Guild Wars 2

ilr.9675:

John Smith.4610:

market manipulation.

… well that’s unfortunate that the head Econ guy doesn’t see “Flipping” as Manipulation.

I’m just curious what else you’d call it when the entire point is to manipulate the final sales price for a bigger profit on something that would have been a lot cheaper if there was no short-term speculating middlemen driving up the prices.

Keep in mind there is a difference between Moving along the Supply Demand curves, and shifting the supply demand curves.

I don’t recall making any statement about what I consider market manipulation? Have a forgotten something?

I would still consider it too soon to have reliable statistics. (Not even a quarter has passed)

Astraea.6075:

I believe John was responding to the OP not myself.

You are correct sir. I was in fact responding to the OP in that statement.

I would very much disagree with all of these suggestions. I would also be curious to know what evidence you see of market manipulation.

The trading post is specifically designed to allow buy offers. The forums are not a tertiary marketplace.

Quick response.
1) Astraea is correct here. Assuming your preferences are representative of preferences as a whole is incorrect.

2) The Gold to Gem exchange isn’t an indicator of gold’s current value. Or rather it can’t be effectively used as one from your end. The demand for gems for Halloween items played a large role in the exchange recently. This doesn’t mean gold is less valuable, it just means gems were in demand.

3) Astraea

4) None of what you said here is true

5) I have an update coming out for this soon

6) Astraea is correct, the sheer volume of items traded in the TP makes it much harder to speculate than normal. Also it’s very likely you’re mistaking natural market patterns for manipulation.

You can report a scammer. Screenshots aren’t necessary we’ll know on investigation.

You should delete mails in your inbox.

Ceronose.6019:

Hello. I read somewhere on this forum about the gold selling to the BLTC gold tranfers. The person who wrote said that gold sellers offered more for less. I went to a site and saw the prices they are charging and I would rather buy gold from them then Anet themselves. Anet says that gold sellers are bad people who steal your account. They say that gold sellers are just sucking you into buying their gold and getting money. John Smith from Anet says…
“Supporting gold sellers doesn’t just damage the game, it supports an industry that lives off of stealing from gamers and ruining communities.”
Well then I have to ask, isn’t Anet doing the same thing but worse? I support Anet in everyway for making such an amazing game for no fee, however, I believe that Anet is sucking my money right out of the drain. Let’s be honest here, you need gold to make gold. But the problem is, people in-game on the BLTC sell stuff for 50 silver at least. Then Anet tells us buying gems and turning it into gold is a positive experience. The problem here Anet is that the amount of gold you get for buying gems at the current economy as of today is outragious. 2800 gems gets you 10 gold. …Thank you for your responses.

Quote shortened.

Most of this post points at a serious misunderstanding of how the game and the gaming/RMT industry works. It’s upsetting that you think that going to the goldsellers is 1. your only alternative or 2. acceptable because you encapsulate the risk yourself. I’m not an educator by trade, but perhaps if I can make the issues a little more clear it will help others understand why none of this is true.

Ceronose.6019:

Anet says that gold sellers are bad people who steal your account.

This is a major misunderstanding. Goldsellers are not bad people who steal your account, they are bad people who steal accounts. One of the primary tactics of goldsellers is getting into legitamate players accounts and using them as throwaway accounts. How often have you seen an advertiser in map and thought to yourself, that guy has a lifetime of about 2 minutes and that’s probably some poor guy who just didn’t pick a great password, or reused an old password from a different game. We’re always working on ways to make accounts more secure which helps, but it isn’t perfect.

Ceronose.6019:

Well then I have to ask, isn’t Anet doing the same thing but worse?… Anet I just wanna bring up the point that if you guys had a set amount of gold you get from gems (and make it reasonable) then people might not be turning towards the gold sellers as I am.

No we aren’t doing the same thing. We created an exchange fueled by player demand, not a port of sales of other people’s property. We don’t hack accounts, we provide the service to help return people’s hacked accounts and increase their future security. We don’t bot our game or engage in other illegal or destructive activities, because we love the game and the community, so we don’t create profit at the expensive of the players.
Secondly, there are several good economic reasons why we shouldn’t set a flat rate and sell gold. The forefront of which is that gold’s value is very relative to the scarcity of gold. With a flat rate and sales of gold we would risk hyper-inflating the economy. This would in turn alienate new players, and make the game much less fun overall.

