(edited by Wazabi.1439)
yes, and neglect the fact that the drops are free money to begin with, and that selling for higher means they themselves will be paying a higher price when they buy something else. They fail to see how each components of the economy interacts with each other as a whole.
allow players to post items 1 copper below vender price, it will help the servers and the players
in Suggestions
Posted by: Wazabi.1439
I am starting to think the people who do this are gold farmers who are trying to destroy the Economy …the bot is told to sell everything in the TP for 1 copper over vendor so no one else in the game has a chance to profit and the gold farmers think maybe that people will turn to them for this and in turn steal their accounts yada yada .
I would rather they would lower/remove the 10%cost of selling the item and make the list price go up a bit.
Also it may not be people are sending stuff to the TP from the field since you can relocate crafting mats to the consumables, add a salvage to that and you can keep going for a long time.
The cost of selling item is exactly the mechanism to deter speculation, which the gold farmers will definitely exploit. A lower transaction cost makes moving the market for a short period of time possible…If I’m a gold farmer, I will have a large pooled resource to move the market even for a little while to exploit it.
gold sink = inflation control. Less inflation = more stable economy = good
I personally don’t find it to be a big hindrance even though I always use wp. Crafting in most game cost money to level up.
This is actually the first game where I feel that I actually need to control my spending, and for me that’s a good thing. It’s just a big change that many people are having trouble to adjust from other MMO experience. If they adjust the “income” to a higher level, that means more money in the system, met price in TP will “inflate”, your real purchasing power doesn’t change.
The system today rewards anyone who wants to make it work. At the same time, it’s also simple enough for people who don’t care about analyzing market trends to also earn money.
I like this one.
Right now, there are a million or more people using the trading post; it’s going to take time for it to come to an equilibrium.
Trash loot already at equilibrium price, which is vendor price.
Many of these changes are suggested due to a lack of understanding on economics. The ultimate goal is simple, increasing personal wealth. But some fails to understand how money supply & competition influence it, and only look at it at a nominal level rather than real. They also fail to look at purchasing power to evaluate their ultimate well being. The current TP is not a good mechanism for speculators to make vast profit easily…but not all players are speculators.
@Nerelith.7360
Yes, I agree with that. I believes it stems from familiarity with an old trading mechanism. In this new mechanism, some people are finding it hard, and have to learn it all over again. I do see TP as path to wealth, but you need more knowledge and effort to make a profit out of it. It’s a big ego hit for people who were able to make money from other TP mechanism to have to re-learn to adapt to this new environment. But for any real traders or people with background in stock investment, this is just a small change of environment which they will adapt quickly.
Best advice I can think of to new players is what you’ve said earlier. Don’t expect to get rich crafting and playing the market. Be prepared to spend some time researching to be good at it.
that doesn’t change that I was able to sell even blue loots for a couple silver a large amount of the time.
Someone is paying higher than what he could had gotten from the TP. What TP does is improves the efficiency of trade, making it easier for transactions to occur, in turn improving competition. The competition drives the price down, which in the end benefits the consumer. In a world without TP, people have to setup “stall” (to distinguish from market, the mechanism) or shouting WTS. They are being paid higher for their effort to advertise and sell their items. There’s also less of them doing it, so in a world where actual supply can meet the demand, but accessibility restricts that supply from reaching the hands of all the consumers who demand it. That reduces competition, and hence created a situation where the real supply is actually lower, driving price up. If the price is up, demand decreases, hence instead of 100 people selling it at cost price, only say 50 will be able to sell it at above cost price.
If everyone is making a higher profit, you’ll also be spending more to purchase things, hence your real purchasing power doesn’t change. It’s just an illusion. Think of it as having $100 in a world where a McDonald burger cost $10, and in another world having $10 where a burger cost $1.
Again, I think the trading post is working to the overall disadvantage of the GW2 user base. One immediate solution would be to establish a separate TP for each server. As I said, there’s just too many participants that it creates a race to the bottom, where sellers are actually selling for less than they could get from NPC merchants. Admittedly, buyers of final equipment are benefitting from this, but it also makes speculation the only other real reason to participate, and I think that’s also a bad thing.
