Price Wars / Impatient Sellers

[bgryph]

And my point is that the pieces normally sell for 15k. They have sold for 15k for months and months. If they were "worth" 8k, they would have deflated to 8k normally long ago. They did not, and they only do for short periods, when one of the annoying little undercutters we're complaining about comes along.

But that seems to go along with what I pointed out earlier: this sort of pricing may be annoying but it's not "ruining the neoeconomy" -- if you wait a bit the price will cycle back to whatever the "true" price actually is. Without changing either the supply or the demand a few people can't change the price of an item long-term.

[HotRoxy]

And I'd like to echo that not only is it annoying to chase after 1 undercutter, there are several out there. Spending upwards of 200K a week to "keep up" is fairly futile not to mention not very cost effective. Take for example you wind up wth 8 of a particular piece, it will, even at fair value take a few weeks to sell them all. Even if you managed to go around buying up all the cheap pieces and holding them for profit, you would wind up going broke before seeing any sort of pay off and even then you would not get much of a payoff because you could no longer buy up the cheaper pieces (sorry, not everyone is super weathy) and just to replenish your neopoing supply you would have to dump them below what you felt "value" was prior to being able to catch up.

[theonlysaneone]

Three pieces per day, seven days a week = 21 pieces per week. At 8k per piece, we're talking about 168k per week just to clean up these guys' messes. And my point is that the pieces normally sell for 15k. They have sold for 15k for months and months. If they were "worth" 8k, they would have deflated to 8k normally long ago. They did not, and they only do for short periods, when one of the annoying little undercutters we're complaining about comes along.

Buying all three of their pieces at once, every day, will certainly encourage them. They'll think, "Oh great, my pieces sell well at this price; I'm gonna keep pricing them this way!" If we leave them, the 8k pieces still sit around for a few days (not a week, like the normally-priced pieces, but they still don't sell instantly). The downside to that is that other people will start undercutting the undercutters... there's really no way to win unless they go away.

I don't think I can make it any clearer; sorry.

The way I see it, you're not spending 168K a week to defeat the undercutters, you are getting items worth 15K for half price. I think it's actually a very good deal. If someone priced their pieces at 8K and I saw it, I would DEFINITELY buy them.

When I price WC pieces, I really don't know how much each one is worth, so I find the lowest price on the SW that isn't ridiculous (if it is, I buy it) and price it about 1.5K lower. Usually, the person who owns a map mall and is also on my letter buys them from me because they want to maintain the lowest price and make a profit.

[Daze]

That's not really a valid argument... That's the same as saying that the prizes we get from plots (like BD weapons and paint brushes) should be sold for 1NP, because you'd still be making a profit out of something that didn't cost anything to begin with.

Some plot items are not worth much at all. But I never suggested that anything gotten for 'free' should be sold at 1np, just that when it is free that some users will not care what the market value is and sell at what they want to.

It's true, but I don't think it's wise. Those of us who enter the WC do it to make the best profit we can. Many WCers are gameplayers only, and this is their main source of income. You wouldn't tell a rser to sell you his Leaded Elemental Vial for 200k just because that's double what he paid in the Neopian shop, would you? No, because the thing's worth 30 mil+, and no one expects him to sell for a lot less and be happy he made a profit at all.

I agree with what a lot of you are saying, in general, but you don't seem to be familiar with World Challenges and/or the WC map market, so your strategies ("buy up the cheaper ones") don't really work.

I am a WC'er, a look at the screenie thread will show you my latest haul - I done it without buying 1 piece.

That is something unique about WC pieces - you can trade 1 for 1 without worrying about price (most times).

But if you are selling just to make a profit (rather than converting maps) than the maps are no different to the rest of the items on the SSW - prices rise and fall. I would rather see them selling cheaper than going the way of the codestones - continually on the rise.

Uhh, I'd very much advise against taking such a view. That's the sort of view that can threaten to destroy an economy, especially one in a game where the (real-world) labor costs tend to disappear.

If there is any reason for the neoeconomy to be destroyed it is Neo's uneven distribution of WC pieces - I can collect up to 4 of 1 piece and none of the 1 to finish my map. So either you have to buy and pay for something that would be free to you or trade for it.

Most sellers are very good about undercutting each other by only 500np-1k, but occasionally some new WCer will come in, be too lazy to check prices (or just be impatient), and will sell all their pieces really cheap.