Ceronose.6019:

So if I want to buy gold from gold sellers, why shouldn’t I do it other than the fact that gold sellers have better buisness than you(ANET) does and you are trapping us (your customers) into buying gems from you only. I think it’s unfair and I don’t like being forced into buying from a certain company when I should have the freedom to choose.

This argument is equivalent to saying the mob has a much better deal on cigarettes because they stole a whole truck and can sell them for $1 a pack now. Why should you have to buy cigarettes from the store when the mob sells them so cheap?
People invested huge quantities of money and huge parts of their lives to make this game. Arguing that the creators of a product are practicing monopolistic behavior relative to black market copies is upsetting. So I will say this, you have the freedom to choose, you may choose to play the games that the goldsellers spent their lives creating…but I don’t think you want to play those games.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Goldsellers are illegal scum …period.

Supporting gold sellers doesn’t just damage the game, it supports an industry that lives off of stealing from gamers and ruining communities.

Clear your mailbox.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Actually if Ford needed bicycles in order to make mustangs they would either A- produce biycycles in a way to make a profit to keep producing bicycles until they could make mustangs … or B -Let some other fool go broke making bicycles at a loss while they just purchase the bicycles needed to make the mustangs. Option B is how the current TP functions.

Which is why until a true economy comes about , I will skip crafting, because its broken, and I will skip the business aspect of finished products on the TP, because its also broken, and I will sell only basic farmed mats and play the main part of the game.

So basically a large portion of the replayability of this game drops off and at some point I can always turn to another game …. Torchlight 2, Path of Exile, Aion, Borderlands 2 etc… and this game will be nothing more than a backup … like Diablo 3 is now. That game’s developers didn’t react to the inherently basic flaws that players brought up until the 1.05 patch only recently released. Too bad they lost 70 + percent of their player base first. Will that happen to GW2 ?… before you go fanboi on me … No it will not … not to that extent, the main game is still very very good.

I am disheartened by the total malfunction of the TP and the collateral damage to the crafting skills it has caused. I pick a crafting skill ONLY to have access to the bank more freely. If the Devs want to keep the TP global… then the only way to fix the pricing structure is to increase the basic mat drops by 50-75% and saturate the market with the mats to the point the selling price of those mats plummets and effectively sets the finished products value higher. I think that move however would have a negative impact in that the scaled cost of porting and repairs would be even harder to compensate for.

I really like how the assumption that controlling, CONTROLLING, the market for personal gain is so easily jumped to.If I were to make just 5c on every 1s invested in a completed product after tax, crafting would be worth it and I would have no complaint on the economy. Thats not anywhere close to market control. Find any solution, ANY SOLUTION, that achieves this, and I’m with you on it. Either way …. I guess you play your way … I play or not play my way.

What you’re arguing has nothing to do with the TP. It’s a simple matter of scarcity and usability. Arguing that the trading post being too large is a mistake because you can’t create imbalanced markets isn’t a good argument, and it would come at the cost of other players and a more stable economy.

You guys got this thread under control. Well done

Evon Gnashblade does not approve of competition.

sinisterpink.7912:

Hey guys, first off thanks Anet for your continued effort and dedication to improving the game. I’ve got 500hrs + on my account and I’m still finding it a pleasure to play each time I log on. Also thanks my fellow players that have made this one of the best MMO communities I’ve been with thus far <3.

The Trading Post: recent trends with popular, fast moving items suggest they are losing value and fast. Despite the nerfs to things such as karma commodities, Orichalcum nodes, etc, the supply (according to gw2 spidy) always seem to find a way to tank and prices go through the floor.

As a farmer, a TP enthusiastic, and an honest gamer trying to grind out a little personal profit, I find this pattern with prices discouraging. We are a little over week 7 of gw2, and it ‘seems’ that the volume of stuff hitting the TP is far greater than the demand. Does this suggest that there’s just now a whole bunch of 80lv players competing for sales? If so, I fear for what the economy will look like in the next few months. Perhaps there’s just not enough sources for players to burn these materials? Between PVP gear, dungeon gear, and drops perhaps highly valued commodities aren’t as needed as they should be.

