Guild Wars 2

Nice try, but people haven’t been saving up for Chaos of Lyssa for months.

Lolindir.3518:

The price went down to 100g and I still have to finish the download of the update XD anyway, I suppose this answers the question “was it working as intended?”… guess not

Gotta love panic sales.

Get ready for the “I didn’t get any, so how can they say the drop rate was increased?” complaints.

A Massive Headache.1879:

tolunart.2095:

Rouven.7409:

The discrepancy is simply too high vs grenth and dwayna.

Or those two recipes dropped to much and the devs made the new one more rare. Isn’t there a Balthazar back piece too? I thought I saw a link to it in the Wiki.

yeah, it’s a pvp reward track, that’s super easy to obtain, with zero rng in obtaining it.

Ok, I found a page about it in the Wiki but wasn’t sure how you got it. The point is, I said before they have tried different methods of acquisition for similar items. Look at Wintersday, Fused, Sclerite, Jade weapon skins, acquired through the gem shop (“zero rng”), BL chests, event-specific rewards boxes, and finally through a vendor that accepts BL weapon tickets.

Fused weapons were especially difficult to obtain because they were locked in RNG boxes and couldn’t be sold on the TP. Either you bought a lot of keys or accepted you’d probably never get one.

Sclerite and Jade tickets were at least obtainable through playing the game, the rng boxes dropped through doing event-related activities.

I don’t see anything different here. Four god-themed skins obtained in different ways, some are easier than others. The devs will continue to tweak the methods until they are satisfied, and there is the option to re-release them later through different methods.

Rouven.7409:

The discrepancy is simply too high vs grenth and dwayna.

Or those two recipes dropped to much and the devs made the new one more rare. Isn’t there a Balthazar back piece too? I thought I saw a link to it in the Wiki.

Astralporing.1957:

You are really asking the wrong person here. I have always insisted that the real value of the items lies in how good they look, not in how rare they are. Personally i couldn’t care if everyone else had access to the same items i do, as long as i could get things i like. So, to answer your question: it doesn’t matter if i am the only person that has these rewards or if everyone has them. I don’t care about rarity at all.

Good for you, I happen to agree. Some of my favorite armor and weapon skins (and dye colors) cost me less than 10s on the TP. I’m not chasing ascended or Legendary gear so I can completely outfit a character in level 80 exotics for perhaps 25g or less, plus a few transmute charges.

But I’m really asking you to do what I’m trying to do, and look beyond your personal preferences and view the game as an “average player” who desires these items because few people have them. When many people have them, they become worthless because only those people who do not have them want them. He can’t impress people with Twilight if they already have Eternity.

It’s a paradox – the average player wants the rare gear that only a few players have, but if the average player has it, then by definition it is not “the rare gear that only a few players have” and so he doesn’t want it.

In essence, these posts are demanding that the devs hand the individual posting the rare items instead of distributing them randomly, so that the poster has the things he wants but no one else can have them.

Pandaman.4758:

Well, that is reasonable, but only as far as permanent content goes. It really shouldn’t be applied to a temporary event (even one that’s two months long) and hidden behind two layers of grinding (farming for tickets, then farming for chance bags).

But it is what it is. I’ll just hope they put it in the next Wintersday box like the Dwayna and Grenth pieces and pick up the recipe for 10g.

Data from previous events has probably shown them that a small percentage of players will “farm” the event for as long a possible in order to obtain as many rare items as possible to sell, or to hold until the supply drops after the event and sell then. As time goes on, more players will realize they can make more money by hoarding the items and selling only when supply is nearly gone. This leads to the situation you see – lots of people who obtained the recipes will not sell them until the price is right, when they dump the recipes, if there are enough hoarders, the supply will overwhelm demand and the prices drop as speculators rush to compete with each other and sell before the price drops too far.

This is more the responsibility of the players than the devs. If the devs do increase the drop rate, more players will hoard them and you will still not see the numbers on the TP increase by very much.

