PyroLobster I like your brutal, straightforward analysis. I think it makes a lot of sense. The price that the market bears is the item's price, regardless of what anyone says it should/could/would be. The bids that you get are the reality of the situation. The talk is just talk. From the perspective, the talk is basically pointless, especially if someone just wants to sell and item *now* because they need the money for some reason, and the PC forum should indeed be burned to the ground and forgotten about. If a seller wants to know the price of their item, they should simply put it up for sale, advertise it in as many channels as possible (legacy auction, Kamadan, whatever) and see what bids come in or what prices they can negotiate. They can take the offer they like best and rest assured that, by definition, they have received market value for their item. After all, it's only the market that can tell the market value of an item. Talking heads just talk.
I think your analysis really does apply best to people who have an item that they just want to sell right now. But not all sellers are motivated that way. For example, imagine a collector with a large store of presumably valuable items who has decided on a new direction for their collection. To start moving in that new direction, they decide to sell off some of their stash in order to stockpile some cash just so they can be ready if something they like suddenly appears. This collector is flipping through their storage, thinking about what might be good to sell. From your perspective, there's really no way to know other than to sell the items. That's undeniably true in some sense. There is no price for the item until a sale is agreed upon. But we also know that certain items have value apart from their specific price at any moment. Req 8 sephis axes are worth more than feathers. We don't need to sell the sephis and the feather to figure that out. We can know these things in general and that kind of knowledge can help guide us toward an expectation about an acceptable sale price.
The sephis-feather example is hyperbolic but I hope it helps convey a point: The value of items isn't simply unknown or unknowable until the moment they are sold. Another way of seeing this in action would be if the hypothetical collector pulls a particular skin out of storage that isn't especially popular right now. Maybe it's not the right time to sell that particular item. Things go in and out of fashion. Specific skins might be hot shit for a certain amount of time (sometimes a very long time, sometimes not so much) and then become cliche...and then become popular again. There are plenty of examples, especially (I think) with shields, for whatever reason. Even though it's 100% true that we can only know the price of an item when we sell it, it's possible for someone to (accurately) say that a particular item is out of fashion now and that it may be smarter to hold onto that item (and maybe sell something else more popular) right now. This is another way that knowledge can creep into the process of determining what kind of price you might want to get for an item, apart from what the market will bear at the moment.
So, while I agree with you that:
- selling an item is the only way to learn its price, and...
- market conditions are changing constantly, so previous sales can't be taken as a straightforward indication of current price
...I think that there has to be some place for knowledge in the process of evaluating the prices of potential sales. How do I know not to sell my Req 8 Sephis Axe for 15k even if that's the best bid/offer I get? I know because items aren't really completely independent of each other in terms of value. Sales aren't really completely independent events. There is a system. Whether it's rarity, aesthetics, or whatever, items are valued in relation to each other. Nothing makes that fact clearer than when those value relationships are violated, when they change, or when groups of people don't agree on those what those relationships are like in the first place. In the guild, we've had people wonder aloud how an item of Type X can really sell for more than an item of Type Y. A pair of sales can be surprising in relation to each other (and becomes a topic of conversation) because we have implicit ideas about the relative value of kinds of items, independent of the specific prices that the market might bear at any given time.
I know I've gone on for a while here and I've gone in a couple of different directions. Sorry about that. I just wanted to post to keep the ball rolling on the constructive conversation that's been intermittently happening in this thread. I hope at least something is clear. I agree with your point about the emptiness of talk compared to the reality of the market. I think PyroLobster has done a nice job of pushing us to at least consider some pretty substantial changes to how we do things. But I also think there's more to it than just that. And, maybe unfortunately, the fact that knowledge, experience, and perspective have something to contribute to our price expectations means that asking people who may possess some of that knowledge for advice on prices is likely to remain a valid activity for the foreseeable future.
What we need to be careful of is people taking advantage of any reputation they may have for being knowledgeable or experienced. It is naive to ignore the power that comes with that kind of reputation. And it's naive to think that those who actively try to wield that reputation do so out of altruism. But it's too much to ask new/returning players to be critical of who they receive price checks from. They're just happy to get some help when they feel like they need it. It's really up to the rest of us to do better if we want to see better done.
