Anet, what are you doing? [Rare Materials Trader]

I'm sure everyone's come to know and love the infamous rare material trader by now--the same guy buyers base their prices on, and busybodies like shouting in retort to low buy prices.

Well, something funny I've noticed. Recently, when a friend of mine tried to sell an ectoplasm to the merchant, he was only offered -100- gold for it. Apparently, the trader didn't want any more. The fun part? Current prices were at 11,000G EACH.

Now, tell me, if the merchant sets prices based on supply, why does Anet force him to have more demand than supply? This does, in effect, increase the prices drastically while increasing this "Percieved need to farm" as eloquently put in a recent statement. Anet has total control over the buying price at the merchant, so my question is this. Why? Why are you forcing prices to rise? Isn't this against your "code" of play?

I don't understand this. If anyone can help shed some light on the situation I'd much appreciate it.

The prices he sells at and the prices he buys at are constantly fluctuating and not connected to each other at all IMO, which is totally different from most games traders.

Same thing happened to me last night when I tried to sell a glob. I thought maybe it was because they created some new script that only lets you sell uw and fow materials while america had favor. But apparently that isn't it......

I'm a little confused by your statements. But if I understand you correctly, the merchant offers 100g for your 'farmed' ecto but you can buy one from him for 11p?

If so, I think this drastically decreases the perceived need to farm since the benefits are very minimal.

buhuhu i can only sell a steel ingot for 30gp and the merchant himself sells them for over the 300gp

There is some trigger point, however, that this occurs. I've seen prices jump from 3k+ on shards to 100g in an instant, then up to 3k again at the next fluctuation period. If prices are tied in any way to supply, then this is seriously not helping at all. If they're independent from supply, then my question of why the prices are allowed to rise this high still stands. It's ridiculous to have to pay 10k+ for one item (especially when you want 30+ of them)

I'm looking to buy an armor that needs these items. Which means if I really want it, I need to increase my farming by a large amount. Otherwise I should give up, which I wouldn't like to do.

-edit: forgot to mention that other people WILL buy these at these prices and waiting prices out isn't going to happen, as they'll stay high or rise-

Not true - People will buy them. I saw people buying for 8 - 8.5k last night. the trader was at 10k

I've never seen the sell-to-merchant price any higher than 100g. I always thought it was preset.

I use/mistake Merchant for Trader. All transactions occured at the trader.

My bad

I sold a ruby the other day to a trader for 8k. Then, a day later I sold a glob for 4k. And last night, a glob was only worth 100.

I too have notcied this whats going on? Did Anet Nerf material prices to stop material farmers or what?

There is a difference between selling to a MERCHANT and the RARE meterial TRADER. The merchant has a FIXED price for everything the TRADER does NOT.

I think the dramatic price drop is just a "nudge" from Anet to inspire you to pay close attention to price fluctuations. That's what I think.

So how does this semi economy work though? The way i understand things work in real life:

The more people want to BUY an item the higher the prices go up [DEMAND]
The more people want to SELL an item the lower the prices go [SUPPLY]
The fluctuation between SUPPLY & DEMAND will either raise/lower a price.

Now how is supply and demand determined in GW? Lets assume the following:

1. Players never sell their items at the Trader.
(a) they will either hoard it, like me , for later use
(b) expect very poor prices [100g vs 11plat to buy it]
(c) rather sell it to other players for 10plat

2. Players will more often BUY at the trader than SELL at the trade [see point 1].

So isn't it inevitable that from the TRADER's viewpoint that DEMAND will go skyhigh and will go on up and up. There will NEVER be a "realistic" supply. The only supply will be purely based on whatever GW-devs coded it. I would assume this can only be

1. Based on how many items are in the game as whole [i.e. counting all player inventory]
and/or

2. Based on a droprate/rarity [set by devs]

or

3. Some arbitrary hardcoded amount.

or [and what i'm really asking]

4. Based on sales made directly to traders/merchants.


....anyone know? Something is fishy

Whenever he only offers me 100g, I come back later. The price is nearly always fluctuating. If he keeps trying to give me 100g all night, I wait until the next day. It's usually back to a more "normal" amount then.

Something is fishy! The trader sells an item for 10k, so the demand is very high. But he is only willing to pay 100g to the person, who gives him his supply? He wants to sell an item for 10k and only pays 100g for it ?

