Something I just don't understand: One copper price ... in the wrong column!

[Daddicus.6128]

I see this every day, and I simply don't understand how it can happen. Someone will undercut the current price by a copper. That's just fine. But, they don't actually undercut the price. They set a sell price one copper higher than the current "buy instantly" price.

The worst part is I see hundreds of items for sale, all at one copper more than what they could have sold them for immediately.

It seems people are trying to be clever, but showing incredible sloppiness. Tonight I was selling 40 intricate totems. I saw prices of 2.48, 2.49, and 2.51c. But, the current buyer price was 2.47c. The real price should have been 3.24c, if they wanted to undercut the price by a copper. I bought almost 300 totems and immediately turned them around for the right price, netting nearly a gold. The worst part was that the other guy kept doing it. It was only 40-something for sale initially, but every time I bought a load, more would appear.

Now, I understand that the columns are mislabeled. But, you don't consult the column when you're selling (or buying). You should look at the prices. I'll never understand.

[Daddicus.6128]

Someone is at it again. Mithril ingots. 264 available for ... drum roll please ... 1.07, when they could have sold them at 1.06 instantly.

Worse: someone ELSE did the same thing at 1.09, and they're selling 2500 of them.

It's changing AS I TYPE: the guy selling at 1.09 now has 7000 of them for sale. It's been going up in increments of 250, so this is probably all one person ... losing their shorts. Now 9000. Incredible!

[VDAC.2137]

It is a strange oversight to price just above buy rather than just below sell, especially when one is selling so much, but their loss, your gain! ;) Not much reason to sell at a buy instant price though (except when the two are a copper or so apart) since you don’t save on any of the fees so why not get a bit extra?

[Daddicus.6128]

Crazy.

I hope the guy reads this. Because he finally stopped posting sales at 10,750, all around 15c less than he was really trying to shoot for.

I can understand selling for the instant price. If you're impatient, or if you need money immediately, etc. I never do it.

But, to gamble for a single penny: the guy has already lost money, because the actual price dropped by 3c while he was posting his sales. People have posted below his price and sold, all while he was still clicking sell.

[Tommo Chocolate.5870]

I think you can only speculate as to why someone would do this. Maybe they don't really know how the trading post works, maybe they're doing it late at night and are really tired, maybe they're not very numerate, maybe they think they're doing something clever but haven't thought it through, etc.

@Daddicus.6128 said:Now, I understand that the columns are mislabeled.

I can never remember which of 'buy' and 'sell' is which, since in both cases there's one player buying and another selling, and either of those players could be me. Thankfully, in the game the columns are also labelled 'Ordered' and 'Available', which makes much more sense to me - but there are several websites that don't do that (e.g. GW2Efficiency, GW2BLTC).

[casualkenny.9817]

this might allow him to sell his full stack at a fixed almost-sellitnow price, without having the price decrease as the buy orders get depleted. Plus buy-order ppl are bound to buy that straight out, so it's a guaranteed fast sale for fast moving things. Dunno, shrug

(ie a maximised pseudo-sellnow)

[Cyninja.2954]

@Daddicus.6128 said:Someone is at it again. Mithril ingots. 264 available for ... drum roll please ... 1.07, when they could have sold them at 1.06 instantly.

Worse: someone ELSE did the same thing at 1.09, and they're selling 2500 of them.

It's changing AS I TYPE: the guy selling at 1.09 now has 7000 of them for sale. It's been going up in increments of 250, so this is probably all one person ... losing their shorts. Now 9000. Incredible!

If you want to sell a stack bigger than what the instant sell can manage, you are forced to sell in multiple clicks, first part of your stack to instant, then to the next lower, etc.

By pricing 1 copper above the instant sell price, he can put his entire stock on the TP and guarantee almost instant sell, without the extra hassle. This becomes more of an issue when selling in bulk.

[mercury ranique.2170]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:Someone is at it again. Mithril ingots. 264 available for ... drum roll please ... 1.07, when they could have sold them at 1.06 instantly.

Worse: someone ELSE did the same thing at 1.09, and they're selling 2500 of them.

It's changing AS I TYPE: the guy selling at 1.09 now has 7000 of them for sale. It's been going up in increments of 250, so this is probably all one person ... losing their shorts. Now 9000. Incredible!

If you want to sell a stack bigger than what the instant sell can manage, you are forced to sell in multiple clicks, first part of your stack to instant, then to the next lower, etc.

By pricing 1 copper above the instant sell price, he can put his entire stock on the TP and guarantee almost instant sell, without the extra hassle. This becomes more of an issue when selling in bulk.

^^ This!

Another scenario would be the following (times are made up)

1h45.30: Player A orders 250 mithril ingots for 1s5c ach1h55.10: 240 mithril ingots are sold, 10 are left in the order. Player B opens the TP and sees the order for 10 ingots1h55.15: Player C opens the TP and sees the order for 10 ingots as well1h55:17: Player B sells 7 ingots using the 10 ingots order from Player A1h55:19: Player C sells 7 ingots using the 10 ingots order from player A. As there are only 3 more needed in the order, 4 are automatically put on to sell for 1s5c each, which is currently 1c above the buy direct price.

[Zaklex.6308]

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:Someone is at it again. Mithril ingots. 264 available for ... drum roll please ... 1.07, when they could have sold them at 1.06 instantly.

Worse: someone ELSE did the same thing at 1.09, and they're selling 2500 of them.

It's changing AS I TYPE: the guy selling at 1.09 now has 7000 of them for sale. It's been going up in increments of 250, so this is probably all one person ... losing their shorts. Now 9000. Incredible!

If you want to sell a stack bigger than what the instant sell can manage, you are forced to sell in multiple clicks, first part of your stack to instant, then to the next lower, etc.

