Has TTC become useless?

Kwoung

With so many people spending so much time in game, the new sticker book, and numerous other factors... is the fact that TTC only considers the bottom 1/3 of the listing prices when giving pricing data no longer reliable on any level? A year ago when the market was somewhat stable, this seemed ok and TTC suggested/average prices were fairly in line with what items were actually worth. But now, items commonly sell for 50-1000% higher than TTC "suggests" or tells you the "average price" is, since it ignores the more expensive 2/3 of all the listings on the market when generating the numbers that it shows you on the in-game tooltip.

Honestly, it almost seems predatory lately, telling players "this is the average price", when it isn't even close... It is the average price of the cheapest 1/3 of the listings and ignores the real average price. While not an issue for high demand items like craft mats with thousands of listings, for things like motifs, rare gear and other things, it is basically feeding flippers great deals and taking advantage of folks that think what they are seeing in game is actual pricing data.

At this point, manually looking at listings on the TTC website is the only reliable source of info. A simple search for an item and looking at the first couple of pages will tell you what something is actually worth, and is generally 50-100% more than what the in-game tooltip or the website "price check" says (sometimes considerably more). Even when doing that you can toss out all the cheap listings you see, as those are from people that relied on the in-game tooltip data, so their items were most like snapped up immediately by flippers.

I have loved this tool for years, but now it just isn't trustworthy at all, and simply gives out bad data that only benefits the flippers, not the average player just wanting to sell an item.

Jaraal

Yeah the in-game TTC tooltips are worthless. I always go to the website and sort by price, low to high.... then compare to Master Merchant actual sales figures.

Kwoung

Jaraal wrote: »

Yeah the in-game TTC tooltips are worthless. I always go to the website and sort by price, low to high.... then compare to Master Merchant actual sales figures.

The messed up thing that is ticking me off, is that the tooltip presents the data as if it is the actual pricing data. There is nothing on the tooltip that says "This is the average price of the cheapest 30% of the items", it simply says this is the "average" price, which is completely false. If it was the actual average price, the addon would be perfect and people could make informed selling decisions, instead of being dupped into feeding the flippers.

LoneStar2911

Wow. I had no idea about this. This is great information.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

You are spreading misinformation. The average is the average, possibly with extreme outliers removed (to prevent one person from influencing the average by listing a single item at an insane price). The "recommended price" is the value that is calculated by a more complicated ad-hoc formula. The formula is clearly stated in the add-on description to be 0.8*(average price of 30% cheapest items after outliers are removed). The outliers removed from the average in this case would be items listed at a very low cost in attempts to artificially reduce both the average and the recommended price. The impact of a few items listed at 1g is not all that great, unless that item is very rare. It's 100x more efficient to list one item at a 100x inflated price.

TTC's "suggested price" makes stuff sell. You can get more if you don't care about moving the items quickly. It is a weird formula, but it works, and you won't be cheated by using it. For any high cost and/or rare items, however, you should look at the actual distribution of prices, not just the min/avg/max and a simplistic "recommended price".

Belegnole

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

You are spreading misinformation. The average is the average, possibly with extreme outliers removed (to prevent one person from influencing the average by listing a single item at an insane price). The "recommended price" is the value that is calculated by a more complicated ad-hoc formula. The formula is clearly stated in the add-on description to be 0.8*(average price of 30% cheapest items after outliers are removed). The outliers removed from the average in this case would be items listed at a very low cost in attempts to artificially reduce both the average and the recommended price. The impact of a few items listed at 1g is not all that great, unless that item is very rare. It's 100x more efficient to list one item at a 100x inflated price.

TTC's "suggested price" makes stuff sell. You can get more if you don't care about moving the items quickly. It is a weird formula, but it works, and you won't be cheated by using it. For any high cost and/or rare items, however, you should look at the actual distribution of prices, not just the min/avg/max and a simplistic "recommended price".

If ANY data is removed, the "average" is not the average.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

Belegnole wrote: »

If ANY data is removed, the "average" is not the average.

Removing obvious outliers is a standard practice in statistics, and a sound one. Make of that what you will, but a puritan approach to this is not really helpful. If one person chooses to list one lock pick for 1,000,000 gold, I would not like that to have a strong and immediate impact on the reported average price.

jle30303

Average prices don't matter. What matters are two things:

(1) The highest price at which an item IS selling.
(2) The lowest price at which an item is NOT selling.