Yep, that's the problem ._. Unfortunately, there is no other way to get these items other than farming the underworld, which by money/time is a less efficient way for me to get them... So either Anet has to increase drop rate dramatically, or fix this stupid merchant.

*$@#%*^(!!!
How the hell am I going to sell platinum to IGE if this continues!!!
oops...did I post that?

Works well for me...I bought 50 ectos from the merchant at 8k a piece and sold them all a few days ago, when prices were hitting 13.5k per ecto.

Wouldn't it be more fun to just go out and find the bloody things?

thats the problem, they dont drop much and buying isnt really an option for much people atm since they are SO expensive, you might not even get any ecto in an uw run, ive never gotten one from a drop yet, i bought all mine for 1k-3k each before rare material trader came ^.^ so i am one of the lucky few who bought fissure armor before it was over 1 million gold

In the real world, there is no true law of supply and demand. In fact, corporations often try to reverse this "law" to compete in the marketplace. If you see a supply/demand trend that appears to hold true to the "law," it's merely a facile justification for greed.

If Anet is actually using supply/demand with their traders, which is plausible in a game economy, then the relationship between supply/demand in this instance is clearly broken. Otherwise, if it's intentional, they may be (a) trying to discourage any buying and selling of ecto at the rare material traders or (b) trying to encourage trade of ecto among players, neither of which seems to make much sense. Strange.

Traders can be bugged in their "buy" prices.


Yesterday I went to the dye trader with blue dye to sell. The dye trader was selling them for roughly 345 gold. The sell window however would not offer more than 1 gold. I thought I was seeing things so I tried again. Sure enough, the offer was 1 gold.

Several minutes later the price of blue dye fluctuated by a few gold. Went back to the dye trader and the price showed a much more reasonable 228 or so gold to sell at.

Several minutes later it was back to 1 gold.

And then back to around 238 gold later in the day. None of the other dyes were showing this anomaly, whether the dye was more or less expensive.


Next Time I'll have to grab screenshots.

Just had the same thing happen to me with furr sqaures at the rare materials trader. Offered me 1 gold for a fur square when he is selling them for 340?? Whats the deal?

Wow so your saying the trader actually changes buy prices? Thats something I didn't know. No wonder the trader was offering 1g for my orange dye, I thought I was going crazy.

The trading programming might be bugged - or may reflect unequal prices during update periods when the servers adjust prices based on current supply/demand.

While I haven't heard anyone discuss it, I have a suspicion that the game tracks not only sales to merchants, but also trades of player-2-player as well. Market prices fluxuate based on both sale prices. Most people sell items (dyes, for example) to players, while the dye trader - with an abundance of dyes - will pay you far less. Player to Player sale prices are normally 10% (or so) less than the trader sale price, and this drives down the prices of dyes. People that buy directly from the dye trader pay full market price, and as they buy more dye from the trader, the price rises.

This, I believe, is how the market prices are set. If no one ever buys from a trader, the price eventually will drop to almost nothing if the players only sell to players at reduced rates.

The trader also tracks (and adjusts) prices based on sales to the trader, which will have a much more dramatic price influence since they pay far less than what the item is worth in the "real economy".

Just a hunch, I have no proof that this is how it works.

I noticed the same thing with sigils and the rae material trader. I think ANet should fix it by making the traders all buy at 90% of the price they are selling for at that exact time. This would be easy to code and would lower the cost of the items. How you ask? LIke this:
Rare Material trader is selling Ectoplasm for 10K per glob. 90% of 10K is 9K. Rare MAterial Trader is buying for 9K per Glob. Player A notices what price the trader is paying for the globs and realizes its higher than what people usally will pay for the globs. Player A sells to the trader and tells all his friends about the traders price so they sell also. Player B does the same thing as Player A and so on. The price is lowered to 8K now because a lot of globs were sold to the trader. Players will olny pay about 7K per now. Trader will pay 7.2K now. The whole process continues until the price reaches a steady level were the price is low enough that people will buy them (like 5-6K a piece) and the people who don't need the globs sell to the trader because it has the best price around.

Ectos are being bought for 2.7k now... something's definitely screwy
I wouldn't mind some sort of official explanation as to how it works... maybe with answers there wouldn't be so much confusion...

Either way, I wish Anet would just take initiative and force prices down at the trader. It'd give those of us who're interested in the armor a little bit of a reprieve.

This whole deal with ectoplasm is driving me nuts. Let me tell you my story.

