Is Everyone on PWI a Swindler?

pezizgood · July 2009

*WARNING* Below is a big block of text. If you hate reading, are incapable of reading, or refuse to read all that is written below, look below the big block of text for a condensed version.

Is Everyone on PWI a Swindler, or is the vast majority of players clueless about item pricing?
I used to play [removed], another free MMORPG, and pre-08 99% the [removed] economy was merchanting--buying low and selling high. On [removed], merchanting was a well-oiled machine. Almost anyone could make money doing it if they knew how to do it. If you wanted to be successfull, you constantly watched markets through other players and through the forums, you memorized item prices for everything, anticipated inflations, etc.
There doesn't seem to be any of this on PWI. To me, the PWI economy seems to be: Set up a catshop and hope people come and buy your items. I'm not writing this to say [removed] is better than PWI. I just want to know if I;m missing something? Do people really buy those 7K priced DQ31 items? They can't possibly be selling if my own DQ31 items don't sell for 2K or less. Do other players really sell their mats for 1K to these players, when I offer to pay 3 to 4 times more? Can't be, and yet it seems to happen. And this really ticks me off. People who either have no clue about the prices of items, or people who intend to rip newbies off seem to drown out all of the other honest pricing players. There are like 500 catshops in WestArch, and I have found 1, literally 1 catshop, that I regularly sell to because he actually buys my mats for a fair price.
Example:
I want to sell some DQ items to other players. I want to sell a DQ31 for 2K, only 700 more what I would get by selling to an NPC. (By selling to an NPC you get half the price of what you would pay to buy, so if an NPC sold DQ items, they would sell for around 2600). Other players, like 500 other players, are selling DQ items for around 4K and up. My items don't sell because buyers think that DQ items cost 4K because that's what other players are selling them for. They don't know that I want to give them a good deal because they can't see my shop among the hundreds of other players trying to sell their items for jacked up prices.
The same goes for mats.
Is there anything, anything at all that I can do to combat the numerous shysters? I've tried using the auction house but that fails miserably. I've tried setting up my shop in different locations but that doesn't help. I've tried going AFK for hours with my shop up, (I am right now, and I just checked it and guess what? No sales). So far, the only way I've made any money is questing, grinding, and selling to NPC's. I've done all right so far, I think. I'm not hurting for money for armor or repairs, but if I want to keep up with other players as far as leveling, I'm gonna need a mount soon, and I don't see getting that anytime soon.
So, am I just ranting, or does this seem to be true? Either way, I would really like to know what I can do to learn the economy of PWI. I'd hate to start paying with real money to buy stuff, or worse, quit playing.

Condensed Version for people who obviously can't read:
I grind.
I farm.
I try to sell drops and mats.
I DO NOT,(repeat DO NOT) want to buy anything. I want to SELL.
People won't buy them for what they're worth.
They overprice when selling, and yet they make a profit.
I underprice when selling, and get no sales.
What can I do differently?

I am also on Dreamweaver.

MiniFreak - Heavens Tear · July 2009

You're just ranting. Not all of us are swindlers but a lot are. Best to just pass up the over inflated cat shops and keep an eye out for bargins or um, heaven forbid, GRIND and FARM for your mats like everyone else does. If you farm while questing, you can end up getting a lot of mats. Makes it longer to do a quest, but in the end you save money and hey, it's not a race to the finish for your level.

pezizgood · July 2009

MiniFreak - Heavens Tear wrote: »

You're just ranting. Not all of us are swindlers but a lot are. Best to just pass up the over inflated cat shops and keep an eye out for bargins or um, heaven forbid, GRIND and FARM for your mats like everyone else does. If you farm while questing, you can end up getting a lot of mats. Makes it longer to do a quest, but in the end you save money and hey, it's not a race to the finish for your level.

I think you missed what the problem is. I am grinding and farming, where do you think I'm getting the DQ items and mats I told you about(please read the post again)?. But I don't want the mats. I want to sell them, and it's hard to sell them for a decent price when
1. Everyone buys them for practically nothing
2. Other players who sell for more than I am selling them drown out my shop.
Please read the post carefully again because I think you missed what I was saying. And I'm not "racing" to level up. I just don't want to be a low level forever. I'd like to PK at somepoint. And Imagine me trying to chase someone who has a mount when I don't.
And I ask again, is there anything I can do to learn the economy of PWI?

