GW Stock Market Crash!

It doesn't make sense anymore to stock up on rare materials if the traders buy them for so cheap. And it takes alot of time to trade with real people. Also after all your pre-update stocks are out where do you get them? definitely not from the traders since you will make no profit buying from traders.

Note: if you didn't know before, the price of ectoplasm sometimes spiked to almost 20k because hoarders were buying them in mass. Example, when ecto price is at 10k/ecto, a hoarder will buy all of them until they are out of stock. Then after a while, the trader will restock and change the price to 20k/ecto. When the hoarder see this, he'll sell all his stock back to the trader and make a profit out of basically nothing. If more and more hoarders are doing this, then the price per ectoplasm will keep rising. The update will definitely take care of this problem for people who only buy materials to use.

Yeap, and coupled with the lack of content....

Alright, let's suppose EVERYBODY players HoH because there is no other way to attain that ultimate goal.. FoW armor, nice weapons, etc.

Will everyone win?

Nope, time invested is not even worth time spent. Not that time spent is enjoyable anyway. At least everyone is "grinding", always "doing the same thing". Day in day out the same cookie cutter team builds in HoH, or perhaps "Farming experiments"

At this point I should stress again that I never once farmed anything, nor have I ever played in the HoH either. I don't know what Anet perceives to be a regular player, but I reckon I'm not way too off the bat either.

I got the gold I have today due to a couple of seriously lucky incidents when I just ascended, and was at dragon lair looking for a party, and someone announced "Giving 10K to monks joining our team"! And upon joining I immediately received 5K. Then my total wealth is probably 20K (on my THIRD char), so it is quite hard to turn down that much money.

That day my wealth increased by 50%!

Of course I had yet another lucky break in ToA when a millionaire needed help to get to the forge.. I won't disclose figures here, but it is A LOT of gold.

The following week she needed help again, DOUBLE the previous reward. It does raise the question of how they can afford to be so frivolous with gold to start with.. perhaps they have too much? Possibly.

That millionaire btw had a perfect storm bow, and 6-7 gold firey swords with *perfect mods*

Guess what? She plays the HoH.

And then I start dabbling a bit in materials and now this nerf bat. I'll leave you guys to think about the various imbalances my story presented. At this rate I know I will probably never attain that kind of a *ultimate goal*. Unless I have the "skill", which does not really come from the "time" I put into it, but also the "connections" I have, which I do not really like at all.

What is this? Cronisim? The rich gets richer? The poor continues to get stomped?

Visualise a boot continually stomping a human face.. that is a quote from 1984.. but pretty much is what ANET is continually doing to the rest of us who didn't take the opportunity before to single handled take on 9999 mobs. In fact, I'd blame myself for being so "typical" a player.

Oh, and a couple days earlier a guildie got scammed in a trade, he had a Superior Vigor drop, and he was SOOOO happy because he never had a decent drop before (after 4 fully ascended characters who are at the RoF.. mind you), and when in the trade he accepted the 30 plat submission, and apparently the other party quickly modified his offer and replaced it with nothing.

I do not know how that exploit works, but apparently ANET is too busy stomping on our faces instead of doing something about it.

Needless to say, he was really upset about it, essentially giving his best drop ever away!

Will this be the future state of affairs? Well, considering it is SO HARD to make any coin in this game, and all those new mercenaries spring up all over the place offering running services for gold... I'd say that's highly possible!

Why the hell should it be that difficult to attain any form of status in a game totally eludes me. Time you put in it is DEFINITELY NOT equitable to what you achieve. NEITHER IS EFFORT.

On one hand is people like my guildie.. on the other hand is that scam. And that scam effectively made 30 plat (probably 50 by today's prices) in that wink of an eye.

What does this tell you? Play honestly? No! Be a total asshat and earn your money the pretty much the American Corporate Way.

Is this how you keep customers? I'll leave ANet to think about it. Afterall they still need us to buy their chapter 2.

But if nothing reverses the current trend, the response is a flat and definite NO. Utter waste of my time, if not money.

I'll leave you guys tonight to think about it. The recent turn of affairs outright sickens me.

If priced low enough you can sell almost instantly. Selling Ectos for 9K each in ToA and you will sell out so fast you have no idea what happened. The point is no one has any left and as no one will buy from the trader because of its horribley high price, which is caused by no one selling to the trader because of his horibly low price, the price continues to rise when that 1 in a thousand PvPer comes along who wants fissure armor and doesn't care about the gold.

Check my editted post. If the trader keeps restocking and nobody is buying from it, then the price will drop. The point is that hoarder can't make profit from the trader anymore and this will keep the price down.

