Item values - lowballers or overly optimistic sellers?

I don't even see the point in having a separate starting bid and reserve. Just state your minimum acceptable price, minimum bid increment, and a buyout if you like.
This would cut out all the BS and let everyone know where they stand.

But then again, I don't see the point of buying overpriced(imo) inherent weapons when I can get a more flexible inscribable version cheaper, so maybe I'm trying to apply logic in the wrong place

people should just seriously list the b/o or reserve price and stop extending auctions when not needed, if someone wants your item they will pay the reserve, i dont like to wait for auctions that linger more then a week.

you may call them lowballers but at the end of the day we are all trying to get a bargain, so if you dont like lowball offers you are better off posting a buy out or reserve price after the first bump atleast, saves everyone time.

its almost as annoying when people say 'offer' and when you do give an offer they almost in 99% of the cases reject it and when you ask how much they go spaz, such a sad case.

sorry if we went off topic

hmm
according to the list players would base the prices on past trades. if i was to sell any o/s item of mine i would have nothing to relate it to from the 2006 prices to now. so a couple of searches on argos gw related threads and if i remember what i paid for them ill try to deduce what i think is a fair price but it mostly still be OP'ed and i would end up been like ah forget it ill just keep it

which is what mostly happens anyway

2nd if the player selling sets a price at a decent market price and the offers given to it is way off the market then i guess you can consider them lowballing

3rd one i think will be divided into many categories since on the availability of the item
if its o/s,rare, which u think a couple mite have then players overpaying to them will happen since its a 2-3 ppl owned item (something like seller sets the prices for these and you cant do much to argue since there wont be any weps/minis/el hench like it)

but what most ppl should grasp is that the population is on a downtrend so shouldnt expect huge offers for certain items, but there are large money still in it so who knows

Hi! Good thread.

If the buyers are "lowballing" it's the sellers fault for having the s/b too low. Having said that, I think the sellers realize this and only use a low s/b to generate/gauge interest and free bumps

To be honest I haven't heard much complaining on either end. And the little complaining I do hear is in my opinion, unjustified. If I set a high buyout on one of my items, and no one pays it, then that's fine - because that is what the item is worth to me - and I'd rather keep it in my inventory than part with it for anything less.

I agree with this - an item is only worth as much as someone would pay for it. Sometimes people in game will ask me "Should I pay XXe for this item?" And I tell them "What's it worth to you?" Value is all relative.

If I want 100armbraces for my Fungal Wallow then that's what I want! Problem is there's 1 million people who will sell for 500g. But I love my Fungal Wallow so I'm keeping it. xD

Actually I don't own a Fungal.

WTB Fungal Wallow 100a! xD

I just happened to have received a newly minted oldschool (uninscribable... at least I havent found any inscription slot yet) Fungal Wallow yesterday

Luny does have a good point in some parts, although I must say that you cant compare ingame trades with Guru or other sites, mainly because there are far too many variables and the userbases are too different.

You probably just had great luck with a few of those items because no one else had those particular items in their wishlist and did not know of them.

I see my fair share of optimistic sellers on guru and in kamadan. Mostly It's the same people over and over. For some reason they cannot accept the fact nobody wants to pay their asking price for that particular item. Even if you offer a price that is clearly reasonable they take offense to it like I am trying to rip them off. It's sometimes not direct like them loling me or throwing obscenities my way but you get the feeling, especially when they ignore you. Unfortunately many so called power traders have the mentality of screw you while I rub my e-peen. Greed and the human ego go hand in hand in most games with some sort of economic class hierarchy and Guild Wars in recent years has taken a top 10 spot for me with this problem. It's easy to blame problems such as these on a lack of an AH but that was never the case.