As my point made above, without TP then many people will not be able to conveniently get what they need to craft…they will have to grind it to be self sufficient. May be that’s why you find met price cheaper…or met price is cheap simply because it’s week 1 because no one knows how much things are worth. Buyers have to pay a low price to purchase goods, that’s a good thing. Establishing a TP for each server reduces the competition, and reduces the efficiency off the market….that’s how speculators make money, on the in-efficiency of the market (even Warren Buffet admitted to it). We are all consumers at the end, so low price is benefiting everyone in the end. With a cross server TP with more people participating, efficiency increases, and harder for speculators to make money, which is also a good thing. There is this thing called expectation in economic theory. Inflation causes this variable to go haywire, that’s why in an unstable market, prices can swing very wide range. Speculators can profit by exploiting these swings, and can even create them if the market is small. This kind of market only benefits speculators at the expense of the general population. That is also why modern monetary policy targets a steady inflation rate.
I find that in your perspective, you’re assuming that everyone wants to play like you and make a profit out of the market. It is not impossible, but harder.
Lets explore this from a consumer’s perspective. Say someone has a wealth of 100c. He wants to buy a weapon and armour, which with TP, each cost 50c. He can afford both, and will probably buy it. In a world without TP, maybe both items increases to 100c. He either choose only to purchase one of them, or need to grind (work) for more money just to be able to buy it and the other. This also increases the money supply in the world (inflation), which diminishes the real purchasing power of everyone in the game world since money is created out of thin air.
Look at it with selling included. Same person, with wealth of 50c, and loots equivalent to value to 50c. He can still afford both weapon and armour if he sells his loot in market at minimum price. Now same person again, with 50c wealth, but loot now can sell at 100c, and both weapon and armour cost 100c. He’ll have to grind another 50c or get another drop to be able to purchase both weapon and armour.
I think it’s neccessary for Arena.net model. The problem is I think you’re looking at or demanding thing at an incorect angle.
As people play the game for the next few months and years, eventually people will have a lot of money. The Real Money <—> Gems relationship obviously can not change, for example Arena.net can’t make a policy where they say: depend on the in game market, we will charge $5 for 300gems today, and it will be changed to $8 for 300gems tomorrow. Neither they can alter the cost of the gems shop price like this item will cost 500 gems today and cost 800 gems tomorrow. This mean without some constraint, eventually you will see the gem is so cheap that nobody will bother to buy gems with real money (bad for Arenanet) or too expensive that cause people buying gems with real money and convert to gold (creating massive inflation, which can’t be a good thing).
Another argument is that the majority of in game gold are also black box generated vendor. When you loot a mob, the items you got wasn’t created using some finite resource pool in the game. When you vendor that item, the gold being paid to you weren’t withdraw from the finite bank. So there have to be a control to limit inflation.
Yes, the policy does favor Arenanet but that’s for obvious (and not unreasonable reason). This is not a stock market, so you can’t demand or liken it to one, it’s not a free for all environment. It’s a great alternative option and as far as I can see, nothing yet is unreasonable. Maybe that’s exactly what it’s meant to be, an alternative to the cash shop for people who can play more and want to pay less, not as a mean for a “get rich quick” scheme. Also the disparity between the 2 conversion rate is for a very obvious that I’ve mentioned so far, in case you can’t see it, again, it’s to limit inflation.
Well ok, I’m a noob in this thing so forgive me if I say some non-senses. But from what it seens the gem conversion to gold do not worth at all atm. If people stop to trade gems for gold, what will happen? Like a guy here already said he used 20 dollars to get 1 gold and 9x silver lol
The most correct for me would be a price set by the player. It can create inflation but the game itself has so many ways to take out in game gold from the player that I do not think a apocaliptic inflation will happens. lol
In Perfect World for example you put the price you want for your cash (zen), not only for the itens you buy in the cash (you can sell them in the streets and auction) but for the cash (zen) itself. From what I know, theres no company’s control in the prices. The prices are always ok, I never ever seen a giant inflation. It worth to change cash for gold there, and its worth to change gold for cash. It’s just supply and demand…
By the way I know theres variables we do not have here, like most people there NEED gold to keep upgrading and buying their armors and weapons with a high chance of failure, and things like that wich make them do not keep so much in game gold for example.
