Undercutting

[kaynide]

Re: Buy orders and sell orders/How it works in GW2

Wind crystals are on sale:
1,000 at 75 gil
another 1,000 available at 100 gil
a final 5,000 at 500 gil

Bill makes a new sell order: 100 wind crystals at a price of 50 gil, currently making a new lowest price.

Ted puts in a buy order: 5,000 crystals at 50 gil.

Then, Don puts in a buy order: 5,000 wind crystals at a price of 200 gil.

What happens:

Bill’s 100 crystals sell first, at 50g each, to Ted.

Then Ted still has a remaining 4,900 crystals he wants to buy for 50g each but no one is selling at that price.

Don then gets all 1,000 at 75 gil, then 1,000 at 100 gil. He still needs 3,000 but no one is selling at 200 gil or less.

And then the market shows:

There are 5,000 available at 500 gil. (The current lowest “want to sell” ceiling)
There is a buy order that wants a further 3,000 crystals at 200 gil each. (The current highest “want to buy” floor)
Ted has to wait until Don gets all of his crystals, raise his buy price above 200 gil, or just buy the current available stock at 500 gil.

Current Wind Crystal Celing/Floor: 5,000@500g / 3,000@200g

Other random players who want to buy or sell quickly need to price somewhere between that ceiling/floor. Or match the current ceiling/floor as a kind of “buy/sell it now” option.

———

The only way to tank this is to be able to put in a massive buy or sell order that no one can compete with, in which case you will lose lots of money buying stock at overpriced value or by selling too cheap. Or alternatively controlling the supply (which is impossible in this game; there aren’t limited notorious monster drops/resource nodes/etc that players can monopolize)

As long as they sell for outrageous prices, people will be riding that gravy train. And as soon as they get too cheap to be worth the time, people stop farming them.