Guild Wars 2

I noticed something interesting today, somebody’s placed moderate size buy orders (~160) for 4s for pretty much every type of major rune. For some of the runes this nearly 75c more then the next highest bid.

I’m curious as to why somebody might do that, does anyone have any theories? My theory is that perhaps the market is small enough that this could result in price rises across the board and whoever placed those buy orders is hoping that all those buy orders will never actually fulfilled (because somebody else will eventually bid 1c higher) and they’ll be able to sell a bunch of runes at a higher price than normal.

Maybe the new rune overhaul will include putting four of the same major to get a superior in the forge and some internal tester(s) are taking advantage of it. Alternatively, mere speculation.

the sheer amount of clicking to put 4 majors in the forge to get superiors out scares me. I mean I’ve done about 100 at one time and that’s is a helluva process.

I wish they would allow for 4 superior runes to get another random superior, just seems like a logical formula.

Mayor Runes are nearly exclusively used to be forged into Superior Runes.
Depending on RNG, there is some good profit in it. IT did it once in a while when i was bored and usually i would search for “rune” on the tp and set the filter on rare.

Then i would sort by price ascending, which would list the cheapest runes first and then put in 100 or 250 buy orders in for every rune that had a highest bid under 4s.

I would do that for for like 20 or 30 different runes maybe and i think most people who want to buy lots of runes to forge would go about it the same way.

But that means that the runes with currently the cheapest sell listing on page 1 would get overbid quite fast. I know that alot of people are impatient and rather buy directly, even though it costs more. They would go about it the same way, starting with the cheapest rune and buy 100 each, raising the price so it would be displayed on the 3rd or 4th page, if you sort by price, meaning less people will put in buy orders for them because its listed further to the end.

This would mean that any particular mayor rune would go in cycles in price and the page listed. Once it is cheap enough to be displayed on the first page, it gets bought out and listed in the latter pages until enough undercutting went on to move forward in the listing when sorted by price.

Usually, if you would go to the 3rd or 4th page of runes, you would see the highest bids way more often below 4s than on the runes listed on the first 2 pages. If you check the price graphs on spidy for any mayor rune for a long period, you will see that the lowest sell listings raw data graph is alot more spiky compared to exotic runes, which arent that a high velocity market. Thats an indication for big amounts of a major rune being bought out, which increases its price and rapidly going down again due to undercutting.

My two attachments show the sell listings raw data for Mayor Rune of the Traveler and Superior Rune of Lyssa, i think you can see the difference in low value spikes, which underlines my theory.

tldr: (I actually dont know what tldr means but people seem to use it to summarize long posts, please enlighten me)

In most cases, the highest bid and the frequency of being outbid is usually lower, the higher the lowest listing of a rune is.

If we assume that it was only 1 person that placed high volume bids on nearly every major rune at 4s, he makes sure that he gets a constant flow of new runes, as the sell listing of each rune goes in circles between 4 and 6s.

Wanze.8410:

I actually dont know what tldr means but people seem to use it to summarize long posts, please enlighten me

tl;dr

Wanze is correct. We purchase the Major Runes to take a chance at getting expensive Superiors to resell for profit.

Dworkin.1734:

Wanze.8410:

I actually dont know what tldr means but people seem to use it to summarize long posts, please enlighten me

tl;dr

Thanks, youre a champ!

You lack a loot bag, though.

Neurophen.9738:

I noticed something interesting today, somebody’s placed moderate size buy orders (~160) for 4s for pretty much every type of major rune. For some of the runes this nearly 75c more then the next highest bid.

I’m curious as to why somebody might do that, does anyone have any theories? My theory is that perhaps the market is small enough that this could result in price rises across the board and whoever placed those buy orders is hoping that all those buy orders will never actually fulfilled (because somebody else will eventually bid 1c higher) and they’ll be able to sell a bunch of runes at a higher price than normal.

