Curse

tanwarv · Jul 24, 2005, 06:27 PM // 18:27

Kershent, I believe you are more or less correct when it comes to items that turn over often, like steel and fur. However, with low-turnover items like black dye, obsidian shards, ecto, superior runes, and many of the rarer materials, the patch did send things into a really bad spiral. Ecto is the clearest example. Try selling it to the trader. He has none in stock 99% of the time now, but he still will offer you a fraction of the current selling price (which is hard to see).

Same applies to black dye. Pre-patch, black dye was trading for about 5-6k. It's much higher now, because I believe post-pacth all of the buyback dye prices were reset to 1gp. So in turn only newbies would sell their dye to the trader, which would immediately get bought by another player. The trader would increase his selling price to accomodate, but the buy price would barely move (but would still rise). In high turnover items like steel, fur, and leather, this eventually stabilized to a semi-reasonable supply and demand model. But in the case of low-turnover items, prices never mover quickly enough to compensate. Since many human players base their sell prices to be slightly less than the trader, we have inflation on those items. I imagine this might eventually fix itself, but it has been 11 days, and people are still complaining. There are numerous threads on this same issue, each with other examples documenting this phenomenon.

GW Monkey · Jul 24, 2005, 06:56 PM // 18:56

GW Monkey: WTB All your shards, 150g each! (trader is offering only 100g)

kongar, if he's offering a price that's stupidly low, do like you would in real life... walk away. Come back in a couple hours, or tomorrow, or next week. It's the frequency and amount other people are selling stuff to him. It's not a fixed amount. Sometimes the Rare Materials Trader wants to buy your steel ingots @ 30g/ea. Are you going to sell them for that? I'll take them. I'll give you 40g/ea (in stacks of 250 only.)

No of course not. So wait. If you wait till he's not so saturated, you'll see this amount start climbing... re: steel it'll climb back over 200g/ea in short order as long as the market isn't staying flooded.

I haven't figured out the "market recovery" pattern but I'm guessing it's calculated per minute. There's plenty of full-time traders out there. Experiment. Play the market.

Shadow Aster · Jul 24, 2005, 07:01 PM // 19:01

I don't pretend to understand how the system works. I DO know that I always try to keep materials on hand (between my husband and I, we have 8 characters) for armor. I have a couple sets of Ascension armor, some from Droknar's, and we both have characters still moving through the game.

It's worth it to me to take stacks of materials down to the trader and see how much he'll offer for them when he quotes and see if anything is worth selling. Yesterday, I had a couple dozen bolts of silk. The rare trader was offering 15 gold each, but the material trader was offering 528 gold for 10. I realize I probably could have gotten more by taking the time to advertise them and try to sell them to people, but that really doesn't interest me. Trading just isn't my thing. Maybe if I had played a single character, and was completely done with everything, I'd think about taking more time to socialize and stand around in the cities/towns/outposts, but I'm not there yet.

I DID take a little time last week to sell fur squares when the selling price was over 600. 200 gold apiece was a pretty good deal for everyone involved I think.

twicky_kid · Jul 24, 2005, 07:03 PM // 19:03

i think its per hour.....i've sat at merchant for 30 minutes waiting for prices to change and they never did.

i go out for about and hour or 2 and check it. the prices then change.

PieXags · Jul 24, 2005, 07:06 PM // 19:06

Here's just something I'm trying to figure out, if say the dye traders work like people say they do, then when they have quite a few, but not a ton of black dyes, they should buy it from people for somewhere in the hundreds of gold, say 700. I've only seen black dye sell for over 4k to the trader, or 1g. Nowhere in the middle. And I know for a fact that everytime it switches someone didn't just go and sell 20 black dyes to the trader, it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't change accordingly. The price it buys from people is either high and reasonable, or 1g. Never anywhere in the middle, and it should be if it really does work on a tweaked supply/demand basis.

Kershent · Jul 24, 2005, 07:17 PM // 19:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by tanwarv

Kershent, I believe you are more or less correct when it comes to items that turn over often, like steel and fur. However, with low-turnover items like black dye, obsidian shards, ecto, superior runes, and many of the rarer materials, the patch did send things into a really bad spiral. Ecto is the clearest example. Try selling it to the trader. He has none in stock 99% of the time now, but he still will offer you a fraction of the current selling price (which is hard to see).

