Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been buying and selling in various crafts and have found that it’s either hard to make a decent profit, or that very few items are profitable. Now I’m not saying that you can’t make a profit off majority of items from buying in the auction house and selling them back as goods. I’m just saying that a lot of things aren’t worthwhile to craft. For example, buying the materials to craft a specific gem only to make a few silver; if someone doesn’t undercut your price to oblivion in the process. On another note selling a satchel a week to make a 10g profit is worthwhile, because people aren’t making a lot of them, as well as people aren’t buying a lot of them.

My point and question is… Will products that are easier to craft or less desirable ever be tweaked to be more desirable by the consumers or harder to obtain? Since the TP is a free market, that means the products sold has to be something needed, and somewhat hard to obtain. Is this current setup meant to force people to buy gems to trade for gold to make any real profits.

I’m asking, because I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars in gems, just to make gold. Before anyone goes crying like the usual GW2 troll; I make roughly around 10-15g a week, so it’s not like I’m hurting for cash that bad anyway. I just like playing a market, and feel that it’s lacking and only leaves 15-20% of products to a good profit margin.

If you checked the prices of the mats recently, you would notice it has gone up. However, the Item crafted still remains the same price.

It’s a global market, of course only a minority of the products in there are going to provide a profit.

Otherwise you would somehow have a system where majority of things provide you with a profit. I am pretty sure that’s called a bubble. And those never last.

And it’s not like you ever need a lot of gold in the game. Unless your goal happens to be getting a legendary. Anything else and you can get by with a relatively small amount.

Wolfgang Michael.8217:

If you checked the prices of the mats recently, you would notice it has gone up. However, the Item crafted still remains the same price.

Yes I have noticed that, and for saw that it was due to RMT trading. Even before the initial spike tho, it was the same way. Most of the time it’s more worthwhile to sell your mats rather than craft them and sell your goods. It’s a sucky system.

But who would buy the items you craft?

Gankfest.4965:

Wolfgang Michael.8217:

If you checked the prices of the mats recently, you would notice it has gone up. However, the Item crafted still remains the same price.

Yes I have noticed that, and for saw that it was due to RMT trading. Even before the initial spike tho, it was the same way. Most of the time it’s more worthwhile to sell your mats rather than craft them and sell your goods. It’s a sucky system.

If you got in the t5 mats while they where low and had some surplus then you could have craft crap people throw in the forge. I know GS jumped 10s since the mats went up and their isn’t alot of them for sale. Rare ones that is.

Im sure more stuff will be added I think this new update will add some things since it will result in permanent changes to the world after the event is over. Halloween was a small sample of what is to come and from what I am reading this update is a big one so it will give us a idea of other updates. Then 1 month after this update is Wintersday on the 15th of Dec at least that is what it was in GW1 and it goes till the beginning of Jan.

I saved up a bunch of candy corn hoping the price will jump after christmas.

Crafting in most MMOs is just another progress bar to max out. There are so many people who pursue crafting as a matter of completionism that the crafting economy works backwards — raw materials command a premium and the finished product is driven down to vendor price. And for the crafters it’s basically a command economy, they have to keep producing stuff that nobody wants in order to level up. It’s not their choice to make worthless crap, the game forces them to do it.

In most cases the quality of the item doesn’t matter, the supply of items (every crafter) outstrips the demand several times over. There has to be a fundamental change in the way crafting systems are implemented for them to work the way people expect. For one thing, from an economic standpoint it’s a huge error to allow every player to take on every crafting profession by themselves. In GW2, you can accomplish that with 4 characters and still have room left over with your basic number of slots. How can you have a healthy crafting economy when people are encouraged to do everything themselves and not trade?

I think the problem is we level too fast for crafted gear to be of any sort of real value. If it lasted a little longer it might be worth a little more. It doesnt help that everyone and their grandmother can do crafting up till 200 without breaking a sweat.

I’ve put some thought into this problem too, but dont’ see any good solutions. Some solutions that probably aren’t very good include things like: items crafted that give you experience are set to account bound. This makes them potentially useful to the crafter, salable to vendors, or at worst, salvageable, but keeps them from from flooding the market. Once one’s skill is maxed, or for items that one is no longer gaining xp from, then they would be set to being unbound and could be sold on the market.

The reason there is not a whole lot worth value, or why it seems to be constantly moving target, or why most rares get salvaged is because 1)

1) The skins aren’t super desirable.
2) The stat mixes don’t work for many classes.
3) Everyone has all the patterns <- This is the most important.

To make money crafting you have to add value beyond “push the button”. Some mystic forge items have value because you put 30-50 skill points into them. This keeps people from spam crafting them. That’s fine for a few items, but I hate that kind of system as a crafting system. (Same as Soulbound Drops) because these systems pay you to farm.

Since there is no time limiter, and no quality limiter like in the real world the only way to “limit” crafts is to somehow restrict the patterns. Sometimes that means specializations, sometimes that means quest lines, dungeons, or drops for rarer and more desirable patterns.

Some games have cooldowns, no farming requirement but you can only get a certain amount of items. Of course then you are just selling your cooldown in many cases.

No matter what for crafted items to have long term value they have to be desirable and there has to be some kind of value beyond “push the button”>

Or, they could have the crafted items actually have high npc-sale values. For instance, 20-slot bags should at least be able to be npc-ed for slightly more than 10g. That would at least prevent crafted items from being sold for too low, and would give crafters a way to make (a little) money, without needing a buyer.

But I doubt anet wants that. They don’t want players to have a freedom of choice, they want players to log in, zerg+multi-task specific things (tyvm xp/loot/karma/dungeon DR -_-) and log out.

If you could craft things at a profit selling to a vendor then gold would be useless.

If you just raise the sale prices then you force crafters to list thier items higher on the TP. If they are a lot higher than drop items nobody buys them. (This is the case in a lot of markets already).