Astralporing.1957:

For the individual person, however, all those 50 000 items dropping do not mean anything, if they don’t drop for them. The individual chance for drop is still 1/20, and that’s the only thing that counts.

I don’t care if in a mass lottery chances are big enough that every week someone usually wins the big one. That someone still wouldn’t be me. That’s where statistics and individual fun completely miss each other.

It doesn’t matter. You’re treating an MMO as if it were a single player game. You are not the center of the GW2 universe. Every player who reaches 5000/10000/15000 etc. AP gets special weapon/armor skins in a rewards chest. I saw a lot of them when the rewards chests were new (and veteran players got several chests over the course of a week or two), but I don’t see so many of them any more. They are not rare or difficult to obtain, and therefore they are not special or desired.

How special are these reward skins to you when you know that everyone in the game will eventually get them?

You view the game as a single player and want the rare item to drop for you specificially. The devs look at the game as a population of nearly four million accounts, consider the percentage of those accounts logging in every week, and must consider how millions of loot rolls every hour will produce X rare items, Y exotic items (of which Z are precursors) and what percentage of those will make it to the TP.

If they tweaked drop rates so that everyone got twice as many chances to get a rare/exotic/precursor, then the rate at which everything accumulates doubles, and the rate at which they are sold on the TP more than doubles, because players are now getting rare drops more often that they don’t have as much use for, or see as more valuable when converted into gold instead of bound to a toon.

They generally do not discuss this with players because most of them are not capable of looking at the game as a whole without access to numbers that Anet execs do not want made public. JS is the only dev I know of who posts numbers in response to these threads, and that info is sparse and very specific, like the # of Dusks sold over a specific period of time.

When there are five players, a 1/100,000 chance per hour of an item dropping means you’ll probably never see one in the game. When there are a million players, the same chance means there are 10 per hour dropping. With hundreds of precursors entering the game every day, it’s not a matter of whether you’ll even see one, it’s a matter of how to get one of the hundreds you know are in circulation.

Buttercup.5871:

Technically you’re right, you could refer to it as long term and short term flipping. However, the term “flip” to me has a very immediate and short-term connotation to it. I would not label my hoarding+investment behavior as “flipping” as I literally let stacks of random stuff sit in my bank without even thinking about it. From time to time I check on it and think “hey, this is a price worth selling it for” and I proceed to slowly feed my inventory to the market.

I don’t know of any “MMO Dictionary” where terms like flipping and hardcore are defined, so it does get a little blurry around the edges, but since I was describing the differences between flipping and speculating, yeah, there’s definitely a short-term vibe there.

Exactly how long it should take to “flip” something and when it becomes speculating depends on the particular item/market but generally speaking I’d expect a flipper to either sell or relist within a few days to a week. If it’s on the TP more than that you’ve definitely misread the market and priced too high, or no one’s buying right now. At that point you need to either decide to leave it there in hopes the market will move to meet your price someday, or pull it and relist at a lower price. If you leave it alone, then it becomes speculation, you’re just storing on the TP instead of your bank.

Svarty.8019:

tolunart.2095:

Ve Salu Sigtyr.4807:

Then one day I ran into a flipper, which I think is just a slur for “investor”.

It’s a little more complicated than that. A flipper is someone who accumulates gold quickly by buying items priced below the market average (buying from players who either don’t know the value of the items or aren’t interested in waiting for a buyer who will offer market value) and “flipping” them by immediately offering them for sale at market value to someone else. The risk to this is that if he misjudges the market price, he may not sell the items quickly enough, tying up a lot of gold in unsold inventory and costing more in TP fees when he cancels and relists.

This is great in theory, but most flippers will have enough cash to just sit on stuff at the new price.

???

Then they are not flipping.

Axialbloom.8109:

Carighan.6758:

Hell Avenger.7021:

1. Surely my Harvard Economics Prof would disagree. Pretty sure he would say an increase in “drop rate” or aka production efficiency is a shock to the supply curve and causing it to shift downwards.

Yes but this is a virtual economy. Unlike a real one, we’re not actually trading goods, and most importantly we’re not doing so with any graspable form of value token.