At the moment, if anything, I am noticing prices going up, up and up again. Chromium and Zircon grains and plating have increased by about 40% since I started playing in July: even Potent Nirncrux and Nirnhoned weapons, and Dawn-Prisms and Triune jewelry (can you guess what stage I've got to in my item research) have gone up by a couple of thousand as far as I can see. Other gold crafting materials have also risen somewhat, though not as much. A whole load of weapons and jewelry (much more so than armour) disappeared from the mall when the sticker book was implemented - people buying them to bind, deconstruct and install in their sticker book - and prices of the remainder have shot up.

Even the negotiated price of Crowns in chat is higher - it used to be 250-300 gold per crown, now I'm seeing about twice that, and that's just in zone chat.

Time and again I head to the TTC website which shows me a ton of low prices, all of which have gone by the time I actually get there. Like when I sort by price I've seen an item available for, say, anywhere between 1k and 5k - often in half a dozen places, sometimes half a dozen times at the same vendor - then when I actually check the vendors there's nothing for less than 20k.

You know what I think? Items should become "bound" when you buy them from the shop. It would allow people to sell to other buyers who wanted the actual item, but prevent "flipping", buying to resell.

phantasmalD

TTC is not a sellers only tool, it's for buyers as well. And any rational buyer will look for the cheapest listing. Everyone has their own personal limit of how much they are willing to pay which probably going to fall within the average price range listed by TTC.

So it doesn't matter that you could have listed X for 1m if nobody is going to buy it for that much, you aren't cheating yourself out of profit.

Danikat

I agree with the people saying to look at all the data available, not just the recommended price.

It used to be that TTC had the opposite problem, always showing average prices well above what would actually sell because it was based on listings and not sales so that one idiot listing a common item for 1 million gold would raise the average even though no one would ever actually buy that item. So I can understand why they added recommended prices and why they use a more complex formula. The formula itself also looks reasonable to me, as someone who is not a statistician but does frequently work with statistics. There absolutely are good reasons to remove anomalous outliers because otherwise they will skew your data and leave you with useless results.

Having said that I still use two different addons to decide prices: I run TTC and Arkadius' Trade Tools, which gives pricing data based on actual sales but only in your guilds. Then I look at the data from both (not just recommend sales but how many sales/listings that's based on) when deciding what to list stuff for.

In general I find TTC to be more reactive, it's quicker to show items going up or down in price, but during those volatile periods it can be less reliable for showing what will actually sell (especially if you aim for the top end of the range). Whereas ATT is more at risk of being out of date but at least I know it's showing real sales, and through the guild stores I'm using.

When they match I know that's a safe price range to sell at, when they don't I have to think about why: has an event just started/ended/been announced that's affecting prices? Is there an update changing things? What's that likely to mean for demand? Then decide based on that which addon's recommendations to use.

Since I'm not a serious trader and not that concerned about maximising profit (my top priority is to get stuff I don't need out my inventory, I just don't want to delete it if I can sell it) and most of what I sell isn't that valuable anyway I don't mind playing it safe and undercutting the average if it means a guarenteed sale.

redlink1979

Kwoung wrote: »

(...) At this point, manually looking at listings on the TTC website is the only reliable source of info. A simple search for an item and looking at the first couple of pages will tell you what something is actually worth, and is generally 50-100% more than what the in-game tooltip or the website "price check" says (sometimes considerably more).(...)

Listing prices are different from selling prices...
TTC prices shown on tooltip (min, avg and max) are based on the actual sales not the listings of TTC users.

You can list any item for any amount (whatever you want) but that doesn't mean the item actually worths the value you listed it for...

twev

jle30303 wrote: »

snip

Time and again I head to the TTC website which shows me a ton of low prices, all of which have gone by the time I actually get there. Like when I sort by price I've seen an item available for, say, anywhere between 1k and 5k - often in half a dozen places, sometimes half a dozen times at the same vendor - then when I actually check the vendors there's nothing for less than 20k.
snip

Time and again you can go to a guild vendor shown as having an item within the last 15 (approx.) minutes and find it gone.

The salty part is that if you want to waste some time - You can check the item on TTC while standing at the vendor searching every few minutes, and it will keep saying that it's been there in the last 15 (approx.) minutes.

