Guild Wars 2

Rodnix.4263:

Haha, i see… but then again, isn’t it time? 2 years!!!

Jennah didnt celebrate her 11th year in charge last year, so i doubt she will celebrate her 12th this year.

Narrrz.7532:

Wanze.8410:

Actually, I think BL Salvage kits and their 100% chance to recover upgrades are one of the main reasons the upgrade component market is messed up and I wouldnt mind, if they take them out of the game, along with the upgrade extractor.

Because it made us think about upgrade components as permanently retrievable and reusable and not as a consumable, like it should be.

OK, the BL Kits were introduced to generate gem sales but as you stated, most of the players generate enough of those for their use through drops and login rewards, so i doubt that people actually pay real money for gems to buy them.

In my opinion upgrade components should work like consumables or crafting materials, once you put them on gear, there shouldnt be a 100% chance to retrieve them again.

I even think that the 80% chance of master kits is too high.

The problem there is that upgrades then become the province of the rich & elite. Strength runes are 15g apiece as is; tell me that wouldn’t double, triple or more if people couldn’t retrieve them from armour.

Actually, on that note… those runes would become unable to be found except through mystic forging, which would artificially inflate the price of upgrades across the board. I doubt there’d be anything more lucrative than crafting major or even minor upgrades to sell.

You are right, strength runes would become more expensive, just like any other popular UC that isnt craftable. Thats part of the problem and indicates, how messed up the UC market is at the moment, as i stated before.

A viable solution to this isnt making karma or batch armor salvageable, as it only addresses one part of the problem. In general, i dont have a problem with people having to pay a good chunk more for meta builds because in some way, it promotes build diversity as some might opt to go for a cheaper, alternative build but the price range is a bit high with UCs where the range for a full set of runes/sigils can range from a couple of silver to 100g for the most popular builds.

Zerker gear for example, which is about 30% more expensive than most other builds, is in a good place in terms of pricing for meta builds, i think.

Sentinel armor and weapons are on the edge of being too expensive, sent trinkets are too expensive and Keeper/zealot gear is simply rediculous, considering you need 500 sprockets per piece.

For upgrade components, i would draw the line at 10g per piece for the most popular ones.

But as I mentioned, the possibility to recover UCs via salvage kits makes it really hard to balance their demand and therefore their supply as well. The only possibility of expensive UCs to be destroyed is to put them on unsalvageable gear and even then, they still fill their purpose, so the owner wont become a buyer anytime soon.

In general, a low volume market, like UCs, is way harder to balance compared to high volume markets.
If we have 10k players using a strength rune set thats already 60k runes in use and there are only about 500 on the tp. Maybe there is demand for another 1000 runes per day and on a regular day, that can be covered by regular supply. But once big changes come to the game, like the last balance patch, its hard to cover the additional demand because there isnt elastic supply.

In order to rework the UC market, a great deal of additional sinks and more elastic supply has to be created, we cant only address high value UCs but also have to consider the bulk of undesired UCs and how ethey can be used up or put a higher value on.

The best choice to do that, is to introduce some kind of UC library, where you unlock UCs to use and can choose your active one while OOC. Personally, i firmly believe that they intend to introduce such a system in the future but it will have a big impact on the economy, just like the wardrobe or dye changes or the recent change to switchable stats on ascended gear or the added functionality to legendary weapons. And I am not so sure, if it is in the works for HoT, my tip would be a release date with a feature/balance patch next year at the earliest.

Narrrz.7532:

Wanze.8410:

Narrrz.7532:

i think that salvage kits should work as they did in gw1, ie giving the option to remove an upgrade rather than retrieving materials. If used this way, the chance to preserve the armor is twice what the chance to preserve the upgrade would be now, so using a masters/mystic kit or better ensures that the armor is not destroyed.

from an economic POV, the balancing factor to this would be that if you’re concerned with preserving the upgrade, you use up charges twice as fast when salvaging gear for materials. depending on what you’re salvaging, this might not be cost-effective.

all existing upgrade extractors should be turned into a permanent one, and everyone who has bought and consumed upgrade extractors should receive the permanent one in the mail. if the number you’ve bought exceeds the gem store cost of the new permanent upgrade extractor (which essentially just pulls out upgrades at no cost or risk), then there should be some kind of compensation/refund proportional to what was spent.

So how will exotic upgrade components be consumed in the future if you can reuse them indefinately? Or we just wait until they flood the market and all of them are at vendor value.

Then we go back to the forums and complain that the unlimited upgrade extractor, which we paid 1000 gems for, is basically worthless because its cheaper to buy the upgrade components at vendor price from the tp.

mmm… you have a point.

perhaps, then, allow a use of the salvage kit to attempt to remove an upgrade at the salvage kit’s return rate but with no risk to the parent item. If you fail to remove the upgrade, it is destroyed.

So you can still burn a black lion salvage kit charge to guarantee an extraction, or take the 50/50 risk of using a mystic/masters (which, while it would be devastating to destroy an upgrade with a failure, would still at least give you the possibility of returning the upgrade)

As a possible fringe benefit, this would potentially chew through a great many of the huge number of black lion kits already out there (i know i for one have one on every character and another one for each of them in my bank; i’ve likely used at least that many in my time since i started playing)

Actually, I think BL Salvage kits and their 100% chance to recover upgrades are one of the main reasons the upgrade component market is messed up and I wouldnt mind, if they take them out of the game, along with the upgrade extractor.

Because it made us think about upgrade components as permanently retrievable and reusable and not as a consumable, like it should be.

OK, the BL Kits were introduced to generate gem sales but as you stated, most of the players generate enough of those for their use through drops and login rewards, so i doubt that people actually pay real money for gems to buy them.

In my opinion upgrade components should work like consumables or crafting materials, once you put them on gear, there shouldnt be a 100% chance to retrieve them again.

I even think that the 80% chance of master kits is too high.

maddoctor.2738:

Ayrilana.1396:

It may be for economic reasons.

If it was for economic reasons they wouldn’t allow us to recover upgrades easily with the old transmute system. The problem with badge/karma armor started with the wardrobe update, there was no problem before it so it can’t be for anything related to the economy.

Anet simply underestimated the new supply of upgrade components from the start and overestimated the demand for them.
Thats why, shortly after launch, they disabled the function to throw 4 exotic upgrades into the forge and get a new one, to cut supply of in demand sigils and runes.
However, that also cut a mayor sink for undesired runes and sigils, which all sit at vendor value now. And that didnt adress the demand side either as most people kept their expensive UC´s via the old transmutation system.
The old transmutation system took a bit longer to fix but just because they waited 1.5 years for it doesnt mean that the ability to retrieve upgrade components in the process was an intended feature.

Fingolfin.7451:

But let’s be honest,the extraction of upgrades DOES NOT hurt any economy.Anet you should at least give an answer to those thoughts.

Except the upgrade market itself. Even the expensive runes and sigils will keep being generated by the forge and salvaged from random exotic gear drops until there is more supply than demand.
The runes and sigils that are only available via crafting will also lose value, as none are destroyed, so there goes demand for the mats that are used to craft them, which are quite alot.

This would terminate alot of material sinks which is harmful to any economy.