The 2 biggest games I have wasted my life on are Guild Wars and WoW so I will be comparing problems in both to each other. Ugh I know another GWs/WoW comparison but bear with me. WoW is no innocent game where egos are non-existent, they just exist in the raiding community and are all about your accomplishments. This is where Guild Wars differs from WoW greatly. Compared to WoW GWs has almost no endgame. Because of WoWs endgame content there exists almost no concern for economic superiority because everyone is too busy working with their guild to accomplish a very organized and difficult feat. Once you finish the story in Guild Wars it's off to do the dungeons and those can be done in a week. Players have gotten so bored that the last thing to do is accumulate wealth... by any means possible for some. This is where I believe Guild Wars' trading problems stem from more than the lack of an AH.

The sad thing is Guild Wars itself encourages this with or without the developers intentions. With people getting max gear so early after playing the game there's nothing to work for besides c-space pve titles and high priced aesthetics. Super rare old school perfects and the Asian minis come to mind. This is why I really like the direction Guild Wars 2 went with being a MMO and why I may hate it for having the same flaws Anet still hasn't learned from. I can only pray they did.

I've seen my fair share of lowballers. Not only that, but I've seen considerably more lowballers on guru and in kama than optimistic sellers. I believe that is called a coincidence? PS. Apparently GW2 is not going to be even remotely close to GW1 with regards to highend/lowend weapons. Don't quote me, but that's what I've heard from a few sources.

Whats your definition of a lowballer? Someone who starts the bidding but leaves once the bids gets higher? Then, to those sellers, I suggest posting a higher s/b than 1g like I see all the time. If your items haven't sold in months then I suggest lowering your price. If your not willing to accept the actual price of your item then don't keep on selling it for months like its going to turn into a brick of gold. That ever so rarely happens. If you made a bad trade but are to stubborn to cut your losses then your just cheating yourself out of more money.

***mod edit--removed unnecessary link--mod edit***

Not true! I had no objections whatsoever to "Hey folks" Thank you for the clarification though ... and +1 internet point for a spectacular use of bullet lists!


Ok, well I need to preface all this by explaining that I don't consider myself a "powertrader" at all, but I unusually wind up a "trader" when I'm active in GW much at all. Of my friends who do/have considered themselves "traders" or "powertraders," they often tell me that I'm not the same thing, not at all - "junk lover" or its variations are the terms they use for me. Most everything I buy starts out with me wanting it for some reason or another. Most everything I sell is because it's something I no longer want or need ... either a new drop or an old purchase which I've changed my mind about keeping.

Now I'll let folks decide if that leaves me disqualified to offer a meaningful answer to your discussion questions, but I'll answer them here anyway.

1. Where do sellers generally get their ideas of item prices? Occasionally out of their asses?
   
   For most of the things I sell, I get prices from various combinations of,
   • my own trade histories and my own observations about how common it is to see an item like mine offered for sale vs. how common it is to see folks wanting to buy an item like mine, (For the more unusual items, I also consider how long I'm willing to use a precious inventory slot while waiting to sell the thing.)
   • what information on final prices I can find from searching,
   • what information and insight I can get from a handful of trusted friends when I ask their opinions or recent experiences with something like my item. Of my list of such folks, I think I have a pretty good feel for their approaches to trading. So I use those impressions to consider how I use their specific PC guesses for the item in question. If the guess comes from a "sell it cheap, sell it fast"-minded friend, I might consider holding out for more. If the guess comes froms a friend with experience and history holding out for "the right buyers," I might consider accepting a lower price if I'm not willing to wait around as long as they are. Of course, this only applies to items that aren't easily found all over the place.
   • what information and insight I can get from anyone willing to respond to my PC queries, either on a thread here or in game.
   
   Now, it seems like the question may be more along the lines of, "Where do those sellers get their prices?" and less, "Where do you, a seller, get your prices?"
   
   I'm not them, so I can't really say. I would like to suggest another consideration when determining how nuts they are, though.
   