Sylvermynx

The reason you see that item on the vendor is because the person who snapped it up is the one uploading the info. It's not often worth trekking to wherever the five lowest most recent prices are. By the 6th or so down, I find I have better luck, and still it's usually cheap enough.

But that's only if I feel like spending the time to go there. Mostly I don't. If I can find what I'm looking for in Vivec, I buy it and don't give a rat's patoot I might have "paid too much". My time in game is worth far more than in game gold....

Alinhbo_Tyaka

twev wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

snip

Time and again I head to the TTC website which shows me a ton of low prices, all of which have gone by the time I actually get there. Like when I sort by price I've seen an item available for, say, anywhere between 1k and 5k - often in half a dozen places, sometimes half a dozen times at the same vendor - then when I actually check the vendors there's nothing for less than 20k.
snip

Time and again you can go to a guild vendor shown as having an item within the last 15 (approx.) minutes and find it gone.

The salty part is that if you want to waste some time - You can check the item on TTC while standing at the vendor searching every few minutes, and it will keep saying that it's been there in the last 15 (approx.) minutes.

Things might have changed but I was under the impression that TTC only updates when players using the addon cause the data to be uploaded to the TTC. This means the data is just a snapshot of the what is available when a player running the client was at a guild store. Any items that are listed by players who do not use the addon will not show up until a player using the addon causes TTC data to be update. Unless it has been sold in between updates then it will never appear.

When my guild was bidding on guild stores I never looked at TTC as anything other rough guide to price my items. I would look on the web site at the list in lowest to highest order and the suggested sales price then decide what I was going to price an item with.

FinneganFroth

Jeez, I had no idea about this either. Thanks for the info.

barney2525

It shows a price range I should be able to sell the item for

I pick a price and list it

it sells

I make gold

I'm happy. I do not have to spend 2 hours running around to traders to try and find out all the different prices my item might sell for just to determine a reasonable price to list it.

rpa

A price which sells in few mins or does not sell at all is wrong.
A price which sells in few days is correct.

twev

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

twev wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

snip

Time and again I head to the TTC website which shows me a ton of low prices, all of which have gone by the time I actually get there. Like when I sort by price I've seen an item available for, say, anywhere between 1k and 5k - often in half a dozen places, sometimes half a dozen times at the same vendor - then when I actually check the vendors there's nothing for less than 20k.
snip

Time and again you can go to a guild vendor shown as having an item within the last 15 (approx.) minutes and find it gone.

The salty part is that if you want to waste some time - You can check the item on TTC while standing at the vendor searching every few minutes, and it will keep saying that it's been there in the last 15 (approx.) minutes.

Things might have changed but I was under the impression that TTC only updates when players using the addon cause the data to be uploaded to the TTC. This means the data is just a snapshot of the what is available when a player running the client was at a guild store. Any items that are listed by players who do not use the addon will not show up until a player using the addon causes TTC data to be update. Unless it has been sold in between updates then it will never appear.

When my guild was bidding on guild stores I never looked at TTC as anything other rough guide to price my items. I would look on the web site at the list in lowest to highest order and the suggested sales price then decide what I was going to price an item with.

I'm a paid member at TTC, I use the web site and the add-on.
I've tried logging out/in after finding the item isn't at the vendor to upload any data to TTC that the client allows.

I could deal with the 'time since seen' incrementing even if it was bought, as the client database may not update often, but what galls me is that the client and addon almost always tell me 'in the last 15 minutes' regardless of how long I've checked again, over and over.

And I agree that TTC is best used as a 'guide' to pricing, and less frequently as a means to efficiently obtain said items.
Don't get me wrong, I HAVE gotten stuff at vendors that I journeyed to based on TTC, but it's always a surprise when I score an item at all.

Gythral

Update only happens after a change of zone, /reloadui or log out!

So standing at a trder loading does nothing until you move

twev

Gythral wrote: »

Update only happens after a change of zone, /reloadui or log out!

So standing at a trder loading does nothing until you move

See the post above yours.

Danikat

Gythral wrote: »

Update only happens after a change of zone, /reloadui or log out!

So standing at a trder loading does nothing until you move

Even then it doesn't always remove items which have been sold, it seems to only update the stuff which is currently there.