Rare runes and sigil would go back to vendor value, exotic armor drops will ALL go towards their salvage value of ectos and insignias, the price of exotic weapons will only be determined by the value of the corresponding precursor, so say goodby to exotic gear drops that will net you more than 5g, unless its a rare skin.

The only thing ANet did wrong was allowing us to keep 1 upgrade with the old transmutation system, which we now think should be the status quo but that was never working as intended.

John Smith already stated that the upgrade component market needs a mayor overhaul and thats more complicated than most of you think.

And any suggestions that have been made, be it cheaper upgrade extractors, salvageable karma or wvw gear or else, are mostly counterproductive in a macro economic way.

Narrrz.7532:

i think that salvage kits should work as they did in gw1, ie giving the option to remove an upgrade rather than retrieving materials. If used this way, the chance to preserve the armor is twice what the chance to preserve the upgrade would be now, so using a masters/mystic kit or better ensures that the armor is not destroyed.

from an economic POV, the balancing factor to this would be that if you’re concerned with preserving the upgrade, you use up charges twice as fast when salvaging gear for materials. depending on what you’re salvaging, this might not be cost-effective.

all existing upgrade extractors should be turned into a permanent one, and everyone who has bought and consumed upgrade extractors should receive the permanent one in the mail. if the number you’ve bought exceeds the gem store cost of the new permanent upgrade extractor (which essentially just pulls out upgrades at no cost or risk), then there should be some kind of compensation/refund proportional to what was spent.

So how will exotic upgrade components be consumed in the future if you can reuse them indefinately? Or we just wait until they flood the market and all of them are at vendor value.

Then we go back to the forums and complain that the unlimited upgrade extractor, which we paid 1000 gems for, is basically worthless because its cheaper to buy the upgrade components at vendor price from the tp.

Maybe the Cities will send them again when Jennah celebrates her 15 years of reign jubilee in 2018.

They already didnt show last year when the gauntlet was open for the festival of the 4 winds.

I got those recipes already and make good profit with selling those runes and sigils on the tp so you get a nay from me.

SicilianDragon.3071:

Pick up tab is empty. I know about the 100 item limit in the pickup tab. The rest go into overflow

OK, log out and log back in and see what happens.

You can also create an trading API key and check your purchase history and current buy orders via a website to see if the API picked up your trade somehow and only the trading ui is laggy.
TO do that go to My Account on the top right of this screen, sign in and click API Keys on the left hand side.
Create a new key and check trading post permissions, copy the key.
Go to https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/account?login

and log in using your generated api key.

Once logged in, you might have to “click to load all transactions” then check your history and current listings.

Narrrz.7532:

not immediately, but if you get more than you can use, the value won’t rise, and sooner or later it will hit that ‘worthless’ point.

That would be the case, if you would get quartz without farming for it but thats not the case. Lets take silk scraps for example.

Most players that want to craft their daily damask wont get 300 scraps per day, so they have to buy whatever they need from other players that dont need silk atm.
The diffrence between silk and quartz is that basically every player is getting a constant supply of silk, wether he is farming for it or not, it drops through secondary sources from almost any game content.
Quartz however, you have to go out of your way to farm it, into your home instance or dry top, you wont get any from other game content.

So most players who farm it already do so because they need it for themselves, players who farm it to sell for a profit dont make a big enough impact because they can only farm a small amount per day (not like other ressources, which you can farm indefintaely).

My bet would be that you started out with a full pick up tab, so you didnt see the bags coming in and ordered them while having the my transactions tab/current transactions open.

Your gold is gone because you placed those bids, the bids filled but arent visible in your pick up tab because its full. If you now switch to your purchase history without leaving the my transactions tab before (either close the tp ui, go to sell items, home or buy items), your history wont update with the filled buy orders as it doesnt operate in real time, it only updates when you enter my transactions.

Zephyra.4709:

Manasa Devi.7958:

You’ll find that the entire supply of those blueprints is not on the tradepost. I know this for a fact.

A ‘fact’ with nothing to back it up? I am not surprised.

It’s posts like those that are almost cringeworthy, but, do go on… My biggest question is are any of these blueprints still acquirable other than the TP?

Its posts like yours that make me cringe. You also didnt back up the fact that you got enough gold to do so or that all supply of those blueprints are on the tp available for sale (a little hint: most of the supply in game is in peoples storage and not for sale).

Then you probably only calculated their lowest listing and multiplied it with supply to determine how much gold you need, unfortunately there are many listings at higher prices. I checked for 2 blueprint scraps (those with the lowest supply) and just the couple of hundred listings over 1g accumulate to roughly 1000g alone.

But lets assume you have enough gold to buy out 1 scrap, about 10k from the tp and another 50k from people that make their supply available once you brought the price up. What then?

I tell you what will happen: You will be stuck with a boatload of scraps in your banks that you cant sell because there isnt enough demand for it.

Sure some people would like to craft these backpacks for their skin but we will run out of power cores long before you sold off your blueprint scraps.

And the power cores arent the real problem its blade shards, which are hard to farm or expensive to forge and you need 425 of them for the exotic piece, 925 for the first stage of ascended. Long story short, you will have a hard time to find consumers that will buy your scraps at a price that would enable you to recover your investment costs, let alone make a profit.

But go ahead and buy the blueprints out and please keep us updated how your investment is getting along in the next month.

Ah, you were just bigmouthing and thought becuase you had a couple of thousand gold to your account you can manipulate a market?

Well, I also got lots of gold and like to bigmouth a bit, so I will offer you a reward of 500g, if you manage to completely buy out one of the spinal blades blueprint scraps until monday night.
Just make a screenshot of their 0 supply on the tp, once youre done.

Happy Trading!

Narrrz.7532:

i think people are being a bit shortsighted about this.
There are two scenarios: the former is our present situation.

a) The total available quartz is too little for every account to produce a charged crystal everyday without running through their stockpile or buying to supplement. Quartz is valuable.
b)The total available quartz means that every account can produce a charged crystal every day. Not all do, because of laziness/ignorance/some other reason, but every day someone wishes to charge quartz, they can acquire enough without buying any. Quartz’ value falls to the highest someone is willing to pay to save them the trouble of harvesting it themselves, which will probably be at or barely above vendor value.

Everyone complaining about the shortage of quartz is effectively asking that it be made worthless.

Quartz wasnt even at vendor value during the festival when it rained from the sky, so i doubt that adding a few new sources would crash the market.

Riesty.9075:

you talk like you have only 1 character greated lol if you rly need more
you have at least 5char slots to go farm dry top…
but maybe you use only your main not sure about that o.O

if it rise 6-10s peopl are maybe go out and farm to sell who knows
(cough new trol jump puzzle 30s Chili Pepper camping yes random but you can also get other cooking stuff 1-5s for a few seconds log on a character a nice thing and i get chilli more often then silver dublons cough)
i compare it with oricaclum
stable but there are more resources
i think we get some more for quartz with hot

Youre right, I only play 1 character. I have 4 more but i only use them for storage, crafting or opening champ bags at lowr levels to get t4 mats. As only 2 of them are level 80, i could only take those to DT.

That doesnt matter though because quartz nodes can only be harvested once per day per account. No point in parking any alts there.

Youre right, we probably will get some quartz with HoT but last time i checked, there wasnt even a release date yet.