Same applies to black dye. Pre-patch, black dye was trading for about 5-6k. It's much higher now, because I believe post-pacth all of the buyback dye prices were reset to 1gp. So in turn only newbies would sell their dye to the trader, which would immediately get bought by another player. The trader would increase his selling price to accomodate, but the buy price would barely move (but would still rise). In high turnover items like steel, fur, and leather, this eventually stabilized to a semi-reasonable supply and demand model. But in the case of low-turnover items, prices never mover quickly enough to compensate. Since many human players base their sell prices to be slightly less than the trader, we have inflation on those items. I imagine this might eventually fix itself, but it has been 11 days, and people are still complaining. There are numerous threads on this same issue, each with other examples documenting this phenomenon.

I think the problem with ectos and shards is a botter. Didn't someone come through here once saying that someone admitted to having a bot that bought every ecto and shard that came on the market? If that's the case, buy prices are so low because everyone is selling to the trader, assuming their buy prices won't rise. I can't verify that there's still a botter standing there, so that theory could be bunk.

As for low turnover items, keep in mind that they are in very high demand because of their rarity. People are buying black dye constantly, even though it's over 11k. Because of this, the trader doesn't have to lower his prices to get more people to buy. He's getting dye at about the same rate people are buying it, so the prices are staying the same. If all of a sudden nobody bought black dye, and nobody sold it to the trader, his buy price would shoot up, and his sell price would plummet.

So boycott the dye trader! That'll fix it.

Tactical-Dillusions · Jul 24, 2005, 07:27 PM // 19:27

Went to sell a few scraps of rare material to the trader today.
I got a fair price on the furs but when i went to sell the bit of linen...15 gold!!

I checked the buying price and it was 1027 gold a piece!! Jesus.

What's with that? I put out a trade advert for this one piece and nobody wanted it at 800 or even 600 gold.

I put it in the merchant in the end. I'm not wasting more than 1 minute on a scrap of material.

PieXags · Jul 24, 2005, 07:33 PM // 19:33

They just don't make sense, how come deldrimor steel, a much more expensive and high-end material, is worth much less than say...iron ingots? (Not to mention deldrimor steel is MADE from iron ingots...among other things.) Doesn't make sense to me.

nitetime · Jul 24, 2005, 07:48 PM // 19:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arturo02

don't ever use real life money to buy pixels. Not worth it.

Especially on a night like tonight where black dye sold to the NPC vendor put 8+ plat in your inventory.

Where does this guy get this crap? This was posted in the Ebay to buy or not thread....

Aka · Jul 24, 2005, 08:19 PM // 20:19

The problem as I see it is that traders only relate to their own stock, and not to each other. In a "real world" system there would be more than one retailer, and if one trader is selling something for 4k and buying for 100g, the next trader would buy for more or sell for less. There would be competition between the traders, and that would even out the market.

Of course, that would also mean a lot of zooming around from trader to trader for the player, which would only be fun for a few people. (not that dope wars isn't a great game...)

It's a funky system, and I'm glad there isn't that much to buy or it would be intolerable.

Slimcea · Jul 24, 2005, 08:53 PM // 20:53

Its broken for sure. Theres probably a bug or two somewhere in the trader code, especially with regards to stock.. I mean, I tried selling 10 steel ingots to the material trader, and got the shock of my life when I was offered a measly 300g. Going over to the Rare Material trader, he was buying them for 125g each. If that's not a sign of something being screwed up, I don't know what is.

Kershent · Jul 24, 2005, 10:47 PM // 22:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tactical-Dillusions

Went to sell a few scraps of rare material to the trader today.
I got a fair price on the furs but when i went to sell the bit of linen...15 gold!!

I checked the buying price and it was 1027 gold a piece!! Jesus.

What's with that? I put out a trade advert for this one piece and nobody wanted it at 800 or even 600 gold.

I put it in the merchant in the end. I'm not wasting more than 1 minute on a scrap of material.

