[2023] 7.4 GTN Preview Live on PTS

Hello there!

With the Public Test Server live I wanted to take a moment to dive into what’s changed, what the plan is moving forward, and how you fit into it all. TLDR: We want your feedback and need your help to improve this feature further.

There’s a lot of things that have changed in the backend that will be hard to see at first, but I hope you’ll agree that the new system is better overall for both the current Galactic Trade Network and the future!

The version of the GTN that is available on the PTS is in many ways still work in progress, you might find bugs or issues with it as well as find some features you preferred have changed or been removed. We wanted to get this into your hands as soon as we possibly could to ensure that we get your feedback while still having the time necessary to act on that feedback. Feel free to report issues or bugs, share feedback, and I assure you that we will do our best to address them.

What hasn’t changed

The GTN is still a place where you can put an item up for sale and get credits in exchange. The search functions that existed prior to the revamp also have been maintained with some slight adjustments.

We haven’t updated auction categories yet. Reason being how these are set up on items. If you’ve got feedback about categories though please let us know!

What has changed

• Searching
  • Search now returns a list of items with all available items per type collapsed down into a single listing.
  • Each of these listings shows the item, the quantity available on the market, and the lowest available price.
  • Clicking on the item/credit button will now open a new window showing each available listing of that item.
• Buying
  • Seller’s names are now obfuscated from the sale. This is largely due to the amount of information in the new listing page.
  • You will see many listings at the various prices here. There’s a limit though if the item is listed at many different price points you will only see the first 20.
  • You’ll always get the best available listing when you click purchase.
  • Sometimes while you're placing an order, new items might be posted for sale or items you're considering might be purchased.
  • When this happens, you will get as much of the sale as possible at whatever the best price is for that sale.
  • If there’s not enough items to cover the sale, you will be refunded the difference.
  • If you overpay due to a new lower price, you will be refunded.
• Claiming
  • Claiming now has its own window within the Galactic Trade Network!
  • Mail is only used in cases of alerts about sales or expirations.
  • Opening the claim page you will see a list of claimable sales and purchases.
  • You have a limit on purchases of 10 Buy Slots. Buy slots can be increased as necessary up to a maximum of 50.
  • Sale Slots are the same as our current slots. These can be increased to 100.
  • Slots become used when you create a listing or make a purchase.
  • Slots become available again after you claim all of the associated credits and items within that slot.
  • There is still a 60 day time limit to claim the item, make sure you claim your items!
• Selling
  • Fees:
    • A buyer’s fee is added to the purchase price. This means the amount you put into the unit price is the amount you will receive.
    • The buyer’s fee is dependent on the unit price and is progressive starting at 6% (lower than current) but scaling up from there. Below is a chart that lays out the rates:

 

Minimum Price	Marginal Rate	Cumulative Fee	Effective Rate
0	6%	0	6%
1,000,000	8%	60,000	6%
10,000,000	10%	780,000	7.80%
100,000,000	12%	9,780,000	9.78%
500,000,000	14%	57,780,000	11.56%
1,000,000,000	16%	127,780,000	12.78%
3,000,000,000	16%	447,780,000	14.93%

 

• Deposits have been adjusted to be fees. This is to encourage folks to list their items at prices that are more likely to move. Below is a chart that shows the minimum and maximum fee depending on the Buyout Price and the Duration.

 

Duration	Fee Percent	Minimum Fee	Maximum Fee
12 Hours	0.01%	100	10,000
1 Day	0.025%	125	25,000
2 Days	0.05%	250	50,000
3 Days	0.1%	500	100,000
7 Days	0.25%	1000	250,000

 

• As you can see, we’ve also increased the minimum duration from 6 hours to 12 hours, and the maximum duration is now 7 days up from 3 days. This is to make it more likely for listings to sell and to reduce relisting.
• Under this model the fees max out at 100 Million. Due to the minimum fee, listings under that value can end up being not profitable. We warn you when you create a listing like this with a confirmation as well as highlighting the total profit in red if it is negative.

New Features:

