Rune trade, slightly unrealistic

I just got an armour piece with a Sup Absorption rune attached. I go to check the prices at the rune trader and find that he doesn't have any listed.

So if its not listed it means his run out right, as in has no stock.
So I salvage the rune and decide to help the trader out and supply the rune as a sale.
But on pricing the rune its suggests 160 gold, so I'm like ok we'll see what the QUOTED price is.
I request a quote and get 25g...

A rune that he has sold out of, has the suggested price, before asking for a quote, at 160. But then is only willing to pay me 25g for it!


What the F@#$! I'm about ready to report the trader for unfair trading, and while I'm at it report his butt to Anet, for scamming! lol :P

Its because the rune is very common and people sell it to the Rune trader all the time. So of course the price he gives when selling is very low.

Trader of course always sells higher to make a "profit".

Its supply and demand. Always been that way.

I know that, supply and demand and its always been that way.

But if its following the true idea of supply and demand. Shouldn't it buy the rune from players at a higher rate when its out of stock?

Personally, I think any system where an NPC buys an item for any less than 50% of what they will sell it for is just unnecessarily jackassed.

Are you SURE it's out of stock?

I've just checked and it's there. 100g each.

You're getting an offer of 25g from the trader because 1) the trader already has a large quantity of said rune in stock, and 2) you did not identify the rune after salvaging. If you had, the bottom line of the rune's description in your inventory would read "Value: X gold." That, then, would be the lowest price the rune trader offers, instead of the default lowest price of 25 gold.

You can witness the same price jump when selling item components that were identified prior to being salvaged. These will have no value on them and the merchant will offer you the base price of 25g for each. If you actually take the time to ID them again, the "value" line will show a higher number. A similar thing happens with white, unidentified items: their "value" after IDing is always higher that the merchant's original offer, even if it only rises by 1g.

how does it suggest a price if it has none? perhaps some other people sold them just before you did and the buying price went back to 100.

I also checked shortly after this thread was posted. Minors and majors but no superiors in stock at the time.

Superior Absorption runes gave me a traumatic experience

Before Factions came out, I thought everyone would need those a lot because they were going to buy new armor. Then Anet decided to to vastly increase the drop rate of those runes. I paid 90k each, and I bought like 6 of those. In total, I think I had about 350k loss

( Just a random story :P )

I love when people ignore reading the original post!
I said the rune trader was out of stock, and too prove it because I knew at some point I would come across someone more interested in debating semantics then talking about the problem, I took scrn caps. And its clearly not listed in the sales list!

Still it doesn't make sense, the trader is out of the item... so he offers me only 25g for it... when its going to most likely sell for higher straight away since it would be the only stock.

I'm gonna ask an obvious question don't shout back but you know some of the mistakes we can make. Are you sure it wasn't 25k?

Haha, sup abs is the rune in question here. Not sup vigor.

O_o

As mentioned before... the mistakes we make

lol ok I won't snap... wait I can't your asking something I haven't answered or mentioned yet.

No it wasn't 25K... it should have been :P ok maybe not that much

I got two of these today. Usually I check the trader before taking the runes out of the salvage armors, if the price is terrible, I normally just merchant the armor with the rune since every gold armor+rune that I remember seeing has been >200g, so to me it's not worth the 47% chance (seeker 1) of destroying the scrap for the ID price of the rune (around 175g is the best I've gotten as the value price for an ID'ed superior rune)

Since he didn't have any sup. absorptions I decided to take one of them out to see what sort of price they offer for an out-of-stock item, and also got offered 25g, then was offered the value price after IDing it.

I don't see how they'd reasonably restock "cheap" runes that sold out this way, except with a large rank of treasure hunter and a large rank of seeker of wisdom, it doesn't seem worth the risk vs. the immediate merchant value to salvage the rune out, some of those armor fragments I've had have had 450g+ merchant value...

They really need to do something about the rune traders pricing, I bought the last attunement rune the other day, and only paid 250g, that is too low of a price when there are very few in stock.

i thought the price dropped b/c they only work for physical damage and people are using elemental weapons.

I had exactly the same experience with exactly the same rune last night.

Rune was out of stock. Last traded price was 160g. Trader offered me 25g.
If the rune is out of stock, then obviously demand is greater than supply, so in theory the rune trader should be increasing his buy price not decreasing it.

As you can probably guess, the rune is still in my inventory!

Yes, that brought the demand down. However, the traders are supposed to adjust their price depending on supply also. Now the demand has gone past the supply, yet the trader offers the lowest possible price for someone selling the rune to it.

Frankly I don't see why anyone would even bother salvaging the rune to sell it to the npc. The only way for supply and demand to work here is that players don't sell to the trader anymore, keeping it out of stock, and then just start trading with each other with higher price. Clearly the trader isn't working as intended.

Personally I think runes should be slightly rarer.
Also the trader really does need fixing, if something is out of stock it should theoretically catch a larger price.