Message to Trading Post developers. Please Change LIFO system (stack) by a FIFO (queue)
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Yeah, when the TP was down on the 20th of this month, pretty much everything took a huge hit in price when it came back up, since people continued gathering and increasing supply while no one was buying, and the people who would have been buying at that time just went out and gathered as well, so demand didn’t go up to match.
I would generally expect price drops on the weekend, since people have more time to go get things themselves instead of buying off the TP.
Gossamer scraps plummeted mid-week but have been rising in price since then. Some of the other stuff might be a matter of more people now having access to them than are able to craft with them yet? That, or people have started farming them for profit because TP prices were pretty high before.
Yeah, the unfortunate thing about this is that it doesn’t directly tell you in-game. It’s not a problem to have the fee, it just needs to be more explicit.
At the same time, iron and platinum are going up in price, and silver has been stable for the last week. I really don’t think this is the result of bots, but of more people getting the items than are reliably buying them.
And given that it’s possible to gain several levels a day, especially on weekends, it doesn’t surprise me that TP prices would fluctuate much more rapidly than real-world commodities. Jewelers in meatspace don’t suddenly lose all interest in copper once they’ve had enough training to use silver, and you don’t make furniture with increasingly older wood as you gain experience in carpentry.
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
Yeah, I don’t see any reason why the sell interface can’t basically be the same as the one for buying, where you can choose between selling at the current highest bid, the current lowest ask, or a custom price which you can choose after seeing a list of current offers. I get that the interface is a bit more constrained due to the fact that it shows a column of your inventory when you go to sell something, but presumably they could get rid of the text for that and just show the icons with mouseover text like they do so many other places.
Message to Trading Post developers. Please Change LIFO system (stack) by a FIFO (queue)
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
As far as I can tell (and based on other users’ experience with their own trades, as well as a post or two from John Smith in this forum), the current system is a glitch and is not actually consistent. Sometimes it seems to be LIFO, especially with small order sizes, but there have been other times when I know my most recent order gets filled after others, because it’s an item that’s moving slowly enough to be able to identify individual orders going through by looking at the prices. Others have experienced this, as well, where 5 orders of 50 each will consistently go through faster than (any part of) one order of 250.
But like I said, the current system is also afaik still glitchy, and not actually what is intended.
A random choice among goods at a particular price is perhaps the best fix, because then if there are already a hundred thousand orders, my new one for 50 will at least start going through before all 100k of the existing ones go through (which would be what happens with FIFO). Really, though, there are pros and cons for any option (LIFO, FIFO, random, small orders first, etc.). Probably someone will post here to complain regardless of what they do.
(That said, it would be nice if there were more transparency, so whatever it is they do we at least know about it.)
Use gw2spidy.com to look at price trends over the past few days. Whether something’s going up, going down, or fluctuating a lot, buy and sell orders at the right prices can net you a profit. (Since there’s nothing in place to allow actually shorting the market as people do in real life, the way to profit from falling prices is to sell something you yourself will use at the current going rate, and put in a buy order for less than the current rate, in hopes that the price will fall to that point and you’ll get back your goods for cheaper than you sold them.)
Easy fix for that is making everything account based, like your bank and achievements and so on already are.
Aren’t they counted separately, anyway? Like if I have an attack that naturally causes bleeding, the +Condition Damage affects that, while at the same time any attack capable of getting a critical hit is helped by the +Precision, right?
Omg, you really don’t understand this thread, I cannot argue with you anymore.
I know you can’t. It’s hard to argue when none of the facts are on your side, isn’t it?
Anyway, I’m done with this thread. The first reply really said all that needed to be said.
I know nothing about economies but Im angry because supply is out pacing demand.
I fixed that for you.
No, actually supply and demand mean everything, because the things selling for prices “too low” for your liking are doing so because everyone gets tons more of them than anyone wants. The things that are selling for significant profit over what you’d get from a vendor are the ones people actually want, so they’re willing to pay more for them.
It is really that simple.
I’ve played other games with economies, and I also know a thing or two about the real-world economy. For example, I know that low prices for items where supply outstrips demand is not the sign of a completely ruined economy.
If you want to sell mats to make money for a siege golem, farm lowbie areas and sell copper, green wood, and jute, because those are actually in demand.
Lower than it “should be” is not at all the same as selling for 1c above vendor price. Platinum ore vends for 6c, and the going rate on the TP is twice that. Iron vends for 3c and is trading for the same price as platinum.