• Favorites
  • Favorites is a Subscriber feature.
  • You can now mark an item as a Favorite! Click the `star` to set this.
  • There is a limit of 5 Favorites.
  • Clicking on the Quick Search button for Favorites will quickly show only these items you’ve selected.
• Newly Listed
  • You can see up to 30 of the most recently listed items with this search. It’s not real time, but should update when you perform the search.
• Popular
  • This is based on recent sales volume.
  • Up to 30 of the most purchased items.
• Cartel Rarity Filter
  • You can now filter based on the Cartel Rarity of an item:
    • Bronze
    • Silver
    • Gold
    • Platinum
  • Having this set will filter out any non-Cartel items and show only items of the selected Rarity.
• Market Data
  • We have some more information coming to the purchase page that shows the current median value and its recent high/low values as well as a more historical version of that value.
  • Recent looks at a smaller subset of time to give you an idea of the trend.
  • Historical is a larger time frame but is not lifetime.
  • We plan on expanding on this section in the future, details to come when we have them.
• Additional Changes:
  • Due to some backend changes we no longer support items with random stat allocations  on the Galactic Trade Network. These are primarily world drops from leveling up to 70. These will continue to be tradable and marketable versions of their appearances will eventually be made available in game wherever they are not currently.
  • Similarly in the case of Crafted Augmented Gear, we will still allow the gear to be sold but the Augmentation Slot will be removed. We will warn you in this case before you list the item 
  • We removed the Usable By for Companions filter. Ultimately this filter was not used often and due to the sheer amount of potential companions and changes in companion equipment since launch. We did maintain the “Usable By Me '' functionality, though it's still limited in the same way it was prior to the revamp to showing items that can be equipped as opposed to actually "usable".
• Trading Fees:
  • We previously stated that we planned on keeping the trade fees tied to the highest marginal rate on the Galactic Trade Network. Due to the nature of these fees applying in both directions, the effective rate is actually double (16% as 8% is assessed twice). To keep the trade fees a bit better aligned with the GTN, we will not be increasing the rate at this time as a 16% effective rate is still higher than the new top effective rate of 14.93%.
  • We will be monitoring both Galactic Trade Network use as well as Trading and may make further adjustments where necessary.

It’s worth noting that this is a multi-phase release, meaning there will be continued improvements based on your feedback, our data, and some plans are still in motion. Buy orders are on the top of our list, but there’s other smaller improvements that are still in the pipeline based on previous feedback.

So, with that in mind - please continue to give us feedback on this new system. Jump on PTS and hammer away at it! We’ve added some initial listings to flesh out the market and added vendors with sellable items for you to list.

Some general questions to answer in your feedback:

• Is there any functionality of the existing system that you don’t see in the new system that you would prefer we preserve?
• What do you like about the new system? What do you dislike?
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items that you wish existed?
• Do you have any concerns with how the new system feels to use?

PTS Specific Testing

If you use the Level Boost NPC in Kessan’s Landing you’ll also receive a handful of Marketable crafted equipment, some materials, and crystals. Feel free to put these on the GTN to go through the selling flow, and when looking to buy you’ll likely be able to find these items available from others who have gone through the selling flow to test the buying flow. You can use any Marketable items for testing but we wanted to give a select amount of them so that folks have a particular set to work from with new characters.

 

Edited Friday at 11:25 AM by JoeStramaglia
Updated new expiration time for claim page, fixed a slight miscalculation on top effective rate.

Hello folks! Thank you so much for all the feedback, especially from those of you that have hopped on PTS and given it a fair shake! I wanted to take a moment to answer some of your questions.

 

On 10/27/2023 at 1:36 PM, BenKatarn said:

Am I correct in assuming you are talking about gear that usually has a prefix to its name that is based on one of Star Wars' many companies, i.e. Adascorp, InterroTek, QorWorks etc, or in the case of low level gear, named after a race, i.e. Cerean, Gamorrean, Echani, with each of those prefixes implying a specific stat distribution?

Yes, these are the type of items that currently are incompatible with the new GTN due to the way the random elements of the items work. The system currently would make those pieces become unidentified and the item the buyer would receive would not necessarily be the item you listed.

On 10/27/2023 at 2:06 PM, Darcmoon said:

Is this going to work like the current suggested price does?  As I understood it, the price that is suggested is supposed to be based of recent sale prices.  Unfortunately I’ve had it list the suggested price at 1/3 or more than the going price for items.  That doesn’t seem like it is keeping a record or history very well. I worry that this will have the same issue. 

It's important to note that these are medians, meaning if the price has historically been higher and is now trending downwards there will be a bit of lag between the median price and the currently listed price (also listed prices don’t affect the median only successful sales). However you will see more information in the new Market Data section detailing both the median, as well as highs and lows (of successful sales) to give you a better idea, you will also see what folks are currently listing at.

On 10/27/2023 at 2:13 PM, Darkestmonty said:

Are trade taxes changing?

Not currently planned, due to the way trade works with both parties being taxed the effective rate is 16% which is still slightly higher than the maximum effective tax rate on the GTN. The goal is to drive transactions between players through the GTN to ensure players get the best prices and to mitigate fraud.

On 10/27/2023 at 8:27 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

can you please explain the difference between the marginal rate & the effective rate? Why is there a difference? 

Of course! So in a progressive system, you are only charged a specific % on the credits that fall within that range. Meaning you only pay 6% on the first million credits, even if the listing in question is 1 Billion. This means that while the marginal rate increases as the list price increases, the effective rate does not match the marginal rate outside of the first bracket. Think of “effective” as the true percent being paid on a listing at that specific price, whereas marginal is the amount charged to a specific “margin” or bracket.
 

On 10/27/2023 at 8:27 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

Will the buyer or seller see that fee on the list price when they are browsing or making the purchase? Or will it be a hidden cost that will automatically be deducted when they make the purchase?

The seller will see what the total price including the fee is, the buyer will have the fee included into their purchase price so it is not listed separately. Ultimately, how many credits the seller will receive shouldn’t be of any concern to the buyer.

On 10/27/2023 at 8:46 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

If we can’t see the sellers names, how will we report anyone suspected of gaming the CM or GTN systems? 

