Gamewide Trading Post is a mistake

#1 - Oct. 25, 2012, 9:58 a.m.

With everything else having to do with GW2 being server specific, the approach of a gamewide Trading Post is just contradictory. I think the economics of a server should be just as specific to the server as any other aspect of the game.

There should be servers with a glut of a specific item and a lack of another. It helps make each server more unique and I also believe this separation of Trading Post will actually benefit the players.

Why should my decisions on what to farm,craft,buy or sell be impacted by players who will never contribute directly to the overall health of the server I play on?

I suggest changing to server specific Trading Posts, or at the very least a clustered approach. Tie only 3 or 4 servers together on a TP if individual TP’s don’t fit ANETs business model.

Hippocampus.8470

#1 - Oct. 25, 2012, 11:44 a.m.

But their actions will contribute to the health of your server, in the sense that their items and gold can move in and out of your server.

Server-specific markets would help some servers and hurt others. Prices would be much more volatile and unpredictable, which hurts casual players but is great for market players (who a lot of casual players love to complain about here on the forum). Super-rare items like precursors would almost never show up on small servers, so if/when they do, people could charge pretty much whatever they want, since there’d be no one to undercut them.

A worldwide trading system provides stability and predictability and keeps both supply and demand relatively high, and doesn’t penalize smaller servers for not having enough hardcore gamers to get the really high-end items.

John Smith

#5 - Oct. 25, 2012, 1:04 p.m.

You guys got this thread under control. Well done

John Smith

#25 - Oct. 26, 2012, 9:49 p.m.

VendettaDFA.9368:
Actually if Ford needed bicycles in order to make mustangs they would either A- produce biycycles in a way to make a profit to keep producing bicycles until they could make mustangs … or B -Let some other fool go broke making bicycles at a loss while they just purchase the bicycles needed to make the mustangs. Option B is how the current TP functions.

Which is why until a true economy comes about , I will skip crafting, because its broken, and I will skip the business aspect of finished products on the TP, because its also broken, and I will sell only basic farmed mats and play the main part of the game.

So basically a large portion of the replayability of this game drops off and at some point I can always turn to another game …. Torchlight 2, Path of Exile, Aion, Borderlands 2 etc… and this game will be nothing more than a backup … like Diablo 3 is now. That game’s developers didn’t react to the inherently basic flaws that players brought up until the 1.05 patch only recently released. Too bad they lost 70 + percent of their player base first. Will that happen to GW2 ?… before you go fanboi on me … No it will not … not to that extent, the main game is still very very good.

I am disheartened by the total malfunction of the TP and the collateral damage to the crafting skills it has caused. I pick a crafting skill ONLY to have access to the bank more freely. If the Devs want to keep the TP global… then the only way to fix the pricing structure is to increase the basic mat drops by 50-75% and saturate the market with the mats to the point the selling price of those mats plummets and effectively sets the finished products value higher. I think that move however would have a negative impact in that the scaled cost of porting and repairs would be even harder to compensate for.

I really like how the assumption that controlling, CONTROLLING, the market for personal gain is so easily jumped to.If I were to make just 5c on every 1s invested in a completed product after tax, crafting would be worth it and I would have no complaint on the economy. Thats not anywhere close to market control. Find any solution, ANY SOLUTION, that achieves this, and I’m with you on it. Either way …. I guess you play your way … I play or not play my way.

What you’re arguing has nothing to do with the TP. It’s a simple matter of scarcity and usability. Arguing that the trading post being too large is a mistake because you can’t create imbalanced markets isn’t a good argument, and it would come at the cost of other players and a more stable economy.