Like who honestly thought this was a good idea?
People that had crafting mats that they werent able to sell at their own decent server prices before the update are now stuck with them being worth about 1/2 or 1/3…
Furthermore, instead of having 1 or 2 idiots that like to undercut-scam 24/7, you now how the entire region of these clowns to deal with…
I have been observing several of the current crafting mats and have seen several people that didnt double check their prices, so they posted like 500mats for sometimes 15g less then they would have gotten.
And since blizz doesnt consider “undercutters” scammers, they do not feel like they have to do anything about this…
Like hello?!? the AH is an unregulated market, so of course people are going to pull some BS, and therefore people are going to get screwed over, so just revert the regionwide-change, so the undercut-clowns are split up more
Because they aren’t? You’re free to list your mats at whatever price you deem reasonable, that’s kind of the point of a free market. Mats don’t have a base value like a crafted piece of gear that costs minimum raw mats + a fee for crafting it.
If i gather a node of ore, then the price is literally just what i value my time at over the period of time it took to gather and post. If i consider my time free, then why not undercut all the time since my profits are infinite then.
Thats the point though… technically its not a scam yes, but this change is incredibly bad for newcommers and people that may not be paying perfect attention.
So from a technical/definition standpoint you are correct, morally and overall benefit for the players its a sh*tshow
The ones buying on the AH obviously.
I think you misunderstand. There is indeed a scam that involve someone buying an item for 300g, posting it for 100g, and then hoping that tons of people will post at 100g to beat that price, then quickly buying all those and reposing them for 300g again.
They have no intention of actually selling at 100g - so in that sense it is kind of a scam. It exploits the way the default AH posting price is calculated.
Sure, there are a ton of things you can do to manipulate the markets, and especially to mess with automated trading like TSM. But undercutting isn’t wrong or bad in and of itself.
I agree. And while it might technically not be illegal, as players are able to post items at any price, it is definitely morally questionable…
And since the regions are combined now, the amount of people posting like this increased
hi
there are baiters that list shrouded cloth for 1s to around 25s and grab the cloth that unaware sellers put in lightening speed, this is not what undercutting should be, its just wrong, I think a certain addon should be banned.
Undercutting no, but pricedumping for example “Elethium Ore” to 1G 4S instead of the usual 20ish G to then make profit of people that might not be paying perfect attention is highly questionable
It doesn’t just mess with TSM, it messes with the default UI.
Market manipulation is not a good thing. These kinds of volatility spikes is what MSRP’s and futures try to fix - by allowing the manufacturer to agree on the selling and/or retail price well ahead of schedule you avoid this - though of course scalping can mess even with that.
In a normal market, if you pull this trick, the amount of vendors will simply leave most people buying at the old price and not trusting your little grift store, and therefore the value stays the same as the investment is lost. But WoW’s AH is a single output market, so it’s vulnerable to some things a normal free market is not.
Speaking of which, scalping is also very common on the AH; someone buys tons of items to resell at a higher price thus effectively driving markets up by throwing their own investment power around. This is also similar to what George Soros, for instance, does. He did it so well he broke the British pound!
I don’t know what to do about this but I would definitely suggest that the default UI should be able to spot this somehow, but it’s complicated - a game of cat and mouse.
wats good? 
Well in the real world of course there are protections against this, and there are regulations against price gouging for example. It just doesn’t feel like it translates into wow very well, price gouging laws are there for prices of necessities like water and food during catastrophes, not luxury graphics cards.
What would the equivalent be for wow? How do you determine what is a need for players in the economy and what is a luxury? Because if everyone was honest everything is a need, everyone needs everything, so why not just regulate everything? Get rid of player transaction and the AH and have a weekly allowance vendor in the capital that gives every player a provision bag of gems, enchants, food, at every reset.
A free market is a kiss/curse dynamic, you either learn to live with it and don’t get fooled twice or scrap it entirely.
You have my seal of approval. You may now continue to discuss this
Fair point, however there should then be a system to limit or exclude people that are intentionally trying to trick people out of their gold.
Im not saying the AH should be regulated completely, but this change just opened up the pool of players that these pricegougers can negatively affect 10 fold.
It’s not about what is a need and what is not - it’s about market manipulation of commodities in particular. A commodity being an item that exists many, many, many times over in exact replicate and which can be bought and sold in large quantities. So things like cloth, ore, leather etc. - and in the real world this includes both luxury and manufacturing items and food - all the way from peas to gold to zinc and hides and leather and so on.
The way these markets work is there are millions of vendors, and the price that things are bought and sold at is collected by broker firms who then output guidelines as to the average price in the market so that people can find out if the vendor they have found is cheap or expensive.
WoW has ONE vendor with everyone selling through that vendor, and therein lies the problem because anyone can just insert any random number as the latest price worldwide and the broker is basically an idiot which takes that price and says it’s the market price, then encourages you to post at that price.
Sure, it’s not the exact same, which is why it’s not comparable really. WoW for example has no limit on the amount of materials, which might limit the prices of real world items that exist in a fixed quantity, items in wow are going to behave more like cryptocurrency or stocks since there is no cap on how many of them exist.
If every player out there went out and mined elethium ore for 24 hours a day for a year there isn’t a point in time where elethium would ‘‘stop’’ existing, volume is only regulated by either deleting or selling the same raw mats to a vendor.
Well, that’s a little complicated indeed. WoW indeed has no limit on the amount of available raw material, however it does have time investment on collecting that raw material. (droprates, respawn timers, etc.)
This is also why bots are so damaging to the game - the only thing regulating prices is time investment to collect, and bots… well, they really have A LOT of time.
But that really has nothing to do with this clever little exploit.
It’s just plain market mechanics. Players will need to learn to check price history.
Stock brokers have adapted to such attempts, EVE Online players have adapted to such attempts, now it’s the same game with the WoW AH. Players need to learn market mechanics.
What’s happening there is simply an attempt at a long squeeze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_squeeze
Shorties are putting up sell orders to fool participants into selling their stuff before it loses too much value. The actual danger of such a long squeeze is that if it becomes a feedback loop then the prices won’t recover and the Shortie won’t be able to sell higher. However in real markets the Shortie usually has himself secured somehow.
As long as people fall for that trap that trick will work and unfortunately it is legitimate. But once that trick becomes known its yield will decrease and we’ll have proper market prices.
A mechanic that could counter this would be the ability to post buy-orders. They would capture such low sell orders immediately.
A fool and his money…
Or cloth in this case.