Nerithos - Sanctuary · July 2009

If everybody buys them for the price of "practically nothing," then that item's market value is "practically nothing" and you aren't getting swindled - you're simply being paid market value for it.

pezizgood · July 2009

Nerithos - Sanctuary wrote: »

If everybody buys them for the price of "practically nothing," then that item's market value is "practically nothing" and you aren't getting swindled - you're simply being paid market value for it.

If market value is "practically nothing" why are people buying for "practically nothing" and then turning around and selling for twice as much. I've seen catshops buying and selling the same item at the same time. They'll be buying an item for like 1K and then selling it for 4K. It's obvious what they're doing. And they have every right to do it. I just want to know if there's some way to sell my items without having to deal with these people. Like, is there some location where people go to sell and buy reasonably? Is there a sub forum somewhere where I can sell less valuable items. Most people use the official trading forum for very valuable items, so I don't really want to spam that forum with a post selling mats.

killedualot · July 2009

i agree with the pezizgood. most of the catshops in etherblade are ripoffs one of the catshops was selling pig iron for 10k and i only found one good catshop in etherblade and she sold pig iron for 500. and i have to say that runescape has way better priceing than pwi cause i play runescape when im baord

MiniFace - Lost City · July 2009

Wow.. never thought [removed]would ever get mentioned here.
Quit Rs as PvP got ruined, and trade limit.

Anyway, What server are you on? I'm not sure if prices vary from servers, but that could also be part of your problem. If you're on a new server prices will vary alot.. old server around the same I'd imagine.

I haven't had the trouble of trying to sell my mats because I farm alot, then use them. I only do herbs though, so I'm not sure about other mats.

West Arch is Flooded with catshops, its pretty bs if you ask me. Should re-do shops cause lots of people get lag going threw there. I feel sorry for players you cant fly yet and have to walk through that.

CandyCaneNJ - Dreamweaver · July 2009

The catshops and auctions are totally beyond ridiculous. They are buying Guardian Angels for like .80 cents in the boutique and turning around to sell them for 40k. Don't get me started on the Gold trading. The economy stinks because people are willing to shell out the money sadly.

Whenever I rarely ever did a Shop, I had low fair prices and none of the ripoffs that I see now. Archosaur is a cess pool

Nerithos - Sanctuary · July 2009

GAs for 40k are very reasonable. Given gold prices, that's almost exactly what you'd expect one to cost.

Garmr - Harshlands · July 2009

When I have a bulk of unwanted mats, I just AH them. When my manufacturing went up to the level 2 mats, I dumped all my level 1 furs & such into the AH. Starting bid 300g each, buy now 900g each, each lot was about 12-24. Catshop price is usually 400-600g on a good day, 1.5k when people are being stingy. All my mat lots went for the 900g ea price. The fact that they went that quickly kind of indicates that maybe I'm not greedy enough

Daerina - Heavens Tear · July 2009

I think I agree with the OP, i once went around looking for a DQ31 item i needed 15 of, bought 3 or 4 for 3k then someone asked if anyone needed to buy any and offered them to me for almost twice that and claimed to be selling them for that amount all day. It pissed me off because I checked every other cat shop in W arch and couldn't find any more so I had to go with the guy who was ripping me off or wait until later. Selling to vendcats seems useless to me, in a lot of cases I see them buying goods for less than the NPC value hoping to catch people unaware.

but the WORST that i see that really upsets me are the stone sellers near the crazystone npcs, you'll often see someone with a shop that says "roughs 1630", and selling the first 4 for 1630 but the last one is 16,300 hoping to catch someone rushing through buying stones and not realize the last one is 10x the amount of the others.

