Guild Wars 2

Hi,
Here is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Are minis a good investment? I know many people are collectors and such but do they impact the market? In "13 I bought a mini polar bear and brown bear both aprox 80 silver. I just sold the polar bear for 2g. So i made more in one mini transaction than in two months of playing. How does this affect the economy I’m interested to know. Ideas?

low risk, low return when it comes to the common and fine ones.

Rares are a bit better, but too late to invest.

Exotic, limited-edition ones are good to hold on to.

But this can all change with the introduction of Polymock Arena, though it depends if some mini’s get skills that are OP over others.

Polymock arena? And minis have skills? What have i missed here…?

Squishy.3694:

Polymock arena? And minis have skills? What have i missed here…?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Polymock

Long ago there was some datamined info that Polymock assets were in game. Unfortunately nothing has been released or updated in that regard.

Shame. Looks good. But you say low risk low return for common and fine but i made almost 300% on the original buy price….

Squishy.3694:

Shame. Looks good. But you say low risk low return for common and fine but i made almost 300% on the original buy price….

It took you 2 months to make 2 gold on your investment. That’s not a good return when you consider opportunity cost/time, especially when you only have one.

Maybe if you had 1000 mini bears, it would be OK.

Ah i see your point

Squishy.3694:

Hi,
Here is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Are minis a good investment? I know many people are collectors and such but do they impact the market? In "13 I bought a mini polar bear and brown bear both aprox 80 silver. I just sold the polar bear for 2g. So i made more in one mini transaction than in two months of playing. How does this affect the economy I’m interested to know. Ideas?

Wait, you don’t make more than 2 gold in 2 months? How can that be?? I did a cursed shore run over the weekend in which I made 3 .4 gold in less than 40 minutes and I didn’t even farm the entire area. (honestly it was a test to see what I could get in a short amount of time just farming and fighting NPCs)

As far as minis go, I think they are a tiny part of the economy and truly cater to the collectors though if the Polymock has some form of payout/reward, mini popularity might spike for a short time.

Well i only play for about an hour or two 3 times a week and i dont have any valuables to make huge profit off

Squishy.3694:

Well i only play for about an hour or two 3 times a week and i dont have any valuables to make huge profit off

If you only have an hour, I suggest doing a few easy dungeon runs (minimum 1 gold each), meta-event chains (30s per boss), or even gathering runs.

I have started gathering runs but am not high enough lvl to dungeon and our world doesn’t really do meta stuff

Squishy.3694:

I have started gathering runs but am not high enough lvl to dungeon and our world doesn’t really do meta stuff

I suggest you guest to the higher-tiered servers, they usually have trains running before reset.

Yaks Bend has a mega blob that starts collecting for Karka at 6:45. Although with the new update it may take a few weeks for players to go back to the train.

Squishy.3694:

I have started gathering runs but am not high enough lvl to dungeon and our world doesn’t really do meta stuff

Tier 3 and 4 materials are very profitable from a gathering standpoint. If you have fields of ruin, iron marches, gendarren, kessex, harathi, diessa plateau, bloodtide or Lornar’s pass mapped then farm those areas extensively during your hour or two of play. Salvage equipment drops for an increase in your Magic Find and sell the mats from the salvage and what you gathered. Do any and all non-heart events in these zones, the hearts give good exp but not a lot of payout whereas the events pay decent and scale with level.

To the OP: I made quite a profit on minis in the last 3 months through only minimal efforts. So I’d say yes, if you have the patience and some common sense, minis can be a stable investment.

Not all minis are the same though; as with any product you have to find out what you’re looking for – and when.

For example, the buy price of the gemstore minis is currently too low. It must go up because too many people already banked on the upper side of the market (exotic minis) to go up. In a healthy mini market prices go up from bottom to top. Which in our example means people will drain out the supply of the lower end (gemstore minis) since there’s profit to be made from forging them into overpriced exotics. So we’ll see exotics bottoming out a bit, and the gemstore minis going up until a new balance is reached. And then, yes, then exotics will go up again – all minis will – but they will drop a bit again when BL keys go on sale. Yea, Anet figured out a way to keep the upper end of the mini market prices in check – through BL key discounts

No – next patch there will be a rare minipet that cost 20silver and can be put into the mystic forge and prices will crash again

Dwaynas Avatar.1562:

No – next patch there will be a rare minipet that cost 20silver and can be put into the mystic forge and prices will crash again

Mmm mmm. This happened once, and the market corrected itself instantly afterwards. We now had a 2 months of rare minis flowing into the market and still the market corrects itself rather quickly. So no, that is false.