In other words, a giant portion of our economy is driven by some form of valueless hype, comparable only to (if even that) tech bubbles and startup hype.

It doesn’t quite adhere to the same mechanics.

1. Increase precursor drop chance.
2. List this in patch notes.
3. Everyone goes: OMG OMG OMG NEED PRECURSAH NAO!
4. Price skyrockets as per-customer supply just dropped by 90% or so.

Sure, long-term the price would come down, if the supply is increased so much that the playerbase saturates and everyone “just has” a Legendary. Sure. But that’s exactly what the dev said. :P

That is not what would happen at all. People would wait for the price of precursors to fall due to the increased supply, then buy them. No one would scramble to buy the steadily dropping precursors…

Right, because everything we know about human nature is wrong. I want to make some comparison to first-month sales numbers of a new generation Xbox or Iphone, but… there just really isn’t any point to it. Anyone who would make the statement above just isn’t going to understand what I’m talking about.

Pandaman.4758:

That is true for in-game drops, though I would argue any tabletop game that asks players to roll a d100000 and only gives out loot on a 100000 would find itself being used as a coaster in other, more enjoyable games. It’s not just about the element of randomness, but scale as well, which is what everybody’s grouching about.

If the tabletop game consisted of hundreds of thousands of players sitting at the same table, trading with each other… yeah, scale.

Mission accomplished. Come back tomorrow, if it’s a bug then they’ll probably fix it on patch day. If it’s a design choice then it will probably be 3-6 months before you see a difference.

Not sure what you mean… but you have to buy Wildstar to play it, your GW2 account only grants access to GW2.

Pandaman.4758:

To be fair, being successful business model doesn’t automatically mean that people like it. Nobody likes having their time and effort rewarded with nothing (unless they’re massive masochists who are into neglect play), but due to whatever psychological quirk a lot of people seem to be particularly weak to gambling.

Hell, it works for Las Vegas, it’ll work for GW2.

I don’t think any game should be proud of sharing a business model with Vegas though.

Many types of games, especially RPGs, have always had this element of randomness. This goes back to Dungeons and Dragons and the random treasure tables.

You might not like it, personally, but casinos and lotteries are a huge profit-generating industry that goes way beyond Las Vegas. I don’t know of any MMO that doesn’t reward random loot, GW2 gives each player his own loot roll instead of making him fight the other members of his group for a rare drop, so I see it as better than most.

Lolindir.3518:

tolunart.2095:

If you could get a precursor with 8000 dungeon tokens, the hardcore players would have all gotten their by November 2012 and no one would care about them any more because they aren’t special.

And that is the point. It’s the chase that drives people, not the item iteself.

I repeat, I’m ok with legendaries being rare. I don’t care about this.

What is wrong is that normal items like this recipe, that is the same as Grenth and Dwayna’s backpiece recipes, are so overpriced only because the drop rate is low.

If they wanted the god’s backpieces to be so expensive, it should have been all or none of them. Balthazar’s backpiece can be acquired with some pvp, so basically free… all this difference has no real reason except the stupid rng.

They try different things. Some weapon skins were found in BL chests. Some were sold directly through the gem shop. Some were found in event-specific containers. Eventually they decided on a single method.

So it doesn’t surprise me that some back skins are more/less common than others, because they went through the same process before. Remember that the recipe is rare right now but that doesn’t mean it will always be. Patience.

If you could get a precursor with 8000 dungeon tokens, the hardcore players would have all gotten their by November 2012 and no one would care about them any more because they aren’t special.

And that is the point. It’s the chase that drives people, not the item iteself.

Astralporing.1957:

Also, John: gratz on being lucky with Tequatl (never even seen a tequatl hoard myself). If you do play, however, then i don’t get why your posts seem to show complete lack of understanding of players psychology.

Perhaps because his posts are based on actual data obtained from player behavior in the game instead of assumptions and personal preferences.

