Traidingpost Flipping should brought in line

#131 - June 30, 2014, 2:41 p.m.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Jansen.4753:

Flipping does not increase any price, in fact, without flippers sell orders could be higher, if you don’t understand this, then you don’t understand how it works, plus with the gold sink it creates its actually helping reduce inflation, which is good for everyone.

Sorry for my spelling

yeah… no. How, in gods name, should people who buying cheap and selling expensive help keeping the prices down? It makes no sense.

When a player adds velocity or liquidity to a market, the result is often lower prices and often prices closer to equilibrium.
Given recent feedback let me try also this in other terms (I’ve tried this before and failed so bare with me).

Supply and Demand curves can also be called Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Sell curves. Essentially they are the shape of what people are willing to pay or how much people are willing to sell for. If everyone is will to pay $5 then the “demand” curve would be a flat horizontal line at $5.
In real markets the curves end up being curves because people have different preferences or costs. I might be willing to pay $100 for a new video game and you may be willing to pay $50 and yet another person $30. When you extrapolate this out you get a smooth curve of what people are willing to pay (it works the same way for the willingness to sell).

Balance (or equilibrium) occurs when those two lines meet, and people are willing to pay the same amount people are willing to sell. This price is decided by the market as a whole. Given the “freeness” of our market in GW2 people can sell for more or less than this price. In a textbook this would never happen because people always want to be in that balanced state. In real life though, especially in video games, people have different preferences outside of that market equation. Time is a major factor of this equation in real life. Imagine you could instantly sell items to a vendor for 1 gold or you could place them on the TP for 1gold 5 silver; some amount of player would be willing to sell straight the the vendor and save the time because their preference for time or convenience makes that a good trade off for them and that’s awesome, people should be allowed to make that trade off if they want. Now let’s say people instead just place everything on the TP for super cheap instead of vendoring because it’s easier. The prices these items are placed at are often placed below that equilibrium price which leaves room for someone to purchase those items and sell them at equilibrium price earning some profit per item. The person who purchases and resells values that trades and so does the individual selling easily, in this case both parties match what they want. Now the market has items placed at the equilibrium price for the standard buyers/sellers that sell at that equilibrium. Those sellers cannot change that equilibrium price and placing items above that price will result in the items not selling. They cannot raise the price, the market has decided the price and other people have decided their willingness to sell.

The first question to ask here is, “Isn’t the profit of the reseller directly equivalent to how much people are willing to trade off money for time or other preferences?”
The answer is yes, and more than that, the potential profit is split between all the different individuals attempting to buy and resell. Since the profit is finite and will become distributed between players, why wouldn’t people begin doing that until everyone only made little to no money? If everyone was the same person they would, but there must be some barrier to entry to that activity, there must be something that stops people from jumping in and distributing some of that profit to themselves. The most common and the most correct (but not complete) is that it takes time and skill, if it did not there would be almost no profit in the activity because the potential would be split between too many different individuals.

(Hello again econ and business people, I’m aware that this is very simple, but I’m attempting to introduce people to the ideas and attempting to explain complex concepts right away turns out poorly)

#181 - July 1, 2014, 1:25 p.m.

LordByron.8369:

During war people is willingly to pay absurd prices for food and medicines.

People gathering stuff to resell are consideered criminals.

This is a game and even if stuff is not needed as food would be, its basically the same thing.

Since the purpose of the game is FUN, people is forced to trade mostof their rewards in order to be able to have fun.

This is where your economy is totally wrong.

Wow…

#415 - July 2, 2014, 11:37 p.m.

Let’s calm down a bit, this is getting heated and it doesn’t need to be.

I want to go through a hypothetical to explain a point about the TP.
Before I start I want to restate (it was quoted earlier) that the TP is part of the Tyrian world, we don’t make monster killing games here, we make online worlds (in which you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome).

Ok, hypothetical:
We increase rewards to dungeon running to let’s say triple what they currently are. This would make it VERY difficult for almost all players to earn better rewards anywhere but dungeon running.
Now, everyone’s earning money and items all over the place, but we haven’t changed their original preferences for trading. This means a week later, they make the same trade preferences they previous made, just with more money, the more money makes flipping equivalently more profitable and you’re back in the same place. Unless players decide that they want to play the game differently, and there’s no reason they should, or we force them to play differently, and we shouldn’t definitely not, or we fundamentally change the way the game works, then you will have a problem. The profit from “flipping” items is a natural byproduct of people’s preferences inside a game. In my many, many years studying virtual economies I’ve never read or heard of an option that solves your personal dilemma without making the economy, the game and the players much worse off. The point of this hypothetical is the explain that even if I did think this was a problem (which I don’t) fixing it is much more complex than you may realize and you should incorporate that into your suggestions.

That being said, I’m often reading and interested in hearing your suggestions and you should feel free to present them. There are a couple of popular suggestions that do not meet my requirements of not making the game a much worse experience:

1. Server specific economies. I can’t even begin to describe the myriad of problems that server specific economies have, but I will tell you, most of them are so bad, you don’t even realize that they aren’t in their natural state.

2. Binding after purchasing items – this has been thoroughly explained in many forums the several ways that this would prove disastrous.

My biggest argument I would make against myself is that the fix for this is simply education or more information (I don’t mean academia, I mean education inside the game). I would argue that people naturally want to make the most money possible and the amount of profit available is enhanced, not by laziness, but by a lack of information or education.

To which I would respond that players have many resources for information and while some portion of this may be caused by that issue, it seems clear that it’s much more a matter of preference than education.

I think both are good arguments, and the HOW of disseminating information is the interesting part.

#502 - July 3, 2014, 6:42 p.m.

While we allowed this debate to continue while it stayed clean, it has since veered back into disrespectful and insulting language. We are closing this thread as it cannot stay on-topic and respectful.