Guild Wars 2

So, I’ve never had a ton of luck at investing in items before patches, but I thought I knew a decent item to flip: Sigil of Air.

Before the patch, it was a pretty lackluster sigil since it did near the same damage as Fire, but only single target with the same internal cooldown. After the patch, it now has a 3 second internal cooldown, which should make this a solid choice for people who are min/maxing DPS for boss fights, especially now that they have an extra sigil spot on 2h weapons…

…but the price plummeted after the patch. Ugh.

Better hold on to them for a bit… the theorycrafters are still working out what the impact is. You may be yet sitting on a gold mine.

You picked an item which a lot of other people attempted to do the exact same thing with. I remember right after the ready up that previewed the change the price of the item spiked pretty heavily. Which means a lot of the supply was bought up immediately, likely by a lot of people attempting the same thing you were.

Word has gotten out that TP flipping is one of the best ways to make money, so anything super obvious to flip (like a sigil that’s suddenly going to be a lot better in a few weeks) is going to have a lot of competition.

Between the high flipper volume (which means a lot of people attempting to sell all at once, which means a lot of undercutting) and the fact that the sigil itself doesn’t quite seem as good as people were expecting… yah, not a super great investment right now.

I bought like 250 when they are at 20 silver. Mainly because I have too many alts. And I can’t afford first tier sigil for all of them.

So sigil of air did go up. There are some other choices, unless proven air is better than force, bloodlust, accuracy, strength etc… It’s probably not going to go higher.

I tried flipping then I gave up because i have no sense of business.

now i am broke.

Thank you for your gold.

Wanze.8410:

Thank you for your gold.

This comes across quite flippant.

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

Thank you for your gold.

This comes across quite flippant.

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

Wanze.8410:

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

It’s like they say, old habits die hard.

(I am simply proud of my flipping/flippant pun.)

On topic – never give up, never surrender.

Edit: Pun might not be the right word, but my mind already wandered off and I’m currently trying to catch up.

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

It’s like they say, old habits die hard.

(I am simply proud of my flipping/flippant pun.)

On topic – never give up, never surrender.

Edit: Pun might not be the right word, but my mind already wandered off and I’m currently trying to catch up.

I actually had to look up what flippant means, as english is my 2nd language.

Wanze.8410:

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

It’s like they say, old habits die hard.

(I am simply proud of my flipping/flippant pun.)

On topic – never give up, never surrender.

Edit: Pun might not be the right word, but my mind already wandered off and I’m currently trying to catch up.

I actually had to look up what flippant means, as english is my 2nd language.

Off topic, but I never would’ve guessed english isn’t your native language. You use it very well.

Wanze.8410:

Thank you for your gold.

Well I m broke mainly cuz I blew my money on crafting not from flipping.

The crafting of flipped items or items crafted with flipped items, or the flipping of crafted items or items crafted with flipped items, shall be taxeable by Evon not under 15%.

It’s a ‘goes around comes around’ kinda thing.

What you were doing was speculating, not flipping (well perhaps a form of flipping). The key to flipping is finding items with both a high volume of supply and real demand and make a profit off of that.

Bad speculators give flippers a bad rep because their speculating is what anti-flippers see as “market manipulation” or even inflation. The rise and fall of the fine dye and enhancement markets are great examples of players failing badly at what they think is flipping. A good speculator buys over a period of days before an upward price move and knows when to take profit over thinking they can earn even more. Good speculators sell off to bad ones who think it’s they who are getting the deal.

Wanze.8410:

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

It’s like they say, old habits die hard.

(I am simply proud of my flipping/flippant pun.)

On topic – never give up, never surrender.

Edit: Pun might not be the right word, but my mind already wandered off and I’m currently trying to catch up.

I actually had to look up what flippant means, as english is my 2nd language.

I also had to look it up, and english is my 1st language. It did not mean exactly what I thought it meant.

you should hold onto your sigils until they are profitable. it’s just unusually low right now because everyone’s grandmother is selling them after they are in your same position.

