tighten up the buy/sell gap at merchants (runes, materials, etc)

This one would be very easy. If you buy an ecto from a trader, say it's 10k, then if you sell it, it's 8k. That's a 2k difference, and I know this fluctuates and is usually a larger difference (it's just an example). And this is why hardly anyone buys from material traders, and the same goes for runes.

The result: everyone's spamming, wtb ectos 8.5k, wts ectos 9.5k. It's a tremendous waste of people's time and bw. People don't want to buy at inflated trader price, or sell when they can buy one cheaper from a person.......after spamming and haggling.

I'd like to see the trader difference tightened up so that you are only taking a small hit by visiting them. No major update, just something to make both buyers and sellers lives easier, and to move the game more towards playing, and away from spamming.

awww but spamming is part of the tedious work of selling. And if GW did this, i would buy mules and mules of ectos and wait for the price to inflate. Im sure many others would too. And economy goes bam!

actually if people reacted very fast to price fluctuations (sell high buy low), that would result in a very fast price balancing

it fluctuates more when people buy and sell to other people

Currently the traders also act as a gold sink. If ANET tightened up their price range, you would be reducing how good a gold sink they are. Though as long as ANET keeps the traders margin larger at all price ranges than the next step for the items price, I don't see any other problems happening.

As for the people trading with other players, whats the harm in that ?
Its such a small portion of the current trade spam.

Personally, I buy and sell at any given merchant all the time, except for some rare mats, there's a huge drop in some of the prices, like parchment.

I would tighten up some of the lower end stuff like parchment, where a merchant makes 200% or more on stuff. Give it an acrost the board 10% markup or something.

But back to my original point, it's so much faster to sell to merchant and go right back out in the field and play. If you know what you're doing you can make up the difference of even 2k for large things, pretty quick, and have the added bonus of possibly more gold drops and mats...which you don't get while hocking your black dye to the public for a half hour.

I can understand hocking things to other players like greens, but not things you can get at the traders. In GW it's all free to begin with, IE no item repair costs, no potion use(life or magic). I think people bring in the mindset of get as much gold from other players as humanly possible from other games, and that's why WTB/S spam is so terrible, and why everyone whines for AFK shops....

As if spamming is more fun than going out and fighting....

For dyes, the usual prices are 10sell-100buy.
That is 900% increased price!
Traders are not meant to get money, but to make stuff available for others.
If they pay reasonable prices, more people would sell their stuff, thus making it more available for other players.

Instead of fixed independent sell and buy price limits, the prices should be balanced with the buy price then, make the sell price 20% less than the buy one.

That is 80g for a dye sold by 100g.
Or 640g for a Scroll sold by 800g.
Or 9p500g for a rare material sold by 10p000g.

That makes sense for me.

Making NPCs pay more would help lower prices overall, and that's not a bad thing.

If you don't want to waste time when you sell, then sell at a lower price.

I sold a +30 HP Sword Pommel for 20k yesterday in less than 5 minutes. If I tried to sell it for 25k (like a dozen other people were) it would have taken me over 30.

I then spent the net 25 minutes doing something useful, like mapping or quests, and essentially earned the 5k back just as easily.

Besides, with the introduction of the material storage, the price of common materials have dropped significantly. Your suggestion would only have a significant effect Ectos and some Runes, and would reduce the gold-sink effectiveness of the traders themselves.

I think the point being made is that the NPCs aren't being used, so they're not even a functioning gold sink.

/sign

As one who used to make heavy money on the ecto market through buying and selling (and even controlling the trader prices by buying 5-6, or selling 5-6 to change overall price when trading with players in high numbers) with other players, I would have found this much more helpful. It seems ridiculous to sell materials for 30g and then when you want to buy it from the trader is 10x that price.

/signed i never spam takes to long and i end up at the merchant anyway.

~the rat~

/signed - Example: Superior Vigor 35k to buy, 24k to sell? :\

/signed
The buy sell price in this game is incredibly weird. So what if someone was prepared to buy low and sell high later. There are some interesting ways of manipulating material and making a profit. I don not think you can buy the materials and turn a profit making a rare material. Although I will check this one out.

I'm not sure you if you can, but certain materials are really close if you know where the crafter is(or know how to find them on guildwiki). If you buy when the common materials sink low, and sell the rare when they spike you might make some free coin at the price for putting it away and being patient, or if you salvage one part of the common materials(wood and iron are very easy to farm for) you can stand to make a bit in chunks. The only thing is that when you sell the merchant alot of mats, he pays progressively less.

There are alot more things you can get cheaper in common parts than you can buy for as rare also, though I guess that's more of a way to save money than make it, unless you sell to unsuspecting buyers.

Anyways, point I'm making, is that some of that may be by design, as far as materials go.