Removing seller names actually makes it a lot harder for bad actors to do things they like to do with our GTN. We’ve also greatly improved our systems for monitoring activity, so when someone starts doing something suspicious we’ll know.

On 10/31/2023 at 12:24 PM, LadyAdmiral said:

• Recent range is what, a week? or more or less?
• Historic range - is this a month? a year?

Part of why this is a little vague is because it might not be exactly the same for each item depending on volume. For items that do trade fairly often, Recent should be a week (give or take depending on if we’ve done any new patches in the period since). Historic would be all data we’ve collected up to a certain point (we began taking snapshots in 7.2.1). Some items may have no data as they haven’t been sold in the timeframe, some items may have only one or the other depending on volume. Low volume items may have skewed data because we only take snapshots when sales occur.

On 10/31/2023 at 12:24 PM, LadyAdmiral said:

For the ranges, what do the colors of the boxes on the slider mean? I've seen red and green.

Red means it is in the top 3rd of its range, blue means it's in the middle 3rd, and green means it's in the bottom 3rd. It's meant to be a visual indicator of where the price is compared to its highs and lows.

On 10/31/2023 at 3:21 PM, Balameb said:

What happens if there is no item listed currently? Let's imagine a rare limited mat as was the case when 6.X lauched. We know the item exists but is on so high demand while limited supply that was hard to spot. Other games with similar search/list do show the item and you can even see trends in value and volume.

The current implementation will only show items that have listings but when we do Buy Orders our intention is that you will be able to find items that are not listed.
 

On 11/1/2023 at 11:53 AM, Spikanor said:

if you have set up 5 favorites in the GTN and you drop back to preferred status what will happing to the 5 favorietes then you have set up on the GTN?

You will still have those favorites but will lose them when you unset them. It works a bit like a soft cap, you won’t lose it but you won’t be able to add any others, and if you remove the ones you have they will be gone. If you re-sub you’ll keep the ones you have and be able to change them again freely.

A Change

Something else I wanted to touch on, while items cannot sit in the claim page for eternity, we have been able to extend it. So instead of expiring after 30 days they will now expire after 60. I'll update the main post to reflect this. We’ve also added some warning states that will let you know a week ahead of time if you happen to look at the Claim Page. 

A big shout out to those that have found bugs, especially with regards to missing QoL we’ve had previously! We’re working to incorporate things like Shift+Click back in. We’ll be continuing to improve this system up to release and will have further improvements in the future! Keep the feedback coming and let me know if you have further questions.
 

19 minutes ago, BenKatarn said:

So, since you are using the word "currently", do you have any intention of addressing this issue? You are killing half the GTN's armor listings this way, unless you are trying to move people more into dealing with Cartel Market gear. If I put this gear into the outfitter, yeah, it'll list it as "Unidentified Guardsman's Chestguard" instead of "Echani Guardsman's Chestguard", but that isn't the issue here. People are not buying this old gear for the stats (usually, at least), they are buying it for the appearance, usually also because of unique color variants. The blue prototype versions of these armor pieces usually also feature a different coloring form the normal green premium quality versions.

It really cannot be your intention to make so much gear unavailable to be sold, not unless you have something in mind to keep this stuff somehow available, like making it all available for crafting.

Our data shows these items do not sell on the GTN very often, however we immediately realized the problem to solve here was not about access to the gear, but about access to the appearances. They will still be tradable and available outside of the GTN the way they currently are and we want to give additional avenues to get them. Although that won't happen in 7.4, we are already looking at how we can start getting players access to those appearances in-game. Hopefully as soon as our next patch (7.4.1) but we'll let you know once we have details.

Hello folks! 7.4 is fast approaching and I wanted to touch on some changes we’ve made in the interim between PTS and what you can expect on December 5th.

• Seller Input
  • Instead of putting in the unit price and having the game calculate for you the buyer’s price, which was an adjustment from the way it currently works in the live game, we’ve changed it back to letting the seller enter the buyer’s price. This is closer to how it works in live currently and should ideally make it easier for sellers to input a price that is competitive with other listings.
  • We still show you the unit price you will receive as the seller and calculate the total expected profit, taking into account any fees.
  • The Buyout Limit is still equal to the new 3B Seller’s Unit Price + Buyer’s Fee. (Total Limit = 3,447,780,000)
• Claim slots
  • We’ve increased the base claim slots for Subscribers to 20
  • You can still only add additional slots up to 50 at this time, but we may re-evaluate this in the future.
• We’ve adjusted many UI interactions and messaging.
  • My favorites are clicking on the entire row will bring up the item details page in search and clicking claim will take you to the relevant claim page depending on where you are when you click it!
  • Another one I want to call out is we no longer allow listings that result in negative profit. This means you’ll need to set your prices to at least enough to cover the listing fee in order to list the item.

It’s important to note we will be making further changes in upcoming patches, so keep giving feedback! We’ve got things in the pipeline based on your feedback that I will be excited to share in the future.

Additionally, when we go live, existing auctions will expire. During maintenance, your items will be sent back to your in-game inboxes and can be relisted when the servers come back up.