It’s not an assumption that random number generation takes processor time.
Yeah, I know player laziness is why they’re willing to buy intermediate mats, but the effort of finding the item on the TP often exceeds the effort of clicking on it at a crafting station, so the relevant laziness is more about going out and finding the raw materials.
Crafting is and always has been worth 10 levels of XP per 400 levels of crafting. If you learn and then forget each craft in turn, you’ll get to level 80 without ever leaving your starting city.
Crappy crafted items sell for vendor+1c because they’re crappy and far more are created than desired.
Basic materials, on the other hand, will likely always sell for a profit because people are willing to pay gold for at least some of them instead of taking the time required to farm or gather everything they need for crafting.
And finally, as I and others have said many other places, GW2 is entirely playable and entirely enjoyable even if you avoid the BLTC and crafting completely. So even if the economy is irrevocably broken, what real harm does that cause you?
Because it only causes slightly more lag than the previous small-orders-first system. There are practical considerations as well as market freedom considerations.
What system would you recommend instead, which could be implemented at anything like the same speed we’ve come to expect from the TP?
I can’t imagine the intermediate crafting mats will ever actually sell above the cost of the raw materials to make them. The only people who have any use for glove panels are the same people who can make their own, so if raw materials are cheaper than intermediate materials, any rational crafter would just buy those instead.
Why would I buy a 3-plank rifle stock for more than triple the price of three planks?
The only crafting-related things I’d expect to ever sell above materials cost are the actual finished armor/weapon/jewelery/consumable products. Because then at least your market doesn’t consist entirely of people who are perfectly capable of making the exact same things themselves.
As a fairly simple example, when I see intermediate-stage crafting items (things like rifle stocks rather than finished rifles) listed for significantly more than the TP cost of the materials to make them, I know no one who’s thinking things through will actually buy them at that price. The only people who can use a rifle stock are people who could also make it from scratch, so the only reason one would ever sell on the TP is if it’s at least a bit cheaper than the number of planks needed to make it. So when I sold some the other day (having leveled up the Huntsman craft to the next tier, and seeing no point in filling a bank slot with an item I no longer have any need for), I undercut the previous listing by about 30%. Not because I don’t understand how profit works, but because I know no one will buy that particular item in a way that gives me a profit over materials cost, since if they’re willing to spend that much they’ll just by mats themselves.
I’m not saying you in particular aren’t using the terms correctly, so much as that I’ve seen a lot of people discussing supply and demand on this forum as though they were just single numbers rather than multidimensional functions of other things.
In any case, it occurred to me after finishing that post why we really shouldn’t be surprised at excess buy orders for an item that has just been falling in price:
Because it has just fallen in price, every single sale listing for prices at or just above the current minimum has been posted in the past few hours or, at most, days. Some of the buy orders, on the other hand, could have been sitting there for weeks, for all we know, since there’s no time limit and no doubt many predicted that copper ore prices would eventually fall from the ridiculous level they were at before.
So what would be truly shocking would be to see an excess the other way, with more sell orders posted at, say, 12c in the past day than there have been buy orders posted at 10c in the entire time since the TP went live and copper ore first rocketed up to the rather inflated price it sat at for so long.
The excess of bids over sell orders, in other words, is a consequence of what the price just has done, rather than an indication of what the price will (or “should”) do.
Edit: When you say “rapidly increasing”, would you care to provide specific numbers over time for buy and sell orders, to verify your claim that these are new bids you’re talking about are actually predominantly recent? That would certainly suggest that my account in the preceding paragraphs is incomplete at best, but at the same time I’m skeptical that it is indeed recent, since at least with iron ore (the one I’ve bought and sold more of than copper), there have been hundreds of thousands of orders piled up on either side of the current spread since I started trading.
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
If those numbers didn’t consistently represent a stronger demand than supply, copper ore wouldn’t be at the top of the demand list. It is an important factor in the context of this conversation, whether you agree with it or not.
No, you’re begging the question. Copper ore is at the top of the demand list because its position on the demand list depends only on how many current orders there are for it. (Including, incidentally, unfulfillable orders below vendor price or, in the case of lemons, for account-bound items.) Therefore, with that many orders, it will be at the top of the demand list, regardless of what those numbers “consistently represent”.
Also, it’s worth noting that when real economists talk about things like supply and demand curves, they’re talking about them as functions of price. They aren’t just static numbers representing the number of people who would be abstractly interested in having a particular item. A bunch of orders for copper ore at 10c or whatever indicates, at most, that there is a high demand for copper ore at that particular price. It doesn’t mean those same people would put in the same number of buy orders at a higher price, and therefore it doesn’t mean that the current price is lower than it “should be”.