Three pieces per day, seven days a week = 21 pieces per week. At 8k per piece, we're talking about 168k per week just to clean up these guys' messes.

Why is it the seller of cheaper pieces automatically the 'bad guy'? Why are they lazy? It is a personal choice at what to sell each item for. Just because a lot of us understand the principal of the marketplace doesn't mean everyone has to live by it. The statement 'these guys messes' makes me shudder - it sounds like the people selling cheaper have done something wrong. They have not.

The question was: Is impatience killing the neoconomy?

YES. The impatience of people wanting to sell high. Not the people wanting to sell low.

Basically there are 2 types of pricers - those who use the Shop Wiz and those who use the SSW.

If you use the Shop Wiz, then the odds are you are pricing to your shop group. Fair enough, you want to sell it so you price slightly lower than the first in your group.

Now if you times that by the amount of groups - that is 13 cheaper pieces.

Now, if you use the SSW - you can see that there might be a few cheaper items and decide to buy them or if you have the patience put them in at your desired price.

I don't know if there is a group trying to lower the prices of the WC pieces but I do think 75K is way to much for a piece. I know you get good paint brushes - I have a gallery full of them. An Orange Paint Brush which can get you an avatar is going for around 500,000 nps - if you sold each piece at 25,000 you make 500,000 nps, the price of the brush. By raising the price by 10,000 you can make 700,000nps.

BUT, not all map pieces are being sold for that because of TNT's uneven distribution - so those pieces that are rarer go up in price. Now it is the 'Converter' of maps who have to pay the ultimate price. Eventually a map piece will sell,but those who want to trade find it difficult because the market tells us that a certain piece is just worth to much to trade for.

I do not think Roxy is greedy and I have not deliberately said anything to offend, but I have my opinion on the subject and I hope that it isn't condescending to give it.

[Cranberry]

But if you are selling just to make a profit (rather than converting maps) than the maps are no different to the rest of the items on the SSW - prices rise and fall. I would rather see them selling cheaper than going the way of the codestones - continually on the rise.

They don't really rise and fall, though. Well, they DO (pretty much everything on the site fluctuates in price), but by maybe 1-2k a month, not normally by 7k or more.

Why is it the seller of cheaper pieces automatically the 'bad guy'?

Uh, because they annoy me? Look, seriously, I came over here, saw Roxy's thread, read it, and thought, "Yeah, it annoys me too when people bring down the price of WC pieces!" I probably wouldn't have even commented, except that she's a friend of mine and a few people were being rude to her, and I don't like that. My argument is all from MY perspective as a seller of WC pieces. Last time I checked, we were allowed to complain about neo practices we found annoying, yes?

I don't know if there is a group trying to lower the prices of the WC pieces but I do think 75K is way to much for a piece. I know you get good paint brushes - I have a gallery full of them.

Right, most pieces don't sell for 25k -- most sell for 10-15k. The 75k pieces are necessary to balance the map price as a whole, and they are "worth" that much, obviously, or very few people would buy maps and turn them in. Like I've said a few times, the price of WC maps fluctuates very little, normally -- it's held in check by the price of the paintbrushes it gives out (if the map costs too much, the converters know they won't make a profit, so they don't buy -- this is why the price of maps doesn't rise like codestones). It's a nice system that way (for both the buyers, who can make sure they at worst break even, and for the sellers, who know that as long as pb prices stay high, the map pieces won't drop too low).

The way I see it, you're not spending 168K a week to defeat the undercutters, you are getting items worth 15K for half price. I think it's actually a very good deal. If someone priced their pieces at 8K and I saw it, I would DEFINITELY buy them.

TOSO, I could buy up all the cheaper pieces and wait for the price to rise (because yeah, it usually does -- the undercutters don't seem to be long-term WCers, for whatever reason). But that's 168k per week (if we're talking about just ONE undercutter), and you know I'm saving for a 2-player battleset. I spend on Food Club and the stock market each day and that's it -- I don't want to mess around with reselling that will take a while to pay off. Again, my perspective. If one of the other WCers wants to try and doesn't mind waiting quite a while for a payoff, they can go right ahead.

But that seems to go along with what I pointed out earlier: this sort of pricing may be annoying but it's not "ruining the neoeconomy" -- if you wait a bit the price will cycle back to whatever the "true" price actually is. Without changing either the supply or the demand a few people can't change the price of an item long-term.

