Does ArenaNet manipulate trading post prices?

[GlenRoss.8570]

I'm seeing a broad, downward push in certain areas that looks suspiciously like someone dumping to rebaseline those parts of the economy.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Unlikely. Which item are you referring to?

[GlenRoss.8570]

Several moderately high cost items. It would take a long post to detail what I'm seeing and it can all be explained away. There are just some curious patterns that would be difficult for a single player to pull off and improbable for a confluence of multiple players to have done.

Edited June 13, 2021 by GlenRoss.8570
clarification

[AgentMoore.9453]

I doubt it. If memory serves, their last game economist left and they currently do not have one. It's a lot more likely that players are playing their usual flipping games or a number of hyper-rich "barons" are adjusting the market to serve their needs. Or nothing's amiss at all, and these are just natural market trends based on changing supply and demand.

 

When ArenaNet wants to impact the market or material scarcity, they implement events and collections that pull or push these things in or out of circulation. Fiddling with the market directly only happens when they remove a cheating player (and all of their illicit trade activity) from the game, and even then it's just a side effect.

[GlenRoss.8570]

All possible. And if it is Anet, they're within their rights to do it, but it's a bit unsettling.

[Zephire.8049]

Odds are it's either natural market trends or some TP barons decided to change the market. The main way Anet affects the TP is by adding other sources of item(s) and/or adding a recipe that requires item(s) that are deemed too cheap, not generating a bunch of new items. The closest they got to directly affecting the TP is when they banned the baron who put up a price wall of Mystic Coins and that wall was removed as a result of the ban.

 

Also keep in mind that players are coming back after being away for years so are going through their inventories and selling things for immediate gold as they start playing again, which can look like a concerted effort to affect the market but those items were already in-game to begin with.

 

Without knowing which items you're referring to it's hard to say, but it's much more likely that it's another player doing it instead of Anet.

[Omega.6801]

Well, Anet does "manipulate" the market by designing the game's economy, i.e. how much of a given item you need to craft X or how often material Y drops from mobs. I doubt Anet manipulates the market by doing stuff on the TP. However, I doubt anybody on the forums can give you an answer that's not baseless speculation so, how should we know?

[GlenRoss.8570]

One example I observed is in celestial exotic armor. A lot of armor has been dropped in at well-below market price. An earlier drop was overcome by the market and prices didn't change much so now, another, broader drop has been inserted and the prices, across the board are dropping by several gold. The timing and manner of the change caused my cynicism to tingle. The drops were very similar and seemed strategic.
Anyway, I'll drop out on that. There's no conclusion to be drawn. It's intriguing, though.

[Ayrilana.1396]

I looked and a lot of the celestial exotic gear is selling substantially higher than the cost to craft. It also appears to be the most profitable way to convert charged quartz into gold. This could simply be someone being dumb and flooding the market hoping to make some gold or they’re flooding the market in an attempt to bring down the prices. 
 

Celestial draconic plate sells for 27G and costs about 7G to make. That’s over 16G in profit from just two charged quartz. It’s also the armor piece that I found to have had a larger number of sell listings added recently relative to the others. 

Edited June 13, 2021 by Ayrilana.1396

[Zephire.8049]

What Ayrilana said. It's far cheaper to craft celestial exotic gear than it is to buy it. Even with the Hardened Leather, that's 15-20 gold difference between crafting it yourself or buying from the trading post so most players will opt to craft it.

 

There's also more and more stat-selectable pieces of gear that players get from achievements and even the trading post (e.g. the charr masks, ice golem's helm, etc.) and celestial is a niche stat so generally once a player has a full set on one character, they don't need any more unless they run celestial builds on multiple characters.

[b k.1648]

2 hours ago, GlenRoss.8570 said:

One example I observed is in celestial exotic armor. A lot of armor has been dropped in at well-below market price. An earlier drop was overcome by the market and prices didn't change much so now, another, broader drop has been inserted and the prices, across the board are dropping by several gold. The timing and manner of the change caused my cynicism to tingle. The drops were very similar and seemed strategic.
Anyway, I'll drop out on that. There's no conclusion to be drawn. It's intriguing, though.

 

The obvious reason why this might be happening is excess quartz supply from the population boom in Dry Top.

[Danikat.8537]

If Anet do directly influence the market they have never admitted to it, or even hinted at it and have been subtle enough that it's impossible for us to tell it's not players doing it. When we know they wanted to change the value of items they've done it by introducing new sources or sinks, or change the values of existing ones and announce those changes in the patch notes.