from my experience, the community on PWI is unfortunately about 70/30, 70% of them seem to be swindlers, KSers, PKers, FB looters, or generally not very helpful or friendly at all, the rest are actually nice people b:lipcurl

pezizgood · July 2009

I've agreed with a lot of what you guys have been saying. What really makes me mad about the whole thing is that you really can't know you're being ripped off without trial and error. I think we've all sold something valuable for a fraction of its worth when we were still learning the game. And that's and honest mistake on our part, but it's just low for someone else who isn't a newbie to knowingly take advantage of the situation.
For a newbie who isn't familiar with pricing, it can be extremely confusing to see items being bought for less than what you can get from selling them to an NPC. It's even more confusing to see people selling DQ items for several thousands. This led me to believe that my DQ items were valuable, but after setting up a catshop for hours, and getting pretty much no sales with trully cheap prices, like 2K for DQ31, I've now realized that catshopping is a waste of time, so I just sell DQ items to NPCs and sell my mats to the one fair catshop in archosaur, maybe even all of Dreamweaver.

eatwithspoons · July 2009

Please chill out with the mentions of other games, I removed 5 instances of it in the first post b:shocked

CandyCaneNJ - Dreamweaver · July 2009

Nerithos - Sanctuary wrote: »

GAs for 40k are very reasonable. Given gold prices, that's almost exactly what you'd expect one to cost.

I totally disagree. The ones who buy them from the Boutique for under a dollar and then sell them at insane prices. It is just plain greed

Tigriss - Heavens Tear · July 2009

Spoon you missed an instance of someone mentioning another game.

eatwithspoons · July 2009

Tigriss - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Spoon you missed an instance of someone mentioning another game.

b:angryb:angryb:angry

FitHitDShan - Sanctuary · July 2009

Daerina - Heavens Tear wrote: »

selling the first 4 for 1630 but the last one is 16,300

I wasn't expecting to find a single thing with which I could agree in this thread, but I was wrong. Would it kill you, PWE, to format the number displays with commas? Such a simple fix that would do so much to reduce the costs of using the various commerce systems in game. Alternatively, we could start a class action suit for causing eye strain.

Everything else in this thread is simply mistaken. Various pricing schemes that extract value from relative differences in inpatience have been criticized when these are, in fact, a healthy thing for an economy that fundamentally trades money for time.

Teh_fishey - Dreamweaver · July 2009

I try to sell at a fair price however some players might be a "swindler". Although the "set up a catshop and hope people buys it" technique is commonly used and is often very effective.

_DarkSeph_ - Sanctuary · July 2009

The economy on PW baffles me. I can set up a cat shop for 4 hours and sell nothing, and some other catshop might sell the same things at double the price.

To be honest, I don't mind the shops trying to buy a little cheaply. It's a legitimate way to try make a little profit and st least if a nub gets caught out, they still end up with a fair amount of coin. What annoys me are the shops that buy so low it's insulting. Like the catshops set up outside towns buying 2-3k value mats at double NPC price, which is about 170 coin.

The overpriced shops are in every game and confuse me. Especially in the auction house. No one is going to buy your NPC equip with a minor crappy ability or two for 1-2 hundred thousand coin. o_O Especially when there's a decent amount of fairly priced, better equips. Even funnier is the rip off shouts via WC. You're spending money on a heap of tele's to try rip off someone for an item only an experienced player could afford? (I saw one guy the last day spamming wc for about 4 hours with "buying battlecat, offering 2.000.000 million coins". lol

notice the way he dragged out 2m to make it look like a big number?)

Half of the swindlers aren't swindlers at all, just unintelligent little kids. b:laugh

FitHitDShan - Sanctuary · July 2009

_DarkSeph_ - Sanctuary wrote: »

The economy on PW baffles me. I can set up a cat shop for 4 hours and sell nothing, and some other catshop might sell the same things at double the price.

The cat shop system makes for high search costs (which I guess is intended to push people to pay the auction house fees). When search costs are high, random chance has relatively more to say about which seller gets customer and there is less constraint on price from competing sellers. Some sellers invest in reputation (low prices at same spot all the time), but most cannot. So, best you can do is make your shop more enticing with a better name or location for the items you have in stock. And, consider raising your price if underbidding is not generating sales.

