power selling

No, your post didn't really address anything, other than quoting wikipedia.

I'm trying to have those posters that are claiming "exploitation of ignorance" elaborate their statement, rather than providing some sort of technical definition, which you have attempted to do. The definition of ignorance in this sense is a relative term based on each person's perception. I'm trying to gather what that perception is (which is what Antheus and Chthon has posted above - thank you!).

I assumed that your post was trying to attempt to elaborate that point. I apologize since you were simply trying to quote another source.

This is where I thought you might be going, and I'm glad you acknowledge the difference between some abstract "market price" and what is a fair price for that person.

The key with ethical trading in the market is not based on what is the "true value" of something. It's recognizing constraints to market forces and providing a conduit to effect trades to gain value from those constraints.

What does that mean? Like your example above, some players simply don't want to spend hours locating a buyer for a specific item. Many of those players are willing to accept a certain sum of gold to be able to dispose of the item quickly and continue playing the game.

Some players realize this and do something that exists in real life called "arbitrage". The concept there is that they can purchase that item from the player realizing their situation (i.e. time and market constraint), knowing that they have other potential outlets for selling that item that the original player might not have access to (or would want access to).

This is the aspect of "power trading" that is often chalked up to "exploiting the ignorance of others" and, as some people even stretch it, to "lying". It is this type of negative connotation that kind of makes my skin crawl, as it just becomes a giant generalization that is based on a preconceived perception.

Again, I'm glad that you realize that there are circumstances where trading isn't "scamming" as well.

Thanks for the explanation on what you view as ignorance. To address this point, the game isn't just a simple equation of TIME = MONEY. There is also a function of TIME = ENJOYMENT.

In short, many players are willing to sell an item for a certain price just for the simplicity of gaining a value of the item so they can get back to playing the game. It's not necessarily a function of a "well, can I farm that gold faster?" cost-benefit analysis.

In real life, there are farmers, there are retailers. If you are good at farming and can farm faster than others, why would u spend ur time trying to do something you are not good at (ie selling).

You have the choice to sell the item on your own for that extra 5k by spending an hour or 2 spamming. or u can sell it to the power trader, who is spending his time spamming sales for other items as well.

There is no fixed price for every item. The farmer sells the elemental sword for 100k to the power trader cos both of them agreed to that price. The power trader resells for 100k + 10e, cos the seller and the power trader, again, agrees to that price.

Farmers learn how to farm more efficiently, and traders learn about the price of market and how to negotiate. If u say power traders are exploiting the ignorance of farmers, then farmers are exploiting the game by exploiting the limitations of the AI?

Ultimately, power trading is maximization of income over time.

Is it worth spending 3 weeks to sell something for 1 ecto more than, spending 10 minutes selling it for 1 ecto less?

Time is a factor here, especially since prices fluctuate.

The usual farming income is 10k/hour. Hard-core, with a bit of luck, but not much knowledge can bring this to 20k/hour. Any power trading will need to surpass this, simply because farming yields consistent drops.

So anyone thinking about power trading should always be be critical of money made / hour. With farming, that time equals /age. With power trading, it involves much more, including searching the forums, talking, negotiating, waiting for good opportunities...

If you spend 4 hours trying to sell an item, your profit needs to be 80k - that is the money you would have made by farming.

When I'm selling commodity stuff (mods, greens, ...) I'll gladly drop the price 20% if it means instant sale. Let's say I'm selling the more expensive mods. I'll make 5-20k per. If I sell 5 of them at 20% discount price in an hour, compared to 5 of them at full price in 2 hours, I've *made* money by lowering the price.

This is something many fail at. They'll insist on prices and complain they can sell it ("but it's listed on guru....").

Time turns out to be one of more important criteria when dealing with anything outside of truly high-end items.

I see your point now, let me post something constructive.

We might need to define "exploit" as well, which I would like to describe its meaning: "utilize with great efficiency", a neutral term.