By pricing 1 copper above the instant sell price, he can put his entire stock on the TP and guarantee almost instant sell, without the extra hassle. This becomes more of an issue when selling in bulk.

^^ This!

Another scenario would be the following (times are made up)

1h45.30: Player A orders 250 mithril ingots for 1s5c ach1h55.10: 240 mithril ingots are sold, 10 are left in the order. Player B opens the TP and sees the order for 10 ingots1h55.15: Player C opens the TP and sees the order for 10 ingots as well1h55:17: Player B sells 7 ingots using the 10 ingots order from Player A1h55:19: Player C sells 7 ingots using the 10 ingots order from player A. As there are only 3 more needed in the order, 4 are automatically put on to sell for 1s5c each, which is currently 1c above the buy direct price.

This is most likely what is happening, I'm one of those people that do instant sell for almost anything on the TP(I don't need the gold and obviously don't need what I'm selling), but for those rare times when I do get something that is worth several hundred gold on the TP I usually price my item half way between the highest ordered price and the lowest sell price, it's a happy medium and I know that sometimes those items are bought by the TP flippers. I don't care where my gold comes from, as long as someone buys it.

[Daddicus.6128]

I'm not buying it. It happens far too often to be such a specialized end-case.

[Solvar.7953]

I've sometime done the instant sell of a stack of items, and then the game comes back and says 'your items have been listed for sale' - presumably at what was the instant buy price someone put.My guess is this a race condition or error, in that that game finds enough of the given item for sale at someones instant buy price, and the new highest instant price is 1 cp less than what it was before. So the remainder of my items get listed for that 1c difference.I usually do an instant sell if the price difference between that as the current lowest listed sell price is not much. I'm not going to worry about a silver here and there. Plus, some commodities keep going lower in price, so if I don't do an instant sell, it may never sell.

[Daddicus.6128]

That's plausible. But, it can't explain the number I see. Such a situation can only happen once per set of sales. The one guy sold 40 stacks. If he had been receiving that warning, he would have only sold one pile at that price. I've done that myself. Kick myself for it, but then move on ... with the right price.

[Skotlex.7580]

@Daddicus.6128 said:That's plausible. But, it can't explain the number I see. Such a situation can only happen once per set of sales. The one guy sold 40 stacks. If he had been receiving that warning, he would have only sold one pile at that price. I've done that myself. Kick myself for it, but then move on ... with the right price.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people used macros/tools to help them handle multiple stack trades on the market. So a mistake for one stack becomes a mistake for all listed stacks. <_<

[Trise.2865]

Not everyone has your apparent business savvy. Sometimes folks just want to get rid of stuff... especially with all the doom and gloom and "sky is falling" nonsense being thrown around.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

If players want to 'lose Gold', we should care why?I can't say I've seen that very much; it's usually 1 copper less than the lowest Sell offer. Or, one copper more than the highest Buy offer.

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

@Daddicus.6128 said:I'm not buying it. It happens far too often to be such a specialized end-case.

Not really. It's a shared market between NA and EU so there's always going to be someone who's bound to be buying regardless of time. And considering there's no Asia region server outside of China, the Asia region players are in the NA/EU servers meaning there's a 24 hour player base across the globe so there's always someone who's buying and someone who will sell 1 copper higher than the instant sell price.

[Rukario.1695]

This will happen any time someone completely satisfies a buy order (or tries to sell at that price when someone has already satisfied it before them.)

Rather then it jumping to the next buy order to instantly sell, instead it goes to the Listing Order column. (at the same price as the buy order you were trying to instantly sell for.)

Because a lot of people do instant sales instead of listing it themselves, they ultimately never notice they listed it, or simply do not care.

--

The other instance is that someone wants to instant sell but doesn't feel like selecting the next buy order, so they just sell it all at one copper above the highest order; this lets them list all of their stacks without micromanaging the window.

[Danikat.8537]

One other possibility which I've not seen mentioned yet is that it's actually someone trying to buy that item. I've been told that some people will list a relatively small number of an item they're trying to buy at just above the highest buy order, hoping to trick sellers into choosing to sell instantly. If you only look at the top two listings and there's only 1 copper difference between them there's a good chance you'll decide there's no point listing it for sale and just sell it to the highest buyer, even if it's only actually one sell listing at that price and all the rest are much higher.

Even if someone buys the items they have listed all they need to do is put more up. They will of course lose coin to unnecessary TP fees, but if they're buying large amounts of low cost items (like most crafting materials) the fees may be negligible, especially compared to the money saved by putting in a buy order instead of meeting sellers prices.

I've not done it myself, because I'm never in that much of a rush to get my buy orders filled, but I've had various people recommend that as a way of getting items quickly and cheaply.

@Daddicus.6128 said:That's plausible. But, it can't explain the number I see. Such a situation can only happen once per set of sales. The one guy sold 40 stacks. If he had been receiving that warning, he would have only sold one pile at that price. I've done that myself. Kick myself for it, but then move on ... with the right price.

Do you know it's one guy? The TP is game-wide; all players on all servers across both the NA and EU region share it, so at any given time there's dozens, potentially thousands of people using it. It's possible therefore you're seeing multiple different people selling items, rather than one person constantly listing the same things over and over.

[Daddicus.6128]

@Skotlex.7580 said:

@Daddicus.6128 said:That's plausible. But, it can't explain the number I see. Such a situation can only happen once per set of sales. The one guy sold 40 stacks. If he had been receiving that warning, he would have only sold one pile at that price. I've done that myself. Kick myself for it, but then move on ... with the right price.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people used macros/tools to help them handle multiple stack trades on the market. So a mistake for one stack becomes a mistake for all listed stacks. <_<

Now THAT makes a lot of sense.

Of course, since that would be a violation of the terms of service, I am rapidly losing my empathy for these. :)