Quality of Life: Prevent Buyers from Ordering at a Price that is Less than the Minimum

I see this a lot with Minor Sigils and Minor Runes. You go to sell them on the trading post and it defaults to the buy like always... for lower than is possible to sell for. If you can't sell it to them for that price, then it shouldn't be possible to buy for that price on the trading post.

Has been this way since launch, so I have no expectations of it ever being fixed. Probably considered a "feature" that is highly praised during meetings.

You can't actually put in buy orders for below the vendor price divided by 0.85 (the price at which you'd break even between selling to vendor or selling on TP). Every single buy order you see today that is below Vendor/0.85 is from the first year or two of the game, when it was still possible to (a) sell an item at any price, including lower than vendor and later (b) sell an item at vendor + 1 copper.

In other words, the OP's request has long since been implemented.

ANet has gone through the database to remove the existing orders (and refund the relevant buy offers to the players), but this is incredibly expensive. Writing a script to seek out the relevant orders: easy enough. Writing a script to cancel those orders and return the funds to the players BLTC pickup queue: not too bad. QAing said script to make sure it doesn't break any of the things that people can think of nor any of the things that never occurred to the current programmers (but were somehow made part of the original code years ago): priceless.

tl;dr no one can put in buy orders for less than what someone would make from selling to a vendor (including fees), but ANet hasn't wanted to make a second pass at removing existing orders that violate the new policies.

What I’d like to see implemented in the UI to help alleviate the situation is:

1. If the min sell price is greater than the highest offer, default to min sell “and” total number of items in your stack. By default if the “number” of the highest offer is less than the stack size you want to sell, it cuts your sell stack down to that number and that offer price, both of which are annoying “if you have more things to sell”.
2. Add an option to set what you are selling to the lowest min sell price with a quick click. So I don’t have to type in 28 ?

Those are old orders. You can no longer put in an order for a price less than the minimum.

Ah, if those are actually old orders, what if they implemented a way to report orders that are impossible on the trading post? Like adding a button near "Current Buyers"?

@"pholtos.9751" said:Ah, if those are actually old orders, what if they implemented a way to report orders that are impossible on the trading post? Like adding a button near "Current Buyers"?

Because it's a fair bit of extra coding for a minor QoL improvement.

Buyorders you can’t fill out are old ones. Probably of people who forgot they had orders up, or stopped playing.Anet should just do a TP “cleanse” and be done with it

@Ayakaru.6583 said:Buyorders you can’t fill out are old ones. Probably of people who forgot they had orders up, or stopped playing.Anet should just do a TP “cleanse” and be done with it

I am afraid it is not that easy. It has to do with taxes. Specifically the 5% listing fee. People allready payed money to get it listed. This is a so called gold sink.A gold sink is needed cause gold flows in games work different. We are virtually rewarded by playing cause the game generates rewards (loot). This means the game is constantly adding gold to the economy. This would lead to inflation unless you also takes out money. This is a gold sink.

5% might seem to be very low, but there are still a lot of orders out there and giving it back to the players would mean a big cashflow into the economy, creating more inflation. Also as the goods themselfes are refunded too, this means another cashflow from the merchant as that is where they will end up.

@Ayakaru.6583 said:Buyorders you can’t fill out are old ones. Probably of people who forgot they had orders up, or stopped playing.Anet should just do a TP “cleanse” and be done with it

They have done, a couple of times. See Illconcieved's post above ;)

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@Ayakaru.6583 said:Buyorders you can’t fill out are old ones. Probably of people who forgot they had orders up, or stopped playing.Anet should just do a TP “cleanse” and be done with it

People are talking about buy orders; there's no listing fee associated with those.

Say, there is one thing they could do without refunding any money: Put a lower limit on buy prices that show in the table (and in the price, if you're searching from outside an actual order).

In other words, for a major rune that sells for 1s 8c, don't allow any price less than 1s 28c to show up in the list or search results. They might still be there, but they don't SHOW, which is just as good as actually removing them (from the viewer's perspective).

@Daddicus.6128 said:Say, there is one thing they could do without refunding any money: Put a lower limit on buy prices that show in the table (and in the price, if you're searching from outside an actual order).

In other words, for a major rune that sells for 1s 8c, don't allow any price less than 1s 28c to show up in the list or search results. They might still be there, but they don't SHOW, which is just as good as actually removing them (from the viewer's perspective).

That also takes additional coding (and thus isn't free). For something that doesn't affect all that many items, it seems like more trouble than it's worth.

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:ANet has gone through the database to remove the existing orders (and refund the relevant buy offers to the players), but this is incredibly expensive. Writing a script to seek out the relevant orders: easy enough. Writing a script to cancel those orders and return the funds to the players BLTC pickup queue: not too bad. QAing said script to make sure it doesn't break any of the things that people can think of nor any of the things that never occurred to the current programmers (but were somehow made part of the original code years ago): priceless.

So how expensive is it? "Incredibly" is a rather vague term when it comes to estimating costs. You keep posting the same argument over and over on these forums that basically is "Sorry, too expensive and too complicated and Anet has other priorities to put their resources in."

In reality, you have no idea how Anet prioritizes things, and you have no idea how much work something is and how much it costs. I wished some dev would read this thread and reply with "Oh yeah, that was an oversight, thanks for the heads up, I'll add a line to our purchase order removal script that will take care of it, takes only a minute, done!".

Also, your attitude is destructive for ideas and suggestions, you add nothing of value when you just play down complaints and tell people off. I wonder if you ever get things done. Please just stop. Or tell me that you are indeed an Anet representative and that you are talking for the company.

