Curse

Alcazanar · Jun 26, 2006, 03:55 PM // 15:55

When i started playing guild wars the black dye costed about 2k (believe it
or not) and when i checked today it costed about 12k, looking at those
two values i think something went wrong.

The trader system is based on how much is the item selled and bought
with more players (+with time and +with factions) the price will just
increase (maybe black dye cost 15k in nightfall) anyways
my idea is that ALL traders should have fixed prices because i
didnt agree on that the sooner you start playing guild wars the
better will you have it with econemy. The system can seem
fair right now but what if 3 million start playing guild wars or
4 million? then there will be a minor (or major) chaos.

so those who have thoughts or totally agrees with me should
sign here....

BrotherGilburt · Jun 26, 2006, 07:07 PM // 19:07

The black dye prive is so high becuase theres high demand and lots of people buy black dye. People buy it from the trader for the convineince. Now, if the price goes to high, they'll stop buying it from the trader and either wait for it to go down or buy it from real people for a cheaper price. This will result in it going down. Ectos used to be 18k each. They went down. Don't expect black dye to stay that high forever.

/notsigned

Theres nothign wrong with the trader system. Maybe Anet should make dye drops a little more commen but that would make the other values of the cheaper dyed go down to far.

Brother Gilburt

Loviatar · Jun 26, 2006, 07:15 PM // 19:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alcazanar

When i started playing guild wars the black dye costed about 2k (believe it
or not) and when i checked today it costed about 12k, looking at those
two values i think something went wrong.

....

i have bought for less than that

i have also SOLD black to the trader for 26 k EACH at one time

this is very reasonable

Winterclaw · Jun 26, 2006, 09:01 PM // 21:01

When I'm selling, I love high trader prices, when I am buying I hate them.

Instead of mucking with the prices or making them fixed (which I don't think will help the economy that much) maybe they should start increasing the drop rates in the game.

Alcazanar · Jun 26, 2006, 09:57 PM // 21:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Winterclaw

Instead of mucking with the prices or making them fixed (which I don't think will help the economy that much) maybe they should start increasing the drop rates in the game.

yes! an excellent idea
they should increase and desincrease drops
according to amout of players playing? perhaps?
but i like my idea the most (i hate that guild wars
is in a constant change)

ducktape · Jun 26, 2006, 10:38 PM // 22:38

While it does sound nice to have fixed prices at the trader, I can't see that being very productive, because then people will be mad that they think and item is overpriced or underpriced and it will never change.

Maybe base the trader's price on how many copies of a commodity are in the game at that time? If 10,000 existing items is the "normal supply" marker, and there are 2,000 black dyes floating around in people's possession but 6,482 yellow dyes sitting around, and 9,500 purple dyes out there, black should cost about 3x more than yellow when you go to buy it, and yellow should cost maybe 1.5x more than purple and purple should be the base item price (100g) since there are lots of them. It's kind of hard to manipulate prices that way (hoarding won't help jack things up) and if the trader would always give 50% of the item's price when you sell stuff to him, that would encourage more people to use the trader since he would be more reasonable for buying and selling.

If an item starts having too low of an occurence in inventory of the trader or player inventories, have it automatically increase the drop rates until the item occurence is back to normal.

The only thing I can't quite come up with a solution for is when the trader keeps getting bought out. That would allow people who have all the black dye or ectos or iron ingots or whatever to charge tons of money because you can't get it from the trader. Hmm....

/sorta signed, the trader is goofy and we should tweak him.

bilateralrope · Jun 27, 2006, 03:35 AM // 03:35

Quote:

Maybe base the trader's price on how many copies of a commodity are in the game at that time? If 10,000 existing items is the "normal supply" marker, and there are 2,000 black dyes floating around in people's possession but 6,482 yellow dyes sitting around, and 9,500 purple dyes out there, black should cost about 3x more than yellow when you go to buy it, and yellow should cost maybe 1.5x more than purple and purple should be the base item price (100g) since there are lots of them. It's kind of hard to manipulate prices that way (hoarding won't help jack things up) and if the trader would always give 50% of the item's price when you sell stuff to him, that would encourage more people to use the trader since he would be more reasonable for buying and selling.

