Guild Wars 2

Could someone enlighten me about the recent changes of price on the following items please?

I only know the basics in that new patches shake up supply and demand but don’t have a full understanding of what is actually happening.

1/ Mithril ore : it was about 70c back in august, collapsed to 30 in sept and seemed to have picked up around 50 but now seems to drop again.

2/ elder wood: was around 70c in August, dropped to 13 from sept and seemed to have picked up at 23 now

3/ t4 mats (I think they’re t4: large gangs, large claws, potent venom…). They used to trade above 4s in sept but dropped to 2s50-3s now.

Thanks for the insight:p

1. Not sure what causes the mithril cycle. It drops to 30c every month or so then swings back up to around 50c. This repeats every few months, no idea what causes it.

2. Elder wood dropped due to Foxfire Clusters. These were used for a backpack that was part of the LS. They dropped from harvesting elder wood logs, and were selling for 1g each for a while. This led people to mass harvest the logs, causing the price to plummet. Foxfire is down to 20s now so people stopped farming it so the price is slowly climbing back up.

3. The fine mats go high until it is profitable to forge the lower tier mat into the higher tier and then they go back down. This happens on cycles as well.

Mithril probably went up because the demand increased during mad king when tons of large bones dropped from Labyrinth which meant more people tried to craft rares to forge precursors.

Elder wood as said above, foxfire. People parked alts at Malchor’s Leap and farmed that hard which was why price tanked.

Not sure what goes on in the T4 market, I don’t really look at them tbh. If I had to guess though, maybe they were used in some of the collections that came out at the start such as the Ogre collection: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ogre_Cleaver which caused a massive spike and now has settled down.

Basically what fishball said. Mithril ore and elder wood are complimentary goods to T5 fine materials. When you see a supply surge of T5 fine mats (such as from the Mad King’s Labyrinth, and later the Silverwastes chests) you’ll see a corresponding surge in the prices of mithril and elder wood, as people buy those up to craft cheap rares to forge precursors.

The T4 fine market was most likely spiked by the Ogre collection; now that enough people have those it’s starting to return to normal.

T3 and T4 metal and wood also went up after silverwaste release. So maybe it was
also that people craftet more ascended stuff because of all the dragonite from the
chests. T3 wood at least already started to go down again after the chest nerf.

The easy answer is supply and demand. The more complicated answer is the rise and fall of people farming certain areas of the game or amount of players doing content in the different tiers. Typically when there is a break period in content releases people will go back and play older content or level new characters. This can lead to a rise in supply while the demand may remain constant. This would lower the price. Also a reduction in demand while supply remains constant will result in a lower price. Combine increased supply with decreased demand and a price will plummet. All these are the nature of a truly global trading system. This isn’t a bad thing though as long as the drop rates don’t get messed up by a bug or something so that the supply is artificially plummeted so that prices skyrocket or the reverse insanely high drops and the price plummets.