Guild Wars 2

Today I was trading in minis and since I am a newb I traded 5 or 6G to get the three pack thinking I could double my money. It was a rookie mistake but it cost me half of the gold I made over the past three days.

What boneheaded ideas have you had that didn’t work out?

I wouldn’t exactly be a power trader, but I try to keep my gold in circulation. I’d be a fairly casual player (3-4 hours per week I’d guess) but I still have around 40 gold atm while still having the gold for things like exotics and makeover kits (really really hated the hair on my main

As for TP gaffs too many to list them all here but edited highlights:

Wasting gold to buy gems to buy a mini pack to trade on the TP : I think I spent 4 Gold to get a mini that I eventually sold for less than 1.

Buying Major runes of Altruism (after listening to a certain podcast) at 80 silver and eventually having to sell at less than 70 just to get my gold back.

Accidentally buying 20 Carrion Rings for 14 silver each when they were going for around 7 then having to sell for even less to get rid of them.

I’ve bought mats at prices that have crashed plenty of times and have had to have a fire sale to get my gold back.

Following weblogs too closely I bought a load of Reyna’s gloves last week which still haven’t sold yet and the price has plunged, ho hum…

Trying to use the mystic forge to get rich. I bought a load of greens on the TP hoping to get golds then salvage them. Now I didn’t spend a lot but I basically found a good way to convert silver into copper

Buying unid dyes in bulk in the hope of getting an Abyss . Again silver to copper.

Not realizing the market has moved on : I started out by flipping mid range dyes which seemed to net nice profits early in the game, but probably around 2 or three months ago that market just seemed to disappear. Needless to say I got left with a few sky and ash dyes that I just couldn’t shift at any kind of profit.

Investing money in items before a patch.

I knew this but did it anyway. Most likely going to take a 50% loss on my investing gold.

Really pisses me off too, I was close to buying the lover. Last thing I need for dreamer…

Not buying an Emberglow before the preview came out.

Let’s see
-failing to invest in glob of ectos when they were 11s. I should have known that globs were a big part of crafting many desirable items at the time. It should’ve dwelled on me that in the future there could be more recipes using it
-investing way too much in piles of putrid essence. I thought that it had to go up at some point since it’s a rare quality and Arenanet has shown the willingness to introduce temporary recipes. But I totally forgot that this item only drops from Risen – so any future recipes would have to be related to Risen, such as undead buff food
-investing in armored scales after the bot ban in November. I think it became quite obvious that Armored Scales were the T6 that was massively underpriced. Now alone, this was a good investment. But during the patch fix in January, it took probably 2 weeks for the market for scales to react since there was soo much invested supply. People invested too much in Armored Scales. I should have invested more in Claws or Fangs, since those were still relatively cheap

Recently I had invested in ancient bones and two Storm precursors, but I have sold my inventory. I’m considering investing in the lower-priced lodestones in anticipation for new legendaries several months down the road, but I have a feeling that Arenanet might introduce better drop rates or drop locations for them in the near future.

Of course there are tons of “Ishould have bought this”…. but my big mistakes. I bought about 50 unID dyes when they were 12-13 silver. Then I ended up opening them all (I had planned to wait till they raise) and ended up with like 1 or 2 bad rares.

With the recent patch I went to the laurels and saw ectos for earrings, so I immediately went and bought 80 ectos around 40 silver each. I completely didn’t realize that due to the guaranteed rare from world events, that they would actually be dropping in price. I ended up doing a fire sale around 35-36 silver ea I think. Cost me around 5 gold-6gold overall =(

Edit: For the record I think a lot of people did this too. I noticed the price jumped up to 44-45 silver before it started crashing.

I got a permanent hair stylest contract during wintersday event and ended up selling it for for 76 gold. Its goin for around 500g now. Boo

I was going to sell an item for ~95 silver, and accidentally entered that value into the gold field and clicked sell button. So paid about 4.7 gold in extra tax there.

