Trade explained.

Since trading appears to be large part of Guild Wars, I think it would be useful to explain a few things to those people who think they are so beyond selling their one zaishen key at 3.5k instead of 3.8k.

Time is money. I can't stress this enough. Time spent farming generates money. Time spend trying to fool newbies for your pitiful 100g trading profit is a waste of time. See what companies in real life do. They offer discounts for bulk trades and generally act in very nice and helpful manner towards customers. You can sell stuff cheap and still end up millionaire.

My favourite quote about trading:
"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."

Why is it so common to see two people spamming the trade chat
Player 1: "WTS zkey 4k"
Player 2: "WTB zkey 3.5k"

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Never even trying to settle the price anywhere. Clock is ticking and if either player had spend that time playing something like Random Arenas, they'd have (additional) zaishen key. Think about it. Three reasons why you're standing around shouting like idiot for nothing:

#1: your stuff isn't wanted
#2: your stuff is wanted, but someone else offers it at better price (duh)
#3: bad time of day

Common items = buyer's market
Rare items = seller's market

Don't put "WTS candy cane". That's common item and you'll die of old age before you can get anyone to buy it to warrant trading profit. If someone is looking to buy common item, then PM so can settle the price with him. Reason why storage space is so needed is because we players lug around common trash everyone and their brother already has, thinking those 20/20 sundering bowstrings are worth something because that's how it used to be four years ago. Rare items are the only ones worth of "WTS".

Someone was wanting 4k for a z-key and someone wanted a zkey for 3.5k, that's about it.

Like someone said in a trade thread earlier, you have to remember your audience of GW. You cannot apply real world trade logic to GW trade logic.

I totally agree that some buyers and sellers should meet in the middle and get on with life, but I find a very large market for common items. This is why storage space is so valuable. Take your 20/20 bowstring. They don't stack, but I get 1-2k for them regularly. But, it does take time, which is why I usually save up max mods for a while then sell them all.

It rarely takes a long time, and selling a mod for 1k is more than 3x the value of the weapon.


As for your "only sell rare items" idea, I think there are many more buyers for common items. Few people have 100k +xxx ecto for that rare pet, so people spam WTS on those for longer (sometimes weeks) before finding a sale.

IMO, using an auction site to sell rare items is better than hours of WTS. Leave the trade channel for the 20/20 bowstrings of the world!

There are some items that the more you have the more you can ask for them. You can buy them cheap as 1 & 2's but in bulk people will pay more
since as you said time is money so get what i need and get on with it.

Items im talking about are 25 rin relics 50 D-CHalises 250SCC 250cores.
the more of these you have the higher you can charge and if you have all then you can get as high as 25= 55k for rins and D-C and 50=55k and 50k for SCC and 100k for 250cores. Sellers market and will be for a long time.

OP: Clearly you have never sat in Balth and spammed yourself. Chances are that both of those players made a large number of transactions in that time frame. You are forgetting that there are a lot of buyers and sellers that never post, but merely react to other players' WTB/WTS.

500g's a large difference on the price of that particular item, and there's no reason to overpay for an item just to make someone else's spam go away.

You are correct that time is money, but some players may not be able to convert time to money with outside options as easily as other players. It's entirely possible that 15-20k/hr from buying and selling zkeys at margin is the best return those players know how to generate.

500g propagated over however many zkeys it takes to max that title is a lot of money...

Also, speaking from personal experience, a lot of times people who are trading are somewhat afk spamming. By which I mean, I'll be doing homework at my desk with a trade message in party chat, and every so often I'll hit enter-up arrow-enter to put it in again. If someone is right next to me offering to buy for 500g less, I really don't notice; only when I hear that little *ding* will I look up and make a trade.

I think some of it is that people just don't read the other messages being sent. I often have seen someone selling at the same price another is wanting to buy it at, yet they both keep posting over and over again. If you whisper the buyer and ask why they don't buy from the seller offering exactly what they want, the response is almost always, "I didn't see it, thanks!"

Oh, for an auction house in GW..... even a limited one.

I don't even bother trying to buy or sell usually, I can better use my time playing the game and getting drops.

The thing about your Z-key example is that it's more a matter of principle than of wasting time. Sellers want to sell their items for the maximum profit. Buyers want to buy their items at the greatest bargain. All sellers know that Z-keys are worth 4k. All buyers know that Z-keys are worth 3.5K. However, the thing to point out is that Z-keys used to easily sell for 5k each. Since those days, however, there have been lots of people 'settling' for a price, which means that the price has crept from an easy 5k to a hard 3.9K. I think a lot of sellers realize that, and are trying in their own little way to keep the price up for their own gain, while buyers are doing the opposite.

Not to mention the fact that, as Skyy pointed out, a lot of these people probably are buying or selling in bulk. In which case that means a very large sum of difference. Though I do agree, it seems like the best way to handle it is to just settler for a median price.

Now as far as your point about the 20/20 bow strings, I think that's pretty valid. Which is why if I ever get any mods, I just save them until I need them, sell them all in one big spree, or give them out in trivia quizzes.

