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).
I believe there is a very good reason why and it seems like you probably missed this. Any item that appears in the world and is looted by a player and then sold does one of two things depending on where it is sold. If it sold to a player then the item remains spawned. If it is sold to a vendor then it despawns after the player has elected not to buy it back. This reduces the overall availability of items of all types if selling to a vendor is the most frequent decision. So there are two things that this system has done to discourage the loss of useful items to vendor sales.
Why would they want to discourage that? These items keep popping into the world (through crafting and loot), so presumably they think it’s a good idea for at least some fraction of them to promptly disappear back out of the world, whether that’s through salvaging, Mystic Forging, or selling to a vendor. If too many pile up in the world, they become truly worthless, and no one will buy them on the TP for any price. We’d just see more and more items with ever-increasing piles of seller listings at whatever the minimum permitted price is.
From a buyer’s perspective this is also desirable because the system keeps supply higher and thereby balances out the high potential price any seller could ask for the item on the TP. That is why buyers should be and are required to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit. It lets sellers profit, it keeps the average price of items lower by increasing item supply, and it keeps useful items in the world for players to experience and enjoy. Win-win-win.
No. The hard minimum is not a win for buyers. Keeping supply high and prices low is only a win if those prices are actually allowed to reach equilibrium. They never will when there’s a hard minimum in place. (And again, I think the reason for the minimum isn’t to guarantee seller profit, but rather to prohibit buyer profit by immediately vending anything they get on TP below vendor price.)
Actually, I am going to go ahead and add this on as a suggestion. To avoid having unmovable items on the TP, which constitutes an item which does not tend to sell even at the minimum listing, the TP should have some kind of tracking which calls for item review after significant failure. So that a minimum listing with no sale notifies the team after a certain amount of time and can be looked at to evaluate its desirability and usefulness.
None of those items are useless. They just aren’t useful enough for people to pay more than the absolute minimum for them. And that will always be the case unless they get rid of mid-level whites, blues, and greens entirely. Which seems like an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Just farmed the same 5 mithril nodes in Cursed Shore twice in less than 3 hours – so much for the 24 hour respawn rate huh?
Perhaps you got lucky and found some glitched nodes, because I think the official patch notes said 24 hours for all of them.
I know the normal approximation for a binomial distribution isn’t accurate at the ends of the relevant interval, but I didn’t feel like doing the extra math.
@Paladine:
Firstly, yes, the first quest absolutely does level you up to 2. I have done this on 5 characters, and it happens every time (it levels you up exactly to 2, it seems, so gives less XP if you managed to get more XP during the first quest). Second, yes, it works a bit differently up to level 15, so I believe you when you say you leveled 1 craft up to 400 and got 15 levels. (You got a bit less, actually, since you started crafting a bit above 2 — since you leveled to 2 in your first quest and discovered a few waypoints on your way through Lion’s Arch to the crafting stations.)
However, if you took up another craft now and leveled it up to 400, you would get at most 10 levels exactly (a bit less, as mentioned, because the number of XP for each item that dings you to the next level is determined as a percentage of the previous level, and is thus slightly low). So yeah, you could level up 7 crafts all the way and the 8th would get you to level 80 by the time you hit 300. But it’s definitely not 15 levels per craft for anyone who starts above level 2, and it’s definitely not 1/8 of the XP needed to get to 80, since pretty much all experience in this game is calculated as a fraction of level (whether it’s you or your foe or the event or the instance you’re doing).
Regarding probabilities:
If I log on now and do 100 conversions, there is about a 1 in 40,000 chance of never getting an exotic, assuming the probability is 10% each time. So if 40,000 people do this, we’d expect at least one of them to get no exotics. And since it’s really kittening annoying to have that happen, we’d expect people who got 0 or 1 or 2 exotics to post here more often than the equally uncommon people that got 18 or 19 or 20. Because even though those numbers are about as unlikely as 0-2, it probably doesn’t feel as lucky as getting 0-2 feels unlucky.
But yeah, if you did 200 in a row with nothing, that’s suddenly the much more striking probability of 1 in 1.4 billion, and it would indeed suggest that something strange was going on.
@Lucubration
I don’t need to look at some external web site, I can look at my purchases right there in my client and see exactly what I have been paying since the game launched. I can check my Fiancée’s purchases too and see the exact same rates.