Carighan.6758:

Yeah those + the home node. Among all players that’s a steady income, do you need 1000 a day or what? I don’t exactly level a character I want to deck out in Celestial every 1-2 days.

Most of the people dont harvest in dry top, let alone the home node.
Anyways, if you do, you get 1 quartz as a minimumper pick, with a rare chance of 5 quartz or a charged.

You need 25 quartz per day to charge, so people have to buy to supplement.

Carighan.6758:

Honestly seeing how I get some Quartz every day, and so do a lot of other players, I can’t see us have a shortage any time soon.

Well, feel free to tell us where you get your quartz because i sure as hell can only find 4 regular nodes in game that i can loot once per day, the rich node is only available during a t4 sandstorm in DT.

And i dont know at which supply level you gonna call it a shortage, i would say we are already in one.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Khisanth.2948:

Are you sure the ToT bags and Wintersday Gifts were dropping the charged quartz? Wintersday Gifts did drop charged at the beginning but that was a bug and it got fixed before the end of the event.

By the end… I looted 300 of those things before they patched it. I’ll never need charged quartz again most likely.

I didnt do any tests on the gifts but took the info on the wiki but i usually get charged quartz from a batch of treat bags (1-2k) i open.

Taxidriver.2043:

1-100g min upbid=1g
101-500 min upbid=5g
501-1000 min upbid=10g
u get the idea

So if the highest bid on an item is 1g and the lowest listing is 1.5g, i have to buy directly because 1g + 1g upbid is 2g.

Cool suggestion, bro.

I made some research about a year ago into this, the thread should still be somewhere in bltc or crafting forum archives.

What i found is a borked salvage rate just like you mentioned.

It seemed to me that each salvage item has an internal chance of salvaging rarer materials (t6 instead of t5 mats), on which the rate of the salvage kit is applied and it seemed to be around the 10% range. So a crude kit which has zero chance, still gave you t6 mats every 10th try, while the chance to get some with a rare or silver salvage o matic, was 12.5% (10%x125%).
Its either that and working as intended (in which case the tooltip is misleading) or its simply bugged and they didnt get around to fix it.
A couple of months back they fixed the salvage rate of upgrade components, which seemed to be bugged. At least the crude and fine salvage kit slavage upgrade compenents at a higher rate now than before. So i wouldnt be surprised, if the chance ot find rarer mats isnt working as intended either.

Up to now, i havent even seen a suggestion that would disallow overbidding by 1c.

As i already mentioned, with the proposed change, i can simply up a 1g highest bid by whatever value will be the minimum, lets say 1s, making 1g1s the highest bid.
Then i place a bid at 1g1c and cancel my bid at 1g1s.

States.6387:

Wanze.8410:

Just wait for a week until you relist and your item is more likely to sell.
You a greatly exaggerating to prove a point without giving any specific example of an item or any other evidence that this is a widespread occurence.

If you think i am exaggerating then i’m going to assume you hardly use the trade house. The example i provided is not even close to being exaggerated.

I use the trading post quite often and almost exclusively sell item via listings, not directly to buy orders.

In the last 90 days (thats how long the api tracks your sales history), i sold 233k items worth over 48k gold.

I think i know what i am talking about when i say that most of my listings sell within a week.

Menadena.7482:

If they are going to just change only one thing about the tp it should be not letting bids below the minimum selling cost of the item (and removing the ones already there).

You already can only place bids at a minimum of vendor value +15%.
The bids below that threshold are old ones. They cant be filled and do no harm to the economy. If Anet was to cancel all those bids, it would only eat up work hours and have no benefit whatsoever. The gold of those bids would most probably go towards long inactive or banned accounts anyways.

States.6387:

Wanze.8410:

States.6387:

Wanze.8410:

For people that want minimum increments implemented, can you explain to me, why you think this would chance anything about the fact that you will get outbid?

It seems to me that you want a way to be able to place a bid and not get outbid without having to update your buy orders.

If you think someone who outbid you a copper on a 100g item before wont outbid you 10s or 1g now, i think you will be disappointed.

You already have the chance to minimize the risk of being outbid by bidding 110g instead of 100g, so i dont see, how this system would give your bid addional security that isnt already available via personal choice now.

All it would to is increase the pace of price spikes and dumps or in demand and oversupplied items.

I dont have a problem with people wanting to outbid or undersell players on the trade house. The issue i have is that there is no balance to it. A player can jump on the trade house and instantly step in front of 5k people for the price of 1 copper. I’d rather there be limits to to how much you can undersell or outbid someone so its a fair trade off to all the players who are now having to wait behind the person choosing to jump in front of them. And this issue is not just on the bidding side of the trade house. It occurs just as much (if not more) on the selling side of the trade house which is even more of an issue imo. You cant just list all your items for dirt cheap to ensure they get bought. It would defeat the whole purpose of grinding those items to make a fair profit off them.

And I disagree because the trading post is one of the most balanced areas of the game, as everyone is subject to the same rules yet has a free choice when it comes to his personal evaluation of an item.
Its up to the individual seller and buyer to make the right choice in order for his item to sell or his bid to fill in the desired time frame.

Nevermind that any system that requires you to outbid/undercut by a certain amount (be it a % or minimum amount of gold) can be easily circumnavigated.

If a minimum bid for an item is 100g and by new rules i would have to place a bid of at least 101g if I want to raise it, i do just that, then place another bid at 100g and 1 copper, then cancel my bid of 101g.

You can not make “the right bid” in this games current trade house. Literally every time something is put on the trade house be it bids for buying or selling it is almost always immediately outbid or undercut by someone else for 1 copper. And this continues endlessly. That means that no matter what number you make up to sell or bid on an item, it will never “be the right bid”. The only items that are not affected by this issue are the ones in high demand (which is pretty much only crafting materials). That is a problem. The trading system in this game is not anywhere near balanced.

Heres an example of what currently goes on with it:

Item A is listed on the trade house for 10 gold.
I put item A on the trade house for 9 gold. (1 gold less should be good right?)
Immediately after, someone puts item A on the trade house for 8.9 gold
Immediately after that someone puts item A on the trade house for 8.8 gold
Immediately after that someone puts item A on the trade house for 8.7 gold
This continues endlessly or until an item is being sold for the same price as people are placing buy orders. The next day or sometimes even in the next few hours item A can now be as low kitten and my original listing can be behind thousands of other orders forcing me to pull my item off and start over.

This is part of the reason why prices on items fluctuate so often and so dramatically and that is not good for the trading system.

Edit: the “kitten” was five gold with the number and letter g. Not sure why that is bleeped out lol

Just wait for a week until you relist and your item is more likely to sell.
You a greatly exaggerating to prove a point without giving any specific example of an item or any other evidence that this is a widespread occurence.

McJAC.4739:

When I was bidding on Reyna’s armor pieces I got the feeling that there are probably many bots playing the TP instead of people. That is why I find upbidding by 1c so annoying sometimes.

I would almost always upbid by something like 5-20s on a piece of armor. But if that bid is not high enough, there will be always people (or bots?) with their bid orders higher by 1c. There won’t be 1 bid or 2 that are higher than mine, there will be around 6-8 buy orders that are all just 1c higher than the previous one (when I come back to check the prices in the evening or next day). Every single time, unless I reach a certain price where it is not worth for them to overbid me (when I make the potential profits too small). The annoying part is reaching that point, because it seems like those people are babysitting their buy orders all day, every day.

