There seems to be a bug in trader merchants

First off all, supposedly if you sell, prices are driven down, however, thats not the case, I sold about 116 deldrimor steel to merchant and it drove the price up by 20g(if you buy from them) -_-

2nd, you buy 1 or 2 things from trader and immediately it starts thinking is hot cakes and drives the price up immediately, and there seems to be no way of lowering it.

Anet stated that ingame AI balances the $ trader buys and sell based on people selling and buying, but merchant is selling black dye for fricking 30plats and buying for about 500g-1k -_- WTF?! IS this a side effect of an update that was unforseen?

I think ANET is trying to encourage player to player trading, rather than player to merchant trading. By making the buy back value so low, players will be discouraged to sell to the trader. The merchant basically sets the base price, max and min being the buy and sell back price, respectively.

Using your numbers, you could sell back your black dye for 1k, but since the merchant buy price is so high, it would be nonsensical to do that. You could sell your black dye, to a player, much faster at 10 times the price and people will be messaging you left and right (that's 10k compared to 30k). In the end you get more money and the buyer didn't have to spend as much money. And it was a player to player trade, just like ANET wanted. So to them, it was a win-win-win, situation.

I don't think that this was a "side effect", though maybe ANET didn't realize that the it would be to the extreme, as we are seeing right now.

By forcing players to do interplayer trades... well, essentially the very rich can just corner off the entire dye/materials/rune market, like what we are seeing now!

The irony perhaps, would come when instead of having more and more bots out farming, those ebay-botters would instead script their bots to run around town buying up all materials, and periodically sending spam.

I can understand ANet wanting to encourage player - player trading, but I think the current system goes way too far. Players set their sale prices according to the merchants. So if black dye is selling from merchants at 30k, players can sell at 25k. But that is still a ton of money. It seems unreasonable for prices to go that high. And in the end, even if ANet wants to discourage player - merchant trading, merchants are still setting the price "ceiling". And I think it's way out of hand.

Actually, thats PURE RUBBISH, if they encourage p2p interaction so much, then why do they send notices to people who trade(for items)large amounts of gold are transfered for possible real money to gold purchase(and possible ban, atleast some people have gotten such). At certain trade items, large amounts of golds are gonna be standard, whats for them to tell the difference? I know some people has had the shaft due to this. Their anti measures are too extreme, especially when problems really are due to other people's decisions on how they wanna play the game w/o retorting to cheating other players or ruining the game for everybody else. They created the problem and now they're nuking it along w/ everything else surrouding it. :\

Also, you dont get the point of the argument, I'm saying that the balance factor affecting prices dont seem to come to play. Point is, when demand is high, so are prices(buying and selling) and when prices are low demand, prices come down too whether you're buying or selling to trader. It seems that only the selling to trader is affected by the fluctuation of prices. Price tags will remain high no matter(and it only rises nowadays) what it seems and only when you try to sell(most times its the fastest way to get rid of excess) they buy for really really low. I mean they buy for the absolute minimum and charge a premium, that ain't right, there should be a balance.

I'm all for p2p but lets be honest, EVERYONE WANTS TO MAKE AS MUCH GOLD AS POSSIBLE, so you'll see prices comparable to trader and not higher than trader buys for. So trader sells for 30k per black dye and buys back for 1k, instead of people selling for 5-10k they sell for 20-25k, you'll have to scour for great deals which can add up in time. Point is, their "Remedies" seem to be the root of all problems. I see alot of newbies so turned off the fact that they can't afford anything good now, and thats bad due to GW is still young and growing and already a very harsh system. Thats a bad formula to attract new players.

Also, b4 they revamped the trader system, everybody was happy, you could get access to materials for higher prices than players but still reasonable and save time instead of having to advertise all day. Then you could sell and depending on demand, you get usually decent returns, slightly less than selling to players but save time. Now you're stuck w/ the extremes, that I simply dont get, why they had to ruin a good thing. I love the new interface, just not the problems that came along w/ it.

if player-player trade was the primary goal of ArenaNet they wouldn't have added a rune trader(making runes completely worthless) or a rare material trader....Prices remain high because ArenaNet botched their economical scoping of the project and the amount of gold inside the community is out of control. The traders primary purpose is to take materials/weapons/gold out of the economy...

then they need to suck it up and give us an auction house setup.

I don't applaud the current system by any means, and I hope the next couple of updates includes something that will help balance the economy out, so that the buy back prices are a little more fair. Because some people do not want to deal with the hassle of trading with other players, and there is always a chance of being scammed.

I think once the auction house gets implement, the economy might start improving. Players that were hesitant to sell to a player, and would not sell to a merchant due to poor buy back prices, might find it easier to put their wares on the auction block. Demand will still be high, but maybe those who've been hoarding black dyes might loosen up a little to sell them, since with a new system, prices should start going down.

edit: I don't think ANET can keep track of all player to player trades. The merchant is there to help set the price, in ANET's view. Before the price checks, the economy fluctuated quite nicely, the black dyes were never that expensive. I don't remember the reasoning behind the price quotes, besides trying to show people what they could be buying/selling at.

The auction house is being implemented, as explained in the State of the Game letter. We know that ANET is aware of the problem, and even at some point told us that the current system right now was a work in progress. Getting an in game economy to work correctly, is probably pretty difficult, especially with what they want to do with it. So yes, the economy system isn't so good right now, the supply and demand seems iffy, but it's a work in progress.

Though it's besides the point, dyes are purely optional, they are not a necessity, and new players need not worry about dying their disposable armor. Shards and ecto are also not a necessary part of the game. Sure, it sucks at the moment, but you can attain armor at regular prices, and collector items without too much of a problem.

As far as I can tell there is no control on gold. Since maps are created as instances, there's no limit (aside from time, of course) to the amount of "wealth" people can aquire. It seems to me that this makes it difficult if not impossible for ANet to control the economy, because there is no control on the money supply. And yet the traders don't seem to be working so well cause the prices aren't even close to affordable, and they keep rising.

So unless you play/farm constantly, it's near impossible to keep up with inflation. And what's the fun of that?

The developer of a video game should be in complete control of every aspect of that game at all times...the fact that they have zero control over the gold being introduced into the economy is the problem I was refering to.

You have low level characters just entering Post Sear with little gold. and they usualy need to buy their starting armor and materials.

Then you have the veterines who can buy everything they need from scratch like you would tip a waiter. (For certain equipment).


Maybe some sort of level/ gold-on-hand ratio between selling and buying price with merchants.

Just a thought.

I'm using dyes as the example, BTW try to buy 10 plant fibers and it'll cost you nearly 1k ^^

Short story: I log in, and decide to sell the two minor vigor rune in my inventory. So I ask the price on the vendor for the first... 25g.

Err okay, it's not worth much.

But then I decide to check the other...

It was worth 29 gold!

I doublecheck, close and reopen the window, nothing to do. I have a minor vigor that is worth 4 gold more than another, EXACTLY SAME minor vigor!

Frankly, I'm stunned.

The sell price went up becuase people bought some of them...? O.o

Some runes get a value, other's don't.

When you Identify a rune (the rune not an armor containing it) you discover its inherent gold value. The rune description will show its gold value. NPC traders will always offer at least this value. For some reason runes of the same type have slightly random gold values.

The one for 25g, did you get coffee stains on it or something? That'll always drop the value. Clean it first with dye remover.

OK, I'm not serious.

actually it was supply and demand

enough people in different districts/cities bought enough of them to move the trader a smigin from the minimum of 25 gold to a lofty 29 gold

and people are still buying and the price is still rising

notice silver dye has now passed 10 k for the moment?

people think it will go higher and are grabbing it.