Guild Trader Prices

Hutch679

With the new expansion is there a trend of increasing end game prices for crafting materials? Has anyone noticed a difference?

tonemd

Normally surges when expansions are released as people come back and want to craft new sets.

However, armor crafting mats may dip due to reliable top tier node farming.The land of Hews Bane is rich with mats.

Hutch679

tonemd wrote: »

Normally surges when expansions are released as people come back and want to craft new sets.

However, armor crafting mats may dip due to reliable top tier node farming.The land of Hews Bane is rich with mats.

This is what I was thinking as well. Increased supply. Drop in price. Thank you for confirming.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Don't ever let anybody tell you that guild store prices respond to the laws of supply and demand. More like they follow the principle of Follow-The-Leader. Somebody put an item up for sale and sells a few (no count is kept of the people who refused the deal), and then the next vendor who wants to sell the same thing does a price check and finds out what the average price was for the items that previously sold, and he sets his own price to match. The buyer's influence is never sounded. You don't know whether 20% more people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether twice as many people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether 10 times more people would buy if the price were cut 20%.

If the law of supply-and-demand were setting the prices of items, then they'd be no difference in the average prices between the NA and EU megaservers, or between the PC and console versions of the game. It's the same game, with the same supply opportunities, with the same sorts of ways to process/sell the mats and the items made from them. But these prices vary, and they vary because the sellers on the different platforms are all playing price follow-the-leader.

Occasionally, one sort of item will have its price jacked up to a premium because of an unspoken understanding between everyone who sells that item. The situation lasts until someone comes along to bust the cartel by producing the item in quantity and underselling the cartel by, oh, 15% or so, and when the cartel drops its price by that much, the cartel-buster will drop her price by another 15%... and so on, until the price of the item really does match the fair market price.

Callous2208

The price of v16 mats on pc has plummeted. Gold tempers are what will cost you. Currently 6.4-7k a pop, depending on where you look.

KaleidoscopeEyz

@goatlyonesub17_ESO

That's not exactly accurate. There are differences in prices, especially between PC & console because it has a different supply and different demand. I'm sure there are not the same # of PC, Xbox and PS4 players equally. There's your demand shift. The different # of players create different farming amounts so now we have a difference is supply too.

Also console doesn't have the add ons so we can't see what other stuff sold for. We can go to other guild stores and see what stuff is listed for but add ons for sales is a luxury we don't have. I think console is more supply & demand.

If my pricing isn't selling, I'm sure not going to keep listing it at the price. Demand will then influence my reduction.

Also, who are you to say what "fair market value" is? FMV is whatever people are willing to pay.

The bottom line is I'm trying to sell my stuff as quick as possible for as much money as possible. That's it.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

KaleidoscopeEyz wrote: »

Also, who are you to say what "fair market value" is? FMV is whatever people are willing to pay.

Which people? How many people? I addressed that point.

Quote: "You don't know whether 20% more people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether twice as many people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether 10 times more people would buy if the price were cut 20%."

Myxril

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

Don't ever let anybody tell you that guild store prices respond to the laws of supply and demand. More like they follow the principle of Follow-The-Leader. Somebody put an item up for sale and sells a few (no count is kept of the people who refused the deal), and then the next vendor who wants to sell the same thing does a price check and finds out what the average price was for the items that previously sold, and he sets his own price to match. The buyer's influence is never sounded. You don't know whether 20% more people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether twice as many people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether 10 times more people would buy if the price were cut 20%.

If the law of supply-and-demand were setting the prices of items, then they'd be no difference in the average prices between the NA and EU megaservers, or between the PC and console versions of the game. It's the same game, with the same supply opportunities, with the same sorts of ways to process/sell the mats and the items made from them. But these prices vary, and they vary because the sellers on the different platforms are all playing price follow-the-leader.

Occasionally, one sort of item will have its price jacked up to a premium because of an unspoken understanding between everyone who sells that item. The situation lasts until someone comes along to bust the cartel by producing the item in quantity and underselling the cartel by, oh, 15% or so, and when the cartel drops its price by that much, the cartel-buster will drop her price by another 15%... and so on, until the price of the item really does match the fair market price.

