Fixing the rare material trader and sigil trader

The other traders have a standard system for buying items from players but the rare material trader doesn't. Heres what I mean:

Regular Material Trader - Selling price-100 gold

Dye Trader - 90% of Selling price (about some small variations)

Rare Material Trader - Absoulty no sense. Ectoplasm is selling for 10K trader will pay 6K for it (60% of selling value). Ectoplasm is selling for 8K trader will pay a little over 3.5K for it (if your lucky). There are no clear buying guid lines for this guy. Like steel will be selling for 295. Trader will buy it for 30 Gold 10 seconds later he will pay 195 gold for it. Obsidian shards are the same way.

Now the sigil trader: She is selling a sigil for 70K. She is buying a sigil for about 50K. She is selling for 60K. She is buying for about 44K. As you can see the differences are pretty large. I Think that the sigil trader should buy sigils for 90% of the selling price.

A good fix IMHO would be to make all traders pay 90% of their selling price for an item.

Do any of you notice this occurince also? It appeares to be world wide (on all servers) as far as I can tell.

Please post if you have noticed this or have any suggestions or critisims of this proprosal.

(Sorry for any spelling errors)

/Agree.

I concurr with OP. The vast inequity in buy price for rare materials is just insane.

Goldsink.

Most other games I've played have approximately 50% (or less) return on items sold to "vendors" or vendor-like people. I think this system, based in part, on market demand, is great.

Correct, Indigo and, yep, gold sink.

And the problem with this is that no one sells to the vendor. Vendor will pay 50% I can sell for 60% or more in an instant. And the system appears to be based on market demand but it isn't. Look at the Rare Material Trader. The supply is there the demand is there but the trader is being avoided because of his pricing. This means that the vendor is getting no supply of the item, which raises the price, this raise causes everyone selling outside of the trader to raise their prices because you can always sell a glob of ectoplasm for 80% of the trader cost in about 30 seconds. Inflatin is caused.

It isn't a gold sink though. No one sells to the trader because of the vast inequality of the pricing. I can sell to the trader for 6K or to another player for 8K. WHich do I choose? The 8K price. Similarly no one buys from the trader because the price is so outrageous. If the price was 90% of the selling price or even 80% I would be making roughly the same amount of money if I sold to the trader this lowers the price so that others will buy from the trader creating a goldsink. But said gold sink doesn't exist at the trader.

I think after all the farmers get their fissure armor and start spreading their blobs and shards to others we will finally see more people selling to the trader. There will be 2 full waves of fissure armor before this happens.

Right now a lot of people want the armor without getting the materials themselves. After the newness of the game wears of on some, we will see more hardcore do-it-yourself players getting the materials and saturating the market.

If the traders buy from you at 90% that would completely eliminate in game trading between players of the items. You would not trade with another player for less than 90% because you can easily sell to trader, the other player will not buy for more than 100% because he would buy from trader. Therefore, the only reasonable price for trading between players is about 95%. It's not even worth the time to find another player to only get 5% more, (which is why I think people who say "WTS ___ dye" are stupid) because in the few minutes it takes to find a potential trader he could have easily earned the difference in killing two monsters (The only exception being the extremely rare stuff like Superior Absorptions, where 5% is more than what you can earn in the 15 mins it takes to find a customer).

i totally support a fix to the trader system that fixes the buy price at 90% (or even 80%) of the sell price.

i believe that very few of us are playing the game just so that we can be doing: WTS <something> in the trade channel for 20 minutes. personally, i want to spend my time doing the actual playing (missions, quests, or just exploring).

however, i am prevented from doing the above because i don't feel like getting ripped off by the traders -- i mean who like the feeling of selling some thing to the trader, only to find that something being sold for some excession gp later in the trade channel?

Actually, the argument could be made that all traders should buy at the exact same price they sell for, or almost. In the real world, market efficiency would eliminate huge spreads between buy & sell prices. Or, in other words, there would be more than one dye vendor, and they would compete on price.
There are quite a few things in GW that make me wish they had an economist on staff...

The reason why the "sell" price of an item is nowhere near 90% of the item's "buy" price in-game is pretty simple. They don't want to turn the game's economic engine into a giant "day trader" operation for people.

They don't want someone to buy a black dye for 5000 in the morning and then sell it back to the trader for 5400 in the evening when the trader is selling it for 6000 due to market fluctuations. By spacing the buy/sell prices apart by a significant margin they are minimizing or completely eliminating the possibility of people doing this sort of scheme.

Ok, this could be an EFFECT of their economic model and not the cause of it, but it's not a bad reason for keeping buy/sell prices at such a disparity.

Way to hit the nail on the head. I completely agree with you. If they made it 90% even 80% of the selling price people would use the exploit explain above and gold will be worthless and only people in the know would have buying power. That exploit would be as destructive to GW's PvE as bots where to D2.