There are so many variables. Us players don’t have the figures, but Anet you do. I’m not asking for insider info so I can make a quick buck off TP in the next 5 minutes.
My request: could you kindly provide some thoughts on the current state of the economy. How do you feel about the trends? Is there hope for us blue-collar farmers? Are there any changes that you ‘can’ comment on planned for the future, that will positively influence prices and the economy?

Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your thoughts.

I don’t have any specifics to give you unfortunately. What I will say is that we pay a lot of attention to the economy. It is vastly complex and so changes made have to be gentle and precise. This means there is a lag between recognizing problems and finding the exact solution that meets the problem and the exact intensity of the solution, because we don’t want to take shots in the dark. The economy is still stabilizing, but we are paying attention to patterns that aren’t positive and taking steps to correct the issues. In the next few month I would continue to expect an evolving game (and maybe some specific data eventually).

I don’t have an official response to state, but I will say you should be careful of making assumptions that aren’t necessarily true.

edit: I’m told some of the previous post was not evident at all unless you’re me, so I’ve simplified the response.

It’s my understanding that this is already in place. We still have some unfulfillable orders up that we need to clean, but no more should be created.

There has been no price manipulation, there is a transaction fee, I don’t feel these are the same thing.

Venge.6893:

- The acknowledgement of price manipulation leads to more distrust of the current system.

Can you elaborate on this?

Darmikau.9413:

(you know economist really don’t like assuming :P )

I’m a 4th year Econ major and what is this?

90% of everything I’ve ever done is grounded in some pretty ridiculous assumptions the get absolutely crushed in real world scenarios. The ones that don’t get crushed are universally necessary, like ceteris paribus.

That’s the joke I was making.

Ghoest.3945:

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I do.

And the whole "no real free market exists’ thing is red herring.

What we have now for gems is a completely fake free market – you guys made an algorithm that lets the trade value shift slightly – but the algorithm has aa strong attractor for the point you would prefer.

So what we mean when we say we want a free market is that people make sell and buy order for gems with no restrictions.

The intent of this was to provoke an academic debate over whether players thought a free market would be superior.

I’m not asking if you want a free market, I’m asking for players to discuss why or why not they think a free market would be better.

In order to keep this discussion productive we should try a couple of things (I know it’s the internet, but I have faith in all of us ):

1. Provide evidence of our opinions, assuming your experience is indicative of all experiences is a fallacy.

2. Don’t poison the well.

3. Make an attempt to be unbiased.

Smoeki.2756:

John Smith.4610:

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

You can’t have anything resembling a free market is this game (or any game for that matter), Anet, is basically the God of GW2, anything you do to the game (bugs, fixes, added content. Node respawns etc…) can destroy or create markets in minutes. So It would make no sense to do such a thing or even pretend to do such a thing.

That is correct, there has never been a completely free market in any MMO, patches and fixes modify markets. For the sake of this argument though I think you have to assume (you know economist really don’t like assuming :P ) that the game design is static.

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

They are account bound.

Everyone should keep in mind that the value of gold is mostly defined by its scarcity.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/gems-1-1-1/90768

The black lion tools are working as intended and are significantly better than regular tools.

This is my new favorite thread.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Last-in-First-out-Please-tell-me-the-TP/104484

There are quite a few people who have gotten them

Any chests opened after the change reflect the change, regardless of when the item was created/dropped.

The conduit is not currently a part of the Black Lion Chest. Sorry for the confusion.

We’ve made some changes to improve the black lion chests.

First, we’ve changed all tonics to be stackable and random. If you prefer a specific tonic, we’ve added mystic forge recipes for 3 mystery tonics and one extra item to transform mystery tonics into specific transformations.

We’ve also added a rare chance for a Permanent Banker, Trading Post NPC or Black Lion Merchant.

Chiming in to say I’m reading this thread because it’s awesome. I don’t want to chime in with much because your debate doesn’t require me.

I have only two minor points this time:
1. This thread has split off into multiple topics, all of which are relevant, but may need to separated into different threads soon.

2. It seems that CdrRogdan may be arguing something a bit different from everyone else. If the disjointedness comes from a language barrier, or if it doesn’t, you are free to send me a PM in English/French/German/Korean/Chinese and we can work to understand what your concerns are.