I wish this would happen for Perfect Roes. PC NA's market sets PRs at ~9k/ea. Yet any time I try selling Psijic Ambrosia for 2.7k (when it's definitely worth 3k), people yell at me and say that it's too pricey and 2.5k is correct.

So, basically, people want the PR farmer to make 9k while I spend 9k to make 4 potions @ 2.5k/ea to gain 10k-9k=1k profit. So....I get 1k profit for facilitating your 4x.5hr of +50% xp, via the rather pricey/rare recipe, and the person who's pulling their *** at a fishing hole gets a whopping 9k 'for their trouble'.

Fishing is 10-20sec per casting. That makes it 3-6 casts/minute. 180-360/hour. Factoring in rare fish, catchable bait and wet gunny sacks, that's still a large margin of fish catching. Even when you factor in the 'running from hole to hole' aspect.
PR has roughly 1% drop rate, so even if you're bogged down to 100-280 fish per hour from previously mentioned factors, that's still 9-27k per hour you can make from fishing.

Try selling Psijic Ambrosia @ 2.7k to make (10.8k-9k=) 1.8k profit and you're going to have a bad time. Sell at 2.5k/ea and you might be able to make a few sales for a whopping 1k/sale profit. It can take long enough to push just 9 PA's at times that actually fishing the PR and selling it would be more lucrative and time-efficient.
And even then, there's /still/ people that demand potions at 2k/ea. AND people who think PRs should be listed in guild stores for /over/ 9k.
*Don't even get me started on people wanting COD without paying the scumbag postage fee, on top of bilking your non-existent profit margin.

The long of it is: I think you're right about the "unspoken understanding between everyone who sells that item" in regards to Perfect Roes. I personally wouldn't care if they still sold at 9k if I could push Psijics for more than 2.5k/ea. 3k/ea would be ideal; that makes me (12k-9k=) 3k profit, the fisher 9k, and the buyer gets 4x30minutes of +50% xp (4x45minutes if their Provisioning passive for Drink duration is rank 3[+5min/rank]).

This post is meant to provide insight into how skewed the in-game market can be, and why listed prices can be 'wrong'. Also, to add further, just because someone flashes their Master Merchant price at you doesn't mean anything. Everyone's MM goes off of their circle of guilds. One person's guild circle can have an item selling all day at 100g, and another person's guild circle can have the same thing selling at 500g.
If you flash your MM's lower price at someone's advert and demand to pay less than your already-less-than MM price, don't expect anything except verbal berating because, quite frankly, it's petty and insulting.

PS: There are people who sell PRs in Zone for 8-8.5k, which is admittedly pretty cool. I wouldn't really be bothered with the Psijic market if that was the /standard/ rate (in comparison to 9k PRs with 3k PAs), as the profit margin for either is roughly the same. However, actually finding a PR merchant for that 8-8.5k price range on the regular is wishful thinking. Good for spurts, but not to sustain an actual Psijic supply.

Hutch679

As thoughtful as your long post is... All market prices are controlled by supply and demand. If there is no demand for an item then it's not going to sell for a given price. If there is a smaller supply of an item let's say hakeijo runes. Then they will sell for a higher price. Which is why you see the prices for hakeijo what they are versus the prices of say Makko runes at what they are. The fact that you say there is no supply and demand makes me wonder if you understand market economics.

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

Myxril

Hutch679 wrote: »

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

I'm going out on a limb here and presuming that you play on console. Or maybe on PC without paying attention to the markets and people thumping MM as if it were the end-all decision making aparatus for market price.

Hutch679

"If the law of supply-and-demand were setting the prices of items, then they'd be no difference in the average prices between the NA and EU megaservers, or between the PC and console versions of the game"

What you fail to realize is that in correlation to supply what is the population between Europe and NA? Console to PC? On PC prices are lower and more competitive bases on add ons that allow users to track things like average price.

I bought 2 Kuta runes on Xbox One Na for 3k gold. Is this the norm? No. They typically sell for around 12k. Do the typically sell at the 3k price? No. Likewise can be said in real transactions in any market. Said house is appraised at $50,000. Said house has sold for $35,000 at foreclosure sale because the bank was only owed $35,000. Yes they know it's worth more however, they were only concerned of their indebtedness.

Hutch679

Myxril wrote: »

Hutch679 wrote: »

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

I'm going out on a limb here and presuming that you play on console. Or maybe on PC without paying attention to the markets and people thumping MM as if it were the end-all decision making aparatus for market price.