If you have the item in your inventory, another easy way is to take off three times the listing fee.
Personally, I tend to just type in x * 0.85 or x / 0.85 into Google (where x is the appropriate number).
Yeah, that tpcalc site looks far more cumbersome than multiplying or dividing by 0.85, either on Google or on my phone, depending on which is handier at the moment.
Heck, for anyone used to figuring out 15% tips at restaurants, it’s not even that hard to do in your head.
Supply and demand are typically treated as functions of price, rather than as raw values. If no one buys something at 10s, then it means there is no demand for the item at 10s.
Because genius, bulk flippers aren’t going to look at a spread wall and say "hmmm, I could “maybe” make a profit now, or, I could work extra extra hard over the next week and raise the sell price". They’re going to flip when they can, and when the time to wait for a transaction allows the spread to close and stay closed, they will pull out their large buy orders at one price and go to the next lowest buy increment (because it’s free to do, whereas listing a sell order is not). I know this is challenging for you, but it’s really not that hard, I promise lol.
Being a condescending kittenhole doesn’t make you look smarter, fyi.
I flip items in bulk, and for currently marginless items I do so by placing sell and buy orders outside the current range and waiting. After all, with FIFO, everyone has to wait for the previous orders to go through, at every price point. So since there are already thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of buy orders at that lower point, and because by your own account this is greater for copper than the number of sell listings at points at or above the current minimum, you’re actually more likely to have your transaction go through quickly by placing sell orders above that minimum than by placing buy orders below the maximum.
You keep accusing me of not making an argument, giving proof, or showing logic, when I’ve given you darn near a book on it. Just because you -choose- to disagree with it, doesn’t make it a “sky-is-falling” conspiracy.
A book filled with repetitions of the same flawed logic is not the same as proof or a sound argument.
Also as a result of this ‘fix’ you can no longer buy chocolate bars and cinnamon sticks on the TP for 1c. As a result, way less people are buying it on the TP
You never could, because you can’t sell at or below vendor price. This isn’t a new development unless the fix changed the vendor price of some items.
YES I’m continuously using copper ore as an example, BECAUSE it has been the #1 TOP DEMANDED ITEM, while RARELY the #1 TOP SUPPLIED on the TP, for weeks, while the price has continued to fall. Seriously, would you like me to use colored blocks to prove my point?
If using colored blocks also signals your moving away from the same flawed reasoning you’ve been using, I welcome it.
Copper prices are falling because they’d previously been inflated since the start of the game by all the demand among low-level crafters. It is the easiest ore to get and the least useful once you’re out of the bottom level bracket, so it’s really not a surprise that the price would fall. Sure, the recent increase in the rate at which it’s falling may be the result of properly enacting FIFO, as all the people with giant bulk orders sitting there finally had those go through fairly quickly, but people have expected this drop for weeks.
And yeah, counting custom orders only gives you have the picture, because most people don’t sit at the market flipping copper, but instead just one-click buy or sell at the prices already listed. Every single transaction on the trading post involves one party that sets a custom price and another party that accepts that price. So looking only at the custom prices and not the rate at which they’re accepted cannot possibly give you the complete picture.
What is an item “supposed” to be worth, separate from what people actually reliably pay for it?
Yes, I know how to make money flipping items, but are there really things with spreads of more than 10s that will nonetheless trade reliably at both the current highest bid and the current lowest ask price?
Yes, the 10% tax should be calculated and listed on the selling interface.
No, this won’t really help with people who are already willing to sell at an obvious loss. I mostly craft to level up my crafting, and I know I’m not alone in this, so I’m willing to sell things at some loss compared to mats cost. Also, for non-bind-on-use items goods, at least some of the stuff on the TP is stuff a character outgrew and replaced. I don’t need to sell my level whatever armor for a profit when I’m now at level whatever+5, because I’ve gotten five good levels of use out of it, which is surely worth the few excess coins I spent on materials.
If they post 10s under the lowest current selling price, that means the highest current buy order is more than 10s below the lowest current selling price. That can be a sign that the current listings to sell are overpriced, and the undercutters are helping to correct the problem.
He also made the now-deleted original post in the “icy bags were a great investment” thread, which from the title seems like another attempt to drive up the prices for an item.
The next top demand item will likely be iron ore, and right now the spread is roughly 13-11. The longer people trade on that, the closer we get to a sell wall of 12, gradually forcing the buy orders to 10. It is systematically driving the price down.
Again with the nonsense claims about iron.