What price do you, in your infinite wisdom, think these items “should be” selling for?
I’ve read all your posts. It’s not my fault you keep making blatantly false claims, such as that crafting materials are selling for vendor prices on the TP.
I still maintain that every item there’s actually a demand for sells at a higher price than you’d get from a vendor. It just so happens that blue and green drops and crafted items don’t have much demand for them, since everyone in the game is getting them or making them and then turning around and dumping them on the trading post.
Well yeah, they just don’t move in the kind of volume of basic materials or low-quality items. Also, the ones with large gaps are not the ones that end up being listed for 1c over vendor price, obviously.
And once again, that is only possible when there is already a significant gap between buy prices and sell prices. A properly balanced price, for something that sells in high volume, will never have that kind of margin.
The food items that sell for dirt cheap are the ones that are easy to make and not that great.
Just like the weapons that sell for the minimum price, and the armor that sells for the minimum price, and everything else in the game that sells for really cheap. No one is manipulating anything to cause this situation, unless you count the people flooding the market with low-quality goods.
Everything that drops and is a teal/green – lowest price possible – naga jolokias – near lowest price possible – many cooking mats, – near lowest price possible except for a handful – level 375 leather or so – at the lowest price – ancient bones, near or at lowest price – there is plenty of them, you must not have seen them, but there is too many like this to not see it, and I just don’t understand why I’d have to tell you this — saffron threads is another some fo the wood is at lowest price, all the mid levelled crystal collectibles are worth merchanting, etc. Don’t see how you missed all these items when it’s almost everything except a rare or exotic weapon/gear.
This is not opinion, this is facts.
No, it’s not facts, because you’re still wrong: the vast majority of trades are in ores and cloth, particularly low-level ores and cloth. And all the ores and cloth sell for far more than vendor price. Most low-level fine materials also sell for far more than vendor price. HIgh-level stuff doesn’t yet because not enough people want those materials. (Top-tier stuff might always stay cheap, actually, because I suspect the main demand for lower stuff is so people can level their crafting.)
Yes, some cooking materials are really cheap. Because they’re really common and so supply is high and demand is low and that lowers the price. Others are expensive, because people don’t already have tons of them and are willing to pay those that do.
Yes, some items are cheap, because there are a lot more of them than people are willing to pay for. This is how a proper market should work.
Almost everything is at the lowest possible price to sell (1 copper above merchants buy price)
Sure, “almost everything” if you’re counting the number of distinct types of things on the TP, because most of those items are severely oversupplied midlevel green and blue items that nobody wants to spend a lot of money on.
If, instead, you count “almost everything” in terms of the actual volume traded, then no. “Almost everything” that goes through the TP is one crafting material or another, and pretty much all of those things are going for significantly more than what a vendor would give you.
You know why? Because people actually want them and are thus willing to pay for them.
This is mainly talking about greens and blues, the drops, also crafting mats.
Greens and blues sell just above vendor value because no one wants them enough to pay more for them. When the price for something people don’t want is low, that’s the market working correctly.
And what do you mean about crafting mats? Have you looked at those recently? The ones that everyone uses (cloth, for example) sell for far more than vendor price. Jute, which I believe would vendor for 1c, has been selling between 25 and 30 copper for the past several weeks. This is because there’s actual demand for it, which there isn’t for midlevel blues and greens.
You can’t undercut from 123s to 67s unless the highest current buy offer is less than 67s. If it is, then perhaps the people looking to buy the item aren’t willing to pay 123s in the first place, and you’re doing everyone a favor by dropping the price.
And how would decreasing the duration of listings help the price come back up? The listings that stay up the longest are the ones asking for the most money.
If you’re talking about the crappy items that sit in a huge clump 1c above vendor price, limiting the duration of listings would only reduce that number somewhat, it wouldn’t eliminate it. Those items are so cheap because buyers aren’t willing to spend much more than vendor price for them.
You guys are all missing the point.
He’s saying somebody lists an omnomberry for 75 silver and then a bunch of people just assume that’s the going price so they list theirs, then that guy who only listed 1 omnomberry buys a bunch of them for 75 silver to craft with.
No, I didn’t miss that point. I countered with the observation that this is impossible to do with anything that has only a small gap between selling price and buying price. If the current lowest selling price is 1g50s, then either the highest buying price is going to be around 1g25s or more, or it’s not an item that actually sells all that frequently.