I am seriously playing the TP for over a year now and i never thought investing into Minis was a good idea at any point of time. This market got screwed over too many times by simple bugs with the holographic risen knight, Scarlet and Caithe.
I invested a bit of gold when Set1 got discontinued but as mentioned before in this topic, the ROI over time is just not worth it in my opinion. Time restricted skins are way more worth investing in, if you got a couple of spare slots in your bank.

Wanze.8410:

I am seriously playing the TP for over a year now and i never thought investing into Minis was a good idea at any point of time. This market got screwed over too many times by simple bugs with the holographic risen knight, Scarlet and Caithe.
I invested a bit of gold when Set1 got discontinued but as mentioned before in this topic, the ROI over time is just not worth it in my opinion. Time restricted skins are way more worth investing in, if you got a couple of spare slots in your bank.

That’s why you bought buckets of gossamer, while I was buying the bolts of linen and wool. Seriously, how can you put such bold statements? I made over 500g in about 2 months just with minis by investing a minimal amount of effort and time, and I really mean minimal. As with any trading, all you have to do is study the market a bit and know when to buy, buy/forge, or buy/forge/sell. That’s it.

Buttercup.5871:

Wanze.8410:

I am seriously playing the TP for over a year now and i never thought investing into Minis was a good idea at any point of time. This market got screwed over too many times by simple bugs with the holographic risen knight, Scarlet and Caithe.
I invested a bit of gold when Set1 got discontinued but as mentioned before in this topic, the ROI over time is just not worth it in my opinion. Time restricted skins are way more worth investing in, if you got a couple of spare slots in your bank.

That’s why you bought buckets of gossamer, while I was buying the bolts of linen and wool. Seriously, how can you put such bold statements? I made over 500g in about 2 months just with minis by investing a minimal amount of effort and time, and I really mean minimal. As with any trading, all you have to do is study the market a bit and know when to buy, buy/forge, or buy/forge/sell. That’s it.

IF you make money on the mini market that is fair enough, its just not my cup of tea.

I bought bolts of gossamer the week after ascended weaponcrafting got introduced back in september and sold before ascended armorcrafting went live, so i made quite some money on gossamer.

I never bought Linen or wool directly but opened more than 100k lootbags of different tiers between september and December, keeping all cloth to sell after the patch. I usually made a profit on the lootbags, selling everything except the cloth.

I dont know where your hostility comes from. The OP asked about what people think of the mini market and i gave my honest opinion based on my past experience.

If you had better success, fair enough, and congrats to you. If you want to share your positive experience in the mini market, go ahead.
As i said, i invested a bit as well, a couple of hundred gold when set 1 was discontinued, and i made some profit, about 30% ROI over 2 weeks. But i rather invest into other market where i can make more money.

Wanze.8410:

I dont know where your hostility comes from. The OP asked about what people think of the mini market and i gave my honest opinion based on my past experience.

Hostility was not my intention, but I’d be lying – reading back my reply – that there wasn’t some of it in there. I’ll try to explain some of the thoughts behind it.

First you say that based on your vast experience as a trader, trading in X is good/bad.
Then you say you have no experience in trading in X, and that it’s not your cup of tea.
What then, I wonder, is your advice based on? On information available to everyone – yes – but not in hands-on trading in the item itself.

I guess my problem is that your opinion carries weight – you know it does having caused quite a stir on the market with your posts in the past – but that you use that opinion on items in which you have no experience in, and which at times defy logic. Which brought me to the t2-t5 cloth example, where I kept telling people to use their head instead of blindly following the crowd and the wealthier investors. And the crowd, as you know quite well, will blindly follow. But as you know, that crowd will not sell right before a patch hits; they will hold on to it and lose out bigtime. You won, that’s great, but most of them lost.

So I guess I would have preferred that you questioned me on my advice in this thread – which even though it is based on experience can still be tested to see whether it’s really that solid – instead of giving advice to one person (read by 1000 others) that has no basis in hands-on experience in the item itself. Mind you, profits margins in that market are through the roof, and I mean really, through the roof. It was disgusting how much gold I could make on certain evenings when minis bottomed out; I mean, even with black lion skins I couldn’t even come close to those margins. Anyway, I’ll stop here. Take it with a grain of candy corn.