For example, a typical assumption is “rich players control the precursor market,” while actual data shows that dozens of precursors are sold every day and most of them are sold by different individuals (no one person or small group are responsible for most of the precursor sales, a prerequisite to controlling the market).

The former statement comes from forum posters, the latter from JS.

Lolindir.3518:

Do you think this is fun for the players? For example you talk about Tequatl, I’ve been killing that dragon for months everyday and I still haven’t got a single Hoard. I’ve killed the wurm around 80 times, haven’t got the Wurmslayer armor ( or the minipet..).

Seriously, I like this game but sometimes I don’t understand how you guys can’t see that rng is not fun, give us a token system for this kind of things that are even account bound (so it’s not like we’re going to make tons of money on it).
.

If so many players hate RNG then why do they sell so many dye packs and BL keys? There are multiple weapons and sets of armor you can buy for karma and dungeon tokens, but the only one that players used to wear a lot was from CoF. That fad has passed and these items are all but ignored except as MF fuel to try and get a random precursor drop. It’s the same with rare and exotic weapons, while rare individually they drop in great enough numbers that many players see them only as material to salvage for runes and ectos or throw into the MF.

The most popular and expensive items in the game tend to be RNG-based. Precursors/Legendaries, extremely rare dyes from gem shop dye packs and other rare dyes like Abyss… Before they were added to the weapon ticket vendor, Fused weapon skins were more prized than anything except Legendaries, far more popular than the Wintersday weapons that were sold directly through the gem shop.

Complain about it if you want, but player behavior overwhelmingly indicates that the chase to find random drops drives most of the players, and vendor-based items are all but ignored. The devs collect data from many different sources, and if the RNG based methods were not successful, they wouldn’t be handing out ticket scraps and unidentified dyes.

In the beginning of the game, I played just to explore the world. When I needed rare/exotic equipment or another bank/character slot, I just emptied my collectibles storage and sold everything I could. A week or two of accumulating crafting mats and I could pretty much buy anything I really needed.

Then I started supplementing exploration XP with crafting XP…

Thobek.1730:

TL;DR – give them a chance…

Did I fall through a wormhole into the Opposite Universe where people on the internet are nice to each other?

Astralporing.1957:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Taisia.2813:

It is literally vicious capitalism at work, making the game more and more intimidating for especially new and returning players…

That’s one of the things you need to live with if you choose to take a break from the game. Players who left and come back to complain they’re so far behind, just have to realize it’s their own doing.

Except it was supposed to be the MMORPG where you could stop playing for a while without getting far behind.

Last I checked, exotic gear was still available on the TP for 1-2g per piece, as well as through karma vendors. It costs about the same right now to gear up a fresh 80-level toon as it did a year ago.

Ve Salu Sigtyr.4807:

Then one day I ran into a flipper, which I think is just a slur for “investor”.

It’s a little more complicated than that. A flipper is someone who accumulates gold quickly by buying items priced below the market average (buying from players who either don’t know the value of the items or aren’t interested in waiting for a buyer who will offer market value) and “flipping” them by immediately offering them for sale at market value to someone else. The risk to this is that if he misjudges the market price, he may not sell the items quickly enough, tying up a lot of gold in unsold inventory and costing more in TP fees when he cancels and relists.

An investor is also called a speculator, they buy underpriced goods they believe will be worth much more in the future, then hold them until the time is right and sell at (hopefully) a much higher price. Speculators gamble that items like weapon skins, backpacks, and crafting mats will go up in price as they become harder to acquire or when changes to the game make them more desirable. The risk here is that those changes to the game may never come, or the items are reintroduced into the game (becoming more common and thus less valuable) or too many speculators hoard the same items leading to supply overwhelming the demand for these items.

Both approaches have risks and benefits, the main difference being that flippers are looking for immediate profit that they reinvest, while speculators take a long term approach.

You’re free to express your opinion. The game is nearly two years old, and this is the first time I’ve heard of someone complaining because they make too much money.

That’s called a great opportunity for speculators.

