Guild Wars 2

So I loaded up my spreadsheet, entered TP values for my chosen exotic armor set and all ingredients at all stages, and noticed something that didn’t make sense. My 400 tailoring skill is meaningless. I can buy the armor already made for a bit less than I could acquire the necessary components.

What this means to me is that people are crafting and selling exotics at a monetary loss. Lower level stuff I understand; the difference is the value of the skill points. And I’m not complaining; I’m not married to my crafting skill. I make money however I can, and this just means I’ll buy the armor, instead of crafting it.

Really, I’m just curious as to why people are doing this.

Good question.

The economy in this game is absolutely terrible. Most, if not all, things you can craft, are sold at a loss. No kittening clue why people would this. Welcome to GW2

Do you want a legendary? Then you need some crafting skills (google the one you want). Do you want to use rares to try and make your legendary precursor in the mystic forge? Get that profession as you can save a small amount of money making the rares over buying them (usually). Do you want a specific mystic forge unique weapon that requires a certain weapon skill? Get that profession.

Professions aren’t a good way to make money in this game. They instead help you level faster/level an alt.

As far as WHY the exotic’s are expensive to make? Many of those mats/parts are used in higher end weapon skinsand other items in the mystic forge (unique recipes).

Why do people sell them at a loss? They probably made them when the armor was cheaper to make. Mat prices seem to go up often depending on supply and demand.

Deathjester.9841:

Why do people sell them at a loss? They probably made them when the armor was cheaper to make. Mat prices seem to go up often depending on supply and demand.

This is an answer to my question, and was one possibility I was considering. I wonder if current armor prices will consistently lag behind current materials prices due to inflation.

Either way, there’s better ways to make money, as I expect there would be. When you put your money in the highest bid, while putting your inventory in the lowest offer, you’re essentially selling time. Given how impatient the average MMOer can be, time is the most profitable resource to sell.

couple possibilities:
1) people find mats, craft exotics, sell for sell prices. since there aren’t many buyers, sell prices go down. people just didn’t make the same spreadsheet you did
2) people calculate the cost of making an exotic and see the price they can sell it for, see that there’s a profit, but forget about the 15% market tax
3) buy it and craft when it would be profitable, don’t sell all of them, relist at lower price for fear of price dipping even lower.

Your analysis is flawed because you can definitely make them without spending anything if you gather the resources.

Your assumed static link between the finished product and the components does not actually exist, you are missing the big picture by assuming it does. The relationship is coincidental.

That the componenets themselves cost more than the finished product is not unusual, as the components are not limited to only the finished product. Value is not necessarily added by irreversible assembly.

The fluctuation in this releationship shows a healthy economy actually.

RollingBob.8502:

Your analysis is flawed because you can definitely make them without spending anything if you gather the resources.

Your assumed static link between the finished product and the components does not actually exist, you are missing the big picture by assuming it does. The relationship is coincidental.

That the componenets themselves cost more than the finished product is not unusual, as the components are not limited to only the finished product. Value is not necessarily added by irreversible assembly.

The fluctuation in this releationship shows a healthy economy actually.

your theory is incorrect, because even if you farmed all the parts, the fact remains you would still profit more by selling the materials, not only that but the materials all tend to sell faster due to having multiple uses.

most likely it happens on a regular basis due to the fact that some gears drop(or you get for map completion, and people are operating too close to cost on these items, so the guy who finds one has no reason to not undercut.
Another factor is mystic forge users, some people throw armor in with the other stuff, hoping to get a legendary, or a good rune (probably small amount though)

most likely its partially due to bad math, and panic, its better to get back 90% of your investment than just wait too long and price drops further.

really people who manufacture, should only manufacture if the profit is actually worthwhile, they should look at cost of materials versus profit, and time it takes to sell. if something is going to take a week to sell its probably not worth tying up that money, better investments can be made. However, many people dont do this, so you have some recipes that come up short on profit, which weirdly ends up being a lot of them.

It may help to understand the drop in value by considering the spread of demand. T6 exotics have a complicating factor we’ll address in a moment, but consider T5 armor for now.

for a given set of ingredients there are 6 armor items that can be made with them, and there are 3 rarities of each, and 3 weights of each. That means the same raw ingredients can be used for 54 separate armor items. The ingredients are 100% in demand for anyone crafting these, but the demand for individual items will only be 1/54 of that group. That is how, in this closed system, the finished product loses value, because it loses demand. Simple enough really, and the trend will always be towards this end.

Now there are also outliers; there are going to be about 500 other pieces of armor which use most of the same ingredients. There are also several hundred weapons which share demand for many of the same ingredients. For some of the metals even jewelry shares the demand. So the demand pressure of raw ingredients, as you can see, is much higher than any of the individual finished products.

As to your other conjecture about why someone should manufacture, you are assuming things that are simply untrue. Some things for sale are not crafted. Those that are crafted may not have cost the seller as much as the buy price would indicate, and your argument that they would be inclined to sell the ingredients instead assumes the sell price matches the buy price, which it seldom does. Not everyone is comfortable with the risk, nor are they always tracking the markets. And we are only presented with the OPs one-time research on a small subset, which only shows the waxing trend.

And of course, finally, we are specifically discussing exotics in this thread, and we all know that the cost factor of materials is ecto; a swing in ecto prices can make a huge difference in crafted item profitability, while the rare or fine ingredients have a similar, if lesser, effect.

AdaM.6735:

Good question.

The economy in this game is absolutely terrible. Most, if not all, things you can craft, are sold at a loss. No kittening clue why people would this. Welcome to GW2

People that don’t buy the mats from the tp to craft aren’t really losing money, they are just earning less profit. When you just need the gold, you don’t care if you get 50s less if it means you don’t have to wait a day or several days to get the gold.

You can also get crafted armor from the forge.