Guild Wars 2

Just wondering what people are doing for money. I was making a petty 60s an hour mining in orr. Now I make about 1.5-2 gold per hour grinding certain mobs with magic find. I am wondering if there is yet another way to make more money.

What do you guys do?

Your mining $$ was pretty bad if that was pre-patch.

I used to make about 1.5-2g an hour mining in SoD and Frostgorge. (Trees were 41c a log or something dumb like that).

I make most of my money other ways too, mostly involving arbitrage.

Elder logs are worth 12c now last time I checked. And mithril ore is worth 21c a piece. It is barely worth taking the time to gather when you are passing by now, imo.

and Logun: the way I made my money in Guildwars 1 was power trading. Its much harder to do it in GW2 for me because of the TP and its cuts.

It is harder to do but you still can. Also, if you have enough gold, you can temporarily manipulate certain high volume markets or dominate slow volume high dollar markets like Dusk pre-event

You make 25 gold/hour on a bad day? You mean you never lose money trading?
Maybe you made a typo and you meant silver. 25 silver/hour on a bad day.

Fractals is quite profitable as it has good drops (Vials of Powerful Blood, rares, etc)

Mine the rich orichalcum node in Southsun Cove, or do orichalcum runs. I was getting 1g per character pre-patch just by doing that, it would give around 70s now though as prices have dropped.

Or you can do Orr farming (boringggg)

I’ve actually got most of my gold from dungeons, they are even more profitable now due to the recent patch that makes bosses drop silver. Cof Path 1 can be done in 10 minutes and yields 1g guaranteed + drops + Tokens (If you don’t need the tokens, you can get exotic weapons and salvage or throw them in the forge).

Cymatoperior.5942:

You make 25 gold/hour on a bad day? You mean you never lose money trading?
Maybe you made a typo and you meant silver. 25 silver/hour on a bad day.

No, that wasn’t a typo. Common principle of hedge funds is buy the whole market and hold unless you know something others don’t about a particular stock. I occasionally lose money but that’s only when I attempt short term price manipulation. It pays off about 25% of the time, some times big. My recent attempts have been in the four doubloons, I lost about 200g messing with gold and copper doubloons, people wisely refused to buy at the higher prices and I had to get out but I made it back and then some on platinum and silver doubloons. I’ve been buying up chocolate lately because it’s going to 21-25c minimum over the next couple of weeks, which will give me a 50% return. My main problem with the lower value stuff is space, so even though chocolate is a great buy, it’s not that good in terms of the short to mid term space it takes up.

I used to make around 2g an hour farming events in orr like yourself, but I find that after the last big patch dungeon running has been more lucrative. I make almost 1g or more per run (between silver dropped from chests/bosses and selling the loot), some of which take less than 20 mins. Furthermore, if you have no use for all those tokens, you can just buy the cheap level 80 armor (30 tokens each) and salvage for ecto and sell.

This means you’ll essentially make almost 1g per run and then up to 70s if you get lucky with 3 ectos from the piece of armor. 1.7g for 20 min isn’t half bad

I mostly just do CoF and AC.

Just don’t be a market troll that ruins the game for others like the poster above me. 20-30s for a silver doubloon? Thanks a lot buddy.

Ermmm you should be able to buy space at 600 gems a bank slot right? That is only like 7 gold and should be peanuts to you if you made that much…

3-4 gold fracta;l dungeons, exotics drop like candy in there.

I make 3-5 gold an hour farming Orr. Exotic drop quite often too.
More than normal people with full magic find, thats because I play an elementalist with lots of AoE to steal everyone’s frags LOL.

Let’s see…

First, you say you make 25g per hour. A statement that I find extremely unlikely.

Then, you claim that ‘you know something others don’t’. Again, very, very unlikely.

You claim to have lost 200g and then won it back on… platinum and silver doubloons which is an extremely tricky market, thir price plummeted then skyrocketed, on very thin sales number. Again, very unlikely.

All talk, talk, talk. When I read the post, I was thinking : ‘why would anyone lie like this’.

