Guild Wars 2

I’ve been watching the TP for a while now and frankly, I’m unimpressed. New players think they’ll at least make a little bit of money by farming mats to sell and so on. Forget about it. Looking on the TP you’ll see most things being listed 1 whole copper above vendor cost which is taken by the TP so you’re left with exactly what you would have gotten had you just gone to an NPC vendor and sold them outright. Same for all but the most high end player manufactured gear too.

Maybe I’m just not “getting it” which is entirely possible, lol, but exactly what is the point of the TP under current conditions as mentioned above? How did this happen? In other games, new players can sell raw mats and so on for a small profit, as well as those items they make themselves…even those games which have been around a while and whose markets are flooded. I’m just not understanding what the heck happened to the TP to make it so incredibly useless to anyone but the most high end users.

I am not an economist by any means so will someone explain this to me? Maybe I’m just not understanding what I’m looking at when I’m looking at the TP window, which is also entirely possible. It all seems a little convoluted to me so I could just be very very confused.

You don’t use it to sell gear drops that are blue. You can use it so sell some of the better green (leveling) drops. You usually can’t use it to sell leveling yellows, though.

The majority of items you pick up are not something to put on the trade post – they’re cheap crap that no one else wants, either. Take them to an NPC vendor or salvage them as appropriate.

You use the trade post to:

(1) Buy food very cheaply for the XP boost and useful stats. It’s worthwhile to always have an XP boost from food, and there are plenty of foods that sell for 2 cp.

(2) Buy gear cheaply for slots that you’ve had bad luck filling for 5+ levels. Especially accessories.

(3) Sell excess crafting materials – especially cloth, metals, rare herbs, and “fine crafting materials” – those blue-quality teeth and claws and such. Vanilla sells especially well, but other limited materials like strawberries do well, too.

(4) Buy or sell upgrade items. Buy cheap upgrades, sell expensive ones.

(5) Buy bags.

(6) Trade on items that you think you can profit on – this is probably not something you in particular want to do, but it is a viable use for those interested.

I just realized that I should also mention something very important about the trade post.

There is a 15% fee for a successful transaction. If you want to profit at all you should be aware of this. When you post an item, there’s an obvious 5% fee for listing the item. When the item is sold, the trade post takes a 10% tax from your profits – and that tax isn’t clearly described in-game yet. So make sure your profit margin accounts for that!

Always multiply your sale price by 0.85 and compare that number to the vendor price before you bother posting stuff.

as far as i am aware, the 15% total tax is now shown as ‘profits’ or something like that when u post an item/stack onto the TP

When you sell something, it now shows you “Projected profit”, which includes the 10% sales tax, but not the 5% listing fee.

my bad i thought it showed the full 15% tax :P

The TP is plenty profitable.

But not on every item.

Just like if you put every item in your house on eBay I suspect there would be some unsold things.

The most commonly sold things have low prices. Especially when there’s low demand to go with the high profit.