Merching packs

Can't speak for others, but I prefer to just buy the gold in the AH myself and use the spend rewards.

The gold price being that much higher than years ago is of no influence really.

If you had left your country in 1970 and hid in the jungle for 45 years, you would now also find bread about 10x more expensive than back then. Still people eat bread. Numbers just changed.

I do think however that the amount of merchants has increased so competition is more fierce and margins are smaller.
You can sell boutique stuff immediately at micro margins (usually around 5%) or buy stuff on sale and resell it after sale for more significant margins. (anywhere between 10 and 60% or so)

VileBlack - Archosaur wrote: »

This is the beauty of inflation. Yes things cost/sell for more, but there is also more coin floating around. The problem I'm more concerned with is that they removed the easiest/most common ways for the masses to acquire coin, meaning less people have it and try to spend more carefully. Of course this doesn't affect everyone, but it does for the general population, which are the majority of buyers. That is why I'm weary of merchanting until the economy restabalizes.

One important thing i have learned from my merching endeavors in PWI, but also real life is that you should not allow fear to hold you back too much. Surely you need to use your brains and always keep your eyes open so you dont fall into some kind of stupid mistake that will cost you everything you have, but surely, just keep faith and keep merching.

I am not on the servers now, but if it looks like the gold price keeps dropping, i would just do the reverse of what i always did in the past 2 years. Whereas id always avoid having coins and have everything in gold or merchandise instead (because of the constant coin devaluation) i would now try to keep a more significant portion of my holdings in coins. At least that part that i would have otherwise kept in gold. (less so the portion that i would have kept in merchandise, as said, dont let fear hold you back too much, merchanting can easilly quadruple your bankroll in a year, the economy wont shift that much that you will still be losing with that kind of profit)

That was just about the general merchants mindset though, now the current situation.

Most of the coin production that has now ended was not made by the masses. Most was made by a moderate amount of dayly botters, a bunch of it by big multiaccounters even. Maybe these people were my main customers of +12 orbs. The masses though, they make their coins from BHs jolly jones and selling farmed mats (TT, warsong) to other people who got their coins from BH and jones. The important exception i would guess is the NW tokens that the masses sell to the select few.

Actually, lowering gold prices should enable these masses to buy more of it. So if above my ideas above make any sense, the markets for medium priced stuff that the masses buy (dorbs 1-7, MOGs, GSTs) shouldnt be much affected. The price and demand for high end stuff not directly bought from the boutique (+12 orbs in catshop, NW tokens and high end items made with them) should go down a bit. Although im sure there are still plenty inpatient cashshoppers who want to buy their +12s off sale so you can make a profit by holding them in your shop for a month for them.

It all balances out, If fewer coins are created, gold prices will go down, markets might shift a bit from the select few rich to the masses who can now buy more from their coins. If gold keeps giong down, maybe PWI will introduce more coin production for the masses. If that happens to come true, it will be the best thing they did to the game in ages (stopping the botting and instead spreading the coinsproduction fairly)

PS: you might have noticed i didnt mention packs so far. I never touched them while merchanting. No doubt there is demand for them, but i think they are a genuine cashshoppers item. Not many free to players want to spend their coins on these. Therefore i think its not where the merching opportunities really lie.

WannaBM - Archosaur wrote: »

I am not on the servers now, but if it looks like the gold price keeps dropping, i would just do the reverse of what i always did in the past 2 years. Whereas id always avoid having coins and have everything in gold or merchandise instead (because of the constant coin devaluation) i would now try to keep a more significant portion of my holdings in coins. At least that part that i would have otherwise kept in gold. (less so the portion that i would have kept in merchandise, as said, dont let fear hold you back too much, merchanting can easilly quadruple your bankroll in a year, the economy wont shift that much that you will still be losing with that kind of profit)

That sounds smart, but I guess it will also depend on what people spend their gold/coins on (what they want to merch). We need more weeks to check but I guess that when there will be MOG sales for examples there could be some inflation again. If you intend to make money by buying MOG on sales from the boutique, then resell after the sales period, you probably still need to save some golds.

All the points above are valid, but one must consider that there is a time to sell and a time to buy stuff you need.

Currently i've noticed (on my server at least), that the goldprice is dropping. At the same time one can see that high end items, like gems and vit stones, are dropping rapidly in the catshops.
This can mean several things, but , imo, it signifies that among the players, a very large group, namely the non-cashshoppers, are running out of money.

When players don't buy items from catshops anymore, and it takes a longer time, catshops will lower their prices. Some won't, but they won't sell anything anymore, which halts the income of those catshop players. The others, who are desperate for cash or become that way, will lower their prices.

Where a vit gem used to cost over 120M, they now go for around 90M, where a garnet gem was sold for 120M they now go as low (in some shops) to 75M.

The introduction of the pill-babies hasn't helped much either. Players now find, that the stone collector which costs 300K each day for each toon above lvl 100, chips away at their well saved or earned cash. count to that the repair bills from running bh's and instances, and you find yourself with a pretty expensive bill each day.

Money runs out (no more dq items adds to that) and players start to lower their prices in order to sell at least something that compensates for that. It is a vicious circle until a group of people start pumping cash into the economy again.

I've seen several catshop that still keep selling their items at the same prices as before. But NONE of those items ever get to be sold. Those that want to sell, have to adapt.
If a goldseller only gets 2M /gold, they're not eager to invest either. Those that have a lot of gold, hang on to it in the hopes it will rise again. And those that want gold, are not willing anymore to spend their diminishing cash on it.

Sthenith - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Where a vit gem used to cost over 120M, they now go for around 90M, where a garnet gem was sold for 120M they now go as low (in some shops) to 75M.

That's not due to less coin available, it's a reflection of the reduced cost to get the item.

People who would merch opened packs, had spreadsheets for their assumed value of return from items gained. That is what would let them know to sell the packs, or open them.

Since gold went down 25% on many servers, the cost of packs went down 25%; which means the items sold should also drop 25%. Otherwise people might as well save up and buy the packs to open themselves.

The only reason people resist dropping item prices, is a mix of stupidity and greed. Theirs if they think they can get the price and they are wrong; the customers if they are dumb enough to buy it; and pure greed like the people who sell rep badges at a 50% mark-up to what someone can buy them for even off sale.

WannaBM - Archosaur wrote: »

Say whut ! b:shocked

Back when it was only anni packs, and later one or two others, people would make spread sheets of the value of each item, the percentage of getting it, and the total value expected from opening them. With a large enough sample, it averages out better obviously.

But people could use that to compare what the value of a pack is opened to sell, vs. the cost of obtaining or the amount they could expect to sell the packs for. So they could load up selling them, and when the values would change they would usually have a large enough stockpile to get their expected return.

Technically you could even reverse it, by finding out the deficit needed to be made up by key items after taking out junk items/tokens for left-over cost. Then compare that to the remaining items and use their % multiplied by their value to see whether the over-all value is under or over the amount.

Basically once you set a base line, you could manipulate the table to tell you what is over-priced, under-priced, high demand, low demand, packs worth more selling/opened, etc. Anything you wanted to know, you had available by just flipping a few variables around.

Though there weren't as many merchants then, so people might have been posting because they weren't worried about much competition. Once merchants started appearing everywhere, people would keep it as a personal reference for competitive pricing.