Edit: You’re free to send me a PM in any language, but there may be a bit of a lag in some other languages

John Smith.4610:

Wazabi.1439:

1. Custom bidding is not risk free.
Yes, I’m speaking in terms of turning a profit from putting a bid then sell the item, making profit as long as the spread is sufficiently wide. I do farm items with wide spread. For items with higher transaction volume, the spread usually don’t last long. For slow moving item, there can be a 40% spread like you say. I am merely fronting the payment to those who have no patient to post and wait for their item to sell, and earning premium for it. Although it is profitable and relatively low risk, it is not no risk at all. If the flavor of the month changes or if A-net changes something that impacts the demand of said item, I stand at losing. Also, I suffer from liquidity risk if the item doesn’t sell fast enough where I could had invested in a lower return investment and flip it quickly. This is how the market works.

2. Crafting is not supposed to be profitable.
I’ll put the blame on crafting being too easy to level and a global market. Not necessarily a bad thing as I’ve manage to buy what I can’t craft at an affordable price.

3. A ceiling/floor hurts the economy
There is a complicated explanation that I don’t think you guys are interested in hearing…I don’t know how to make it simple.

4. Transparency is better for the market.
Ok, this I misunderstood what you’re trying to say. What you propose is an auction system with a range of reservation price. I must say it is one of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen in forum post. No comment on that.

5. I just described the stock market! What’s the problem?
To many (me), trading is a game within a game…

6. These are real people, therefore it functions like a real economy.
All the factors you’ve listed determines price, true. From an economist’s perspective, we look at things on a more general view..so advertising, location and such are not considered in the model. What you describe falls more on to marketing…and looking more from a single company’s perspective. For an economic model of any kind, human behavior is an important factor. A game economy simply follows a much simpler model (still complicated) with less variables, and some unique constrains. The underlying foundation applies to both. Example: people prefer to pay less than to pay more for a homogeneous goods, price depreciates when supply exceeds demand. Prices of goods are all driven by people’s action.

Wazabi is almost dead on here.
Just a couple of things I would add. You’re last paragraph is correct, but only to a certain degree inside a game. There is much more examples in the game, than in real life, of people deciding not to maximize profit, or to have odd trade offs for personal preference inside the game that people don’t usually have in real life. People are still people in a sense, but people’s character in games often have very different preferences than the person in real life. I would argue that we have to be careful to remember that motivations in the game aren’t necessarily the same as motivations in real life.

Secondly, not related to Wazabi being correct, is that applying pressure through the trading system to attempt to modify scarcity of an item in the game isn’t the way to solve problems. If an item should be more scarce, then the faucet/sink of that item is off, not the manner in which it’s traded.

Overall great discussions here everyone, we have a set of clearly educated and intelligent people in this forums and it rocks.

Wazabi.1439:

1. Custom bidding is not risk free.
Yes, I’m speaking in terms of turning a profit from putting a bid then sell the item, making profit as long as the spread is sufficiently wide. I do farm items with wide spread. For items with higher transaction volume, the spread usually don’t last long. For slow moving item, there can be a 40% spread like you say. I am merely fronting the payment to those who have no patient to post and wait for their item to sell, and earning premium for it. Although it is profitable and relatively low risk, it is not no risk at all. If the flavor of the month changes or if A-net changes something that impacts the demand of said item, I stand at losing. Also, I suffer from liquidity risk if the item doesn’t sell fast enough where I could had invested in a lower return investment and flip it quickly. This is how the market works.

2. Crafting is not supposed to be profitable.
I’ll put the blame on crafting being too easy to level and a global market. Not necessarily a bad thing as I’ve manage to buy what I can’t craft at an affordable price.

3. A ceiling/floor hurts the economy
There is a complicated explanation that I don’t think you guys are interested in hearing…I don’t know how to make it simple.

4. Transparency is better for the market.
Ok, this I misunderstood what you’re trying to say. What you propose is an auction system with a range of reservation price. I must say it is one of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen in forum post. No comment on that.