I tend to take a less glamorous approach to flipping. Maintain a steady rate of items that are consumed on a regular basis. There are certain items that have a surprisingly high turnover rate.

“Buy the rumor, sell the news,” they say. That is what everyone did here, and so no one made any real gold. The real money, however, was to be made doing the opposite: sell on the rumor (i.e. to the speculators.). In fact, selling to speculators is perhaps my most garaunteed income stream. It’s never amazing, but it’s consistent.

Sigil of air could still rise since it is now quite useful in PvE and there will be a lot more sigils consumed period due to 2h weapons gettting a second slot. A lot of speculators panicked when it didn’t immediately rise and sold off all their stock, but I suspect it will be one of the ones that rises slowly from here on out.

There are BOTS that flipping things automaticly.
That is why you get outbid. Yes, you can check YouTube about GW2 hacks.
~ and this post will be removed by mod anyway… I’m sorry~

Except bots can’t flip because they can’t pick up from the TP. Yes they can remove and up bids but that doesn’t retrieve the coin from those canceled bids/sold items so it needs someone to periodically stop in and do pickup.

The game is specifically designed to discourage money making outside of buying it on the fun money store.

GW2 has the worst AH ever for flipping, really wish they wouldn’t of even added one. P2P trading can be a lot more rewarding / fun if you are into that type of stuff.

Wanze.8410:

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

Thank you for your gold.

This comes across quite flippant.

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

And you wonder why people hate TP traders??? Really? You could at least put on a decent outward face and cackle like scrooge mcduck in private.

TooBz.3065:

Wanze.8410:

Rouven.7409:

Wanze.8410:

Thank you for your gold.

This comes across quite flippant.

But it comes from the bottom of my heart.

And you wonder why people hate TP traders??? Really? You could at least put on a decent outward face and cackle like scrooge mcduck in private.

I dont wonder why people hate traders and i dont feel hated. I get alot of positive response, actually.

Make your own TP flipping bot, all the resources needed are on the API forum

You won’t earn gold on obvious items – look at dyes, everyone probably thought they gonna be worthless for a while but now they are at 25s(I bought at 19s). Celestial and Abyss recovered too, even if I’ve invested in this market I’m actually astonished they are at this price because so much people were unlocking dyes for duplicates.

Dyes are as obvious as they get lol… nonetheless, I think they are one of the best investment opportunities we’ve had in a while, since there is a massive burst of supply, and then suddenly there will be none. If that’s not a recipe for easy money I don’t know what is. Very little risk since even Anet is predicting them becoming more expensive than before (see: gift of color requires only 100 dyes now).

Dahkeus.8243:

So, I’ve never had a ton of luck at investing in items before patches, but I thought I knew a decent item to flip: Sigil of Air.

Before the patch, it was a pretty lackluster sigil since it did near the same damage as Fire, but only single target with the same internal cooldown. After the patch, it now has a 3 second internal cooldown, which should make this a solid choice for people who are min/maxing DPS for boss fights, especially now that they have an extra sigil spot on 2h weapons…

…but the price plummeted after the patch. Ugh.

This is speculation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Flipping is (AIUI) buying when there’s a spread between the buy and sell prices which is larger than 15%. For a high volume market, this can be very profitable. Let me give a concrete example — one which I failed to fully utilize since I didn’t understand how stable the prices would be until the patch.

For ~15-17 days (a few days after the announcement through patch day) the price of identified blue dyes was typically 10-12s to buy, and 17-18s to sell. If you were conservative, and bought at 12s you could then turn around and sell for 17s — yielding a profit of of 2. 4 4 silver per dye.