Last week I was trying to buy some ecto as usual, prices were around 5-6k each. I went on vacation and came back just about 2 days ago. To my dismay, the prices had shot up in ONE WEEK from 5k to 9k. Well, since Obsidian Shards are so "cheap" now, I decided to sell all 17 that I didn't need (I'm a monk going for the Ascetic's set) to hopefully get some money for ectoplasm that I do need. I got up to 50k selling Shards and some other junk and thought that would be plenty to get the remaining 5 shards I needed to get the hand wraps. So this morning I go to Temple of Ages advertising to buy ectoplasm at 9k per. No luck, so I go to Lion's Arch where I'm informed that the trader is BUYING them for 10k each. A flow of "WTF"s ran through my mind as I recalled just YESTERDAY the trader BUYING them for 2k!!! "Well," I thought, "Prices must have gone up 8k while I was sleeping". So I spend all my money buying 4 globs for 12k each. 2 hours later I see someone selling globs for 9k... I go to the trader and see that he is selling them for 9.4k each. Therefore I wasted about 12k that I could've used to buy that last glob... Now normally I would think, "Gee how stupid of me", but this has got to be a bug of some sort, and it's really making me mad.

No supply and demand in the real world ??

What have you been smoking ?
Although it is true that for the most part, a "normal citizen" seldom notices the fluctuation of prices due to supply and demand, it is not so because the "greed of multinational corporation" or some other conspiration theory one might think of.

In fact, most people would dislike the very notion of supply and demand affecting their very lives. They dislike if one day the price of milk is 1$ per liter then the next day it's 1.1$ and yet the day after tommorow it's 0.8$. They'd hate it if their wages are lowered due to oversupply (which is why a low rate of inflation is often a good thing). People usually want some kind of certainty, a feeling of security. And the chaotic movement of prices due to supply and demand is sure as hell not what most people want. Fluctuating prices on consumer level also often means higher cost due to the cost of reprinting the price tags and menus. These are just some reasons why prices (which of course, is the result of the interaction of supply and demand) only change gradually

Law of supply and demand in action is most apparent when one deals with currency, commodities or securities trading. One who has been to a stock exchange wouldnt say "law of supply and demand doesnt exist" for he can see it most clearly there how prices goes up and down continuously due to changes in supply and demand.

I agree that the phenomenon of supply and demand can occur. But it is not an inviolable law, as some people believe. In the last instance, it is frequently determined by someone's decision to take advantage of a circumstance.

Maybe they have a certain number they stock. Say it is 1000 each. At an inventory of 1001 they start giving 1g per piece?

The whole economy in this game is messed.

It's a game about skill, and yet you have this one item that requires such a large amount of gold to buy. In order to obtain that gold quickly, you hone your skills and find a farming place that could get you one of these items realtively quickly. Anet, however, keeps nerfing farming, and as it has become very apparent globs are not dropping with the frequency they used to be.

And in the end what is this item and all that gold going to do? Improve your skills at this game? No, it'll make you LOOK different and that's it. So why the nerfing, the flucuating market prices?

The fissure of woe armour won't give you any advantage over any players. In reality, it will put you at a disadvantage because any player that sees you wearing that and knows you've put in a hell of a lot of hours of gameplay. In which case, you'll be at your peak of skill. A player that walks around in the 1.5k armour doesn't let off this impression and is treated as just another player.

I find it really stupid that the main reason I'm still playing this game is just to make my character look cool. Anet needs to get their priorities in order and stop with all of these stupid changes. The PvP players got what they wanted... give us BACK the good drops.

The merchant rarely offers more then the base value for the item . meaning the Identified Value of the item. Same with materials traders. The exception is the normal materials trader which is market set by quantities of 10. IE Steel ingots. and such.

However the OPTION materials, not really REQUIRED in the game at all... meaning Runes and other such things are still Base value set. that's why when you sell a superior vigor rune to the trader you only get about 125 gold. Oh well... Either use it, give it away, or trash it in my opinion. Congratulations at least you unlocked it if you have some. The reason for this is because in the game OVERALL there are still LOTS of these out there, and as such the buy back value is not that great. why should it be when all it takes is a few mins in fissure to get some? Same with runes... they are plentiful in the game, as long as you go with no henchmen. they take a lot of loot, more then their fair share normally... the gold is even, but little else is. Go in large groups of nothing but regular players and you see all kinds of drops happening... purples, Golds, all kinds. but if even one henchie is along some of the best items are snatched up buy them. Going solo is even better IF you can that is... not too many places that is easy to do...

