Guild Wars 2

So I was leveling huntsman the other night and noticed that Darksteel Warhorns were listed on the TP at 6s with a cost to make around 1.15s.

Thinking this odd I checked the Buy side and most of them were at 60-80c, but there were a couple right around 1.2s

No obviously the taxes would prevent me from creating these horn parts at a profit, but it got me thinking whether or not I should fill buy orders even if I could make a profit. Suppose the spread was 2s by 6s.

Firstly are the horns really selling for 6s. If the average price was any indication they weren’t, so I would be just listing things which were either going to sit there or get undercut.

Maybe the buyer was making horns to sell, or maybe he was just flipping horn parts.

Would I be a fool to fill that order if it were profitable?

(Cleric’s Orichalcum Inscription)

Are there any stats out there that would hint that this market was false beyond guessing at the listing volume?

1. No one logically buys Cleric’s Orichalcum Inscription.

99% of the playerbase uses hard DPS stats, usually Berserker, rarely other things. I imagine there may be a small generic demand for Carrion, Rampager, Cleric’s.

2. The Inscription is an intermediate item. The majority of players buying gear either:

a) Can craft it themselves. Therefore they are buying the Fine material and Ectos, not the Inscription, for cheaper.
b) Are looking for someone to craft it. This would support a demand for the Inscription except … they still need someone to craft it anyways, so the player may as well BUY the Fine material and Ecto, then have their crafter friend make the Inscripton and then the final item. For cheaper.

3. The only case where someone would purchase Cleric’s off the TP is because they are batkitten incoherent or they are looking for an underpriced item due to a surplus of supply because someone randomly made a Cleric’s Inscription by mistake and it’s burning a hole in their inventory because they can’t sell it.

Sidenote: the player listing for 6s or w/e it was is probably hooking the price target higher to sucker someone into making the Inscription. … … …

In terms of making $ on the TP, here are a few observations:

1. It’s very easy to add up the “cost to make”. Divide by 0.85 to look for your break-even price point (TP taxes).

2. If the sell and purchase order prices have a large spread, something odd is happening with that item’s market. A spread like the Cleric’s Inscription cited above automatically screams “extremely low supply, probably because of extremely low demand”. It may be a low-supply situation and prices are going whacky. There is risk and there is reward for these situations. For stable income, expect a low (5-15% profit) for selling an item. Remember, in some cases quantity > profit per transaction. In some cases, profit per transaction > quantity. Get a feel for it.

3. Never sell to purchase orders if you are intending to make any sort of profit crafting. The only items that are vaguely worth using purchase orders are basic materials that have very high volumes (e.g. Iron Ore). The delta between purchase orders and normal sales is very small, even in large quantities.

There are some rare times where you want very fast transactions. In those cases, you can consider purchase orders. But, these are rare. The key is that you need to think about “do I really want fast transactions that badly? is that worth 5/10/15% of my revenue — probably 20/50/80% of my profit per item?”

It depends. If the buy order is super low compared to the listed sell price, then I post for the sell price as the people placing buy orders are most likely trying to get the goods at an extremely low price then repost for a profit.

Example:
Sell Price – 5s
Order Price – 50c
I’m going to post it for the sell price.

Sell Price – 5s
Order Price – 4s
I may go with the order price if I’m in a need for cash.

Sell Price – 5s
Order Price – 4.99s
I just go with the instant sell as 1c is almost useless to me.

Depends. The bigger the discrepancy, the more likely I will just match to lowest. But if it’s relatively small, or the quantity is few, I can fill up the buy orders.

you realize as soon as the order for minimum is filled its going to be turned around and resold for a huge profit

Player.9621:

you realize as soon as the order for minimum is filled its going to be turned around and resold for a huge profit

Maybe; its also possible nobody is buying at 6 silver, and only a few are buying at 1.2 silver (in the OPs example), so no huge profits are to be made. Remember all you can see at any one moment is stuff which has failed to sell. Which is why it can take some fairly careful study and tracking of specific items on the TP to make anything on it.

Do you think there is a better way to determine that than making and item and gambling?

I made a Cleric’s Orichalcum Inscription the other night. It cost about 1.8g to make and the sale price was about 2.45g. I’m thinking EZ money. Apparently though, the market for these is super thin because I left it there for 3-4 days watching people gradually undercut me and they didn’t seem to be selling either. I took a big bite out of my price hoping a speculator would grab it. (2.20g) but that sat there for a while as well (and started getting undercut for a couple days). I ended up selling it to a buy order after 8 days because I realized the market was just artificial.

Are there any stats out there that would hint that this market was false beyond guessing at the listing volume?

I set up a spreadsheet and spent 3-4 days tracking about 60 items I thought people would find useful (since I did) twice a day to see what typical margins were. I found about 6 of them it was possible to make some kind of reasonable margin on most of the time. Only then did I start making any of them.

From what I’ve seen a general rule is that your first 10 hours invested in studying the TP are likely to be less lucrative then your first 10 hours farming Orr (from what I’ve read, nobody high enough to go there yet). The next 10 hours maybe you break even. Then, if you did it right, you should have a few products you can make in a few minutes when you have a chance, post, and generate additional income besides that playing the game. At least the way I operate, though, doing it right involves a lot of tracking and analysis. Some people seem to make good bets on trends, I’d want more capital to work with before I try that, because much like with gambling you hear a lot more about the big success stories then the many people who lose a little.

There are sites on the internet, like gw2db, that track the prices for you.

Sometimes I fulfill buy orders, if it’s relatively close or I just want to unload an item.

I usually stay away from stuff with a large spread like that that is really not very desirable, and the intermediary crafting parts tend to fall firmly in line with that. If it’s going for 6s and the highest buy is 80c, people probably aren’t buying them at 6s, and your item will likely just sit forever to eventually be undercut when sellers start to close towards the actual price people are willing to buy at.

its not rocket science