Idea for driving prices up.

Alway sell items at the average between the what the traders buy and sell price. ie. Boycott the traders and only deal direct. Maybe then the difference between the buy and sell prices will be tightened up. For example jewels sell for 7.5K and are bought for 5.5K. Offer to sell for 6.5K. Jewel prices will keep going up as long as traders are not buying.

You can only sell things for what people are willing to pay for them. If everyone is asking 6.5k for a Jewel and Im struggling to sell I'll undercut by a k. As long as I'm making a profit I dont give a rats ass. One of the main problems in the game is thousands of people spamming for hours upon hours trying to sell stuff for too much money.
Someone did an excellent selling guide on here once which I stick by. Keep your prices reasnoble but competitive and spend a maximum of 10 mins at any one time trying to sell it. That way you can keep farming and earning money. I often hear people begging or complaining about gold but realisticaly its not hard to come by

Why would anyone want to drive prices up?

I'd rather see the prices get driven down, like what happened with the Superior Absorbtion and Superior Vigor.

first of all most of us would rather play GW than get the last coin like greedy farmbots who play GOLD wars.

secondly if you made the slightest impact on prices Anet would just increase the drop rate.

third Anet is actively bringing prices DOWN so theit target buyer can have nice and needed things not just a greedy hardcore elite .

sigels?
superior absorbs?
runes in general?
dyes?

and more traders to come to help with mod prices perhaps?

I can't be botherd to deal with buyers, Playing the game is more importent to me, spamming trade channel is a waist of time

I am suggesting that ANet lower the discrepancy between buying and selling. One of the ways to do this is to force the issue by driving prices up. Also I do not mind if prices go up. I can sell for more money and the things that I buy most like skills are maxed at 1k anyway. I would rather sell a jewel for 7K rather than 5.5K it is one and half skills more for me. having a merchant pay 1g for a black dye is ridiculous. 25g for a 100g rune is also way silly. A weapon that costs 5K plus material can only be sold for 125g ludicrous. Your basic 15K armour cannot be sold but for a song, crazy.

umm one question, why the heck are you trying to sell dyes to the merchant . .. there's a trader for those things (where black dyes are usually 8k-10k)

You must be joking. The material trader generally has only a platinum or two in between his buy and sell prices; everyone sells in the middle. This isn't new.

Black dye sells at the DYE trader for...what, must be around 9k, I haven't checked in a while.

If you get a rune or insignia that's not worth anything, as most of them are, don't salvage it. Sell the armor to the merchant for more money.

Don't sell weapons to the merchant if you don't like what you're getting for them; salvage them for materials and sell those for more.

Of course I know how the buying and selling works. I know what the cost of black dye is at a dye trader. Merchants should not even offer to buy them. But the economics of the game is screwy. Saying don't sell but salvage is meaningless. The reason we have such stupid discrepancies in the price of stuff is due to the high difference in buy and sell prices. Runes that are hardly worth the money being asked have players paying ridiculous amounts for them. The rune of major vigor for a PvE player being the price it is, is just crazy. But I guess some of the players are just crazy. Once you have unlocked the rune any PvP character you create gets it.

You really how no idea of how well GW reflects the real world market on good.
The rune/Dye merchant will only buy for 25g for a reason, because they're common as dirt. The merchants are just as much scurvey schiester bastards as some of us players. I think they're about perfect, except in for a few specific items.

But anyways, you missed a thread exactly like this apparently, maybe you should use search or read the frirst and second pages titles, or even, you know, follow the instructions at the top of the page(read stickies).

If I am reading this correctly, I actually believe this system will lower prices on high end items slightly. This would be because more people would be selling to the merchant rather than directly to other players. The more the traders take in, the lower the price goes.

Black Dye and Ectos can have a difference of up to 2500gold. Most players sell these two items directly to other players at roughly the average raising the prices the traders sell for due to less supply. Rubies and Sapphires are in almost the same position. These items are not hard to find a buyer within a few minutes.

This is also very apparent in common crafting materials where you pay at least 10gold for 1, but for many items you can sell to the trader at the merchant price of 30gold for 10.