If the current highest buying price is 1.25g, you can’t undercut 1.5g by much. If the current highest buying price is much lower than that, say, even lower than 75s, then just put in a buy order for 75s. That way yours will be the highest buy order and people will sell to you first.
If there is a big gap, maybe it’s because the people buying the item don’t agree with the people selling the item that it should cost 1.5g, and you’ll actually be doing all of them a favor by setting the new price lower than that.
Going the other way, you actually need to sell it for about 17.6% above vendor price, because 1/.85 = 1.176. Selling at 15% above will still lose you a couple percent compared to vendoring it.
The thing the OP is complaining about is only possible for items that have a large gap between bid and ask prices. When the margin is greater than the 15% tax that will ultimately be taken out of a successful sell, then yes, there is opportunity for profit at the potential expense of others.
However, as I and others have pointed out repeatedly, the only items that have real margins (i.e. buying at the highest bid and selling at the lowest ask will give you a profit) are the ones that aren’t very common and aren’t selling very quickly. Anything that is traded in high volume has zero margin, so it’s impossible to actually undercut the lowest asking price significantly without hitting the highest bid price.
Also, what Ghoest said: when there’s a bid-ask spread, sellers can do the same thing by asking for one at a higher price than the current highest, then waiting for others to do the same and selling to them for more money than could have been made otherwise.
The two trends will tend to narrow the gap until it disappears, rather than consistently pushing it one direction indefinitely.
The trading postes minimum prices on our weapon/armor drops being the same as what the merchant would buy them from you
This is obviously not true, since no merchant would pay you 80g for Dusk.
The problem is that people expect midlevel crafting to be profitable, so all of them try to sell their junk on the TP, so supply outweighs demand enough for prices to bottom out.
It’s likely another complaint that mid-level blues and greens aren’t selling for enough money on the TP, on account of they’re not actually that great and will be out-leveled within a few days by most people who play regularly.
Fifteen-slot invisible bags are not falling in price over time, and neither are 18-slot silk bags. There are fluctuations on shorter timelines, to be sure, but that doesn’t indicate any overarching trend that will eventually lead to their being sold for 1c above vendor price the way midlevel blue and green items are.
Also, I’m not sure I understand your complaint about pricing too high and then undercutting too much. If you think prices are too high, then the undercutting should be good. If you think prices are too low, then the high asks should be good. How are both of those things bad?
What does having a fiance have to do with anything?
It hurts them short term, but once they’re acquiring their gold cheaper it will stop mattering again.
Also, ANet can’t lower the price by too much without it encouraging rampant inflation, which they obviously don’t want to do.
Yeah, while rounding can significantly affect the actual net revenue for cheap items, rounding to the nearest 0.0001 gold obviously doesn’t have a significant impact on the math you do with amounts over 1g.
Wow, that would be really annoying.
Does it work for allies/party members too, or just the character who owns it?
Yeah, if more people wanted those items than were selling them, there wouldn’t be hundreds or even thousands of them sitting in the TP at minimum value. People (myself included) aren’t willing to spend much more than vendor price for mid-level blues and greens that aren’t stunningly fantastic and which are going to be outleveled in a few more days of playing. If you want to craft and make more money on the TP than through a vendor, you pretty much need to make Rare or better items.
Or take some actual time to see what’s selling for how much before crafting a bunch of stuff. Personally, I largely use crafting as a way to level up crafting (and get some xp and occasional good equipment for my own toons in the process), so until I max it out, I’m quite content to break even or operate at a slight financial loss while doing so.
Anything that can sell on the trading post for 1c won’t sell to vendors at all, so there’s no other option. Furthermore, I doubt anyone sells them one at a time. If you sell 20 of them, there’s still only a 1c listing fee, and there’ll be another 2c taken from your revenue after they sell, which still nets you 18c.
Anything that vendors for 4c or less is fine to sell (in bulk) at the minimum 1c markup on the BLTC, because that 1c markup is at least the 20% you’re talking about.
(Actually, how does the 10% thing work? Does it apply it to each item if they sell one at a time, in which case you get ripped off for items selling at 5c to 10c if they round up, but you don’t have to pay a fee for items under 5c?)
There are items with margins, but they’re uncommon and you have to go looking. Also, this almost never includes any raw materials.
Yes, I know people use it as a garbage can. I was denying that people use it for storage.