I got 11 z keys 2 days ago and I sold them all for 4k each, it took time but it's the principle of the matter, I don't like being ripped off, there worth 4k and if people start selling them for less then the price will go down and down and eventually become worthless.
When I sell I play my other games on my consoles so im not just staring at this screen all day so the time it takes to sell doesn't bother me.

This. When I do sell zaishen keys (and it's not often) one of the main reasons I hate to sell for a lower price is because I hate to perpetuate the lowering value. I'd far prefer they'd stayed at a firm 5k, but that would have required them to be available at a merchant for something like 6k to buy, 4k to sell, kind of like lockpicks have their value firmly set between merchant buy/sell values.

For that matter, I usually sell lockpicks at slightly below the accepted price (which is 1.25k, I believe? I sell at 1.1k, sometimes 1k), because while it's not a lot of gold, people tend to jump for it quickly. But I only do this because lockpicks have a fixed standard market price amongst players and thus my selling for less isn't going to devaluate them. Whereas zaishen keys have no fixed price.

Tip to ArenaNet and people who want a regulated economy:

If you want to have an item maintain one standard value, simply make it available to buy from / sell to the NPC merchants. Make the cost to buy significantly (but not overwhelmingly) higher, and make the value to sell significantly (but not overwhelmingly) lower, and you'll tend to find the players will almost all buy and sell at the value right between the buy and sell merchant values. The logic behind this is simple - the seller makes more money than he would at a merchant, and the buyer saves money. The merchant is not selling the item to sell the item, and the same with buying; the merchant is there simply to keep the item's value (and to provide an option for players who don't want to spend time trading).

This. I don't often trade at all anymore, because it bores me; I tend to give away zkeys to a friend working on the title, stick mods on heroes, etc. But if I do want to sell something, I'm not really into negotiating. I decide on a price, turn up my volume, do something else I was going to do anyway (watch TV, read a book, make a phone call), hit the keys to enter my message every so often, and only pay attention when there's a ding. I'd bet a lot of sellers are doing that.

- This is against the golden rule of supply and demand. When zaishen combat quest shower you with 9000k faction for each GvG victory and same for a few HA wins, it's hard to maintain high gold value. There are many people stuck with their zaishen keys and ambitions to trade them away for PvE stuff. At the same time zaishen title is starting to lose its novelty and buyers know they won't be the first ones getting high ranking, which affects their will to buy keys at high price.

Same trend is with ecto and shard prices. You don't even have to pay 1k to enter FoW, as scrolls are dropping abundantly. Luckily for farmers FoW armor is still very wanted, so prices won't drop very low.

Also just because lockpicks are sold at 1,5k in regular trader doesn't mean their value is such, it can be anything between NPC buying price and NPC selling price. Only way to get permanent value item is to have NPC buying and selling price set to same, so it's interchangeable with gold.

By your extaordinary intelligence in Economics, the logic should also mean: Instead of spamming WTB zkeys 3.5k, and sitting there for an hour, go farm RA and get one without paying for it, right?

Your QQ of thinking that people should sell low just to save time. In the game time is what you want it to be, it is not a job. If someone wants to sit in Spamadan all day trying to sell a crap q9 gold (bow,hammer,sword,etc.) that is there choice. By your logic the only reason to log on is to make money. Oh wait, its not real. Sorry.
Roll to next char and have fun.

When i started seeing people trying to buy zkeys for less than 4.5k a while back, I just started opening the chest for myself. The amount of people that get zkeys each month for no in-game time spent is what causes prices to go down, but not as much as you want it to.

After taking many classes in Economics, I have learned that supply and demand only works if both parties are rational and behaving optimally.

Which never happens in GW.

Which is why i made 7k per cake last Monday.

Short and to the point, your comment was the best way to describe it. Rational is the key word.

If everyone only ever sells the really rare and valuable stuff what happens when no one has the really cheap mods for their stuff. By your logic of selling the high end stuff, I'd never make any money at all. And yet I do, quite a lot each month, by selling the "junk" I get opening Locked chests on Auctions. Individually they're not worth much. En masse its a tidy amount.

Like others posted, I tend to sell stuff in game when I'm doing other stuff. Like getting drunk in game. I'd be standing around somewhere anyway, may as well be vaguely entertained selling stuff.

You're correct that time matters. What you're not pinpointing is that both of these players aren't trying to trade with each other. They're trading just fine with the players who value their time more than their money: the player who pops in and sells 20 keys to the guy buying for 3.5k, and the player who pops in to buy as many keys as he can at the listed 4k price (to buy quickly instead of competing with someone trying to buy at 3.5k).

Because of this, it is actually most natural to see a listed selling price above a listed buying price, it would be goofy any other way.

well if u apply realworld economics, ppl should start hoarding wanted items until prices increase, feathers r a good one, pretty much all the feathers come from feather farmers.

- That depends entirely on trading profit divided by time taken to get things sold. If it's worse than what you'd get by playing something else, trading is a waste.

- This topic is about elementary trading strategy. Go discuss meaning of gaming on other topic.

The initial premise also presumes the two players trading at different prices (buy @ 3.5k and sell @ 4k) are not in fact the same person on two accounts, or two partners working together, practicing the old get-rich maxim of "buy low and sell high."