Slicers hosing other crafters with missions

[Corlantis]

What's needed is a small % charge on the deposit for an item that expires on the GTC.

 

At the moment I can post something to the GTC at vastly inflated prices and 'fish' for a sucker or someone desperate. If it doesn't sell, I can just post it again. It costs me nothing to do this.

 

In markets where demand outweighs supply and all the reasonably- or acceptably-priced items pass through the market pretty quickly, most occasional visitors will only see the overpriced items in stock. This creates the illusion that these are 'normal' prices to anyone who doesn't pay much attention to the market. They then either obliviously play along by overpricing their items or wisely look for other points of trade, like guilds.

 

Meanwhile those of us that deliberately overprice our items are happy to see the market wither, as it means it's more likely that someone will pay over-the-odds for our stuff.

 

Putting a fee for a failed-sale that scales with asking price creates a deterrent to posting and reposting things at inflated prices and holding out for someone willing to pay silly money, because it diminishes the potential return with each failed sale.

 

Nah, people want to make money eventually, or they wouldn't be posting to the GTN.

 

If they will potentially lose money by posting to the GTN, 9 times out of 10 they are going to vendor it, because a guaranteed small profit is better than losing money on a non sale.

 

In games with deterrent fees, often the only items that tend to get listed are the very rare, high level, high demand items or consumables. Even then, the only consumables are often the ones associated with max level or raiding - all the lower level stuff will be harder to come by.

 

So, deterrent fees will shrink the market of available items and make tradeskills even less profitable than they currently are.

[Optionalboss]

What's needed is a small % charge on the deposit for an item that expires on the GTC.

 

At the moment I can post something to the GTC at vastly inflated prices and 'fish' for a sucker or someone desperate. If it doesn't sell, I can just post it again. It costs me nothing to do this.

 

In markets where demand outweighs supply and all the reasonably- or acceptably-priced items pass through the market pretty quickly, most occasional visitors will only see the overpriced items in stock. This creates the illusion that these are 'normal' prices to anyone who doesn't pay much attention to the market. They then either obliviously play along by overpricing their items or wisely look for other points of trade, like guilds.

 

Meanwhile those of us that deliberately overprice our items are happy to see the market wither, as it means it's more likely that someone will pay over-the-odds for our stuff.

 

Putting a fee for a failed-sale that scales with asking price creates a deterrent to posting and reposting things at inflated prices and holding out for someone willing to pay silly money, because it diminishes the potential return with each failed sale.

 

I can see your point, but looking at our server's market, this would kill the already struggling low-level market and probably many others too.

 

Adding a fee for the failed sale would actually discourage people from posting lower level, non-premium items that might not sell for a few days... how many searches of "no item found" would you like to see on the GTN? Your point for the 'posting and reposting' actually will create more of a problem for those who don't try to get silly money out of people... and simply want to sell their extra items and mats. For example, slicing missions determining the entire GTN finance makeup would not be a good thing in my opinion. Overpricing is something that anyone can be free to do and it is up to the buyer to want to pay that or not and I don't think that the majority of people putting items on the GTN are fishing for those suckers... adding a deposit would probably create a problem similar to one WoW's struggles with the AH the entire time- pricing being adjusted for 1) anticipated lost costs in the reposting 2) cornering a section of the market by buying all of something and marking it up knowing that you'll sell it all at an even higher price.

 

The no-cost on the GTN for the items allows anyone to have anything extra that they want to get rid of add their items to the market for whatever value they put up there, my guess being mostly that just right click the item and then hit 'create sale'.

 

In a situation like this, if anything needs to be adjusted, it probably wouldn't be the GTN's policies, it's the mission discoveries and other items like that that are so sought after... and this comes from a 400 slicer.

 

To your specific point, I'd rather be the dick that posts the mission at 30% under what people are trying to gouge out of those suckers and sell my mission quickly, get my creds, and eventually work the costs down that way. This isn't real world economics, this is a game... I'll take your 70% any day, whether it is a fellow slicer trying to corner the market or someone who needs the mission for their craft and likes the deal they see.

[Khadroth]

What's needed is a small % charge on the deposit for an item that expires on the GTC.

 

At the moment I can post something to the GTC at vastly inflated prices and 'fish' for a sucker or someone desperate. If it doesn't sell, I can just post it again. It costs me nothing to do this.

 

In markets where demand outweighs supply and all the reasonably- or acceptably-priced items pass through the market pretty quickly, most occasional visitors will only see the overpriced items in stock. This creates the illusion that these are 'normal' prices to anyone who doesn't pay much attention to the market. They then either obliviously play along by overpricing their items or wisely look for other points of trade, like guilds.

 

Meanwhile those of us that deliberately overprice our items are happy to see the market wither, as it means it's more likely that someone will pay over-the-odds for our stuff.

 

Putting a fee for a failed-sale that scales with asking price creates a deterrent to posting and reposting things at inflated prices and holding out for someone willing to pay silly money, because it diminishes the potential return with each failed sale.

 

Like others have said, this is the wrong approach. You create an uneccesary barrier, a punishment if you will, for those who are already punished by failing to sell their product.

 

The result is easy to predict because it can be seen in any other game with a similar punishment. People vendor items whose profitability doesn't outweigh the cost of the risk in their eyes, and for those that do, they spam chat channels attempting to sell them directly causing players to try and cheat the system. In turn this annoys players into actually avoiding the channels when they aren't interested. Even now you see people spamming general chat to sell items with no cost because they may be able to attract interest and speed up the sale, so all you're doing in the end is incentivizing that behavior while creating yet another money sink for an overburdened crafter. Slicing missions will always be in fairly high demand with few exceptions, so you just end up hurting other crafters who now have a penalty to posting their low demand goods.

 

And again there's nothing wrong with someone overpaying. A competetive market still relies on an intelligent buyer to enforce the competition. When a sucker does pay too much because he didn't bother or have the patience to assess the value of the competition, that's his loss and your gain. Like they say, Buyer Beware.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Khadroth

[GnatB]

Yup, me too. When I see schematics for 2 or 3K I have a big fun.... Schematics grade 22 should be charged at least 50 - 100K. Or even more, this is one time investment, later is only profit.

 

Only problem with this is how common those schematics turn out to be considering how many parts missions you need to churn out to get those purple mats. Each of my slicers has several dozen grade 22 schematics.

 

'Course, I've been stockpiling (instead of selling) the schematics for the augments my alts sell. No reason to help the competition and all that. I realize I won't get as much for 'em once they are more common, but the money I make from augment exclusivity will presumably make up for that.

[venomlash]

I've got Arms, Scav, and Slicing. I've been distributing mission items out to my guildies pro bono. And let me tell you, Slicing is a pretty decent money-spinner, but mission items are ALWAYS overpriced on the GTN.

[Mystry]

Quit your ************. The only way slicers get cash is from selling missions. If a slicer gets a lockbox, they lose money because it costs them more to start the mission than what they get out of the box.

[Pardoz]

Prices of missions have skyrocketed on my server to 30k... .

 

Check the Known Issues page. Look at the part where it says that slicing returns on Abundant/Bountiful/Rich missions are currently broken, making running most Slicing missions a serious money-losing proposition - running a mission for 2k and getting back a lockbox worth 700 credits isn't really viable long-term - meaning there's only one tier six Slicing mission you realistically have much hope of at least breaking even on while you hope for a mission drop. Add to that people running sliced tech parts missions hoping for augment schematics, and supply dries up while demand remains increases as people try to craft crit oranges.

 

Once the bug gets fixed and it becomes feasible to run lockbox missions again without losing your (augmented orange) shirt, expect mission prices to drop again.