Buttercup.5871:

Wanze.8410:

I dont know where your hostility comes from. The OP asked about what people think of the mini market and i gave my honest opinion based on my past experience.

Hostility was not my intention, but I’d be lying – reading back my reply – that there wasn’t some of it in there. I’ll try to explain some of the thoughts behind it.

First you say that based on your vast experience as a trader, trading in X is good/bad.
Then you say you have no experience in trading in X, and that it’s not your cup of tea.
What then, I wonder, is your advice based on? On information available to everyone – yes – but not in hands-on trading in the item itself.

I guess my problem is that your opinion carries weight – you know it does having caused quite a stir on the market with your posts in the past – but that you use that opinion on items in which you have no experience in, and which at times defy logic. Which brought me to the t2-t5 cloth example, where I kept telling people to use their head instead of blindly following the crowd and the wealthier investors. And the crowd, as you know quite well, will blindly follow. But as you know, that crowd will not sell right before a patch hits; they will hold on to it and lose out bigtime. You won, that’s great, but most of them lost.

So I guess I would have preferred that you questioned me on my advice in this thread – which even though it is based on experience can still be tested to see whether it’s really that solid – instead of giving advice to one person (read by 1000 others) that has no basis in hands-on experience in the item itself. Mind you, profits margins in that market are through the roof, and I mean really, through the roof. It was disgusting how much gold I could make on certain evenings when minis bottomed out; I mean, even with black lion skins I couldn’t even come close to those margins. Anyway, I’ll stop here. Take it with a grain of candy corn.

Well, as I said, I did invest in Mini´s at some point (about 2000g), and I also made profit, so i think I have experience in it. I also observe the market occasionally for a longer period of time, if something happens to it, be it risen knights being a rare mini when they came out, discontinuation of set 1 or the rare chest minis recently.

My main problem with the market is that in my opinion its just pure vanity. Their in game use is pretty limited and they are not consumed or bound, when used (unless you forge them). So for me its more a decision based on the design and mechanics behind it than anything else.

And why should i question your advice? Everybody has its own opinion and if you made good money with it, I cant argue much with that.

Minis and cash shop dyes are best understood as a way to invest in the price of gems without actually buying the gems for later resale and paying big taxes.

The price of gems rises with gemstore demand and gold inflation so it’s tempting to try and invest in something anet is invested into.

The average gem cost of a rare or exotic mini is a fixed number. When the gold price rises, the gold price of that fixed gold gem conversion out to rise also.

In theory anyways. But also in historical fact, the mini prices usually track gem prices.

You also get a temporary market abnormality bump when minis go off the market for a whil and thus become more “rare.” However, the season one minis have been brought back for gemstore sales, and its safe to assume the will be brought back again, so in the long run the price will regress to the gem price mean. A bunch of people recently lost big on dye speculation when anet brought the dyes back twice in the last 4 months. Don’t be them. Only count on the gem price conversion number.

As for rare discontinued minis, these are great if the mini is popular, and are a good buy and hold candidate. The game doesn’t have a lot of discontinued and never coming back items, so this improves them in my view. However, be aware that minis are not consumed or dedicated (like the ghastly grinning shield weapon skin), and o there are theoretically the same number of mini lord Farens running around as there have always been. (Fluctuations in demand and supply would depend on players who own or want the mini and the rates at which they quit or enter the game).

BUT, mini buyer beware. Changes by anet to how the game works can affect the mini market as well as how well minis track gem prices. The ingame farmable mini risen knights crashed the mini market and lost a bunch of gold for mini investors. Likewise, the mini Caithes and Scarlets, rare minis in Black lion chests at a time when players wanted scraps for Halloween weapons also depressed the mini market, even the season 1 mini market. All it takes is one droppable non exotic mini to forever crash the mini market.

TL;DR buy BL chest minis when moderately low (3-7g), sell when moderately high (40-50g). If the price is too high, it probably won’t stay that way for long.

Just one addition: when these minis leave the BL chests, their price cannot be affected by risen knights and the like. In a way they are “exempt” (similar to the mini karka or reef drake), because these minis cannot be forged.