I've noticed this sometimes when buying items with very few listings (meaning it's easy to keep track of a specific one). For example a while ago I bought a Dawn-Prism, then scanned the guild store and logged out to upload the data. 18 hours later that exact same listing was still on TTC (I'd book marked the page for that listing, so I know it wasn't just another one on the same trader at the same price). If I remember correctly it took almost 3 days for that listing to disappear after being bought, during which time I scanned the whole trader and uploaded the data multiple times.

I'm not sure what the process is for TTC working out an item has been sold or removed and needs to be taken off the website but it would be helpful if it could tell when a full guild store has been scanned instead of just speciifc categories and remove anything listed on the site which wasn't picked up in that scan.

But even with this problem using TTC is still easier than having to make wild guesses at which traders might possibly have the items/ you want. At least you can narrow it down to ones that had it recently instead of having to check them all.

CrashTest

Nah, TTC is awesome if you know how to use it.

This guy is spot on. Let the last paragraph sink in:

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

You are spreading misinformation. The average is the average, possibly with extreme outliers removed (to prevent one person from influencing the average by listing a single item at an insane price). The "recommended price" is the value that is calculated by a more complicated ad-hoc formula. The formula is clearly stated in the add-on description to be 0.8*(average price of 30% cheapest items after outliers are removed). The outliers removed from the average in this case would be items listed at a very low cost in attempts to artificially reduce both the average and the recommended price. The impact of a few items listed at 1g is not all that great, unless that item is very rare. It's 100x more efficient to list one item at a 100x inflated price.

TTC's "suggested price" makes stuff sell. You can get more if you don't care about moving the items quickly. It is a weird formula, but it works, and you won't be cheated by using it. For any high cost and/or rare items, however, you should look at the actual distribution of prices, not just the min/avg/max and a simplistic "recommended price".

Reverb

I use TTC for shopping, and MM for pricing things to sell. Since MM represents actual sales in the guilds I am in, that’s the best tool for me to know what people are really buying and what they’re paying for it. Items sell differently depending on trader location as well.

TTC isn’t useless, but it’s only one part of the equation, not some version of a global house that so many people want it to be.

majulook

If you are looking at prices in the TTC website for prices of items for "sticker book" you should do a advanced search so that you can see all traits and a all quality of the item since the 'sticker book" does not care about trait or quality.

the1andonlyskwex

A global AH would solve all this.

kargen27

jle30303 wrote: »

Average prices don't matter. What matters are two things:

(1) The highest price at which an item IS selling.
(2) The lowest price at which an item is NOT selling.

At the moment, if anything, I am noticing prices going up, up and up again. Chromium and Zircon grains and plating have increased by about 40% since I started playing in July: even Potent Nirncrux and Nirnhoned weapons, and Dawn-Prisms and Triune jewelry (can you guess what stage I've got to in my item research) have gone up by a couple of thousand as far as I can see. Other gold crafting materials have also risen somewhat, though not as much. A whole load of weapons and jewelry (much more so than armour) disappeared from the mall when the sticker book was implemented - people buying them to bind, deconstruct and install in their sticker book - and prices of the remainder have shot up.

Even the negotiated price of Crowns in chat is higher - it used to be 250-300 gold per crown, now I'm seeing about twice that, and that's just in zone chat.

Time and again I head to the TTC website which shows me a ton of low prices, all of which have gone by the time I actually get there. Like when I sort by price I've seen an item available for, say, anywhere between 1k and 5k - often in half a dozen places, sometimes half a dozen times at the same vendor - then when I actually check the vendors there's nothing for less than 20k.

You know what I think? Items should become "bound" when you buy them from the shop. It would allow people to sell to other buyers who wanted the actual item, but prevent "flipping", buying to resell.

The trade system in this game is some players end game content. That includes the ability to flip items. Taking that away would take away the reason a lot of people play this game.

Crowns till haven't caught back up from houses being giftable.

When you see an item listed several times at the same vendor there was only one item there. More than one player uploaded the data to TTC though so each time the item gets listed.

I don't use TTC often but when I have something kind of rare to sell I will go to TTC to see about how many are available at the different traders. Knowing about how many of one item might currently be listed gives me an idea where to set my price.

newtinmpls

Belegnole wrote: »

If ANY data is removed, the "average" is not the average.

You do not seem to be familiar with the fact that "average" could mean mean, median or mode.

You also do not seem to be familiar with the way outliers skew the mean, but do less to corrupt the median or the mode.

newtinmpls

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

A global AH would solve all this.

If by "solve" you mean "make worse" then, yes.