Previous whinging aside.. I'm starting to like the current trader now :)

Here comes the Attack of the high price player-traders

Are you saying that you've found a way to make money of this ruined trader economy?

I'm sorry for the inconvenience but i've sold out of linen.

/Bull

Goes to farm linen.....

Oh well.. with everything in shabbles, maybe it'd be best to just keep playing the game to get more materials.

Since materials are worth serious coin now......

Of course next week Anet will probably make all salvagables salvage into 1 unit of that material. God knows what they are thinking >_<

They'd have to be insane or just plain stupid to make that move. Honestly.

I think their patches are already evidence of insanity and/or stupidity.

Well...ummm...damn, you're right.

Generik is right, I've been making a pretty penny off of cloth, tanned hides, and iron lately, just selling them when the demand is high. One night, I remember hides selling for 425, buying for 200, I made a nice profit that night

i dont' completely understand how the traders work now.. what effects the change in buying selling price on the traders? simply supply and demmand?

for example--
cloth selling from trader for 200+g
trader buying cloth for 30g

i have 0% clue how all this works now, but i love it for one reason... i can check how much the last chump paid.. luckly i rarely buy anything

Just sucks to be the little guy now

For the first time ever.. you can safely sell steel for 200g each, cloth for 15 each, and parchment for 75-100 and no one will challenge you..

why are you giving them ideas!!!!

j/k, tho it seems theres a cap on the buyback price of the traders, now matching much like that of the rune traders with the execption of a few of the items, im not really happy with this as now to make the optimum amout you need to interact with players hoping to get the price your asking or waiting for them to make up their minds etc etc , a good time waster.

i mean what is it a 90% mark down?...was never good at math.

:::End Transmission:::

From Gaile:

I wanted to let you know a bit about how pricing works in Guild Wars. There isn't a fixed ration of sell price to buy price. Traders will pay up to 80% of the sell price for items that they need. But, as their inventory of an item starts to fill -- and it will because there are more sellers than buyers -- the merchans will begin lowering what they're paying for an item to try to even out the number of buyers and sellers. They're sort of AI-operated capitalists.

So the merchants will lower their buy price to avoid buying things they can't sell, and then they'll slowly lower their sell price until they find an equilibrium. The programming is pretty nifty for that, I think.

That's how it used to be before the patch, the algorithm had a flakey startup also as it offers a pittance (and sells cheap) for a long time so no one sells and there is never enough turn over for the algorithm to establish a market value. In europe it took weeks before the material trader started selling linen, silk, and fur he still doesn't sell charcoal or any of the rarer materials because only a fool would sell to him at the low algorithm starting price.

For example last week I noticed he had some Vellum for 40g each I bought his whole stock of 40 (so he doesn't sell it any more again). I clicked on the rare material trader standing next to him and sold it all for 170g each. I made 5.2 plat in 5 minutes without moving an inch, 5.2 plat that some fool lost selling it to him in the first place. The algorithm requires fools to get it started, I assume america has a bigger population with enough fools to make it work.

Since the patch I thought maybe the algorithm had been reset and was having trouble starting but now I'm sure it is more than that. Yesterday I watched the (euro) trader going in and out of stock of parchment most of the day, his buy price hardly changed and was nearer 25% of his sell price not 80%.

a week ago i was selling steel for 250

i sold 11 furs yesterday at 453 EACH

More likely than not, that's because furs were sellings at several thousand.


Personally, I don't think the developers will leave us out to dry. All systems take time. They probably want to see if the situation stabilizes with this system.

It, for lack of a better word, castrated much of the economic system and balance, but possibly in an effort to prevent abuse.


If the situation continues to deteriorate, I think ArenaNet will take steps.

Patience.

/me scrambles off to check out ecto prices

The trader's buy-price of steel was at the bare minimum at one time yesterday. Today it was only at roughly 50. The whole time he was selling it for between 250 to 350. That's a pretty huge gap. I really hope this either works itself out, or ANet fixes it.

Or stop wasting your gold and save up. I only buy armor upgrades. I keep the same weapon. I only buy id kits for drops that are un-identified. I only salvage the colored ones. I never buy dye-friggin-remover I only spend what I absolutely MUST. That way, while so many people are pissing their pants about the economy being in shambles, I have a quiet empire