Not me personally(I didn’t get a Precursor…), but a lot of people who sold their Precursor they got in the Karka Event immediately afterwards. A friend of mine got less than 100g for Dusk. If she had held onto it, she’d be super rich today.

Just today I was trying to place two buy orders, and somehow instead bought two items.

Lost a decent amount of gold.

0_____________________________o

I like this thread,make me feel less bad about myself.

I’m always hate myself because of one thing:

When I get “a lot” (for me) of money,I never spend it on something useful.
I always try to gamble it trying to double the gold or something,like spending gold on TP buying rare greatswords trying to get Dusk from MF (500+ greatswords,no dusk of course)

Buying a lot of unid dyes trying to get abyss,I always lose like 20g+ trying that.

I only have 2 characters that I use a lot (Mesmer and Warrior) and they already have full exotic gear etc,so I don’t really have anything to spend on them,thats why I keep wasting it on gambling.

And of course,when I lose all this money that took me a whole week to farm,I get depressed because I have to get it all back

My blunders all come from selling too early.

- I invested heavily in Armored Scales, and when they reached 11s I sold them because that’s where they were before and I anticipated price to crash. Unfortunately, they sold and they jumped up to 17s. There’s something like 100g I missed out on.
- I invested heavily in Abyss Dye before the dye patch fix. I sold them at 6g, thinking that ANet had actually fixed the drop rate for dyes, not made them worse. They are now at something like 20g a pop, losing me a lot of potential profit.

Then of course I could blame myself for not seeing the future, but I was a poor chap in-game early on. I couldn’t really have done much investing back in the day. Still, the real winners of the TP are:

- The players who invested in 17c Vicious Fangs back in the day. These people, selling today, would see thousands of gold in profit.
- The players who invested in Unidentified Dyes back when they were dropping more frequently.

Vol.5241:

Let’s see
-failing to invest in glob of ectos when they were 11s. I should have known that globs were a big part of crafting many desirable items at the time. It should’ve dwelled on me that in the future there could be more recipes using it
-investing way too much in piles of putrid essence. I thought that it had to go up at some point since it’s a rare quality and Arenanet has shown the willingness to introduce temporary recipes. But I totally forgot that this item only drops from Risen – so any future recipes would have to be related to Risen, such as undead buff food
-investing in armored scales after the bot ban in November. I think it became quite obvious that Armored Scales were the T6 that was massively underpriced. Now alone, this was a good investment. But during the patch fix in January, it took probably 2 weeks for the market for scales to react since there was soo much invested supply. People invested too much in Armored Scales. I should have invested more in Claws or Fangs, since those were still relatively cheap

Recently I had invested in ancient bones and two Storm precursors, but I have sold my inventory. I’m considering investing in the lower-priced lodestones in anticipation for new legendaries several months down the road, but I have a feeling that Arenanet might introduce better drop rates or drop locations for them in the near future.

I like reading your posts because they actually provide good insight into how you made the money for your legendaries. Unfortunately, I always spend my money on other things, so I still haven’t got the T6 to finish mine up. (Accepting donations!!!!)

Blueday.6953:

Today I was trading in minis and since I am a newb I traded 5 or 6G to get the three pack thinking I could double my money. It was a rookie mistake but it cost me half of the gold I made over the past three days.

What boneheaded ideas have you had that didn’t work out?

at least you were looking to trade them back in… I on the other hand, had no idea you could get mini’s on the TP so I bought them with gems. Then a friend said, why don’t you just buy the mini’s you want on the TP…..it was a very Duh! moment for me.

I didn’t hire John Smith as my personal advisor.

Hermes.7014:

Not buying an Emberglow before the preview came out.

I was debating buying both this and Emberspire a day before the patch, but I had finally made up my mind the day the patch came out, and was shocked at the prices.

Oh yeah and buying Exotics with Superior runes of divinity to BLK salvage them to get the gold back from the runes, and make a profit off of the globs I got. I didn’t realize the TP ate 1g for listing, so I lost about 30 silver.