I do play on Xbox one. Prices are pretty consistent and only fluctuate during content release. With more resources flooding the market from TG I would expect for prices to slightly lower. However the price of tempering materials will probably go up as people will be upgrading new sets THAT Drop and are not crafted, to legendary. Meaning they won't need crafting mats like leathers however they will need the Temps which is why their price will go up.

Increase in demand for upgrading epic to legendary means increase in price of tempering materials

Increase in supply of leather, ingots, silk, means decrease in price.

Supply. Demand. I work in accounting.... Lol unless I'm completely missing something and everything I learned in college from economics is wrong.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Hutch679 wrote: »

As thoughtful as your long post is... All market prices are controlled by supply and demand. If there is no demand for an item then it's not going to sell for a given price. If there is a smaller supply of an item let's say hakeijo runes. Then they will sell for a higher price. Which is why you see the prices for hakeijo what they are versus the prices of say Makko runes at what they are. The fact that you say there is no supply and demand makes me wonder if you understand market economics.

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

I've learned to suspect, above all, any statement that is said to be undebatable, especially when there are people who are debating it.

Several months ago, when writs were a New Thing, the price of sanded nightwood skyrocketed on the NA megaserver. Only. The prices didn't rise by anywhere near the same amount on other game platforms.

Sure, there were people willing to pay the inflated prices that sellers were charging for sanded nightwood on the NA megaserver. But there were more people who started harvesting it for themselves, rather than pay. Again, I repeat: NOBODY COUNTS THE PEOPLE WHO REFUSED TO BUY. Put it to a vote, and you'd learn that most people decided that the price of sanded nightwood was way above the fair market price.

Along came a player who made it her mission to bust the sanded nightwood cartel. She spent most of her in-game time harvesting nightwood west of Belkarth. You know the route: it goes westward from the city and turns north at the wayshrine by the sandwarrior place. She gathered thousands of nightwoods and sanded it all, and then uploaded them in stacks of 200 to her five guild stores at 85% of the cartel's price.

A few times, the cartel bought her out. But she always had more. More. MORE! The cartel was spending more than it was taking in on sanded nightwood. So their price dropped.

The player dropped her own price to 85% of the cartel's new price, and the process started all over again. Gradually, she walked the price of sanded nightwood DOWN TO the fair market price, the price at which it was, in the opinion of the average player, just as easy to buy it as to produce it himself.

It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay.

Myxril

Hutch679 wrote: »

Myxril wrote: »

Hutch679 wrote: »

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

I'm going out on a limb here and presuming that you play on console. Or maybe on PC without paying attention to the markets and people thumping MM as if it were the end-all decision making aparatus for market price.

I do play on Xbox one. Prices are pretty consistent and only fluctuate during content release. With more resources flooding the market from TG I would expect for prices to slightly lower. However the price of tempering materials will probably go up as people will be upgrading new sets THAT Drop and are not crafted, to legendary. Meaning they won't need crafting mats like leathers however they will need the Temps which is why their price will go up.

Increase in demand for upgrading epic to legendary means increase in price of tempering materials

Increase in supply of leather, ingots, silk, means decrease in price.

Supply. Demand. I work in accounting.... Lol unless I'm completely missing something and everything I learned in college from economics is wrong.

You're limiting your scope of applying supply and demand to spikes in market activity based on a sequenced anomally that stems from content release.

In your specific, narrow example of DLC coming out, you are correct; Improvement items will sell like hot cakes to upgrade drop-only gear, and Materials will stagnate as the gear focus jumps toward the drop-only.

To discuss the game's market as a whole, and suggesting that supply and demand just 'simply applies' to it no matter what, is a fallacy. There's a reason I guessed correctly, and without much thought, that you play on console based on what you said.

Hutch679

"It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay."

Fair market value is an agreed upon price that a buyer and seller agree upon.... If someone sells something at 500 gold and someone buys it then the FMP is 500. Same item sells for 1000 gold. Someone buys it. The the FMP is also 1000. This creates a range. This is how prices are driven. I don't think even know what you're talking about lol

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Hutch679 wrote: »

Try selling Psijic Ambrosia @ 2.7k to make (10.8k-9k=) 1.8k profit and you're going to have a bad time. Sell at 2.5k/ea and you might be able to make a few sales for a whopping 1k/sale profit. It can take long enough to push just 9 PA's at times that actually fishing the PR and selling it would be more lucrative and time-efficient.

