The two mechanisms together make it difficult for any casual player without key knowledge or insight to compete.
There are definitely unfortunate consequences of the one-sided risk in custom orders/offers, but I don’t think this is one of them.
We’re talking about making money solely by playing the market, right? That’s not the sort of thing people without sufficient knowledge or insight should expect to be able to compete effectively in, especially when there are others whose main enjoyment in playing the game comes from using the BLTC commodities market.
@Power.2957
You speculated on the market and lost money because the perceived value of the things you were trading in fluctuated unexpectedly. There are other people who have had equal or greater amounts of gold just up and vanish due to BLTC downtime and bugs. Personally, I think those people have a wee bit more right to be angry right now than you do. And yet, from the threads I’ve seen, those people are filled with far less uncontrolled rage than you seem to have, despite losing more money than you through less fault of their own.
Calm the kittening kitten down, in other words. (If the forum is going to convert every bad word to “kitten”, I figure why not cut out the middle man.)
I personally enjoy the possibility of getting a nice new weapon or piece of armor from mobs that I kill, but I would definitely agree that reducing the equipment drop rate might help the trade economy. Stop having bears drop longbows, for example, but keep them as potential drops from humanoid mobs which have just failed to kill you with that very weapon.
Moreover without a time-limited auctions prices will be only dropping
How is this the case at all? Why would prices drop if my item is listed there for weeks? The reason it stays there instead of selling is because my asking price is too high. I have no idea why a load of people asking for too much money (and then not getting it) could possibly drive prices down.
One thing that I think may drive prices down is, as Ensign explains above, there is far more risk to asking a higher price than the current going rate than there is to bidding a lower price than the current rate. There is some liquidity loss with making a bid that just sits there, but since you can remove your order at any time with no risk (well, none apart from potentially losing all your gold to a bug I suppose…), buy orders aren’t actually all that illiquid. (Would they technically be illiquid at all, given that you can pretty much instantly convert them back into cash?)
This asymmetry of risk likely makes people more willing to bid lower prices and less likely to ask higher prices than they would be without the asymmetry, which means stable prices will tend to be lower than they would be otherwise. They would still eventually stabilize, though, and well above vendor price for valuable but common items like crafting materials.
(The phenomenon of loads of mediocre gear being listed for 1c above vendor price is the result of people using the TC as a convenient way to get rid of things filling up their inventory, which many are willing to do even at some loss relative to what a vendor would give them. If the cost of waypointing to and from the nearest vendor, which gets pretty absurd as you level, is greater than the 15% loss you’ll suffer using the TC, it’s worth it to dump stuff on the TC at the cheapest possible price.)
My Bank had declined one purchase attempt twice because I did not have enough on the card at the time but afterwards they wont let anymore go through.
Yes, because your bank declined an attempt and this flagged their anti-fraud measures.
They are not “punishing you for buying too many gems”. You tried to buy gems without having enough money to do so and now it will take some effort to be able to buy more in the future.
Also, do you have any reason to think that these 48-hour windows will always be the case for you in the future? Or might it just be once, and after that you’ll go back to being able to buy as usual?
600has been PAID you clearly misread
No, you clearly misread. The email you yourself quoted in your second post.
The first few attempts were declined by your bank, which flagged their anti-fraud measures (since that’s the sort of thing a stolen credit card would do, presumably). So even if now that purchase did in fact go through, it wasn’t a problem on their end that’s giving you this difficulty.
How: Take a look at Eve Online. Large scale operations and ships require large scale supplies. Make items that take 400 Healing Long Bows from crafters.
And now I’m giggling at the idea of a starship made entirely of strung-together long bows.
I don’t agree with the original problem statement. When there’s a large gap between the lowest WTS and the highest WTB, speculators will enter the market, attempting to make money off that difference. The bigger the gap, the more people that will try to use this as an easy way of buying low and selling high.
That ultimately drives the WTS prices lower (each speculator undercutting the others to sell quickly) and drives the WTB higher (each speculator trying to obtain enough product to sell). This will drive that product to a new equilibrium more quickly than any sort of proposed “government regulation.”
Plus, as I mentioned before (that was in this thread, right?) the items that do have huge margins tend to be really valuable and rare items that are not likely being bought or sold at either of those prices. Sure, you can put in a custom buy order at 1c above the highest existing one, or a custom sell order at 1c below the lowest existing one, and your offer is roughly as unlikely to be taken up as the ones already there.
If you actually want yours to be the first offer accepted, you’ll have to overcut or undercut by something substantial, possibly even greater than the OP’s proposed 10%, because no one is seriously going to jump on your sale for 10g49s99c when they were completely ignoring the previous listing at 10g50s. And if I’m unwilling to sell that same item for 3g, I’m equally unlikely to sell it for one copper more. Those items tend to stay on there for awhile and not really have a widely agreed-upon price yet.
The stuff you can reliably trade quickly tends to be raw crafting materials and consumables, the margins on which tend to be nonexistent.