If an item starts having too low of an occurence in inventory of the trader or player inventories, have it automatically increase the drop rates until the item occurence is back to normal.

That sounds very complex, so could you provide exact details on how this algorithim would work. Include how you can determine how much each dye should be worth in relation to other dye. That way ANET can compare it to the one they currently use, without having to spend a lot of time working out exactly what you mean only to find an algorithim that is worse that what they currently use.

To me it seems much simpler if ANET uses code that only looks at one item at a time, ignoring the other items, then uses that for all supply/demand items and lets market forces handle similar items. Otherwise ANET would need seperate systems for each catagory of supply/demand items (dyes, crafting materiles, sigils). This would mean they couldn't reuse as much code, meaning much more work to get running and debug.

Also a more complex algorithim requires more processing power, meaning more load on the servers CPU, meaning ANET needs to have a more powerful server, which costs more money.

Quote:

The only thing I can't quite come up with a solution for is when the trader keeps getting bought out. That would allow people who have all the black dye or ectos or iron ingots or whatever to charge tons of money because you can't get it from the trader. Hmm....

This will happen every time demand exceeds supply. You only have two ways to prevent this shortage from re-occouring over and over:
1 - Increase the supply
2 - Change the price to bring demand close to supply

The trader works fine as it is. The items you need to play guild wars have low enough prices. The vanity items are more expensive, but most are still obtainable if you are willing to farm enough.

shadowfell · Jun 27, 2006, 05:04 AM // 05:04

Black dye isn't just high because people are buying it from the trader, but because people are also hoarding black dyes, as it is currently, the most stable means of holding cash in excess of 1.6 million across one account. at 10-12 k, I won't even buy black dye from the trader and I'm loaded, so it wouldn't affect me in any way, economically, and I know I have been hoarding a few myself. As for the drop rate, I do think it has increased because I went for 8 months with only one black drop, and then the other day, I got three in a row.. so..

TheLordOfBlah · Jun 27, 2006, 05:16 AM // 05:16

I remember when black dye was 45k

ducktape · Jun 27, 2006, 05:46 AM // 05:46

Quote:

That sounds very complex, so could you provide exact details on how this algorithim would work.

Sure. I'll change it away from dyes since it seems to be a touchy subject for people with 650 black dyes. The base price of crafting items is 100 gold. The server knows what we all have in inventory and storage, therefore knowing how many dyes and runes and crafting materials exist in the game at any given time. Establish some sort of marker as the healthy level of item existence, say 10,000 copies for example.

Every crafting item costs 100 gold. If the ideal level of item supply in the game (not at the trader) is 10,000 copies, when the supply is at ideal level the price at the traders is the base price for the item (100g). Now let's use feathers as an example for a demonstration. Let's say all players posess a total of 12,500 feathers today. That means there is a 25% surplus of feathers, so the trader would want to unload some, and sell them at 25% less (75 gold instead of 100), he obviously wouldn't be so interested in having more feathers, but would buy them at 25% less than the normal price of 1/2 of the selling price [1/2 of 75g is 37g, 25% off 37g would be 28g]. Let's say next monday the players are using up feathers left and right to make armor and everyone posesses a total of 8,000 feathers, that means there is a 20% shortage from the ideal amount of feathers in existence. The trader would sell the feathers at a 20% markup (120 gold instead of 100) and buy at a 20% more than normal (72 gold instead of 60) to encourage players to sell and replenish stock, and yet charge a little more to slow down buying.

Right now the traders seems obsessed with making profit. If they were programmed to facilitate adequate levels of supply instead, we would probably see less high prices, and very stable trading patterns.

I'm kinda tired and I hope I didn't screw that up too bad.