It is just so consistent that it is really suspicious…and of course annoying because I don’t want to check my buy orders every 30 minutes until I figure out where the maximum buy order price of the other people is. It would just go much faster if they couldn’t outbid me just by 1c.

On the other hand, I don’t feel like this is a big problem for cheap items that are high in demand and high in supply. If you really need those items, all you need to do is to increase the buy price a little bit more than just 1c any you are probably good.

Its a global economy, most of the time, you are just being outbid by other players that babysit their orders while you go out and play.
Rheynas armor is profitable when salvaged, as you not only get ectos and dark matter but also the chance to salvage a shamans insignia and melandru runes, worth both 2g each.
That means you not only have competition form other players that want to equip it (because its cheaper than buying a craft4ed shamans exotic set and 6 runes) but also professional salvagers that want to make a profit of 1 or 2g for a black lion salvage kit charge.

I wont deny that there are bots operating on the tp but in my experience there are far less now than last year.
Most of the time, they operate on medium and low velocity items that are usually sold as single items, rather than in bulk (for example exotics).
If i happen to find a bot bidding on the same item as me, outbidding me by 1 copper within under a minute after i place my bid, i usually start using higher price increments, until i find the maximum value the bot is programmed to bid.
If an item has a highest bid of 1g and sells for 1.5g, i might put in a bid at 1g1c.
If i place against a bot, i place higher bids and might find out that the maximum bid the bot is allowed place is 1.3g.
I place 1 order at 1.2999g, so the bot has to pay the max amount of gold he is allowed to do and i also place another 10 bids at 1g 1c, so once the bot gets cancelled and my 1 high bid gets filled, i get the item close to 1g again.
I also report the bot in the “Bot Hot Spot” sticky, so devs can take care of it.
Usually the next day, the bot is gone, either banned or went on to a different item.

But as already mentioned, most of the times, you actually get outbid by other players who spend more time updating their bids than you.
WIth the new trading API released, there are plenty of apps and websites that warn you in real time, if you get outbid or undercut, so people dont have to stop playing other content in orderto double check their bids, they just have to open the tp, when they are actually being outbid.

States.6387:

Wanze.8410:

For people that want minimum increments implemented, can you explain to me, why you think this would chance anything about the fact that you will get outbid?

It seems to me that you want a way to be able to place a bid and not get outbid without having to update your buy orders.

If you think someone who outbid you a copper on a 100g item before wont outbid you 10s or 1g now, i think you will be disappointed.

You already have the chance to minimize the risk of being outbid by bidding 110g instead of 100g, so i dont see, how this system would give your bid addional security that isnt already available via personal choice now.

All it would to is increase the pace of price spikes and dumps or in demand and oversupplied items.

I dont have a problem with people wanting to outbid or undersell players on the trade house. The issue i have is that there is no balance to it. A player can jump on the trade house and instantly step in front of 5k people for the price of 1 copper. I’d rather there be limits to to how much you can undersell or outbid someone so its a fair trade off to all the players who are now having to wait behind the person choosing to jump in front of them. And this issue is not just on the bidding side of the trade house. It occurs just as much (if not more) on the selling side of the trade house which is even more of an issue imo. You cant just list all your items for dirt cheap to ensure they get bought. It would defeat the whole purpose of grinding those items to make a fair profit off them.

And I disagree because the trading post is one of the most balanced areas of the game, as everyone is subject to the same rules yet has a free choice when it comes to his personal evaluation of an item.
Its up to the individual seller and buyer to make the right choice in order for his item to sell or his bid to fill in the desired time frame.

Nevermind that any system that requires you to outbid/undercut by a certain amount (be it a % or minimum amount of gold) can be easily circumnavigated.

If a minimum bid for an item is 100g and by new rules i would have to place a bid of at least 101g if I want to raise it, i do just that, then place another bid at 100g and 1 copper, then cancel my bid of 101g.

For people that want minimum increments implemented, can you explain to me, why you think this would chance anything about the fact that you will get outbid?

It seems to me that you want a way to be able to place a bid and not get outbid without having to update your buy orders.

If you think someone who outbid you a copper on a 100g item before wont outbid you 10s or 1g now, i think you will be disappointed.

You already have the chance to minimize the risk of being outbid by bidding 110g instead of 100g, so i dont see, how this system would give your bid addional security that isnt already available via personal choice now.

All it would to is increase the pace of price spikes and dumps or in demand and oversupplied items.

Julie Yann.5379:

Wanze.8410:

Julie Yann.5379:

Did level after 80 really have a point before the patch? Seriously, I had hundreds of skill points that we never used before the changes. Now you get shards as drops, I still have hundreds of shards that probably will never get used. I don’t see why people are making such a big deal out of this.

Because clearly other people consume skill points/shards on a more regular basis than you.

Last year, i made an average of 3g profit for skillpoints by promoting t1 common mats and used up thousands of skill points in the process. Some people craft superior siege for wvw on a regular basis, craft lots of legendaries or ascended gear.

But you still get shards, I get them from drops fairly regularly and you get them from dailies as well. Shard supply hasn’t changed with the patch, I just get them differently.

Last year, i would make at least 10 per day (and also use 10 per day), i didnt really adjust my play style but i get far less than that now (I also stopped using them for profit since they announced HoT, so i built up a nice supply in the last 6 months).

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Sometime in the next year I suspect they will eventually upgrade jewelcrafting which would change a lot of things. The whole jewel system is fairly convoluted and I think they may do a complete overhaul which is why they shelved it. Of course that is highly speculative, and has no time frame so it isn’t really worth betting on, but I do think it will happen eventually.

Of course I also expect HoT to introduce multiple quartz nodes since we have cliffs, cities of gold, etc, that just screams quartz mining. Once HoT launches we will know for sure, but the prices will quickly adjust. I sold all my quartz when it hit 2.5s as I suspect it will come plummeting back down on HoT release.

Yeah I will definately try to get rid of my stock before HoT, just to clear all my vaults for trading once it goes live. But until now, we dont have a release date yet and we might still be a couple of months off.
Before the balance patch, i still believed that Anet might add one or two content patches between now and HoT that would pour out some quartz (and other limited items) but im not so sure about that anymore.

Shivan.9438:

rhapsody.3615:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Eldritch_Scroll

Here are some things you can make with your spirit shards.

Making exotics is a waste of money. 250 Ectos sells for a lot more than the exotic you make.

Fortunately, only 11 of the 78 recipes need a stack of ectos.

I didnt check profit margins on the weapons but there there shouldnt be any, its probably due to the recent price increase of ectos. Those weapons move alot slower than ectos, so they need some time to adjust.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

My take on this. Sinister gear is being used more now, because it’s cheaper to craft the Ascended version of armors with it. All other Ascended armor costs 5 Laurels for each piece of the recipe (30 Laurels per weight class). For Verata gear, you can buy them on the TP for extremely cheap (comparably). I did this to complete my Ascended armor set of Light, Medium, and Heavy for the achievement. Later, I’ll change the stats with the new MF recipe.

BUT… each inscription only takes 25 Quartz. 6 × 25 is only 150 per weight class. So we can also speculate that some people are crafting and hoarding Sinister inscriptions as an investment.