Power traders, ultimately makes money by:

Exploiting players' ignorance on market price of an item. Either due to players' uninformation or power traders' misinformation or a combination of both.
(by market price i mean average trading price in an infinitely large sample of transactions)
Exploiting players differences in world view and value.
(some ppl like farming, some people hate it; some believe minimalism is great, some want everything in the game to cost like obsidian armors)

No one can deny the point that power traders provided a common ground for people to buy what they want and sell what they don't need to the level of their best of knowledge.

Like diddy bow, you take an argument with a grain of truth and expand it beyond its logical bounds to fashion a defense of power merching.

Yes, for many people, "time = enjoyment" and it might be worth foregoing some amount of gold to avoid trade spamming and go back to playing the game in a manner they enjoy.

However, there is a limit to how big this "some amount of gold" is. There's a huge difference between "give a power-merch 2k that I could have gotten for myself to avoid half an hour of trade spamming" and "give a power merch 200 ecto that I could have gotten for myself to avoid half an hour of trade spamming." One is a rational choice and the other is not. No matter how much a person dislikes trade spamming, and no matter how much more they enjoy spending their time playing the game in other ways, people simply do not knowingly give up 200 ecto to avoid half an hour of trade spamming.

Certainly, the line defined by how much gold you're willing to forego to avoid X minutes of trade spamming is subjective and fuzzy. However, it definitely exists. There isn't a player in the game who wouldn't trade spam for X minutes if you offered them a big enough Y gold to do it.

Much like I conceded to diddy, I will concede to you that charging a premium (or demanding a discount) equal to the value of the time you save your "customer" is perfectly fine. And you can evaluate "the value of the time" however precisely you want. (For example, by counting both the amount you can farm during that time and some amount of enjoyment you get from being farming instead of trade spamming.)

However, the bottom line is that power-merching is about trying to get premiums and discounts far, far bigger than the value of the time you save your "customers." And that holds true no matter how simple or how nitpicky you make your valuation of that time's worth.

Which leads me back to ignorance. Any way you cut it, you are trying to induce your "customers" to choose the worser of two outcomes for themselves. And, any way you cut it, they will only do so if they are (a) irrational, (b) not looking out for their own interests, or (c) ignorant regarding the potential outcomes. (c) is by far the most common reason.

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Let me put this a different way. If power merching was really about saving people time, for a price, instead of taking advantage of their ignorance, why is it that you never hear a power merc say to a potential "customer," "If you waited for the right buyer you could get 100k, but I'd give you 20k on the spot, plus the time you save"? If that's what the deal you're offering really is, why not just say so? Why do we never hear that? Why, instead, is the power merc always keeping conspicuously silent about what other people might pay for an item, and even lying if asked about the market price? Is it perhaps because power merching is really about exploiting ignorance?

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Let's try approaching this from another angle. Let's call the people in this picture Seller, Merc, and Buyer:

Put yourself in seller's shoes. If you knew Buyer existed, and he was going to show up in one minute, would you sell to Merc instead? Hell no, you would not. Perhaps, if Buyer would take several hours to find, you might consider it. But for one minute's wait, you wouldn't give up 26k.

Do you really, honestly think that Seller knew Buyer was out there when he sold to Merc? No, I didn't think so. You know what that is? Ignorance.

Now, on a different point, how would you feel about Merc, through omissions and/or lies, trying to induce you to believe that Buyer doesn't exist (/is too hard to find) and that 4k is the best offer you're going to get? How would you feel about that? Might you feel like they're trying to mislead you, to rip you off? At any rate, I don't supposed you'd like it, now would you. "Do unto others...," my friends. If you would not like people to treat you this way, don't do it to them.

1. I am calm. Do not confuse clarity for agitation. I use bold, italics, and sometimes underlining to convey points more effectively to the reading-comprehension-challenged segment of the forum population, not because I am incensed.

2. Game or not, there are real people on the other end of that network cable, and what you do affects them. If in-game gold is important to them, then you have no right to cheat them of it because it's "just a game" to you.

You need market makers, or nothing will ever get bought or sold.

Power traders are the market makers of this game; they comprise a disproportionately large number of transactions concluded.

Power traders provide a service (immediate liquidity) at a cost (lower price than one could realistically obtain on the open market). Your typical power trader has invested thousands of hours in trading, making contacts, and socializing in-game that most of us choose not to invest.

