(03-11-2017, 03:11 PM)Lophorius Wrote: Instead of first making a post in the forums stating that you want to get rid of your cts for gold to get that fancy white trans and then waiting prolonged periods for somebody that is actually interested in your gear you could just put it up on the ah for the price you want to get it sold for.
You just have to wait for someone willing to pay the amount you want for it, just like you would on the forum. It is arguable that the AH will have more people seeing it than those on the forums as not everyone has a forum account, but realistically most people interested and able to pay for decent items use the forums and the majority of these trades are not pure gold anyways. This is why you can see items like the Sugarloaf sit on the Auction Hall and never be purchased but sell fairly quickly on the forum for the same price, but primarily in materials (at least you could when I played. I don't know how accurate that is now). People don't like to spend only gold on items.
(03-11-2017, 03:11 PM)Lophorius Wrote: Why are people not doing this? Or why is it that those items, if they get put up on the ah, usually are overpriced so that none ends up buying it? It's simple: The fee. Most are not willing to pay that 40k fee to put up cts for 800k.
They are not willing to do so when direct trading is free, correct. The developers should put a modest tax on gold traded between players once the unified inventory is released (since it would be horribly unfair now with players trading money between their own characters). I will explain why in response to your next point.
(03-11-2017, 03:11 PM)Lophorius Wrote: Honestly its hard for me to grasp why there is a fee in the first place...I suppose its to protect the mats' price.
You are partially correct. Have you ever played an MMO for an extended amount of time in which there was not an auction hall fee? This is not an appeal to tradition, I'm just curious if you are aware of the effects it has on the economy. First, the auction hall tax serves as an important gold sink. Without the auction hall tax, the only gold sinks left are marketplace materials and hero class. It is worth noting that when the auction hall tax was first implemented, neither of these things really existed (marketplace materials were very cheap besides the Phoenix Feather and only 3 *very* high end items used them). There was a need for a gold sink and the auction hall served that purpose. I can't say much on how well it serves its purpose now as I don't have any data on it (one of the side-effects of being retired and not looking at any of that stuff), but it served its purpose for a long time. A second, equally important reason does have to do with protecting the price of the materials, but it is not in the way you describe. In games I have played without auction hall taxes, rich players could easily buy materials as soon as they went up and put them back up for whatever higher price they wanted. It was common to put up an item for $2000 and have someone buy it and place it back up for $2100 within seconds. Many items had very controlled markets that made certain players very wealthy and items very hard to afford. It was very easy to manipulate the market and people were constantly driving the prices higher through constant incremental increases. Your items may sell faster, but people will tend to be selling items back at a much higher price. Auction hall taxes make market manipulation harder to do by minimizing or entirely removing the profit from small increases, meaning players wanting to manipulate the market will have to buy more items and place them up at higher prices while suffering a much higher tax that could result in a huge loss if their attempt at manipulation is unsuccessful.
For more information on this, you can google "why are there auction hall taxes in mmos?" and read the discussions.