You’re aware that your “things I’ve bought” tab doesn’t always have the correct timestamp, right? Personally, I’m far more willing to trust gw2spidy or guildwarstrade, which checks prices and volume every 15 minutes or so, 24/7, than some random dude on a forum.
Well the problem with these 1c bids is they lower the overall average listing price of the item.
How does it do that? What possible effect do unfulfillable orders have on prices 10x higher?
It’s not like anyone actually compares supply and demand directly before placing an order, they just look at where the price is currently.
As an update, I took artificing from 187 to 376 for a total cost of a bit under 60s (after selling back untradeable potions, that is). Since low-level mats are still a bit disproportionately expensive, I’d currently guesstimate maybe twice that to start all the way from 0.
Buyers can no longer bid below vendor price, they just haven’t cleared out previously existing unfulfillable orders.
And why should buyers be required to bid high enough for sellers to make a profit? If sellers want to make a profit, shouldn’t it be their own responsibility to avoid selling too low?
Most of the greens and nearly all of the blues that sit there with tons of sell listings 1c above vendor price don’t sell very quickly at all. If they raised the minimum, they’d move even more slowly, with the added cost of a higher listing fee for the higher price. Now you’d have an unsellable item you paid 5.75% of vendor price to list, instead of one you only paid 5% of vendor price to list.
Flipping a coin has two potential outcomes.
…
10 samples is not nearly enough for establishing a trend when there are 150+ potential outcomes.
When the potential trend being suggested is diminishing returns, though, the outcomes are again reduced to just two: below the last one or above it (plus a small chance of the same number, for the discrete case we’re discussing here).
Suppose I only ever do two consecutive conversions at a time, and wait long enough between each pair to make sure there’s definitely no DR effect remaining. Suppose also that every time, the second conversion gives fewer materials than the first one. Now we’re basically back into coin-flip territory, albeit with varying probability depending on where the first conversion is on the relevant interval.
If we had DR in Salvaging or the Mystic Forge, we would tell you, just like we told you about the DR in other areas of the game.
Thanks for your prompt reply to this issue, and for the reassurance that DR doesn’t exist on the Forge. For the record, I don’t think the OP or (most) others in this thread thought this was some secret attempt to sneak DR into other areas of the game, hence the “glitch?” in the thread title. It was more a concern that there might be some kind of bug in which intentional DR in one area had unintended DR effects in another.
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When the undercut sale listing gets close enough to the highest existing buy offer, impatient players will just sell directly to that buyer. And the same thing would happen in reverse, so I’m not sure why we’d expect this to push prices consistently in one direction.
Do you know for sure that that is, in fact, how it works? It shouldn’t be difficult to test with fast-moving items like copper or iron ore, but have you actually done such tests?
supposedly a stack of the highest quality harvest tool that actually returns “ruined ore etc”.
Yeah, and it’s especially annoying when the tool doesn’t tell you what tier it actually is. I’d be fine with like a “higher chance of rares iron axe”, because then at least I’d know what I was getting and wouldn’t waste uses on the wrong kind of trees. (Because apparently cheap metals can only cut young plants?)
I have converted literally over 200 stacks of silver into gold usually in bulk (30-50 stacks at a time). My running average was 250 silver > 89 gold. If I break them down into sub groups of 10 the averages typically range from 85-95 with no noticeable decline especially not towards the bare minimum (40 gold).
So I am highly speculative of your claim that the mystic forge is being affected by DR.
Were these conversions done recently and consecutively?
I’ve done 5 consecutive conversions each of the past two days, and on each day there was a monotonic downward trend in the number of resulting materials I got out of it. I know 10 trials isn’t fantastic for statistics, but it does make me wary of continuing to do them several at a time, unless/until someone else verifies that they’ve done a lot of conversions one after the other within the past couple of days and saw no DR.
Any trend derived from fewer than 100 unbiased data points is sheer garbage from a statistical analysis standpoint.
You definitely don’t always need at least 100 trials to get statistical significance. If I flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads each time, I will start to doubt that it’s a fair coin, because that has only 1/1024 chance of happening with a fair coin. It’s not proof, of course, but it’s a reject-the-null-hypothesis situation with 99.9% confidence.
I’d agree that you need a sample size about that large if you’re sampling from a bigger population (50 patients in each arm of the study is a good rule of thumb for preliminary clinical trials), but that’s not exactly what’s happening here.