This is true. It's annoying that it can take a while for it to happen (I like a steady income, and I'm sure it's even more annoying for people who use games as their sole source of NP), but it does eventually happen. If the undercutters keep at it for too long, though, I usually just end up pricing a few np below them. I don't like items sitting in my shop for weeks, either. (I use my shop profits to buy stocks/play Food Club; I don't like withdrawing NP from the bank, ever. Again, that's just me.) I wasn't, and Roxy wasn't, asking anyone for advice -- Roxy actually intended this thread as a place for anyone to gripe about undercutting in general, if you look at the last sentence of her first post.

I really didn't feel like debating today! Now I'm sorry I even got bored and wandered back here.

[SierraRaven]

Personally, I think that TNT messed the WC up when they quit awarding the pieces we needed, and started awarding the pieces randomly. Oh, well... It is just a game, after all.

[twinklyspangle]

That's not really a valid argument... That's the same as saying that the prizes we get from plots (like BD weapons and paint brushes) should be sold for 1NP, because you'd still be making a profit out of something that didn't cost anything to begin with.

As for the thing with the WC pieces, it's been discussed pretty extensively, so I have nothing to add to that

I'm not saying 1np, but the point is I think it's a bit stingy to expect to get 50K, and be annoyed if you don't, for something that hasn't taken you more than an hour and 100np.

[Cranberry]

I'm not saying 1np, but the point is I think it's a bit stingy to expect to get 50K, and be annoyed if you don't, for something that hasn't taken you more than an hour and 100np.

Most of the time, the pieces we sell are not worth nearly that much (like I said, most sell for 10-15k). The 50k pieces are rare, which is why they're so expensive. And it's not the hour and 100np it took to get that one piece that factors in here; it's the three hours per day, seven days a week we spend to make our average WC piece profit.

Again, think about rsers. Say someone rses for three hours a day and makes about 100k in profit, on average (which is more than gameplayers make!). One day they rs an item worth several mil. Is it stingy if they try to get that several mil? It's the same idea -- they didn't put in any extra time, and that item cost them relatively little. But I can bet there's no way you'd write that rser and say, "Hey, pal, you didn't spend any extra time getting that, so you're being stingy trying to get what it's 'worth!' Sell it to me for 50k!" So why are you doing that here?

[bgryph]

Maybe the solution is to post here when one of the WC peices is being undercut and let the people who make a Neoliving buying underpriced items on the Shop Wiz take care of it. ;-)

[Karnatu]

I've been in a similar situation and my advice is to sell the same as the lowest in the ssw or sw. I had a WC piece and started rsing and in the end I made no profit and lost money. Just sell at the lowest price or complete the picture and get yourself a paintbrush (which can be a pirate paintbrush). I don't mind prices lowering. Cranberry and Daze are both right.

I've dealt with forums for the majorty of the last 5-8 years, and when something like this happens, it's best just to ignore and move on

Just something off-topic: This summer I went to war in the neoseeker forums with another person and in the end people were saying Jeffroe vs Archimonde_STG round 2, that was a big experience for me. Altough the guy really had some psycologicol problems, he couldn't even bare any other opinion than his.

[XenaAndGabrielle]

I decided to go do a price check for the Faerieland 3.16 piece tonight.

Seller #1: Faerieland 3.16 WC Piece 1 11,888 NP
Seller #2: Faerieland 3.16 WC Piece 2 12,000 NP
Seller #3: Faerieland 3.16 WC Piece 5 12,000 NP
Seller #4: Faerieland 3.16 WC Piece 6 12,000 NP
Seller #5: Faerieland 3.16 WC Piece 2 12,199 NP

It doesn't seem this piece is worth anywhere near 50k. Did they plummet over the past 2 days?

WC maps are a gamble. People like to gamble with their NPs ... that is why prices for them tend to be "higher" than they seem "worth."

If the pieces were actually "random," then one would think that all pieces should generally be about the same price for a given land. As many people have pointed out ... this is not the case. Some can be around 10k, while others can be upwards of 75k.

Why are the prices of different, then? Some rich Neopian has bought all of a certain piece from the TP, and inflated the price in hopes of making a nice profit. Because the awarding of pieces is random, it takes awhile for the market to adjust back to an equilibrium value. This is the biggest flaw of the WC, ever since they started awarding random pieces. The market cannot react in a timely manner to adjust to the inflated price.

