It's been about a year now since the big revamp of the Galactic Trade Network, and I wanted to use the occasion to post some thoughts on how things have been going. Overall, the deflation of the economy due to the taxation changes has been absolutely bananas (which, to be clear, is a good thing), and the GTN has probably played at least a part in this.
Transaction fees aside, the sales data it provides makes it obvious to potential buyers what other players have been willing to pay for an item in the past, so it's much harder to artificially drive up the price of things, and you can't hope to just fool someone into overpaying by making sure that you're the only one selling and putting a unreasonably high price tag on the item.
The only annoying thing about this is that you can't see this sales data if there isn't already an active listing, and the prices that the GTN "recommends" based on this sales data don't always make sense, in either direction. I saw this recently when opening some of the Cartel packs you get from the Galactic Seasons track on the Shae Vizla server, where the GTN is a lot more quiet.
First I got what I thought was a new-ish and pretty rare weapon which had no listings on the GTN. The system suggested I list it at 30 million credits and I was like "sure, that sounds reasonable for a rare weapon". Then I opened the listing I'd created and...
The historic price was less than half a million? Why in the world would you recommend that I try selling at 30 million then?! Needless to say that listing expired and I re-listed it at a lot less afterwards.
However, it works the other way round as well. Another Cartel Pack gifted me a bronze armour set that wasn't currently being sold on the GTN either. I know that those usually aren't worth that much, so I wasn't surprised that the recommended listing price was only 10k credits. But again, I checked the listing afterwards...
... and the historic range was ten times as much. Why do you do this to me, GTN? I'd really love to know where those numbers come from.
Also, whatever happened to those buy orders we were supposed to get with the new GTN? I was really excited about those but haven't heard anything about that feature in forever. I thought being able to add new functionality like that was partially the point of revamping the whole thing in the first place.
From my own experiences checking prices, Historic Median Price is the average sale price of every one of those items sold since the GTN overhaul. Because of the constant downward trend of prices since the overhaul, this metric is not very useful when pricing items. It's mostly a curiosity to see what things used to cost. Occasionally, items do sell at a high price like this, but it's pretty rare.
ReplyDeleteFor Shae Vizla, Historic Median Price would be from the server launch day. Back when Shae Vizla was new, there was a lot more activity on the server. More demand means prices were a lot higher. Now the low population has significantly reduced demand, so prices have to be very low to sell anything.
The much more useful one is Recent Median Price. I don't know the exact range of data for this one, but it's somewhere around 1 to 2 weeks. It shows what items are actually selling for in the present. If it says, 0 than none of those items have sold recently. Either there is no demand for it at all or the people trying to sell it have listed their items too high for the current demand.
I can usually sell something listed at the Recent Median Price the first time it's listed. For valuable items like platinums, I will usually list a little bit higher and reduce price over time as needed. Because of the tax for listing items, I have to sell items quickly or I lose credits on the sale from the listing tax. Occasionally, I have to sell lower than the recent price when the supply is very high (lots of sellers) for an item.
I don't know where the recommended prices come from when listing an item. They are often times different than the two stats shown to players. I'm thinking they might be using more global data, like the average sale price for the item across all servers. That works fine on a server like Darth Malgus, but not on a server like Shae Vizla.