Yes, there are opportunities for arbitrage, just like in the real economy. But also just like in the real economy, they don’t tend to last for a very long time because wildly incorrect pricing is a problem that gets corrected by the very people trying to take advantage of it.
You want me to provide specific in-game sources for the claim that the Asura believe in the Eternal Alchemy, the Sylvari worship the Pale Tree, and the Norn have a spiritual connection with the Spirits of the Wild?
Have you, like, played this game at all?
Or do you take issue with my claim that none of the playable races have an omnipotent deity? Do you have any ArenaNet sources that say they do? Because all the ones thus mentioned in this thread aren’t (if it can be killed, it’s not omnipotent; if it doesn’t actually do anything, it’s not omnipotent).
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
Time is not a true limiting factor on resources, as you will never actually run out. And as new players can enter the market they provide a greater quantity of those same resources, something that wouldn’t be possible if those resources were limited.
This is an absolutely absurd claim to make. Time is exactly the limiting factor that determines whether I will buy something on the TP versus going out and looking for it myself. The amount of time it would take me to find another 30 vials of whatever blood is precisely what leads me to either pay or not pay the current going rate on the TP.
Time is also the main thing that really does make this a real-world market in meatspace terms. Because there is a real-world opportunity cost to spending time just to grind certain materials for crafting or to go through an area hoping for a good weapon or piece of armor to drop. The considerations that occasionally lead me to spend more money to have food delivered so I can save the time of going to pick it up or cooking it myself are the very same considerations that lead me to spend in-game money on materials and items instead of going out and finding them myself.
Regarding complaints about custom bidding, this really isn’t an opportunity for infinite exponential growth, because the “infinitely” available items rarely have any margin to speak of, when you factor in the 15% cut of any successful trade that the BLTC takes. The items that do have real margins tend to be the ones that aren’t traded in very high volume, and so you actually have no reason to assume that anyone will accept your custom bid during the time you’re willing to keep that money locked up in the bid where it can’t be used to buy other things.
Yeah, works fine in Chrome for me, though I sometimes seem to have to refresh item pages for the actual price graph to show up.
Charr should have been the main enemy. Undead are boring and repetitive.
in Lore
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
As for the current charr, their expansionist nature is hardly unique. Humans pushed themselves on to everyone else when they were on top.
Which is incidentally the main reason the centaurs hate humans, as far as I can tell.
Most of you are just making up whatever you want it to be and ignoring what is actually explained through the game at which point this conversation becomes pointless.
Care to point out anything specific that is just being made up?
It doesn’t surprise me at all that some Asura would combine a couple existing technologies into a new package and then claim credit as though they innovated the entire thing from scratch.
I’ve gotta reiterate this point majorly, now that one of my characters has chatted with the Asura in charge of the gates in Lion’s Arch, who claims that the Asura’s first invention was innovation itself.
So yeah, they strike me as a rather clever race which has let that cleverness go to their heads, to the point where they will claim to have invented something just because they happen to understand it well enough to widely use it and improve upon it. After all, who from the other races is in a position to argue about it?
Yeah, once we understand that no (playable) race believes in any omnipotent divine beings, we kinda have to broaden our working definition of “god”, from what it is among real-world monotheists, in order to usefully discuss religion and philosophy among those races. Upon doing that, I don’t see any reason not to include the Eternal Alchemy, the Pale Tree, and the Spirits of the Wild alongside the six human deities.
This is a little unnerving
I believe that’s about a completely different outage, which happened last night and, as far as I could tell, seems to have just reset the entire game to an earlier state. So if you got some super awesome item during that time, you won’t have it any more. But if you bought it at the TP, you’ll at least have your gold back.
So to my surprise now Asura claims it to be their invention. Although the origin of the original inventions is unknown, I find it very unlikely that in GW1 it was an Asura invention. The best they did was combining two existing technologies into one device.
See, I may not have gotten far enough into my Asura character’s story to have a good feel for the lore (and I never played GW1), but from what I’ve seen so far it doesn’t surprise me at all that some Asura would combine a couple existing technologies into a new package and then claim credit as though they innovated the entire thing from scratch. Maybe they dressed up the design and had a slick marketing campaign to promote it to a less savvy audience unaware of the previous state of the art, telling consumers to think differently or somesuch…
On the original question, I really doubt Liraz was asking for the in-game technical details of exactly how waypoints work. We don’t need any, “the device creates a stable wormhole between superconducting rings that have been placed in fixed positions elsewhere in the galaxy.” We just want to know, from a character perspective, about the actual requirements and limitations of the waypoints.
And yes, of course the system is primarily there to make gameplay less tedious, with existing lore in place to back up that mechanic. I don’t think anyone’s denying that. But we can still be interested in more specific details about that lore, such as anything else designers might have come up with as background ideas without putting them into the game explicitly.
Absent any canonical answer, though, I for one am perfectly content to speculate wildly along with other players until such a time as we hit on some mostly consistent explanation I’m willing to work with as a character when RPing.