You are correct…it depends a lot on the game design and mechanism used to control inflation. But if GW2 starts implementing crafting system like PW, I’ll stop playing.
Why does trash items being sold for “trash” bother you? If it’s trash then why would anyone pay more for it then they do now?
If you had to run or port across zones only to TP items, you would be forced to start analyzing the item value, to know what is worth keeping in your bags. Most wouldn’t bother doing that, instead vending items. This would naturally increase the value of greens and even blue items, making it worth for people who spend the time analyzing and running to TP to make some extra coin above what the vendor offers. Why reward those who don’t think instead those who do think? At the moment those who do not think, can dump everything on TP, hurting everyone. And yes, in GW2 lowering prices does hurt everyone, unlike in most other MMO’s. Because the less items cost, the less gold you can earn, the less you can buy from the gem shop, without having to pay real money. I’m talking here mostly bag space, which is very important.
I agree that maybe value of a certain green/yellow that is actually useful will increase because most would vendor it instead…but to say that lower prices hurt everyone is the most absurd thing I’ve heard from all the arguments.
The less the item cost, the less gold you earn selling, but you also pay less to buy stuffs, thus more to spend on gem shop. You “purchasing power” remains the same as if everything were more expansive.
Perhaps I should had clarified. Prices of things where supply>demand will eventually converge to cost price. For goods like mets where the supply and demand are constantly at flux, price does moves around a little.
People selling 1c above vendor is losing money due to ignorance or they doing it for convenience while on the field. There’s nothing wrong with that. Even if everyone is doing it in ignorance, and eventually everyone learns to sell it at a higher price…a trash loot is still a trash loot. You will probably end up at near the profit of selling directly to vendor after the transaction cost. This is not an economic model describes something…it doesn’t produce it…what you’re talking about is fiscal and monetary policy.
Take your example of TP being down. You manage to sell your loots at a higher price. That means someone is paying a higher price to buy it compare to what he could had gotten from TP. Real market adds a premium of convenience to the price of goods, nothing more. As you claim, MMO had evolved pass this. TP is just more efficient. Also, a “market” in your context is not a real-world economic factor.
If everyone is making a higher profit, you’ll also be spending more to purchase things, hence your real purchasing power doesn’t change. It’s just an illusion. Think of it as having $100 in a world where a McDonald burger cost $10, and in another world having $10 where a burger cost $1.
(edited by Wazabi.1439)
I like the idea of not being able to sell anywhere. However, that only means trash items being sold to vendors instead of in the TP. Selling price for such trash item will only be determined by it’s intrinsic value….and supply. If no one wants it or if it’s over supplied, its value will still be low. Maybe not 1c above vendor price…but the price probably won’t make you a significant difference in net profit compared to vendoring it. It will not magically improve your profit for selling them. Basic economics.
Expiry on listed item has 2 impact:
1. more money will be suck out of the system due to reposting
2. More posting around the clearing price rather than extreme range
3. costlier to speculate (which is good generally)
Impact? not much to prices since people will be more conservative in their posting price in order to sell it quickly…it actually encourage selling 1c less than the lowest seller.
On replacing “match lowest seller” with average price. I don’t mean any insult…but any competent traders will know that average price doesn’t mean anything. Average price could be 100c when most of the time the clearing price of the item is at 80c. What matters is the trade price and volume on the list.
Most if not all of your suggestions will only create a theoretical (yours) illusion of what you want, but it will not magically increase the selling price of your trash loot significantly, and thus will not suddenly make you wealthier.
Even if I’m wrong and you’re right, and even assuming money supply is not a factor, then everyone is selling their trash loot at a higher price, and are thus wealthier…thus you’re still paying more to buy stuffs. Your real purchasing power still remains the same.
The world money supply will be a huge factor on how much prices are inflated. When that happen, I have no doubt the gem exchange rate will change to reflect that.
TP is not broken, it’s just not working in a way that you’re familiar with. In fact, it is more real.
(edited by Wazabi.1439)
it is fun if you know what you’re getting into beforehand.