@ John Smith
Is there anything that would actually verify this to the rest of us, who are perhaps becoming skeptical of some of A.Net’s claims?
But normal items that can be found off monsters will NEVER yield a profit unless they are intentionally manipulated by forcing the price higher or lower with individual purchases.
No, sufficiently rare items from monsters yield a TC profit over what can be made from a vendor, because they are rare and high quality.
Even then…it will eventually even out (and go down in price). There is no stopping the inflation. Even with the mystic conduits..butter is already back down to 3 copper.
It’s back down to 3 copper because the mystic recipes don’t work any more.
Made 20 silver in 1 minute. cool. I’ll do it again. Made 12 silver. Did it again, lost 12 silver. Did it again, lost 20 silver.
That goes without saying that everytime YOU luck out on a mystic forge craft, someone else misses.
You missed because you kept trying even as the price went down (likely due to other people doing the same thing). Paying closer attention to prices would have avoided this. Don’t offer to buy or sell at prices that you know will lose you money, and you’ll lose less money!
You will not sustain any kind of profit, it will always go back to 0. Its just how this game is laid out.
Except that people who continue making money would continue to disagree with you.
How does one become a “shark”?
According to this thread, to become a shark one must play EVE, it seems.
people just blindly put things up for minimum amount as a form of storage while out doing other things.
I don’t believe this actually ever happens. While people are out doing other things, they might dump stuff at the minimum value to get it out of their inventory and eventually get some copper later (though less than if they sold it to a vendor). I highly doubt anyone is using it as a bank (with the intent of using those items later), and I definitely refuse to believe that’s what the one-copper-over-vendor-price listers are doing, seeing as their items will sell first.
The TP translates to a dynamic vendor. That is ALL it is. There is no ‘playing the TP’, especially back when the ‘tax’ was 15%.
Those of us who’ve made profits playing the TP would beg to differ.
Sure, not many are playing it by buying materials and selling the finished product for huge profits, since that tends to work poorly. But buying something at a low price and then selling that same thing later at a higher price looks a lot like profit to me, anyway. I don’t have an economics degree, though, so I guess I could be mistaken.
Are you actually sure all that is happening? With all the items that have nearly identical curves for daily average? You claim there’s a daily cycle to it, but I don’t notice any such thing in the raw bid/ask data.
Also, why does this kind of manipulation suck? It keeps prices manageable for everyone who actually uses the item, and people trying to profit from selling it will just have to work a bit harder or deal more exclusively in other things.
Even if it really is manipulation, which I continue to doubt, I’m unwilling to say it “sucks” for anyone but other people trying to play the market, and even for them it doesn’t really suck all that badly.
I wish we could short-sell the market.
There’s nothing really stopping you, is there? It’s just that you’d have to find a person or guild willing to act as a lender.
it is so much of a kitten up. (I actually typed kitten there :p)
Yeah, I’ve also just cut out the middleman and started using it directly as a curse word. Because middlemen can kitten themselves.
I want a quaggan plushie =(
Yeah, I gotta say that even as a grown heterosexual man who has not owned any sort of stuffed animal in probably 20 years at least, I would totally buy one of those.
Quaggan are awesome.
When they cry for help, like “Pleeeaaaseee stop hurting quaggan” I feel a mix of “want to cry” and “want to slaughter those guys hurting them”.
To be fair, the “want to cry” reaction is one I get from time to time with most of the “lesser” races, when there’s an “evil” one who you have to fight. Some of their last words are just so pathetic.
Ones that come to mind right now are the Ogre wondering who will take care of his pet, and the Hylak who gasps, “I thought I was winning…”
Yeah, it’d be one thing if there were any profession that could use more than one type of armor, but since each can only use 1/3 of the total, it really doesn’t make sense to have to skim through so much unusable crap to find something I can actually wear.
I know what the creator of this thread is talking about since I’ve been monitoring a few items on TP, and in particular the small claw.
It started like 10 days ago, price was pretty much stable and between 1s40c and 1s20c give or take. Then someone intervened and started lowering the price bit by bit. Now at first this wasn’t a problem, he lowered it to around 1s and it came back up to 1s14c – small drop, not so noticeable for us that sold it in normal amounts. But then he kept pushing it down. The lowest priced item was like 1s14c he put an offer of 40 of them for 1s10c, then 32 for 1s2c then 100 for 92c etc. which made other people undercutting it.