I understand where you’re coming from, it’s just a limitation of computers, they can only do the things they are programmed to do. Like RPers complaining because they can’t do something as simple as sit in a chair and drink a mug of ale… the program just wasn’t designed to do this.

An MMO is just a game? Inconceivable! Try telling that to the guy who ended up divorced because his wife’s birthday happened to fall on raid night…

Eh, it’s essentially a commodities market simulator, not a virtual mall. The idea of “clearance sale” doesn’t really apply here.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

If feel strongly against this, simply sell the item to a merchant, and that will save you from moral headaches.

Or just send it to me. I’ll be happy to take it off your hands for nothing, and you can feel all warm and fuzzy about it.

Not exactly sure what you’re getting at, but with regards to buy orders, the system is just not set up to deliberately sell an item for less than the highest buy order.

When the player places the buy order, the system collects the money to pay for it and holds it until the order is filled or cancelled. If I place a buy order for an item at 10g, the 10g is taken from me right then and there. You do not have the option of saying “I only want 8g so give tolunart 2g back.” You sell the item, you get the 10g the system is holding, and I get the item.

Why does it work that way? Because whoever programmed the system never imagined that someone would say “I don’t want that much money, give some back to the buyer.” Frankly, I don’t think anyone would expect that to happen. It’s like walking onto a car lot and insisting that you will pay $30,000 for a $20,000 car. It just doesn’t work like that.

There are almost four million accounts. If just 5% of those players (200,000) spend $10 on gems, that $2 million. In “Free To Play” games some players toss in a few bucks now and then (my wife recently bought gems), and a very few spend thousands. Those few % who spend big keep the game free for the rest of us cheapskates.

Nerelith.7360:

tolunart.2095:

What about the 97% or so of players who never even read the forums, let alone start posting here?

Oh yes, I agree. Only about 3 % of players bother posting in the forums. about 97 % don’t.

Those that do not bother posting and are dissatisfied because they notice how the game is steering the average player to the gem store for gold… and nerfing any decent repeatable, consistent way to earn money, which means any of those Limited time only items on the cash shop will have to be bought with Gold Bought with gems, will skip steps 2 through whatever… and just leave.

I doubt that.

The game was not built around typical hardcore-MMO-gamer activities like raids and chasing BiS gear. Most of those players have already jumped to a different MMO – and a different MMO after that – by now. The players they are going after are casuals who log in for a few hours now and then, and actually like getting things from the cash shop instead of grinding for weeks to get to Ultimate reputation level or somesuch. Income reports and other things point towards this, such as the popularity of dye packs and BL keys. They do throw the hardcores a bone now and then, starting with Legendary weapons and continuing through fractals and ascended crafting. But I think the majority of players who are still in the game are doing it on a casual basis, logging in a few hours here and there to check out the new LS chapter or whatever, then going back to their jobs and families.

Why do you think they have been so adamant about keeping the LS the way it was? They track how many people are doing what activities – WvW, dungeon runs, open world bosses, etc. If something isn’t working, they change it, and if it’s going the way they want it to (such as putting weapon skins in BL chests, it makes them tons more money than selling the skins directly), they continue doing it… even if a handful of players on the forums complain about it. Because no matter what they do, someone won’t like it.

The fact that they’re setting up for LS season 2 indicates they were pleased with at least some of the results from season 1. I expect some tweaks to satisfy the hardcore gamers, but for the most part, this is a casual-oriented game, one that can be taken in small doses rather than something to schedule the rest of your life around.

What about the 97% or so of players who never even read the forums, let alone start posting here?

No.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Account-login-from-TX-US

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The way I see it (and many others as well), if there’s no problem to begin with, there’s no need for a solution.

You can’t win an argument with a rock.

JS said a long time ago that this sort of thing is not a solution, and another hundred threads about it isn’t going to make him change his mind. If you read an announcement that JS resigned and has been replaced by a parrot, then we might have a problem. Until then, however, no amount of “discussion” about this non-problem is going to lead to change.