Naturally, this generates information asymmetries that they choose to exploit; it's the payoff for all that time investment. However, it's not like you would be unable to operate in the same fashion, given that you have the same skill set when it comes to socializing. You've just chosen not to invest your time in such a fashion. Perhaps you're like me, and baby + graduate school > GW. Perhaps you have other reasons for making different choices than the power traders.

Essentially, any anti-power-trader rant has at its core this principle: "Power traders have invested tons more time than other people into trading and take advantage of the benefits of that time investment, and that's JUST NOT FAIR!" This is a ludicrous proposition. Strip away the rewards to be had from spending tons of time trading, and the immediate result is market failure. I'd rather have predators running around preying on the ignorant than be unable to sell my Elemental Sword drop.

Now, there's plenty of reason to rant against the present, opaque trading system in contrast to a transparent system such as an auction house. But don't blame those players whose behavior is a direct consequence of the trading system in GW. Blame the developers for putting a trade system in place which creates undesirable behavioral incentives.

Also note that everyone that ever spends time power trading, just like you, has ended up on the short end of trades. I've got a req 10 Serpent Axe I bought 2 weeks before GW:EN that I couldn't possibly resell for more than 1/10 what I paid for it. See that q9 Runic Blade over there in the lower-left corner of the avatar? I paid 100k + 200e for it in a 100k +300-350e market and customized it. Then GW:EN came out. GG me.

Well, there are honest power traders and there are dishonest power traders

just like in a farm group (eg for elite mission, uw) there are honest and nice ppl, as well as dishonest and nasty, name calling ones

And in the end, it all comes to luck, just like farming. Ofcourse you can bargain the price down 5 to10 ecto -or more depending on the price range of the item-, BUT you need to be at the right place at the right time. Ofcourse, if you spend a lot of time every day hunting for bargains you will find some, definately. But, if you're one of those people that (i.e.) bought a mini ghostly for 300 ecto and sold for 1000 ecto, you shouldn't be feeling so good about yourself (i'm not saying you are, Herbalizer).

This is true; however, just as in, say, Rollerbeetle, if you spend enough time at it the luck factor drops from the equation via the law of averages.

Just wondering... could anyone give a rough estimate as to the lowest possible price one might be able to purchase a non-inscribable Chaos Axe Req.9, 20/20, +30, 15^50, as compared to the highest possible price one might be able to sell it for?

Says who? A lot of people actually enjoy doing that instead of mind numbingly sitting in LA/Kamadan etc. Besides you just mentioned power trading thousands of ectos is over so nothing wrong with people who choose to farm and enjoy the game instead of try to rip people off for deals. What's the point if you have a crystaline sword but you're sitting in LA for the whole time instead of using the sword or shield or whatever item of value you have. Also another group of people see time as object of value so those are the people power traders can benefit from.
if they benefit from people who are oblivious..that's a different story

I've power-traded to a smaller degree than many others and I've farmed to a greater degree than others. At least I can say I've done both.

"Exploiting the ignorant", in terms of power-trading, is correct however you choose to look at it. You can see it as a selfish act by a greedy person or a clever person siezing an opportunity to increase his wealth. Either way the dispute will never be resolved so it's not worth arguing.

I remember pre-NF days where I'd buy req.9 15%^50 Chaos Axes for 30-50k and sell them at around 100k two minutes later in a different town which wasn't particularly clever but the change in income was enjoyable. I didn't need the cash but I felt greedy and thought lining my storage couldn't hurt much.

When you're in a town and you see an opportunity you have two choices: inform the seller that their item is potentially worth more or buy the item with the intention of reselling for your own benefit. There is a moral dilemna involved for those with a sense of empathy and there is no issue for those without that inhibition in their personality. Some people mask that feeling by blaming the other person for being ingorant and for not checking forums or spending more time studying the market.

Make your own opinions but don't argue the ethics of power trading or merchanting because it goes nowhere.

0g if it's a drop.
anywhere upwards of 1g for everything else.

You have somewhat missed the discussion of idea behind power trading.