Newer players missed the bus…too bad. And this is not going to be the last for many people throughout the length of the game. Save the energy from crying, and find the next best way to level your craft. Resetting those that are already there changes nothing.
Still, crafting is easy in this game. If that’s how the dev intended it to be, then its not broken…its just not how you wanted it. There’s a big difference in that.
Also, I think dev stated in a blog post, and also in the strategy guide that crafting is not going to make you big money. Most people just didn’t bother to do enough research before jumping into things, and then complaint about it when it isn’t what they expect even though it was due to their own folly/ignorance.
I think the food can come in handy for dungeons….and the dyes….
It seems many fail at reading comprehension, that, or some are simply in too much of a hurry to post “your doing it wrong” (*s) that they ignore the real issue.
This is not about levelling crafting by zooming through with discoveries, ok, got it? We all know we can use discoveries to level crafting, its not rocket science, despite how smart it makes you feel to tell others they are wrong.
This game, we were told, we would be ale to craft our gear as we go, because we can have two crafting professions that means weapons AND armour for many, and level our crafting in line with our adventure level doing just that, and ONLY that, ok, not too hard a concept to grasp?
We want to craft level appropriate gear, with stats that are useful to our char. Crafting items with five or six useless stats that are no good to us, using up our mats is the issue; it means in order to make complete sets of gear as you level, you end up having to grind mats, something areanet claimed would NOT be required.
Players were also told they could level by using crafting, and ONLY crafting, it’s clear that is more horsekitten, anet clearly failed to understand their own economy. Because of the shortfall in the availability of fine mats, crafted items sell for less than it costs to produce them; this would leave pure crafters in a financial deficit, and in the absence of credit loans, not viable at all.
The only players that should need to buy mats through trade posts, are dedicated crafters that sell crafted goods in bulk for profit, and do not use game time to hunt for their own mats; that is simply not possible at present, despite the claims it would be.
Maybe you should give a solid example on how “crafting as you go” is suppose to be? I picked artificing…so I should only be crafting 1 staff and 1 scepter every 25 crafting level to level them up?
No one said you don’t have to put in effort to craft. It is possible to craft your way to lv80…but I don’t think anyone says it’s gonna be easy. I’ve only spend 1 hour to grind for small venom at earlier level…got about 60 of them…that’s it… I’m max at artificing right now.
Crafting is already too easy to level, that’s why there are tons of crafters out there all selling the same stuffs…that’s one of the reason why they can’t turn a profit, and no one that I know buy mets from TP, craft and then sell it.
which is why i said “trade” IE: sell what you get that you dont need so you can afford to buy what you do need…
you are acting like the trading post doesn’t exist AT ALL…
There is another side to this coin, though. Yes, you’re absolutely correct in saying that one could use the Trading Post to buy & sell materials they want or need.
There are some folks, though, that like or aim for the sense of achievement of having provided all their own materials to level. Whilst that may not be something all enjoy, or would aim for, the reality is some may choose to do that, and I don’t believe they could be labelled “wrong” for wanting to achieve this.
You are correct. But to demand change when you can’t achieve said target is…well….you be the judge.
They should reset all 400 cooking got pre nerf,, its not fair on people who now have the grind or cost of levelling it now
That’s jealousy talking… resetting won’t change the fact that you are still having trouble getting to 400… and people who have the guile and act to take advantage of it to get to 400 before you will still get there before you after reset.
Then we 400 will have to demand A-net to compensate us for the time we’ve wasted hunting for karma vendors and spending in game gold instead of investing in some other things resulting in lost profit…you see where this is going and how silly it is?
I think crafting is too easy in this game…This is the first game where I capped both my crafting in 2wks. My last push was 2.5G spent to push artificing from 325 to 400…and that’s because I bought 95% of the mets I need. You need some planning to level craft in order to be efficient.
HOW DOES THIS IMPACTS THE GAME?
CRAFTING
It is very hard to make money in crafting at the current state of the game. I believe it was the developer’s intent that crafting is used to supply gears for yourself and your friends, and maybe that shiny legendry item. I find crafting pretty easy to level in this game. It also gives out good experience, so there are a lot of incentives to craft…which means there are many people that can craft what you could. Add to the fact that TP gives you access to all the crafters in the GW2 world… just like a degree holder is a common sight in the real world, so are master crafters. It is the way it is by design.