But then it became clear… you try to sell something ’’I’ve been buying up chocolate lately because it’s going to 21-25c minimum over the next couple of weeks, which will give me a 50% return. My main problem with the lower value stuff is space, so even though chocolate is a great buy, it’s not that good in terms of the short to mid term space it takes up.’’

So, basically, you are just trying trick people into buying chocolate.

I doubt anyone would fall for it, people aren’t THAT stupid, Mister I-make-25-gold-per-hour.

You make 25g a day by selling high value items in lower numbers, the 25g per hour is way over the top, on a very good day and you constantly buying and selling items, you might make 10g per hour… But those very good days are rare nowadays.

I’ve been seeing anywhere from 8g-12g from Fractals the past couple of days (4-5 hrs a day); seems to be about the best I can do, while still remaining fun.

On a really good Day you can even make 60-70 Gold in a few Hours, but those Days are very Rare those Days. Ikittennow the prices u can still make 20 Gold in like two hours work. Buy Orders for 120-150 Gold before i go to sleep will give me Items I can sell the next few days for like 15-25 Gold Profit. Some Prices allways go up and down, so if u dont mind waiting some days for your money its pretty easy. If your like “Omg prices are falling i need to sell right NOW” you might even lose money on Trading.

I just farm snow trolls if I need gold. They go down fast and there are five or six drops that sell for 15 or more silver. That’s not including the common drops I get that go for 1 or 2 silver. So on average like 1.5g an hour, or maybe if I’m getting lucky on drops 3g an hour. Then every three hours dragon spawns close by.

Playing the market is risky but if you know what you’re doing you can make lots of gold per hour. 25g an hour isn’t that much of a stretch as some are saying. Like I said, if you know what you’re doing there is always gold to be made. I never do it simply because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve made huge profits on other games and also got burnt huge on other games. I’m happy with the gold I make from grinding and don’t really see the need of having hundreds, if not thousands of gold like other players. I’ve been pretty successful at making gold without playing the market in this game.

Cymatoperior.5942:

Ermmm you should be able to buy space at 600 gems a bank slot right? That is only like 7 gold and should be peanuts to you if you made that much…

I’ve already bought all my bank and bag spaces. But that’s only 386 spaces since I’m using 18 slotters right now. So even if I filled them all with chocolate I’d only be looking at a 45-50g return over a couple of days. I’m sure this sounds great but there are more profitable items out there that require bag space. I regardless to what some may think, I have no need to pump chocolate bars. It was easy to see what would happen after ArenaNet nerfed chocolate bar drop rates across the board. They did the same thing to oranges before chocolate and those are still going up. Supply for chocolate is going down while demand is steady.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/12229

Tallis.5607:

Let’s see…

First, you say you make 25g per hour. A statement that I find extremely unlikely.

Then, you claim that ‘you know something others don’t’. Again, very, very unlikely.

You claim to have lost 200g and then won it back on… platinum and silver doubloons which is an extremely tricky market, thir price plummeted then skyrocketed, on very thin sales number. Again, very unlikely.

All talk, talk, talk. When I read the post, I was thinking : ‘why would anyone lie like this’.

But then it became clear… you try to sell something ’’I’ve been buying up chocolate lately because it’s going to 21-25c minimum over the next couple of weeks, which will give me a 50% return. My main problem with the lower value stuff is space, so even though chocolate is a great buy, it’s not that good in terms of the short to mid term space it takes up.’’

So, basically, you are just trying trick people into buying chocolate.

I doubt anyone would fall for it, people aren’t THAT stupid, Mister I-make-25-gold-per-hour.

Just because you can’t fathom it, doesn’t mean I or others can’t and don’t do it. There are hundreds of power traders in the game that make this rate or more. Additionally, you are misquoting me and taking me out of context. I did not say that I know things other people don’t know. I said “. Common principle of hedge funds is buy the whole market and hold unless you know something others don’t about a particular stock.” That means, in the stock market, stay away from individual stocks, unless you are aware of something that a majority of traders are not. Many of the same principles can be applied to this game. You probably don’t have the patience but if you do, there is a lot of real world (and in-game) value in listening to the lectures below. So in summation, I’m arguing a hedge fund approach to the game not a stock picking approach. I only list the doubloon examples because I got burned two of the four.