   I've seen two cases/explanations where the answer to the implied question is not as easy as, "He pulled that number out of his ass!"
   1. He may very well get those prices. Just because no one who can and does post on Guru offers his price, does not mean there is no player who can and does read Guru who may be willing. I think it's each user's choice how to use the resources we have to advertise their trading intentions. There are LOTS of players who have things they'll sell when the opportunity presents itself. Often, for the higher price and/or rarer stuff, the best opportunity comes when a buyer makes themselves known. Some of those sell threads which seem to vex folks around here so much may be a case of one collector of hard-to-find stuff just trying to keep his name out there in the memories of other collectors of hard-to-find stuff. To me, that's not the same as "showing off."
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   2. Some rare, hard-to-find thing a seller is just desperate for has become available to buy from another player. He wants it bad enough that he's willing to sell off some of his own collection of rare, hard-to-find things in order to raise funds. He lists the whole set for offers to get a feel for what he can sell for a decent price now in order to raise the necessary funds ASAP.
   To me, neither of the above cases are inherently wrong or even necessarily crummy tactics. My only objection to either of those situations would be the seller in question misleading potential buyers about his intentions.
   
   One example - I've been interested in buying a 16/8 command Scarabshell Aegis for over two years now. It's been on my buy thread the entire time. A gold one came up for sale in an emergency-fund-collecting thread like the second case I mentioned above. I spoke with the OP, learned his intentions, and so did wind up posting bids. It may not have been my first posted offer, but I pretty quickly went ahead and posted my max offer, the amount I was willing to pay to get that shield in my collection. Another user was willing to pay more, and he wound up winning it.
   
   Not long after that, the guy who outbid me (or at least one of them) contacted me offering the shield when he saw it on my buy thread. I told him that the most I was willing to pay for one was the same as my last offer on the other guy's thread, clearly less than he paid in the first place.
   
   Was that scummy and/or price-out-of-his-ass of the second guy? No! Not at all! He realized how unusual it is to find one of those shields for sale; he paid a price he felt was worth it; he found an interested buyer, me, and checked to see what price they'd feel was worth it. He wasn't rude or unpleasant, so I have no problems with anything he did.
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2. "Where does pride enter into it? For example, "Billy" lists his Echovald Shield with a b/o of 100e, but after 3 weeks of thread bumps the bids don't go over 75k. Does that mean that the bidders are all lowballing assholes?"
   
   The example above seems rather exaggerated in terms of cases worth discussing. Obviously in that case Billy is probably full of it. But consider in the less extreme cases: it could be "evil lowballers;" it could be "overpriced;" it could simply be Billy's shield isn't getting attention from the really motivated buyers with a lot invested in collecting shields like his.
   
   In terms of pride, it doesn't really enter into it for me at all, since I don't ever list anything for sale that I'm not ready and willing to sell. For me, that's either listing something with
   • a buyout target (or close to it) that I pick ahead of time from the sources mentioned above (in which case I list/offer the item with my price stated and do what I can to let folks know they're welcome to get in touch with me if they want to haggle)
   • a reserve/starting bid that I state up front. I resort to using such an approach only when I honestly cannot figure a buyout to begin with. (In those cases, I list it with the "s/b" at whatever the minimum I'm willing to accept is and then simply see who's the most interested by letting the high bid win. If it gets into a really obvious and ridiculous bid war between two collectors with no one else interested, I'm more likely to give up on "high bid wins" and make them play rock/paper/scissors to see who gets to keep it for some number we all agree is a "fair price," especially when I already know both interested parties to be enjoyable folks.)
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3. "Player wealth - I think we can all accept that some people overpay on a regular basis. How does that effect their perception of their items' value? (IE: Do they think that because they overpaid, that they should be able to recoup 100% of their investment when selling?)"
   
   Well, if I decide to sell something that I know I overpaid for and did so intentionally (or if the market has clearly changed since I bought it,) then no, I don't expect to recover my investment.
   