@Faaris.8013 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:ANet has gone through the database to remove the existing orders (and refund the relevant buy offers to the players), but this is incredibly expensive. Writing a script to seek out the relevant orders: easy enough. Writing a script to cancel those orders and return the funds to the players BLTC pickup queue: not too bad. QAing said script to make sure it doesn't break any of the things that people can think of nor any of the things that never occurred to the current programmers (but were somehow made part of the original code years ago): priceless.

I'm sorry you don't appreciate when someone else offers insight into why things that seem like a good idea from the outside might seem "incredibly expensive" from within.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:You can't actually put in buy orders for below the vendor price divided by 0.85 (the price at which you'd break even between selling to vendor or selling on TP). Every single buy order you see today that is below Vendor/0.85 is from the first year or two of the game, when it was still possible to (a) sell an item at any price, including lower than vendor and later (b) sell an item at vendor + 1 copper.

This has often been stated but is provably untrue. With some regularity I come across buy orders below the lowest possible sale price for an item for which no such buy orders were shown the day before (or whenever I most recently had occasion to sell this item on the TP). I also sometimes see sell orders below the lowest possible sale price for items for which no such apparently impossible sell order existed the last time I had occasion to sell it on the TP.

So while the vast majority of these TP orders below the lowest sale price are indubitably remnants from before the lowest sale price limitation was put in, there apparently does exist a bug on the TP which still makes it possible to enter such orders.

One solution would be to add maximum time limit for the buy/sell orders placed @ TP with the refund of taxed gold/silver/copper if the time limit is being exceeded when the item's sold are returned to the owner.

The time limit could be let's say 3 months to be generous.

They can just remove those old "impossible" orders from the database.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:Say, there is one thing they could do without refunding any money: Put a lower limit on buy prices that show in the table (and in the price, if you're searching from outside an actual order).

In other words, for a major rune that sells for 1s 8c, don't allow any price less than 1s 28c to show up in the list or search results. They might still be there, but they don't SHOW, which is just as good as actually removing them (from the viewer's perspective).

Agreed. Whether it is worth it or not is another conversation (probably done internally at ANet). But, ideas can't hurt.

@"Umut.5471" said:They can just remove those old "impossible" orders from the database.

That's not as easy as it sounds. It's a database, and thus has tentacles all over the place. "Removing" one record affects other records, frequently in ways that are not easily predicted.

@Daddicus.6128 said:

@"Umut.5471" said:They can just remove those old "impossible" orders from the database.

Which is why I posted my idea of adding some kind of "death time" for the auctions in general so that there could not be one year+ sales/bids that no one can fulfill. What I mean, if user cannot sell or buy the item in let's say in 1 year then perhaps user never get transaction done.

@YuckaMountain.3786 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:

@"Umut.5471" said:They can just remove those old "impossible" orders from the database.

That's a good idea, but there's a problem: to close out the transaction fairly, they have to return the money to the buyer. But, apparently they have trouble doing that (they've stated there are technical issues).

It's a good idea, but it's not straightforward (for them). Databases tend to be created with a plan initially, but then additions and subtractions of code happen over time, and each change makes it that much harder to keep the whole database working properly.

@YuckaMountain.3786 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:

@"Umut.5471" said:They can just remove those old "impossible" orders from the database.

There is no "auction" system in GW2, which is why there is no expiration date on listings. This is a commodity exchange. It may seem like the same thing to most gamers, but the underlying economic principles are very different.

In the GW2 economy, old listings provide price stability during periods of significant market adjustment. Plus, if orders dropped off after a certain amount of time, many market segments that have low turnover would have wildly inaccurate prices making it very, very difficult or expensive to buy anything rare.

Similar to the effect the OP showed, this image (taken on 2018-01-13, 22:03 UTC) shows that sellers currently have listings on the BLTC below minimum unit price.An item listed below the minimum unit price cannot be purchased, as shown in this example. In this particular listing, a person must purchase more than the first 17 items in this listing to be able to complete the purchase.

This bug would prevent someone that may be low on funds from buying just the first item in the listing if they cannot buy a significant number of it. These listings prevent the item from moving at all unless someone comes along and purchases all of the below-minimum listings in bulk. The only way to correct the issue, aside from people coming along and bulk-purchasing would be returning the items, with listing fees, to the sellers.

Despite listings like this one being cleared before, some bug or other error is permitting users to continue listing below minimum unit price. The trading post really needs continual clean up of such invalid sales, at least until the problem allowing these listings is fixed. We already know this can be automated from previous actions.

@Gudy.3607 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:You can't actually put in buy orders for below the vendor price divided by 0.85 (the price at which you'd break even between selling to vendor or selling on TP). Every single buy order you see today that is below Vendor/0.85 is from the first year or two of the game, when it was still possible to (a) sell an item at any price, including lower than vendor and later (b) sell an item at vendor + 1 copper.

I've never ever seen this. Can you provide a few examples? (via PM is fine, if you don't wish to share them in public)It shouldn't be that hard for one of the techier people here to put together something that looks for this.

Among the possible explanations is that sometimes the TP is slow to populate online or uses cached data, so what we see in game isn't what's actually queued up on the TP. That's admittedly rare and won't affect everyone, which is why I'd be curious to see some specific items

And just to be clear: I'm completely in favor of ANet updating the TP interface (there are all sorts of minor and major improvements that I think should have been included ages ago). And I'm in favor of ANet removing all too-low-to-fulfill buy offers, not just once, but putting in a spider to crawl the TP and cancel them, just in case @Gudy.3607 is correct.

The point I've been making is that this isn't free and worse, it's likely to be costly, since it requires focus on a core system that ain't otherwise broke. We just prefer it to behave differently.

The issue isn't whether this is useful, it's whether it's important enough to do instead of address any of the other issues we want fixed or improved or otherwise changed.