_DarkSeph_ - Sanctuary wrote: »

To be honest, I don't mind the shops trying to buy a little cheaply. It's a legitimate way to try make a little profit and st least if a nub gets caught out, they still end up with a fair amount of coin. What annoys me are the shops that buy so low it's insulting. Like the catshops set up outside towns buying 2-3k value mats at double NPC price, which is about 170 coin.

I often wonder if anyone really sells to these guys. It may be that some people are so inpatient that they were going to NPC mats, but why would they have bothered to collect mats in the first place? I suspect, instead, that these shops are noobs themselves who saw that lots of people impose a large convenience fee and did not know how high the buy side still needs to be to get mats in.

_DarkSeph_ - Sanctuary wrote: »

The overpriced shops are in every game and confuse me. Especially in the auction house. No one is going to buy your NPC equip with a minor crappy ability or two for 1-2 hundred thousand coin.

It is funny to see the prices in the AH swing due to every new seller looking at the prevailing "prices" to set their own. This is kind of the opposite effect from the cat shop one - all the sellers have perfect information about their competition and hard to get information about what the buyers will be willing to pay. Hint to AH rookies: look at how much time is on the items at particular prices.

Sidel - Dreamweaver · July 2009

Your post is a joke man, I hit level 26, had 2 mil and bought a swift onyx jaguar which I found was over priced after the fact... one posted for 1.8mil and 1.5 mil.

was i pissed? hell no! I made 2 mil in about a week.

To be honest I've never seen so much opportunity to make coin in a game. PW has almost a 100% free market, they even let us AH CS gold!

As for you rant on prices... you should look at CS items to give yourself an idea of what an item is worth... 1 gold=140000 coins~ I think that pig iron is 60silver for 20.

take 140000 x.60 = 84000 devide by 20 = 4200 (which is the real value of lazy man's pig iron)

If you arn't paying 4200 for pig iron then someone else is doing the work for you. Since anyone can go get pig iron for free then it's up to those people to set a fair price. I agree 10k would be considered expensive and 500 would be dirt cheap.

The real questions about your cat shop is how much are you selling your mats for? 4200 is a stone cold fair deal, but people would like a deal... so some shops sell it for 2000-3000 and most new players can afford that (unless they have a main).

All you need to do is look at all the other cat shops in the area and sell for less than they do and you will be cleaned out in half a day.

In fact I consider us very lucky to even get cat shops... I just let my computer run all day and night and a makes coin. sure it cost a bit of electricity but you should queue up some downloads and get an EE CPU to make yourself feel better about it all

The other thing you should do is sell items where people need them... chi next to genie guys, iron next to tailors/smith.

I'm rolling up on my 3rd mil and i'm going to be saving it for some bag slots...so I can become a super farmer. Flying looks kool but I'm sure all the mats are on the ground

If your not searching for mats to sell then expect to be poor.

The other thing you must do is set a goal and curb your spending...it would be nice to buy all the weapons and abilities you see but I try to use everything I wear from drops and I only take abilities that I think I need right now. If you want to skill up some crafting then go FARM your own mats buying mats to skill up is a bad idea unless you are already rich lol

The other thing you can do is grind with a buddy... it makes it a hell of a lot less boring. If you find a material you need and don't want to level up... feed your exp to your genie. Then you can sit at good drop percentage.

mastas · July 2009

if you don't like the price of the catshop then just go get the items ur self

pezizgood · July 2009

mastas wrote: »

if you don't like the price of the catshop then just go get the items ur self

PLEASE LEARN TO READ

I'm going to clarify, because people obviously can't read.
I grind.
I farm.
I try to sell drops and materials.
People won't buy them for what they're worth.
They overprice when selling, and yet they make a profit.
I underprice when selling, and get no sales.
What can I do differently?

IceJazmin - Heavens Tear · July 2009

pezizgood wrote: »

PLEASE LEARN TO READ

I'm going to clarify, because people obviously can't read.
I grind.
I farm.
I try to sell drops and materials.
People won't buy them for what they're worth.
They overprice when selling, and yet they make a profit.
I underprice when selling, and get no sales.
What can I do differently?