Concerning gold and copper doubloons, I did lose 200g on them because I bought all gold doubloons up to 50s per level. However, people refused to buy gold doubloons at these levels and there were other traders sitting on small to medium quantities that they started releasing into the market. So prices quickly fell back to 4s level. I did the same thing with platinum and silver but with a much better success rate.

Check out the buy and sell volumns around the 11th. Silver doubloons went from 3s to 15s. Pretty reasonable that this would happen over the long haul (because bots were providing a majority of the supply) but there was a large supply that would need to be removed for it to happen. Enter power trader, buy up all of the supply then slowly release it into the market. Platinum doubloons, high supply do to event, players were paying 25s per less than a month ago, event ends, buy up the cheap ones, wait, then slowly release into the market.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24502

As for chocolate, that was a freebie. Even if I filled all of my available space with chocolate, the return would only be net 45-50g based on my buying in a second time at 12-13c per. Much fewer people read these forums than play the game. Feel free to doubt me, you can always check back in a couple of weeks and see how it went.

http://s12.postimage.org/l3tbaphrh/Hedge2.png

>> There are hundreds of power traders in the
>> game that make this rate or more.

Hundreds of people making 25g per hour. No. Not gonne happen.

I know a thing or two about game markets. I was one of the first billionaires in SWG. I hit the cap in WoW back when it was 210k.

There are no hundreds of people making 25g per hour in this game. The market simply isn’t there.

Also, there is nothing special about the silver doublon graphic on the 11th. You are simply counting on the fact that no one checks up on your statements…

Since you have difficulty reading graphs, I zoomed in on this one for you. Sell volume dropped from low 2000’s to the low 700s, because I was buying them up. This is the last time I’m going to respond to you until you have something worthwhile to add to the conversation.

http://s11.postimage.org/b9e444egj/Silver.png

Logun: I’ve been considering doing exactly what you are, but I have to muster up the capital to make the initial investment on a market first…

Which means sitting here playing with sigils for hours, and hours :P

Also, probably best to ignore that guy; he doesn’t really seem to understand the concept of how a market works at all.

captaincrunch.6731:

Just don’t be a market troll that ruins the game for others like the poster above me. 20-30s for a silver doubloon? Thanks a lot buddy.

Captain,

I’ve been out of silver doubloons since the 18th. All I did was remove the massive amount of supply built up at 3-4s. Silver doubloons, just like platinum, would have risen in price naturally over the next few weeks. I just sped up the process. Additionally, I helped farmers get a better return on their time for farming them. Prices will drop if farmers can supply enough to the market, if not, they will continue to rise.

What Logun simply did was nothing wrong. If anything, I would say he’s given a clue to all of us on what is the problem.

Low drop rates.

Just think about it, and why Logun is able to do it. Simple concept of economics.

Your original statement…

>> Check out the buy and sell volumns around
>> the 11th. Silver doubloons went from 3s to 15s.

Now… look at the graph you posted. Look the the left. You will see the actual amount of silver. See it? It is 5. Not 15, 5.

Tallis.5607:

Your original statement…
Now… look at the graph you posted. Look the the left. You will see the actual amount of silver. See it? It is 5. Not 15, 5.

You finally managed to add something worthwhile. You are correct, I could have been clearer. My statement about sell and buy volume was specific to the 11th, which you don’t seem to disagree with. My second statement was in reference to the total price swing (between 11th and my post) after I bought up all of the excess between 3s and 5s, I thought this was obvious but clearly it wasn’t. So now that I’ve made myself clearer, do you retract any of your previous skepticism and accusations?