I'm out of game until my new computer arrives, but weren't perfect roe mats selling for 12k each?

Anyway, unlike nightwood, perfect roe would be difficult to bust the cartel price on. It's rarity might justify the prices I've seen, in fact. One of my characters is doing the fishing quest now. From cleaning all her normal fish from Bleakrock, Bal Foyen, Stonefalls, and Deshaan, she found only five perfect roes. When something is rare like this, I don't sell it at all, if I have any use for it at all. I can make money by cooking VR10/15 green foods/drinks at "3 extra servings" and selling to an NPC.

(I've made maybe 10 million gold, something like that, just cooking and selling. I've bought everything I want that can be bought with gold, and I have a bank balance of 2.2 million.)

Myxril

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

I'm out of game until my new computer arrives, but weren't perfect roe mats selling for 12k each?

Some are listed that high, but generally they sell commonly for ~9k.

Anyway, unlike nightwood, perfect roe would be difficult to bust the cartel price on. It's rarity might justify the prices I've seen, in fact. One of my characters is doing the fishing quest now. From cleaning all her normal fish from Bleakrock, Bal Foyen, Stonefalls, and Deshaan, she found only five perfect roes. When something is rare like this, I don't sell it at all, if I have any use for it at all. I can make money by cooking VR10/15 green foods/drinks at "3 extra servings" and selling to an NPC.

The rarity could justify the 8-9k range, sure, given the catchability of it. As I already explained one hour of fishing can yield 1-3 PRs at the more-or-less 1% rate they drop. So the (8-9k) to (24-27k) range for that one hour is pretty solid.

As for busting the PR cartel, I think the easier thing would actually be to get people to buy at 3k/potion. That would only be doable if all PA sellers came to an agreement that all Zone sales would be 3k and all guild store listings would be like 3.5k. Again, to repeat, -that- would probably be easier than forcing PR costs down.


PS: That quote you quoted was from me, not Hutch.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Hutch679 wrote: »

"It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay."

Fair market value is an agreed upon price that a buyer and seller agree upon.... If someone sells something at 500 gold and someone buys it then the FMP is 500. Same item sells for 1000 gold. Someone buys it. The the FMP is also 1000. This creates a range. This is how prices are driven. I don't think even know what you're talking about lol

Here's what I'm talking about.

"A fool and his money are soon parted." ~~Thomas Tusser (1524-1580). English poet and farmer.
"There's a sucker born every minute." ~~David Hannum, in criticism of both P. T. Barnum, an American showman of the mid 19th century, and his customers.

The problem with the perspective of the economics teacher (and the reader of Ayn Rand's books) is that humans aren't as intelligent or as rational as they'd have to be, in order to spend their money optimally. They may, and they do, spend their money stupidly. Yes, that's "freedom," but freedom isn't a moral imperative. It's a moral luxury, to be indulged when, and only insofar as, the conditions for securing higher values are met.

DRXHarbinger

Callous2208 wrote: »

The price of v16 mats on pc has plummeted. Gold tempers are what will cost you. Currently 6.4-7k a pop, depending on where you look.

Wow on XB currently no less than 14.5k right now. Potent nirns are still 15k.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Also, it can be misleading to compare the game-gold marketplace within ESO and the real life marketplace.

In ESO, you know exactly what you are getting when you buy a "perfect roe" or a "kuta runestone" or 100 pieces of rye.

In real life, you have advertisers who "puff" (use loaded/slanted language) to mislead the customer about the nature and/or the worth of an item, or the benefits of buying it. Puff means any deception that isn't an outright lie, or that can't be ruled a violation of the "truth in advertising" laws. Sellers in real life also rely on omissions of important details, which the buyer must ask for in particular, and knowing what to ask often presupposes an education that most buyers don't have.

So if the phenomenon of gouge-by-cartel exists even on ESO, where the nature of the items being traded are perfectly well understood, then so much the less can it be said that agreed-upon prices in the real world are "fair" prices.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Hutch679 wrote: »

"It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay."

Fair market value is an agreed upon price that a buyer and seller agree upon....