It was 13-11 a week ago when I first started using iron ore as my primary flipping good. That doesn’t actually net a profit, but it would sometimes go down to 13-10, which gives 1.05c per unit profit, or up to 11-14, which gives 0.9c per unit profit. When I was about to log off for the night, I’d put in buy orders at 10 and sell orders at 14, and by the next time I played both would have gone through, for a profit of 1.9c per unit.
Yesterday, I did the same thing, because prices are hovering about the same place. There was a point where it was 15-11, but basically prices were what they were before.
And once again, I don’t understand the logic behind your claim that sales at 12c will force buys down to 10c, but somehow buys at 12c wouldn’t push sells up to 14c. Yes, of course the new system incentivizes reducing the spread, but I have yet to see a reasonable argument from you or anyone else for how it pushes prices preferentially in a downward direction.
2.) The average players who simply wish to sell or buy and don’t feel like waiting days for their cue in a pile of 500,000 units, are going to place them in the next shortest price cues (buying at 15c, selling at 16c). This kills the spread very quickly.
If they really don’t want to wait, they’ll just buy/sell at the price of the asks/bids that are already there. After all, obviously lots of people do that, else your custom orders would never go through. Flipping has always depended on the existence of people unwilling to wait for their own custom orders to go through, and instead choosing to buy and sell according to the custom orders other people have already made.
3.) Day traders, botters & gold sellers, realize their ability to make even a marginal profit is being eaten away at, since the amount of time required to fill a buy order in a FIFO system means they will have to wait. If they see the price of product “x” is falling, the opportunity to flip in a reasonable amount of time is removed, and the spread (14-17) is closing, they will pull their bulk orders out of 14c-buy, and place them in 13c-buy preparing for the next spread.
And if they see the price is going up, they’ll put their bulk offers higher than the current rate. This still isn’t justification for why the prices will be driven ever downwards.
The only difference is that they’d lose money moving their current orders, but I don’t think anyone playing the market spends much time with all of their capital continuously sitting in sell listings. What I’ve personally done when it looks like a price is going up is leave remaining things at the current lowest sell price, but put in buy orders 1c above what they already are, and then when I start getting those items, I’ll sell them 1c higher than the current minimum sale listings.
So I remain completely unconvinced that narrowing spreads will lead preferentially to falling prices. At most, the asymmetry in cost for custom listings results in a lower equilibrium point than there would be if it were symmetrical.
What you (and other sky-is-falling complainers) seem to consistently miss is the fact that, for casual players not looking to turn a profit by flipping items, a lower price means an increased willingness to just buy immediately at the current lowest sell offer. And the more people who do that, the faster items will move at that price, and the more likely they are to disappear entirely, moving the lowest sell price up to the next slot.
Two days ago, you could flip 7 of the 8 top demanded items on the TP and make a couple silver every 30-45 minutes. Today, those same profits will take you hours, and if you try to speed up the process by moving in one increment on the spread, you will take a loss.
The other way to speed up the process is to move to items that aren’t traded in such bulk. I made quite a bit more than “a couple silver” in about that time frame last night, fiddling around with the new system. I just had to look at different things than iron and copper.
(And for the record, the total net worth of all five of my characters is only on the order of 5-6g, so I’m not one of the 1% by any means.)
The 5% listing fee is definitely for the BLTC, but do we have any reason to believe one way or the other about whether the 10% cut is for VAT or commission?
An item can’t sell for a price if no one can afford it…it will gradually be lowered.
Yeah, the thing to remember is that these things have buy orders as well. If no one could afford 120g, they wouldn’t offer to buy an item for 120g, obviously.
That the best items in the game are not accessible to players who haven’t made enough money isn’t a flaw the game or of the market. It’s the expected outcome.
Yeah, I had this happen a few minutes ago as well.
Can players buy these items cheaper than a Vender selling them?
No, but they can buy them for vendor+1c from hundreds of other sellers. Why would they buy from you for vendor+18% (the price you’d need to charge to get the same value as vendor price, approximately), when they can buy the same thing for vendor+1% or so?
Commander’s Manuals aren’t supposed to be easy to come by for just anyone. They’re supposed to be the sort of thing a guild might chip in to buy one of.
And inflation will be inevitable as people acquire gradually more money throughout the course of the game. Cash sinks serve to keep it to a manageable level.
I actually noticed this bug before the most recent TP update, where an initial search would show a price far off from the actual current lowest offer. So yeah, doesn’t seem like this particular one is related to the update.
Yeah, guys, it’s so terrible that we can’t make a quick profit and cut in line any more by selling 5 lots of 50 faster than someone who posted a single stack of 250 long before us.