To first order ... we can approximate what the "true value" of WC 3 map pieces should be. Take the list of possible prizes, and then find an average selling price for the winnings. I'm not going to do any actual math, but I would expect that answer to be between 300k to 400k. Someone else can do real math, if they want.

Divide this number by 20 (since there are 20 pieces in a map), and that should be the average price of a map piece. This suggests map pieces (WC 3) should be around 15k to 20k a piece.

The problem, as Cranberry has pointed out, is that one needs to also complete WC 1 and 2 maps before they can convert the WC3 map. Since many of those pieces are similarly priced as the WC 3 counterparts ... and the prizes aren't nearly as good (especially on WC 1 maps ... I recently got a "Yellow Petpet Paint Brush" worth 25kish from one of my conversions) ... the gamble of converting becomes quite bad (especially if you are having to purchase map pieces to convert your 1 and 2 maps). This means you are losing big money on those maps. This should tend to make the prices of WC 3 map prices even lower, to compensate.

I think the big problem with the WC now that it has been out for such a long time ... is that most people get to the level 3 map, and just keep winning pieces from that map. This has a tendancy to flood the market with pieces from the third map. Take a look in trades for almost any world ... you will see that there are generally many more full WC 3 maps for sale, compared to WC 1 or 2 maps. The people selling the WC 1 and 2 maps are making a killing (compared to the expected "true value" of the map), since people want them in order to convert their level 3 maps.

I've rambled ... but I mainly just wanted to bring up some points.

To bring this back to the original topic ... I agree, undercutters are hard to deal with ... but if you believe they really are selling at a "low" price ... then you really do need to buy them out and sell at your price. Yes, this will tie up NPs ... but if they truly are low and you think about it as an investment ... then it is all good in the end. They make quick NPs. You make NPs. Everyone is happy.

[HotRoxy]

Yeah, the price on that particular piece has fallen way down in the last two days , and that was what was bothering me originally because that downward trend begins with just one or two people. But on the flip side, there are two other fairly common pieces that have risen in value, so go figure. Basically, it's something that needs to be checked a few times a day. It's annoying, but a part of the game.

WC as a steady source of income is fairly decent, but only on the level 3 pieces. I didn't see any steady selling on the first two levels, and most of them I dumped in the auctions (the dups) and used the funds to buy up the more rare pieces I couldn't win in a reasonable amount of time.

See, if someone is interested in quicker profit, I think the auctions are a great option, if you only want 8K for a piece, put it up and you'll probably wind up with more. You'd probably sell it quicker, too.

[Cranberry]

If the pieces were actually "random," then one would think that all pieces should generally be about the same price for a given land. As many people have pointed out ... this is not the case. Some can be around 10k, while others can be upwards of 75k.

Why are the prices of different, then? Some rich Neopian has bought all of a certain piece from the TP, and inflated the price in hopes of making a nice profit.

I'm not sure this is the case. Tyrannia 3.15 WC Piece has been expensive (75-90k) for as long as I can remember -- it never falls down to 25k and then rises again (maybe it did once due to undercutters, but very quickly shot back up). I know I personally rarely earn that one, instead getting a lot of Tyrannia 3.6 and 3.4 (one of the cheapest pieces, but one which also takes longer to sell, leading me to believe it's given out much more often than others -- most people earn it and don't need to buy). On several occasions I've gotten two 3.4 or 3.6s in one day (April 15th and 16th being the most recent examples). I don't think the piece awarding is truly random. Maybe some rich players do buy up all the 3.15s (though I don't notice mine going to the same people every sale), but they're helped by the fact that those pieces are much more rare. Just check the shop wiz -- I never see anyone with a bunch in stock.

[theonlysaneone]

Cranberry is right, the randomizer that determines which WC piece you get (as with all computer pseudo-randomizers) is broken. We found this out day one, and unfortunately I don't think TNT has any plans to fix it.

On a side note, which set of maps is more profitable? I currently sell series I maps, but I'm thinking about converting to II or III. The prizes that they award are more rare, but there are far less people buying them.

[HotRoxy]

The randomizer sucks big time. There have been a few times where I've even gotten the same piece all three times in one day, and a lot of the time I wind up with at least two of the same in the same day.

As for which is better... I would still say that level three would yeild the most income, but level one may be easier to sell and if you were able to win more than three pieces a day, it may be the better money maker with all those who want to convert to get up to the second or third level, but with all the prices going wacky lately, who knows. I'm no help. Haha.