Guild Wars 2

So, to pick a nit, it’s not vendor * 1.15. It’s vendor/.85, or vendor * 1.17647058824… which is another point entirely. How many people think that vendor*1.15 is the correct calculation, I wonder?

You’re welcome to continue to call me lazy; I don’t see myself as lazy. I value my time greatly, so I suggested a way that would improve my experience. Such a message would allow me to get back to the game quickly. Instead, it may be the case that I ignore the BLTC for most items, it’s not worth my time to check every price. For a single item, I agree, I’ll do the calculation, who cares. When it’s an inventory full of things I just crafted? Or the haul after several dungeon runs? The calculation times add up, and I’m not interested.

Question for you: From your perspective, there shouldn’t be a message at all about selling on the BLTC for less than the vendor cost?

Also don’t forget that one of the reasons that the parts cost more than the whole is that there is experienced gained in the creation process. That experience has a value, so the materials go up in cost, but when you sell the item, the experience has already been siphoned off of it, causing a decrease in value.

At least, that’s how I look at it.

The motivation for my idea is that there is already a precedent protecting the user from selling something at below vendor pricing. Clearly ANet wants to provide some protection for the seller. It just seems to me that they did it in the most obvious way: without considering their own price “taxes.” For a game that’s supposed to be streamlined and skill based, it occurred to me as being counter to the game’s goal. There’s no “skill” in punching a number into a calculator to see if you’ll actually profit on it, and why should I need to waste my time checking every value against the calculator? What they’ve done is built in a trap option into the game, and then obscured it in two ways:
1) by not making the 10% selling fee “abundantly” clear and,
2) by providing a false safety net by not allowing you to sell at below vendor value, but it does allow you to sell at below vendor value after taxes.

I will admit there IS an argument to be made in the (extremely rare, from my experience) case that in the field, away from all vendors (including completed hearts), that your inventory is full and you have nothing to salvage and no collectibles to deposit (I bet you like this lazy option!), that you would consider posting to the trading post at below value.

In light of such a case, then I think the calculation should be built in. That is, it already pops up a message that says “you can’t sell for below vendor cost,” it could just as easily say “after posting and selling fees, you will earn less money than you would if you sold this to an NPC, do you wish to continue?”

This highlights the trap and informs the market to check out the “mysterious” selling fee.

Something to look out for is on the Trading Post, try searching the inscriptions / insignias. I’ve found it to be an acceptable cost to buy 6 of the cheapest insignias/inscriptions, and then craft those and vendor the results to get some money back (unless that happens to line up with what one of my characters needs ) Always double check that the cost of the inscription/insignia is cheaper than the cost of the materials, but that is often the case for a few of them, I’ve found.

I’m sure this has been mentioned in the past, but I couldn’t find a proper discussion on it, so I thought I’d raise the issue here.

Minimum custom offer price:
The trading post is already smart enough to not let me sell an item at below NPC merchant’s value. So why doesn’t it apply this filter to the buyer? That is, as a buyer, I shouldn’t be able to post a an offer less than (NPCvalue+1)/.85. If I post an offer at that price, after the 15% “tax,” the seller will get NPC value +1 copper, the minimum profit for the effort.

Inventory price filter:
While we’re at it, as a seller, when I open the “sell your inventory on BLTC” tab and see my whole inventory, I think it’d be really spiffy if there was a filter to display only my items that selling the item to the highest buyer would yield a x% profit over just vendoring it. Those items could be “no brainers” for me, and then for the rest of the items I could evaluate what I wanted to do.