Your problem can be summurized in 3 words
Location
Location
Location

DarKye - Sanctuary · July 2009

IceJazmin - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Your problem can be summurized in 3 words
Location
Location
Location

This is very much true.

And this is also why I personally don't bother trying to catshop DQ items.. Those quests are random, so there's never a certain location where people will have to go through. (Other than the Director at the beginning/end)

In my experience, equipments should be sold through the AH, and mats should be sold near a NPC that allows people to forge stuff with whatever you're selling. The rest is just playing the waiting game and having a bit of luck.

pezizgood · July 2009

Sidel - Dreamweaver wrote: »

As for you rant on prices... you should look at CS items to give yourself an idea of what an item is worth... 1 gold=140000 coins~ I think that pig iron is 60silver for 20.

take 140000 x.60 = 84000 devide by 20 = 4200 (which is the real value of lazy man's pig iron)

If you arn't paying 4200 for pig iron then someone else is doing the work for you. Since anyone can go get pig iron for free then it's up to those people to set a fair price. I agree 10k would be considered expensive and 500 would be dirt cheap.

The real questions about your cat shop is how much are you selling your mats for? 4200 is a stone cold fair deal, but people would like a deal... so some shops sell it for 2000-3000 and most new players can afford that (unless they have a main).

All you need to do is look at all the other cat shops in the area and sell for less than they do and you will be cleaned out in half a day.

I know the prices. I've been constantly checking and comparing gold to coins for items in the boutique. I have seen people buying mats that should be several thousand for, I quote you, "dirt cheap." And they're not buying for dirt cheap because they want a good deal, they do it to sell the stuff back to other players for an overly inflated price. And they have that right. I'm just saying that I want two things.
1. More players who buy for a fair price.
2. Less players who sell for a ridiculous price. Not so I can buy, but so that they don't jack up the prices. People price their items by lokking around. When a lot of people sell for high, others see these prices, and think that they can sell for a high price too. Next, everyone is trying selling for ridiculous prices, but no one is buying, so you get massive amounts of catshops and a decent seller like me can't attract buyers.

Example:
I want to sell some DQ items to other players. I want to sell a DQ31 for 2K, only 700 more what I would get by selling to an NPC. (By selling to an NPC you get half the price of what you would pay to buy, so if an NPC sold DQ items, they would sell for around 2600). Other players, like 500 other players, are selling DQ items for around 4K and up. My items don't sell because buyers think that DQ items cost 4K because that's what other players are selling them for. They don't know that I want to give them a good deal because they can't see my shop among the hundreds of other players trying to sell their items for jacked up prices.
The same goes for mats.

Sidel, everything else you said was helpful, thank you.

Anders - Lost City · July 2009

PROTIP: Sell good monster drops from grinding overnight.

pezizgood · July 2009

IceJazmin - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Your problem can be summurized in 3 words
Location
Location
Location

Yeah, i've been working on finding better places to sell. I've noticed that the one guy I always sell to is always in the same place. That makes it much easier to find him. And i've noticed that herbs are always sold near apothecaries. I've given up on selling DQ items to players. What about mirage stones? Where do people go to buy those? Near an elder maybe?

pezizgood · July 2009

Anders - Lost City wrote: »

PROTIP: Sell good monster drops from grinding overnight.

I've thought about that, but I didn't think it would be worth it. My computer is in my room and loud, so it would be hard to sleep. And I didn't think many players played, much less shopped at night. But I guess there are players from other countries.

Anders - Lost City · July 2009

mmhm, I sold a +2 vit +1% crit ring overnight for 300k
got it from grinding b:thanks

zaaphiel · July 2009

I have spied a HH gold mat in AH for 30.000.000 who the **** in there right mind would buy it,cos i wont and i know its value.. and i have also seen over inflated prices for mats in AH. These idiots are clearly in fantasy land....i have even seen a 1Mill extacy card trying to be sold for 1.3 Mill to many swindlers out there.....simple as that

Is Everyone on PWI a Swindler?

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