I also wanted to hoard some stuff related to sinister as an investment but the inscriptions wasnt one of them because they arent tradeable, compared to the recipes, quartz and charged sheets.

I went for the sheets and quartz as i think those 2 are more affected by actual demand from consumers compared to the recipes, which were mostly traded bewtween traders. I flipped some of the recipes for a decent profit but overall, i made the most profit with the first 2.

Julie Yann.5379:

Wanze.8410:

Julie Yann.5379:

I’m kind of glad I filled my private guild bank with quartz months ago.

Congratulations. Assuming you have a fully upgraded guild vault, you are they proud owner of 62.5k quartz, less than 0.8% of the supply that vanished from the tp in the last 180 days. If you wanted to, you could satisfy the daily demand for maybe 2 days, i doubt though that you will do it, unless you are in immediate need of gold.

I will wait for the price to rise some more, I paid next to nothing for them so I don’t mind risking it for huge profits.

Yeah and i think thats a mentality that many others that hold a decent amount of quartz share, me included.
If i needed gold quick, i would have no problem cashing some stacks in, at this point i would have already made over 500% profit on them. But as i dont need gold atm, i rather hold on to it. Even if prices should stabilize now for longer than a couple of weeks, i probably wouldnt sell my whole stock either but keep a couple dozen stacks for future personal consumption.

Julie Yann.5379:

Did level after 80 really have a point before the patch? Seriously, I had hundreds of skill points that we never used before the changes. Now you get shards as drops, I still have hundreds of shards that probably will never get used. I don’t see why people are making such a big deal out of this.

Because clearly other people consume skill points/shards on a more regular basis than you.

Last year, i made an average of 3g profit for skillpoints by promoting t1 common mats and used up thousands of skill points in the process. Some people craft superior siege for wvw on a regular basis, craft lots of legendaries or ascended gear.

Julie Yann.5379:

I’m kind of glad I filled my private guild bank with quartz months ago.

Congratulations. Assuming you have a fully upgraded guild vault, you are they proud owner of 62.5k quartz, less than 0.8% of the supply that vanished from the tp in the last 180 days. If you wanted to, you could satisfy the daily demand for maybe 2 days, i doubt though that you will do it, unless you are in immediate need of gold.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The rumors covered both Beta slot forging, and regular slot forging. Mine was done on my main. I’ve done 3 more Exotic tries since, and so far nothing. But with my small sample size of 4, I’m at a 25% success rate. I’m guestimating Mea to be a 3.7% with getting Zap. Tman, Seyiwaji and Quarktastic are at 50%. This is on the assumption that they’re all telling the truth. Squishy and rhapsody are at 0%, which would have been the norm.

So yes, more attempts = more successes. But take away the ones who tested it on the Beta slot, and you still have a pretty sizable number of people getting Precursors on regular character slots.

rhapsody.3615:

If you’re going to present a theory like this, you need a large sample size. Hearsay isn’t enough.

Yeah, I’m looking to craft more Exotic Giver GS and try.

Those people that got a pre from exotics on their normal characters, would have also gotten one, if the beta wasnt going on but in that case, they probably wouldnt mention it on the forums or reddit.

So they wouldnt add to the rumors either.
Just because people are more vocal atm about their precursor drops doesnt mean that more pres are forged in relation to exotics thrown in.

And I wouldnt suggest to craft givers gs either, unless you want to use them to level your weaponsmith.
Right now it costs 5.5g to craft one but you could buy at least a dozen different gs around the 4g mark directly, 3g on buy order.

If that is your way to go about forging, you would probably make a loss in the long run because you pay 66% more than me per average forge attempt with exotics and 150% more if i use self crafted rares.

Thank you for your gold.

Wanze.8410:

Azurite Orbs were only available during the molten facility mini dungeon during the season 1. They were used to craft exotic sentinel weapons/armor/trinkets. They werent obtainable for a while but with asscended crafting Anet introduced salvageable inscriptions in august 2013 and insignias in dec 2013 for previously uncraftable stats. While sentinel WAS craftable, only the stat sensitive material (orbs) wasnt farmable anymore, so they added sentinel insignias and inscriptions to the guild commendation vendor to add an additional faucet for those. Why they decided to make the stat combo available through that vendor instead of establishing new faucets for azurite orbs, is up for speculation, i think they just wanted to add an additonal sink for guild commendations at that time.

Just some extra info on this:
Many players dont know that sentinel insignias and inscriptions are also salvageable because for the most time, this hasnt been a viable option to obtain them.
As this feature was added with ascended crafting later in 2013, there was simply no supply of exotic sentinel armor and weapons left from the molten facility. After that, they stopped dropping and their prices went up in the hundreds of gold, so if someone paid lots of gold for it, they certainly wouldnt salvage it.
But in april last year, all those exotic sentinel gear dropped again from scarlets chest and nobody really noticed. Their price dropped so fast, that they were available on buy order for way less than the cheapest other exotics making it even good forge fodder.
But when you salvaged them, you got a couple of ectos, dark matter, maybe an inscription or insignia worth 10g and sometimes even an expensive rune or sigil.
I think i burned through 30 stacks of bl salvage kits that i amassed during that time, making an average profit of 5-10g per salvage. When i was done with those 75o charges, i bought plenty more on the gem store with gold and still made a profit.
I think i made more than 5k gold profit during the first week.
However, since the end of season 1, that gear stopped dropping once again and prices are back in the hundreds of gold.

Mea.8967:

Wanze.8410:

quaniesan.8497:

JustTrogdor.7892:

So, buy the cheapest precursor off the TP and exchange it via the mystic forge for the most expensive one? Sounds like a plan!

Sure is. Didn’t i say it being one time only and it come with some cost. Of course, an initial ripple in market is to be expected. If you are one of the market manipulators, of course you wouldn’t like it, no?

I bet Average Joe, who just crafted one of the expensive legendaries in order to sell it for 3.5k gold will be delighted by this change and this sudden influx of new supply, forged by rich players, who can afford to outright buy one of the cheaper legendaries for around 2k gold, throw in a couple of mats worth 50g and undercut him with a legendary that cost them 500g less to acquire within 3 min, while he was grinding for it for the past couple of months.

I have enough gold to purchase one of the cheap legendaries to turn it into a quick 500g profit, so i second this proposal.

Not so sure wether average joe would agree though.

Maybe they should make a way to produce an account bound precursor.

Like a scavenger hunt or something?

Thats an awesome idea and you should open a seperate thread in the suggestion subforum about it, so maybe Anet can squeeze it into HoT.
Shouldnt take much to time to implement, anyways.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I understand what Wanze is saying, but if other player’s claims are true, then the bar skews from lucky RNG drop to potentially changed forge mechanics.

If one person gets lucky, they’re one of the outliners on the probability scale. But if many get lucky, chances are less that they all got lucky without the help of some unknown deviation.

I attached a graph I found that should help illustrate the chance.

Thats true but you fail to provide substancial evidence that more people like usual got lucky (map chat, forums and personally crafting 1 pre cursor with a lucky roll isnt enough).

