the highest price), it’ll probably swing back to that point before it goes away forever, but there’s no real way to predict how long that would take.

To discover everything you go through more fine materials. This list is nice because the only fine material it requires is dust, which is generally the cheapest.

Also, any money saved trying to optimize it further is outweighed by the effort required to figure out what to purchase in what quantities and making sure you really have the cheapest combination and so on.

Daenji.5280:

Hmmm, okay, your comment does appear to involve something I had not calculated. You’re saying that demand could be low, supply could be very high, the price could be at the absolute minimum, and simply due to the large numbers of items the one that you are listing would take a long time to sell?

Yes, exactly. A lot of mid-level stuff has hundreds or a few thousand sell orders sitting at vendor+1c. At the rate I suspect many of those things sell, stuff has the potential to sit there for quite some time, simply because all those other sell listings have to be gotten through first.

I agree that an “estimated time to sell” notification would be nice, but would be hard to compute if you aren’t posting an order at a price that has been stable for awhile. More useful, I think, would simply be to know how many have sold in the past hour or day or week (depending on the item). Because knowing that 100,000 copper ore have sold in the past hour doesn’t mean your listing behind 600,000 others at 16c will sell in anything like 6 hours, if suddenly people start posting at 15c because copper is in higher supply than demand and has been slowly falling in price for awhile now. So I’d prefer to just be told the bare fact that 100,000 have sold in the past hour and be left to make my own estimates of how long my listing will take to sell.

Mog.1589:

Trading post UI is pretty bad overall. Its needs work no doubt.

However the transaction and listing fees are just too high atm in this market. The amount of available product and product being produced is higher then gold being produced in the market. So basically more players are trying to sell their product then players buying it. Result is what you currently get, overall net loss on the majority of products sold on the market.

Some products have higher supply than demand. Others have higher demand than supply. Neither of these things is a problem or a sign that fees and taxes are too high or too low.

The main recent decline has been to low-level crafting materials, which is the entirely predictable consequence of more and more people getting past the first tier or two of their chosen craft(s). Higher level things are starting to go up, with especially significant rises in the top two tiers as resource nodes were nerfed.

As you say, prices will only go up or down as far as people on the other side of the transaction let them go. So aren’t you yourself falling into the same trap you accuse others of? If prices are going up, it’s because buyers continue willingly spending money at higher prices. If they’re going down, it’s because sellers are willing to unload those items for less. Neither trend can be blamed in whole or even in significant part on those who take advantage of moving prices or wide bid-ask spreads to siphon off a bit of profit.

Cheap extra bank slots, convenient (as in anywhere in the world or instances or dungeons or whatever) vendor substitute, or a willingness to provide those items to other people who might find a use for them as cheaply as possible, all come to mind as possible reasons to make those listings.

That’s all very interesting, but no one is saying bots are good in general, or that we support what they do for society, or that they are having an overall helpful effect on the economy. We’re just not accepting, on basically zero evidence, some people’s claims that bots are having a significant enough negative effect on the economy to have “ruined” it in any sense of the word.

Yes, of course bots are against the TOS, they violate the spirit of the game, they make some events way less fun for legitimate players, they are part of a (real-money) economy that can be pretty hard on its workers, they often run on stolen or hacked accounts, and all sorts of other terrible things.

But exactly none of this actually means that they are a significant force behind any of the recent price changes on the TP, which is what people in this thread are primarily complaining about.

(Also, if you’re worried about sweatshops and indentured servitude, do you really think your clothes and food and computer and other physical goods were all produced by fine upstanding companies employing well-paid and fairly treated workers? Of all the good reasons not to support gold farmers, the mistreatment of the people doing the farming rings the most hollow, coming from basically anyone in a first-world country who had the money to buy this game and a computer to play it on in the first place.)

Daenji.5280:

You seem to have directed this comment as if you were describing specific items. Were you continuing to discuss items you described as being slow to sell from your earlier posts? I was not. I was advocating a function to be added to their tracking of items in the game. If they already have something like this that would be great. I’m only saying I can see its value to the team for evaluating whether an item needs to be updated or replaced and for watching data relative to stat usage and character builds.

It doesn’t matter whether I had any specific items in mind, because the argument works equally for all slow-selling items that have a number of very similar “competing” items, between which most buyers will always just choose the cheapest.

I’m also not sure how things are working on your server

All servers use the same TP.

Blue and green items don’t sell as well but I don’t feel like I can’t sell them for profit. A few items don’t sell well because of stat combos that few players would want. I’m imaging most of the whites, the blues, and some of the greens I sell are being salvaged.

Yeah, low-level whites sell for a lot because people use them to make low-level crafting mats that still sell for quite a bit. The same is likely true of any low-level blue or green that is also selling above vendor price.

I would become concerned when they don’t sell or the demand is very low. Then its time to ask the team to look at how useful these items are. An item no one wants either shouldn’t be in the game or should be designated as junk loot.

As I said (but apparently in a confusing way?) an individual item may not be “junk” and yet will not move at the minimum allowed price so long as there’s a large enough supply of similarly useful items to keep prices low.

But to take a more specific example, consider pretty much all low-level consumables. These do not sell quickly, even at the absolute minimum possible price. Because everyone makes far more of them than they will ever need, while leveling up their crafting. Would you seriously argue that therefore low-level consumables are “junk” that should be turned grey and only sold to vendors? Could it be instead that the suppliers are severely overestimating its value and as a result are putting far too many on the TP for sale?

@DomDeuce:
It would never close the gap smaller than 5% of the minimum sell listing. At that point, it’s cheaper to sell to the highest bidder than to make your own listing, so that’s what any rational person would do.

And as such, it wouldn’t really help sellers profit who are trying to make a profit, since those people will only sell directly to the highest bidder when that makes them as much as the lowest sale listing, which is how much they’d sell it for under the current system.

If you hope to reduce supply by making something server-only, keep in mind that you also reduce demand by a similar amount.

Well sure. The general point still remains, though, which is that there’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that ANet must want sellers to profit, because there are tons of alternative explanations, many of which make quite a bit more sense than that one.

A thousand samples could definitely be enough to give strong reason to reject the claim that the underlying probability hasn’t changed. If my 1000 trials before the latest update gave me 100 exotics, and my 1000 trials afterwards gave me only 50, that’s a decent reason to suspect that something changed. Because if it’s actually the same before and after, at least one of those results is more than 2.63 standard deviations from average. Which is typically considered statistically significant.

Of course, if I didn’t do those trials myself, and instead only notice that someone did and posted their results here, I should be more skeptical, because I have no information about how many hundreds or thousands of other people ran similar tests and got more “normal” results.

lackofcheese.5617:

Hippocampus.8470:

Daenji.5280:

The minimum listing price directly indicates the intent to require buyers to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit.

No, all it indicates to me is the intent to prevent people from buying low on the TP and then selling to vendors for profit (though admittedly that wouldn’t justify prohibiting vendor price bids, just the ones below vendor price).

Why would they care about that?

It’s not something I would have assumed they’d want ahead of time, but it certainly makes more sense than the other claim.

They want to give sellers a profit? Really? So they just, what, forgot that they charge 15% in taxes and fees?