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Oh I’m not suggesting switching back and forth repeatedly. Does anyone actually do that?
To many players are botting for what they want .Why would they pay you when they can set back and watch some tv and earn it the easy way .Bots have killed all crafting and the economy or all the know it alls who tell you they made 100’s of gold but what they didn’t tell you was they were in the game months before you and knew all the ins and outs before the game even started . Its is kind of like insider trading and know they want to rub all noses in it about how smart they are. Give us a break
Yes, there are bots in the game. However, I think midlevel blue and green crafted junk would not sell even if there weren’t any, for the simple reason that 25% of the population can make any given item, and most make more than they need, so there’s far more supply than demand for crafted goods.
Also, why would bots bother to craft anything? Crafting hasn’t been particularly profitable since the beginning, and I would have thought people make bots in order to get useful things in-game, such as gold and karma and items that actually sell for a reasonable amount.
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How is the “mess” of the TP what prevents mid-level things from selling? They don’t sell for a lot of money because there’s more supply than demand, and any trading system that didn’t result in low prices for that situation would be broken.
Except that each craft will get you 10 levels of xp, which for some people is evidently worth the 80s.
Thanks for this guide. My artificer character has fallen way behind in that since my other characters (and his other craft) have been using all the materials.
It should be noted, though, that putting this out there might reduce or remove the profitability from what it was for the OP, since more people will be buying the same mats to make the same potions, so mats will go up and potions will go down in price.
But still, even if the price doubles or triples, it looks to be more affordable in terms of both time and money than leveling up with insignias and weapons and suchlike.
It appears that Strill is only willing to stop using magic find if everyone is forced to stop using magic find.
A very community-minded view, that.
That you are getting so kittened off by this discussion does not mean I’m trying to do that. I’m asking for an explanation to justify your claim that bots are ruining the economy because you keep saying that, but have yet to provide adequate justification for it.
If you’re going to get upset because people who disagree with your reasoning are questioning it, you shouldn’t have made claims based on that reasoning in the first place.
Ok then what? What are you going to do about it? Nothing, absolutely nothing, because -you- can’t.
Hence, people here do -not- have to explain anything to you
I can do exactly as much about it as you can, though. So if my inability to actually effect change means I shouldn’t post here to ask for some stronger justification for your claims, your inability to actually effect change means you shouldn’t post here to complain about the problem in the first place.
I find it rather telling that, rather than actually providing the explanations I and others are asking for, you instead get really defensive about how you shouldn’t need to support your claims. Historically, this usually happens when someone doesn’t actually have any such support.
(And again, if the reason you shouldn’t have to explain yourself to me is because I can’t do anything about it, then why are you posting about it in the first place? You can’t do anything about it either, and contacting ANet works better through bug reports than through forum posts.)
If someone asks for clarification or for the logic that backs up claims and assertions then you should be able to present it. Otherwise, how are you coming to your claims? Just making them up?
See, your post is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. “Just making them up”? Do you seriously think people are just “making stuff up” then coming here and posting about it?
No man, people are trying to enjoy the game. Besides, I’ve noticed plenty of posters going into great detail to explain what they’re seeing, and then the same two or three critics keep picking at them and insulting them. It’s rude and it’s not helping.
Good job continuing to miss the point.
You mention some stuff you saw, and then proclaim that this means bots are ruining the economy. We don’t think you’re making up the stuff you saw, but we need more justification than your proclamation to buy the conclusion that bots are ruining the economy. If you are unwilling or unable to provide such justification, then there’s really no rational reason to believe your claim.
I was under the impression that you could only buy gems in lots of 800. Or do you mean you bought them with in-game gold?
The example I used for 10.5% profit was an item with 10c bids and 13c asks. Items at that price aren’t typically the ones that move slow or have high risk.
Which is why someone with 2g should prefer to invest in things with greater than 1% profit. Fortunately, something closer to 10% profit is fairly easy to come by for cheap items (buying at 10c and selling at 13c gives 10.5% profit after fees and taxes). Repeat that 7 times and you’ve just about doubled your money. Not a bad deal, I’d say, given how fast items move at those prices.
If you read the post you would see I asked for them to -either- charge the listing fee after sale -or- allow us to edit our prices.
Yes, but the “or” is irrelevant, because I responded specifically to the idea of charging the fee only after a successful sale.