You buy weapon at some price you know is lower than you can sell it for. Then you factor in the time needed to resell, the mods you might need to add, as well as overall time needed to do all of the above, including raising the funds for initial purchase.

For example, if you buy such weapon for 1k, and sell it for 5k in next minute, you've just made 240k profit per hour, or 10 times more than a farmer.

If you buy it for 100k, and sell it for 100k+5e, but it takes you 9 hours total, you've earned 2.6k per hour. Or, less than you would have by just completing missions during that time.

Excellent analysis Chthon. I appreciate a very well thought out position.

Addressing the quote above, this actually happens all the time, but not in the manner in which you refer.

In short, there are many people that spam "WTS XXX for 10K!" in trade chat.

You have no idea how many times I have (and I'm assuming other people have) responded to them...

"Hey, I'll give you 5K for that XXX."

Their reaction is normally one of three options:

1. Sure, I'm tired of spamming this.
2. Are you crazy? I'm not taking that, you n00b.
3. Hey, but I had this PC'd, and they said it was worth 10K.

If the response is #3, that is where I would normally say...

"Yeah, but if you want to sell it right away so you can stop spamming, I'll give you 5K for it..."

You have no idea how many times people go ahead and accept the offer.

Now, in this scenario, where exactly am I exploiting the ignorance of that seller? This goes to the arbitrage factor that I described - if you can find a way to find a better price by identifying a time/market constraint, and the seller realizes that there IS a time/market constraint, I'm not sure how this gets classified as something "sleazy".

Now, don't get me wrong. There are many people out there attempting to actively deceive players (e.g. WTB Battle Commendations - 50 gold each!!!!), but that doesn't mean that generalizing that all people that are involved in the active buying and selling of items are out to lie to people in order to make a quick buck.

By the way, for the record, I have never (or hardly ever) powertraded - but I do have a collection of items that I've gathered over my playing time that I purchased at what I believed to be fair prices using the methodology I described above...

I purchased a Req8 15^50 broadsword. For 470k. This was...a year ago?

I just sold it, for 300e.

onoes, i am a bad person, i purchased for less and sold for more.

/goestohell

This whole argument about ignorance is some of the biggest BS I've ever seen.

Personally i find it a thin line between scamming and power trading. Since some times i power trade to make money. Sometimes im unsure of the value and settle for a price that is too low for the seller. This ends in me making more money then i should have. My most common example: mini gwen selling. one time ive bought a mini gwen under 100k and sell for a profit of over 100k in ectos

There is a GREAT difference between Power Trading and scamming. Think of Power trading as a service, as mentioned in all of the above posts. The trader spends his time to sell an item, and he expects to make a profit, else he wouldnt do it. I once had a person ask me if I intended to sell an item for 3x what I paid him for it, and I truthfully answered yes. He was still happy cus he wouldnt have to spend the time to sell it (took me ~2 hrs) and I made my money.

Power trading all about timing. All you need is that one person who will pay full price+ to make your day. Its also about luck. I just won an auction today for 100k, and 20 minutes later I sold it for 100+5.

It is not for everyone, but for some, it can be very rewarding.

I do power trading occasionally, and get a really good deal, but most of the time I'll buy something cheap and sell it for a few plat more, so I only gain a bit of profit. I have been very lucky in the past with three amazing bargains:

1. Crystalline Sword (bought for 14k and sold for 185.5k over a year ago)

2. Kunnavang (bought for 3k and sold for 100k +2e, and the person was quitting the game)

3. Rare shield (bought for 17k and sold for 100k +2e)

I absolutely detest farming so this is the only viable way of making money, and I see no harm coming from it as long as the market stays reasonably balanced. If I see someone willing to buy an item and they don't know what it costs, I'll always PM them sothey don't get ripped off. Yesterday someone in Lions Arch sold a Kanaxai's Edge for 35k to someone who clearly had no idea of it's value.

I am totally 100% OK with this. You made it expressly clear that the deal you were proposing was one of [gold + time <--> item], and they presumably understood, decided that the time as worth at least 5k to them, and accepted.

