Hammers not horrible in certain dungeon paths for a warrior. When I’m running noobs through AC for instance equipping it and a full toughness full utility build so I can spam bursts gives me great survivability and the ability to interrupt gravelings etc. to buy floundering would be heroes (who forgot stability) a chance to make the longer runs. I also enjoy knocking the howling king on his face
In fractals I actually find its not a bad build either. I’m hardly an expert but it’s a viable tankish build. Suffers when running into some of those unstunnable sorts, I’ll give you that, but useful enough in general.
I was thinking about this on the drive home. Consider a more GW2’ish case. So say you found out that a large country in Asia was suddenly coming online and going to be interacting with your market. Now lets say you know that as a result a large number of players will come online and want to make ascended items (legendary drops being what they are).
What good would a flipper who enjoys playing the market invest in? Lets say you figure maybe something like Ecto would be important to have. So what does flipper Fred and his mighty guild of banker brothers do? Why they start buying ecto up. They figure that new market is certain to want the stuff cause you need it in pretty much everything “good” and high level.
What is the effect of this speculation on average player Joe Schmoe? Ecto Rises in price considerably, now Joe isn’t a trader and hasn’t been playing the market game… so he doesn’t happen to have mats of it stock piled away. In fact he’d sort of like to buy 100 or so so he can ascend his ring and play a fractal.
However he looks for ecto and finds the price has gone up significantly because of the reasonable expectation of future demand. Because there are people who want to play guildwars the banker way and are stock piling the stuff as well as buying up existing supply. Now GW2 isn’t increasing the rate that the stuff is coming into the market, and the new players from Asia are not selling theirs because they need it and the stuff is so expensive.
Is the argument that everyone is unconnected and free to play the game there way and that the impact of people making money off of market trading for large volume profit does not at all impact the enjoyability of people who don’t want to engage in the activity for the sake of their personal use?
Incidentally this is all theoretical, I have no idea if ecto has gone up in price since the knowledge about China became well known. Nor do I know if people who play the market think like I do about it. I’m sort of interested to check now though….
I would argue that people whom complain about folks playing the banking for profit way could potentially say that their game experience was impacted in a negative way by speculators driving up costs on commodities to artifically high levels. Maybe this is what the nay sayers are concerned about? Is that a more reasonable way to put it?
Essentially to get what they want in a reasonable time they then have to start changing their game style to do the world boss circuit to salvage rares or other things that don’t really suit their interests. Whereas without these people they could have reasonably supplemented off the trading post?
this is a different side of the coin than is being presented, and it isnt incorrect, but in the long term they were going to be screwed anyway. The flippers smoothed out the curve by taking some supply from a time when it was more abundant, and supplying it at times it is low in demand.
So yeah you get price raises in anticipation.
however that kind of goes more into the effects of speculation.
there will also be times when the speculators cause huge spikes instead of smoothing out.
flippers generally do more predictable, consistent hustles, generally going for the sure thing.
for example, an item that they can buy daily for 10 gold, and sell for 15 gold.
It goes back to my original question about what defines a flipper I suppose. So someone who will hold on for a month is not a “flipper” then I take it. My game lingo is poor
hi John, haven’t figured out how to quote so please bare with I have no particular view yet on flipping but I found your post interesting and had some questions.
So when you say flipping will result in “lower prices”… how do you mean lower? I mean to say that lets say there were 1000 widgets in the market, and 100 of them are listed at an offerng price that buyers seem to be willing to pay (equillibrium) which we’ll call 10(gold). These 95% of these are currently offered by flipper Fred.
Now I happen to have a sizeable portion of widgets (10 of them) and know that selling all these widgets at the same price as the 100 are currently listed will take me longer than I’d like. Plus I have a feel for the market and realize that by listing them all at 100 G I might cause sellers who have just a few to give up on the 10G price and undercut my price cause they don’t want to line up behind me to sell their’s. Possibly engaging chaos mathematics and causing a traumatic downward spiral in prices as people loose confidence in the value of widgets. So I decide to get mine sold first and realize that it is much more reasonable for me to take a 3G hit and sell at 7. (this is worth it to me cause I really want to go invest in gizmos which I think are a real “deal”)
Therefore there is now a reasonable number of these available at 7G. BUT flipper Fred comes along and purchases these all up (say there is actually only one person selling all those other 100 at the 10G price and he buys my stock, maybe it’s two flippers doing this, but whatever). This purchaser is also not dumb enough to list them since he has 100 already at the price of 10 and also understand 100 is sort of the tipping point after which others give up on waiting and will start undercutting in too large a number. He wants to keep the supply at that cost low enough that he won’t be undercut by folks who’ve given up on waiting. he’s willing to dole out his supply in portions at a time.
How has the flipper made the price of Joe Schmo who wants 1 widget “lower”? I mean he could have bought it at 7, but now has to buy at 10 again because someone who is making a lot of money off trading post is able to manipulate supply of goods. (or whatever the economic term for it is). In any case in the immediate sense a flipper has raised the price.
Perhaps I misunderstand your use of the term flipping as being within a short period of time? Or would say buying and holding for a month qualify as flipping as well?
When you say "This price is decided by the market as a whole. Given the “freeness” of our market in GW2 people can sell for more or less than this price. In a textbook this would never happen because people always want to be in that balanced state. "
Do people in textbooks not anticipate that the balanced state will fluctuate over time based on factors like supply and demand and developer nerfs? Why wouldn’t those whom don’t see better investment options choose to wait for an upward fluctuation and sell for more than the current going rate, speculating that rates will rise and fall as they are wont to do?
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When a player adds velocity or liquidity to a market, the result is often lower prices and often prices closer to equilibrium.
Supply and Demand curves can also be called Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Sell curves. Essentially they are the shape of what people are willing to pay or how much people are willing to sell for. If everyone is will to pay $5 then the “demand” curve would be a flat horizontal line at $5.
In real markets the curves end up being curves because people have different preferences or costs. I might be willing to pay $100 for a new video game and you may be willing to pay $50 and yet another person $30. When you extrapolate this out you get a smooth curve of what people are willing to pay (it works the same way for the willingness to sell).
Balance (or equilibrium) occurs when those two lines meet, and people are willing to pay the same amount people are willing to sell. This price is decided by the market as a whole. Given the “freeness” of our market in GW2 people can sell for more or less than this price. In a textbook this would never happen because people always want to be in that balanced state.
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