   If I decide to sell something that I feel I bought at a fair price in the first place and I don't see indication (by my own price checking methods above) that the fair price is lower now, then I will expect or at least try to get back my investment, sure! If the fair market price has increased since I bought the thing, then I'll try to get whatever that is today, too.
   
   If I decided to sell "the Crude to curse Onis with" (I never would, never ever! I only mention it as an example.) I would not expect anyone else to pay what I paid for it.

I will agree with everything you just said above except the part about making it a rule! I absolutely disagree with making it a rule which requires enforcement.

• There are plenty of venues already where listings and bids are binding. Ventari's has never been one of them, and I think to make it such would unnecessarily remove an option from some folks' games.
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• I don't like those style threads any more than it seems you do - not at all! So I don't usually reward them with a bump posting my offers. Instead, I either move on to the next thread or PM the OP asking their ideas on actual price and see if we can work something out that way.
  
  If you don't like threads with 1k s/b and hidden reserves, the solution is easy and we, the users of Ventari's, can handle it ourselves - don't post in those threads!
  
  As a player and a trader, I put inestimably more value on concepts like dealing straight with folks, being civil, and letting people make their own impressions on me than I do on pink goo and pixels. I know it doesn't matter to some, that's fine, but to my way of looking at it both the sellers whining about lowballers and the buyers whining about overpricing are doing me a favor! They're saving me the trouble of having to find out first hand that I don't want to play a video game with these people! How thoughtful!
  
  So, is it OK for people put up Ventari's threads with tons of shiny shit and no price info other than 1k s/b? To me, yeah, it's ok. And it's OK if I intentionally avoid helping them out by not bidding or PMing my bids, too.
  
  I see absolutely no reason to legislate something we should each be perfectly capable of deciding for ourselves, when the possible decisions one of us could make do not have a reasonable likelihood of impacting the rest of us in a very negative way.
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• Finally, Ventari's mods (who are unpaid volunteers for those who didn't know) already have plenty of rules to enforce as it is. The rules are there and enforced in order to make this place useful to us, the users. As a mod, the existing rules about pricing are already enough of a pain to enforce. But those people do their best to enforce them for the users' sake.
  
  If you think that nasty mod was being mean/powerhungry/a nazi/etc. by not letting you sell your r9 15^50 inherent Shortbow in a High End thread then think again! I used to mod around here. The single most onerous rule to enforce was the 100k split between low and high end! Just imagine how much fun it is to be tasked with playing PC-bitch to anyone and everyone who lists a thread selling anything at all! There was nothing I loathed so much as a thread with borderline 100k-value items listed for 1k starting bids and no buyouts or reserves. The next least favorite were the threads with clearly <100k items listed for painfully overly optimistic prices. Take my word for it - you do not want to have to enforce rules about pricing around here! I signed up to mod in the first place feeling like I owed something back for having the wonderful resource that is Ventari's. I knew it wouldn't be fun cleaning up non-bids and multiple threads, but I figured it was like helping out with the chores after dinner. None of the tasks and the effort involved in modding Ventari's surprised me except what a friggin' pain the 100k rule was to enforce (in the fair, objective, and even way which all rules are enforced.) It's also the rule whose enforcement led to the most time spent answering complaints - oh such a fun task to do in a courteous and professional manner, remembering that you're writing as a representative of more than just your own opinions!
  I would bet cash money that the mods are not at all interested in having yet another "reasonable value" rule to enforce!
  (Ok, yeah - touched a nerve there, I admit it. #%@%^$%#^ $#%$#^%^ "oldschool" Shortbow $#$^$%^%^)

Alright, still reading? Nope, ok then I can just leave this here at the bottom.

Regarding the price tags on stuff right now that seem to be so high just because they're "oldschool" (read "not inscribable") has to do with market demand. It honestly does seem like more players, active now, are interested in and put a premium on having inherent gear.

