Guild Wars 2

Hi-

I wanted to share some thoughts on GW2 Spidy and see if anyone else has had similar experiences. And I want to say up front that I think it’s an awesome tool, so I’m not looking to solicit comments along the lines of `you should be more careful` or `don’t use it if you have a problem`, I’m already aware of that.

Basically the tool is a bit harder to use as a profit-making aid that is implied by commentary I’ve seen in these forums. My main issue with it is that the projected profits are based on the sellers’ asking prices and not what people are actually paying. This might be okay if your use of the market focuses on how much you might be able to make if you can wait it out. For an average user who is more likely to be concerned with what profit they can make today because they need money, this is not helpful.

Aside from things being unclear as regards to what profit you can actually make, I think the use of this tool might even be skewing the market. As an example, look at the data posted on the site for the prices of the Rampager’s Intricate Linen Insignia. For some reason, these started to be listed at a price near 6g even though nobody was buying them for more than around 50s. During that week, I had been browsing the site trying to find if there were any items I could sell for a profit provided I was buying all the required materials from the TP. Thanks to the 6g price, this item qualified. I suspect that in addition to myself, other people noticed this and we all flooded the market with offers for these insignia. As the week went on and nobody was actually paying these prices, we’ve now been undercutting ourselves trying to get these off the shelf, but you can see that buyers’ prices still haven’t gone up past 50s.

So it looks like misinterpreted profits from the site can unintentionally flood the market with items that will never sell since the prices are based on wishful thinking from the sellers. Ideally you could see the potential profits based on both the dreams of the sellers are the realities of what people are actually paying. I’ve tried to email the site owner to discuss this but haven’t received any reply. If I had more money I’d love to try an experiment where I post some items at randomly inflated prices to see how many others then follow suit.

What are some of your experiences with this?

I think its very rare that you can directly buy materials, craft something out of it and sell it to the highest bid while making a profit.
However, spidy also calculates with buying stuff directly, if you put in buy orders, your profit margins are higher than advertized.

But the golden rule of profit also applies to crafting:
Buy low (on buy order) and sell high (undercut the lowest listing by a copper).

June 14: 84 listed, 48s was lowest
June 15: 11 listed, 7g was lowest
June 16: 31 listed, 2g was lowest
June 17: 44 listed, 1.8g was lowest
June 22: 88 listed, 55s was lowest
personally, I see this as someone bought 70 of them, driving the price to 7g. Then people saw this and sold the ones they had.

Wanze.8410:

I think its very rare that you can directly buy materials, craft something out of it and sell it to the highest bid while making a profit.

I see this as a challenge!
nope; couldn’t find one. closest I got was Darksteel Dagger Blade, which costs 13s14c to make via sell listing prices and sells for 13s95c via buy order (11s85c after tax).
most things that are craftable have a huge buy order / sell listing spread.