Ideally you’d do this by choosing 20-40 dyes where prices are in the right range, and buying/selling 20-50 at a time. If you choose 40 dyes and did them in batches of 30, you could make 30g a day with relatively little effort — selling and buying once a day. (Doing this is — believe it or not — beneficial for those who are least savvy about the market, since it reduces the spread between buy and sell, improving prices for those who buy or sell at the buy/sell prices.) If you choose 100 dyes and did them in batches of 40, you could have made 100g per cycle (1-2 cycles per day) … but this would be much more time consuming.

Even better would have been using this to fill up your characters with identified colors to get unid dyes on patch day — the fact that you can resell at a profit means it didn’t matter if you bought too many, so no careful accounting was needed.

Ah well. I realized too late to take full advantage of this. I think the raw number of different markets is why it remained profitable — there weren’t enough people doing it for competition on all of them.

You could do flipping with identified dyes now — lots of them have a large enough spread to make this profitable; but you run the risk that the price will change under you. Still, if you pay attention and choose 5-10 dyes this could make a little profit.

(Disclaimer: I’m speculating in identified dyes now — I purchased … a lot. Stacks of most blue ones, 100+ for each green dye which hit 1s4c, and 5-10 of many rares (those which hit 10s). Prices for most have gone up, but some are still available “cheap”. No guarantees that this will make a profit in any specific timeframe, though, so I wouldn’t advise it unless you have lots of storage available.)

linuxotaku.4731:

For ~15-17 days (a few days after the announcement through patch day) the price of identified blue dyes was typically 10-12s to buy, and 17-18s to sell. If you were conservative, and bought at 12s you could then turn around and sell for 17s — yielding a profit of of 2. 4 4 silver per dye.

As a correction — the spread was fairly consistent at 5-6s, but the prices did trend up and down:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/20464

The result is still the same — if you planned appropriately, you could easily make 2s/item flipping, and this scaled fairly well since there was high volume and more markets than competitors (meaning there was still a fair bit of inefficiency which could be taken advantage of).

Also, I wanted to comment — if you’d wanted to speculate on sigils, a lower-risk way to do so would have been to buy major sigils or runes pre-patch, based on the guess that sigil changes would make some sigils more expensive. The runes wouldn’t have done much better than breaking even, the sigils would have given around 70-100% profit (buy at ~2.7s, sell at 5-6s): http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24553

The advantage to major sigils is that they can be transformed into random superior sigils via the mystic forge (at a rate of ~15:1). The output is random, but the value of a random major sigil is based on the average value of the resulting superior sigils. So doing this would allow you to gamble on an increase in some kinds of superior sigil, without being tied to a specific one — which helps if you’re wrong about which ones will increase in value.

For sigils and runes, I think you can make a little money doing minor (green/masterwork) → major conversion via the mystic forge (18c * 15 =~ 2.7 silver per major, and majors sell for > 4s), but it’s far too much clicking and waiting to seem worth the time IMO.

linuxotaku.4731:

linuxotaku.4731:

For ~15-17 days (a few days after the announcement through patch day) the price of identified blue dyes was typically 10-12s to buy, and 17-18s to sell. If you were conservative, and bought at 12s you could then turn around and sell for 17s — yielding a profit of of 2. 4 4 silver per dye.

As a correction — the spread was fairly consistent at 5-6s, but the prices did trend up and down:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/20464

The result is still the same — if you planned appropriately, you could easily make 2s/item flipping, and this scaled fairly well since there was high volume and more markets than competitors (meaning there was still a fair bit of inefficiency which could be taken advantage of).

Also, I wanted to comment — if you’d wanted to speculate on sigils, a lower-risk way to do so would have been to buy major sigils or runes pre-patch, based on the guess that sigil changes would make some sigils more expensive. The runes wouldn’t have done much better than breaking even, the sigils would have given around 70-100% profit (buy at ~2.7s, sell at 5-6s): http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24553

The advantage to major sigils is that they can be transformed into random superior sigils via the mystic forge (at a rate of ~15:1). The output is random, but the value of a random major sigil is based on the average value of the resulting superior sigils. So doing this would allow you to gamble on an increase in some kinds of superior sigil, without being tied to a specific one — which helps if you’re wrong about which ones will increase in value.