Why is it that you think this is just one person, and why do you think he’s specifically manipulating the small claw market? As far as I can tell, most crafting materials have experienced similar price movements over the past week. Everything took a hit after the last serious BLTC glitch, then prices were high for a few days, and now they’re falling.
Silk Scraps
Bolts of Gossamer
Large Claws
Vials of Blood
The list could continue, I just don’t feel like checking every crafting material. Pretty much everything I have checked has a similar curve. Do you suppose this one guy is trying to corner all the crafting mat markets? Or might it be more reasonable to suppose that supply and/or demand are changing in such a way as to result in lower prices?
No, markets and wealth are one of the many “85%-15%” things that show a majority consistently losing over time and a minority slowly accruing immense riches and power
How is anyone consistently losing over time on the BLTC? The fun thing about the GW2 economy is that, unlike the real economy, no one will starve or lose their house or have to survive on ramen for the next two weeks if someone manipulates the market. If I find that I’m not doing well using the market, I can completely ignore it for days or weeks and just do PvE and PvP and WvW to have fun and level my characters and get the items I need for crafting. Any equipment I find that isn’t an upgrade to what I’m currently using, I can salvage or sell to vendors or drop into the mystic forge in hopes that it’ll spit out something better.
And this would be a perfectly enjoyable way to play the game, and a perfectly adequate way to make a (quite modest, admittedly) amount of money over time.
The reason I’m not worried about the “losers” in the GW2 economy the same way I care about the poor in the real world is that, in the game, it is entirely possible to 100% avoid the market and refuse to let it affect you in any way whatsoever.
So the system optimizes the choice for the player and only allows them to buy the item that is priced lowest. And more specifically it only allows them to buy the item that is the lowest price that has been listed the longest (FIFO sell order). Because of this the market isn’t free, a particular vendor gets a Monopoly on a given item at a given price point if that price is the lowest price and if they were the first to list it at that price point.
No, unfortunately the market currently seems to be more of a LIFO system. And that is what allows someone to monopolize it, because they can always list more items later and continue to be guaranteed that theirs will be the ones other people are buying. If that glitch gets fixed (or is already from this morning’s update? I’ve heard mixed things about that), so that it truly is FIFO, I don’t know how monopolies will work as you claim.
Because if the first things sold are the oldest ones at that price, then eventually all of that seller’s items will be sold, and to sell any more they’ll have to wait for everything that’s been listed since they first started selling at that price. The only way to have a monopoly in FIFO is if you’re the only one selling at the lowest price, but this would monopolize a random-seller system just as effectively, since there’s only one way to choose one from a set of one.
What the current system does that is artificial is that is arrays the Seller table’s in straight line. So that when the Buyer walks in the room he can only buy from the table at the front. When buyers aren’t in the room the tables are artificially moved around so that the lowest seller is at the front. This is further sorted by which Seller decided first to price the Widget lowest.
Well, yeah. But would people actually buy the same thing for a higher price if they were able to? Sure, this technically is a restriction on the market because it prevents people from voluntarily paying too much or earning too little, but I’m unsure why actual price movements and such would be different if that restriction were removed.
While the so-called Trading Ghost Bug is a very real problem for some people, which has so far received a pretty kitteny level of attention from actual humans working for ANet, I really don’t think it has a place in a discussion of some alleged “Crash” of the economy. Yes, it’s awful for the people who’ve lost all their gold, and a bit scary for the rest of us (who know about it, at least) not knowing whether it might happen again, but it is nevertheless a technical glitch which will hopefully be fixed eventually (which may in fact already be fixed, though we wouldn’t know since no one official has acknowledged that the glitch ever existed in the first place…).
Once that real problem is removed from the picture, the rest of the OP’s complaints start to look a lot like all the other posts by people who know enough about economics to realize that they don’t know enough about economics to ever use the BLTC to their own financial advantage, and who are bitter about this fact.
Yeah, if a vendor is handy, you should always sell to the vendor instead of the BLTC when the BLTC price is only a little above the vendor price (you lose 15% from the price you sell at, so even a several copper difference isn’t worth it for more expensive items).
I believe the reason some people are willing to sell at a loss like this is that they find it more convenient (and possibly cheaper) to sell unstackable items immediately on the BLTC at whatever price they can, instead of paying for a waypoint so they can sell to a vendor for at most a few copper more than they’ll end up making on the trade.