While it might be true that more precursors per day were forged since the last patch (causing all that chatter about pre forging in map chat, forums, reddit etc) and through beta weekend its much more likely that the cause of it was an unusual high amount of exotics being thrown into the forge per day (from beta gear boxes) and not a ninja buffed forge rate or forge related bug.

This weekend people who usually dont have the gold to gamble away with exotic weapons had the opportunity to test out the precursor droprate with them without having to pay the price, if they have an unlucky streak and many took advantage of it, at least going for it until they had the first pre.

I didnt pre order yet, so i didnt participate but if i would, i would probably spend my whole game time during that weekend forging exotics, just for personal research.

quaniesan.8497:

JustTrogdor.7892:

So, buy the cheapest precursor off the TP and exchange it via the mystic forge for the most expensive one? Sounds like a plan!

Sure is. Didn’t i say it being one time only and it come with some cost. Of course, an initial ripple in market is to be expected. If you are one of the market manipulators, of course you wouldn’t like it, no?

I bet Average Joe, who just crafted one of the expensive legendaries in order to sell it for 3.5k gold will be delighted by this change and this sudden influx of new supply, forged by rich players, who can afford to outright buy one of the cheaper legendaries for around 2k gold, throw in a couple of mats worth 50g and undercut him with a legendary that cost them 500g less to acquire within 3 min, while he was grinding for it for the past couple of months.

I have enough gold to purchase one of the cheap legendaries to turn it into a quick 500g profit, so i second this proposal.

Not so sure wether average joe would agree though.

Danikat.8537:

TheGrimm.5624:

One statistic I would love to see is how many players list buy orders or sell orders versus those that sell to the highest buy order or buy what they need immediately. Without that I am not certain that the causal player deals with buy orders or place sell orders that much, therefore its the traders that are driving the value of items that players farm down in value.

We do live in the microwave age where people don’t even have time for 24-hour banking. I base this opinion off of fellow players. I know others that will spend 40+ hours in game but don’t work with the TP outside of buying directly what they need or selling to the highest bidder. IMO if people spending that much time in game follow that route, odds are high a more casual player will act similar.

Could be wrong, but likewise agree sometimes its better to deal with the devil you know. Good hunting!

I think you’d be surprised. I consider myself a casual player, especially when it comes to the TP. The vast majority of the time I don’t know or care what affects the price of items or how much it’s likely to vary in a day, week, month etc. As you and Wanze have said I’m simply buying things I want to use, because I want to use them (and selling things I have and don’t want to use).

But the Trading Post interface can function a bit like an ‘idiots guide’ to the market. It doesn’t tell you everything of course but it gives you a lot of useful information very clearly. You can see how many of a given item are currently being sold vs. how many buy orders there are, the range of prices for both buy and sell orders and the difference between the two. That’s enough to make a basic decision on whether it’s better to place a buy order or buy directly.

For example earlier today I set out to buy a full set of celestial light armor recipes. I’ve never bought these before, or paid any attention to the market for them, I’m only buying them because I got my ele to level 80 and decided I wanted celestial armor.

By looking at the TP I was able to tell that there was a significant difference between the lowest sell price and the highest buy price, and that there are enough of them in circulation that I don’t have to worry about the supply disappearing (and can be reasonably sure they’re not all tied up in sell orders).

I knew I couldn’t expect buy orders to fill right away, and that there was a good chance I’d be outbid and have to wait for 2 or more to sell before I get mine. But I also knew my main focus for this character currently is the personal story, which hardly requires a full set of matching exotics, so I can afford to wait and, for me, the money I’ll save will be worth it.

(On the other side I also decided to list a lot of the equipment I made while levelling tailor instead of selling it right away, again because I didn’t need the sale to be instant and the difference in price was big enough to make it worthwhile.)

You are probably a good example of the average player, when it comes to tp interaction and I dont mean that in a disrespective way. Sometimes people try to safe a buck or two but most of the time, they make impulsive decisions when it comes to trading.

I just checked celestial light recipes and added some prices:
in order to purchase one of each light recipes you currently pay 113s on buy order, if you buy directly, you pay 191s, thats 80s saved, congrats to that.

If you would have done some additional research, you would have found out that since the 2nd festival of the 4 winds last year, they introduced recipes to craft a full satchel of celestial exalted armor, which goes for 7/17s.

It takes exactly the same amount of mats to craft the satchel and the 6 individual armor pieces combined, the only disadvantage is that you have to wait until you gathered all the mats before crafting the whole satchel, if you craft pieces individually, you can already use some, while you wait until you have enough charged quartz for the other pieces.
But that would have been another 1 gold saved in recipe costs.

I tend to level up in wvw, right before a ganker group or the enemy zerg is about to kill me, then bang, full health and knockback, free to go.

Especially exciting next to a high cliff.

Vavume.8065:

TLDR : Wanze bought 7 million quartz and now wants to unload, just kidding :P

but really, thanks and keep these insights coming, they are pretty interesting to read.

I know youre kidding but just to burst that bubble of a single person buying up 7 million quartz over the course of the last 6 months:

The only way to realistically do that is by storing them in your trading post pick up tab, which requires you to buy a seperate account. At an average price of 1.5s, thats 105k gold. That account would either have to buy that gold via gems (around 10k bucks at current value) or transfer 100k gold from his main account which probably would have him at least flagged for gold selling, if not banned.
If someone done it nonetheless and the 7 million supply were bought up by a single person or a group, they will have a hard time selling it because it would mean that regular supply and demand has been in equilibrium for the whole year and the player base produces enough to sustain itself. The moment they additional 7 million are going back on the tp, no matter how slow, we will have more supply coming in than we need and prices will falls immediately. In that case, all the investor did was spreading his wealth.

Never mind the amount of time needed to take the 28k stacks off the pick up tab, 100 at a time and relist them with the slow TP UI and sell spam restrictions.

khani.4786:

Why can’t we get Azurite orbs anymore except from rarely from generosity’s reward? Why can’t we upgrade azurite crystals into orbs? And the only way to get Azurite crystals is in a single fractal (that they removed the Ori nodes from so you can’t get the orbs there anymore)

Azurite Orbs were only available during the molten facility mini dungeon during the season 1. They were used to craft exotic sentinel weapons/armor/trinkets. They werent obtainable for a while but with asscended crafting Anet introduced salvageable inscriptions in august 2013 and insignias in dec 2013 for previously uncraftable stats. While sentinel WAS craftable, only the stat sensitive material (orbs) wasnt farmable anymore, so they added sentinel insignias and inscriptions to the guild commendation vendor to add an additional faucet for those. Why they decided to make the stat combo available through that vendor instead of establishing new faucets for azurite orbs, is up for speculation, i think they just wanted to add an additonal sink for guild commendations at that time.
Anyways, it was a good solution to make exotic and ascended sentinel gear available at a cheaper price than before, at least weapons and armor. In 2013, they intended to raise every crafting profession to 500 but as we all know, they never came around to do it for jeweling. If they would have released jeweling 500 as intended, i would assume they would have added exquisite azurite jewels (the equivalent to inscriptions and insignias) to the guild com vendor as well.
But that never happened and since then they abandoned any changes to jeweling.

The inability to transmogrify azurite crystals into orbs might have been an initial oversight when f&f got released that never was fixed. Its either low on their priority list or its working as intended but I am pretty sure they are aware of the situation.

