Snowflakes, Special Snowflakes, Snowflake Consumption, and Supplies on the TP

Our own @"Wanze.8410" (writing as Rude Asura) made the following observations about the supply of the new snowflakes, which helps explain why the price went up, while typically prices for new mats go down during festivals.

Rude Asura wrote

I am just trying to figure out our snowflake consumption, old and new, so I had a closer look at the amount of old tiered snowflakes, that vanished from the trading post since wintersday began. And i find the numbers quite impressive:

• supply before patch: 16.5 million
• current supply: 8.8 million
• supply deficit: 7.7 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:1
• new snowflakes generated: 7.7 million

• supply before patch: 4.7 million
• current supply: 3.3 million
• supply deficit: 1.4 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:1
• new snowflakes generated: 1.4 million

• supply before patch: 4.5 million
• current supply: 2.6 million
• supply deficit: 1.9 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:3
• new snowflakes generated: 5.7 million

• supply before patch: 0.63 million
• current supply: 0.23 million
• supply deficit: 0.4 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:5
• new snowflakes generated: 2 million

• supply before patch: 0.39 million
• current supply: 0.14 million
• supply deficit: 0.25 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:7
• new snowflakes generated: 1.75 million

• supply before patch: 5.9 million
• current supply: 0.9 million
• supply deficit: 5 million
• conversion rates into new snowflakes: 1:10
• new snowflakes generated: 50 million

A few things that weren't mentioned in the above:

• Wintersday gifts drop about half as many snowflakes as they did last year (using a 10:1 ratio for Flawless and a 1:1 for Tiny Snowflakes, the only sorts that dropped last year)
• There are several new sinks, mostly one time achievements or skin unlocks, but we players are impatient as a group; we like our shinies now, not tomorrow or next week.
• Some supply will get converted into Snow Diamonds, which is to Snowflakes as Corn Cobs are to Candy Corn (i.e. 1000 flakes = 1 snow diamond).
• A couple of new recipes use flakes or diamonds, but it's unclear how popular those will be.

Trends

• Snowflakes: Overall, prices started at 26 copper/flake, spiked as high as 83 copper, and are now hovering at 37-44 copper now.
• Snow Diamonds: launched at 1.8-3.1 gold, spiked as high as 4 gold, and now hover around 2.0-2.3 gold. (Notice that it's far cheaper to buy the diamonds than make your own, which is similar to the corn cob/candy corn situation.)

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:A few things that weren't mentioned in the above:

• Wintersday gifts drop about half as many snowflakes as they did last year (using a 10:1 ratio for Flawless and a 1:1 for Tiny Snowflakes, the only sorts that dropped last year)
• There are several new sinks, mostly one time achievements or skin unlocks, but we players are impatient as a group; we like our shinies now, not tomorrow or next week.
• Some supply will get converted into Snow Diamonds, which is to Snowflakes as Corn Cobs are to Candy Corn (i.e. 1000 flakes = 1 snow diamond).
• A couple of new recipes use flakes or diamonds, but it's unclear how popular those will be.

Trends

• Snowflakes: Overall, prices started at 26 copper/flake, spiked as high as 83 copper, and are now hovering at 37-44 copper now.
• Snow Diamonds: launched at 1.8-3.1 gold, spiked as high as 4 gold, and now hover around 2.0-2.3 gold. (Notice that it's far cheaper to buy the diamonds than make your own, which is similar to the corn cob/candy corn situation.)

During this week, it seemed a little odd to me, that both, value and volume of snowflakes kept creeping up over time. Value gradually went from 40-50c while volume went up from a couple hundreds of thousands to 2 million.

So I had a closer look where all these snowflakes are listed and they are all bulked up right below 1s, from 2 million snowflakes

• 146k are listed @ 99c

• 519k are listed @ 98c

• 963k are listed at 97c

Together, they make up over 80% of the total listings of snowflakes and only 16% of all snowflakes are listed between the lowest listing and 96c.

I tip my Tinfoil Hat to whoever is doing this because besides a full wallet, they also need to dedicate alot of time to listing these huge amounts of snowflakes, over 6k stacks.

Since you get an error message, when listing too fast, you can only make a listing every ten seconds after your 16th listing in quick succession, so it would take 60k seconds to list this amount of snowflakes, which equals 1k minutes or 16 hours and 40 minutes.

I guess they will be using auto clickers to post all these listings but even with those, its not possible to just list them all in one go while staying afk.

Because you can only list whats in your bags, they would have to refill their inventory with snowflakes, once they listed the first batch.

Anyways, thought its something worth mentioning to consider, when speculating about the future value of snowflakes.

@Wanze.8410 said:Anyways, thought its something worth mentioning to consider, when speculating about the future value of snowflakes.

Definitely worth mentioning. Thanks for adding the data here.