I'll bet that I can think of circumstances under which I could make you agree to pay me $1 million, or else all you have and will ever have, in exchange for 20 feet of rope, suitably anchored by me at cliff top, with a few climbing knots graciously tied in by me at no extra charge.

starkerealm

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

KaleidoscopeEyz wrote: »

Also, who are you to say what "fair market value" is? FMV is whatever people are willing to pay.

Which people? How many people? I addressed that point.

Quote: "You don't know whether 20% more people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether twice as many people would buy if the price were cut by 20%, or whether 10 times more people would buy if the price were cut 20%."

Actually, you do. Because if you're charging too much, someone can and will undercut you.

Source: Someone who has undercut their guildmates in the store.
Source: Someone who has been undercut by their guildmates in the store.

People list stuff for the prices they think will sell at. If it doesn't sell, in 30 days it gets kicked back to you, and you eat the listing cost. Trust me, I want this stuff to sell. I'm not going to try gouging, because, if nothing else, some derp in zone can undercut my prices if I'm being unreasonable.

starkerealm

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

*conspiracy theory*

Okay, so many things wrong with this post.

First, if you're flat out undercutting the going rate for an item, expect to see it sell very quickly. And, yes, some of that will get flipped. It doesn't require a "cartel." It requires that one person purchase what you're selling, and relist it at the going rate, then pocket the cash afterwards.

Don't believe me? Try to force the price down on Kutas or something. Just list all of the ones you've got for 500g or 1k, or whatever. And, oh, look, they'll sell instantly. That's not an indication that there's some vast conspiracy out there. It just means at least one person, with a few thousand gold saw a really good deal, and bought it up.

Saying there was a cartel is... there was a rate that Nightwood was selling at. It was selling up to that price. Pushed over it, and it would sit in the stores. Yes, addons like MM can help you identify what the going price for something is. It will also shift down over time because it will tell you what things sell for. And yes, people do list items at lower prices all the time. If you were in a guild and used MM, you'd see this.

Nightwood was a limited resource. Not by supply in game, but by the time commitment needed to obtain it. If you wanted to put the time in, you could obtain it yourself. That was never the issue. The issue was people wanting it right now, and not wanting to take the time to go farming in their late gold zones or in Craglorn.

Nightwood spiked harder than Voidsteel or Voidcloth, because people were actively neglecting nightwood before the writs dropped. A lot of people, who had stocked up on the other crafting materials didn't have enough on hand when the writs got added, because in normal gameplay you do not use that much wood in your builds. A character can have nine slots that require metal, seven slots that require cloth or leather. But they can only have wood in two slots. So people ignored it. Suddenly there was a use for it, no one had any saved away, and the price skyrocketed.

You weren't paying people for nightwood because it was rare, you were paying for it because you didn't want to go out there and take the time to collect it yourself. This was especially true among players who had 8 characters, all running crafting writs.

So, why did it drop? People started completing their glass collections (which was the entire reason to collect the writs in the first place).

It wasn't your friend. What she did was a service to a lot of players, and that's great. But there wasn't some mysterious cartel out there controlling the prices.

You know why I know this? Because if they existed, they wouldn't be able to keep it a secret. They'd blow it sooner or later, and then everyone would be raging about it. Someone would be forced out, or some dispute would go nuclear. Basically, with people, you cannot hide that kind of behavior.

I know, it's a complex system, and it defies simple explanations, but, for once, the truth is not out there. Nightwood spiked because people were buying it.

And, trust me, as someone who sells blue and purple recipes, if I ask too much for something? It does not sell. Same for crafting mats, I sell those too. Sometimes, I overestimate and it comes back to me. Sometimes someone lists Malacath daggers for 39 gold and it miscalibrates everyone's MM on that item for weeks.

There is no conspiracy or cartel.

Except for those guilds on the consoles that were buying out other stalls and extorting guilds for their use... because that was crap.

Hutch679

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

Hutch679 wrote: »

"It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay."

Fair market value is an agreed upon price that a buyer and seller agree upon....

I'll bet that I can think of circumstances under which I could make you agree to pay me $1 million, or else all you have and will ever have, in exchange for 20 feet of rope, suitably anchored by me at cliff top, with a few climbing knots graciously tied in by me at no extra charge.

"What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

bryanhaas

tonemd wrote: »

Normally surges when expansions are released as people come back and want to craft new sets.