Also, I always love all the doom-and-gloom slippery-slope predictions of price movements, which a quick check of gw2spidy will show are completely false. For the past 3.5 days, iron ore has consistently had buy orders between 10c and 12c and sell orders between 12c and 14c, with very occasional drops to 11 when someone undercut to unload quickly. And sure, other items have indeed dropped, but often not to a point any lower than they already have been before. Gossamer scraps, for example, dropped from about 4s to about 3s50c. Which is pretty much exactly how much they were selling for a week ago.
As other threads have discussed, the newest TP bug is that prices don’t show up correctly in the initial search, but only after clicking through to the actual orders list. This doesn’t sound like precisely the same bug, but it might be related and is a possible side effect of the things that got fixed in the latest BLTC update.
Looks to me like MF Panda said support is now able to modify inventory. Presumably that means they weren’t able to before, which is why that was their standard answer.
The stupid kittening forum censorship software doesn’t care where words actually begin and end. If someone types a certain set of letters in a certain consecutive order, it gets changed to “kitten”, even if the first part of the “bad” word was at the end of hapPEN and IS doesn’t show up until the next word.
And the repeated “place order” clicking is also something I use on the custom bid screen to get an update in prices. I place orders for 1 unit at 1c to see the list update, and then once the price is favorable and I can actually place the order I wanted, I go and cancel my unfulfillable 1c buy orders. (So don’t worry, I’m not one of the people cluttering up the bid list with all the stupid below-vendor-price orders. Nor have I ever done anything stupid like order a bunch of account-bound items such as lemons.)
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
There’s a miniscule chance of getting this if you never buy Black Lion keys (daily/monthly achievements and map completion can give BL keys,) so you will pretty much only get one by buying tons of keys on the gem store.
There’s a minuscule chance of getting it regardless, because it’s really rare. And frankly if someone wants to give ANet hundreds of real-money dollars just so they can keep their bags a little neater, let them. I am not in any way disadvantaged by someone else not having to run to a crafting station or bank teller to deposit non-collectible items. (Since ores and leathers and such can already be deposited from anywhere in Tyria.)
Also, if someone is willing to waste that much money on BLKs, I suspect they’d also be fine using the existing TP setup to store items on there via wasted sell listings and then pick them up next time they’re by a TP NPC.
all prices across the board suddenly dropped 50%+
No, they really didn’t. Stuff you were trying to sell might have, but quite a few other things have been increasing steadily or have prices that still fluctuate quite a bit.
A FIFO scheme seems the fairest scheme since it ensures that if the price stays steady, then all sell orders listed at that price will eventually sell. Any other scheme involves newer orders being sold before older ones, raising the possibility that the older ones will never sell.
A random selection scheme does no such thing, instead ensuring that all orders will sell roughly at the same rate.
Also, FIFO encourages undercutting and overcutting whenever possible by anyone who wants to be sure their stuff sells first, and without small-orders-first processing, their best option is to list all of what they have at the under- or over-cut price, since FIFO guarantees that the entire thing will sell before anyone else’s orders.
The tax makes it almost impossible to make money and there is no justification for it.
Actually, you already just explained a pretty good justification for it. If it’s too easy to make money, there will be too much money in circulation, which leads to rampant inflation and makes it impossible for new players to really use the market until they become suitably wealthy through other means.
We should stage a protest. Every player on each server should goto Lion’s Arch at 12pm gmt on Saturday – this will hopefully make the servers crash and make Anet sit up and take notice.
At which point they’re more likely to ban people for intentionally crashing the servers than they are to figure out that it’s due to someone complaining about the sales tax.
It’s worth noting, however, that for sufficiently cheap items sold in bulk, 1c over vendor will still give you a profit. (Basically, if the vendor price is 5c or less, which it is for a lot of raw materials.)
Um how does that work after the fees?
If you buy 100 of an item at 3c and sell it at 4c, you’ll spend 3s and get 4s*.85=3.4s, for a profit of 40c per 100 units.
Sure, it’s not a lot of profit, and items selling that low usually do so because no one wants them so they don’t move all that fast, but it is still some profit.
Edit: in terms of vendor prices, this means that you’ll make 0.4c per item more selling on the TP than you would selling to a vendor.
Vendor / profit per 100 units at 1c over vendor on the TP
1c / 70c
2c / 55c
3c / 40c
4c / 25c
5c / 10c
——
6c / -5c
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
this bug alone is reason enough to add expiration of both bids and selling items. to clear it of these bugged transactions that are below the base values.