And you have to remember these are supposed to be GOLD SINKS. not gold producers. they are pulling gold OUT of the market not mass producing more for everyone. this is the SOLE reason rune prices are coming DOWN. not rising uncontrollably as they were before the traders. you would never have been able to get a superior Vigor rune for under 30K 8 weeks ago. but you can now. no problem. the prices are becoming competitive cause gold is getting harder to accumulate. Congratulations your gold now buys more per piece then it has since the launch of the game.

Not sure if this has been said yet but.

All the vendors that buy/sell stuff (excluding the merchant) will buy stuff based on how many he has in stock and what they are worth.

Example, for ectolpasm.

The trader only has as many ectoplasm in stock that where sold to him from players. So, if he reaches so many ectoplasm, he no longer wants to buy them and gives you a piss-poor offer. When someone buys a ectoplasm from him, he is then not full of them and will buy so many at a reasonable price until he is full.

I saw that when the rune trader first came out, everyone quickly sold their runes to him. I could sell my major vigor for 8k for a while, then bam he was offering 25g because he was full.

Of course, I could be completely wrong but I think my idea answers this question.

I dont see how that will work. How will they distinguish between a "TRANSACTION" and simply 2 players giving stuff to each other via the trade window. Nevermind the issue of selling multiple items [i.e. a fur square + dye for 1 rune, will that mean fur will now get some major supply boost?]. Plus, itll mean players can manipulate the economy just by trading stuff back and forth over and over without actual "sinking" any gold.

Actually even though that is completely flawed theoretically, i think that is most probably what is happening and will certainl explain the "extreme" fluctuation.

1. So mathematically i think this happens:

(a) Base Price of Item = 1000 gold

(b) Supply_Demand = Everytime someone SELL an item, the supply_demand DECREASE, everytime someone BUY an item the Supply_Demand INCREASE [default = 1]

-- > MATHS ----------------------------
Simple formula:
Sell Price = (base price) + (supply_demand) =
(1000) + (1) = 1001 gold

Buy Price = (base price) - (supply_demand) =
(1000) - (1) = 999 gold

Now lets say the people starts buying stuff and supply increase to 500 and a few sell 100 items at the trader, so supply_demand = 500 - 100 = 400

Sell Price = 1000 + (400) = 1.4 plat
Buy Price = 1000 - (400) = 600 gold

Now after a long day of trading, we get figures like this [because more people BUY than SELL at the trader meaning the supply_demand will always go up]:

Supply_Demand = 10,000
Sell Price = 1000 + (10,000) = 11 plat
Buy Price = 1000 - (10,000) = -9 plat

Now Buy price [which is negative] will revert back to a "minimum" price, in this case it is 100 gold.

---> END MATHS ----------------------------------

3. Now we can assume, the Trader get supply from somewhere else too [coded in by devs]. Lets say every 12 hours it gets 1000 items which will simulate players selling. So this DECREASE the supply_demand again. (in my example it will bring it back to 1) resetting the prices to normal levels.

4. So what i THINK is happening, the supply_demand will raise and raise and SELL prices will increase. At some point the Buy Price will go negative and will revert back to 1 gold or 100 gold. THEN my guess the Trader gets re-supplied [how many and how often is supplied depends on the rarirty of the item and whether the buy price reached it's minimum). So i'd even go as far as, they might re-supply the trader whenever the buy price goes negative BUT will only supply enough to keep the SELL price at it's current levels. [i.e. raising the base price].

So what does it come down to? They entire system is dependent on the re-supply rate which are determined by devs. I'd think this probably relates to the drop-rate [i.e. the lower the droprate, the less the trader well get re-supplied], which causes further price spikes [depending on item].

Anyway this just my guess...who knows.

PS I left out factors like profit margin and rarity factors for the sake of simplification :P

The rare material trader is bugged. Simple as that. The regular trader will buy 10 pieces of steel for 1.5k ish...

The rare material trader is buying them at 30 cent a peice. Really WTF!

Ive never had a merchant offer me LESS than 26 plat for a Sup Vigor.

Not talking about rune trade... talking about rare material trader. I think the code is bugged on that one.

I haven't had ni problem with rune trader.