Decrease the difference in the trader buy/sell prices and more people would use them for common and very high end items. Make common items that sell for 100gold be bought by the trader for 80gold, or decrease the sell price to 50gold. Find some way to bring the gap between high priced items closer, such as increasing the max buy amount.

^^^above me

this would indeed help the mess we have now of spammage just to get that difference smaller between player buying and merchant/trader.

As I am in the market to sell, I have no reason to buy anything but fixed price items like keys and skills, I am quite happy that prices go up. Take for example the New Year Festival where glittering dust went up to 260 to buy and 160 to sell. I farmed dust outside ToA and made 8-10k on dust. The price of dust did not take long to return to normal prices after the weekend.

So the forcing of prices up helps the sellers in the market. For the sellers never sell to the trader but sell to the punter, much more bucks.

Why would a seller ever have a problem with prices rising ?

The people complaining about prices rising are buyers like myself. As for the price difference between selling to traders and players, I'll usually take the trader because its usually quicker.

So considering that your title of the thread is: I have to ask you, why do you think that rising prices would be good for the majority of the guild wars players ?

Because thats who ANET considers when implementing suggestions.

If everyone never sells to the traders then ANET will tighten up the prices. This is the cycle that is needed to force a change.

Most players farming FoW and Uw want high prices. In order to keep prices going up rather sell to the punters. Even if you sell to the punters at the price the dealer offers you. But you can put on a reasonable markup and keep the prices escalating. Obviously there is a market for the high priced items with ready buyers so it is no worse a grind than solo farming. (Or farming for lightbringer points.)

No they wont tighten the prices, Anet really doesn't care whether people want to use the Rare Material Trader or sell their materials directly. If no one sells to the trader and no one buys from it, its prices wont change at all. If no one sells to it but people still buy from it, its prices will go up and the price at which it buys materials from players will go up respectively. But there will always be the same relative difference between the traders buy and sell price.

Judging by what i've read so far in your posts, it seems that youre only interested in increasing the amount of gold that you are earning.

Increasing the prices of things in my opinion wont improove anything, it'll make it worse. What about the people that can't spend hours farming for stuff and have to rely on what drops they get from questing ect? They are gonna end up struggling early on and may lose interest. The cost of some of the rare items/materials at the moment is ridiculous.

Just how are you hoping to sway people to not sell their stuff to traders? Are you taking into consideration the people that havent got time to stand around spamming "WTS this" or "WTT that"? I for one cant stand the trade spam as is, I almost always sell my stuff to the trader simply because its a waste of my time standing around spamming over and over in the hope of some finding some one in need of what im selling just for some gold, when I can be out doing things and earning money that way.

As I fore mentioned it seems you just looking for a quick gold gain which inevitably wont do you any good since the prices will all be higher anyway..

/notsigned this idea is stupid plain and simple.

Ha ha what's very funny here is I know what he's talking about.
The price he wants to drive up, is the price that the trader pays you, the seller.

The trader price is based on supply and demand. The more stuff you sell to the trader, the more he has, so the less he pays you for it. The less he has, the more he pays you for it.

He's suggesting that by selling direct to the public (and I didn't see him say anything spamming the local and trade channels), you will reduce the amount of stuff going into the trader, so the trader's buying price will go up.

What he's missing, is that the trader's selling price will go up too. And that will affect the trade channel pricing. Because the midway price between the trader's buying and selling prices will rise as a result.

What he's trying to do is stage a sort of protest he hopes will force Anet to lessen the gap between the price at which the trader buys materials and the price at which he sells them. He doesn't care about the actual price either way, just the relative gap between buy and sell.

I would like to point out that GW is not just a game of doing quests and missions. There are other sides to the game and trading is part of it. If I was desperate to get Vabbi armour and I needed jewels, then I would encourage people to sell the jewels to the trader if it would drive the price down. However because it is more attractive to avoid buying the jewels from the trader and directly from the spammer guess where I would like to buy my jewels from, which has the sad side effect of pushing the price up. A veritable catch 22.

