A few questions regarding the Trading Post

Hi,

1. The TP hinders you from from completing a trade where the seller would gain less profit than selling to a vendor. Still, the TP is full of these "impossible trades". Where do these come from? Why has Anet never bothered to purge all these items?
2. What happened after PoF launch? GW2Spidy shows a few days of missing data ( The API was down?), during this time some items (like Mithril Ore or Silk Scraps) have seriously dropped, while others like Skins have strongly increased in value.
3. Who actually undercuts sale orders? What is the intent behind that? I can understand players that place higher buy orders - they want said item fast. But undercutting sales is a loss-loss situation: You're wasting time to type in a new price instead of selecting one of the existing prices and you're even gaining less gold. Especially with items were thousands are traded daily like materials it bothers me everytime.

Thanks for your answers.

The TP did not always have the restriction, and these items are relics from that ancient time of wild west offers. ArenaNet didn't purge them (or at least not all of them). My guess is that issuing that many cancellations all at once would have been... problematic.

The API was off for a few days for bug resolution, which is why there is a gap. The huge decline in value for many items is due to the fact that the PoF content dumps out vast quantities of those items.

If I list my item for sale for 1c less than you did, my item sells first. If I list my items for sale at the same price as you, your item has to sell before my item does. Thus, I can take a 1c hit on the price to jump the line.

1) as mtpelion said these listings were put up before they restricted TP sales to vendor price. They actually have purged some of them periodically but apparently it's quite a time consuming process, especially when checking they're only removing invalid trades, and I think they were worried about breaking something if they did too many at once.

2) No idea what happened to GW2spidy (did it affect other price tracking sites too?) or the API, but the price changes are basically down to lots of people playing in level 80 maps. That means more people are gathering level 80 materials like mithril and silk and more people are in-game (either new or returning) to buy things like skins. Also I suspect there was a drop in people crafting (and therefore buying materials) while everyone was playing the new expansion and trying to get to grips with new recipes, materials etc.

3) Me. I don't track prices or really pay any attention to them with a few very rare exceptions, so I have no idea if the current lowest price is stable or if it's going down, or up, or what and with the majority of items I really don't care enough to take the time to check - I just want to get it out of my inventory and get some coin in return. I could list those items for the same price and hope it stays stable long enough for all the ones in front to sell and mine to sell as well...or I could lose a few copper on the sale price and jump to the front of the 'queue' making it far more likely mine will sell even if the price is dropping.

Well that makes sense. If they are actually purging these periodically, I'd guess they should be done by now. But maybe there are new invalid items added or vendor prices adjusted or there are just so many different items and Anet didn't originally create the TP with purging in mind.

I haven't set foot in any PoF map yet , but I can't imagine you get that much more of T5 materials. In LS they have included items like Unstable Metal Chunk which salvage into lower Tier materials so they surely would have done in PoF as well?

From personal experience I can say that selecting any of the 3 lowest sell orders will result in a 90% sell rate within a week and a 99,5% sell rate within half a year. I can't imagine people are so poor they need the gold within a day, so again that makes no sense to me.

You also often see larger jumps in prices which doesn't even make sense from a "I want to be first in queue" standpoint.

@mtpelion.4562 said:

1. The TP did not always have the restriction, and these items are relics from that ancient time of wild west offers. ArenaNet didn't purge them (or at least not all of them). My guess is that issuing that many cancellations all at once would have been... problematic.
2. The API was off for a few days for bug resolution, which is why there is a gap. The huge decline in value for many items is due to the fact that the PoF content dumps out vast quantities of those items.
3. If I list my item for sale for 1c less than you did, my item sells first. If I list my items for sale at the same price as you, your item has to sell before my item does. Thus, I can take a 1c hit on the price to jump the line.

The sentence in #3 "If I list my items for sale at the same price as you, your item has to sell before my item does." isn't true. It SHOULD be true that the first listed should be listed first, but I've proven it's not. I have reported it several times.