A couple years ago, it didn't seem that way to me, not at all. I kept noticing some folks replying to PC threads giving prices based on common things being "oldschool." I hadn't seen the demand and interest around Kama or Guru at the time to lead me to believe that alone was really still so important, so I started this Trader's Outpost thread back in June 2010 asking about it. The consensus seemed to be that, at that point, the "oldschool" alone really didn't justify higher prices due to demand. From what I've seen around here lately, I would say there may very well be enough increased demand for the higher price tags.


EDIT

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rushin Roulette Luny does have a good point in some parts, although I must say that you cant compare ingame trades with Guru or other sites, mainly because there are far too many variables and the userbases are too different.

That was my point though - given the variations between trading venues are in this game, I say it's incredibly hard to judge ahead of time what the price may be for something not easily reproduced, like inherent gear - especially the wands, foci and shields with dual mods.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rushin Roulette You probably just had great luck with a few of those items because no one else had those particular items in their wishlist and did not know of them.

Oh, I'm sure that was the case with those examples of the staff, the axe and the WG scythe, absolutely! I mentioned those trying to demonstrate how a player new to trading in such items could easily get the wrong idea of "fair market value" based on what they see in trade chat - another source of players' forming very different ideas about prices.

/EDIT

Cheers,
Luny

Did you like my bullet lists? I had to step-up my game and use some numbered ones. Can't let jimbo win!

"My shortbow is so 100k! It's oldschool! Put my thread back!" Gah, memories of modding the 100k rules still make me want to punch things!

As a former Venturi mod myself I cannot agree more. The very generous mods we have there, have more than enough to deal with as is. My admiration goes to Cosy for all she does.

My definition of a lowballer is someone who bids at a level that is considerably lower than the listed b/o, then gives you crap about it when you don't sell it. If an item is rare, and you have it, it's your decision to sell at w/e price you want. If I'm unable to sell something for a while, it doesn't bother me. Some people want to sell things as fast as possible, all the power to them. Those people are perfect targets for getting a great deal. Other people, such as myself, don't care about how long it takes. We are bad people to get great deals from.

Stu has been on guru selling things for long enough that if he puts a price down, it's for a good reason. I'm going to trust his judgement 9/10 times. So that's a terrible example, as many people here will give him the benefit of the doubt in almost any case.

P.S. This goes back to that zod sword which BTW I ended up selling for 175e in Kama. So.. Yea? I wait because eventually I get what I ask for because the price isn't wholey unreasonable and there is a market for some items still.

I was talking to a guildy about this and it is Along the same lines, but slighty different, i find it very frustrating.

When you see someone in kammadon selling an item and you pm them: "hey what you want for xx item?" (xx item I have found is anything from a simple 20/20 sword mod to high end minis and everything in between). The response 95% of the time is one word, "offer". I have found that in almost all the cases of this offer, I offer some price and for low end items, I get essentially "lol this is worth way more." Or for high end, my c/o (probably fake) is way more. Then I ask, see you had some idea, why didn't you just tell me a price? You have to have one in mind if you are selling your item, and most of the time I get no response.

This practice leads me to believe most people doing this are in the "overcharging" boat. Most likely due to the "pride" of being a powertrader when in fact they are just some wannabe.

You're misunderstanding the nature of the type of auction (first price, ie: high bidder wins) that we see on Guru and in Kamadan. As a seller, you always want to get as much of the buyer's reserve price as possible. Revealing what you'll actually take undermines achieving that goal.

That's usually immaturity coupled with low time price. Let's face it, a junior high school or high school kid has a pretty low time price. By college there are other things you could be doing, and by the time you have kids of your own time gets real, real valuable. If you're getting griefed by some ragey individual who won't give you any information that helps both of you make a mutually satisfactory deal, odds are that you're dealing with a kid that doesn't understand the value of time yet.



The big thing that hasn't been said about item prices is that the reliability of comparison sales depends upon rarity. If the Mona Lisa went up for sale, the best experts in the world couldn't tell you more than this:

"It will sell for at least X, and how much more than X it will sell for is totally unpredictable. That will depend upon who shows up and the course of the auction."