I think there are many easy ways they could reintroduce azurite orb supply, adding the transmogrifying recipe to the mystic forge would be an easy fix but that would crash its price due to the glut of azurite crystals on the market, so i dont think that would be anets first choice. I bought 20 stacks anyways, just in case.
Another way would be to put them on the loot table of the mystic forge, when forging 4 other orbs, crests or doubloons but as most of them are at vendor value as well, it might crash their price as well.

Actually, i just double checked general prices on exotic trinkets and in order to to bring azurite down to value of other stat trinkets, Anet basically has to bring azurite orbs down close to vendor value, so one of those solutions is probably the best one.

Adding it as a rare drop to the azurite nodes in the molten facility fractals wouldnt yield enough to bring the price down much, so it would only add a nice rare drop to a fractal run, which is nice for frequent fractal runners but wouldnt put too much of a dent into sentinel trinket prices.

I would like to see John Smith on POI at some time and maybe some team members from the rewards team talking a bit about their work regarding HoT or if that isnt possible without releasing economy sensitive imformation prematurely, talk a bit about all the changes towards the reward system they introduced since Season 2.

Beldin.5498:

celestial aromor

Smelling armor confirmed.

Serophous.9085:

fishball.7204:

Dry top is definitely less popular now which has led to a drastic drop in quartz supply. I’d bet that most of the supply now comes from home instances which realistically only gives 3-8 per person per day whereas charging it up requires 25 quartz.

Looking at the graph, over 300k supply burned this week with only 300k left, ruh roh.

dont forget, there are people also like wanze who keep some back in stock. That stock will flow when they feel the price is right to them.

The amount of supply on accounts compared to the tp is always very speculative.
In most cases, the supply on the tp only accounts for a small fraction of overall supply, the same goes for quartz. But compared to daily consumption, i dont believe that that stock isnt nearly as big as it once was.

Most people that bought when supplies were at their peek would in my opinion already have cashed in by now and made up to 500% profit, which is a decent return for half a years investment.
I already said i have 70 stacks but that doesnt mean that I intend to sell them. I charge quartz daily since the start of the year, even though i dont have any need for it. But if Anet brings out new sinks for charged quartz, i will have enough and its also a way for me to store more quartz per slot.
I already said that my supply is only 5% of the supply on the tp, i couldnt flood the market, if i wanted to, it would only turn the tide for 12 hours, then its gone. And I rather hold on to my supply for personal use than selling now, in a week, in a month for 4, 5 or 6 s.
If there is still a huge amount supplies lying around, it has to come from the general player base, accounts that have a stack in the material storage since yesteryear and maybe a couple more in their bank. Chance is, that most of them arent even aware whats going on because they are casuals and dont give a kitten. Some might be aware and rather than cashing in a couple of gold, keep their supply intentionally for future use because there are no reasonable faucets atm, with the 4 nodes per day and account, they can barely charge a crystal.
Thats why i think that even if there is still a decent amount of supply stored outside of the tp, that supply isnt neccesarily designated for future sale and wont help satisfying the demand for it from new accounts.

fishball.7204:

Dry top is definitely less popular now which has led to a drastic drop in quartz supply. I’d bet that most of the supply now comes from home instances which realistically only gives 3-8 per person per day whereas charging it up requires 25 quartz.

Looking at the graph, over 300k supply burned this week with only 300k left, ruh roh.

Youre right but i dont think that a less populated DT contributed much towards the supply drain in the last 6 months. The population went off DT towards SW and the festival in november last year and supply started vanishing only 3 months later. That lead me to the conclusion that supply has been pretty steady since November, when sinister gear was introduced all up until today and therefore the demand side of the equation had to be greatly grown starting in january.
That can only have been triggered by the HoT announcement and lots of new accounts (and consumers) through the sales. If I would take an educated guess, i would estimate that at least half of the current active player base are accounts opened in the last 5 months, which all have a big demand for celestial and sinister gear, which they have to level their professions for to be able to craft them. The changes to the condi meta and the balance patch recently added additonal demand for those stats from veterans as well, that until then didnt bother to try out those builds.

TheGrimm.5624:

Wanze.8410:

TheGrimm.5624:

This is easy. Move the listing fee to the buyer in the case of the buy orders. That way if someone offers a buy it had best be a good one else they will have to pay a price to re-list the same that sellers do.

This is easily the worst suggestion i read in this thread.
Moving the listing fee to the bidder would mean that the trading post could be utilized as free storage, just list all your stuff for 10000g each, so it doesnt get bought, delist if you want it back.

I am not suggesting removing it if items are placed for sale. If you put something out for sale then the listing fee is on the seller. I am saying in the case of buy orders it’s moved to the buyer. The discouragement to have it act as a storage locker remains.

The point is that there is no penalty to the buyer putting a bid out there that undervalues the item. There is a penalty to a seller valuing something wrong if they list and then re-list. Even in this method a buyer underbidding would still be better off then a seller over-valuing the item but at least its a discouragement. If someone wants to keep 1 upping a bid then that fine but there is a price for each time that transaction occurs.

A low bid doesnt undervalue the item in general, it only states the personal evaluation of the bidder.
And those bids aound 10-20% lower than the highest bid have an important role to balance the balance when supply and demand change for periods of time. Most items usually swing in value in that range on a weekly circle without any new content or information added just because of population, production and consumption changes between weekdays and weekends.

Putting bidding fees on every placed bid (assuming 5% of the total value) would put casual players at a great disadvantage towards traders like me. Most of the time, they want to buy stuff on the tp because they are consumers and want to use whatever they are buying as fast as possible. They either buy directly, which is instant but comes at a premium or place bids. That will take a bit longer but most of the time will grant them a great rebate. Most of the time, they will be able to pick their orders up, at least partially, during the same playing session or at least the next day. They also have the opportunity to increase their chances, by constantly updating their highest bid but with your suggestion, they would think twice to place bids because they would lose gold every time the cancel one bid and add another. Of course, they could just place their bid and leave it until its filled, usually under a week but if an item is in high demand (or short supply) for whatever reasons and its price is constantly rising, it could take months to fill. Most casuals and consumers would simply stop placing bets and buy directly, which leaves the bidding market nearly exclusively to traders.

Because i dont care if my order fills today or in a week because i dont want to immediately use it. Whenever its filled, i relist it 50% higher and can be most certain that it usually sell within a week. I dont care as much as average joe, who usually scraps around with less than 100g, to tie up 50, 100, 500 or 1000g in buy orders for a week or two because i constantly have new gold coming in.

If you would paint the whole scenario in black and white, it would basically show poor casual players selling their earned loot directly to rich traders for cheap gold, when they dont have demand for it, and buy it back from them when they need it for a premium.

But anyways, I dont even agree that the status quo is a problem and needs fixing.
The ability to renew your order without a penalty is a great way for every player to strike a bargain in his purchases and shouldnt be limited to rich people and traders as it would greatly increase the wealth gap.

