Guild Wars 2

Most of the time when I ask someone who they their money in GW2 they say that they “Play the market” So I Googled “How to play GW2 market” and the only useful information I got out of it was to buy low sell high, and how to do basic flipping. The problem is all of the items that I try to flip I can’t sell them or buy them easily. Can anyone recommend any guides, markets, items, or just give advice as to how I can start playing the market? Thanks ahead of time

Safest bet is just to buy what you think will increase in price, and sell when you think it peaks.

For example, you could’ve spent 100g on Toxic Spores not too long ago (1s), and they’d be worth 500g+ now (5s+), or spent 100g on Desert Rose skins (2g-ish) some time ago, and they’d be worth 1500g now (30g-ish).

The what, how, why, etc. questions are… probably best for you to discover.

While there are high profit margins on the tp, its up to you to find those markets. That will require tons of research and patience as well as quite some bank roll. Once profitable markets are listed either here or on reddit, you can basically forget about making any profit on them.

Basically if you share, you are either telling someone about a market that’s already tapped out or you are shooting yourself in the foot as other players try to do the same thing as you were and destroy that opportunity.

Let me tell you a story. Back when they got rid of Traveler armor, they replaced it with Dire. But most people didn’t notice Dire armor at all. GW2TP still doesn’t even prompt dire as a searchable word. Because not a lot of people noticed, you could buy rare dire armor significantly cheaper than any of the other “standard” rare armor drops (Berserker/Carrion/Cleric/Rampage/Shaman). And because of that the profit from buying/salvaging and sell off the mats and ruins was huge. But as time went on profits slowly dropped as prices rose to match the other five until one day someone spilled the beans and WHAM, they were actually more expensive. So time to bury that market opportunity and look for something else.

I wasn’t even a flipper, that’s another skill entirely.

Pretty much as stated above. If you really want viable tips, you need to find someone in game who is a regular TP trader and “network” with them to learn the trade. Its not for everyone, but its the most money you can make in game with a character that never has to leave the capital city. Ebonhawk is nice, btw.

These are the things that I can think off that may be useful to start playing the TP.

You will have to work your way around three main methods: Flipping items, Converting items (crafting or mystic forging) and Speculation.

Flipping

You have two flavors, massive flipping and finding gaps and walls.

Massive flipping is basically buying a huge amount of materials at the cheapest price, and selling them at the most expensive price possible. The more money you invest, the more money you get back. This method works better with materials that move fast, if you list 250 of Product A, and it gets sold in seconds, then here you have something to work with.

Gaps and Walls is about searching the TP for some special conditions. This can also be combined with other methods. A gap is something like this

Product X – 40 Units – 12.45 silver
Product X – 22 Units – 12.40 silver
Product X – 38 Units – 6.22 silver <- This is a gap, there is a huge jump in price for the same item.
Product X – 14 Units – 6.19 silver

You could instantly buy all the Product X under 6.22 silver and re list them at 12.39 silver. This is a bit more risky, and you have to make sure that this Product X is actually demanded.

And a Wall is something like this:

Product Y – 230 Units – 40.33 silver
Product Y – 6344 Units – 40.32 silver <- This is a Wall, there are a lot of items at this price
Product Y – 133 Units – 40.31 silver <- This is a good spot to sell because it is closer to the wall
Product Y – 55 Units – 40.22 silver

If you list your stock of Product Y at 40.32 or higher, you will have to wait for those 6344 units to get sold first, but if you list at 40.31, it will sell before those 6344 units. And if you do this with an item that moves very fast, it is very probable that even if your offer is not the best one, eventually it will get sold, even if there are better offers than yours. This is also useful with items that move slowly, you can buy with Buy Orders and let the market reach the Gaps and Walls by itself, then sell all your stock.

So when you are flipping items, you better pay attention at all of this. If you dedicate enough time, you may be able to find at what times of the day some items move faster or slower. Hint: Prime times for Europe and America tend to move the market a lot.

Converting

This is the most simple and almost risk free way to use the TP. Basically, you buy raw materials and convert them into something else, more expensive than those materials alone. Juts pay a visit to gw2spidy a search for profitable recipes.

The problem with this method is that there are probably thousands of people doing the same, and it is very likely that you will get outbid, or that you find a product that look profitable one day but it is not the day after.

There are some recipes that require stuff that cannot be bought, like some Mystic Forge Weapons that require skill points. In this case they may get you more money, but you may run out of skill points.

Speculation

This is the most risky and the most profitable method. Unfortunately it is also the most difficult one. Basically this relies in your ability to foresee how a specific market may change in the future. You only have to remember two rules, if it looks too simple, then there will be thousands of people doing the same; if it looks too complicated, then don’t do it.

Most of the speculation happens with products that are recurrent to some periods of time, or that are affected by updates.

Take for example the crafting disciplines, it is highly possible that Cooking and Jewelry get the same update as the others and can be leveled up to 500. If they follow a similar pattern to the armor and weapons disciplines, it should be fairly simple to find out products with low demand and huge amounts on the TP that may be required to level up those disciplines. You can buy them now, while they are super cheap, and sell them in the future for 2x, 5x or 10x times its current value. The risk here is that you don’t know for sure if it will happen, when will it happen, how many people will be doing the same…

Last remarks

Knowing a bit of programming and building your own Google Spreadsheet (or Excel if you are rich) connected with the gw2spidy api helps a lot. There are also software that let’s you automate parts of this process, but I don’t know if they are legit.

I started by buying bowls of strawberry pie filling and 42 and selling for 65.