Graph 1
http://s12.postimage.org/717r43wn1/Sil2.png

Graph 2
http://s11.postimage.org/hkgxktj83/Sil3.png

Side note, Ruben, the guy who built and runs Spidy, updates his data every 12-15 minutes. However, he only shows this data on the current day. For previous days, he just shows the hourly data. If you had access to the 12-15 minute samples on the 11th, you’d be able to better see the price and volume movements.

I indeed retract my very last statement ‘You are simply counting on the fact that no one checks up on your statements…’ You didn’t lie about the 11th, your statement was just unintentionally uncomprehensive.

My apologies.

Did anyone buy chocolate bars back when I first suggested it? Buy orders were around 13c then.

Logun.5360:

Cymatoperior.5942:

Ermmm you should be able to buy space at 600 gems a bank slot right? That is only like 7 gold and should be peanuts to you if you made that much…

I’ve already bought all my bank and bag spaces. But that’s only 386 spaces since I’m using 18 slotters right now. So even if I filled them all with chocolate I’d only be looking at a 45-50g return over a couple of days. I’m sure this sounds great but there are more profitable items out there that require bag space. I regardless to what some may think, I have no need to pump chocolate bars. It was easy to see what would happen after ArenaNet nerfed chocolate bar drop rates across the board. They did the same thing to oranges before chocolate and those are still going up. Supply for chocolate is going down while demand is steady.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/12229

Err you can buy new character slots and use the new characters to hold stuff?

Anyway I did a quick mental calculation before I rebuked your 30-40 gold average an hour, for that to happen there should be high and predictable items to trade and there wasnt any at the moment and anytime in future. Plus you lose 15% of your selling price each time you trade making profit very minimal. Real stocks dont make you pay so much so you cant plat the trading house like you can a stock market.
It is possible to do only long term investment, but no way can you play it short term to make 30 gold per hour.

Put in buy order, leave for a day. Log in tomorrow, collect items and adjust buy order. Log in 3rd day and readjust buy order. Log in 2 days later and sell all —- that’s where you can count x amount of gold “per hour” of effort, though the actual time invested is multiple days.

That is considered short term trading… long term trading is years. And the game is not even 4 months old.

Logun.5360:

It was easy to see what would happen after ArenaNet nerfed chocolate bar drop rates across the board.

Just curious, where did ArenaNet say they were nerfing chocolate bar drop rates? Didn’t see it in any of the recent patch notes, or anywhere obvious.

I buy things off the TP, put them in the Mystic Forge, and sell the products. I make about 10-15g/hour doing this, though I personally don’t play more than an hour or two per day.

I don’t think 25g/hour is unreasonable at all. Basically all you’d have to do is do what I’m doing, but play two markets at the same time, maybe one market liquid with lower margins and one market less liquid with higher margins, and play different less liquid markets from hour to hour to give your stuff time to sell.

Frankly, I’d be surprised if someone out there wasn’t making 50g/hour or more… possibly much more. There are so many ways to make money. If you can juggle several of them simultaneously with bag/bank space limitations and what have you, and you have enough cash on hand to take full advantage of a particular market, there’s really no particular limit on how much you can make.

I also limit myself completely to arbitrage. If you were to buy and hold strategically, that could potentially be a high gold/hour boost.

There is no reliable way of making money with the MF unless you throw skillpoints in it.

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

There is no reliable way of making money with the MF unless you throw skillpoints in it.

If you insist.

I’m about to hit Forge approximately 220.5 times, and I’m sure you’re right that I won’t make on average about 5.5s per combine this time for about 12.13g profit in the next 45 minutes or so.

That is what I am saying, you hope for the money shot, and it will eventually come. Yet it is not entirely reliable.

If you found an item niche, of course, will work for some time. I found that too for specific items for a short time.

But the supply just is not there to keep it up.

You labeled it as gold per hour, but buying up the items you need to play the mystic forge game should be considered in that estimation.
Doing thus would not let a number like 20g/h pop.

Rare items prices have shot up 2 fold, from 14s to 28s now. If you seem to be making money from the MF you will soon not make much cos other people will also do the same and push raw material prices up. I farm cursed shore before the quests bugged the hell up and made lots of gold selling the rares I find to gamblers like you. Hell I even sell the bags I pick up cos I know you people love to gamble.

