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Sunday 16 September 2012

[GW2] Illogical Prices on the Trading Post

I wonder if whether the problem with the Trading Post is that the automatic reaction when you go to sell an item is to hit "match lowest price" - regardless of what that price is. The obvious incentive is to sell quickly, but without compromising on price by listing lower than everyone else.

But if everyone does this the price of items will never change, and some items are vastly overpriced.
Looking at gw2tp, I can see that Copper Ore, even though it is the most "available" item (currently just under 1.2m units on the market, almost twice a many as the second place item - Iron) is also still priced at 20 coins (at the time of writing), this is over 3x the price of Iron.



I imagine the price difference is partly because Copper is one of the items in the most demand - but even with this in mind, with the sheer quantity available on the market - you think the price would be considerably lower.

Even if someone were to start undercutting the price of copper in an attempt to drive the price down, they'd have to have enough other players doing the same thing so that the new price "caught on" with the players hitting "match lowest price" before all the units were snapped up by people looking to buy the cheapest materials.

In practice, the situation is probably unchangeable; Copper will always be in high demand due to the number of people dabbling in the lower ranks of crafting where Copper is so prevalent in recipes. Whereas, the higher leveled materials will be still abundant on the market, but there will be far fewer people who can craft recipes using theses higher leveled materials.
So, you'll get the odd situation where the high level materials are going for dirt cheap, but the most basic materials are extortionate. This will make it a pain for people wanting to get into crafting from the start because you'll either have to pay through the nose for the mats or go out and gather them all for yourself. Compound this with the fact that people are selling their crafted items for LESS than the merchant price (when taking into account the listing cost) and investing my hard earned silver into crafting is looking less and less attractive.

Hopefully, in a couple of months we'll find that the market calms down and starts following some kind of logic (if you can't already tell, I've got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the whole "selling for effectively less than than the merchant price" thing).

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