What you are saying was impossible. Beleive me you lose more money than you would ever gain doing that. You can't sell all at once only individuialy and with each sale the price decreases. You would just be giving away your gold. To do a cheap experimant buy Iron until the price hits 250 gold for 10 ingots then sell it all back to the trader. Tell me your starting amount of money before any iron was bought and the end amount of money after all iron was sold. You will fin't that you lost money in there. Now if a third party spikes the market on something things are different: Say you bought 5 Ectos at 10K a piece and then one of the rich comes along and buys the 100+ ectos they need for their armor. The price spikes up and you can sell for a profit, but if the rich player tried to sell back they would lose money.

I hope ANet doesn't find this an insanely difficult issue to solve, because I can propose one asininely simple solution. People exploit drastic prices spikes right?

Simply program the backend to keep track of price flucutations over time, with enough statistics very soon you will get the mean selling price as well as the standard deviation.

Also put in a learning rate (it is pretty trivial.. probably derive the new selling price as 0.99 * old selling price + 0.01 * new proposed selling price) to curb drastic buying price rises.

Price falls... that can be hastenedd by just having it fall immediately. Hence, slow to rise.. fast to fall!

Next, never offer more than a certain values for a given item. Or just program it to realise that mean + 1SD is way too high!

There, simple! And a solution that will UTTERLY BURN anyone trying to fool the system by buying 100 ectos, because all that effects is.. pretty much nothing. He buys his ectos at 20 plat, happy selling them back at 8 plat. Another turd burned for it.

Right now everyone is being burned for the inability to use the traders as an easy way to sell our items. Instead we now have to park in town and send out "WTS" posts every 1 minute and must keep our hawk eyes peeled to watch out for the elusive "WTB".

Come on, tell me why this is not a good solution.

In order to achieve a price spike, you actually have to buy up everything from the trader. Once a particular material is out of stock, then you'll see a considerable spike after restocking.

No after restocking nothing happens. The price resets or lowers. It doesen't stay that high or spike more after the restock. It at best stays the same. Now as I didn't get any sleep tonight and I need some I will point out whats wrong with your solution later generik and explain this to you better mr big. So sleep time.

Wow. Good Thread!

I actually got a black dye in a drop not to long ago with a group of 8 people. I feel lucky. Guess I'll just hang on to it. Maybe add it to my newer character's armor down the road.

By the time I was feeling powerful enough to "farm" everything was getting nerfed as you youngens put it. For a short while I was getting some good drops. I mostly gave them away or sold them at a very good price to people I have met that really needed them. I have a hard time being greedy out there.
Plus I can't stand the hassle of selling.

Basically what we have right now is a really screwed up economy.

There are those with a lot of money, and everything they could ever want.

And then there are those fighting to get one piece of the 15k armor. There's hardly any inbetween.

Those who have a lot of money got it a long time ago when it was easy to do so, at that point in time there was a lot of money going around, people sold high, bought high, and most everyone who played the game could get a fair bit of money.

Then they nerfed.

And nerfed.

And nerfed.

And screwed over everyone with the "gold sinks" that WOULD be good if the people that actually SOLD things were the people who had money. The problem is the only reason people DO sell things is because they NEED money, and right now people get some rare item they think will finally get them enough money to finish buying the black dye for their armor...but they get crap gold for it.

Then you've got times where you'll find a godly weapon, finally you can make some money right? But how much do you sell it for? A reasonable price? No, you're going to sell it for 60k because you know someone watching has a lot of money, and they'll easily buy it from you. So you sell a weapon off for 60k a few people out there can actually afford that easily, while the rest of the community stays poor as hell.

There are those who are rich, and those who are poor, nothing else. If you're poor and want to be rich, you've either got to wait weeks and weeks just to search for the right item, then sell it for an assload to become rich just like that.

People can't make money right now, you either got the money when you had the chance or you didn't. If your not a droknar runner or a PvP player who spends his life in the HoH you're pretty well screwed money wise.

The problem is all the gold sinks aren't placed on optional things, they're placed on things people actually want and need on a regular basis. Hell RUNES are goldsinks now, and those were so "necessary" that they even gave PvP only characters a way to get them, and just in this past update they made it EASIER for them to get them. While we still...buy high...and get crap money when we try to sell it.

With the rune traders...they sell for pretty high, vigors and absorptions especially, but it wasn't a big deal when people could actually make money by selling them for a relatively equal price, it was a good cash rotation. Now you've got the rich people who buy what they want from the traders whenever they want, thus shooting up their prices because they're too lazy to buy it from a person, so then the rest of us who DON'T have a thousand plat have to work for hours and hours to buy one of the pieces or something.