Celestial gear is still the biggest sink for quartz, as it is quite a popular stat combo and uses 5 times more quartz than nomad and sinister. If a new account wanted to craft a celestial set with 6 armor pieces and 3 weapons (i disregard exotic trinkets, as i assume people would rather get a celestial ascended trinket by other means rather than crafting 6 exotic trinkets), they would need to get their hands on over 4 stacks of quartz. They didnt have any leftovers of charged or regular quartz from past events, all they could do is farm 4 nodes per day which usually would only yield half the amount of quartz they need for their daily charge, buy wintersday gifts or t&t bags or buy them on the tp. Until the end of march, quartz was still cheap on the tp at around 1s, so most people didnt mind to pay the price as celestial was still one of the cheapest exotic stats to craft.

The problem was that in those 2 1/2 months, we burned through 6 million quartz and suddenly the price went up to 2s. At that time, regular players and investors started selling their stock to make a profit, supplies replenished a bit and stayed level, just like the price, until the end of may. Thats when more news were published about the upcoming changes to the condi meta and the balance patch, including the ability to chance stats on ascended gear.
It sparked a huge demand for sinister gear and propably celestial as well, since people wanted to switch some of their unwanted armor and weapon boxes with undesired stats to something useful.

So in the last 5 weeks, supply went down 82.5%, from 2 million to 350k and we passed the 3 silver mark during the weekend.

Since the update, charged ambrite went up to around crafting value, which indicates that people didnt hoard as much as regular sheets, which are still available for less than 50% of their crafting value.

So what does it mean for the regular player?

The hardest hit will be players that want to craft celestial gear, as the price of quartz will trend up the fastest.

I dont see demand for celestial gear diminishing anytime soon and you have to craft it yourself with quartz, which you cant get enough of by yourself because it has a limited faucet. And by now, many regular players and investors already sold their unwanted quartz. Personally, i have 70 stacks left to sell, which might sound much to some people but atm, those 17.5k wouldnt even cover half a days consumption and is as much kitten of the current supply on the tp.

Sinister gear crafters are a little better off, as they dont need that much quartz for their gear (80% less) and have the possibility to buy additional supplies of charged ambrite on the tp, probably for a little less than crafting value as they still have a decent supply outside of the tp, personally I have twice the amount compared to the supply on the tp stored away. Wether it will be available for a little less or more than crafting value will depend on when people will start to sell additional supplies on the tp and how fast the quartz price rises.

Nomad gear crafters probably dont have to worry at all, as there is so much sheets of ambrite outside the tp that it will take a long time until the price becomes an issue in the crafting process, its still one of the cheapest stats to craft.

Hi guys,

I already mentioned this in another thread of mine about the economic impact of the last balance patch but wanted to make a seperate topic.

Since the start of the year, the bulk of 8 million quartz on the tp has been used up at a rapid pace and as of now, we are left with a mere 350k on the tp.

Some threads already creeped up on the forums since then and some claimed it was market manipulation. I have been trading with quartz and related items, like celestial recipes, sheets of ambrite, grow lamps, and charged ambrite ever since its release and have done some additional research in order to find out what caused the mass consumption of quartz.

What got me baffled is that in the 10 months between its introduction during the bazaar of the 4 winds 7/2013 and the festival of the 4 winds in 5/2014 the supply of quartz was way less, usually hovering between 100 and 400k. During the festival in June 6 million quartz got dumped on the tp and in July, Dry Top opened. It contained 3 quartz nodes, which were harvestable once per day per account, which isnt much but due to the majority of the player base constantly farming DT, another 2 million quartz ended up on the tp.

The problem was that there werent enough sinks for quartz as most players already crafted their celestial gear. In August 2014, supply and demand were pretty much level until the end of the year. Reasons for that are certainly the end of the festival, which diminished supply greatly compared to the limited faucets in DT and the the introduction of mawdrey, which added an addtional sink.
Until the end of the year, there were some additional shifts in supply and demand, Halloween in October spilled out charged quartz from t&t bags, Wintersday Gifts in December/January as well and Additional content in DT during November had people flocking back there from the silverwastes.
Sheets of Ambrite (which need 5 quartz) for Nomads gear were also introduced in August but the stat combo wasnt very popular and quite expensive to craft, as ambrite was quite pricy at that time. In November, sinister stats and SW were introduced, which were a bit more popular. Its also noteworthy, that at that time, a huge amount of ambrite got farmed which brought it down to vendor value. That might seem insignificant but is in my opinion one of the main reasons, why we used up so much quartz in 2015. Its not that nomads gear got any more popular but crafting sheets of ambrite did.

As already mentioned i have been trading in sheets of ambrite alot since its introduction and for most of the time this year, it has been traded for far less than crafting value, which can only have one reason:
We are crafting more of it than we consume. Its a lvl 400 refining recipe used by all armor and weaponcrafting professions and people mass produced it to level from 400-425. There is not much sheets of ambrite on the tp, less than 4k, which would only mean 20k quartz but I suspect a huge amount of sheets of ambrite lying around in peoples material storages.

While leveling crafting professions, many people struggle with inventory space and use the deposit material option a few times. When people start out from lvl 400, refining mats is the first option to advance your level. Since SW, people got plenty of ambrite, it filled up our inventory, was at vendor value and in general a hassle to have. At that time, most people also had at least a stack of quartz left in their storage, enough for 50 sheets of ambrite. It was a great way for many to level their crafting and free inventory slots by burning through 5 stacks of ambrite.
If only 20k people did that, it would already consume 5million quartz.
Hovever, that was already possible in November, which also saw sinister gear being introduced. That was more popular and charged sheets of ambrite even needed 25 quartz but the 8 million supply stayed on the tp until the middle of January when suddenly supply went down hard and constantly.
So what happened there?
First of all, WIntersday ended, which gave a steady supply of charged quartz drops but that alone couldnt have been the cause alone.
At the end of January, HoT was announced, which brought alot of old players back and also started a series of 75% rebate sales for the game, which brought in tons of new accounts. I read some numbers recently I think they sold more account keys in the last 6 months than in the 2 years before combined.
Quartz is such a unique material because every end product that it is used for (nomad/sinister/celestial gear, mawdrey) is account bound on acquire, which means you cant buy it with gold. Therefore all the new accounts that opened this year had to level their crafts in order to obtain them.

TheGrimm.5624:

This is easy. Move the listing fee to the buyer in the case of the buy orders. That way if someone offers a buy it had best be a good one else they will have to pay a price to re-list the same that sellers do.

This is easily the worst suggestion i read in this thread.
Moving the listing fee to the bidder would mean that the trading post could be utilized as free storage, just list all your stuff for 10000g each, so it doesnt get bought, delist if you want it back.

ElforTheLandStander.7052:

There really ought to be be a minimum amount by which you have to up the ante for a buy order on the TP. I haven’t been to many real-life auctions, but I’ve never seen a bidding war tediously go back and forth by one penny at a time.

If you really want an item badly enough to outdo the top bidder, you should have to commit a little more to it than 1 copper, literally the smallest unit of currency in the game.

It could be, like…a silver or .02% of the top bid, whichever is greater. That way on big items that are hundreds of gold, it would force you to bid in gold, without being completely insubstantial on smaller items. Since .02% of something that sells for like 12 silver is basically 2 copper anyway.

Your suggestion wouldnt change the status quo. People who want to up your bid, would still outbid you and it wouldnt change your place in queue.
All it would do is make prices in general more volatile, which is undesired in a balanced economy.

Having at least 1s increments would be futile to low value items, which have a price spread of less than 1 silver.