I dunno, man, there are so many profitable combines, and my bread-and-butter ones have been around for at least a solid month since I figured out how to do this. Granted, sometimes this particular combine I’m doing tonight is worth 6s per combine, and sometimes only 3s, but it’s been profitable 100% of the time for over a month, and it’s a lot more often 5-6s than only 3s.

And I’m counting the time you take buying stuff on TP. If I had eight free hours per day to do nothing but try to make money in GW2, I think I’d average 100g/day easily. Probably considerably more than that because presumably I’d get much better at making money.

There are many different ways to get materials. You can put in buy orders on liquid stuff that get filled almost immediately, and if you sit there nursing the TP to keep your buy orders on top you’d get a constant supply of mats. Then there are semiliquid ones that get filled more sporadically, but the margin is higher on those. And there are illiquid combines where there’s almost no competition for the materials, and the margins are through the roof, but the products take up to several days to resell.

There are also combines where you can buy the stuff straight off of sell orders and make a 100-200% profit. But you can only do those once in a while because you have to wait for the stuff to drop more and get listed again.

If you did each day a mixture of the bread-and-butter liquid combines against competition and various less liquid but higher margin combines, I think it’s fair to call it both reliable and to quote a Xg/hour figure for it.

Also, there’s no “money shot” involved in what I do. Most I’ve ever sold anything for on the TP is about 9g. It’s all steady, smaller stuff. Every morning when I wake up and look at the market, the opportunities are always there.

(BTW, I don’t recommend just grinding the TP and Mystic Forge for hours on end. I only do it 30-60 minutes at a time every few days. But I do put it out there as an option for all those who complain about how horrible the grind may be to get a legendary. You can get all the cash for it within a week, comfortably, if that’s what floats your boat.)

Cymatoperior.5942:

Rare items prices have shot up 2 fold, from 14s to 28s now. If you seem to be making money from the MF you will soon not make much cos other people will also do the same and push raw material prices up. I farm cursed shore before the quests bugged the hell up and made lots of gold selling the rares I find to gamblers like you. Hell I even sell the bags I pick up cos I know you people love to gamble.

The prices have not risen on anything I put into the Mystic Forge except for one market, and while the materials in that market have increased in price, the products have also, so it’s actually a more profitable combine than it was before the prices rose.

And I never buy bags, though I’m told there are opportunities to make money doing it.

I have also never lost money on a 30-60 minute Mystic Forging session. The only gamble is whether I’ll make a little money or a lot. That’s because I only do combines with a high ROI because why do riskier ones if the safe ones are out there?

The casino will always make more money than the gambler. Thats why even anet is selling chests. If you are honest to yourself and did a real calculation, you will find that you arent making as much money as the smart farmers.

Smart farmers never make more money than anyone playing the TP, in which way ever, just saying

Just like in real life, there will be some who strike the lottery, but the majority will win nothing.

Cymatoperior.5942:

The casino will always make more money than the gambler. Thats why even anet is selling chests. If you are honest to yourself and did a real calculation, you will find that you arent making as much money as the smart farmers.

I started with 1g I saved up from Queensdale and Kessex Hills. I now have 300g banked plus I maxed 5 crafting professions and bought full exotics for my main. I’ve been doing this MF thing for about 5-6 weeks and get maybe 10-15 hours a week of play time, half of which I spend in Lion’s Arch and half of which I spend playing the game (WvW on my main or leveling alts).

I mean, maybe farming is more profitable. I don’t know. I’ve never even unlocked a waypoint in Cursed Shore on any character. Never run a dungeon. Can’t ever commit time to a group because my life can always force me to log out at a moment’s notice.

I just get the idea from all the QQing on the forum that farming isn’t as profitable. Maybe smart farming is.

I play only on the weekends and for 2 hours on even weekdays because I have a job and I do a lot of workout. I only make money from farming and right now I got 134 gold.
And one and a half level 80s with a total of 2 maxed out professions.
And I have half a girlfriend so I go out a lot too.