I don't mean to insult you here, but lazy people like you are keeping the prices so low. If you had just held onto that linen for another 12 hours, the price would've been awesome. But since the trader is still getting Linen for such a dirt-cheap price, he'll keep buying it for that price.

The system isn't broken, it's just SMART.

Racthoh · Jul 24, 2005, 11:06 PM // 23:06

To explain the whole broke thing, I recall something from a different game on the SNES. Someone got their character so powerful so that they were doing more damage than the game could handle, so their damage was instead very low. Although what happened was the number exceeded the 16 bit value of 65535 (might be off a bit) so when it went higher than that it just went to 1.

Prehaps what is happening in Guild Wars is the stock of the trader is so high due to a large stock that the number in memory is "overflowing" and simply can't handle it. So it just gives you the default value of the item.

But I doubt that would be a problem in this game since it is far ahead of the time of SNES and its limitations. But if the programmers made a simple mistake like that it would be rather funny.

Kershent · Jul 25, 2005, 12:22 AM // 00:22

Doubtful, Racthoh. Superior vigors were going for well over 100 plat without problems, and black dye is going for a fraction of that.

tanwarv · Jul 25, 2005, 12:24 AM // 00:24

For those that don't yet believe that this was a side-effect of the latest patch, ask yourself, "What is fundamentally different between now and July 12 (pre-patch)?"

To believe that this is simply a side effect of real supply/demand, is to conclude that suddenly the demand for black dye, shards, ecto, linen, parchment, and steel have all doubled. At the same time, you must also conclude that people are suddenly more apt to sell all of the above items at much lower prices (out of newly acquired laziness).

I don't believe that whatsover. I do know that the sell prices did reset to minimum values the day the patch came out, and that inflation over the past 11 days is much higher than the inflation rate of the past 30 days.

Pre-patch, the only examples I could think of where buy prices and sell prices were significantly different from each other were common materials (like planks of wood) where the trader selling price hit a programmed floor of 150gp/10. I cannot think of any other examples of extreme buy/sell price variance. Someone changed the mechanics of the trader, and this resulted in the current situation. Without looking at the code, I couldn't tell you if this was based on some internal assumptions of anticipated turnover rate, or whatever...

IMNHO, they really do need to fix this problem if they want to avoid having a "garbage economy" found in so many other MMORPGs.

Kershent · Jul 25, 2005, 02:21 AM // 02:21

Tan, I agree. I think they changed a lot that last patch, mostly making the supply/demand economic model much more complex, but with very poor results. When nobody understands anything about the system, the system fails. How should everyone know not to sell fur, steel, or anything when the price is low? For all they know, it could be that low for a week. That's why people appear lazy.

ANet either needs to fix this, or explain it.

Arturo02 · Jul 25, 2005, 03:05 AM // 03:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kershent

Arturo, I think you're kind of missing what I'm posting. I'm trying to explain why the prices are fluctuating so rapidly.

yes looking back now I see your point. well said and I'm an idiot sometimes hehe.

UberRusty · Jul 25, 2005, 03:18 AM // 03:18

They changed something with the trader prices during the "new trading interface request quote" update. Everything now sells to the trader for a lot less. Bummer.

Arturo02 · Jul 25, 2005, 03:24 AM // 03:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by nitetime

Where does this guy get this crap? This was posted in the Ebay to buy or not thread....

Not my fault you missed it. Maybe next time if it happens I'll post an alert on the boards. Then you'll not believe me again while others reply thanks and now they are 8 plat richer.

Nobody likes haters.

noblepaladin · Jul 25, 2005, 04:51 PM // 16:51

The economy is definitely NOT running on the standard supply and demand. Considering stuff like Ecto is high in demand and the traders are always out of stock, they should be willing to buy for more than 100g. Nobody sells to them because the price is too low even though they are all willing to buy for 10k, simple economics means they should raise the price that they buy from players until people starts selling to them so they can get some stock and make profit. The market seems to work fine for certain materials though, so for some reason I suspect that this may be intentional to prevent people from getting too rich. Personally, I hate a market that is so obviously bugged though, they could have just lowered it to 50% of the traders selling price and I think that would haved one the same thing (along with special cases for price floors and when he is overstocked or understocked).