And if they still give you problems, I know a Meatoberfest pitmaster who pays well and doesn’t ask where the steaks came from…

Aidan Savage.2078:

You dont get it, do you? No matter who you buy from, you’re buying from someone who undercut others. What are you going to do? Blow through all your money like a fool because you’re buying the most expensive price listing?

He gets it. Telling him the same thing for the hundredth time just gets the same response the last 99 did. This isn’t a discussion, it’s a contest to see who can write more letters of the alphabet in the snow without using his hands.

I tried to read that thread, but gave up when my eyes started to bleed.

You understand perfectly.

Taisia.2813:

I guess that sums this issue up nicely… Sadly GW2 is becoming completely about luck, wealth accumulation though farming or tp and somewhere in a tiny dark forgotten corner is acquisition of unique gear through skill. A corner yet to be found.

You’re playing a game designed for casual players. It’s a population who, for the most part, do not have a huge amount of time to invest in playing the game or developing “skills” that involve pressing buttons on a keyboard. But they do tend to have jobs and extra cash, which can be turned into gems and traded for gold to buy nice things.

For those who do have the time but not the money, you can farm these nice things and trade them for huge piles of gold.

Be glad this isn’t like other games, where spending money can make you unbeatable in PvP or is necessary in order to access the most desirable content. PvE will never be about skill, however.

Obtena.7952:

Duke Nukem.6783:

not all of us want to watch the market, some of us would rathe rplay the game and STILL not support the idea of undercutting by 1c, i think thats a game we can build together

But you see, you don’t need to watch the market. That’s your option. You can’t complain your watching the market if you have the option to not do so. If you can’t be bothered to watch the market, simply sell to the highest offer and be done with it. That’s your solution.

I had some crafting mats on the TP that I listed months ago, apparently at the top of a price spike. I haven’t been watching the market or paying attention to what’s happening beyond reading the forums, but with the Festival driving up demand for mats, I logged in a while back to find most of my TP cleaned out and about 150g waiting for me.

There is no problem here, just impatience.

Or, to look at it another way, demand was increased for Dusk (changes to Eternity + wardrobe unlocks) and players who had enough money as well as the desire to buy the precursor right now drove the market for a short time. Now they have their Dusk and don’t need to buy any more, while those who did not have that much money still do not and so they’re not going to be buying Dusk for 1600g because they simply do not have 1600 gold.

So anyone selling the newly-dropped Dusks have to lower the prices to match what the buyers are willing to pay. Sellers don’t get to dictate the prices, they can try, but if there are no buyers with 1600+g who want Dusk right now then they won’t sell for 1600g. When someone lists at a price the buyers are willing to pay, the item sells.

laokoko.7403:

well, if you go back to the topic. The discussion is really about weather flippers/investors cause the high price. Or the drop rates are just too low.

I think that’s the discussion. I’m not sure if you actually said one way or another.

I think it’s a bit of both to me.

The game and everything in it is set up to be the way it is. Except for bugs, the game environment is a mixture of developer intent plus player reactions. Human nature is such that people want to display things that other people don’t have – a supermodel girlfriend, a rolex watch, the biggest fish at the lake, etc.

So the devs make rare items for people to go after, and if they are not rare then lots and lots of people have them, which makes them less desirable. If Rolex watches (the real ones, not the ones you buy from a guy on the Subway) cost $50, everyone would have them and they would not impress anyone more than a Timex.

So the rare items have to be rare, and because they are rare a lot of people want them. They keep throwing piles of money at them, and whoever has the biggest pile of money gets it. Because players know this will happen, those who are both smart and lucky hold on to the item until they think they can get the biggest pile of money. If the devs increase the drop rate, less people will want them and the piles of money they are willing to throw get smaller.

So it’s not a matter of blame, I’m just acknowledging that this is the way the game was set up. Personally, I don’t see much point in chasing after expensive items unless it’s something that I personally want. Whether I impress anyone else is irrelevant.