TRADING
There is a third mechanism that is very different in this game than others, sales tax (10%). Most other game contains only a listing price (5%). This contains a sales tax as well. How this impact traders is that if you want to buy and sell to make profit from the market, the difference of your sell and buy price needs to be at least 15% to break even. If you’ve priced your sell price too high, too bad…the 5% listing price is non-refundable. Ever notice why the spread (difference of sell/buy price) is always near/at/less than 85% of the lowest selling price?
This makes speculation harder, and thus enhances the stability of the price of goods (good for non speculators) in the market. Due to the vast difference between this and other MMO, the traditional trading strategy that most players are familiar with doesn’t work very well here. Many of you are probably confident of making money in the TP equivalent in other MMO…how many of you have real experience in trading in a real stock market (and turn a consistent profit)? GW2 TP is a less complicated version of it. Due to the size of the market, it is very difficult for most players to have any influence for a significant length of time in the market. It’s 1 against 500k other players (assuming 500k box sale, don’t quote me on that).
Does this makes it impossible to make money from trading? Far from the truth. It only means you have to put in more effort. The easiest is to go through each goods and look for a wide spread, then put in a buy order, and when it fills up, sell it (hopefully the trend hasn’t change much). There was a time last week where I spotted some items that no one was placing any buy orders, and the spread of the sell price and vendor price is quite wide. I put in a large order at 1c above the vendor price. My friend thinks I’m taking a big risk…what if I can’t sell? Well…I can always sell it to the vendor and make a small lost…a small risk of losing versus a large probability of reaping a healthy profit. Other includes monitoring the price of several items daily to figure out the general price level, and then buy at the lowest price. All these involves spending time. I’m sure some other players have a better strategy, but I doubt that any will be willing to share. I know I won’t.
I hope this wall of text help improve the understanding on GW2 economics for some players.
I’ve been seeing much complaints on the Trading Post (TP) on the mechanics…and causes some player to not able to make money from it. I believe that stems from a lack of understanding on economics. Sure, buy low sell high, supply and demand…anyone can quote that…but how many actually understands it? I hope that this post will help improve our fellow GW2 player’s understanding on how basic economics relate to TP, and hopefully help them make some money off it.
BASICS OF GW2 ECONOMICS
The economy of GW2 is vastly different than any other MMO that you probably have played. First, it encompasses the whole game population across all the servers. This significantly improves the liquidity of the market as there are more potential buyers and sellers, and also increases the competition. When there are sufficient participants in the market, competition increases. The clearing price (the price where transaction happens) will then eventually converges to the cost of production (or vendor price). This is already happening in TP. The larger market also makes it harder (not impossible) for speculators to influence the market, which in turn benefits the general players. There are other factors at work here, which leads us to the second difference.
The second thing that GW2 differs from other MMO is that nodes and kill loots are not exclusive to only 1 player. All players can harvest the same node, and all players that contributes sufficiently to a kill will have a random chance of generating a loot drop. It is best that I illustrate this from one of my experience. In one of the event, there were 20-30 (too many to count) players defending a town. At the end of every wave, there are enough loots to fill up all my bag slots. I was fighting and salvaging gears at the same time just to clear it up…same goes to my party member, and I assume the rest of the event participants as well. Thus in GW2, the supply of gear and met drop are significantly higher than other games. What do you think will happen to the price of the gear drop? Met is a different story…crafting consumes tremendous amount of mets…that’s what keeping the met price up. Even when you are adventuring alone, the drop rate of blue and green items are crazy if you have the right buff…so in all….blue and green items are mostly trash in this game. When enough of them floods the TP, it is no suprise that the price converges to vendor price. The only reason it is 1c above vendor price is because of the price floor mechanism.