-CAPTAINS COUNCIL COMMENDATIONS. didn’t know you couldn’t use them on keys anymore until after buying stuff off the TP and converting to stacks of crates.
-a few gambles that didn’t pay off (such as investing in candy corn, which actually might pay off soon)
-mostly just being out of the loop and not knowing something I had plenty of were about to drop in price.
-deciding not to buy things like T6 fine mats when they were low because I didn’t need them yet and thought they’d stay there.

Rising Dusk.2408:

My blunders all come from selling too early.

Same. I think my biggest loss in potential profit thus far was selling Unidentified Dyes too early. I sold them when they were at a then-high of 8-9s. Less than a week later their price literally doubled (and has stayed there ever since).

Conversely, I wait too long to buy things thinking the price will decrease and it almost never does. My biggest regret so far is not buying gems when they were still below 1g. It just never occurred to me that they’d ever go much higher than that. (Stupid, I know.)

Matching the listed price for a Passiflora Mithril Amulet of the Apothecary, about 4 days before a patch that severely buffed the drop rate of passion flowers.

The sell listing price dropped from 10 g (where I put it the first time for around a 2 gold profit, should have just undercut to 9 and gotten something out of it) to below 6 gold within a day. I eventually just filled someone’s 4.5g buy order (losing somewhere around 4.5 gold, after re-listings and such) because I was just tired of trying to make it work.

The item’s sell price has since dropped to 4.5 gold.

I realize people are reading this thinking “Wait, he’s this worried about losing 4.5 gold?” But I basically don’t farm for gold or play the trading post. (This was just an opportunity I noticed when I was leveling up jeweler as a crafting profession.) So this was a fairly big chunk of the gold I had on hand.

Same with the dyes except I sold them at 6s. Oh man.

Also, I clicked Buy instead of place a custom offer, on an exotic. A 2g mistake.

After wintersday, platinum doubloons were selling for 5s apiece. I was considering buying up to 300g worth since I KNEW the same thing happened after halloween, but stupidly invested only 60g because I thought for some dumb reason Anet might have increased their drop rate (and anecdotal evidence based on some personal farming SEEMED to confirm it, which I know now was a bunch of crap). Their price increased more than 10-fold a month later. So I made about 400g (since I sold some before the peak), but could have made 3000 gold… yeah.

And now it feels like I’ll have to wait another year for an opportunity anywhere near the orders of magnitude that wintersday offered (princess wand skins I also fudged on by not buying enough at 2s).

I once had a brilliant money making scheme of combing cores. This works with some but not Crystal Cores at the time… I ended up making them into Superior Runes of the Scholar and I think I made my money back. Probably lost some through listing fees

I bought a few mats off the TP to max all crafts. Farmed most of them. I can’t remember which fine crafting material it was. I only needed a few of them. They were cheep so I decided to instantly buy them. I hit the buy button and ended up losing over 10 gold. Turns out there were not many of them in stock and someone had listed his at 1g a piece. I’ll never instantly buy an item off the TP again!

I purchased globs in bulk. And by bulk, I mean I bought a kitten load of them to sell at a later stage. Then in comes rares almost every time you get a boss chest. NVM, ill use them eventually lol. Running out of bank space for these globs though.

Buying the Tiger Charr Backpack Cover for around 30ish gold when it was new, thinking it might be as rare as the permanent contract and thus could only go up in price ^^
Yeah I was quite wrong on that.

Supply/Demand isn’t that much different from the permanent contracts (roughly twice as high) but it seems less people actually want the things as opposed to the permanent contracts which are darn useful for any character.

Buying Deathwish at 20ish gold when I saw it was 190-ish gold moments before. Of course in hindsight what really happened is someone bought up the 3 or so that were on the market at the time and relisted them for over 100 gold.

Those were my 2 biggest mistakes to date. Besides the usual “I wish I had thought of that” ones of course

My biggest mistakes were (like a couple other people here) things I considered doing but decided not to.