It's just stupid, there are only ways to lose money nowadays, no ways to make it.

Gaile said in one of the recent interviews that ALL merchant stock comes from players. This means no automatic restocking. Anything that you would have perceived as restocking is probably other players selling the same item back at the same time. This was most noticeable back in the first few weeks with the celestial sigil trader constantly out of stock. Also in the betas when black dye was hardly ever for sale on the dye traders.

Actually I found another way to make money a few miniutes ago. I won't post it because of the good old break stuff bat that ANet gave to a blind drunk toddler. No it isn't a farming spot. I founs a way to play the economy again. Even though it isn't as efficient as it was before it still works and I can make about 20K an hour with concertied effort (down from my usal 30K an hour with effort and 20K an hour with no effort at all). The economy is still ruined for the rest of you but...it is beatable. Granted I don't need the gold I just wanted to test and I made 2.25K in 6 miniutes (averaged and tried for 24 miniutes).

And yes we have really messed up gold sinks.

That is iffy as I have seen it restock and then buy it and have the item still be instock. The trader might wait until it has x number of an item to start selling though.

It may seem iffy but that's what was said by Gaile. If she is wrong then that's a pretty big mistake on her behalf.

Just posting what I noticed.

Lucky for you who can afford to dump plat on an experiment

I seriously don't know what drives the NPC these days. The buying prices are essentially RANDOM. Linen selling at 380 (super high price, means high demand right?), oh wait, I can offer you 30 gold for one bolt of linen.

POS.. ridiculous!

What makes him think anyone would sell him linen at 30 gold, even if his stock levels are low? We don't run charities man!

The buying and selling prices completely and blatantly disregard the priciples we have behind capitalism. What system we have in place? Bleigh.. a "because some programmers did it so" system.

Very True. My experimant was about an old bug that pops up after every update and I tell ANet about it every time but they don't seem to fix it. It has dissapeared again which it usally does within 24 hours of the update but they must be building the updates off an older version without the bug fix as it keeps reacurring.

Most of the prices on the rare material trader are similar to what they were a week ago. The price he pays players is what has changed. The price has always been based on supply and demand it just seems they have changed the % of the sell price that he buys from players at. Seems they added a small text that shows all stock comes from players to the merchants. It says:

"Traders only sell items that they have purchased from players, and prices constantly fluctuate based on supply and demand."

the market is buying all runes (yes, even superior absorption, superior vigor, etc) for 25g. yes that's right. 25g. all dyes? 1g. 1 measly RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing gold piece for an 8plat black dye. is it just me, or is something seriously RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed with that picture. seriously.

Dude, for the dyes...sell them to the dye trader.

That is the dye trader Pie.

How come I get more for dyes at the dye trader then...or at least I used to.

One moment I've got a silver dye in my storage, let me check if they screwed that too...

I'm going to kill myself.

I checked like ten miniutes ago with a green, a silver, and a black. The green and silver were both 1 gold each and black was like 3K (about 5K less than the trader at the time). But earlier black was 1 gold and the others were "normal"

I guess that's ANet's screwed up idea of "fluctuation"........ this is getting ridiculous.

Yeah, sounds to me like we've got a damn good sytem going here. *sarcasm*

Alright Anet you gave the PvPers anything they asked for, I think it's time to at least give us back what we once already had, the two new zones can wait, those will be over and done with soon enough, we need to actually get a good base system going.

The good news is over these threads we've created (and my petition which has had great results thus far) seem to be getting pretty big and pretty obvious, hopefully they'll realize the problem soon enough. All we have to do is bitch and moan 'til our hearts can't push anymore blood through our bodies.

It worked for the PvP extremists, why can't it for us?

well ok lets think about this, u have 100 million ppl playin your game and after 3 months u decide to make an update. Is it fair to new comers if it makes the game harder? NO... It is not about the economy... The most important point that is being skipped in this onversation I think is the fact that money and items are not the main point of this game, but the fun, teamwork and other stuff like finishing the game or exploring new exciting stuff on the map. well if u made making gazillions of money your only goal in the game, then go for it but it shouldn't be your goal and ANet also thinks it shouldn't be your ultimate goal... That's why they started to apply economical updates in the game. And yes, I did take economy 101 and 102

You are an idiot if you think the hp penalty on majors and superiors deters people from using them. Vigor runes exist for a reason.