If I want to store an item, and won’t have to pay any fee unless it sells, I’ll just list it for 100g and then cancel that listing and grab the item when I get back to a city. Currently, trying to do the same thing would be an incredibly stupid way to waste 5 gold.
How is it trolling to point out the negative consequences of your suggestion?
A lot of money, too. The top buy orders, last I checked, were for multiple gold, likely put there by someone who thought it was funny (or someone who thought to hide their actual wealth by tying a bunch of it up in the TP). The joke will be on them if suddenly lemons stop being account bound, and the first person to take advantage of this gets tens or hundreds of gold for just a few handfuls of the things.
I’ve seen a lot of places online where people have done SCIENCE on things like magic find and salvage kits, to figure out the actual rates that different things drop and such. I was wondering whether something similar has been done with Mystic Forge recipes that give a random quantity of a known item.
In the section on promoting common crafting materials, the wiki says only, “The number of materials you get out varies with the tier of materials in the process.” But how does it vary? Does it go up with tier, or down? Are there diminishing returns after repeated uses of the same promotion recipe (as there appeared to be the 5 times I did silver -> gold), or was that just bad luck? Do any other factors apart from the tiers of the materials have any effect on how many you’ll get?
The fine materials section gives a range (5-12) of how many of the upgraded item you’ll get, and the dust section speculates that it’s 10-50 and then lists the result from one single attempt (18).
I know I could run the experiments myself, but that would be a pretty expensive thing to do if someone else has already done it.
Whether or not ANet fixes the effective exchange rate is independent of whether or not I’m correct about where the gold and gems come from.
Do you know what the word “extortion” really means? What threat is ANet leveling against you to coerce you to pay the listing fee each time you post a listing, exactly?
If the fee were just computed along with the tax, people would use the TP as a bank far more than they already do (I was surprised that anyone did this, but some other posters verified it). If it doesn’t cost me anything to do so, I’d list this new bit of armor that dropped (but which I can’t wear for a few levels yet) for some ridiculous price, and then cancel the listing when I’m ready to wear it.
My point was that your pessimistic prediction for the gold cost of gems corresponds to a rather optimistic prediction for the gem cost of gold. Sure, botters may still be able to undercut that, but in one sentence you talk about how amazingly cheap $1 per 1g is compared to ANet’s prices (presumably meaning you think ANet’s prices should be lower), and in another you complain about how amazingly expensive gems are going to become eventually (which means ANet’s prices will become as low as current gold seller prices are).
Do you see the contradiction there?
Anyone that needed to buy Gold for gear or repairs would be insane to use the ArenaNet ‘closed’ currency exchange system to buy Gems for RL$ and then trade them back to ArenaNet for Gold
You don’t trade them back to ANet for gold, you trade them to other players for gold. All the gems in the game were bought with real money, and all the gold in the game comes from in-game sources like vendors and events and drops.
I suspect if people keep playing the game the in game gold trade into gems will be around 40 or 50 per gold. Its around 225 right now, and has been declining steadily for a month.
You are aware that both prices fluctuate together, right? So if 1g gets you 40-50 gems, it will mean something around 60-70 gems will give you 1g, which is less than $1 per gold. When gold-to-gems gets worse, it improves the situation for people who have gems and want gold, and vice versa.
Bots do affect AH, but not as much as you imagine and not always in “bad ways”.
Yeah, a lot of the examples given of alleged bots are cases where the bid-ask spread gets closed very quickly. Which is fantastic for the people who are just looking to buy and sell items instead of using the TP to milk out a profit.
If you allow vendor-price or even sub-vendor buy orders, while preventing sell listings below vendor+15%+1c, then the people who don’t care about making a profit will just sell directly to those buy orders, and your junk sitting there at vendor+15%+1c will continue never to sell. Except now you paid an extra 0.75% listing fee to put it there.
Unless we record this by video and post it to youtube where someone can hack another email account on us, there is no proof in what we’re saying.
You missed the point. Even if your direct observations are 100% true, you have yet to provide compelling evidence that the TP-based ones are definitely caused by bots, or that bot activity on the TP is significantly impacting the economy.
Sure, maybe it is, but you haven’t yet given sufficient reason for the rest of us to believe it.
If supply exceeds demand, it drives prices down. That’s why those prices are all lower than you would like.