However, armor crafting mats may dip due to reliable top tier node farming.The land of Hews Bane is rich with mats.

Agreed, I do expect a slight increase in VR9 to 14 mats as those are now only in Craglorn and Gold.

istateres

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

If the law of supply-and-demand were setting the prices of items, then they'd be no difference in the average prices between the NA and EU megaservers, or between the PC and console versions of the game. It's the same game, with the same supply opportunities, with the same sorts of ways to process/sell the mats and the items made from them. But these prices vary, and they vary because the sellers on the different platforms are all playing price follow-the-leader.

I don't agree. The prices would only be the same IF players on the two servers played the game the same way. They would have to collect, use, and save resources in the same way. Next you'll be claiming they drink beer in the same way.

As a long time seller, if SALE prices go up, so do my listing. If SALE prices go down, so do my listings. I HAVE to move inventory. If people don't buy my items, all my bags fill up!

Hutch679

Sigh.

FortheloveofKrist

Hutch679 wrote: »

As thoughtful as your long post is... All market prices are controlled by supply and demand. If there is no demand for an item then it's not going to sell for a given price. If there is a smaller supply of an item let's say hakeijo runes. Then they will sell for a higher price. Which is why you see the prices for hakeijo what they are versus the prices of say Makko runes at what they are. The fact that you say there is no supply and demand makes me wonder if you understand market economics.

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

In a perfect world envisioned by Adam Smith, yes. But in reality that is not true, and it's therefore very debatable. The fact is ZoS does a lot to actively push the market in directions that are of course beneficial to them. So the market is regulated, albeit behind closed doors, to ensure profitability of the Crown Store. That's why certain items drop at specific rates. Items are kept rare and difficult to obtain in order to directly influence the market. So the market is not as laissez fair as you would like to assume.

In ZoS's defense, they would be stupid not to influence the market in their favor when they create and profit directly from it. But let's not pretend it's all the "invisible hand" **** you learned in high school.

Serenityx

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

Hutch679 wrote: »

As thoughtful as your long post is... All market prices are controlled by supply and demand. If there is no demand for an item then it's not going to sell for a given price. If there is a smaller supply of an item let's say hakeijo runes. Then they will sell for a higher price. Which is why you see the prices for hakeijo what they are versus the prices of say Makko runes at what they are. The fact that you say there is no supply and demand makes me wonder if you understand market economics.

Supply and demand drives the prices in every market. That's not even a debatable thing it's fact.

I've learned to suspect, above all, any statement that is said to be undebatable, especially when there are people who are debating it.

Several months ago, when writs were a New Thing, the price of sanded nightwood skyrocketed on the NA megaserver. Only. The prices didn't rise by anywhere near the same amount on other game platforms.

Sure, there were people willing to pay the inflated prices that sellers were charging for sanded nightwood on the NA megaserver. But there were more people who started harvesting it for themselves, rather than pay. Again, I repeat: NOBODY COUNTS THE PEOPLE WHO REFUSED TO BUY. Put it to a vote, and you'd learn that most people decided that the price of sanded nightwood was way above the fair market price.

Along came a player who made it her mission to bust the sanded nightwood cartel. She spent most of her in-game time harvesting nightwood west of Belkarth. You know the route: it goes westward from the city and turns north at the wayshrine by the sandwarrior place. She gathered thousands of nightwoods and sanded it all, and then uploaded them in stacks of 200 to her five guild stores at 85% of the cartel's price.

A few times, the cartel bought her out. But she always had more. More. MORE! The cartel was spending more than it was taking in on sanded nightwood. So their price dropped.

The player dropped her own price to 85% of the cartel's new price, and the process started all over again. Gradually, she walked the price of sanded nightwood DOWN TO the fair market price, the price at which it was, in the opinion of the average player, just as easy to buy it as to produce it himself.

It just plain isn't true that the fair market price is whatever the laziest and/or richest few will pay.

You sound mad bro.

Hutch679

I'm regretting this entire post lol. Everytime I read a response regarding economics and markets I wanna beat my head against a wall. What have I done... This thread is dead and I give up.

Curtdogg47

I'll look around my guild and see what prices people are selling things at. I'll also check other guilds. Then I take into account how much I feel the item is worth, and how quickly I want to move the item.