No, that bug alone is reason enough to clear out low bids and fix the bug. It doesn’t in any way imply that offer expiration is a good idea.
Also, I don’t know why expiring offers would push prices in either direction more than the other. Why do you think prices would go down instead of up? Why do you think it would be good if they did go down?
So what, pray tell, is “very soon”, if this still isn’t fixed after 17 days?
And how exactly they enforce return of a loan?
It’s my understanding that you can attack and kill characters and take all of their stuff, so maybe something like that?
But in any case, as I said it is possible to abuse pretty horribly.
Player “Cally” won at EVE Online despite it being a massively multiplayer game with no victory condition. Other players earn ISK (game currency) by mining, completing quests or killing each other. Cally, on the other hand, simply asked for it. And it worked, and there was nothing they could do about it. Because while the other losers went into the economy as honest workers, or corporations, he realized he could go in as a bank.
He spent months running the “EVE Intergalactic Bank (EIB).” This offered loans for start-up EVE corporations and miners who wanted to buy tools, with interest rates and repayment plans and yes, we’re still talking about a game people apparently play for fun.
Cally certainly had fun: He fulfilled the secret fantasy of every bank manager in history, when one day, he walked in and just took all the money. All the money was 790 billion ISK, about $170,000 in real dollars, which he used to become the greatest video game villain of all time. He spent a huge chunk of the money to buy a ridiculously powerful warship, another chunk posting a huge bounty on his own head, then sailed off into space just daring people to kill him.
I’d love to see the price droppers work on the vanilla bean market. 1s80c for ONE vanilla bean is insane.
It’s that price because it’s rare enough that people are apparently willing to pay that price.
People who undercut the lowest sell offer can’t push the price below the highest buy offers, and those come from people who voluntarily offer to pay that much for an item.
Sorry dude, but you don’t get to proclaim that only people who agree with you are allowed to post in your thread.
First priority is by order size, but for orders of a particular size it might be fifo, I guess? Anyone know which of two equal-sized orders will sell first?
But if you gather those mats incidentally, by going around killing things through the normal course of the game, I wouldn’t say you’re selling at a loss, though admittedly it is less than you’d get selling the mats directly. Selling the mats directly wouldn’t have gotten me from 150 to 210 in Leatherworking yesterday, along with more than 2 levels of regular XP. So I’m pretty okay earning less for the finished products than I would if I’d sold all the mats as I got them.
FIFO? LIFO? Not Exactly, Since this is the reality everyone should know.
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Which is why no one will post the same price when there are already 300k sitting there at that price.
People have set up banking in EvE, and it’s easily taken advantage of over there. That’s all within the framework of how EvE is supposed to work, but GW2 isn’t meant to be the same sort of game.
FIFO? LIFO? Not Exactly, Since this is the reality everyone should know.
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
It would do the same for overcutting, though, so I don’t know that it would push prices consistently in either direction.
Ah, right, pardon the misunderstanding.
I would personally interpret that warning to include bag slots, but as I’ve already demonstrated in this thread, I don’t always know what I’m talking about.
With the mystic forge, it’s conceivable that magic find would increase the rate at which 4 random items produce one that is more rare rather than the same rarity. With gathering, it could increase the rate at which you get gems (which magically increase the stats of the item you upgrade). With salvaging, it could increase rares and upgrade recovery chance over what the salvage kit does on its own.
Bank slots are based on account, not character.
Yeah, if they have different gems in them, they’ll have different stats.
It’s worth noting, however, that for sufficiently cheap items sold in bulk, 1c over vendor will still give you a profit. (Basically, if the vendor price is 5c or less, which it is for a lot of raw materials.)
Yeah, the 5% listing fee and 10% tax are perfectly fine to have in the game. The 10% tax should be made more explicit so people don’t unknowingly lose money, but having it there isn’t a problem.
If you want to make a profit crafting, don’t buy all the materials on the trading post. Problem solved!
As for the whole theory of people “going out in a bang,” I do not see why people who are going to quit would decide to take out a massive loan and just buy stuff if they are going to quit anyway.
Because it would be fun?
They could still buy and sell stuff on the auction house, but they wouldn’t be able to mail loaned money or items to other people to prevent abuse. I suppose an exception could be crafting. They could buy materials off the auction house to level up a craft, and they would be allowed to sell these items on the auction house.
So the system would have to keep track of the money loaned, the stuff bought with the money loaned, the stuff made from the stuff bought with the money loaned, and the money earned selling the stuff made from the stuff bought with the money loaned? If so, it’s a horribly complex system that serves no real purpose. If not, then you’ve just outlined a simple money laundering scheme.