I sold my 500 or so Ancient Bones mid-January for about 1.4s. A couple days later they jumped to 4s-5s.

When the change to Moot hit the patch notes, I actually called up a friend of mine and told him to get online and buy the precursor (he had wanted the mace but wasn’t willing to get a legendary without footsteps) and he bought two. For some reason I just never thought “Oh I could flip one of those.” It went from around 50g to peak at 300g.

I bought high and tried to sell higher.

Don’t do that, please.

If an item has already gone way up in price, just accept that you missed the boat and move on. Don’t assume it’s going to keep going up even more and you can squeeze something out of it.

Just before (I think?) Halloween I bought a bunch of Black Lion Chests for ~28c thinking that they’d spike as people tried to get specific things from them. They instead quickly drop down below 10c and have never recovered

Wow, I suddenly don’t feel so bad about my small misfortunes. I’ve always lamented when I found I should have bought this earlier or sold that, but my first and hopefully only “wow, I could make a killing doing this, I’m gonna try!” came from when I was leveling a crafting profession. Investing a certain amount of gold crafting some items that were selling for way higher than the raw material cost.

Yep, people caught on to that pretty quick. Checked on what remains to be sold, and both are below material cost (a drop of about 50-75%) in just a few days. Dang market wars. Oh well, I learned.

Oh, how could I forget about gems pre-Halloween? I thought 5g for 600 was a little much. All of my gamer facepalm…

When Laurels were announced people told me the price of dyes would fall fast (since they could be bought with Laurels.) I quickly sold over a hundred dyes for under 12s each. The next day they were selling at 19. No one wants to use their laurels for dyes. It was a dumb panicky move that cost me a lot of gold.

Bought an unbreakable bell due to some website’s tip before wintersday ended. Price ended up going down 15 gold.

Playing “up one copper” and then “up 10g for luls” with someone on the TP for Unbreakable Bells. Accidentally ended up buying one for 60g back when they were going for 70g and had 30g bids on them. (Was messing with the guy who kept outbidding me.)

Bought about 2,000 Armored Scales, watched the prices raise. Watched them lower a bit, then a lot more. Sold quickly – lost 200g profit when they doubled a few weeks later. (And took a 20g loss off my original purchase.)

Lost likely 340g total on TP trading so far.

Not really much gold considering how much I’ve made. But it still stings every now and then to remember it.

• I stopped buying Pepper at 8c 5 minutes after PatchNote Release instead of keep buying them up to, I don’t know, 30c or so. Shortly after the Pepper price peaked at 1s before dropping again. So I made 40g out of 5g instead of 300g out of 80g or so. :/
• I still have several 30+ stacks of lvl 20 Weapons stuck in the TradingPost that I failed to flip weeks ago.

I bought about 5,000 ancient bones when they were at market price. a month later I saw they had risen to over 1s each. I quickly sold thinking how smart I was… now they are 5s each… lost out on a ton of gold there.

Bought 3 Energizer’s during the karka event. Sold them 2 weeks later for a crap profit since it didn’t seem they were going anywhere. well they are 10x what they were then. If I had sold them now i’d be done with my legendary.

Bought a ton of toy sword skins at the beginning of the skin craze a few weeks back. If I had sold during the peak I would have made 200+g but I held too long and now they are worthless.

Not getting out of the platinum → Mithril Mystic forge moneymaking scheme fast enough.

Spending 10 g in lower level exotics to get a cheap exotic back dagger via forge.

I ran some maths and figured out a good system of crafting rares to try on the forge to get a precursor in a way that would in the long term ensure a huge ROI – it was mostly a matter of patience obtaining the items for the right price.

I plugged away at that for a couple of weeks; but no precursors, but had quite a bit of exotic weapons to show which if sold would ensure a break even…

…then the karka event hit and buried the precursor and exotic market ¬_¬ – had to suck up a pretty big loss on all those now worthless exotics.