The Free Market At Work

After reading these forums for the last few weeks, I've been quite surprised at the level of interest in the Guild Wars economy, especially after last week's game update. One thing especially notable is the difficulty in tracking the cost changes of materials over time.

With that in mind, I've decided to undertake a little experiment. I've put up a page (http://tribalize.com) tracking market values for gold, common, and rare crafting materials. It's nothing fancy at the moment, but I think it could be interesting.

All prices are in Tyrian gold, with the exception of the first item which is in US Dollars.

Some things to note:

1) Please no flames about the dollar price of gold. I'm not advocating using real money to purchase gold, I'm simply keeping a record of the cost of gold, which could be useful when looking for correlations with material prices

2) The page is updated once per day, usually around 10pm.

3) The stats only go back to Aug 14th, when I started tracking prices

4) At the moment, I'm not doing Dyes or Runes, but I may add it in the future if requested

5) Thanks to the modern wonders of MySQL and PHP, it only takes me 10 minutes to update the page (I record values by hand, then enter them into an HTML form). =)

6) The prices are merchant selling prices. I can't get their buy prices for items I don't have

7) Feel free to reply with any questions or comments!

Yay, thank you so much, I'm really excited about this. I'm really into making money from the market. It's really fun seeing how your investments pay off and predicting where the fire is going to strike next. I'll be sure to check daily and make plans taking the statistics into consideration. Let me know if there's any way I can help you out with this <3 <3 <3

My list of runes, dyes, and materials goes back about 3 months it also has notes as to what may have caused massive price changes and when item prices were reset and it was updated every 1-2 hours with both the buy and sell prices. (I wasn't the only one making it. it was me and 29 other people). Tracking the prices was/is mildly helpful to us manily because we could predict when the lowest price of the day would be and when the highest would be so that we could log on for like 10 or 20 miniutes and be able to get a good price.

I might post it on here or send it to you if people are interested but I would need permission from the other people involved in creating it.

Wow. Having dye and rune prices added to that would be awesome. Great Job.

IDK, but if you can somehow incorperate some diagrams, I think that may be helpful. But of course, I have no idea how long that may take.

heh, any chance of having graphs like the real stock market

Without graphs charting the longterm, you really cannot get that much out of it...

Wow, that really exemplifies the definition of day trading =)

Yeah, diagrams would be very nice to have, that's one thing I plan on looking in to. It would probably show the daily cost of the item for a defined time period (week, month, etc).

Graphs would definitely be useful. I've got the daily values saved in the database, so that's something I hope to add.

Excellent

No flame. Just one Giant hug for awesomeness.

Haha, thanks =)

Big hug for this - it rocks! very hand for a material farmer like me to know - i can now determine which spots to farm for best profit!

shouldnt this be in community works? anyways, good job.

/Bookmark

Great idea .. I'll be looking at this

Great work, I have bookmarked it too. Please add in runes and dyes if you have the time.

Thanks

This is a good idea. Hope you have decent bandwidth, because your site will be hit a lot.

That's great!

HAve to agree, it would be interesting to see dye and rune prices too, and graphs for long-term fluctuations in the market, but as it stands, that is an incredibly useful reference tool! Well done!

Emperortippy - I'd like to see your tracker too. See if you can get permission from the other collaborators.

Thanks for your efforts here.

In the past it was possible to buy from the trader when prices were low then sell back to the trader when prices were high thus making some profit without needing to sell to players. Knowing when to trade was key and not being afraid of holding onto stock for a few weeks.


I have kept a log (about 2 months) of both buy and sell prices during my times online to get a feel of when to trade.

Since 'The Reset' the prices seem *much* more stable.

I wonder - has the economy now been corrected (nerfed? - discuss!) such that a trader will never buy stuff back from you for more than his minimum selling price (the LOW) on the tables provided. Maybe the Devs do not want economics and playing the markets to be part of the overall game experience?

This may have been mentioned on the other massive thread about prices (which I have read large proportions) and if I'm repeating old ground I apologise in advance

GREAT!

...now...

...slave, make me an in-game, constantly updating TICKER so I can keep a minute-to-minute track of how much rubies and sapphires go for >.>

NPC trader prices were stupid for the last month due to broken algorithms which have been fixed. Prices are more stable now because the traders are global, their desired stock levels may also have been increased.

I see little opertunity for making gold playing the NPC trader market now (not complaining).

What I don't like is the rare material trader is now the only tader for rare materials (because the material trader is unlikely to ever find a realistic market price for rare materials).

The NPC traders are supposed to work on about 25% mark up, it seems the minimum sell price and one off pricing from the rare material trader makes his mark up more like 100% for most rare materials.

I want to sell stuff I salvage to the NPC traders, I want to craft with stuff I salvage and sell to the NPC traders. I find myself wasting time and inventory space trying to sell to players because the rare material trader mark up is too high. If I were buying I would also be looking to bypass the rare material trader.

People should be happy to use the NPC traders not reluctant.