5. I just described the stock market! What’s the problem?
To many (me), trading is a game within a game…

6. These are real people, therefore it functions like a real economy.
All the factors you’ve listed determines price, true. From an economist’s perspective, we look at things on a more general view..so advertising, location and such are not considered in the model. What you describe falls more on to marketing…and looking more from a single company’s perspective. For an economic model of any kind, human behavior is an important factor. A game economy simply follows a much simpler model (still complicated) with less variables, and some unique constrains. The underlying foundation applies to both. Example: people prefer to pay less than to pay more for a homogeneous goods, price depreciates when supply exceeds demand. Prices of goods are all driven by people’s action.

Wazabi is almost dead on here.
Just a couple of things I would add. You’re last paragraph is correct, but only to a certain degree inside a game. There is much more examples in the game, than in real life, of people deciding not to maximize profit, or to have odd trade offs for personal preference inside the game that people don’t usually have in real life. People are still people in a sense, but people’s character in games often have very different preferences than the person in real life. This is a larger issue than I want to discuss here. I would argue that we have to be careful to remember that motivations in the game aren’t necessarily the same as motivations in real life.

Secondly, not related to Wazabi being correct, is that applying pressure through the trading system to attempt to modify scarcity of an item in the game isn’t the way to solve problems. If an item should be more scarce, then the faucet/sink of that item is off, not the manner in which it’s traded.

Overall great discussions here everyone, we have a set of clearly educated and intelligent people in this forums and it rocks.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Mystic-Chest-Recipe-Deactivation/first#post209264

Hello all, I have an announcement. On Midnight PDT Monday, the temporary Mystic Forge recipes that create Mystic Chests will come to an end. The Mystic Chests were fantastic and served their purpose, but their time is over. Players may still combine the ingredients from existing Mystic Chests, but no more chests will be created.

The BLTC is an extremely complex system. What I’ll say is we have everyone working as hard as they can to get it back up.

Items and Gold are never lost, the maintenance may have caused a delay in your orders. When the TP is back up just look out for those orders.

99% of the time this is due to a full mailbox. Try deleting some mail.

Y u mad its vydia.6324:

Wow, so many technicalities in your post. You are trying so, so very hard to defend a flawed economy…

When you make your point like in such a negative way, it has much less impact than if you make your point calmly. I recommend trying this in future people will begin to listen, because you clearly are very involved and care about the game and that’s awesome.

Secondly, I do think you are a bit misinformed. You seem to be missing several huge key features of the game that are important to why this economy is different from what you expect (mystic forge for starters).

Lastly, I think that a lot of this is your expectations for things SHOULD work. GW2 is not any other game and it’s economy is unique. It doesn’t necessarily work exactly the same way other games do, nor should it. I encourage you to explore more into the game and economy and think about the differences in detail.

Almost nothing is flooded, you just aren’t used to seeing the scale that the trading post trades in.
The global trading post is really cool.

We’re aware of this bug and are fixing it.

Jakeshipton.6520:

I would just like to say that the 200k+ copper selling for 21c in your screenshot is NOT from one seller it is the total amount of copper ore being sold for 21 across every seller on every server.

The buys and sells are aggregated, it isn’t individual players you are correct, but it isn’t the server it’s the whole world.

Lunesta.3742:

The economy (and prices) were moving up over the first two weeks, but have definitely deflated over the last week. Exotic tailored good prices have gone from 30-40s over cost to 50-60s BELOW cost. Very strange, this has to be novel for a MMO.

When something new is first released, there is a set of early adapters who discover and profit off the new items/markets. Because there is relatively few early adapters, prices are artificially high as supply is much lower than demand. As more players enter the market, the the price falls.

(I wish I could insert graphs)

This is a change in market saturation. It happens in every mmo because the new markets are introduced so frequently.

I think deflating is the wrong word. I think you just mean gold is scarce. And the scarcity of gold means that all items have a low value. I don’t think this is necessarily true, there are other motivations keeping prices for some items low and some high.

Attempting to trade for a tiny amount of gems is a special circumstance due to minimum values set by the server.

Pepcfreak.5984:

John Smith.4610:

If you have an uneven amount of money in the exchange, it refunds the excess to you, it doesn’t keep it.

Might wanna look into that, I’ve tested it multiple times and it is not refunding the excess.

I’ve confirmed that the exchange is functioning properly, and it does return any unevenly matched coin.