For sigils and runes, I think you can make a little money doing minor (green/masterwork) -> major conversion via the mystic forge (18c * 15 =~ 2.7 silver per major, and majors sell for > 4s), but it’s far too much clicking and waiting to seem worth the time IMO.

But with your method, you could only speculate on price increases of sigils that were not crafted becasue craftable sigils dont come out of the forge.

PowerCat.5738:

Make your own TP flipping bot, all the resources needed are on the API forum

And promptly get banned. Yes, you can make a TP bot with an API, but it requires a game key generated upon login in order to actually fill orders. You cannot get that key without violated the User Agreement. So if the game, or Anet, sees you using a login-generated key to place orders, and your characters are not logged in, you’re going to be expecting a ban soon.

Wanze.8410:

But with your method, you could only speculate on price increases of sigils that were not crafted becasue craftable sigils dont come out of the forge.

True, but OP talked about speculating on Sup Sigil of Air, which isn’t craftable; my point was that you’ll have lower variance if you speculate on a basket rather than a specific item (and the addition of another sigil slot meant some additional demand for sigils across the board, so even if you’re wrong about which ones buying into the basket is probably going to pay off).

I wouldn’t have speculated in Superior Sigil of Air since neither Fire nor Air is part of the meta builds I know even for two 1-h weapons, but I wasn’t sure enough of that assessment to buy many of Sup Sigils of Force before the patch (I only had a few extra).

Wanze.8410

I dont wonder why people hate traders and i dont feel hated. I get alot of positive response, actually.

It’s because unlike some (many?) TPvP players, you’re upfront and honest with your responses. You’ve even shared tips on occasion (although I’m sure not ones that would impact too much on your profit margins ). Your arguments are always well-reasoned and thought out, and you come across as someone who genuinely wants to see the GW2 economy do well, not someone who’s in it just for personal profit and couldn’t care less if your actions made it so ordinary players would be negatively impacted.

For all those reasons I respect and pay attention to your posts on this forum more than anyone else, apart from John Smith.

I actually hope someone give a reason for this.

Superior sigil of air seemed to be the highest single dps rune (if i’m not wrong, a bit hard to test when every mob dye in a few hit in the open world). I would guess it should be a more popular rune.

But obviously the cons of sigil of air is you do less dps on group mobs. While force/bloodlust/accuracy etc works if you are hitting multiple target.

IF it procs, and there are other runes that can provide much more damage than the sigil of air ever could, especially when there are very few builds that can take advantage of the proc conditions.

I tested on the last boss of cof path 1. Didn’t dodge at all. The lighting strike give a 6.27%

Obviously too many thing to consider, I have frenzy, and we have a mesmer, but I tested in a pug so I’m not in haste most of the time. I didn’t have much downtime since I didn’t dodge, and have 3 stun breaker. I only used an exotic mace so that’ll tilt the result a bit also.

Overall it isn’t a terrible sigil, not great though since it is only single target. Might be more useful if you have more downtime in a fight. Obviously if you can’t keep up with frenzy it isn’t too useful.

http://s923.photobucket.com/user/Ginobili2010/media/gw021.jpg.html?sort=3&o=3
http://s923.photobucket.com/user/Ginobili2010/media/gw022.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0
http://s923.photobucket.com/user/Ginobili2010/media/gw023.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2
http://s923.photobucket.com/user/Ginobili2010/media/gw025.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1

traits: (5,10,11)(1,5,13)(0)(0)(3)
gear: full berserker, armor(strength rune), axe(sigil of force), mace(sigil of air). Every thing is full ascended beside mace which is exotic.

Apparently it sees more use in PvP, where dual-sigiled Fire/Air weapons can deal a lot of damage on builds with high critical chance. Of course, this is PvP so it wouldn’t affect trade demand in the slightest. :P