 

It is possible for some developers to create items and gold. Support can do it if someone deletes or loses an item, and years ago I saw someone ask a dev who was in-game if they could just make themselves legendaries and they said some developers have access to special commands but every use of it is logged and they'll have to explain what they did and why so they can't just do it for fun. (I imagine it's like the command line in other games, which can do a lot of useful stuff or totally mess things up, which would explain why it's restricted even among staff.)

 

So hypothetically they could spawn a bunch of items and list them for sale to bring the price down, or spawn a bunch of gold to buy stuff to push the price up. But I don't think it would be very practical for them to do it that way. They'd have to spend a lot of time monitoring it and probably spawning more gold or items to actually make the change take hold, and that could lead to problems with flooding the game with spontaneously generated gold.

 

By comparison it's probably easier for them to change the sources or the recipes and then let players do the trading.

[Rukia.4802]

They do in the sense that they control the necessity of materials in crafting recipes, but mostly it is player manipulated .

[Khisanth.2948]

Maybe if they had more money than they know what to do with but we already know that their solution to the the "having too much money" problem is to burn it on side projects.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Usually Anet announces when they change drop rates or crafting requirements.  So yes, they do manipulate the market, but they're quite open about it when they do.  

[Solvar.7953]

The other indirect way is that balance changes can change the desirable or certain item sets.  If after a balance change, X is no longer as desirable, and Y is now desirable, the components to make X will go down in price, and components to make Y go up in price.

I've certainly seem some materials have a very steady price for a while, and then go up (and continue upward) after a balance change increases demand.

 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Regarding what's happening with Celestial Exotic gear, is because recently the devs heavily buffed it by adding Concentration and Expertise, making it one of the best filler sets to add to other builds to round them out, while previously it was unuseable in any build that needed Boon Duration/Condition Duration, and thus was mainly used to round out pure power/condi builds.

 

As a result of this, many players moved some of their Ascended gear to Celestial (which requires only an insignia to stat-change, not a full Exotic), effectively drying up the demand for the Exotics except for new players who don't have Ascended gear.

 

This wasn't the case before because it was such a niche set, but its not anymore. Its in heavy demand in many builds to fill in a few pieces here and there and tweak numbers, and its now one of the best sets for WvW for some classes hands-down. (But again, this creates no demands for the Exotics because of Legacy/Triumphant armor being stat-select.)

 

Its also reduced demand for other Exotic sets with Concentration/Expertise.

Edited June 14, 2021 by Hannelore.8153

[keenedge.9675]

Prices are LOW because there is NO demand - yet.

 

There are also subtle ways they increase the value of mats in the TP with NPCs that want materials to buy event credit or loot-boxes during a festival.

 

Alternately, Drizzlewood has generated a lot of extra low level mats that have saturated the TP in the face of NO demand.

Edited June 14, 2021 by keenedge.9675

[IndigoSundown.5419]

Occam's Razor.

 

The simplest explanation for changes in prices is supply and demand.  ANet can manipulate both and does so regularly, every time they add a mat faucet or sink to the game.  They can also cause "dumping" by introducing things to the gem store that some hoarder(s) cannot do without, and thus dump hoarded mats for gold.

 

Players can have an indirect effect on supply every time they complain that the game is not rewarding.  ANet response to such complaints, when they do respond, has always been to introduce another faucet.

[Obtena.7952]

IF there is a reason for Anet to manipulate market prices, depressing them is most certainly not the direction they would choose to do it. 

Edited June 14, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[Astralporing.1957]

Does Anet make actions that impact TP? Yes, all the time. Are they doing it with the intention of impacting TP? Yes, sometimes. Is it done by directly selling/buying stuff on TP? No, it's not. When they want to adjust prices of certain commodities, they have far better methods to do that - by introducing a new source or sink for said material.

[Mungo Zen.9364]

As mentioned above, ANet has implemented systems to add or remove tradable items and materials.

 

Specific examples include the DRM mats sink for buying the currency/tokens.  However before that, they added Drizzlewood which actually flooded the market with a lot of mats.  At the same time, collections in Drizzlewood require a lot of mats for crafting.  There are vendors at festivals (Festival of Four Winds, maybe others) where you can trade mats for other items or currency.  But then there are also events that push players to zones with very good rewards (like the current one putting many players into Silverwastes).  

 

I would go so far as to suggest that with any major event (Festivals, Rush Weeks, Content Updates etc) offers players ways to farm or sink mats or items and that ANet is not passive in implementing these.

[sorudo.9054]

well, they do but more by changing the loot table which in turn manipulates the TP, it's just that they change the field while the players do the rest.