Will a higher floor price help? In pure honesty, no. All item have an intrinsic value determined by the usefulness and demand of the market. If an item is worthless…why would I want to pay a higher price for it? You may be able to sell it at the higher price…but the probability of selling it is lower. Higher price = less demand. You’ll have a smaller target group to sell to, yet the same number of people who wants to sell that item. What this would do is that some will just sell it to vendor, leaving some posting at the higher ceiling price in the TP, targeting a smaller potential buyer. It doesn’t change anything.
Another thing to keep in mind is the money supply. There is only a finite amount of money in the market at any point of time, and your REAL purchasing power is derived from how much the money supply is. If everything in the TP sells for twice as much it is now, you’ll also be buying things at twice the price….your purchasing power doesn’t change. Since the loots and gold reward appears out of thin air, most MMO will see a gradual increase in inflation. A-net put in some very good mechanism to drain money out from the system (WP, repair cost, vendor mets, listing cost, sales tax, gem sale)…it won’t stop inflation, but it will definitely slow it down.
In summary, we are playing in a very different economy designed with the benefits of players in mind, even though it is not immediately noticeable. Complaints were made because players are not familiar on how the game economic works…where in actual…nothing much really changes except for a few things in the next section.
so everytime you can’t afford something you blame someone else? The world does not revolves around you.
My comments on a few points:
-Floor price
Personally I don’t think removing it will change things. If people try to sell below vendor price, all it does is create and arbitrage opportunity (zero risk profit in financial term) as people snatch up all gears sold below vendor price and sells it to vendor. Buying pressure will push the price back up to vendor price, which is the equilibrium price. I think they put floor price as a guidance on how much the item is worth to prevent people from losing potential profit.
-on listing fee and tax
Necessary to control currency inflation and reduce speculation in the market. I can only say they must have some good economist working for them to make a design like this.
-Crafting not making money
Dev never intends crafting to make huge amount of money…more for your own and guild benefits. Since there is an incentive (xp) to craft, higher proportion of people will be crafting, thus a higher supply of the skill diminishes its value.
-people selling things cheap
They have their own reason: convenience? information asymetry? Ignorance. No point to argue on that.
-On cheap gear
Gear/met drops are much higher because everyone can loot a dead corpse that you contributed in killing it. Not only does this increases supply, but it also decreases demand. Karma gear and crafted gears also reduce demand…hence gear sells at or near vendor price. Natural economic phenomenon in a perfect competition and efficient market.
-Putting it all together
The economy is different to other MMO. Adapt rather than having the game change it to suit you. It is possible to play the market and make profit…it just takes more effort and knowledge on the movement of the market compared to other games.
In all, I think it generally benefits the player base. The huge economy diminishes the power of an individual or a cartel of players to influence/control the market significantly. This may be one of the more efficient market in any mmo (maybe besides eve). Due to the difficulty and cost in trading, more people will be able to use the AH for its true purpose: trade (not speculate). If what you want to sell isn’t fetching a good price, that only means it’s not in demand…no point whining about it. I’m guessing players with real life investment experience don’t have much problem with this system because they already have the knowledge to play the market. For those without, grab an investment book, or just use the AH for its true purpose.
In summary, there is no problem with the AH. However, it would be helpful to make the sales tax more visible to help players that don’t keep an account on their profits from playing the market.
(edited by Wazabi.1439)
I think it’s neccessary for Arena.net model. The problem is I think you’re looking at or demanding thing at an incorect angle.
As people play the game for the next few months and years, eventually people will have a lot of money. The Real Money <—> Gems relationship obviously can not change, for example Arena.net can’t make a policy where they say: depend on the in game market, we will charge $5 for 300gems today, and it will be changed to $8 for 300gems tomorrow. Neither they can alter the cost of the gems shop price like this item will cost 500 gems today and cost 800 gems tomorrow. This mean without some constraint, eventually you will see the gem is so cheap that nobody will bother to buy gems with real money (bad for Arenanet) or too expensive that cause people buying gems with real money and convert to gold (creating massive inflation, which can’t be a good thing).
Another argument is that the majority of in game gold are also black box generated vendor. When you loot a mob, the items you got wasn’t created using some finite resource pool in the game. When you vendor that item, the gold being paid to you weren’t withdraw from the finite bank. So there have to be a control to limit inflation.