Here’s how my Mystic Forging worked out tonight. I placed buy orders for my materials this morning which took me about 5 minutes.

I logged on tonight, and I’d purchased about 32g worth of materials through the buy orders.

I combined all of the materials in the forge, and it took me about 30 minutes to do so. It was roughly 220 combines. From those combines, I received 111 items that I either posted on the TP or sold to a vendor. (The other combines resulted in items that I recombined.)

I posted my items on the TP for a total of 53g49s03c. It’s a liquid market, and the vast majority of these items will be sold within 24 hours.

After TP fees, I project to gross 45g26s68c, and I also vendored 17s worth of items as well. So my profit projects to be about 13g50s or so. Even if I have to relist a few of my items, that should cost me no more than about 10-20s in extra fees.

So let’s call it 13g in profit for five minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. I projected 12.13g profit in my earlier post, so Zommoros smiled just a little bit on me today.

About 80% of the time that I do this, it works out roughly like this. The other 20% of the time there’s a lot of competition for materials and my buy orders don’t get filled too well so I either skip that day or work one of the less liquid markets with less competition.

It’s a bad day to buy wine… but a fine day to drink it.

Cymatoperior.5942:

Err you can buy new character slots and use the new characters to hold stuff?

I’m using my four other characters as 80 slot bag men right now. Additional character slots are the way to go price wise but I’m waiting on the gold to gem conversion rate to come down a little from the last event. I wrongly assumed that you could only purchase a few character slots but it looks like you can buy 32+, so 450g (current conversion rate) will buy an additional 2,560 bag spots if you buy 15 slotters for all of them. This will definitely help with space issues and I appreciate you pointing it out.

Cymatoperior.5942:

Anyway I did a quick mental calculation before I rebuked your 30-40 gold average an hour, for that to happen there should be high and predictable items to trade and there wasnt any at the moment and anytime in future. Plus you lose 15% of your selling price each time you trade making profit very minimal. Real stocks dont make you pay so much so you cant plat the trading house like you can a stock market.
It is possible to do only long term investment, but no way can you play it short term to make 30 gold per hour.

Your missing my point, or maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. I wasn’t advocating a stock picking approach, I was advocating a hedge fund approach. I make short and long term investments. Right now, chocolate bars, yams, chili peppers, and Glacial lonestones are my long term investments. But I make the majority of my gold buying large sections of the market daily. Every day I invest 1000-1300g in bids, which I then resell. The main issue I run into with this is the sell cap. I have to wait 60 secs for the sell post cool-down (you can only post 6 times in 60 secs), which means it takes an hour or two just to list my items for sale. Theoretically, you could make 9.9g per hour just trading the spread on butter once you were in the butter bid and sell rotation but you can only post 6 stacks per minute.

Mr Spooky.5429:

Logun.5360:

It was easy to see what would happen after ArenaNet nerfed chocolate bar drop rates across the board.

Just curious, where did ArenaNet say they were nerfing chocolate bar drop rates? Didn’t see it in any of the recent patch notes, or anywhere obvious.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-October-22-2012/first#post521593

It’s buried in there, I suggest you use the find in your browser. Chocolate was trading at 2c/3c or 3c/4c back then if my memory is correct.

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

That is what I am saying, you hope for the money shot, and it will eventually come. Yet it is not entirely reliable.

If you found an item niche, of course, will work for some time. I found that too for specific items for a short time.

But the supply just is not there to keep it up.

You labeled it as gold per hour, but buying up the items you need to play the mystic forge game should be considered in that estimation.
Doing thus would not let a number like 20g/h pop.

What Majorkong is doing is entirely reliable. You can make millions of dollars playing blackjack if you are able to achieve a 1% edge on the house (which you’ll never get because they’d throw you out for card counting). You only need math and the capital to survive the down swings. It’s not gambling if you are playing the long odds. The same can be said about the mystic forge if you’ve got a large enough sample.