Relatively common items have reliable price ranges, and the truly rare stuff has at best highly unpredictable pricing.

And yes, <3 the Ventari mods, because you people are crazy.

Hahaha so awesome. If only it were true and we didnt have grown men/women that act like kids in this game.

sort of but i already know what an item should go for and as a seller you should also know roughly what price you want, but then again only the rarest of items get unexpected results but thats almost 1% of all trades going around.

That's true, and there's certainly nothing wrong with it. But I think what superraptors meant (and he can correct me if I'm wrong) is the tendency to drag out auctions by setting a s/b which isn't even remotely close to the seller's reserve price. For instance, a 15e s/b when the seller has no intention of selling for less than, say, 200e. If, after weeks of bumping and bids, the offers haven't approached the seller's hidden reserve, who's to blame but the seller himself? Aside from maybe being frustrated himself about not reaching the reserve, the seller has also wasted the time of all of the bidders.

I've also sometimes gotten the impression (almost exclusively from high-end threads) that the seller has absolutely no intention of selling barring some ridiculous knockout offer. They're essentially using the the Sell forum as a method of PC'ing their items. That's really wasting everyone's time.


I'd agree with this as well. Truly rare stuff is extremely difficult to PC, and even if you get opinions from folks knowledgeable about such things, it's impossible to gauge interest. Something could get a consensus PC of 100e, but go bananas if a bidding war happens. It's also possible that the same item won't hit 40e if there's little interest.

I don't think relative rarity is the issue though. It's the tendency of some people to get tied to a reserve price and sit on the item(s) like they're trying to hatch an egg. At some point, don't you have to admit to yourself that you may have been a tad optimistic about the price you had in mind? It ties back in with what you said about the value you place on your own time, right? Sure, at some point in the distant, nebulous future, there might be someone who comes along that places the same value on the item that you do. Then again, maybe not.

That low s/b is a selling technique to draw people into the auction. I started to see more and more of it when I use to be an ebay surfer before ebay became complete crap. I would see items worth thousands of dollars with a s/b of 1 cent and it would only be highly valuable items but all those items would have a r/b close to the b/o. Very close. It's almost like a form of trickery used to target the ignorant.

Yeah, I've heard that there are some people who swear by it. I still think it's dumb though.

It might be fine for an auction-type thing where the seller is bound by the EULA to sell provided that the (predetermined) reserve is met. It gets people bidding and maybe increases interest, and I get that.

But Guru obviously has a different system and there's no way to enforce follow-through on trades, or force the seller to pre-set reserves.

Personally, I prefer the way GWAuctions does things - you *know* that if you're the high bidder you'll be getting the item when the auction ends. Unfortunately, that site doesn't have the population that Guru does, and it's 95% low-end stuff. Someone pointed out recently that Curse should license GWAuctions' software for use on Guru Auctions. Y'know, since Guru Auctions is complete dogshit.

I have not been on GWauctions in a long time but last time I was there it looked like a good place to buy low end items. Unfortunately the sites design looks unattractive and trust me that matters. I was also was very reluctant to use the site considering the failure that is the Guru AH. However the site would end up just like the Guru AH and Sell forums with high end items. If people don't get the price they want they will just keep the item because money>reputation when they can make a new account. Again Anet should have put the work into an AH and it could have been done, but chose to abandon it for GW2 because GW1 is their sickly first born with one foot in the grave.

Ever think that maybe there just aren't many end buyers left in game? That it's just traders buying to resell... Heck even when we are buying for our own use, we'll pay a bit more, but are still trying to get a deal.

IMO the value of an item isn't simply what someone is willing to pay. Uneducated buyers and resellers generally won't give full value. You need 1 serious buyer or a couple of people to get around what it's worth. Get 2 or more aggressive buyers and that's when you may get more than what it's worth.