Yes, the policy does favor Arenanet but that’s for obvious (and not unreasonable reason). This is not a stock market, so you can’t demand or liken it to one, it’s not a free for all environment. It’s a great alternative option and as far as I can see, nothing yet is unreasonable. Maybe that’s exactly what it’s meant to be, an alternative to the cash shop for people who can play more and want to pay less, not as a mean for a “get rich quick” scheme. Also the disparity between the 2 conversion rate is for a very obvious that I’ve mentioned so far, in case you can’t see it, again, it’s to limit inflation.
well put…good to see someone with a firm grasp of economics to see this from a wider/overall perspective.
I think the dev wanted cooking to be harder to level than other crafts to begin with… it was tookitteneasy to level crafting before the nerf. That being said, the minute I spotted the difference in difficulty and the original developer’s intention, I went all the way to “exploit” it….too bad some waited till the last minute or missed the bus.
It’s not really a matter of fairness…if they were to have left it the way it is, then cooking is worthless because everyone will pump it up to 400 easily… It’s not exactly an unfair advantage for players that got it to 400 because for me, I do need to put in effort to find the karma vendor in high level zones. As for butter…I think it’s even cheaper to obtain it now that it is only around 3c…but I do agree on it displacing the drop of other mets.
I think it’s been mentioned by some dev in an interview that you won’t be making big money in crafting like other games. Mainly, crafting is intended to be a way to provide supply of gear to yourself and guild. Due to the appeal of crafting in this game, more people are doing it, flooding the market with a huge supply of crafted gears. I don’t doubt that some people are able to make profit from it…but I know I won’t be sharing it if I know one…coz the minute I share it, it becomes public knowledge, and that would just eliminate that opportunity. Just spent 2.5g to bring my artificer from 325 to 400 yesterday…I don’t see myself making much gold from it…rather…I foresee most of my gold will come from selling mets and playing the market.
I have to say…I’m glad that I took the time to find oranges and peach vendor and bought them in bulk. Figure that such “exploit” would probably be removed soon…and it would be worth the time to get those item even when I’m under level for those areas (died countless times). Too bad the items are account bound.
Op, be productive and create a game that suits your standard and taste. If your arguments are valid I’m sure it will replace all other mmo out there.
Supposedly op thinks that game company is obligated to cater to his every need…
Yup…it just takes more effort and understanding on how a market works to make money trading.
In most other games, crafting is a money sink as well where you craft trash stuffs that no one wants…at least maybe until the higher level. Here, item drops are so much, and you can buy items with karma merchant… So there’s a lot of other options to get the items and that’s what driving the price down.
It’s also been stated by the developer somewhere that crafting is mainly for your own use, and not to expect to make tons of money through it.
What I think though, is that reducing the drop rate of gears from mob should help reduce the supply. Remember that anyone that strikes a mob have a chance to generate a loot… As oppose to other games where only 1 person gets to keep the generated loot….so in an event with 20 people, the same amount of mobs will be dropping 20 times more loot in total into the game world.
2words, perfect competition. Due to the market encompassing all servers, the market is much more efficient where the prices is harder for an individual/guild to manipulate. Also due to the large amount of participants, market actually stabilize faster, reaching the equilibrium state where the selling price is the cost price. There is nothing wrong with the system.
To those familiar with playing the market of other games, the same trick that works in other maket no longer works here… Or that it actually takes effort and understanding to make money in GW2 market. If you find yourself in a system that you are no longer master, you can either cry about it or learn to master it. For those that loses money from the hidden transaction cost on a sale…you have only yourself to blame…why do you think that items that sells at similar prices have similar spread? Especially if it is actively traded? You obviously have no understanding of economics or investment… You can again take it as a lesson, or cry about it.
I have no patience for people like op. if he were to ask for advice, I’ll gladly share my experience without the criticism. But op seems to be crying about something that he can’t understand and demand changes to be made to suit his level of capabilities.
Add to the fact that everyone is able to loot something or harvest a node, most people are still at their early levels, or just started crafting, it comes as no surprise that supply of magic items are hire than demand, and that low tier mets cost more. It you did study the market, you would have noticed that higher tier meta are getting more expansive as well.