And if the minimum goes up, it definitely won’t satisfy everyone. People looking to buy those things obviously like low prices, and might even prefer if the minimum was abolished entirely, so prices drop to whatever level actually fits with supply and demand.
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It does tell you you can’t place an order at or below vendor price. They just haven’t (yet) removed old orders at those prices.
So you’re saying the bot responds to your order but hasn’t for the previous several hours where the spread was holding?
As far as I know, aren’t orders still stored in chunks of 250? As in, the only way to monopolize 100k consecutive items is to get all 400 listings in without a single other person making an order.
Yes, guys, I get that lots of bots could have significant effects on the economy. What Obi has yet to demonstrate is that the current number of bots is sufficient for doing this. Just like I know printing currency has an effect on the real economy, but merely showing that there are some counterfeiters isn’t the same as showing they are actually manipulating the economy in any nationally noticeable way.
Come up with all the individual examples you want, no individual example is proof that bots are ruining the economy. Nor are individual item prices, since the economy as a whole and its health involve more than just a handful of really high-end items.
If someone prints counterfeit money and buys a lot of Ferraris with it and their price doubles or triples, is that really a sign that the auto industry is being “controlled by” counterfeiters?
So let’s look at a snapshot of some low end crafting items in the AH and see if we can spot the bots and how they affect the economy. These were the top 5 sellers in each category I sampled
How exactly can you be sure that those are items listed by one seller?
Hint: they’re not. That’s the total number of items available at each price point. With a couple million people playing the game, each could list a single piece of copper ore to give those numbers. At least some of the other people have pointed to actual evidence of actual bots, based on what the toons themselves are doing. Just looking at the number of items available at a given price tells you exactly nothing about the economic effects of bots in the game.
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Simply knowing that there are bots out there farming, and selling gold is all the proof you need my friend.. Is it not?
No, it really isn’t. Knowing there are some bots isn’t at all the same as knowing they are having a significant impact on the economy.
Not minding the 15% loss isn’t even a little bit the same as not caring at all about what one gets for it. You’re suggesting people who are currently satisfied with 85% of vendor price should instead be willing to part with it for 0% of vendor price.
Do you not see how ridiculous that is?
cizca for you luck is “hard work”? are you kidding right?
Getting enough stuff to dump into the Forge until you’re lucky enough to get the item you want is hard work, yes.
I would also like to point out that at present:
To sell 2x Gems, will net you 36c
To buy 2x Gems will cost you 1.09s
Um, where are you getting those numbers? As far as I can tell, there has never been a 3-fold difference between buy and sell prices for gems. In the past five days, the highest price to buy 100 gems has been 47s, and the lowest amount of money you could get for 100 gems was 26s. And those weren’t even at the same time, since buy and sell prices move exactly in sync at all times.
While there must be a physical hard limit on the number of orders it’s possible for the system to store at any particular time, I somehow doubt anyone is actually finding that they can’t place a new buy order because the servers are full up with unfulfillable 1c orders.
I love that we have people on the one hand saying to get rid of the hard minimum price limit, so the market can be more free, and in other threads there are folks whining that it’s possible to sell for vendor+1c, because they are unable to profit at that price.
If people are unhappy with the current situation from both directions, it’s probably about what it should be.
The more I think about it, the more sure I am that it must, at least mostly, go to healthcare. I have never been charged for a lifesaving procedure, even when I have a known pre-existing condition, such as being technically dead at the time.
(Yes, I’m still charged the waypoint fee, but that’s a separate system and can’t really be blamed on the high cost of healthcare, since it’s the same amount I would pay to use it in a perfectly healthy condition.)
There’s a “sweet spot” of cost at which they would have enticed almost everyone who is interested to buy those things. Lower than that spot would not net them any more sales (or not more than a miniscule amount), while higher than that spot is more than many (perhaps even most) are willing to pay. Somewhat higher is where I believe they currently are.
Yeah, I think ANet, like most companies, has not yet realized the phenomenon Steam discovered awhile ago: people really like sales and discounts. There have been a number of Steam games that, during one weekend of 75% or more discounts, have netted more profit than the entire year or however long the game had been up for sale prior to that. I’ve bought literally dozens of $2-$5 games that I haven’t even downloaded yet, for the primary reason that it only cost $2-$5, so why the heck not?
I suspect the prices that would actually net them the most profit are significantly lower than most companies expect, for most digital content.