Someone is doing the same with minor runes. 1000 orders at the current or 1c higher price on every low price minor rune, every day. No idea what they are doing with all of them. Takes a while to MF even 500 of them.

when they announced that they were overhauling sigils and runes, many superior sigils and runes jumped 2-3 times their value.
I didn’t bother trying to flip those.
Instead, I noticed that the average sigil and rune price went from like 50s to 80s. which means that the minimum profitable price to buy major sigils and runes went from like 5s to 8s. meaning that instead of 100g profit off a couple hour’s forging, you would get 400g profit.
I don’t know of any recent spikes in superior sigil/rune prices, so I’m gonna guess that they are speculating.
btw: it can indeed be profitable to buy major runes and forge into superior. I usually get about 50g/hour from about 2000 majors (throwing the majors that come out back in), but that day I got about 300g in 3 hours from 7500 majors. you just watch a movie at the same time :P Avengers, in this case. I had to stop because I couldn’t buy any more due to other people catching on and the price of majors went up

Heh, you guys have much better luck at the Forge than I do. I’ve never gotten a Superior rune/sigil that was worth more than 5 silver. Granted, I don’t throw the sheer number of upgrades in there as you do.

You only need a couple Superior Runes of divinity to pop out to make you think there might be something to it .

I have never, ever gotten one of those. The most valuable drop I ever had from forging runes was a Superior Rune of the Ranger, and I ended up using that. XD Zommoros just hates me for some reason.

On the other hand, I have also had a Precursor drop from killing random mobs, so I guess Grenth likes me for all the fresh souls I keep sending to him.

out of 2000 major runes, re-forging all the majors that come out, you get about 124 superior runes. there’s about 60 superior runes on the TP, but about 10 of those you can’t get from the forge (4 of which are the nearly the most valuable), and there are about 8 that you can get that are not on the TP because they are account bound (the dungeon runes).
due to randomness, you would probably end up with about 2-8 of 40 of those and 0 of the last ~20.
I’ve definitely had a time where the first 1500 runes yielded no superior traveler or divinity and I was starting to suspect they were removed or something. then I got 2 in a row. by the end of that batch I had 5 traveler and 3 divinity. point being that you need huge sample sizes when dealing with low drop rate things, because there will be dry spells you have to push through.

Several months ago I tried my hand at rune gambling. It can be quite profitable, but is kitten the wrists and time consuming.

If I don’t have the patience to do TP flipping, I won’t have the patience to do rune gambling.

agreed. do not do it every night. it’s even more mind-numbing than champ farming, if you can believe that.
sometimes I wish you could put, for example, 4 stacks of 250 runes in the MF and get 250 random runes out (same chance of superior, so ~50 superior and 200 major). But then I remember that if that were the case, everyone would be MFing runes and sigils to the point it’s anti-profitable (not just not profitable, but actually cheaper to buy the superior you want than make it with majors)

Mystic.5934:

agreed. do not do it every night. it’s even more mind-numbing than champ farming, if you can believe that.
sometimes I wish you could put, for example, 4 stacks of 250 runes in the MF and get 250 random runes out (same chance of superior, so ~50 superior and 200 major). But then I remember that if that were the case, everyone would be MFing runes and sigils to the point it’s anti-profitable (not just not profitable, but actually cheaper to buy the superior you want than make it with majors)

I think it’s just to make it easier on the servers.

If Anet were to do it that way, you’d have 250 calculations all at once. Multiply that with hundreds of players possibly doing it at the same time, and well, it can get pretty laggy.

I guess that’s why we have the mystic forge as opposed to crafter.

Crafting results are guaranteed, and as such, calculations are minimal.

Meanwhile mystic forge results are RNG, and as such, require calculations.

It’s not ideal, of course.

I’d say forging.

There is a major patch coming where all of the rune sets will be reworked.

Major Runes are for forging Superior Runes, and by cornering the major Rune market now, a speculator could hope to reap the windfall on the new Rune Meta (ie ppl ditch scholar and traveler and go to some other runes).

When it was announced, buy orders went almost all the way up to 5.5s. When people realized that the patch wasn’t coming soon after the announcement, buy orders fell to 3s.