[Translation] Over A month ago prices for runes were insanely high because there was no point of reference for supply and demand. People just looked for the words superior, fire, vigor, healing, sword etc and tacked on zeroes as they saw fit since there was no way to tell how many other people were selling the same rune and prices were not at all competetive. Hi, I like to go shopping with a blindfold on.

Now farming is no longer a neccessity since runes are readily available at super low prices and people DON"T have to grind for the things that they need to play the game at peak efficiency.

Life sucks now. Whaaah. [/translation]

Yeah Drizzt but you see the problem is that PvE is easy as hell to complete, and a good majority of us here posting have got our 4 lvl 20 characters, we've beaten the game and we've nothing else to do but get money to help better perfect our characters. Without it we can't do anything else.

Sure it's about fun and completing the game.

At least it is until you've done it 10 times.

Then it's about trying to make it last.

I agree that pve is ez to beat and i have 3 20 lvl chars too but still making 'money' the goal of life... doesn't even sound right in the real life so why bother in a game? well I guess I'll leave that to you guys

Okok, let's all be rational here..

I'm really stymied myself. But what would we propose as a solution to ANet?

Seriously I failed to see why a fully capitalist, player price controlled market would be very nasty.

Let's say the traders are implementated such that, supposing you are the only person in the entire world..

You can start buying all of a trader's stock for something, until it reaches some maximum defined prices, and runs out of stock. You can then proceed to sell your said item back to the trader, such that the trader takes a cut of 10%-15% and no more, and at the end of the exercise, money changed hands, the pricing cycle of said material went to the top, and went back down again (in the exact same order), and the player is less 10%-15% of his original gold.

How is this a bad system?

Sure, in a real world implementation..

Potentially one ultra rich person can buy up all of one resource, say... Ectos..

But don't forget this is capitalism! People will notice the prices of ectos hiking from 12 plat.. and slowly approaching 20 plat, and decide "Hey! Screw the 15% commission taken by the trader, 20 plat * .85 is an awesome price!" and proceed to dump their stocks back to the trader.

Remember here unlike the previous and current system, there is no overly obsessed "gold sink" system that causes all merchant trades to be rip offs. Tell me, how can someone possibly profit from the system?

Short of some moron who bought that remaining ingot for probably 3 million plat... He can't! In fact if he does it he will consistently lose 15%!

The real trouble is the pricing offered by the traders was stuffed to start with, and price control measures (by the players in general) failed to kick in, if you'd put the price differential between buying-selling smaller and more reflective of real world economies, I'm pretty sure prices will all find their balances too.

Alright, ectos was an extreme example:

Remember "the price of steel"? Let's try steel.

So a player with one million plat can probably afford 3 million steel ingots (provided he has room either) and provided there is that much stock to start with. This is a very naive estimate made assuming their is no increment in pricing throughout.

But in actuality prices would increase/decrease on a curve based on stock levels, and eventually when that last ingot costs 3 million plat, even our bidding entrepreneur will find it hard to cough out that cash to buy it.

What happens then?

Everyone else crashes the NPC with their gold stock. Money changed hands from rich fool to NPC.. and less 15% back to the other stockists.. what's wrong here? Nothing, free market movements!

Of course some greedy nut is going to hold on to that 1 steel ingot of his thinking that prices will jack up somemore, and is sorely mistaken one hour later.

The issue of course to to deduce the rate at which price increments would kick in.. that would probably involve figuring out the true total daily demand for a given supply, etc.. and could be quite tricky.

But hey, I only gave 5 minutes thought to this post, and like some said.. ANet is a huge company and probably has dozens of devs at their disposable. Please don't throw PvEers a solution that even a 12 year old can come up with in 10 minutes, and again and again reward PvPers with more and more enchancements.

The buy low sell high model is such a joke. Eventually the rich shots are just going to exhaust supplies in the player market.. then slowly exhaust the NPCs.. then what?

Nobody in their right mind will sell black dye back to the NPC for 1 gold when it is out of stock.. or *maybe* the pitiful 1-2 plat even. Would the current system work? Most definitely not, from initial observations it looks to be severely broken. Especially when there is no automatic restocking, the NPC should NOT have been introducing gold/materials into the economy to start with.

I seriously fail to see how the NPC is able to determine supply and demand if trades are not even going through him! Heck, make ALL material trade go through him, and it will totally cut out on all that material spam (unless some dork is going to sell at 5% below listed price which is still 10% above the offered price) and it saves us all that hassle immediately.