However I am comfortable with the armours I do have so I am happy to have the price of jewels escalate. I am playing the trading aspect of this game. When players spam the local channel, you have two choices ask them politely to use the trade channel or switch off local channel in the main towns. Suprisingly I have had quite good responses to my requests to stop spamming. Noobs often follow by example. I am not suggesting spamming, I wish that we had some form of trade center and I have seen lots of threads in this regard. But I have bought loads of trade contracts with simple single requests while I am out questing.

My first thought is...

Why do we want to increase prices?

My second, third and fourth thought is..

Why? why? why?

Sorry, back to a more rational comment. No one is going to sell items using the method your suggesting. Who is going to sell an item at a price which is mid-way between the NPC traders selling and buying price?

Lets say a weapon trader sold a sword for 150g, but he bought it back for around 50g.

Your suggesting that if you had that drop/identical item, you should sell it on the market for around 100g?

Why would anyone do that? You going to make a 40-45g loss, because you could have sold it for 140-145g and undercut the trader.

But aside from that, I dont understand how that mechanism is going to drive up prices!

The prices at NPC traders are not determined by how much we sell items for. The game has no way of knowing such things.

The prices at NPCs are determined by supply and demand of that particular material at NPCs.

If more people buy more materials from an NPC the price increase. If they buy less materials from an NPC, the price drops. Its intended to mimic a natural econimic sytem.

(For example; If every player sold every ecto drop they got to the NPC, but no one bought those ectos from the NPC. The supply would be too great and the system would eventually knock the price down to their defualt value of around 50-100g - or what ever it is - in order to sell them)

Plus it only works on materials. Equipment, weapons and armor have set prices which dont change. The only prices which change are raw materials, which players sell to the NPCs when they drop and add to their stock pile, which is how they run out if no one supplies them.

But again. Aside from alll of that, why do you want to drive prices up?

The main problem with the market in GWs, are the high prices. Its the lack of gold-sinks and players stock-piling gold and being able to buy weapons and materials in rediculious quantities and driving prices up.

If anything, we need prices to fall. But that wont happen while we have a huge rift between rich and poor players. We need more gold sinks to make rich players spend more on fixed priced items. Items they cant effect the price of.

NOTE:

Your logic is actually wrong, if you compare it to my example about ectos.

Assuming people continued to sell their jewels to the NPC materials trader;

If no one buys those Jewels back and instead buys them from each other, then supply at the NPC materials trader will increase to the point where it has to reduce prices to sell them.

Assuming people didnt sell their jewels to the NPC materials trader;

But even if no one did sell Jewels to the NPC materials trader and the supply ran out. It still wouldnt increase prices. If no one buys back from them, the system or Anet will automatically drop the prices to get rid of them and make people use them NPCs.

It wouldnt work either way to increase prices.

Because the game is driven by money you earn. Fixed cost items remain fixed cost items, so the more money you make the more fixed cost items you can buy. viz. Skills, Keys. If the price of Ecto's and Obsidian Shards dropped the people who farm those would be upset. Farming faction and getting Jadeites or Amber would hardly be worth the effort.

If Arena Net nerf's trading they will do it to keep game balance and I am ok with that. Also there are enough people in the game who will keep using traders to buy from. For a number of valid reasons, expediency is one of them.

Where have you seen a Weapons Trader?

Take 5 Stone Summit Badges worth 40g at the merchant. Go to the collector in Droks and get a Grim Cesta of Soul Reaping which you can sell for 125g. Make the same Cesta at a Weaponsmith and it will cost you about 6K (5K+material). That same Cesta you can only sell again for 125g and see if you can find a buyer to pay you any bucks for it. So again what weapons trader, there is no such NPC?

Let logic drive your thinking rather than emotion. I will be quite happy to concede when I am wrong.

The merchant buy/sell prices are to create a gold sink. You can get a better deal if you buy/sell to other players within that price range, however it comes at the cost of time and effort. Everyone can get by in this type of economy.