Tl;dr. People think an announced change to runes will make them more valuable.

nekretaal.6485:

When it was announced, buy orders went almost all the way up to 5.5s.

THAT WAS ME! WAHAHAAHA
actually, I only bumped them up to 4s. I stopped trying to buy them when I noticed other people bumped them to 5s within hours. I had calculated the maximum purchase price to still make a profit to be about 8s, but in reality it was closer to 6s (stupid exuberance and perplexity). meaning every rune I purchased made me 2s profit, while every rune people after me purchased made them 1s profit

I presume whoever is buying at that price is stocking up for the rune patch. At current prices their margin is so small that it’s hardly worth the effort to forge them (large sample profit = 85 copper per forge).

Yeah, at the 4s price point you’re not making enough money to be worth it. I outbid this individual on runes the other days and actually ended up getting skunked pretty hard.

The profit margin on sigils has gone down the toilet, so I moved to runes. Place a buy order for 100 of every rune, figure out which types of runes are flowing in, then focus on those. I’ve made good money off this off and on for nearly a year now I guess.

Along this line of buying up and holding in speculation, what is the impact point? If I pile up 10,000 major runes to hold onto, how much do I actually impact the system as opposed to a player who buys up 10K of their own and then throws them into the forge to see what the slot machine kicks out? The circulation point is easy, between us we’ve pulled 20K major runes from supply and that tightens the market and has a small chance to impact prices especially if we both purchased on buy orders.

That has to be but a tiny percentage in the supply bucket BUT if the second player destroys 3 out of 4 runes of his 10K then we get an attrition of 75%, or 7500 runes. Those runes are gone forever, never to return to a sale point on the TP. During his further spinning of the Mystic Forge his remaining 2500 will be a mix of superiors and 80% majors so 2000 more can go into the forge, this time destroying another 1500.

We’re up to 9K major runes destroyed at this point and my 10K are still sitting in my inventory. Ultimately, to get to just superiors, 9500, approximately, major sigils have to be destroyed. Now this is just 2 hypothetical players (I don’t have any rune holdings), there are scores of players doing this, holding for speculation or gambling with the forge and destroying 3 out of 4 items.

The ultimate question is, what has a larger impact on prices?

10k major runes is nothing. what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can craft major runes. some particularly cheap recipes:
Major Rune of the Krait = 1 Pile of Vile Essence + 1 Mithril Ingot
Major Rune of the Thief = 1 Crystal Core + 1 Thick Leather Square
Major Rune of the Ice = 1 Glacial Core + 1 Thick Leather Square
Basically, all 3 of those can be crafted for less than 4s. That means that it is pretty hard to increase rune prices above 4s and there is a huge supply of runes for less than 4s.
I can easily buy 10,000 of those materials in under a day. and that 10,000 will only make 600 superior runes which is about 12 of each superior. 12 of each superior is not a big impact – those will sell in less than an hour (it would take 6+ hours to MF them).
Even 100,000 would only be a temporary blip.

I would hate to be the one who buys 10k runes and then has to forge them all.

Great response but still not quite I was asking though Mystic. Even if we were to jump up to 100K runes/sigils per character in my outline or higher, what has the higher impact on pricing? The person who hoards the items or the person who destroys them? Or, is it an equal effect? I know this seems silly but at some point the hoarder will want the bank space back and want to sell and will reintroduce those items to market. The MF-er (heh) is just eliminating them in hopes of a high return. I am thinking the forger has a bigger impact…..just looking to see what others think.

Having thrown a whole lot of sigils into the forge in the last week, I agree that it sucks to do it Vol, with you on that one.

I think it would be easier to sell 10 of each superior rune than 10,000 major runes. They would get more profit from the superiors.
I would say that the amount the increased the price by will be offset by the amount it’s decreased by when they sell. I’m sure they are hoping it’s decreased by less. It’s likely just about the exact same amount.
IMO, buying majors is equivalent to destroying them, because the only good use for them is to destroy them by trying to get superiors out of them.