If you were talking about me there drizzt134 with the economy 101 part I was refering to ANet there and that is the only place were economics classes were mentiond AFAIK. The point is that ANet has created a system that won't get better but will only get worse. The farming nerfs cut off the player salary exxentialy and combined with the economy and trade 'fixes' you end up with a system of ever increasing cost with every decreasing funds for over 90% of the GW community.

Oh you're absolutely right, lord knows my total 4k right now is enough to buy any superior runes I want for the character I'll put in my 4th slot. Especially that superior vigor (afterall...vigor runes are there for a reason right? To balance out the other superiors? Well what the hell am I supposed to do when I can't AFFORD the superiors, ESPECIALLY the vigor?)

Runes aren't anything in fact runes are hardly anything.

Hell if in my 4th slot now say I want to create a warrior. Right now I don't have any good weapons, do I have the money to spend on a good weapon and some decent mods for it for my new character? Hell no. Do I have enough money to buy the 1.5k armor for any more characters? Uh, no. I guess I could go through every mission, and every quest in the game in order to get the money over time with him, but hell I've done that like 10 times with all the professions already...why would I want to do EVERYTHING again? Except this time---not even have enough money to afford everything! I remember on my necromancer when I got him to droknars for the first time, I couldn't afford to buy the armor even though I'd gone through everything. And now I'll be able to afford it even LESS because monster drops are pretty much nonexistant.

Yeap, in fact things are set to look a lot worse..

Right now I still see people pricing steel and 200g each, but as nobody sells to the NPC, and his stocks run low, it is sure going to be hell to pay soon even through the human players, because they are going to point to that 390g each price tag at the merchant while they proclaim "WTS: Steel ingots! 300g each!"

I really fail to see how having all material trades go through the NPC is a bad thing, seriously I don't.

Too much server overhead? Perhaps shutdown some useless services then!

What I have been saying. I am tempted to res my "a possible fix to the guild wars economy thread" which has in it the idea that the trader should always buy for 85-90% list price and why. I will post the link but someone else res it.
Here it is: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=29418

For those of us who do not power game, GW's economy is just fine. We go out and play, and get some loot in the process. Anet's vision was for the game to be for all, for power gamers (PvP), and for the casual player (PvP, PvE). For those of you who are power gamers who mainly play PvE, you will be disappointed, because there is only so much to the PvE aspect of the game. Why in the world does anyone need 600 plat. For some high priced armor? The armor isn't needed, but it is wanted. Why? Status. To heck with status. This is a G-A-M-E, have fun.

Yeah, and what happens when we get tired of the tiny 8vs8 guild skirmishes that always turn out with the same cruddy tactics in the same few zones, and have beaten PvE several times and there's nothing more to do?

That's why they put the 15k/fissure armor there, that's why dye is there, that's why they have these end-game perks. So that people have something work for AFTER they do all that.

Problem is...I can't even afford droknar armor, or a good weapon or some mods for any new characters I might make unless I spent hours upon hours at the lost strongbox in hopes of making 3k.

See, it's not about "having the fissure armor" I hardly have enough to even buy normal things now that they've crapped EVERY monsters drops. From charr to flesh golems, it's all been screwed.

85-90% list price just promotes people to play the market. The money they earn with mass-buying low and selling high comes right out of the pockets of people who 'casually' use the traders. And I can imagine people writing bots to get quotes all day and sell high/buy low automatically, which is something ArenaNet will want to prevent at all costs.

Result: the rich get richer, the poor stay poor, even without bots in the picture. I'd like to see a 50% margin or something that entirely discourages playing the trader market (bartering with players will still continue as it should ofcourse), but will still give a fair return for items you find to encourage people to sell to the trader instead of the merchant.

I can't believe you suggest this again, or even invite people to 'res' that thread when nechronius explained the immense problem with your suggestion already. There are more interests at stake besides your own.

I think normal MERCHANTS should only give like 1g for all runes, dyes, materials, etc.

I think the TRADERS for each of the runes, dyes, and materials should give 85% of the cost they have. That way people will always sell to the traders, sell amongst eachother, etc.

Then again, with the way drops are now, there won't even be much to sell.

PieXags, then wait for the economy to stabilize. If everyone is having such a problem being unable to buy overpriced weapons/upgrades then their prices will come down as well.

People only sell runes they can't use (the majority of the attribute runes fall under this category). EVERYONE can use a vigor rune which is why hardly anyone ever sold them to the trader.

If the current prices over runes troubles you most. Then stand by the rune vendor and yell at everyone that comes by to sell a rune there. The prices are the way they are because the majority makes it so. Place the blame where it is due.