Taisia.2813:

Tolunart but do you see what’s happening in this case, and the way it goes in many other cases with rare and valuable items? The wealthy traders, limiting supply, bloating the prices and constantly pushing the inflation constantly beyond the means of a significant majority of the population.. It is literally vicious capitalism at work, making the game more and more intimidating for especially new and returning players…

So? Demand is high because the item is rare. Prices are high because demand is high. The solution: do not throw money at rare items. The more people throw money at them, the more desirable they are and the more they are hoarded.

Common items are not worth anything because everyone already has ten. If the item was common it would be ignored for exactly this reason. Rare items exist to generate interest among the players.

Who is to blame? The devs for making rare items, or the players for wanting them more than common as dirt items? The TP players are not to blame because if buyers insist on throwing ever-larger piles of money at me, why am I a bad person for letting them?

If I have exactly one recipe to sell, what is the benefit to anyone if I sell it for 10 silver? Or give it to a random player for free? These things don’t actually exist, and neither do the piles of gold that are changing hands. Anet wants to generate interest in their game and rare, expensive flashy items like this are one way of doing that.

pdavis.8031:

If this isn’t “Permenent content” I don’t know what it..

Permanent content is when you’re a new player looking for a group to run through “The Dark Dungeon of Death,” and everyone tells you that nobody bothers to run that dungeon any more because they farmed it for six weeks after it was added to the game and now everyone is bored with it.

No one is placing buy orders every 10 minutes to test consistency. So far as I can tell, in your example someone placed a single buy order, it was filled quickly, and on the basis of this single test he developed the hypothesis that the item was not rare. My example does the same with an item that is known to have a very low drop rate to demonstrate that this is hogwash.

What are they to blame for? Wanting to make a profit? It’s just a game, no one is going to starve to death if you don’t get your recipe today.

http://xkcd.com/605/

It’s called speculation. Rare items from events are often held by smart traders who wait for the market to determine a price before selling, then undercut that price slightly to walk away with a quick sale and a nice profit.

For example, say you and I both had one of these items. I want to make the most profit from it that I can, so I wait until you list it for sale. If I think the price is too low, I’ll hold on to it and see if other sellers start competing with you, and how quickly they sell. If I think your price is too high, I’ll list it for a lot less and it will look like a good deal compared to your listing. If I think your price is just right I’ll list mine for just under yours to sell faster.

It’s like a game of “chicken,” the first person who lists an item of unknown value will usually lose. In fact as time goes by, it becomes more common for players to hoard items for months until they need the inventory space of feel the market has reached its peak before selling items like this.

Anet cannot dictate how players will play the game. If you’re smart and want to make money, you won’t be the first person to throw your cards on the table.

laokoko.7403:

I think according to him his buy order can be fulfilled in 30 minutes and the events does run for 30 days. I’m not sure if that’s called rare.

Most of my other buy orders are fullfilled in 1 minutes during events.

So if I put in a buy order for Dusk at 1s less than the lowest sell order, and it’s filled within ten minutes, that means precursors are not rare, right?

What is it about this forum that brings out all this misinformation?

NonToxic.9185:

Obtena.7952:

Jekkt.6045:

no, people think they can sell it faster if they sell it for less and thats wrong.

Can’t …. believe …. someone …. just …. said …. this.

No, no, your right … people love buying stuff for NOT the lowest price. Class dismissed.

You have missed the whole point, which was that simply listing something lower does not make it sell faster. People buy at the lowest price point, but undercutting doesn’t guarantee you that lowest point unless the buyer buys at the moment the seller lists their undercut. Since anyone can undercut anybody else, the poster you quoted is correct: listing an item lower does not guarantee it sells faster. It guarantees it sells lower.

Do you know how the TP works? With sell listings, you don’t choose which item to buy, you choose the quantity and buy that many items starting with the lowest price. If I list something at 10g and you list the same thing at 8g, unless one of us removes the listing yours will sell before mine. This doesn’t stop someone else from listing the item at 6g, which will sell before both of our listings.

The lower the price, the sooner it sells. Knowing the right price for the market for each item is important. Prices that are too high will never sell, while prices that are too low will sell right away, usually to someone who will flip it for a profit.