Huge price gap between the 4 Agnerod Staves and The Vinktar Square Map

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GreyLensman wrote:

Welcome to "PoE: the Trade Simulator"

There are people who spend most of their PoE time flipping items to take advantage of imperfect market information. (Some might say they are just taking advantage of laziness on the part of players who don't do their research.) Either way, it's probably the best way to make PoE currency if you're willing to invest the time.

I always wonder why folks who like to do this in PoE aren't spending their time doing it in the real world, where they could make some serious money.

Some do. But in truth while the meme is fun, ultimately trading in the real world is still a LOT harder and more complicated than in PoE. Most of the time, all you need to do to find market opportunities like this in PoE is to look up the price of stuff versus their ingredients. But in the real world assessing the investment value of a company's stock involves a lot more research than simply looking up its price chart. If they did try trading using a strategy as simple as what works in PoE, they'd soon find themselves burned and down on funds.

Of course you can also just indulge in arbitrage (trading goods at different prices) in real life too, which is quite similar to what happens in PoE. But since the market in real life is a LOT bigger, those opportunities are typically much harder to find, and often need some sort of institutional setup to be able to take advantage of (like setting up a full business to sell in other nations).

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galuf wrote:

The price difference has 3 explanations:
- players who don't know the recipe
- players who don't bother trading the staves. I mean I don't recognize one from another and it is kind of lots of clics.

And the third is...?

Ironically, there's also a flipside to this phenomenon. As others have pointed out, this happens because of people not wanting to make lots of small trades and so they pay a premium for the completed item (and also some due to ignorance).

However, this mainly holds for more common stuff where a decent proportion of people (like the OP here) DO actually assemble all the parts (or cards) from scratch. But then there's the rarer components / cards - often those actually sell for a higher price than the completed result. Not individually of course, but rather the cost of buying up all the components from zilch will exceed the cost of the resulting item. Why?

Because these things typically aren't bought from scratch. They're usually bought by people who already have some of them, and so choose to buy the last couple of pieces in order to finish the process (as farming it becomes too taxing). Although the price of a full set may be more expensive overall, the price paid by these buyers is still less than buying the item outright since they only need to buy a part of the set. And so the market sets the price of these things higher to cater to that.

Working out which items fit into which category, and why and how that changes from patch to patch, would likely be a fascinating subject to study (for those so inclined towards such research). :)