You make this sound like in order to get money, you have to loose a limb. If you truly did play the game in the way youve described, youd know that money is not so hard to come by. Just because you dont get a rare and expensive drop doesn't mean you should come here and complain and while about it.



Not only because they are dirt cheap, but it tries at its best to follow the real world mechanics of Growth and Decay.

Maybe I'm missing something, but is the point of this thread "I farm and want ANet to help me make more money?" Jesus christ.

Farming is a dull repetitive act. Some people like dull repition that makes a particular number get bigger and bigger (though I don't know why you don't just buy a calculator, hit 1+1, and jam enter a bunch of times to farm bigger numbers on that), and good on them, but there should be nothing important a game that requires extensive farming to achieve, because for most people it just isn't fun. It's GOOD that prices are so low that even casual gamers can get a set of FoW and a complete set of greens eventually.

Higher prices could end this, and force people who want that stuff to do something tedious and stupid. Forcing prices higher helps a small minority of players, and hurts the majority of players, and I use the term "help" loosely." What would you buy with that money that's so important? The guy buying a green boss drop will obviously find use for his purchase, but what does the farmer do with his vast amount of dough. Probably just satisfies an OCD.

I posted a suggestion a few pages ago to tighten up the disparity between buy and sell prices for traders, to keep spam down and make the game more about playing than typing wtb/wts

Yeah gl w/that. Utopian dreams are easy to come up with but generally impossible to implicate. Why? Because for better or worse people are individuals and generally act in their own self-interest, not the interest of the community at whole. You're not going to get people to participate in this grand scheme of yours. For every one person standing on the principle of only selling jewels @ 6.5k, there will be 10 willing to undercut that price in order to make a sale. myself included and others who don't really care one way or the other and still prefer the convenience of going to the trader, low price or no. While the guild wars economy in no way reflects even a small percentage of real world variables > Free market economies are usually much more prosperous than strictly controlled ones for good reasons. Competition and lower prices are good for the buyer, and in turn good for the different sellers, because more money to spend means a buyer can afford to buy more things, and sellers are often buyers as well. Your suggestion of a monolithic organization of people engaged in price fixing won't work in the guild wars economy, competition will kill it, but gl It's easy enough to make money in this game. Sell at prices people can afford while still making a profit, if you want to sell everything at ridiculous prices, you might get lucky a few times, but you won't sell much, and probably just get frustrated in the process

Sorry, but is it save to assume you are one of these players who has a huge stash of gold lying around? So a huge inflation in prices isnt going to effect you in the slightest.

What about those who dont have alot of gold, or find it hard to earn gold. They also need to buy ectos, and jade and jewels too. Do they not count?

And why do I care whether the falling price of Ectos is going to "upset" the people who farm them? If someone is farming ectors with the pure intention of selling them on to make a profit and to increase their own (already) stupidly high wealth, then why do I care if they get upset!

Those who farm ectos, jade and jewels to make armor, arent going to care about falling prices. Those are the players we need to put priority on.

Thats another perfect example of the greed in GWs. People arent happy simply being rich, they have to be richer. Even at the cost of the poor ingame.

Ectos, Jade and Jeweles are NOT simply a rich-persons commodity. The poor ingame need to use them too, but you obviously dont are about that, or you wouldnt be suggesting we increase the cost of rare materials.

Basically you're entire premis is to drive the prices up, so that you can make more money selling them on to other players or the merchant.

Your trying to justify it by saying "Farming faction and getting Jadeites or Amber would hardly be worth the effort" if they didnt cost more to sell on.

That is absolutely selfish and it doesnt reflect the real reason why ectos, jade and other rare materials are farmed or exist.

They are first and formost materials needed for armor. Whether others want to use them as a form of curancey and a way to make profit is secondary to that. We should not put priority on using them as a form of profit.

If we increased their price, it would push them further out of reach of the poorer players and alienate them. The game would become even more elitist, and run by the rich players.

As for that....

...pull your head out your ass and consider other people in the game. Your idea doesnt benefit anyone, except yourself and other farmers who want to being richer then you already are.

It doesnt benefit the manjority of players who dont have gold to role around in.