I'm even OK with the "sure, I'm tired of spamming this" variant because it indicates that they are thinking about the transaction in the same [gold + time <--> item] terms that you are.

(And the same goes for the inverse [item + time <--> gold] transaction when you're selling instead of buying.)

Now, the problem is that this is not typical. At least it does not jive with what I usually see in-game. Based on the above quote, you strike me as a good deal more honest than the typical power merch.

More typical power merching transactions are so lopsided that there's no way that they could be the result of the "customer" making the same rational, informed decision to trade off gold for time as in your case above. Rather, these transactions are the result of the "customer" not knowing what the market value of an item is, and the power merch deliberately misleading them into believing that the price offered is the market value.

For example, I really strongly doubt that these two "customers" made rational, informed decisions to, between the two of them, trade away 26k of the 30k that changed hands for the convenience of a quick trade. Quite the contrary, I strongly suspect that each of them was mislead to believe they were trading at or near the fair market value for the item.

Of this I disapprove.

1. I agree that the proposition "all people that are involved in the active buying and selling of items are out to lie to people in order to make a quick buck" is false. There are plenty of people who buy and sell without resorting to dishonesty.

2. I do not draw a line between what I describe as "typical power merching" (which seems different from your conception of "power merching") and the "WTB Battle Commendations - 50 gold each!!!!" type of scam. After thinking about it for awhile, I realize that they rely on the very same bit of dishonesty: One person is finding another who does not know the item's FMV, and whether through affirmative lies or omissions or both, trying to induce them to believe "my offered value is the FMV; you should take it because you won't get a better offer elsewhere (unless you find a fool)," when, in fact, that is false. The only difference is what sets the true FMV (a NPC or the market) and how easy it is to learn (check the NPC's price or request a PC from a knowledgeable player). The difference is trivial; the similarity goes to the heart of the act.

3. I think the place where so many people are getting mentally hung up and fail to fully understand the moral aspects of power merching (or, more precisely, what I describe as "typical power merching") is the fact that the dishonesty involved is often subtle and using lies of omission rather than lies of affirmative misrepresentation. A disturbing number of posters seem unable to grasp that lies of omission are indeed lies. In a legal sense, this is true in a large number of circumstances. In a moral sense, it may well be true in the absolute.

On a side note, I've enjoyed this discussion. Thanks.

I've often attempted to make friends with traders because they're a great convenience to me. I don't have a problem in taking off a decent part of the price if it means I can get rid of the item quicker, especially if it's not worth the time to get full price. To me, because items were easy to get (I used to mass farm and chest run), and thus weren't of as much value to me as they might have been to someone else. An item's worth in the game isn't a fixed amount posted on the forum.

Chthon brought this up:

A power trader functions through the fact that any item has different worth to different people. Assuming they aren't preying on ignorance, there are always people willing to sell lower to get rid of an item faster, and, in other places, people who are trying to get an item and are willing to pay at the higher end of the spectrum to get it quicker. The trader merely facilitates this - they gain money, but nobody is tricked out of anything because both parties are paying what they are willing to pay for the item. In economic theory, there are ideas called the Producer and Consumer Surplus, which are the gap between the price charged and what a certain producer receives, or consumer is willing to pay, respectively. The trader seeks to capitalize by taking the surplus to himself, and by finding players who are willing to take less and pay more.

There are definitely cases where this may not be true, where ignorance is part of the deal, but it would be ridiculous to say that was the principle of the thing as a whole.

This is fine, but...

... this is what I tend to see in-game.

Of course, since I am only one person, and I don't frequent the trading districts unless I have business there, my observations could be skewed. However, I get the distinct impression that for every power merch who's out to save people time, for a price, there's a dozen who are out to trick people out of their gold.

Based on this observation, in my mind, the term "power merching" (or "power trading" or "power selling") is associated with the latter sort of activity, and not the former. Perhaps we would be well served to coin a new term to refer to one or the other so that we can distinguish what, say, Jetdoc is doing from what, say, Steph Fire Adept is doing...