Lets Get to Healing · Jun 27, 2006, 05:51 AM // 05:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheLordOfBlah

I remember when black dye was 45k

Me too, Blah, me too. It was a happier time, about a year ago,silver was steadily raising too.

bilateralrope · Jun 27, 2006, 07:59 AM // 07:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by ducktape

Sure. I'll change it away from dyes since it seems to be a touchy subject for people with 650 black dyes. The base price of crafting items is 100 gold. The server knows what we all have in inventory and storage, therefore knowing how many dyes and runes and crafting materials exist in the game at any given time. Establish some sort of marker as the healthy level of item existence, say 10,000 copies for example.

Every crafting item costs 100 gold. If the ideal level of item supply in the game (not at the trader) is 10,000 copies, when the supply is at ideal level the price at the traders is the base price for the item (100g). Now let's use feathers as an example for a demonstration. Let's say all players posess a total of 12,500 feathers today. That means there is a 25% surplus of feathers, so the trader would want to unload some, and sell them at 25% less (75 gold instead of 100), he obviously wouldn't be so interested in having more feathers, but would buy them at 25% less than the normal price of 1/2 of the selling price [1/2 of 75g is 37g, 25% off 37g would be 28g]. Let's say next monday the players are using up feathers left and right to make armor and everyone posesses a total of 8,000 feathers, that means there is a 20% shortage from the ideal amount of feathers in existence. The trader would sell the feathers at a 20% markup (120 gold instead of 100) and buy at a 20% more than normal (72 gold instead of 60) to encourage players to sell and replenish stock, and yet charge a little more to slow down buying.

Right now the traders seems obsessed with making profit. If they were programmed to facilitate adequate levels of supply instead, we would probably see less high prices, and very stable trading patterns.

I'm kinda tired and I hope I didn't screw that up too bad.

I was hoping for you to give the implementation in pesdo-code so we can see exactly how it would be implemented, but there is enough detail here for me to notice some problems with it.

For your idea to work, it seems you will need to keep track of the exact number of feathers (lets stick with your example here) that people have in their inventories. So instead of the traders code being triggered only when people buy or sell items to him, the code is called every time someone: picks up feathers, uses trader, sells feathers to merchant, salvaging/creating items involving feathers, drops/deletes them or deletes the character they are on so that it can adjust the count of how many are floating around.

So in order to implement your idea you will require changes to the code that is involved in:
- Picking up items
- Dropping items
- Salvaging armor
- Deleting characters
- Selling items to merchant
- Crafting items
- Deleting items with the delete item icon in inventory
When code gets changed, there is always the possibility of bugs showing up. Sometimes the bugs manifest in eaither very limited (there is a bug going around causing some people to see other people as belonging to their guild when they don't) or very strange ways (like the swap of spirit level and damage numbers a few updates ago).

If you are going to suggest regular checks accross the database that stores peoples inventories, remember that database searchs take a lot of processing power, and you will need to check the entiredatabase every single time.

Another thing your idea fails to address is what happens when someone makes a huge stash of feathers then stops playing guild wars. Then, for all intensive purposes, those feathers cease to exist since no-one can get access to them, lowering supply. But your idea seems to still count those as being part of the supply, causing it to over-estimate supply (taken to the extreme, your code seems millions of feathers, but all but 1000 are on dead accounts). If you have a solution to this, you will need to answer these questions:
- How will your solution tell the difference between someone logging off for the night, and someone logging off for good ?
- How will you tell the difference between someone that has been gone for 6 months but will log in tommorow, and the person whos been gone for 6 months but isn't comming back ?
- How will you stop people with multiple accounts exploiting this for their own gain ?

And once you have all that sorted, you will need to answer:
- What kind of change do you expect the average player to see ?
- Is the change worth the increased server load and therefore costs experianced by ANET because of the increased complexity ?
- How many players will be worse off after this change ?
- How much will they complain ?
- How many people will chose not to buy guild wars because of the complaints ?

Ge4ce · Jun 27, 2006, 09:23 AM // 09:23

hmm, virtual markets arn't stable at any game. Even if the developers "balance" these out. It's an endless strugle if you ask me.