So, out of curiosity, what does everyone think the main factor is here?
I think its the same “greed” exhibited in the OP. There is a “money rush” and the time-value of money is too good to pass up.
Remember, under-cutters do so with the assumption that they’ll make the money NOW. Its like saying “Hey, you’re greedy, i’m greedy, i’ll at least grab my money ASAP so i know at least some of my greed will be satisfied rather than being left hanging like those selling higher”.
I’m actually monitoring the price movement of some items, trying to look for an opening to strike.
If they are “effectively” losing money compared to NPC selling, its a benefit to some other player and the seller paid a holding cost to use an overhead storage. A gold sink is a gold sink. Only thing i’d probably like to see is higher tax if the items have to travel across worlds thus giving priority buying to local goods, maybe something related to WvW.
It’s more convenience than greed.
The typical MMO player doesn’t particularly want to “play the market” — that is, spend time studying prices of items, looking for volume and price disparity patterns, calculating meticulously the differences between selling at a vendor vs paying transaction costs on the TP and so on. The typical player wants to kill stuff and sees the TP as a means to an end — that is, a means to cash out loot drops that the player doesn’t want to use themselves.
As to why people like this (i.e., most players) don’t just sell to vendors, I think the main reason is that it is more convenient for them to sell on the TP (especially by filling orders) than it is to find a vendor. In other games, vendors were always more convenient to use than the market, because you had to physically go to the market to buy and sell there. In this game, the market is everywhere for buying and selling, while vendors may not be very close to where you are, and you may not want to backtrack to find the vendors to sell your items. The TP just feels like a much more convenient way to do it, and, for most players, they don’t care if they are losing a few coppers here and there, because it’s like a “convenience fee” for them to be able to cash out their unwanted loot as quickly and easily as possible.
If Anet disabled the ability to access the market (especially the sell market, because that’s the main driver here), from anywhere, and required you to be physically present at a TP to sell items, supply of a lot of items would drop. It would be more similar to other MMOs, where people “saved” items in inventory to sell at the TP when they were next back in town where the TP is, and otherwise used vendors to empty their bags of unwanted loot for some cash. This reduced supply would push prices up somewhat, obviously. Given that the market is a huge, global market — which means supply is going to be huge — you would need some kind of measure like this to deliberately reduce supply.
I think the other main driver of lower prices in the TP is the lack of currency. While it’s true that some players will buy gold via gems in the future (and perhaps some are even doing so now), the reality is that the way gold sinks work in this game, relatively few players are high rollers cash-wise. In most MMOs, once a player gets past a certain level, cash becomes a non-issue because it is so easy to obtain and amounts tend to snowball. This drives TP/AH prices up, obviously, as there is more cash floating around, in an inflationary sense. That really isn’t happening to a substantial degree here, because Gold is harder to acquire in general and there are significant uses for it both big (e.g., Order gear) and small that add up (scaled WP costs, scaled repair costs), and if you factor in people using the TP to either level crafts and/or obtain items to use in crafting endgame exotic gear, the total endgame gold sink is currently substantial. That depresses pricing. Once more players have their endgame gear sorted in a month or two, that will ease the gold crunch a bit, but also there will be less demand overall as a result, and so I am not sure that this will result in a more robust pricing environment in the market.
In general, it seems to me that the market in GW2 isn’t really designed to function as a money-making exercise, in general. Opportunities exist if you scour the market and find disparities that can support a decent arbitrage profit, but in general this is a market designed to source items at a lowish value due to the overall strong anti-inflationary measures that keep average currency levels low, as well as the global nature of the market creating a constant oversupply environment.