You are kinda correct to a certain extend

Eg. After the first few weeks of release NF, there are lots of WTB elemental Swords, Dead Swords and Colossal Scimitar. Yeah, many of them want them cos the skin is nice. But i dare to say that the majority of them wants to buy them for 5k off the ignorant and resell them for 100k +100ectos++

If you ask me, buying something worth 100k+ for ~5k isn't power trading... it's just dumb luck. Dumb luck that you found someone ignorant enough to sell it for that. Call this scamming, lying, witholding information, call it what you will. This isn't power trading.

Someone posted a nice explanation of the profit from power trading being a payment for your time, which is very much correct. However, he also says that if it takes t amount of hours to sell something, the difference between the purchase price and the selling price must be equal to t * r, where "r" is the rate at which gold can be farmed conventionally. However, this is not necessarily true. Think for example, of wal-mart... Suppose the owner of a particular branch buys a shirt for $4, but said shirt takes 4 days to sell. Obviously, the owner of the store could have just gone to McDonalds, worked minimum wage for an hour, and earned the same amount. Yet owners of large corporations are among the highest earners in the United States. This is due to the volume of business that they conduct. While it may take as long as a month to sell any given item, you have a whole storage full of items available for trade, so you may be making a trade with a profit of ~5k every 5-10 minutes. Naturally, the higher volume of items you have for sale, the more likely at any given time you will have in stock what someone in any given area is looking for.

This means that sure, you need a lot of venture capital to start power trading, but it CAN still be quite lucrative, with even a modest initial investment. I personally started merchanting mods with ~10k a few months ago, and anyone that knows me in game or has seen my various sales in ventari's corner would know that my initial investment has grown slightly While I am most certainly not the richest player in guild wars, I feel that I have done relatively well for myself since I began playing off-and-on this february.

A few tips:

1.) Make sure money doesn't go to waste. For a lot of players, as soon as they get money, it has a way of disappearing, without even really knowing where it went. Make sure that whenever you spend money, you are spending it for a reason. It can be surprising how fast money can pile up just from playing the game if you don't spend it on little things along the way.

2.) DO NOT buy elite armor. do NOT. There are several reasons for this. Elite armor has no liquidity whatsoever. This means you can never get back the money you invested in it. If you buy something else, a sword, a shield, those things may not be very liquid, but they still hold value. Armor does not. Furthermore, elite armors are not worth the amount you pay for them (with the possible exception of eotn armors). It used to be much much easier to farm gold, before loot scaling, which resulted in many many sets of elite armor being bought. Money for a set of elite armor could be farmed in an hour or two at trolls. The same amount of money at 5k per hour would take around 20 hours, after material cost. The gold cost of armor has not changed, but the time cost to get the armors has increased tenfold.

3.) Liquidity is very important, especially starting out. When you are starting out, small profits are ok, since you don't have an established stock, contacts, etc. In order to maximize profits, you need to be making these small profits quickly and consistently. When buying items to increase your stock, think about how much you are likely to make off an item, and how long it will take to sell. Buying a 20/20 sword mod for 10k and hoping to sell for 15k is much better than buying something like dwaynas grace for 20k, and hoping to sell for 25k (don't really keep up on prices for these items, this is just an example).

4.) Once you get established with a decent amount of money and stock, where do you go? You have to grow somewhere, or your profits will never really be substantially better than farming conventionally. Get an idea for what types of items people like to collect. Usually this is perfect uninscribable items of some sort, but it could be other things as well, for example req 8 gold max inscribable items. I personally collect shields with odd dual mods (eg +1/20 of caster attributes with +10 vs damage type as the other mod.. lemme know if you come across any of these, btw ). A lot of people collect perfect dual-modded shields. A few people might collect oddities (old 10/10 sundering mods, nerfed -3/10 shields). Others might collect ridiculously rare skins (swamp hammer ftw). Old skool staves that have an attribute linked to the hrt AND hrc. Max req 7's. The list goes on and on try going to a guild wars wiki and just researching some of the things that have been taken out of the game, or things that are rare.

5.) Make friends with an established power trader. This is probably kind of obvious :P At the very least you have someone that can give you a second opinion on that thing you just THINK might be rare

What about the 55 bots?